FCC Commissioner Simington Remarks to AI Workshop

What I won’t do is reflexively say that no regulation of artificial intelligence is a sine qua non for innovation. Instead, the throughline I think you can trace is that, where the United States has succeeded in technological development, it has done so through a mindful attempt to cultivate and potentiate innovation. Whether rattling an antitrust saber at AT&T in the 1950s or stepping back and letting Larry and Sergey figure it out in the 1990s, the American success stories contrast with the stories of Soviet, and more recently European, technological stagnation in the animating principles, and efficient mechanisms, of government action. In every success cited, people of goodwill in the United States government sought to make new things work.  An American GDPR for A.I. is not what we need. It is not what the American consumer needs. And it would be devastating for America’s leading position in the global order. Let us not cast about for regulatory solutions to problems that do not exist; remedies that may, as yet, be worse than the disease.