The GUARD Act and Recovering Covenant Economics

  

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is something of a gadfly to Silicon Valley.  Even in his days as Missouri's Attorney General, he investigated the likes of Google for violating state consumer-protection laws.  In an editorial published online recently by the journal of religion and public life First Things, he stakes out an existential claim that artificial intelligence (AI) is the defining technology of our day, and threatens to break the founding covenant of the United States:  to hold respect for persons made in the image of God supreme over considerations of money and power.

 

One way he proposes to do this is through passage of a proposed GUARD Act, designed to protect children from the depredations of AI that have led to sexual exploitation, depression, and even suicide in many cases.  Co-authored with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, the act would impose strict age verification to prevent those under 18 from accessing certain AI systems, prohibit systems that are known to promote sexual and violent acts directed at oneself or others among young people, and impose severe meaningful penalties for violations of these regulations.  The bill has been approved by the Senate's Judiciary Committee and awaits action by the full Senate and House.

 

While the GUARD Act would go far in the direction of preventing some of the most horrific side effects of the AI revolution we are now living in, it addresses only the tip of an iceberg of threats that Hawley perceives.  In the editorial, Hawley outlines the history of the United States, beginning not with 1776, but with the 1630 voyage of the Puritans led by John Winthrop from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Opinions differ as to whether the noble sentiments in a sermon delivered during that trip amounted to an actual covenant agreed to by the refugees, or simply aspirations that were not universally shared.  But details aside, Hawley traces the same spirit of democracy guided by Christianity through Lincoln's Homestead Act granting 160 acres of public land to all comers, Samuel Gompers' promotion of the 8-hour workday, and the twentieth century's adoption of social insurance of various kinds. 

 

Opposed to this tendency to regulate economic and technical innovations for the good of all is a progressive notion that the modern world is too complex to leave its governance to the masses.  Hawley proposes what he calls "covenant economics" in opposition to the government-by-expert notions promoted during the Progressive Era and exemplified by the takeover of the economy by Woodrow Wilson during World War I.  Nowadays, he points out, the progressive elite in government and the economic elite who runs Silicon Valley are largely the same class, and are working to make the country "K-shaped."  Meaning, a few lucky people go up one bar of the K and get to run everything and own most of everything, while the unlucky masses have to take the lower arm, which is whatever the elites dish out for them, whether it's unemployment checks compensating for losing one's job to AI or new and fun ways to amuse oneself to death. 

 

Hawley is under no illusions that his own party is going to avert this crisis any better than the Democrats.  He makes no reference to the Trump administration, but he doesn't have to, as it's clear to anybody with working eyes by now that Trump favors Trump, and to hell with everybody else. 

 

But one of the primary Christian virtues is hope.  Only by continuing to take the machinery of government seriously can people like Sen. Hawley make a difference:  drafting laws, passing them in the face of opposition, and rallying like-minded people to just causes.  The prospects for the GUARD Act in a climate in which President Trump has endorsed a laissez-faire attitude toward AI are not good.  But things can change, and if it passes it will be one small step in the direction of covenant economics, and away from the domination of average people by a small, super-powerful elite who increasingly seem to think they live on a different planet than the rest of us.

 

Sen. Hawley is right to look to history for precedents of covenant economics.  What I'd like to see from history is a precedent for our present situation:  one in which a megalomaniacal political leader is largely in cahoots with a small upper class of very wealthy and powerful individuals who dominate politics as well as economics, and how the population of that country got out from under domination.

 

One has to go back to the days of Louis XVI, the last king of France before the Revolution of 1792 abolished the monarchy, to find a similar divide between the ruling classes and the rest of the population.  Ironically, Louis's downfall was caused partly by his adoption of what we would now call liberal ideas, such as supporting the rebellion of the American colonies. 

 

Revolutions are always a last resort, and nothing I write here should be construed as advocating for one.  Once a revolution starts, even its promoters can't tell where it's going to end up—it's like the boys in Mark Twain who started a boulder rolling down a hill just to see what it would do.  As long as the creaky democratic machinery of the U. S. Constitution still works, we should use it to move things in directions that put into practice the idea the country was founded on:  in Lincoln's deathless words, that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

 

In one sense, regulation of AI is like nailing Jell-O to the wall.  It's everywhere, changing all the time, and a key problem in legislating about it is getting enough of a handle on it to say something that will last longer than a few months.  But the pernicious effects of AI are clear enough:  the loss of jobs by millions of people who have done nothing wrong other than not to be born to privilege; the fear, whether justified or no, that the proliferation of data centers is creating burdens of higher electric and water rates as a byproduct of rich people getting even richer; and the harm that AI can do to children and teenagers.  Sen. Hawley wants to draw lines in the sand that tell AI's promoters "here, and no farther."  We can pray that his efforts will be joined by other legislators of good will to turn the vast tide of AI in a direction that will benefit all the citizens of the United States, and not just continue to enrich a few at the cost of the many.

 

Sources:  Sen. Hawley's essay is on the First Things website at https://firstthings.com/the-american-covenants-answer-to-ai/.  I also referred to an AI summary (!) of the GUARD Act and Wikipedia articles on John Winthrop and Louis XVI.  AI isn't all bad. . . .

Should Social Media Be Regulated?

Last month, the youngest U. S. Senator, Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican from Missouri, filed a bill called the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act.  The purpose of the act is to do something about the harmful effects of addiction to social media.

What would the bill do?  I haven't read it, but according to media reports it would change the ways companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google deal with their customers.  The open secret of social media is that they are designed quite consciously and intentionally to be habit-forming.  So-called "free" media make their money by selling advertising, and advertising is worthless unless someone looks at it.  So their bottom line depends on how firmly and how long they glue your eyeballs to their sites.  And they have scads of specialists—psychologists, media experts, and software engineers—whose full-time job is to squeeze an extra minute or two of attention from you every day, regardless of whatever else is going on in your life. 

Writing on the website of the religion and public life journal First Things, Jon Schweppe says the SMART Act may not be the one-stop cure-all for our social media problems, but it's a step in the right direction.  It would  prohibit certain practices that are currently commonplace, apparently including one that has always reminded me of what life might be like in Hell:  the infinite webpage.

It used to be that when people first figured out how to make a web page scroll, it was only so long.  You could always get to the bottom of it, where you might find useful things like who wrote it or other masthead-and-boilerplate information.  Well, that doesn't always happen anymore.  The infinite webpage pits the pitiful finite mortal human against the practically unlimited resources of the machine to come up with more eye candy, as much as you want.  You keep scrolling, it will keep showing you new stuff. 

This particular feature reminds me of a passage from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe featuring the candy called Turkish Delight.   The wicked-witch Queen of Narnia offered the boy Edmund his favorite type of candy to convince him to betray his friends.  The candy she offered him was enchanted so that whoever ate it always wanted more, and "would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves."  No matter how much time you waste on an infinite website, there's always more.

The SMART bill would also give users a realistic option to voluntarily limit their own use of social media with daily timers, prohibits "badge" systems (which is evidently a kind of special-privilege feature that gets rewards heavy users and encourages them even more), and would prohibit or modify other addictive features. 

The Federalist's John Thomas sees the SMART bill as the first step in what may be a turning point in the history of social media.  He likens it to the Parisian reaction to brightly-colored advertising posters enabled by the then-new lithography process in the 1860s.  Pretty soon, a good percentage of all available vertical flat surfaces were covered with posters, and the town fathers decided to regulate how and where posters could be displayed. 

This may be the point at which the U. S. citizenry stops merely wringing its hands and saying there's nothing you can do in the face of rising teen depression and other ill effects of social media, and starts to take action.  As Thomas points out, though, there are few grass-roots organizations taking up the control-social-media banner. 

This may be because the dangers social media pose for mental health are insidious and gradual rather than abrupt and catastrophic.  Suppose that every person had an intrinsic social-media limit:  say after viewing X hours of social media (and X would be different for each person), your brain would literally explode and you'd die.  Well, you can bet that after two or three of these incidents, governments would come down on Facebook, Google, and company like a ton of bricks with all sorts of restrictions, up to and including an outright ban.

But nobody's brain literally explodes from doing too much Facebook.  The negative consequences of social-media use are much less obvious than that, but are nonetheless real.  Even the most tragic cases of teen suicides that result from peer persecution over social media can be blamed not just on the media, but on the cruelty of other teens.  Nevertheless, the nominal anonymity and ease of use that social media offer can turn what might be fairly well-behaved peers in person into abominable monsters on Facebook. 

Some writers oppose the SMART Act and similar legislation on the free-market principle that government is more likely to make things worse with legislation than otherwise.  While that can happen, it is foolish to take the hyper-libertarian position that if a good or service is bad, people just shouldn't use it.  Back when ordinary glass was used for automobile windshields, it would turn into long razor-sharp shards that decapitated numerous drivers, and Congress invited Henry Ford to testify about a proposed law that would require the use of the more expensive safety glass in windshields.  Reportedly (and this is from memory), Ford said, "I'm in the business of making cars, I'm not in the business of saving lives."

When Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress not too long ago, he was self-controlled enough not to say anything that harsh.  But if the day has at last arrived when our elected officials are finally going to do something about the harmful effects of social media, one of two things (or perhaps a combination) is going to happen.  Either the social-media companies will have to get ahead of the proposed legislation and enact real, quantifiable reforms of their own and prove that they work, or they will have to change their ways in accordance with regulatory laws that they brought upon themselves. 

My own hope is that the companies will figure out a transparent and effective way to self-regulate.  But the choice is theirs, and if they brush off the SMART Act and think they have the raw power to squash such regulation, they may be in for a painful surprise.

Sources:  Jon Schweppe's article "Big Addiction" appeared on the First Things website on Aug. 13, 2019 at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/big-addiction.  John Thomas's article "Hawley's SMART Act Is the Beginning Of the Revolt Against Big Tech" is on the Federalist website at https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/13/hawleys-smart-act-beginning-revolt-big-tech/. 

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