On some matters humans do not do well without guidelines or guideposts. Leaving us to our own devices is often unwise.

That was made clear again this past week by the response to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence. Leo’s call for strong regulations on AI was greeted with generally robust applause, not so much for a specific framework envisioned by the pontiff but for the fact that he was pitching any framework at all and proposing principles to undergird that framework.

AI has been living and growing exponentially in a regulatory vacuum since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, stunning the world and catalyzing the headlong artificial intelligence rush. The technology’s astonishing capabilities have propelled the stock market but polarized people. With predictions on AI’s impact ranging from apocalypse to utopia, from a jobs-killing monster to a panacea for all sorts of problems, Congress has sadly lived down to its do-nothing reputation, passing not a single AI........

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