We must create an independent expert agency for AI and ‘Big Tech’

Last week, I met with child psychologists to discuss social media’s profound effects on Colorado’s kids.  

They shared their clinical assessment of the addiction and trauma our kids are experiencing — and the accompanying sleepless nights, searing anxiety, endless bullying and deepening despair.  

Almost all of these clinicians were parents as well. And our conversation shifted from their patients to their kids and how social media has deprived their own sons and daughters of their chance at a healthy childhood.  

They told me about school nights devolving into screaming matches about screen time, the deafening silence during carpool as kids ride hypnotized by an endless feed in the back seat, and the meals skipped by impressionable teens in hopes of achieving the “perfect” bodies these platforms parade to them. 

It was striking to hear these experts, trained in child development, suffering the same helplessness and heartbreak that so many parents experience today (myself included) as we watch our kids slip into cycles of depression, anxiety, and isolation accelerated by digital platforms.  

Five days later, in our nation’s capital, the Big Tech CEOs who conjured these tools gathered to discuss their newest technology: artificial intelligence. They described a future of potentially boundless opportunity — and substantial risk.  

But we also heard something new from virtually everyone there — an emerging consensus that Congress must act, and act quickly to provide essential guardrails while preserving America’s leadership and innovation.

These conversations were over 1,600 miles apart, but mirrored each other — the first a desperate plea and the second a call to action.    

For more than two years, as a former school superintendent and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have argued that the best solution is to create a new, independent, and expert agency to promote the public interest and secure America’s global leadership.  

As participants left the meeting in Washington, it sounded as though others were beginning to share this view.

The five Senate-confirmed commissioners of my proposed Federal Digital Platform Commission would have a mandate to protect consumers, promote competition, and assert the public interest. The Commission would have the power to hold hearings, conduct research, pursue investigations, establish commonsense rules for the sector — and enforce them with tough penalties.  

Most important, the agency would put the American people in a negotiation with platforms that have transformed virtually every aspect of our society, amassing vast power over our lives and the lives of our children.  

This transformation, while a testament to American innovation, has never been guided by what’s best for the public. Instead, it’s been dictated by a few gigantic American enterprises and their bottom line.  

Today, the top five tech companies have a market cap greater than our entire utilities, real estate, materials, and energy sectors combined. And they have accumulated this treasure chest by monetizing our privacy, our identities, and our valuable data.

The smartphones that help us shop, search, and connect have also become instruments of endless distraction and growing alienation. Our kids are retreating into a digital world of someone else’s making, paying for it with less sleep, exercise and time with friends. They are victims of an epidemic of teen anxiety, depression and loneliness.

While our teens’ mental health may be the most acute crisis we face, it is not the only one precipitated by digital platforms moving fast, breaking things, and leaving us to pick up the pieces. Economic disruption, industry fragmentation, and the proliferation of deceptive content online continue to challenge us.  

Now, artificial intelligence promises to supercharge these platforms’ addictive algorithms and aggressive online surveillance — presenting unknown risks to our economy, our society and our democracy.  

This wouldn’t be the first time Congress created an agency to regulate a complex new sector of the economy. After Upton Sinclair exposed ghastly conditions in meatpacking facilities in 1905, we created the Food and Drug Administration the following year. When Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil’s unscrupulous business tactics, public outcryhelped create the Federal Trade Commission. As broadcasting became central to American life, we created the Federal Communications Commission. 

Previous congresses knew they would never have the expertise to approve or disapprove new drugs, much less write airline safety standards or greenlight every cable channel. We shouldn’t expect a modern Congress — that can barely keep the lights on — to regulate technologies moving at quantum speed.  

Instead, we should follow the precedent set by our farseeing predecessors and empower a new agency to write the rules of the road for these companies on behalf of the American people.  

We are in a world-altering moment, and Congress must step up to safeguard our health, safety and freedoms. 

It won’t be easy, but the stakes are existential. We have no choice but to try. 

Michael Bennet is the senior senator from Colorado.