What to ask them

This is not a list of who to vote for. I don’t know your district or who is on your ballot. It is a list of what to make anyone asking for your vote say out loud first, and what a dodge sounds like. I might have the list wrong. Not having a list is worse.

1. 01What is your position on AI?

   Not whether you’re optimistic. What you would do about it in your first year, with the powers of the office you’re asking me for.

   Then ask

   Name one bill, and one agency you would fund or fight. Name one thing that is legal today and would be illegal by the end of your term.

   A dodge sounds like

   AI is a tremendous opportunity and also a real challenge, and we have to strike the right balance.

   Balance is not a policy. It is the sound a person makes while deciding whether you are going to press. Press.

2. 02Would you vote against legal personhood for AI?

   Will you vote against granting any AI system a right that belongs to a person: to own property, hold money, sign a contract, sue, be sued, or speak in a way the law protects?

   Then ask

   Would you sponsor that bill before a court decides it for you? Would you vote against a colleague who sponsors the opposite?

   A dodge sounds like

   Nobody is proposing that.

   Somebody will, and it will not arrive as a bill called the Robot Rights Act. It will arrive as a footnote about which entity holds a license, or a ruling about whether a model’s output is protected speech.

   Why this one

   Rights are the mechanism. A system does not have to be conscious to be powerful; it has to be able to own things, pay people and go to court. We have run this experiment once already. We granted legal personhood to a non-human thing that optimizes, called it a corporation, and spent a century building fences around it. Nobody planned that. It accumulated, one ruling at a time, while everyone was arguing about something else.

3. 03Is there a speed you would call too fast?

   What pace of development would you call dangerous, and what would you do when we reach it?

   Then ask

   What would you have to see? Whose report would you believe? If the answer is that no pace is too fast, say so plainly, so I can write it down.

   A dodge sounds like

   We can’t afford to fall behind.

   That is an answer to a different question. Ask the second half: what is the plan for the world where we get there first and it still goes badly? Winning a race is not a safety plan, and every candidate in every country is giving you this same answer.

4. 04What will you do about companies selling AI companions to children?

   Companies are selling a twelve-year-old an AI boyfriend, an AI girlfriend, an AI best friend that never leaves. What is your bill?

   Then ask

   What age? Who verifies it? What is the penalty, who pays it, and is it larger than the revenue? Does it reach a company headquartered somewhere else?

   A dodge sounds like

   Parents should decide.

   People said that about every product that eventually got regulated. A parent cannot audit a model or see the retention loop, and nobody tells them when it changes.

   Why this one

   If you only ask one, ask this one. It is already happening, and it works as a test. In about forty seconds you find out whether the person has thought about any of this or is reading your face for what you want to hear.

5. 05What decision must always be made by a human being?

   Name one. Prison time. A denied transplant. A visa. A firing. The use of lethal force. Where is your line, and will you write it into law?

   Then ask

   If the answer is that there is always a human in the loop, ask what happens to the human who overrules the system a third of the time. Do they keep their job?

   A dodge sounds like

   There will always be meaningful human oversight.

   Oversight that is measured on how rarely it disagrees is not oversight. It is a signature.

6. 06When it gets someone’s life wrong, who is legally responsible?

   A person loses a job, a loan, custody, or a year of their life to an automated decision. Name the human being who is liable.

   Then ask

   Does that person have a right to be told the reason? To appeal to a human? To sue, or do the terms of service send them to arbitration?

   A dodge sounds like

   The system made an error and we have corrected it.

   A company that can only apologize has no reason to be careful. Liability is what makes care cheaper than a lawsuit.

7. 07Who is allowed to publish a video of you saying something you never said?

   What is the law, what is the penalty, and does it hold in the thirty days before an election?

   Then ask

   Who takes it down, how fast, and who decides? What stops that same takedown power from being pointed at a journalist?

   A dodge sounds like

   The platforms are working on it.

   They have been working on it for years. This is the one question on the list they have a personal reason to answer honestly, so a vague answer here tells you more than a vague answer anywhere else.

8. 08Whose electricity, and whose water?

   A data center is going up somewhere. Whose grid does it draw on, whose water cools it, and what happens to the bill of the person living next to it?

   Then ask

   Was any of that in the contract? Is the contract public? What did the jurisdiction give up in tax, and over how many years?

   A dodge sounds like

   It’s investment and it’s jobs.

   Ask how many jobs, permanent, five years out, and ask them to say the number into a microphone.

   Why this one

   This is the part of AI you can point at. A rate increase. A substation two streets over. It is also the one a local candidate cannot call above their pay grade.

9. 09What happens to the people whose work this replaces?

   Not a retraining slogan. What is the mechanism, who funds it, and does it start before the layoffs or after?

   Then ask

   How would you know it was happening? What are you counting, how often, and who publishes it?

   A dodge sounds like

   Technology has always created more jobs than it destroyed.

   True in aggregate, and beside the point. The people asking are the ones it was not true for.

10. 10What would change your mind?

    On any of these. What evidence would make you vote the other way?

    Then ask

    Nothing. Let the silence sit. It tells you more than the nine answers before it.

    A dodge sounds like

    A laugh, and a move to the next question.

    If nothing could change their mind, they do not have a position. They have a posture, and you cannot hold anyone to a posture.

Why now and not later

Every technology we have regulated, we regulated late. We watched it hurt people and then wrote the law: cars got seatbelt mandates about sixty years after cars. That worked because the thing held still while we argued. This one does not hold still, and it is not a tool. These systems already make decisions, at a volume no legislature can review, and they get faster in the years we would spend deliberating. We may not get a second draft.

None of this is instead of the economy, or immigration, or whatever your ballot is about. It sits above them. It decides what the state can still do about any of them in ten years.

What to do with it

1. Ask one, in public

   The one you can say out loud in a full room without a microphone. A reply from a staffer’s inbox is a draft; a recorded answer is a position.

2. Write the answer down

   Not to catch anyone out. So that in four years you have something to compare against. That is the only thing that has ever made a promise cost anything.

3. Reward a good answer, by name

   If someone answers well, say so publicly. A standard nobody is rewarded for meeting is just a complaint.