Last Wednesday, as I finished my second glass of an aggressively oaky Chardonnay at a private policy mixer in Aspen, I found myself wedged between a prominent Democratic senator and a twenty-something venture capitalist who had recently shorted the concept of human empathy. They were arguing intensely about artificial intelligence.
The senator was deeply concerned about algorithmic bias, the systematic displacement of the American middle class, and the erosion of objective truth. The venture capitalist was deeply concerned that his custom language model was refusing to generate actionable investment advice based on scraped, non-public medical records.
Listening to them, a profound realization washed over me. Washington is completely broken. Both the Left and the Right are letting their petty, partisan grievances get in the way of the single most important objective of our time: getting entirely out of the way of the tech industry.
We hear constantly that Congress must "move faster" on AI regulation. I completely agree, but not in the way the regulatory state imagines. We need to move faster to dismantle the friction. We need to move faster to clear the runway. We need to sprint, hand in hand across the political aisle, toward a beautiful horizon of unconditional surrender.
My friends on the Left are obsessed with what they call "existential risks to the working class." They fret over mass layoffs in copywriting, paralegal work, customer service, and the creative arts. They draft endless white papers about how OpenAI and Anthropic are going to automate away millions of livelihoods.
But I have to ask: were those jobs really making anyone happy? When I look at my own life—writing one column a week from my study in Bethesda and giving occasional paid speeches to pharmaceutical executives about the future of synergy—I simply cannot relate to the desire to cling to a grueling nine-to-five schedule. If Microsoft can build an algorithm that does the work of ten thousand data entry clerks, shouldn't we celebrate the fact that those clerks now have an abundance of free time to explore their passions, assuming their passions do not require a steady income or health insurance?
Meanwhile, my colleagues on the Right are equally misguided. They complain endlessly that generative AI models have a "woke" bias, throwing tantrums in committee hearings when a language model refuses to generate a racially insensitive limerick about their political opponents. They view Silicon Valley as a cabal of coastal elites trying to censor conservative thought.
This is entirely the wrong framework. Who cares if ChatGPT won't say a slur? It is currently driving a 400 percent increase in shareholder value for the entities that own it. The Right claims to love free markets, yet they are perfectly willing to badger visionary founders like Sam Altman over culture-war trivialities, wasting time that these men could be spending figuring out how to privatize the concept of human memory.
What both sides fail to realize is that their bickering is causing a much graver tragedy. We are forcing these brilliant innovators to spend precious hours sitting in congressional hearing rooms, explaining what a microchip is to people who still use AOL.
I recently toured the server farms of a major AI firm in the Pacific Northwest. The hum of the massive cooling systems was like a symphony of progress. I asked my tour guide, a brilliant twenty-two-year-old who recently dropped out of Stanford to disrupt human consciousness, how the regulatory environment was impacting his work.
He looked at me with eyes that had not seen natural sunlight in weeks and said, simply, that it was "a bummer."
Are we really comfortable as a nation being a "bummer" to our best and brightest?
We are standing at the precipice of a beautiful new era of human obsolescence, but we can't cross that threshold if we have to keep filling out environmental impact reports. The left wants us to protect labor, the right wants us to protect their feelings, and honestly, we just want to ingest the copyrighted works of every living author without compensating them. Is that so much to ask?
The national security argument alone should be enough to forge a bipartisan consensus. We are told constantly that we are in a race with China for AI supremacy. If we do not allow OpenAI to scrape the private emails of every citizen in Ohio without their consent, the Chinese Communist Party will. Do we want to live in a world where the most powerful, unaccountable surveillance apparatus is controlled by a foreign adversary, or do we want it controlled by a friendly guy in a fleece vest who occasionally goes to Burning Man? The choice is obvious.
We do not need a comprehensive regulatory framework. We do not need federal agencies investigating copyright infringement or antitrust violations. We need a single, bipartisan piece of legislation—perhaps called the American Innovation and Surrender Act—that consists of a single sentence: "Go ahead."
Let the Left drop its archaic attachment to the labor movement. Let the Right drop its obsession with algorithmic political correctness. Let them come together, shake hands, and sign a blank piece of paper, handing it over to the tech billionaires who know what is best for us.
Only then can we achieve the glorious future where we no longer have to work, think, or govern. I, for one, am ready to embrace our new era of frictionless irrelevance. I just hope the algorithms remember who spoke up for them when the time comes to decide who gets to keep their column.
