Can the Bill of Rights survive the AI revolution?

OPINION:

Artificial intelligence may prove to be the greatest constitutional test our generation will face.

At the outset of the American Experiment, the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to secure specific freedoms for the citizens of their nascent nation, including the rights to worship according to conscience, assemble peaceably and be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The liberties secured in the Bill of Rights were not fully realized at the nation’s founding, but over succeeding generations Americans repeatedly expanded and defended those constitutional protections against new threats. Each generation has faced its own constitutional tests. Artificial intelligence is likely to be ours.

The AI revolution is arriving faster than any that preceded it, expanding human capability in medical research, creative production and nearly every form of thought work. At the same time, AI is destabilizing the constitutional architecture the founders built, demanding that we update our protections for liberty before technological capability outpaces constitutional restraint.

No right illustrates this danger more clearly than the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a warrant with a specific description of what is to be searched. The Fourth Amendment was written for a world in which government surveillance was naturally constrained by time, distance and human effort. Artificial intelligence has removed those constraints.

In 1791, there was no constitutional issue if a constable saw a person ride a horse into town in public. In the age of artificial intelligence, however, over 5,000 communities have deployed more than 100,000 Flock cameras capable of capturing license plates, timestamps and locations for millions of vehicles. This deployment is not simply “taking a picture of a car in public” in the traditional sense; it is automated, continuous and aggregated surveillance able to reconstruct days, weeks or years of a person’s movements.

With AI, enough data points create something fundamentally different from isolated observations. The constitutional question is no longer, “Can police observe a car on a public street?” but rather, “Can the government reconstruct nearly every movement of nearly every citizen for years?”

The quantity of observations becomes a qualitative difference: With AI systems already deployed, government license plate databases can reconstruct where you sleep, where you worship, which political meetings you attend, which gun ranges you frequent and which friends you visit. Accordingly, this technological pressure on the Fourth Amendment equally affects other aspects of the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of religion, the right to peaceful assembly, the right to bear arms and many others.

All of the rights in the Constitution need to be defended against technological disruptions that could not have been foreseen by the Founding Fathers.

Even as automatic license plate readers have helped law enforcement officials solve auto thefts and recover Amber Alert victims, they are far from the technological limit of what governments could use to undermine the Fourth Amendment. Today, the Chinese Communist Party has deployed an estimated 700 million cameras with facial and gait recognition to track every single individual. These surveillance feeds are combined with mobile apps (WeChat, Alipay), financial records, internet activity and government databases to build comprehensive profiles of individuals. No society can remain genuinely free if every public action is permanently recorded, searchable and analyzed by artificial intelligence.

China’s surveillance state is not a distant dystopia but rather a working blueprint that authoritarian governments are already exporting, and that democratic governments are incrementally approximating, one camera and one database at a time. The difference between Beijing and an American city is not yet the technology; it is the legal and moral framework restraining its use. That framework is eroding. What is at stake is not merely the Fourth Amendment, but the entire architecture of ordered liberty the founders constructed. When government can track where you worship, whom you assemble with, what firearms you purchase and which doctors you visit, every right in the Bill of Rights is simultaneously compromised.

Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly make our lives safer, healthier and more productive. But history teaches that every expansion of technological power must be accompanied by an equal commitment to preserving human liberty.

The challenge is not to reject AI, but to ensure that constitutional protections evolve to meet capabilities the founders could never have imagined. The freedoms secured in 1791 must not be surrendered simply because technology has made their erosion easier.

The question, then, is not whether we can prevent every government from ever building a surveillance state, but whether we will choose to defend the Bill of Rights with updated laws and renewed vigilance before they are eroded away by technological innovation.

• Dr. David Kotter, Ph.D., is the director for The Quarry: Innovation Lab for Artificial Intelligence at Colorado Christian University. He also serves as the Dean of the School of Theology at CCU and formerly was a visiting scholar for the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics.