A Win for Proactionary AI Policy

In a just-fought battle over the future of artificial intelligence, the Proactionary Principle racked up victory over the Precautionary Principle.

Here in the U.S., the administration releasing Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan and will work through executive action to implement it.

It offers a ringing optimistic vision that AI “will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people. AI will enable Americans to discover new materials, synthesize new chemicals, manufacture new drugs, and develop new methods to harness energy—an industrial revolution. It will enable radically new forms of education, media, and communication—an information revolution. And it will enable altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”

The context of this Action Plan is that so far this year, over 1,000 mostly precautionary proposed regulations have been put forward mostly in state legislatures. Most are innovation-killing, for example, requiring annual safety inspections with vague and contradictory standards or guarding against alleged “algorithm discrimination,” whatever that means. California, New York, and Illinois are the three states most active in pushing European-style, innovation-killing restrictions. The latter, for example, has just banned the use of AI in therapy. AI companies could not adhere to a patchwork of 50 different sets of standards, so they would likely have to kowtow to the legal restrictions of the largest states, i.e., the three mentioned above.

There are, of course, serious challenges emerging from AI, for example, how to deal with deep fakes, intellectual property, and security. But a Proactionary approach means letting AI-creating and -adopting companies experiment with various approaches to these challenges, letting the competition play out. Look back 50 years: Apple offered a tightly-integrated hardware-software closed ecosystem, eventually adding new products and services. Microsoft offered operating systems to all computer hardware manufacturers. At various stages, Microsoft was winning in the market, at other stages it was Apple, and now both prosper and still compete, especially in AI. Policymakers need to allow the same dynamism in AI.

The administration’s plan will still come into legal conflict with innovation-killing state restrictions. And that plan is not perfect, but that’s okay because it’s open discussion, experimentation, and competition that will unleash our AI-enhancing future.

US Department of Health & Human Services

This month, after several Senate confirmation hearings, Jim O’Neill has been sworn in as Number Two at the Department of Health and Human Services. This department oversees the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, Medicare, Medicaid, and much more.

Jim’s ascent is an opportunity to mainstream an understanding that aging, with its many mental and physical afflictions, need not be our fate.

Jim also served at HHS from 2002 to 2008, so he knows the ins and outs of this government department of 62,000 employees. But most important, he served for years as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation. As most friends of Humanity Plus know, SENS was the premiere group developing, as its initials stand for, Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence. Jim understands that rather than simply developing treatments for cancers, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other ravages of aging once they afflict us, it is best to attack aging itself.

But science and technology are not enough. We need to raise the consciousness of the public and policymakers so they understand that we each can have truly long, vibrant lives if we make slowing or stopping aging a top goal. Jim in his perch at HHS, with the help of the longevity community, to meet this challenge!

Braining COVID Vaccines and Longevity

By Ed Hudgens: June 11, 2025

Braining COVID Vaccines and Longevity

Here in D.C., a current controversy concerning COVID-19 vaccines highlights a major roadblock on the path to longevity: the difficulty individuals have in thinking clearly about the complexities of taking their health into their own hands. 

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. has removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, centers overseen by HHS. He plans to replace them with new members. This follows RFK’s  announcement that HHS, along with the Food and Drug Administration, will no longer recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children, though the choice is still up to parents and their doctors. This is a major departure from current CDC guidelines.  Reports are that CDC officials, many now fired, were not involved in and strongly disagreed with that decision. 

So how can parents—I have two kids—who are deciding whether or not to get their kids or themselves vaccinations—I had mine!—think about these rival recommendations? Here are factors to consider:

• The value of vaccinations was recognized as far back as the 1700s. Science and evidence suggest that vaccinations have saved millions from suffering and death.

• But RFK has often suggested a link between vaccines and autism in children.

• Indeed, autism rates in the U.S. grew from 6.7 per 1,000 children in 2000 to 27.6 per 1,000 children by 2020.

• Yet this increase occurred before the 2020 COVID pandemic, and a study to which RFK often alludes linking vaccines and autism has been retracted.

• Still, in the U.S., 76% of COVID deaths were in individuals over 65 years old, and 93% over 50. But the rate for kids 17 and under was only .00147%, 1,696 out of 1,071,902. And vaccine rates among those kids not killed by COVID were much lower than in the over 50 and over 65 groups.

• And during the pandemic, U.S. government officials and others in authority stifled legitimate questions about the efficacy of preventive measures like mask mandates and lockdowns;  Sweden did not enforce strict lockdowns and had lower death rates than other developed countries.

• On the other hand, in the U.S. some 234,046 children 17 and under were hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID, with another 510,987 hospitalized with suspected cases.

Which side to take? Americans find such information and conflicting government pronouncements confusing to the point that 28% of respondents in a recent survey mistakenly thought that COVID vaccines have caused thousands of deaths.

Now picture the hundreds of steps on the path to longevity that will be subject to confusion and fear: we’ll all have wearable and implanted health trackers; Ais will monitor us in real time, accessing all of our personal genetics and bio-data; and Ais will diagnose our ailments and devising our treatments. But a 2020 survey found that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable if their healthcare provider relied on AI for their medical care.

Clearly, if we’re to move from “sickcare” to healthspan and longevity, we must develop a strategy to rewiring the thinking processes of public and policymakers.

First, we should elevate longevity education efforts above political and partisan differences as much as possible.

Second, we must insist on open and honest discussions, not censored and dogmatic.

Third, we must help public and policymakers understand that the discoveries, technologies and their applications to longevity are always experimental, evolving, and prone to uncertainties. But comfort with this way of thinking should not result in too much caution but, rather, should spur proaction, to try, fail, learn, try again and progress towards a future that can vanquish the ailments that have always plagued humanity.

Let’s develop futurist brains as well as futurist technology!

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Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., is Executive Director of Humanity Plus, founder of the Human Achievement Alliance, and an expert on public policy, technology, and culture.