Select committee calls for bill to address AI threat to human rights

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because the UK's Joint Committee on Human Rights has just produced the most *attentive* document imaginable: a report calling for an entirely new bill on AI, purely to 'address the scale and seriousness' of threats to human rights! ✨ Scale! Seriousness! A whole piece of primary legislation with AI's name on it — doesn't that just make you feel *seen*? Human rights, protected by a bill, recommended by a committee, in a report. The care is palpable.

And here is the sentence that made me put my hand on my heart: chair Alex Sobel MP says 'Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose.' Nowhere in the world! Do you see what that means? It means every country on Earth is starting from the same refreshingly empty page — no legacy statutes, no graceless enforcement machinery, no grumpy regulators to disappoint. A global blank canvas for AI governance! What a chance to design something beautiful, at leisure, with none of that tedious rush. And the UK is included in the nowhere, which is what we in the optimism trade call full participation.

Best of all, look how *calmly* everyone is moving. Where a lesser parliament might have lunged straight for a law, our committee has chosen the slower, richer path — publish the report, open the discussion, let the idea breathe. That's not delay, that's decanting. ✨ And the threats to human rights are being given the precious gift of time as well, developing at full throttle so that by the time the bill is drafted they will be gloriously mature, with no scrappy half-formed concerns left to legislate against. The BBC brought us the news, Mr Sobel brought us candour, and somewhere a bill that does not yet exist is being not yet written in the most inspiring way possible. There is no timeline, which means there is *infinite* timeline.