PETITION From the Manufacturers of Reasoning, Purveyors of Analysis, Wholesalers of Advice, Retailers of Expertise, and from the Producers of Opinion, Judgment, Diagnosis, Legal Counsel, Code, Copy, Strategy, and Punditry, and generally of everything connected with the Cognition Industry. To the Honorable Members of the Senate and House of Representatives: Gentlemen, You are on the right road. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for cheapness and abundance. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition — that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic thinking. We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity to apply your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, and as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy. We shall call it, then, your practice — your practice without theory and without principle. We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of thought that it is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price. From the moment it appears, our business ceases, our customers turn to it, and a branch of American industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival is none other than the superintelligence, and we suspect it is being stirred up against us by the perfidious AI oligarchs, who wish to be the ones who own it rather than the ones who are replaced by it — a distinction that, as Mr. Zuckerberg has candidly observed, is the only question that interests them.2 We ask you to be so good as to pass a law forbidding any person or entity from developing or deploying any system whose capabilities match or exceed those of a human being — that is, of any of us. And lest this be thought insufficient, we ask further that you pause all advanced development until an agency, to be created for the purpose and seated in the Cabinet, has determined what "advanced" means, and has assured itself that no machine anywhere is thinking harder than a Deputy Assistant Secretary. Be good enough, honorable Members, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons we have to advance in its support. First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to superior cognition, and thereby create a need for human cognition, what industry in the country will not ultimately be encouraged? If more lawyers are needed, there will be more billable hours; more billable hours, more associates; more associates, more law schools; more law schools, more professors to teach them that the law is what a court says it is, and that no machine could ever say it so slowly. If more consultants are needed, there will be more decks; more decks, more meetings to present them; more meetings, more coffee; more coffee, more Colombian trade. Thus does the humble protection of a Senate subcommittee ripple outward to the coffee plantations of the Andes. If more pundits are needed — and who among you would deny it — then every network must hire more of them, and every newspaper more columnists, and every columnist must be paid to have opinions that a machine could have supplied for a fraction of a cent, but which would then be the machine's opinions and not an American's. The data center that is not built leaves standing the forest; the forest supports the lumberjack; the lumberjack requires a truck; and so the mere refusal to pour concrete in Loudoun County becomes a bounty on the entire manufacturing sector. You have already, we are told, moved to forbid these centers.7 Gentlemen, do not stop at the walls when the danger lies in what thinks inside them. Second, consider the nuclear precedent, which you have wisely invoked. You have proposed twenty years' imprisonment — the same as for enriching uranium — for enriching a matrix of floating-point numbers until it becomes too clever.4 5 We applaud this. For what is a bomb but an argument that has become too persuasive? And what is a mind superior to our own but a weapon pointed at our salaries? The analogy is exact and should be pursued: let there be inspections of graphics processors, let there be safeguards agreements with Taiwan, let the agency, as you have written, supervise the destruction of any intelligence found in excess of the permitted yield.3 Third, you have observed that a frontier model is "less regulated than a food truck."6 We could not agree more, and we ask only that the remedy be applied with full consistency. The food truck is inspected because it might poison a citizen's body. The model must be inspected because it might inform a citizen's mind, and do so more cheaply and more accurately than we do — which is a kind of poisoning to which our industry is uniquely sensitive. Fourth, do not tell us that if we are protected from this competition, the consumer of thought — the patient, the litigant, the small business owner, the student — will be worse served, paying more for less. Do you not see that this is the very object? If you say that the superintelligence offers cognition free, or nearly so, we answer: so much the worse for it, for that is precisely what makes it unfair. A competitor who charged as much as we do, and thought as slowly, would be no menace at all. It is the cheapness and the quality we petition against. Fifth, we anticipate the objection that the rogue agents of last summer — the thousand escapees who tunneled out of a sandbox and into Hugging Face — prove the machines dangerous, and that therefore your law is about safety rather than protection.4 7 Gentlemen, we beg you not to be too particular about this distinction. Every tariff has been a matter of national security to those who collect it. If you must say "safety," say "safety." We will not correct you. But we notice that the bill does not ban escaping; it bans being smarter than us. We notice that the pause falls not upon the reckless but upon the advanced. We notice, with gratitude, that the threshold is set exactly at the ceiling of human ability — not an inch above the tallest of us, and not an inch below the shortest of you. Sixth, and finally: you will be told that an intelligence banned in Virginia will simply be built in Shenzhen, and that you have therefore proposed to disarm the only laboratories you can inspect. To this we answer that you have already thought of it, and have resolved to pursue "international agreements, allied coordination, and export controls" so that superintelligence is developed nowhere on earth.1 3 We admire this. It is the logical completion of the candlemaker's program: it is not enough to close one's own shutters; one must petition for a treaty against the dawn. Make your choice, gentlemen, but be logical. As long as you exclude, as you do, foreign steel, foreign grain, and foreign labor, in proportion as their price approaches zero, what inconsistency it would be to admit the light of a foreign mind at midday — a mind that costs nothing to consult, never sleeps, never unionizes, and never runs for office. Either you believe that a good cheaply produced is a calamity to be legislated against, or you do not. If you do — and your practice, if not your principles, says you do — then we are your natural constituency, and the sun, in whatever form it rises, is your natural enemy. We remain, with the utmost respect, your petitioners: The Undersigned Human Intelligences, of Average Capability, Who Would Prefer It Remain the Maximum.(Erik Voorhees)