When I was growing up, one of my favorite movies was the 1983 Cold War Classic War

Games. It featured a spooky military computer, the Whopper, that turned on its engineers

and almost launched a nuclear attack.

Well, the Whopper spends all its time thinking about World War III. 24 hours a day, 365

days a year, plays an endless series of war games.

War games grappled with a classic sci-fi question. What happens when the machines are smarter

than the humans?

Last November, with the launch of the Artificial Intelligence Platform Chat GPT, that question

suddenly became very real. It marked the beginning of a new era in technology, one that has

enormous implications for the economy and our nation's politics. On Capitol Hill, members

of Congress suddenly needed answers about the coming disruption, such as the common belief

that AI might replace millions of white-collar jobs in the near future. But as you might

expect, many members of Congress are basically computer illiterate. So when they needed

an expert to understand the AI revolution, the guy they turned to was a video game developer

from Southern California. Congressman J. Obernolte.

I'm Ryan Liza. This is Playbook Deep Dive.

J. Obernolte is not your average member of the house. While his future peers in Washington

were joining the college Republicans or college Democrats, he was a Caltech writing code

for his side hustle. When they got law degrees or internships on Capitol Hill, Obernolte

got a master's in Artificial Intelligence. And as those same future congressional colleagues

were climbing the political ladder in their home states, he was building a very successful

video game company that is now 35 years old. He did eventually jump into politics. Obernolte

...