Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said today that artificial intelligence (AI) will be beneficial to Congress by helping lawmakers write clearer legislation.
Sen. Hickenlooper – who served as the governor of Colorado and the mayor of Denver before joining Congress in 2021 – said he knows what “poorly designed” legislation looks like.
“Having been a mayor and been a governor, I’ve seen [the effects of] poorly designed legislation – the contortions it forces local officials to go through to build the infrastructure to do what they want to do,” the senator said during a Punchbowl News event on June 12.
“A lot of that bad legislation, I think AI [can help make Congress] dramatically better at creating language that is clear, that is legally defensible, that really helps states and municipalities deliver the intended outcomes for the investments that we make at a Federal level,” Sen. Hickenlooper said. “That can be exciting for everybody.”
The lawmaker said that Congress is “learning very rapidly,” but there’s a lot of catching up to be done when it comes to AI.
Sen. Hickenlooper – who serves as the chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security – expressed concerns that Congress was “lagging so far behind” states when it came to passing a comprehensive data privacy bill.
“We still don’t have any AI bill. We don’t even have a data privacy bill,” he said. “And yet, 18 states have data privacy bills that they put out. That’s never a good sign when we’re lagging so far behind.”
“You don’t want to have the Federal government come in and preempt states,” he continued, “By the time you have 18 states feeling this is important, we’re getting all different varieties, and it’s going to be harder and harder for the Federal government to reconcile what it does. So, I think we’re playing a little bit of catch-up.”
The senator emphasized that he believes that AI and data privacy go hand in hand, and one law doesn’t need to come before the other. “You can do both,” he said.
Sen. Hickenlooper said he’s hopeful the House’s American Privacy Rights Act – which is currently stalled in the Energy and Commerce Committee – “should be able to go forward.”
“The basic thing we have to have is standards, and that’s true for AI,” he said. “You need data privacy because they should be limited in how much they can collect. They shouldn’t just be out collecting anything they can about all of us, and we should all have the rights to change if they’ve collected data that’s not right or there’s bias. There should be enough transparency so people can be aware of that and have the right to correct what’s not right.”
