How AI could write our laws

Nearly 90% of the multibillion-dollar federal lobbying apparatus in the U.S. serves corporate interests.

Andrew Hammond: AI will make lobbying more guileful, and perhaps more successful.

He says microlegislation is a term for small pieces of proposed law that cater to narrow interests.

Hammond: Machine-learning systems can uncover the smallest modification that could be made to a bill that would make the biggest impact on a narrow interest.

It can take a highly paid team of human lobbyists days or weeks to generate and analyze alternative pieces of microlegislation on behalf of a client.

With AI assistance, that could be done instantaneously and cheaply.

The full-scale of these technologies to guide lobbying could create an automatic system for generating microlegation.

The transformative benefit that AI offers to lobbyists and their clients is scale.

While individual lobbyists tend to focus on the federal level or a single state, with AI assistance they could more easily infiltrate a large number of state-level (or even local-level) law-making bodies.

This suggests that lobbying will continue to benefit those who are already influential and wealthy, and AI assistance will amplify their existing advantages.