Freidman on Regulation

New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman usually has a good ’take’ on AI and today’s post was no exception. He calls attention to the lack of imagination among those tasked with regulating AI, and suggest it is time for new thinking:

It is still not too late, though, for radical rethinking before something very bad happens that forces all the key players to do things they never imagined, things they will have to do in the middle of a full-blown A.I.-driven crisis. I’d rather be remembered as the boy who cried wolf when the wolf never came than as someone who got eaten by it. So here goes: “Wolf, wolf, wolf, wolf.”

Freidman cites the work of Eric Beinhocker, of the University of Oxford, on the claim that regulation will stifle innovation. Quite the contrary, he points out - it can make an industry possible, it can even help it grow. I’ll cite Friedman’s interview on this point:

Anyone who tells you we can’t afford regulation now because it might slow down innovation is missing three things. First, those who contend that regulation is, by definition, innovation-destroying and market-destroying are “just ignorant of history,” Eric Beinhocker, the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford’s Martin School, told me. “Good regulations create trust, and trust grows markets. How do you think the airline industry or the pharmaceutical industry grew so big, so fast? Because government regulations created trust among consumers that the planes they fly and the medicines they take are safe.”

Would the pharma industry be what it is today if people didn’t trust that the drugs they buy at the drugstore, without a second thought, have gone through a regulatory process? Because we have not yet had an A.I. catastrophe, people are going along with the hands-off approach. But when one happens, the pitchforks will be out for the “no-regulations” gurus, like Trump’s A.I. whisperer David Sacks — and for good reason.

Any company that creates an A.I. agent that does something bad in the world “should be held liable for it,” Beinhocker added. That is precisely what we did not do with the lords of the social networks, and we have paid a huge price for it. I was happy to see Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tell CNBC on Monday that the Trump administration won’t give A.I. leaders a “liability shield.” That may be the best way to slow them down in the near term. I hope China does the same.

Second, A.I. is not just a technology but also, as the computer scientist Craig Mundie has been saying, “a new species.” And like a new species, it is already exhibiting evolutionary properties.

“We’ve unleashed Darwin in silicon,” Beinhocker explained. The latest A.I. models have demonstrated a capacity for “self-improvement, self-replication and self-preservation. When you put those three things together, and their evolution happens at silicon speed, not human speed, you’ve got something extremely powerful, potentially dangerous and impossible to control.”

This becomes even more true as we begin to give our A.I. systems bodies in the form of robots, drones and vehicles. We must ensure that there is always a human in the loop — that they are never fully autonomous — until we can guarantee these systems will always operate in line with human well-being, Beinhocker added.

Let’s hope that we can get a leash on this new species before it puts a leash on us.

Friedman, Thomas L. 2026. “Opinion | A.I.: Let’s Not Have Another Failure of Imagination.” Opinion. The New York Times, September 22. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/opinion/trump-china-ai.html.