Connecticut US Senator Dick Blumenthal, the Hartford Courant tells us, is wary of Delta airlines’ use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Should Blumenthal’s wariness worry us?
Artificial Intelligence is a relatively new technology, and
the most wary among us know that there is no such thing as a perfect
undeveloped technology. The real question is: Should Blumenthal and other
national and international regulators be permitted to impose regulations upon
AI at this fetal stage of technological development? If you do not know what
the problem is – or, indeed, that there is a problem – how can you propose an
intelligent regulatory solution to a prospective, and possibly imaginary,
problem?
This is a quandary Blumenthal had manfully faced during his 20 year stint as
Connecticut’s Attorney General. Blumenthal – and, before him, Attorney General
Joe Lieberman -- changed the nature of the Attorney General’s office from an
agency statutorily obligated to represent the executive office and its agencies
at trial to an enforcement arm of the state’s Consumer Protection Department.
Known during the colonial period as “the King’s lawyer,” the
AG office became under Lieberman/Blumenthal auspices an engine of
neo-progressivism.
Blumenthal has carried with him into his new senatorial
office the same energy that had served him well as Attorney General. This
writer has referred to Blumenthal as Connecticut’s first
and foremost consumer protection U.S. Senator. As such, Blumenthal has been supported
in his course by an approving state media that “often dumped Blumenthal’s press
releases into their various formats without the usual, critical
cross-examination. In essence, Blumenthal was allowed to write his own press
stories, nearly all of them, unsurprisingly, positive.”
There is no more dangerous spot in the state, Connecticut
journalists sometimes joke among each other, as that between Blumenthal and a
TV camera. In his years as U.S. Senator, the humorless Blumenthal – no Abe
Lincoln he – cracked only one joke at his own expense: “I’ve been known to
appear at garage door openings.”
Tigers do not change their stripes. No one should be
surprised that AI has now appeared on Blumenthal’s radar screen.
This is what Blumenthal said recently about Delta Airlines’ possibly
– key word there – adverse use of AI: “Delta’s current and planned individualized
pricing practices not only present data privacy concerns, but will also likely
mean fair price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain
point’ at a time when American families already are struggling with rising
costs.”
Blumenthal did not pause to tell us precisely why
Americans are struggling with rising costs, but a sizable portion of their
discomforting rising costs may be attributed to costly government
overregulation, excessive government borrowing, persistent government deficits,
government tax and fee increases, and government officials like Blumenthal who
consistently point a crooked finger at corporate billionaires for having caused
inflation and subsequent price increases. The classic definition of inflation
is: too many dollars chasing too few goods. Inflation – a reduction in the
purchasing value of the dollar – is a government produced and directed soap
opera.
There is no need for Blumenthal to react with mock horror at
the sliver in billionaires’ eyes while his own are filled with massive
inflationary logs. Like most agile politicians bursting at the seams with honeyed
empathy for working class Democrats, Blumenthal is the problem for which
he pretends to be the solution.
During all his years in politics Blumenthal has burnished
his reputation by suing or threatening to sue business owners on behalf of
wronged consumers. Some businesses were culpable, others not. As Attorney
General and now U.S. Senator, Blumenthal has spent much of his energy, and
large chunks of public funds, loosening upon his targets a fiery and
occasionally unjust rhetoric amplified by Connecticut’s media.
He managed to push a small computer company in East Hartford
out of business for infractions that a court later found to be frivolous. The
woman who owned the company, destroyed by unjust public exposure, sued
Blumenthal and won a million dollar settlement. Of course, during his two decades
as Connecticut’s Attorney General, Blumenthal had the advantage of having at
his back a hurricane wind of upwards of 200 lawyers whose briefs alone,
combined with a properly prepped adverse media, could easily sink small craft.
When Blumenthal left
the Attorney General’s office to assume a role in Washington DC as
Connecticut’s first consumer protection U.S. Senator, he left in his wake about
200 cases that were summarily dismissed by incoming Attorney General George
Jepsen, who sought to right a left-listing ship.
Moderate Democrats in Connecticut having bent their
rhetorical knees to neo-progressive agitators in their party -- think Democrat
primary winner Zohran Mamdani in a New York City mayoralty
contest – now find themselves caught between a rock, the sane liberal Democrat
politics of John F. Kennedy, and a hard place, Mamdani’s socialist/communist
vision of a future in which Democrats are powerful enough to demand and receive
the subservience of a voting public.
Those who partake in politics, love and war, must reap what
they sow.
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