“To overemphasize the novelty or the impossibility of containing it becomes a very convenient excuse. Not to regulate it, right? Oh, it's moving too fast. We can't regulate it.”
GeekWire · October 2026
O'Mara, a historian, was answering an audience question about AI regulation at a live GeekWire event. She grants that AI is broader than earlier technologies, then compares the moment to the first Gilded Age, when fast-growing new industries overwhelmed a small government until it built ways to regulate them. Her conclusion is that a lot being new doesn't mean nothing can be done.
Transcript
Let's get into some of the backlash and the politics about AI. You've got tech leaders calling for more regulation. You've also got folks at the same time in this furious race to build much more powerful AI that's going to lead to the end of the world, essentially. So it's a bit like I was thinking kind of Dr. Frankenstein saying, like, watch out, the monster's going to kill you, and then going to the graveyard and getting back to work. So I have this question I'm going to tack onto that, which is, why can't the tech giants create their own AI risk stop buttons instead of asking for it? This audience member asks. Is it just a PR game? I don't know if any of you know the answer to that.
This is a big debate in the industry right now is whether all of this hype around AI is being created by the companies like Anthropic or OpenAI as a prelude to them going public. And I'm not sure I buy into that, that this is all a marketing scheme. But I think it's an interesting time as it relates to AI and how it's taking root in the economy. I tend to side with Jonathan Weber. I think there's a lot of opportunity. There will be some job loss as a result, as there have been through economic waves and different periods of our history. But for the most part, I'm not buying into the doomers camp that we're all going to get wiped out here. And to the point on the first part of the question on why they don't have a stop button, many do. I don't know if people saw the news from NVIDIA this week, but they kind of came out with their own kind of stop button on AI systems. Now, whether they work or not, I guess that's the key question. And we've seen examples here of OpenAI doing some experiments, obviously, with the attack on Hugging Face. And so I think these systems can get a bit out of control and go rogue whether they kill us all. I'm not quite there yet.
Yeah. AI, in a way, is a boundary breaking, hard to compare to earlier technological transitions because of the scope of the technology. And AI is like a category, like saying the Pacific Ocean. Like there are many, many things that are encompassed in that definition of AI. It isn't just LLMs or chatbots, it's a whole bunch of other things. However, I think to overemphasize the novelty or the impossibility of containing it becomes a very convenient excuse. Not to regulate it, right? Oh, it's moving too fast. We can't regulate it. And I spend a lot of time, unsurprisingly, thinking about the Gilded Age, the first one, back, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et cetera, et cetera, where there was a similar, you know, real imbalance between these very fast-growing, technologically driven new industries that were totally upending job markets and economies, consumer markets, and kind of overwhelming the capacity of what was then a very small U.S. government to, or any government, to regulate it, and the creation of a regulatory apparatus that put some guardrails on it, still allowed people to make a lot of money, mind you. I think where American capitalism has been healthiest is where there has been some things in balance. So it is important to say, yes, so many things are indeed new, but it doesn't mean that nothing can be done.
One thing I observe in the debate for the most part is that most of the people, most of the time, are talking their book. And so that makes it very hard to really read what's actually going on. So Jensen Wong is out there saying, full speed ahead, there's no problems. Now, I'm sure that Jensen is a very, very smart guy, but it's very hard for me to
disentangle his obvious business interest in holding that position from what he really thinks. So that's a problem kind of across the board. We're in the unfortunate moment of having this issue arise at a time where we essentially don't have any national political leadership that's able to deal with it. So that's a big problem. And then I would put, I think Amode and Anthropic are in a weirdly different category because Amode is not like these other people. He's not like Musk or Bezos. He's not like a capitalist shark. He's sort of this kind of intellectual who found himself sitting atop this monster that he isn't really sure what to do about. But he's got a very strange, like it is a cultish kind of company. And he thinks of the AI as like his children. And I will say, I had a super bizarre experience where we ran a little, we sent Claude to, asked it to proofread a little item that we had written that was recounting two stories that had appeared about Dario Modi's wife. This was about three weeks ago, and one in the journal and the other in the information. And we asked Claude to proof the item, and it came back and it said, well, I'll proof that for you, but first, I really have some issues with this item, and you really need to reconsider. You know, this is a private person. I mean, it was like a lawyer's defense of why we shouldn't be running this item about Dario Modi's wife. And it was nuts. I'm still thinking about what to make of that. But what it felt like was the AI was defending Dario.
Let me ask you a question from the audience. And I think this is a kind of captures some of the tech skepticism I think that some people feel. This is a question about taxes, right? Corporate taxes have been slashed at the federal level. We've all heard stories, you know, Microsoft and Amazon evading federal taxes. You know, years go by that they're making all this money but not paying any taxes. I'll just add on to this, just earlier this summer we had the spectacle of the day Meta was announcing all these layoffs in Seattle. Zuckerberg's mega yacht is sort of coming into this. One of our best
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