If Congress Won’t Regulate A.I., States and Cities Will
As the technology explodes, a growing movement of local legislation is setting the groundwork for A.I. regulation in the U.S.
It wasn’t hard to ban facial recognition in Somerville, Massachusetts.
In June, the city of 81,000 outside Boston became the second in the United States to ban public agencies from using the facial recognition technology. It’s part of a sweeping movement from local and state legislatures looking to regulate artificial intelligence.
“Once you kind of just raise the issue with people, they’re very quick to understand. This is not the kind of community that we want to be in Somerville,” says Ben Ewen-Campen, councilor for Somerville’s Ward 3 and sponsor of the city’s facial recognition ban. “In terms of pushback, there was essentially none.”
The boom of artificial intelligence in the last decade has meant that tools like facial recognition have shifted from sci-fi fodder to reality. “Deepfakes” make it relatively simple to create doctored video, while algorithms are being used in the courthouse to predict whether an offender might commit future crimes. So far, these tools have proliferated with little oversight. But lawmakers are starting to realize that A.I. is already…
