Where I’m standing when I say this: I work in AI integration and technology governance for a living. I use these tools every day — this campaign has been upfront that we use them too. I’ve been working with computers since 1980. So when I tell you I’m skeptical of the AI gold rush, it’s not fear of the unknown. It’s familiarity with the salesmen.
You can’t fix a system while you’re billing it.
What I’d push for:
No federal preemption without a federal framework. Congress doesn’t get to block states from protecting their citizens while offering nothing in return.
Datacenter transparency and honest accounting — public reporting of water and energy consumption, and no sweetheart utility deals that make Arizona families subsidize grid upgrades for trillion-dollar companies. If you want to build in the desert, the desert gets to see the bill.
Safety before scale — independent testing standards, incident reporting, and whistleblower protections for the people inside these companies. We should learn to use the tools we already have safely before racing to build more powerful ones.
Rebuild Congress’s own brain — restore an Office of Technology Assessment so lawmakers aren’t outsourcing their understanding to the industries they regulate.
Protecting kids without building a surveillance state. I have two kids; I understand exactly why parents want age verification. I also understand what happens when tech-illiterate legislators build identity-checking infrastructure: it doesn’t protect children, it just makes everyone show papers. There are better tools. Let’s use those.
I’m not afraid of the technology. I’m afraid of the pitch deck.
Sources
Office of Technology Assessment: Defunded by Congress in 1995; never restored.
State AI law preemption: The proposed 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation was stripped from the 2025 budget reconciliation bill by a 99–1 Senate vote, July 2025.
