Kamala Harris Gets $140 Million Budget for Another Job She Can Botch: ‘AI Czar’

Kamala Harris Gets $140 Million Budget for Another Job She Can Botch: ‘AI Czar’

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/05/05/kamala-harris-gets-140-million-budget-for-another-job-she-can-botch-ai-czar-n1692888;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Back in March 2021, Old Joe Biden named alleged Vice President Kamala Harris his “Border Czar,” while she herself told us what a tough but crucial job it was: “Needless to say,” Madame Heartbeat Away intoned, “the work will not be easy. But it is important work.” She then proceeded not to do it. Fox News noted in Jan. 2023 that “Harris has visited the southwest border only once since President Biden tasked her in March 2021 with addressing the root causes of the ongoing immigration surge.” And now the whole charade is beginning all over again, as Old Joe has given The Cackler yet another job she can ignore: Kamala Harris is the nation’s new AI (artificial intelligence) czar.

The White House announced Thursday that the Biden regime is taking “new actions that will further promote responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and protect people’s rights and safety.” Principal among these actions was a meeting that Harris had that same day “with CEOs of four American companies at the forefront of AI innovation — Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI — to underscore this responsibility and emphasize the importance of driving responsible, trustworthy, and ethical innovation with safeguards that mitigate risks and potential harms to individuals and our society.” Who could object to this? Who could be against underscoring responsibility and emphasizing being responsible? Anyone who was paying attention to what was really being said.

The White House press release also stated: “President Biden has been clear that when it comes to AI, we must place people and communities at the center by supporting responsible innovation that serves the public good while protecting our society, security, and economy. Importantly, this means that companies have a fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public.” So that’s four repetitions of “responsible” and “responsibility” within the space of two paragraphs. “AI is one of the most powerful technologies of our time,” the White House also said, “but in order to seize the opportunities it presents, we must first mitigate its risks.” Thus along with all the emphasis on being responsible, we are told there are “potential harms” and “risks” involved with AI.

There certainly are risks involved with AI. Kids are getting it to write their school papers. In fact, it’s writing this column while I’m sipping a martini by the pool. (Okay, not really.) But it strains credulity to think that just when Old Joe and his henchmen are trying to improve Kamala’s tattered image, they would give her the job of making sure schoolchildren were doing their own work. No, she will likely do the job about as well as she has done the border job, but it’s clear that the regime is putting Harris on the AI beat because the irresponsibility and riskiness they’re so concerned about is the possibility that AI might tell people things that deviate from the Leftist establishment line.

It is, after all, abundantly clear at this point that the Biden regime is no friend of the freedom of speech. It tried to establish a Disinformation Governance Board; it worked with Twitter and the other social media giants to silence dissenting voices; and it is in general the least transparent administration in recent memory. And Harris has been at the forefront of efforts to stamp out dissent. Back in June 2022, the New York Post reported that she focused on “developing programs and policies” and that she was heading up a new internet policy task force that was working to protect “political figures” from “disinformation,” “abuse” and “harassment.”

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This was treading dangerous ground in terms of the First Amendment, as “abuse” and “harassment,” to say nothing of “disinformation,” are subjective terms. What was to prevent the person who is charged with judging what constituted them — Kamala Harris, evidently — from considering sharp criticism, or even any criticism at all, no matter how accurate or justified, to be abuse or harassment?

And now she is the AI Czar. There can be little doubt that she will be working to ensure that whatever forms AI takes and whatever it communicates to the American people, it will not give Americans any unwelcome ideas, or lead them to think any thoughts that might take them off the Leftist reservation. Those who understand the importance of the freedom of speech as the foundation of any free society can only hope that Harris’ performance will be as perfunctory and indifferent as her performance at the border.