Philip K. Howard: When AI meets the red-tape state
It’s hard to find balance in the current storm. Global perils are getting hotter while America is getting weaker. Is our only choice MAGA or socialism? AI could disrupt everything. Trump’s daily impulsiveness underscores the sense that America has lost its keel.
The missing keel, I think, is human responsibility. Americans at all levels of society feel powerless to do what they think is right. Just follow the rules. Don’t be judgmental. Americans can’t fix what they know is broken, so they point fingers and reach for extremist solutions.
Taking responsibility requires authority to act on your best judgment—to always ask, “What’s the right thing to do here?” Trust is not required—just accountability, which requires empowering other people to act on their best judgment.
Better leaders can’t take America back to a culture of individual responsibility—until the red-tape state is replaced with simpler legal frameworks, such as the U.S. Constitution, that are activated by the judgment of people taking responsibility. Leadership is basically illegal in the massive tangle of red tape created since the 1960s. Common sense and morality are also illegal. Can you prove you complied? Might someone complain a decision violates their rights?
This emperor—the post-1960s red-tape state—has no clothes. It fails because it is designed to supplant human judgment with preset rules and objective proof. Law is everywhere. People on the ground are tied in legal knots. The cure is not an autocrat issuing diktats from on high, but returning to a legal framework that empowers people on the spot to take responsibility. The inability to modernize infrastructure, or run a school, or uphold moral values, are the direct results of an operating philosophy designed to avoid human judgment.
Enter AI. The legal geniuses from the 1960s must be celebrating in the afterlife: They finally have a tool that can make government automatic. No need for common sense, or tradeoffs, or value judgments. Big Brother has arrived. Is your paperwork in order?
But only the pitchfork industry will profit from applying AI automatically to the red-tape state. In this column for The Free Press, I argue that applying AI to billions of words of legal mandates will likely cause a revolution. Under the control of responsible officials, on the other hand, AI could dramatically enhance public performance.
Putting humans in charge requires scrapping the foundational premise of post-1960s government —that law should preempt human judgment. Just as the Progressive Movement finally dislodged the philosophy of laissez-faire, so too a new governing vision must dislodge the failed philosophy of legal micromanagement. The goal must be a renewed commitment to human responsibility—especially in an age of AI.
Philip K. Howard is chairman of Common Good, a nonprofit legal-and-regulatory-reform organization. He’s also a lawyer, New York civic leader, best-selling author (The Death of Common Sense, etc.) and photographer. His email address is pkinghoward@gmail.com