Steely-eyed government regulators have their sights on AI. These regulators are most active in Europe, but their U.S. counterparts are salivating at the opportunity to be on the ground floor regulating a young industry before it has time to develop bad habits. Incidentally, this will kill AI in the U.S. for all but a few big firms; but that is not the concern of regulators. Shockingly, OpenAI is encouraging regulation. Having achieved alpha leader status with zero regulation, economic headwind, or copyright enforcement, they now support restricting competition by creating regulatory barriers for small companies and others yet to rise.

The calls for regulation are echoing despite the small number of serious problems arising from the industry thus far. Regulation will punish entrepreneurism in this young AI industry, insuring it remains mostly in the realm of billionaire organizations and adversarial foreign governments. This denies the U.S. a major historical advantage enjoyed in prior conflicts with strategic adversaries, the power of industry. Americans risk falling behind in AI if regulators suppress progress at a time when adversaries are fully committed. Even the U.S. military appears more concerned with controlling AI than exploiting it. At a time when adversaries see an advantage in militarized AI systems, the Pentagon is expending resources reassuring everyone that human-in-the-loop (HITL) will remain the policy throughout the 2020s. Make no mistake, China has a different policy. The PRC is not holding back AI development, not for marketplace regulators and not for battlefield nostalgia. Adversarial militaries are not squeamish about fully autonomous combat equipment (battle bots) in both kinetic and cyber domains. In the near-term, the U.S. could find itself in a battlespace with adversarial AI systems that are impossible to counter with HITL systems. What do we do then? Holding the line with HITL systems is like issuing new swords and muskets after the invention of the machine gun, stupid.