Steelmanning AI Policy with the AI Rosetta Stone

As part of my fellowship at Harvard, I’ve been thinking hard about artificial intelligence (AI). Start with the physics of the problem: AI is what lawyers call an unavoidably unsafe product. No matter how carefully we build it, it is going to cause harm, and some of those harms will be unforeseeable. That is not a bug we can engineer away. It is an intrinsic property of the thing, the same way it is a property of pharmaceuticals, vaccines, knives, and power tools. We already have plenty of laws and legal mechanisms for dealing with unsafe products and the harms they cause. The problem is what those mechanisms are built to see. A courtroom is very good at looking at one specific case and measuring the actual loss to one specific person. It is a terrible instrument for weighing that loss against the enormous benefits the same product produced for everyone else. Tort law is a microscope for a problem that needs a scale. But we have stepped on this rake before. In the 1970s and 1980s a…