I was calling the person most explicitly tasked with representing me in Congress, and as a DC resident it was a reminder that I don’t have a voting representative in Congress. But the receptionist in Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office was polite as I nervously explained my concerns about AI, and the legistlation that I wanted the Congresswoman to support (more on that in a future post!). When I paused for breath, she asked if she could put me on hold to see if there was someone I could speak to. She came back shortly to tell me that a person named Jesse (Jessie? Jessy?) would get back to me, and took my name, number, and email address.

This, I gather, is standard. To a first approximation, the job of a receptionist to a Member of Congress is to figure out why you are there and then politely invite you to fuck off as quickly as possible. When I proposed the idea for this project in my group, another student asked if I was worried I would come off as a crazy person. I am! There are few concerns more crazy-person-sounding than a robot apocalypse, and it’s hard to express concerns about AI to someone who isn’t already concerned about AI without it coming across as “robot apocalypse”. And Members of Congress must get plenty of inquiries from people quite disconnected from reality, and so I expect them to be well practiced at ending an interaction.

So I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get an audience with the Congresswoman from my first call. My intent in these initial calls was just to break the ice, dip a toe, and get a feel for it – in that it was a great success.

Then they called me back(!) to ask for further clarification. That was encouraging. I went into a little more depth about the issues AI is creating and is likely to create, focusing on its impact on areas of particular concern to Congresswoman Norton: inequality, unemployment, misinformation, oppression.

But what they were really concerned about was the legislation I mentioned: the Federal Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Act and the CREATE AI Act. A lot of consituent interaction, it seems, is boiled down to a tally mark next to an issue or piece of legislation.

That impression was confirmed in my next call, to Senator Mark Warner’s office.

Senator Warner is not my Senator, I don’t have representation in Senate. But about a third of his constituents live in the Washington Metropolitan Area, and he was a sponsor of the Federal Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Act in the previous Congress. I figured I’d either be treated as an honorary constituent, or the topic would be relevant enough that he’d pay attention.

In fact, his receptionist didn’t ask whether I was a constituent, and I didn’t volunteer that I wasn’t. She asked what I was calling about, I gave my schpiel, and she had me repeat the name of the bills twice as she wrote them down. She then politley but unceremoniously thanked me and ended the call.

I had expected that more brusque reception from Senate offices. Just by dint of their population of constituents, the average Senator must get a lot more calls than the average member of the House (and Congresswoman Norton in particular, by dint of DC’s lack of standing). It also makes sense that they would be less concerned about whether the caller is a constituent, because their role is more national, and their influence more determined by their perception in the public at large.

So again my call was memorialized as a tally mark next to the name of a piece of legislation.

But, given the care with which the receptionist recorded it, and the number of times she asked me to repeat it, I was probably the first to mention the issue or that bill on the day I called, maybe the first to mention it in much longer. If the name of a bill gets onto a piece of paper, and that paper gets into the Senator’s hands, does that impact the likelihood of that bill becoming law? How much? I am not in a position to speculate, but for a five-minute phone call, curt and impersonal, it felt like more impact than I was expecting in my ice-breaking, toe-dipping first foray into direct advocacy. And the second call was easier than the first, and subsequent calls would be easier still.

Of course I’d like to do more than call, and to talk to staffers beyond the receptionist. But its a start.