ChatGPT, the chatbot designed by the San Francisco–based company OpenAI, has elicited excitement, some unease, and much wonderment around the world. In China, though, the U.S. bot and the artificial intelligence that makes it work represent a threat to the country’s political system and global ambitions. This is because chatbots such as ChatGPT revel in information—something the Chinese state insists on controlling.

The Chinese Communist Party keeps itself in power through censorship, and under its domineering leader, Xi Jinping, that effort has intensified in a quest for greater ideological conformity. Chatbots are especially tricky to censor. What they blurt out can be unpredictable, and when it comes to micromanaging what the Chinese public knows, reads, and shares, the authorities don’t like surprises.

Yet this political imperative collides with the country’s urgent and essential need for innovation, especially in areas such as AI and chatbots. Without continuing technological advances, China’s economic miracle could stall and undercut Xi’s aim of overtaking the United States as the world’s premier superpower. Xi is as intent on his campaign for technological progress as he is on his drive for stricter social control. The development of AI is a crucial pillar of that program, and ChatGPT has exposed how China’s tech sector still lags behind that of its chief geopolitical rival, the U.S.

“The Chinese government is very torn” on chatbots, Matt Sheehan, a fellow who focuses on global technology at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “Ideological control, information control, is one of, if not the, top priority of the Chinese government. But they’ve also made leadership in AI and other emerging technologies a top priority.” Chatbots, he said, are “where these two things start to come into conflict.”

Which path Xi chooses could have huge consequences for China’s competitiveness in technology. Will he permit the progress that can propel China to dominance in the global economy? Or will he sacrifice the cause of innovation to his desire to maintain his grip on Chinese society?

[Annie Lowrey: How ChatGPT will destabilize white-collar work]

Those who live in open societies tend to believe that free thinking and the free flow of information are indispensable prerequisites for innovation. A corollary of this view is that a political system such as China’s, which stifles intellectual curiosity and enforces social conformity, discourages the creativity and risk-taking necessary for achieving breakthroughs. In some respects, that argument has merit. There is no Chinese Disney, for instance, and there may never be as long as the state restricts the freedom of filmmakers to tell stories and create characters. Pop culture across Asia is dominated by what the democratic societies of Japan and South Korea produce.

China’s authoritarianism already inhibits its tech sector in other ways. The Chinese video-swapping app TikTok is facing a possible ban or forced sale in the U.S. because of fears that its Beijing-headquartered parent company, ByteDance, could be pressured to give up private data on American citizens to China’s security state.

Chinese leaders do not believe innovation requires individual liberties innovation and see no contradiction between political control and high-tech aspiration. Communist autocracy has not prevented Chinese companies from emerging as leaders in sectors such as 5G telecommunications networks or electric vehicles. Nor has censorship impeded the development of technologies in the politically riskier realm of data and content. China has vibrant and inventive industries in gaming and social media.

In addition, far from suppressing potentially disruptive and subversive AI technology, the state has actively supported it. In 2017, the State Council, the country’s top governing body, released a national strategy for the sector called the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” with the goal of “making China the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. In his report to October’s important Communist Party congress, Xi specifically mentioned AI as one of the “new growth engines” that the country must cultivate.

Despite this high-level attention, China’s AI sector lags behind America’s—at least in the area of chatbots, as ChatGPT made all too obvious. In China, “the government, tech entrepreneurs, and investors understand how incredible ChatGPT is and they don’t want to be left behind,” Jordan Schneider, a senior analyst with the research firm Rhodium Group, told me. “To sort of be upstaged so dramatically by OpenAI and ChatGPT was a little embarrassing and is something that is certainly going to focus minds and companies and talent around closing that gap.”

The deficit appears significant. In March, Robin Li, the founder of the Chinese internet-search firm Baidu, tried to show off his own ERNIE Bot, but the demonstration—which used prerecorded results—was so disappointing that the company’s share price plunged on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

[Read: ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone]

Left to themselves, the talented engineers and coders at Baidu and other Chinese AI labs will likely catch up. But the state is certain to interfere. Whatever chatbots the tech firms create will have to abide by the same restrictions on speech that China’s human residents are compelled to follow. That was made clear this month when the country’s cybersecurity watchdog issued new draft regulations for the AI sector that require chatbots to produce content in line with socialist values and not liable to subvert state power—broad categories indeed.

The government imposes such censorship on the digital world with the same blunt force it applies to the real world. An army of scrupulous censors scrub politically sensitive material from social-media platforms. Many foreign media and internet services are blocked by the Great Firewall, the digital fortification erected by the state to keep out unwanted information and ideas. Internet searches are restricted. Authorities have taken steps to prevent Chinese citizens from using ChatGPT. Regulators reportedly ordered Chinese tech firms to deny their users access.

Otherwise, ChatGPT will produce politically unacceptable—if, in all likelihood, truthful—information on such topics as Beijing’s mistreatment of the minority Uyghur community, which the state doesn’t want the Chinese public to see. The China Daily, a news outlet owned by the Chinese government, warned that ChatGPT can “boost propaganda campaigns launched by the U.S.”

Baidu’s ERNIE, available to the public on a limited basis only, simply refuses to respond to some politically suspect queries and tries instead to change the subject. (I requested access to ERNIE for this article, but have not been granted it.)

How Baidu and other chatbot providers adjust their models to adhere to the state’s censorship rules could have further negative effects. For instance, a chatbot model trained only on vetted information encircled by China’s Great Firewall is unlikely to be as effective as a foreign competitor that draws on a wider and more diverse corpus of sources. (In a recent press release, Baidu noted that ERNIE had been trained on “a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts” and other material, but when I asked for further details of the sources, the company would not comment.)

Chatbots are also potentially more difficult to censor than earlier forms of digital media. Chatbot models will analyze, collate, and connect data in unexpected and surprising ways. “The best analogy would be to how a human learns,” Jeffrey Ding, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies Chinese technology, explained to me. “Even if you are learning things from only a censored set of books, the interactions between all those different books you are reading might produce either flawed information or politically sensitive information.”

That presents special challenges to Chinese AI specialists and state censors. Even if a Chinese chatbot is trained on a limited set of politically acceptable information, it can’t be guaranteed to generate politically acceptable outcomes. Furthermore, chatbots can be “tricked” by determined users into revealing dangerous information or stating things they have been trained not to say, a phenomenon that has already occurred with ChatGPT.

This unpredictability places China’s tech sector in an unenviable position. On the one hand, researchers are under pressure to achieve breakthroughs in AI and meet the government’s targets. On the other, designing chatbots could be dangerous in a political environment that tolerates no dissent. The authorities are unlikely to look kindly on a chatbot that breaks the rules—or on the entrepreneurs and engineers designing and training it. To drive that point home, the draft regulations from the cybersecurity agency hold chatbot providers responsible for the content they produce. That alone could discourage China’s tech elite from pursuing chatbots, or at least advanced models of them that would be available to the public.

[Read: The electric-car lesson China is serving up for America]

Fettering chatbots with too many constraints, however, could imperil China’s progress, as well as inhibit developments in the crucial science behind them. “Chatbots are not just a funny toy,” Sheehan, from the Carnegie Endowment, told me. “A lot of people in the deep tech of AI think this is the most promising path forward for creating more general artificial intelligence, which is kind of the holy grail of the field.” Therefore, “Chinese officials are at cross purposes on this one.”

Much will depend on what China’s leaders are willing to let slide in the name of experimentation. There are good reasons to believe they will allow some latitude. The explosion of social media in China has also posed risks to the state, as it offers Chinese citizens the power to widely share unauthorized information—videos of protests, for instance—faster than censors can suppress it. Yet the authorities have accepted this downside in order to allow new technologies to flourish.

“I do think the Chinese government is concerned about the negative, harmful effects of AI,” Ding told me. Despite “the censorship,” he added, “we’ve seen from the past track record of Chinese companies and the Chinese government that there is a way forward with respect to creating breakthrough innovations in this space.”

The Chinese government could even find ways to use chatbots to its advantage. Just as the authorities have been able to co-opt social media and employ the platforms to manipulate popular opinion, monitor the public, and track dissenters, so could a chatbot easily become a tool of social control, promoting official narratives and principles. In their recent book, Surveillance State, the journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin write that China’s rulers believe that becoming a leader in such technologies as AI “would help the Party build a new system of control that would ensure its own well-being.”

Such an obedient, party-line chatbot—shielded from more formidable, uncensored foreign competitors behind the Great Firewall—could succeed perfectly well within China yet have little appeal outside. In that case, what China’s authoritarianism will inhibit is not technological advancement per se, but its technological competitiveness in the wider world.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

Several months ago, while walking through my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I noticed an impressive number of front-lawn placards celebrating and welcoming refugees. The signs made me proud. I like living in a place where people openly celebrate tolerance and diversity.

Several days later, my pride curdled into bitterness. As part of some reporting on housing policy, I found a State Department page offering advice to Afghans and Iraqis resettling in the U.S. The upshot: Stay away from D.C. “The Washington, D.C., metro area including northern Virginia and some cities in California are very expensive places to live, and it can be difficult to find reasonable housing,” the website warns. “Any resettlement benefits you receive may not comfortably cover the cost of living in these areas.”

My city’s prohibitive housing costs flow, in part, from the district’s infamous war against new construction. Much of D.C. is off-limits for new development, thanks to widespread single-family zoning, berserk historical-preservation rules, and a long-standing aversion to taller buildings, which stems from both federal law and local rules. If the city’s housing policies are so broken that the federal government has to explicitly tell immigrants to find somewhere else to live, then signage welcoming refugees is both futile and hypocritical. The same neighborhoods saying yes to refugees in their front yard are supporting policies in their backyard that say no to refugees.

This dynamic—front-yard proclamations contradicted by backyard policies—extends well beyond refugee policy, and helps explain American 21st-century dysfunction.

The front yard is the realm of language. It is the space for messaging and talking to be seen. Social media and the internet are a kind of global front lawn, where we get to know a thousand strangers by their signage, even when we don’t know a thing about their private lives and virtues. The backyard is the seat of private behavior. This is where the real action lives, where the values of the family—and by extension, the nation—make contact with the real world.

Let’s stick with housing for a moment to see the front yard/backyard divide play out. The 2020 Democratic Party platform called housing a “right and not a privilege” and a “basic need … at the center of the American Dream.” Right on. But the U.S. has a severe housing-affordability crisis that is worst in blue states, where lawmakers have erected obstacle courses of zoning rules and regulations to block construction. In an interview with Slate, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, took aim at his own side, saying progressives are “living in the contradiction that they are nominally liberal [but they] do not want other people to live next to them” if their neighbors are low-income workers. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington; all are run by Democrats. Something very strange is going on when the zip codes with the best housing signs have some of the worst housing outcomes.

Housing scarcity pinches other Democratic priorities. Some people convincingly argue that it constricts all of them. High housing costs pervert “just about every facet of American life,” as The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey has written, including what we eat, how many friends we keep, how many children we bear. “In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black lives matter, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal,” the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote. But in part because those signs sit in front yards “zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes,” the city has built just one home for every eight new jobs in the past decade.

We find a similar discrepancy between stated virtues and outcomes in the realm of green energy. As I wrote last year, liberals own all the backpack buttons denouncing the oil-and-gas industry. But Texas produces more renewable energy than deep-blue California, and Oklahoma and Iowa produce more renewable energy than New York. Yes, wind is abundant in the Midwest, and the Great Plains have lots of space that’s sunny and empty. But the biosphere counts carbon, not excuses. Progressives betray their goals by supporting onerous rules that delay the construction of solar farms and transmission lines that would reduce our dependence on oil and gas.

Granted, although the hypocrisy of NIMBY environmentalists is an irresistibly delicious subject for some writers, it is hardly the only obstacle to building an abundance of clean electricity. Many of the country’s most powerful energy providers play their own word games by loudly advertising their commitment to decarbonization even as they quietly use their political power to block the transition to new energy sources. Here, as in housing, it’s easy to playact as a public crusader, screaming “Everything has to change!” to the world while remaining a private reactionary who whispers, within the back rooms of true power, “But let’s not change anything that matters.”

More broadly, a super-emphasis on language has distracted some Americans from focusing on actual outcomes and working toward material progress.

In the past few years, many employees have encouraged their companies to launch diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. These programs address a real problem: the stubborn gaps in pay and responsibility between white men and their nonwhite and non-male colleagues, which are sometimes borne from prejudice in hiring or promotion processes.

But after an initial burst of enthusiasm, follow-up analyses of DEI programs have found that many of them are worse than useless. First, they sometimes rely on pseudoscience, such as unconscious-bias training, which rarely reduces racism and may accidentally reify existing biases. Second, corporations that hold DEI workshops may use them as an excuse not to pursue real corporate change. In the past few years, as corporate diversity programs have proliferated, the share of Black and Asian workers who “trust their employer to do what is right in response to racism” has actually declined. According to one Bloomberg survey, the person with the least credibility on racism within the company is the person in charge of DEI.

All of the appropriate terms for this state of affairs—whitewashing, window dressing, a facade—capture the essence of front-yardism. The problem with these diversity programs isn’t that they’re “woke,” as in “doing too much to help nonwhite Americans.” The problem is that, keeping with this common if dubious definition, they aren’t nearly woke enough. Full of sound and fury signifying nothing, many DEI initiatives are conservative in nature, preserving the status quo and the power of white-male leadership while advertising a politics of radical change. They are the equivalent of a thousand REFUGEES ARE WELCOME signs in a neighborhood where the residents’ policy preferences make local refugee resettlement impossible.

San Francisco public schools offer another lesson in how an obsession with language can cloud a rightful focus on material outcomes. In 2021, the city’s board of education voted to rename more than 40 schools to scrub out racism. Their dragnet caught such not-quite-famous racists as Abraham Lincoln and Senator Dianne Feinstein. (Paul Revere was added to the list, because one committee member misread a History.com article about his role in the Revolutionary War.) At the same time that the district was putting together its list of names, its schools suffered declines in enrollment, attendance, and learning. Math scores fell sharply and, by 2022, only 9 percent of the district’s Black students met or exceeded math standards.

The renaming committee was obviously not exclusively responsible for pandemic-era learning loss. Learning loss was a national trend, and San Francisco didn’t even experience the worst of it. But if, like the San Francisco Unified School District, you’re a school district with a big math-proficiency problem and your policies include discouraging eighth-grade algebra and holding meetings about nomenclature, you might end up with failing students in well-named schools.

Even the American Medical Association has descended into front-yardism. The AMA recently published a 54-page guide on how doctors should talk with patients, called “Advancing Health Equity,” which urges medical professionals to make their language more inclusive. One particularly silly example: It advises doctors to replace the simple phrase low-income people with new terminology that acknowledges “root causes,” such as people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real-estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements.

I celebrate any emphasis on “root causes.” So let’s talk about the real root causes of dysfunction in America’s expensive and inequitable health-care system. Why is the U.S. one of the only countries in the developed world without universal insurance? A complete analysis might include the AMA’s “explicit, long-standing opposition to single-payer health care.”  Why does the U.S. health system struggle to provide access in rural and low-income areas? One causal factor is the AMA’s steadfast resistance to expanding nurse practitioners’ scope of care. Why does the U.S. have fewer general practitioners per capita than almost any other rich country? It might have something to do with the AMA’s refusal to expand medical-residency slots and other efforts to constrain the number of doctors in America.

Even in science, where empiricism ought to reign, I’ve seen troubling signs of word worship. In 2020, the prestigious journal Nature published its first-ever presidential endorsement, on behalf of Joe Biden. When a group of researchers studied the effect of that endorsement, they found it did nothing to persuade moderate voters and actually made conservatives less trusting of scientific institutions. “The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters,” the paper concluded. “This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature.”

The journal’s article had all the effectiveness of a half-hearted DEI program: a bunch of pretty words doing less than nothing. Nonetheless, in March, the editors of Nature wrote a follow-up essay declaring victory. While they acknowledged that the Biden endorsement had failed to meet every measurable benchmark, they defended their decision on the grounds that “silence was not an option.” “When individuals seeking office” blast science and threaten scientists, they said, “it becomes important to speak up.”

I personally despair of the polarization of science and wish the Nature editorial had, through some magical incantation, depoliticized the vaccine debates. But it didn’t. And that holds an important lesson about the limited ability of words alone to bring about the world that progressives want to live in. The Nature editorial was an experiment, and an independent group of scientists determined that the experiment failed. That’s how science works. For the editors of a science journal to wave it away suggests that the final cause of their politics is to utter the right words, even when those words push them further away from the world they want to build.

Companies hiring DEI consultants to quote Malcolm X in a meeting to cover up a pitiful diversity record; school officials watching math scores plummet for Black kids while they debate whether Lincoln was racist; AMA employees playing word games while limiting the number of physicians; environmentalists buying BEYOND COAL pins while challenging the construction of any clean-energy project that might help the electric grid move beyond coal—what ties these examples together is front-yard theater.

You may have noticed that I’ve mostly focused on progressive causes and left-leaning institutions. This is as deliberate as it is unfair.

It’s deliberate because, to paraphrase Noah Smith, I deeply want progressives to love progress itself, not just the sound of it. When it comes to the virtues of housing affordability, clean-energy abundance, high-quality education, and trustworthy science, I want my political side to turn its signage into signatures, its placards into policies. But my emphasis so far on liberalism is also unfair, because to prattle on about progressive hypocrisy without a similar analysis of the right would profoundly misrepresent the distribution of phoniness in American politics.

When Republicans swept into unified control of the federal government in 2017, Donald Trump promised in his inaugural address to return power to the people, unwind the “American carnage” of previous generations, and restore the manufacturing and coal industries that had been desiccated by decades of neoliberal policies. But once in office, Republicans governed more like plutocrats than populists, trying to slash federal health-insurance coverage (which failed) and to reduce taxes for large corporations by several trillion dollars (which succeeded). On economic and social policy, the Republican Party is a pretzel. The GOP officially opposes “Defund the police” and wants more law enforcement, but Trump is on the record with calls to defund the entire FBI and Department of Justice. Republicans officially seek to “lower the price of housing,” but their pledge to cut appropriated nondefense programs would likely reduce housing assistance, immediately raising the cost of living for millions of low-income renters.

No party claims a monopoly on language theater, either. Many of today’s most influential conservatives are more likely to marinate in indignation over the gender politics of candy, beer, and sneaker commercials than utter anything that might accidentally make contact with poverty, housing, energy, or health-care policy. The most significant GOP leaders, such as Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hardly talk about economic policy at all, preferring to direct their furious attention at culture-war issues, including elementary-school curricula, drag-queen story hours, and the scourge of managerial wokeness in our corporations and schools. This postmaterial posturing might serve a strategic purpose. Behind all that fulminating about Disney and DEI, DeSantis’s views on Social Security, Medicare, and the welfare state are deeply unpopular.

While language wars escalate on the right, the phenomenon of front-yard politics may be peaking on the left. San Francisco ultimately abandoned its plan to scrub Lincoln and Feinstein from its buildings. California has voted to begin the long process of dismantling its NIMBY housing laws. Last year, President Biden signed historic laws to expand green-energy production in the U.S., even though the translation of historic spending into historic construction remains uncertain. These are small steps in the right direction.

Words matter. It would be absurd—and deeply self-defeating—for any writer to suggest otherwise. My aim is not to uproot kind-hearted yard signs, or reverse efforts to remove racist surnames from government buildings, or to discourage doctors from speaking respectfully to patients. But these linguistic efforts are only as successful as the difference they make in the world. When a politics of progressive language becomes disconnected from progressive outcomes, the movement loses. Front-yard radicalism multiplied by backyard stasis does not equal progress. It equals nothing at all.

The Democratic Party is in the midst of an important debate about the future of American political economy. Even as mainstream progressives campaign for further increasing public subsidies for medical care, housing, and higher education, a rising chorus of “supply-side progressives” is urging the left to focus instead on using the power of government to loosen the bottlenecks that make these goods so expensive and inaccessible in the first place. In a number of domains, supply-side progressives embrace prescriptions drawn from market liberalism, most notably in their calls for reforming stringent land-use restrictions that drive up the underlying cost of housing and liberalizing skilled immigration. But what separates supply-side progressives from supply-side conservatives is their enthusiasm for activist government. The movement is united by a belief in the need for a more venturesome and efficient administrative state, one capable of driving down the cost of building complex infrastructure projects and making visionary investments in clean energy, among many other things.

As much as I might disagree with the supply-side progressives on the limits of government power, their openness to market-oriented policies and willingness to at least acknowledge the mismanagement and sclerosis plaguing much of the public sector makes for a favorable contrast with their opponents in the progressive mainstream. Yet supply-side progressivism suffers from a serious weakness, particularly when compared with the mainstream progressivism it is hoping to dislodge as the Democratic Party’s unifying ideological thread. Judging by the visibility and prestige of its intellectual champions, the movement has gone from strength to strength, having captured the imagination of a number of key philanthropists, academic social scientists, opinion journalists, and, perhaps most importantly, Biden-administration officials. But it’s not clear that supply-side progressivism, as a political project, has a way forward.

[Annie Lowrey: The economy’s fundamental problem has changed]

Consider Ezra Klein’s recent critique of “everything-bagel liberalism” in The New York Times, which perfectly captures mainstream progressivism’s fundamental flaw. Drawing on the case of Tahanan, an innovative supportive-housing complex in San Francisco, he laments the accretion of local and state regulations that inflates the cost of public projects in communities throughout the country, and that therefore greatly limits the horizons of progressive governance. Klein, one of the most prominent supply-side progressives, details the various regulatory hurdles facing Tahanan, and offers a larger argument about why so many ambitious progressive initiatives run aground. “Government needs to be able to solve big problems,” writes Klein. “But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice.” He sees that same failure to choose in many other domains as well, including the Biden administration’s push to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The problem with mainstream progressivism, Klein argues, is that it is “much better at seeing where the government could spend more than at determining how it could make that spending go farther and faster,” and this lack of focus risks discrediting progressive governance. This is, of course, a line of argument that will resonate with conservative partisans of limited government, who object to the unlimited welfarism that has come to define mainstream progressivism. But it is also a challenge to supply-side progressives who want to change the Democratic Party’s policy direction. If mainstream progressivism’s failure to make hard choices is doing so much damage, why has it been so politically durable—and why is supply-side progressivism, for all its virtues, proving such an uphill climb?

Rather than evaluate mainstream progressivism as a policy program designed to achieve some well-defined ideological objective, it is instructive to see it more as a political formula, a set of commitments aimed at binding together a diverse Democratic coalition. By that standard, mainstream progressivism has proven incredibly potent. The Democratic Party represents tens of millions of American voters, but voters organized into cohesive interest groups are more powerful than those who happen to show up at the ballot box every now and again. Within the coalition, interest groups wield disproportionate influence, and all the more if they’re capable of bringing significant financial and organizational resources to bear. When elected Democrats strike legislative bargains, they’re keenly aware of the need to incorporate the priorities of these groups, even if that means undermining the efficiency or coherence of their policy initiatives. Contra Klein, the problem is not that progressives aren’t being sufficiently disciplined in their approach to policy design. It’s that the political imperative of holding together the coalition will always win out over high-minded idealism.  

Everything-bagel liberalism reflects the priorities and nonnegotiable demands of the Democratic Party’s most efficacious constituencies, unionized public employees and affluent metropolitan liberals, groups that to some extent overlap. Though members of both of these groups might have idealistic reasons to embrace supply-side progressivism, their material self-interest is well-served by the progressive mainstream.

First, let’s look to the core interests of public-sector labor. Supply-side progressivism envisions a more effective, efficient, and accountable government. At a minimum, achieving that goal will require extracting concessions from public-employee unions, if not limiting collective-bargaining rights in the public sector altogether, as many supply-side progressives will privately concede. But if elected Democrats even inch in this direction, they can expect intense backlash.

As Klein suggests in his essay, regulations that inflate costs, such as buy-American provisions and prevailing-wage requirements, often do so to create employment opportunities and raise wages above the market-clearing rate. Measures designed to lower costs in public projects—to ensure that taxpayer dollars purchase more and higher-quality public goods and services—often involve making the terms of public or subsidized employment less generous, for example by lowering the overall level of compensation, or demanding increased work effort, or substituting capital for labor outright. From the perspective of a union that relies on membership dues, doing more with less labor is profoundly unattractive. This is particularly true for public-employee unions, as their members are unlikely to be anxious about driving their employer out of business by pressing their demands too aggressively. Like all unions, public-employee unions are obliged to defend the interests of their members, regardless of their productivity, and they do so in part by devoting significant financial resources to electing Democratic candidates. Campaign contributions aside, unionized public employees play a crucial role in voter-contact efforts and as influential advocates for union interests in their families and communities. Any policy initiative that risks sapping the enthusiasm of this constituency would be profoundly damaging to the Democratic Party’s political prospects.

[Morgan Ome: What the labor movement can learn from its past]

Second, consider the implications of the Democratic Party’s growing reliance on affluent residents of large metropolitan areas, both as voters and as small-dollar donors. According to the political scientist Sam Zacher, a necessary precondition of Democratic gains among affluent voters is that President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders have embraced a less redistributive economic agenda, grounded more in support for “relatively economically costless forms of extensions of civil rights to more subgroups of Americans” than in deeply held egalitarian convictions. And though there is some evidence to suggest that affluent Democrats support economic redistribution in the abstract, Zacher points to surveys that find that these voters are far less supportive of concrete progressive-taxation policies that affect them directly. One predictable result of the Democratic Party’s rising dependence on the affluent is that elected Democrats are growing reluctant to raise taxes on upper-middle- and high-income voters, as evidenced by President Biden’s commitment to shielding households earning as much as $400,000 from tax increases.

What does the rise of these ActBlue Democrats mean for supply-side progressivism? At first glance, the emergence of a more tax-averse Democratic Party might not seem detrimental to that movement’s prospects. For one, it could be an impetus for an increased emphasis on public-sector efficiency. More difficult to overcome is the fact that affluent Democrats tend to support exclusionary zoning policies in their neighborhoods, a stance that puts them directly at odds with supply-side progressives for whom YIMBYism is a core commitment. Assuming supply-side progressives don’t intend to reinvent themselves as anti-tax NIMBYs dedicated to breaking the power of organized labor, they’re likely to encounter resistance from affluent Democratic voters.

And so the political prospects for supply-side progressivism aren’t especially bright. The Democratic Party has made a deal—for votes, for man power, and for money—with public-sector labor and affluent metropolitan liberals. While leading Democrats may celebrate the merits of supply-side progressivism in the abstract, they will generally choose protecting the material interests of their most powerful allies over effective policy design. This dynamic isn’t an accident. It’s a necessary consequence not just of who the Democrats’ supporters are, but the party’s need to hold together a fissiparous majority coalition.

To change the Democratic Party’s political trajectory, supply-side progressives will have to make its core interest groups a better offer, and how they’d do that without vitiating the substance of their policy vision is not obvious. Or they can mobilize new constituencies capable of changing the balance of power within the Democratic coalition, which is easier said than done. Until the supply-side progressives find new friends, and figure out how to say no to their old ones, they will remain thought leaders without thought followers.

I count the weeks. Before, it was months. Soon it will be days.

I’m counting the time left before my oldest child leaves home. The time left that the four of us will live together, under this roof, intact as a family.

This child, whose name is James, loves soccer. Always has. There’s a photo of him, age 1—1!—tiny soccer ball at his feet and huge grin on his face. Barely able to walk and already learning to dribble. Now fast-forward 16 years. He’s a starting striker on his high-school varsity team. He lives for these games.

This is a boy so catastrophically, irredeemably messy that even his younger brother, also a teenager, gets grossed out by the chaos. This same boy clears a space in the debris to carefully lay out his uniform the night before a game. Cleats, shin guards, cherished jersey—No. 7—all washed and arranged at right angles at the foot of his bed. Game time arrives and the whistle blows and James plays his heart out.

[Annie Lowrey: American motherhood]

At least, for a long time, this was what I had been told. Varsity games tend to happen on weekdays, around 4 p.m. Want to know what else happens on weekdays at 4 p.m.? NPR’s All Things Considered goes on air.

This article is adapted from Kelly’s forthcoming book.

Technology makes possible many once-impossible things, but our broadcast engineers have yet to figure out how I might anchor a daily national news program from the bleachers. And so for years I missed his games. Nearly every one of them.

James was, actually, mostly okay with this. His dad attended every game he could; the other parents cheered James on; he came home and gave me the play-by-play at dinner. I was … not so okay with this, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that there would always be another game. That next time I’d figure out a way to be there, deadlines be damned, screaming myself hoarse on the sidelines.

Except that the years slip by. Ninth grade slides into tenth slides into 11th. Suddenly, James was a senior. I was out of next times. There were no more do-overs.

I swear there are a million well-meaning books about the juggle, and work-life balance, and leaning in and leaning out, and how you can have it all just maybe not all at once. Start reading, though, and you’ll find they’re nearly all aimed at young parents at the beginning of the whole enterprise. Tome after tome offers encouragement and advice for new moms drowning in hormones and guilt in their office cubicles, because their phones have lit up with a picture from day care or the nanny, of their kid happily eating his first banana. And they’re missing it, and it’s only a damn banana, but they’ll never get that moment back. Sister, I’ve been there.

But here is the thing I did not know: The tug is just as strong when your baby is 17 as when he is seven weeks or seven months. For me, it is in fact stronger. You blink and the finish line is in sight. Young parents, listen to me: It. Goes. So. Fast.

Most of the working mothers I know have made a pact with themselves. When the job and the kids collide, the kids come first. I have pushed back from the anchor chair in Studio 31, NPR’s main studio, in the middle of a live broadcast and announced to my co-host and to the startled director, “I’ve got to go.” One cannot get away with this often. But when a text rolls in from the babysitter and it begins, “We’re in the emergency room …,” you stand up and you run.

Another moment: Iraq, 2009. I’m in Baghdad, part of the Pentagon press pool covering a visit by the U.S. secretary of defense. We’re all suited up in body armor and helmets, and we’re being herded toward Black Hawk helicopters that will fly us to the next press conference when my cellphone rings. It’s the school nurse back in Washington. She wants to tell me that my son—the other one, Alexander, then 4 years old—is sick. Really sick. How fast can I get there? “The day after tomorrow” would have been the accurate response, but the line mercifully went dead before I had to deliver it. I cried myself to sleep that night in Baghdad. Not long after, I quit my job.

I would not have believed it at the time, but these are the easy calls. Your phone delivers a panicked summons; your heart thrums with love for your child; you stand up and you run. It has taken me a long time to understand that the hard calls, the ones that may come back to haunt you, are the ones that accumulate in the gray space between the drama of a nurse tracking you down in Iraq and the routine Thursday-afternoon unfolding of a high-school-soccer game. I don’t stand up and sprint from the studio for the latter because there are so many of them. Were so many of them.

[Mary Louise Kelly: Why I went to Iran]

I’m aware that I’m lucky to have a choice in how I spend my time. And I don’t presume to judge others who’ve chosen differently, or who seem at peace with their choices. Hats off. (Only could you please write the next book and clue the rest of us in on how it’s done?) I also know that not everyone reading this is a mother. Not everyone reading this is a parent. This is my story.

Yours will be different. What we have in common is the knowledge that there will never be enough hours in the day or enough years on this Earth to do everything we came here to do.

Last year I realized my firstborn was guaranteed to live under the same roof as me for just one more school year. I also lost my dad and turned 50, and we all began to emerge from a pandemic that had rendered our lives unrecognizable. If all of that’s not a ripe opportunity for reflection, I don’t know what is.

After reflecting on the deals I’ve cut with myself, I made a decision: I wanted to show up for my sons’ soccer games this past fall. Soccer matters a great deal to my sons. My sons matter a great deal to me. And this was not exclusively about James’s senior year. This was also the only season that the boys were likely to suit up in the same uniform on the same field at the same time. Both are strong players, but because of their two-year-and-two-month age gap, they’d never played on the same roster. For years, our family weekends had been an exercise in dividing and conquering, my husband driving one kid to all his travel games and tournaments and me driving the other, often dozens or hundreds of miles in the opposite direction. This was it: my chance to show up for both of them. Two birds, one stone.

I thought about the trade-offs involved in ceding the anchor chair for a long spell. They were not insignificant, but they were mine to make. So I asked to take six weeks away from the newsroom. The leave was officially so I could write a book, but I asked for the dates to overlap with peak high-school-soccer season. The plan was that I would write my butt off every day until 3:30 in the afternoon, then hit “Save,” close my laptop, and race to the stadium to scream my head off at games.

It would be perfect.

And it was, some days.

My very first day of book leave was glorious. Early fall, crystalline blue skies, a hint of chill in the air but the sun still warm on your face. The words had flowed that morning. On the field, James took a few minutes to settle but when he did, he scored, and then he scored again. The second goal was courtesy of a cheeky flick off the back of his heel.

“Jeez, he made that look easy,” whooped the dad of one of the younger boys, spinning around in the bleachers to give me a high five. It is surprising he could reach me, as I was levitating several feet off the ground with pride and love.

[Read: Why we long for the most difficult days of parenthood]

There were even better days. On his 16th birthday, Alexander scored in the last seconds of the game. His very first goal as a varsity player. Even the seniors stormed the field to congratulate him. You have never seen a boy with eyes so bright or a grin so wide. On the drive home, I teased him, “You know this is as good as life gets, right? A sweet goal, on your sweet 16th, in front of the whole school? You do know it’s all downhill from here?”

The best day of all was an ordinary one, in a not particularly important game, early in the season. James and Alexander play the same position. This meant the downside of their being on the same team was that Alexander rarely got off the bench. As a senior, James started every game and finished most of them too; Alexander and many of the other younger players subbed in only if the score grew so lopsided in our favor that we were almost certain to win. When one player subs for another, they’re supposed to do it fast, to minimize disruption. One player runs off, the other runs on, no drama, no breaking stride. When Alexander trotted onto the field to spell his brother that day, he held out his hand for a flying fist bump and kept moving. But for a sliver of a second, James stopped. He reached for Alexander’s shoulder and squeezed it. A look passed from older brother to younger: You got this.

It was the smallest thing. No one else would have noticed. But I watched it and, like the Grinch’s, my heart grew three sizes that day.

Not every day was great. There were days the boys played with everything they had and lost anyway. Days they came home bruised and discouraged. There were leg cramps and rain delays and a dislocated shoulder. There were days they limped off the field in tears.

I was there for all of it.

And yet, as the days slipped by, my own chapters kept not getting written. I was staring down a deadline. I knew how many words needed to get cranked out by the end of my book leave for me to have even a prayer of a chance of turning in the manuscript on time. I was not close. Somehow I found myself back in the gray space of a decision that might come back to haunt me. With reluctance, I concluded that I would need to miss some games after all.

James scored the goal of his high-school career in one of those games: a header, in overtime, to clinch the league trophy. I felt joy (for him) and fury (at myself). Why is life so good at presenting situations where you need to be in two places at once? Sometimes the only thing that gives me solace is the knowledge that we’re all trying, and failing, and then getting up and trying again, to be true both to ourselves and to the people we love.

This article has been adapted from Mary Louise Kelly’s forthcoming book, It. Goes. So. Fast.

A huge event today could have a major impact on national politics—and it might not be the one you have in mind.

While a judge arraigns Donald Trump in New York City, voters in Chicago will be rendering their own verdict on who should lead the nation’s third-largest city: Paul Vallas, a 69-year-old former city-budget director and the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, or Brandon Johnson, a 47-year-old county commissioner, former teacher, and longtime paid organizer for the city’s most progressive political force, the Chicago Teachers Union. The outcome could have meaning well beyond the shores of Lake Michigan, offering an indication of where voters—Democrats in particular—are leaning on the issues of crime, policing, and race.

For Chicagoans, though, this election is about more than augurings for the nation. Crime and public safety are, far and away, the issues of greatest voter concern here. Although shootings and homicides are down from a year ago, Chicago’s homicide rate remains five times higher than New York City’s and 2.5 times higher than Los Angeles’s. In 2022, crime in Chicago rose in almost every other major category, including robbery, burglary, theft, and motor-vehicle theft. Those numbers and the pervasive sense of unease about public safety had a lot to do with the defeat of incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the city’s nonpartisan primary in February.

Even great cities are fragile—one furor or fire away from disaster. In the half century that I’ve called Chicago home, Carl Sandburg’s City of the Big Shoulders has been fortunate to produce a succession of larger-than-life leaders when they were most needed. It’s not clear if either candidate in Tuesday’s runoff is that leader. Chicagoans face an imperfect choice between an aging, white technocrat who believes the answer is more, and more effective, policing, and a relatively inexperienced young progressive, a Black man, whose vision for combatting crime and violence goes to conquering poverty and racial inequity.

[Alec MacGillis: The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight]

The former, Vallas, is a charismatically challenged data nerd with roots in the city’s white bungalow communities and close ties to its conservative police union. Vallas has pitched almost his entire campaign around public safety, promising to add 1,800 police officers and promote “proactive policing” to confront “an utter breakdown of law and order.” He has also said that police have been “handcuffed” in pursuing crime. That phrase worries some Chicagoans who recall incidents such as the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, a teenager shot 16 times in the back while trying to flee Chicago police, which led to a Justice Department investigation and a consent decree with the Illinois attorney general requiring the Chicago police to make reforms.

Johnson, more comfortable in the spotlight than Vallas, began the race last fall with little name recognition in much of the city. But with the financial backing of the CTU, he finished strong enough to squeeze Lightfoot out of the runoff, largely by rallying white voters behind his progressive platform. Johnson has pledged $800 million in new taxes on large businesses and the wealthy to make significant investments in housing, mental-health services, and economic development in impoverished communities on the city’s South and West Sides.

Vallas, who has the backing of the city’s business community, has been more circumspect about tax increases. Johnson has attacked Vallas as a crypto-Republican and an opponent of abortion rights (both of which Vallas denies). Vallas, in turn, has questioned Johnson’s experience and attacked him for owing thousands of dollars in city fees and fines. (City officials recently confirmed that Johnson has now paid off the debts.) And whereas Johnson is a bitter opponent of school vouchers and charter schools, Vallas, who has run public-school systems in four cities, favors them.

But the biggest line between the two has come over the issue of public safety and policing. Johnson has pledged to immediately train and promote 200 officers to the rank of detective to help improve the city’s dismal 30 percent clearance rate of unsolved homicides and other major crimes. But he has resisted Vallas’s call for more police, noting, correctly, that even with its current police manpower—down 1,700 officers since Lightfoot took office—Chicago still has more police per capita than New York, Los Angeles, and almost every other big city in America. Given that, Johnson argues, the city should approach its public-safety challenges with other strategies, namely by addressing the historic resource and investment discrepancies between predominantly white communities and communities of color.

[Annie Lowrey: The misery of being a big-city mayor]

Vallas has pummeled Johnson relentlessly for comments he made following George Floyd’s murder, when Johnson pushed for a county-board resolution calling for a shifting of funds from policing and incarceration to human services. In a radio interview in December 2020, Johnson was asked about a comment by former President Barack Obama, for whom I once worked, who had called “Defund the police” a “snappy” slogan. “I don’t look at it as a slogan,” Johnson said then. “It’s an actual, real political goal.”

John Catanzara, the outspoken and divisive head of Chicago’s local Fraternal Order of Police and a Vallas supporter, told The New York Times that there would be “blood in the streets” if Johnson wins, because as many as 1,000 current police officers would immediately leave the force. It was an ugly and incendiary comment. Still, Johnson’s past statement on defunding the police and his current policy proposals have caused cooler heads than Catanzara to worry about Johnson’s ability to effectively lead and motivate the police as mayor. Arne Duncan, Obama’s former education secretary who leads a violence-intervention program in the city, recently endorsed Vallas. “He’s best positioned to try to lead the change that’s needed in the Chicago Police Department,” Duncan told Politico. “Paul has credibility, and he has trust.”

Vallas, who has family ties to policing and helped negotiate the last city contract on behalf of the FOP, argues that his relationship with the rank and file would revive flagging morale and encourage retired, seasoned officers to return to fill some of the new detective slots he plans to create. He promises to offer more rigorous policing without violating the consent decree against excessive force that the city signed after the McDonald murder. But a major test would come if new cases of excessive force by police emerged on his watch.

[Patrick Sharkey: The crime spike is no mystery]

Johnson hopes that the endorsement of two national progressive icons, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, will help stir turnout among younger voters in the runoff. If Johnson wins, he will join them as a luminary of the left, lauded for his new public-safety paradigm. But he will also become a ready target for Republicans, who have made urban crime and the largely exaggerated specter of “defunding the police” a major focus of their attack on Democrats across the country. A Vallas victory, much like that of Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, would help Democrats rebuff such attacks in 2024.

The choice for Chicago voters is not exactly clear. Johnson’s aspirational vision of fighting crime by combatting injustice is more hopeful than the well-trod path of simply fine-tuning policing, but his is a long-term strategy for an immediate crisis. Vallas’s policing-heavy solution is not enough to end an epidemic that has deeper roots, but it is necessary. Although Johnson’s idealism is appealing, he has never run anything larger than a classroom and too often devolves into progressive sloganeering. Vallas’s long experience in government, however mixed his success, is reassuring. Yet, nearing 70, he seems more a caretaker, subsumed in a tangle of numbers, than the visionary the city requires.

We need a healthy dose of what each man offers but can choose only one, knowing that neither has the whole package. Chicagoans want a change. The rest of the country is watching to see which direction the city goes. But it’s possible that neither candidate can provide the transformation the city needs.

In the past few months, artificial intelligence has managed to pass the bar exam, create award-winning art, and diagnose sick patients better than most physicians. Soon it might eliminate millions of jobs. Eventually it might usher in a post-work utopia or civilizational apocalypse.

At least those are the arguments being made by its boosters and detractors in Silicon Valley. But Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, a New York–based group studying artificial intelligence’s effects on society, says Americans should view the technology with neither a sense of mystery nor a feeling of awed resignation. The former Federal Trade Commission adviser thinks regulators need to analyze AI’s consumer and business applications with a shrewd, empowered skepticism.  

Kak and I discussed how to understand AI, the risks it poses, whether the technology is overhyped, and how to regulate it. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Annie Lowrey: Let’s start off with the most basic question: What is AI?

Amba Kak: AI is a buzzword. The FTC has described the term artificial intelligence as a marketing term. They put out a blog post saying that the term has no discernible, definite meaning! That said, what we are talking about are algorithms that take large amounts of data. They process that data. They generate outputs. Those outputs could be predictions, about what word is going to come next or what direction a car needs to turn. They could be scores, like credit-scoring algorithms. They could be algorithms that rank content in a way, like in your news feed.

Lowrey: That sounds like technology that we already had. What’s different about AI in the past year or two?

Kak: You mean “generative AI.” Colloquially understood, these systems generate text, images, and voice outputs. Like many other kinds of AI, generative AI relies on large and often complex models trained on massive data sets—huge amounts of text scraped from sites like Reddit or Wikipedia, or images downloaded from Flickr. There are image generators, where you put in a text prompt and the output is an image. There are also text generators, where you put in a text prompt and you get back text.

[Read: What have humans just unleashed?]

Lowrey: Do these systems “think”? Are they more “human” or more “intelligent” than past systems working with huge amounts of data?

Kak: The short answer is no. They don’t think. They’re not intelligent. They are “haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms” they observe in the training data, as the AI researchers Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell put it. There are vested interests that want us to see these systems as being intelligent and a stepping stone to the singularity and “artificial general intelligence.”

Lowrey: What does singularity mean in this context?

Kak: It has no clear meaning. It’s this idea that machines will be so intelligent that they will be a threat to the human race. ChatGPT is the beginning. The end is we’re all going to die.

These narratives are purposefully distracting from the fact that these systems aren’t like that. What they are doing is fairly banal, right? They’re taking a ton of data from the web. They’re learning patterns, spitting out outputs, replicating the learning data. They’re better than what we had before. They’re much more effective at mimicking the kind of interaction you might have with a human, or the kind of result you might get from a human.

Lowrey: When you look at the AI systems out there, what do you see as the most immediate, concrete risk for your average American?

Kak: One broad, big bucket of concerns is the generation of inaccurate outputs. Bad advice. Misinformation, inaccurate information. This is especially bad because people think these systems are “intelligent.” They’re throwing medical symptoms into ChatGPT and getting inaccurate diagnoses. As with other applications of algorithms—credit scoring, housing, criminal justice—some groups feel the pinch worse than others. The people who might be most at risk are people who can’t afford proper medical care, for instance.

A second big bucket of concerns has to do with security and privacy. These systems are very susceptible to being gamed and hacked. Will people be prompted to disclose personal information in a dangerous way? Will outputs be manipulated by bad actors? If people are using these as search engines, are they getting spammed? In fact, is ChatGPT the most effective spam generator we’ve ever seen? Will the training data be manipulated? What about phishing at scale?

One third big bucket is competition. Microsoft and Google are well poised to corner this market. Do we want them to have control over an even bigger swath of the digital economy? If we believe—or are being made to believe—that these large language models are the inevitable future, are we accepting that a few companies have a first-mover advantage and might dominate the market? The chair of the FCC, Lina Khan, has already said the government is going to scrutinize this space for anticompetitive behavior. We’re already seeing companies engage in potentially anticompetitive behavior.

Lowrey: One issue seems to be that these models are being created with vast troves of public data—even if that’s not data people intended to be used for this purpose. And the creators of the models are a small elite—a few thousand people, maybe. That seems like an ideal way to amplify existing inequalities.   

[Read: Why are we letting the AI crisis just happen?]

Kak: OpenAI is the company that makes ChatGPT. In an earlier version, some of the training data was sourced from Reddit, user-generated content known for being abusive and biased against gender minorities and members of racial and ethnic minority groups. It would be no surprise that the AI system reflects that reality.

Of course the risk is that it perpetuates dominant viewpoints. Of course the risk is that it reinforces power asymmetries and inequalities that already exist. Of course these models are going to reflect the data that they’re trained on, and the worldviews that are embedded in that data. More than that, Microsoft and Google are now going to have a much wider swath of data to work from, as they get these inputs from the public.

Lowrey: How much is regulating AI like regulating social media? Many of the concerns seem the same: the viral spread of misinformation and disinformation, the use and misuse of truly enormous quantities of personal information, and so on.   

Kak: It took a few tech-driven crisis cycles to bring people to the consensus that we need to hold social-media companies accountable. With Cambridge Analytica, countries that had moved one step in 10 years on privacy laws all of a sudden moved 10 steps in one year. There was finally momentum across political ideologies. With AI, we’re not there. We need to galvanize the political will. We do not need to wait for a crisis.

In terms of whether regulating AI is like regulating other forms of media or tech: I get tired of saying this, but this is about data protection, data privacy, and competition policy. If we have good data-privacy laws and we implement them well, if we protect consumers, if we force these companies to compete and do not allow them to consolidate their advantages early—these are key components. We’re already seeing European regulators step in using existing data-privacy laws to regulate AI.  

Lowrey: But we don’t do a lot of tech regulation, right? Not compared with, say, the regulation of energy utilities, financial firms, providers of health care.

Kak: Big banks are actually a useful way of thinking about how we should be regulating these firms. The actions of large financial firms can have diffuse, unpredictable effects on the broader financial system, and thus the economy. We cannot predict the particular harm that they will cause, but we know they can. So we put the onus on these companies to demonstrate that they are safe enough, and we have a lot of rules that apply to them. That’s what we need to have for our tech companies, because their products have diffuse, unpredictable effects on our information environment, creative industries, labor market, and democracy.

Lowrey: Are we starting from scratch?

Kak: Absolutely not. We are not starting with a blank slate. We already have enforcement tools. This is not the Wild West.

Generative AI is being used for spam, fraud, plagiarism, deepfakes, that kind of stuff. The FTC is already empowered to tackle these issues. It can force companies to substantiate their claims, including the claim that they’ve mitigated risks to users. Then there are the sectoral regulators. Take the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It could protect consumers from being harmed by chatbots in the financial sector.

Lowrey: What about legislative proposals?

Kak: There are bills that have been languishing on the Hill regarding algorithmic accountability, algorithmic transparency, and data privacy. This is the moment to strengthen them and pass them. Everybody’s talking about futuristic risks, the singularity, existential risk. They’re distracting from the fact that the thing that really scares these companies is regulation. Regulation today.

This would address questions like: What training data are you using? Where does it come from? How are you mitigating against discrimination? How are you ensuring that certain types of data aren’t being exploited, or used without consent? What security vulnerabilities do you have and how are you protecting against them? It’s a checklist, almost. It sounds boring. But you get these companies to put their answers on paper, and that empowers the regulators to hold them accountable and initiate enforcement when things go wrong.

In some legislative proposals, these rules won’t apply to private companies. They’re regarding the government use of algorithms. But it gives us a framework we can strengthen and amend for use on private businesses. And I would say we should go much further on the transparency and documentation elements. Until these companies do due diligence, they should not be on the market. These tools should not be public. They shouldn’t be able to sell them.

Lowrey: Does Washington really have its head around this?

Kak: It’s always tempting to put the blame on lawmakers and regulators. They’re slow to understand this technology! They’re overwhelmed! It’s missing the point and it’s not true. It works in the interest of industry. OpenAI and Entropic and all these companies are telling lawmakers and the public that nobody’s as worried about this as they are. We’re capable of fixing it. But these are magic, unknowable systems. Nobody but us understands them. Maybe we don’t even understand them.

There are promising signs that regulators aren’t listening. Regulators at the FTC and elsewhere are saying, We’re going to ask questions. You’re going to answer. We’re going to set the terms of the debate, not you. That’s the crucial move. We need to place the burden on companies to assure regulators and lawmakers and the public. Lawmakers don’t need to understand these systems perfectly. They just need to ask the companies to prove to us that they’re not unleashing them on the public when they think they might do harm.

Lowrey: Let’s talk about the hypothetical long-range risk. A recent public letter called for a six-month halt on AI development. Elon Musk and hundreds of other tech leaders signed it. It asked, and I quote: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” Are these concerns you share? What do you make of those questions?

Kak: Yeah, no. This is a perfect example of a narrative meant to frighten people into complacency and inaction. It shifts the conversation away from the harm these AI systems are creating in the present. The issue is not that they’re omnipotent. It is that they’re janky now. They’re being gamed. They’re being misused. They’re inaccurate. They’re spreading disinformation.

Lowrey: If you were a member of Congress and you had Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, testifying before you, what would you ask him?

Kak: Apart from the laundry list of gaps in knowledge on training data, I would ask for details about the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft, information about what deals they have under way—who’s actually buying this system and how are they using it? Why did the company feel confident enough that it had mitigated enough risk to go forward with commercial release? I would want him to show us documentation, receipts of internal company processes.

Let’s really put him on the spot: Is OpenAI following the laws that exist? My guess is he’d answer that he doesn’t know. That’s exactly the problem. We’re seeing these systems being rolled out with minimal internal or external scrutiny. This is key, because we’re hearing a lot of noise from these executives about their commitments to safety and so on. But surprise! Conspicuously little support for actual, enforceable regulation.

Let’s not stop at Sam Altman, just because he’s all over the media right now. Let’s call Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Google, and other Big Tech executives too. These companies are competing aggressively in this market and control the infrastructure that the whole ecosystem depends on. They’re also significantly more tight-lipped about their policy positions.

Lowrey: I guess a lot of this will become more concrete when folks are using AI technologies to make money. Companies are going to be using this stuff to sell cars soon.

Kak: This is an expensive business, whether it’s the computing costs or the cost of human labor to train these AI systems to be more sophisticated or less toxic or abusive. And this is at a time when financial headwinds are affecting the tech industry. What happens when these companies are squeezed for profit? Regulation becomes more important than ever, to prevent the bottom line from dictating irresponsible choices.

Lowrey: Let’s say we don’t regulate these companies very well. What does the situation look like 20 years from now?

Kak: I can definitely speculate about the unreliable and unpredictable information environment we’d find ourselves in: misinformation, fraud, cybersecurity vulnerability, and hate speech.

Here’s what I know for sure. If we don’t use this moment to reassert public control over the trajectory of the AI industry, in 20 years we’ll be on the back foot, responding to the fallout. We didn’t just wake up one morning with targeted advertising as the business model of the internet, or suddenly find that tech infrastructure was controlled by a handful of companies. It happened because regulators didn’t move when they needed to. And the companies told us they would not “be evil.”

With AI, we’re talking about the same companies. Rather than take their word that they’ve got it covered, rather than getting swept up in their grand claims, let’s use this moment to set guardrails. Put the burden on the companies to prove that they’re going to do no harm. Prevent them from concentrating power in their hands.