How Two Colorado House Candidates Are Thinking About AI
In Colorado, two millennial candidates are thinking about A.I.
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If you want a preview of the country’s political future, look to the exurbs of Denver.
In Colorado’s Eighth District, two millennial candidates competing for a House seat — Representative Gabe Evans, the incumbent Republican, and Manny Rutinel, his Democratic challenger — are having one of the country’s most active debates over the future of A.I.
A.I. has emerged as the Wild West of politics this election cycle, attracting big campaign checks from competing corporate interests and scrambling traditional political lines. Evans and Rutinel, who are running a close race, have both been active in early efforts to regulate the technology.
So last week, while I was in Colorado to report a story on how rising costs are hitting farmers and ranchers, I sat down with both of them to chat about how they’re trying to shape the A.I. future.
‘Immense catastrophic downsides’
To Rutinel, the stakes of the debate are existential.
“This technology has a 10 percent risk of wiping out human civilization,” he told me, in an interview outside a sports bar in Thornton, Colo. “I don’t want human civilization to come to an end.”
Rutinel, who has spent years involved in debates over A.I. regulations and safety, believes government must enact stringent rules dictating how the technology is used.
As a state legislator, he cosponsored a groundbreaking 2024 law that attempted to regulate the use of A.I. by companies and organizations in ways that might be discriminatory. (The law has since been repealed and replaced with a less expansive measure.)
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Originally published by nytimes.com. Syndicated material does not necessarily reflect the views of Glamour Canada.
