What does the article say about engineers?

How could you forget about career politicians?

Ah, yes; it's the software engineers who are the problem. The ones making a decent paycheck to actually write the code.

Not the tech company executives making billions, with a b.

Not Wall Street, that demands infinite, ever-increasing growth.

Software engineers.

Right.

ai doesnt have to, and is trying to avoid carbon emissions.

the oil companies are still doing the worst, along with the oil burners like car and plane operators.

ai on nuclear or solar isnt doing much bad for the planet

Follow the money. Once you realize nothing makes sense, everything suddenly makes sense.

In practice, "states’ rights" is sometimes used strategically, not ideologically. AI though is viewed as as a technological and economic issue, requiring national coordination to maintain US competitiveness and adding a patchwork of States laws impedes that goal

That’s the reason it is different for the GOP

Paraphrasing - Their one principle is that laws should protect them and bind everyone else, and not bind them, and not protect anyone else.

Everyone else is excuses as paper thin as a kid trying to get a cookie

That's because what they actually want is for their policies to be applied everywhere. Sometimes there's a reason they can't just apply the policy everywhere at the highest level. In these cases, what they do is they make sure there's no policy at the highest level, so that as many instances of the lower levels as possible can apply the policies they want.

The reason they said abortion law should be a state issue is they knew they couldn't get a federal abortion ban. By making it a state issue they ensure they get to at least ban abortion in half the country rather than none of the country.

By now they probably can get a federal abortion ban, though, so I expect them to do that sooner or later. Don't expect consistency from their public statements - "abortion should be up to the states" will simply be memory-holed.

Is it your opinion that states should be allowed to regulate AI, but should not be allowed to regulate health?

I agree the GOP is being hypocritical. But I think a lot of other people are hypocritical in the opposite direction.

AI can be a legitimate interstate commerce issue. If my code runs on a data center in Virginia, am I, someone located outside of Virginia now subject to Virginia AI laws? Do I control network routing so that my application requests won’t inadvertently cross some state line? If a state hypothetically made possessing an AI app a felony, but the app weren’t on my phone but instead stored in iCloud — am I guilty of “possession” even though the actual bits and bytes are in some outside data center? If I am a California company and California banned AI, but one of my workers lived in Nevada, could that company still use AI if the work were completed outside of California? It’s a Pandora’s box, luckily that scenario is covered by the Commerce Clause.

On your illustration about abortion: the same people who wanted national vaccine mandates now want AI to be left up to the individual states? The same people that defend the Department of Education’s national influence over public schools are now states rights advocates when it suits their agenda? There is hypocrisy on all sides.

The media and pundits frame budget reconciliation thusly: When Republicans do it, it’s a “threat to Democracy” when Democrats do it, it’s “protecting democracy.” As a practical matter an AI federal law shouldn’t be in a budget bill: it should go through the normal lawmaking process. But there are a lot of things that don’t belong in a budget bill that end up there. The process is rotten.

Democrats and Republicans use federalism as it suits their agenda. Let’s not be surprised anymore. Democrats typically support strong central governments — until they aren’t the majority in Washington. Then they become fervent supporters of the strong states rights used by the Confederacy to justify slavery. When they have power in Washington, they’re now Abraham Lincoln. And vice versa. When Florida wants to strongly enforce immigration law, blue states sue. When California doesn’t want to follow immigration law, that’s somehow heroic? Some states have even passed laws prohibiting law enforcement from following federal laws while simultaneous accepting federal funding for their law enforcement then suing when those funds are withheld.

My basic view is this: there are enumerated powers, the Commerce Clause and the 10th Amendment. Let’s use those to decide who should be doing what.

We can (and should) disagree on the issues, but it would be delightful if we could at least all follow the same processes.

Drug laws: unless you’re crossing a state line, state. Immigration: federal (Commerce Clause) AI: states — until there is an interstate commerce nexus (i.e. data centers, internet)

By the way the author laments the budget reconciliation process for AI laws, but that same process was used to pass Obamacare. Is using reconciliation acceptable when it suits one’s agenda? Again: hypocrisy on all sides.

The Constitution already covers this stuff, if anyone bothers to follow it. The constitution has been bent and beaten to within an inch of its life. We need to push back on that even if it results in outcomes we might not like in the short term.

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There was an article about "accountability sinks" a few weeks ago, i.e. org chart designs that magically result in no one being accountable for some category of problems. This feels like exactly such a thing.

Yes. This falls within the Constitution's interstate commerce clause.

It looks like they will be successful. Democrats in Congress are a bunch of losers who aren't able to deal with this. I am not even sure if they want to.

Hey Hiro...you want to try some Snow Crash?

The thing is the people backing this proposed rule are not exactly marginal players in SV. You can argue that most software engineers don’t agree with it, but you have to accept that who calls the shots in a big business venture is the leadership, not the software engineers.

> Finally, GOP actually favors limited government and deregulation

This feels like a weak argument these days. It can be trivially played both ways, “GOP actually favors limited government, look at abortion,” vs “GOP actually favors powerful government, look at immigration crackdown”

There isn’t consistency on this one way or the other. I don’t think there needs to be but we shouldn’t pretend that there is for the sake of argument.