U. study shows New Jerseyans want regulations for AI, mental health

Splendid news from the Garden State, where Rutgers researchers have discovered that most adults in New Jersey support new regulations surrounding AI and mental health. This is roughly as surprising as discovering that most patients support the idea of doctors not prescribing them the experimental drug with the unpronounceable side effects. The study, no doubt assembled using the cutting-edge methodology of asking people whether they would like their psychological wellbeing to be left to the tender mercies of unregulated software, has produced a verdict that would astonish precisely no one who has ever had a conversation.

One imagines the New Jersey legislature receiving this earth-shattering insight and responding with the alacrity of a man who has just been handed a subpoena. There will be a task force to study the feasibility of forming a working group, a report recommending further study, and then the quiet interment of the entire affair under a cairn of procedural jargon. Meanwhile, the AI systems that prompted these concerns continue humming along in a regulatory vacuum, because the distance between what the public wants and what lawmakers deliver is not a gap at all — it is the Mariana Trench, and we are all at the bottom of it without a diving suit.

The study is a perfectly respectable piece of academic labour in service of the bleeding obvious, and it will no doubt be filed alongside every other inconvenient survey in the great municipal archive of things we chose to ignore. But let us not be entirely churlish: Rutgers has given the people of New Jersey the opportunity to state, for the record, that they would quite like their mental health not to be an unregulated playground for algorithmic experimentation. Whether anyone in Trenton is actually listening is, of course, a separate question — one that, sadly, the study did not think to ask.