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Connecticut US Senator Dick Blumenthal, the Hartford Courant tells us, is wary of Delta airlines’ use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Should Blumenthal’s wariness worry us?
Artificial Intelligence is a relatively new technology, and the most wary among us know that there is no such thing as a perfect undeveloped technology. The real question is: Should Blumenthal and other national and international regulators be permitted to impose regulations upon AI at this fetal stage of technological development? If you do not know what the problem is – or, indeed, that there is a problem – how can you propose an intelligent regulatory solution to a prospective, and possibly imaginary, problem?
This is a quandary Blumenthal had manfully faced during his 20 year stint as Connecticut’s Attorney General. Blumenthal – and, before him, Attorney General Joe Lieberman -- changed the nature of the Attorney General’s office from an agency statutorily obligated to represent the executive office and its agencies at trial to an enforcement arm of the state’s Consumer Protection Department.
Known during the colonial period as “the King’s lawyer,” the AG office became under Lieberman/Blumenthal auspices an engine of neo-progressivism.
Blumenthal has carried with him into his new senatorial office the same energy that had served him well as Attorney General. This writer has referred to Blumenthal as Connecticut’s first and foremost consumer protection U.S. Senator. As such, Blumenthal has been supported in his course by an approving state media that “often dumped Blumenthal’s press releases into their various formats without the usual, critical cross-examination. In essence, Blumenthal was allowed to write his own press stories, nearly all of them, unsurprisingly, positive.”
There is no more dangerous spot in the state, Connecticut journalists sometimes joke among each other, as that between Blumenthal and a TV camera. In his years as U.S. Senator, the humorless Blumenthal – no Abe Lincoln he – cracked only one joke at his own expense: “I’ve been known to appear at garage door openings.”
Tigers do not change their stripes. No one should be surprised that AI has now appeared on Blumenthal’s radar screen.
This is what Blumenthal said recently about Delta Airlines’ possibly – key word there – adverse use of AI: “Delta’s current and planned individualized pricing practices not only present data privacy concerns, but will also likely mean fair price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain point’ at a time when American families already are struggling with rising costs.”
Blumenthal did not pause to tell us precisely why Americans are struggling with rising costs, but a sizable portion of their discomforting rising costs may be attributed to costly government overregulation, excessive government borrowing, persistent government deficits, government tax and fee increases, and government officials like Blumenthal who consistently point a crooked finger at corporate billionaires for having caused inflation and subsequent price increases. The classic definition of inflation is: too many dollars chasing too few goods. Inflation – a reduction in the purchasing value of the dollar – is a government produced and directed soap opera.
There is no need for Blumenthal to react with mock horror at the sliver in billionaires’ eyes while his own are filled with massive inflationary logs. Like most agile politicians bursting at the seams with honeyed empathy for working class Democrats, Blumenthal is the problem for which he pretends to be the solution.
During all his years in politics Blumenthal has burnished his reputation by suing or threatening to sue business owners on behalf of wronged consumers. Some businesses were culpable, others not. As Attorney General and now U.S. Senator, Blumenthal has spent much of his energy, and large chunks of public funds, loosening upon his targets a fiery and occasionally unjust rhetoric amplified by Connecticut’s media.
He managed to push a small computer company in East Hartford out of business for infractions that a court later found to be frivolous. The woman who owned the company, destroyed by unjust public exposure, sued Blumenthal and won a million dollar settlement. Of course, during his two decades as Connecticut’s Attorney General, Blumenthal had the advantage of having at his back a hurricane wind of upwards of 200 lawyers whose briefs alone, combined with a properly prepped adverse media, could easily sink small craft.
When Blumenthal left the Attorney General’s office to assume a role in Washington DC as Connecticut’s first consumer protection U.S. Senator, he left in his wake about 200 cases that were summarily dismissed by incoming Attorney General George Jepsen, who sought to right a left-listing ship.
Moderate Democrats in Connecticut having bent their rhetorical knees to neo-progressive agitators in their party -- think Democrat primary winner Zohran Mamdani in a New York City mayoralty contest – now find themselves caught between a rock, the sane liberal Democrat politics of John F. Kennedy, and a hard place, Mamdani’s socialist/communist vision of a future in which Democrats are powerful enough to demand and receive the subservience of a voting public.
Those who partake in politics, love and war, must reap what they sow.
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