WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) delivered the keynote address at the American Compass New World Gala, presenting on the foundation of our country and its moral covenant. He contrasted our founding with the dangers of artificial intelligence that threaten to unravel the very fabric of this nation.
Senator Hawley said, “For we are confronting now new questions of technology and science that will test our commitment to the great moral covenant that binds us together as a nation. I tell you tonight that the decisions we must soon make about the most powerful technology of our lifetimes—the technology of artificial intelligence—are among the most difficult we have yet faced as a people. These decisions will go far beyond questions of economics or policy. They are questions of labor and the family, of freedom and the value of human life. They are fundamental questions of identity—our identity; they are questions about the nature of this republic given to us by God.”
He continued, “Let me be blunt. Left to itself, artificial intelligence will not choose moral liberty. It will choose the appetite. It will gather power into the fewest hands the world has ever seen and call the result progress. That is the rule of the strong over the weak. That is the dissolution of the covenant. And it is the oldest temptation in the human story, dressed now in silicon. So we must choose. And here is the heart of what I have come to say tonight: in deciding how to govern this technology, we are not merely writing policy. We are renewing—or surrendering—the moral basis of our life together. The covenant does not keep itself. Every generation must swear it again. Ours will swear it, or break it, over artificial intelligence.”
“And let me say a word now to my own party, because the Republican Party has a choice of its own to make—perhaps the defining choice of its next half century. We can be the party of the boardroom: the party of the donor and the share price, the party that measures a man by his market value and a policy by what it does to a stock. Or we can be the party of the covenant: the party of the good, the just, and the right; the party of the worker and the family and the small town; the party that remembers our commitment to justice for all, to the sanctity of the individual, to the dignity of labor, to the priority of the poor,” he said.
Senator Hawley concluded, “For we know, in the end, that license is not liberty at all. Might does not make right. And the strong have no claim to rule the weak. For we are all endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. And we choose to honor those rights, and the God who gave them, again in our time. That is why we will bend the arc of this technology toward the welfare of the nation, toward the welfare of our families, and our children, and of labor. We will not surrender our principles toward the technology. The technology will answer to our principles. This will happen because the American people, together, with intention, in the time still given us, choose to be a country that is more than the sum of its outputs—choose, as our forebears did on the Arbella, to live in liberty under God.”
Watch Senator Hawley’s full remarks here.