How Two Colorado House Candidates Are Thinking About AI - The New York Times

The New York Times has looked at Colorado and discovered that A.I. is 'the Wild West of politics this election cycle,' which is the sort of sentence that sounds rugged until you remember the actual Wild West had sheriffs, territories, and a federal government that occasionally bothered to send someone. Here we have two House candidates in a close race, both described as 'active in early efforts to regulate the technology,' which in a tight district is a polite way of saying both found a camera and stood in front of it. Thinking about AI, says the headline. Thinking is doing an enormous amount of work in that headline. Meanwhile the rules are being drafted by the very people whose campaigns the rules will govern, which is either a conflict of interest or a pilot programme, depending on your mood.

Then the money. The Times reports big campaign checks from 'competing corporate interests,' which is the free-market equivalent of betting on every horse in the race and then complaining about the smell of the stables. Whoever wins, the cheque cleared in October. And the technology has 'scrambled traditional political lines,' which is the most flattering available description of an issue on which nobody knows what they think and everybody knows what their donors think. Scrambled is right — scrambled is what you get when you don't have an omelette plan.

Down the corridor, the actual governing shuffles along at a pace that would bore a sloth. North Dakota's interim AI committee voted one out just last week, to be taken up in 2027, by which time the models will have had several more birthdays and possibly a midlife crisis. Colorado's hopefuls are 'active in early efforts' — early being the operative word, efforts being the generous one. Two candidates, one close race, a technology that rearranges whole job markets between newsletters, and the summit of our civic response is a position paper and a fundraiser. The Wild West at least had the decency to be over eventually.