Every great technology arrives with a promise and a question. The printing press, the railroad, and the internet all changed the world, but the real question was always who would control them.
Artificial intelligence raises the stakes. Will it empower the individual, or replace, subjugate, or even destroy us? The question of who holds the reins is urgent.
Two groups are lining up to take control: Washington and the handful of giant corporations that dominate the field. They are partners, not rivals. When the biggest companies ask Congress to regulate them, it is not because they love oversight. They want rules that keep competitors out.
That is not free enterprise, which is always worth defending. It is corporatism, the cozy partnership that gave us bank bailouts and a Federal Reserve that serves elites, not the people.
And when the biggest players win public land, power, and tax favors, it is dishonest to tell a working family that asking for a return on its taxes is socialism. Who pays for the grid capacity a data center needs? If an employer wants more H-1B workers while promising an AI productivity revolution, what is it doing to train and pay Americans? If public resources help build the machine, the public should not be left with only the bill.
We already know what government does with powerful tools. The Patriot Act was sold as a way to catch terrorists and delivered warrantless surveillance of millions of innocent Americans. Imagine those agencies with machines that can sort every email, purchase, and phone call in seconds.
So what is the answer?
First, machines have no conscience. Every physician learns that the frontal lobe lets a person see the bigger picture, weigh consequences, restrain impulses, feel empathy, and know right from wrong. AI has no frontal lobe. It generates answers from patterns but cannot bear the human consequences of those answers. Responsibility must always rest with an accountable, identifiable person standing between the machine and any decision that touches someone’s life, liberty, or property.
