Sen. Paul: ‘Too Soon’ for ‘Crazy’ AI Regulation

As someone who is a Republican and known to be a populist, you helped to kill Senator Kennedy's kill switch bill. But is there a different approach, or should the government keep its hands off? I mean, you know, since the beginning of time, people have been wary of advances in technology, particularly in the Industrial Revolution. You know, the automated looms scared to seamstresses. The Luddite movement was formed. They smashed the looms with their hammers and axes. When electricity came along, the candlestick makers formed. Unions rioted and worried about their loss of jobs. And each time there was an advancement. Jobs were changed and displaced, but jobs were created and other sectors took a lot of people to make light bulbs took a lot of people to string up electric lines, and ultimately new jobs were created. I think I would be like everything else that came before us. To argue otherwise is to argue that this is in a historic moment, something that has never happened before, but it's going to and there are a lot of smart people saying it will, and all the jobs will be gone, and we'll live in this dystopia or utopia, depending on the person you talk to. But I think we don't know yet, and I think it has great promise for development of drugs, for helping medical decisions. I already see the AI engine is probably 100 times better than it was six months ago, but I don't fear technology. I think you have to have rules against fraud. You got to have rules about how it's used. There will probably end up being self-regulation on those who create ARM, but I suspect the users will have to have protection as well. The same way you have virus protection, I think you're going to probably bay by AI protection against rogue AI. It isn't going to be against the people who obey the law. It's going to be people like nefarious nations or criminal gangs. But I would just be, to me, a more sophisticated way to try to steal stuff from you. So you're going to have to have AI to combat rogue AI, but I don't fear it. Really. And I think it's too soon to be mandating, you know, crazy one line bills to regulate all of AI when we don't even really know what's going on yet or haven't, you know, if you're gonna write a bill to, to regulate it when you bring in some of the people who write to code and ask them, what are the problems and what do you think government should do? So I don't think the rash act like that is logical, but should the people who write the code, the people running these companies be allowed to simply self-regulate? You're comfortable with that notion? Well, people who make, uh, pharmaceuticals are regulated by the. Can't give you something that's toxic. They're regulated by liability. Some of the people that are out there, uh, saying, oh, 10% chance the world's going to end, I think they want liability protection while they're dominant in the force. It may well be rent seeking by people who are actually looking for government protectionism. So, um, No, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The incentives don't align. I'm going to sell you something, but there's a 10% chance. Well, just 10% chance the world will end. Nobody's going to buy that. And no one's going to create that. Who would work on that product? So it's either gamesmanship or they may have some bizarre people working there with some bizarre ideas. Many of these people are left wing. They've got left wing notions of having the government involved and everything. Maybe they're trying to scare us into having government, uh, you know, nationalize. I don't know what their motive is, but, uh, it doesn't seem to really fit with, uh, realistic interpretation of the facts. Well, much of the argument against regulation as well. A senator and you hear this every day like we do, is that we're in a race with China. And as the president says, if you win, AI, you win. Now that we've seen a President XI here in Washington, uh, talking about this just in the last week as Chinese AI, a real threat to the United States, you know, I guess I don't see things always in terms of countries. I see the technology being developed. Almost everything we do is worldwide. Our supply chain is worldwide, technology is worldwide. And so I don't see this as, oh, we have to shut down this or we have to beat somebody at this. Um, I see it as a great technology that's coming on board. There will be some regulation of it, but I don't jump up and down thinking, oh my goodness, the people who can't run the post office or the people who oversee the post office would now be in charge of I. What could go wrong? It's like putting the government in charge of sports now. Oh, this would be great. So I have a general, uh, dislike of regulation because of the incompetence of government. And I have a general appreciation of the market economy because the market does self-regulate, because you can't sell things, you can't commit fraud, you can't sell things that harm other individuals. And there would be and will be and should be liability. You know, you sell me something that contaminates my computer. Maybe it didn't end the world, but it takes over my business and screws up my business and all my vendors because I went a run amuck and is holding my company hostage. You should be liable for a bad product. So nobody's going to sell stuff like that unless the government kills it, gives them liability protection. That's, we're going to say, so important for humanity. Such a big deal. But we can't do this unless the government. That's what they want from regulation. They want to be protected from being sued. So then maybe they could sell you something that might destroy humanity. Well, Senator, I'd like to ask you about some a phenomenon we are seeing in financial markets, in the bond market, specifically in part driven by the competition for capital that we're seeing because so many of these companies are investing so much in infrastructure, build out to power this technology and issuing debt. To do it, the government has to offer a lot more to investors if they want them to buy their debt. Now, the 30 year yield senator hit the highest level since 2002. Today, when I give you that statistic, what do you think? Uh, my first thought is not to blame it on private borrowers, but to blame it on government for borrowing so much money. Our debt is becoming bigger as a percentage of the GDP. That's a bad thing. Uh, $40 trillion in debt, $2 trillion added each year, and about $1 trillion in interest each year. And everybody up here wants to spend more money. Both parties, people ask me, whose fault is it, Republicans or Democrats? And I just say, yes, both parties are spending the money. But this isn't because other people are bidding up the interest rates. It's because people are valuing the risk of government, uh, at a more significant rate. And then the interest rate has to do with all loans. So there is some something to do with the rest of the marketplace. But I don't blame the government's interest rate basically on too much private demand. You know, last time we had a chance to sit down with you, Senator, we talked a lot about, uh, paying for the war with Iran. And we've learned a lot more from the defense secretary since then. Well, we don't have really as a timeline, of course, or a final price tag realizing, of course, the president says this is about keeping a nuclear weapon out of the hands of the Iranians. But there's a request for a trillion and a half dollar defense budget. What questions do you have? As the president predicts, this will end after the midterms. When you were with officials at the Pentagon or the administration at large? As far as spending, we should do the opposite. We should be reducing spending everywhere, at least by a little bit. My proposal has been the penny plan that used to be the penny plan. Now it's the six penny plan. But if you reduce government spending by 6% across the board, you'd still have all your government programs. You have cut them back 6%. Businesses do this all the time. You have to downsize. You might not hire any more employees. You might let the ones retire not be replaced. You'd shrink government 6% a year. That's what we need to be doing. But instead the Republicans are the warfare party, the Democrats are the Welfare Party. And there's always a compromise and spending goes up in both. So if you really if they think they're going to get 1.5 trillion for the military, they're going to have to give the same for welfare. So everything goes up. And so it needs to be the opposite. Uh, time is running short. So security is running out of money. Medicare is running out of money. The that we bring in about 5.5 trillion. It all goes to the entitlement programs. The budget we vote on. You know maybe half 1.5 trillion. 2 trillion. It's all borrowed. You could eliminate the entire budget that the government that the Congress votes on. And that just barely balances the budget, which I'm not saying. You think the war will be over after the midterms like the president's been saying. I think the reason he says that is he believes he doesn't finish. I think the thought he believes that they're continuing the war to affect our election. And once the election is over, they'll figure, well, now we'll settle it. What I would say is this. We have defeated them. Utterly obliterated their military. We win every battle. We sink every ship. But to win a war isn't always just defeating someone militarily. I think it will require negotiation. Unless you're going to occupy Iran. You have to negotiate with them. And so I would negotiate the original memorandum that came out that all the neocons went crazy on, I think was a step forward. But you have to offer Iran some reduction in trade sanctions in exchange for the enriched uranium. And people say, well, how are we going to verify this? It's enriched uranium. If they get a big pile, 440kg of enriched uranium, and they they export it to a third nation. I think that's very verifiable. But I would then reward that with reduction in trade sanctions. And I think they could we could have some normalcy return. But I don't think without that trade that any kind of normalcy is going to return. They're just going to sustain it as long as they can unless their population finally rises up and gets rid of them. Finally, Mr. Chairman, before we let you go, I'd like to ask you about something that happened last week. Senators Bernie Moreno and Elissa Slotkin were seeking unanimous consent on their bill that would see a permanent ban to Chinese EVs being sold in the U.S. they delayed that effort to this week over some concerns that you yourself had had those concerns been resolved. But this is a section of the bill that makes it would ban Mercedes-Benz in the United States. I think it's crazy to put in a bill something that targets one company. And so that needs to come out of the bill. And I told him and he's come out of the bill. There's also another section of the bill that says to Ford batteries, you can't make Ford batteries with any Chinese components. Well, they're making them in Louisville. It's something they've already got contracts for. They're in the middle of making them. How fair would it be to tell a company in the middle of doing something you can't do it, and all the stuff you made can't be sold anymore. So I told him that needs to either come out or be delayed. There's a huge amount of things in this bill that are unpredictable. There's also a ban on any, uh, company that has 25% ownership anywhere in the automobile supply chain. I don't even know who these companies are yet. I haven't had a chance to ask them how that's going to work out what's going to happen. As someone, uh, studied, whether or not if you ban all these companies, there'll be any companies left to do the work you want them to do. Um, it is protectionism. They don't like the inexpensive cars coming from China, which might drive down the price of cars in our country. But I've said I will let it go, but I'm not going to let it go with a specific, uh, part of the bill that attacks one company that. Look, there are thousands. There's probably 10,000 jobs in manufacturing for Mercedes-Benz in our country, and another 20,000 jobs that are ancillary jobs created by them. We shouldn't have legislation that targets one country. So that has to come out of the bill.