Wyoming is the first government on earth to let women vote.
We did not wait for Washington to tell us equality is a good idea; we wrote it into our territorial law in 1869 and never looked back.
We call ourselves the Equality State for a reason.
So, before this legislature spends one more hour on water tables and transformer noise at the new AI data centers, it ought to ask a plainer question: does Wyoming seize the bull by the horns and protect its citizens rights to privacy or wait for permission from corporate cronies and Washington?
Forrest Gump has it right: "Stupid is as stupid does."
You do not judge a thing by its packaging. You judge it by what it does.
Apply that rule to artificial intelligence, and the fashionable debate about robot consciousness collapses, because it was never the right debate.
An AI model is a statistical engine.
It has no conscience and no capacity to tell right from wrong, a point the wisdom literature of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes makes long before anyone coded a neural network: wisdom is inseparable from moral judgment, and a mind without morals, however fast, is not wise.
A tool that is quick but not wise does not deserve to lead; it answers to the human master in charge.
That is the real danger, and it is entirely human. The peril is not a machine waking up. It is a person with no scruples and a login.
The evidence already exists.
In the personal-injury insurance industry, claims software such as Colossus sits at the center of years of litigation, with plaintiffs' attorneys and courts in several states alleging it systematically undervalues claims using inputs the claimant never sees.
When a settlement offer comes from a black box, the injured party has no one to cross-examine and no record to appeal.
Extend the principle: a hidden model can flag a person for a mortgage, a lease, or a job using data he never volunteered and cannot correct. He is simply told no.
Nor is this hypothetical.
During the 2022 Canadian trucker protests, Ottawa invoked emergency powers and directed banks to freeze the accounts of protest organizers without a prior court order, a measure a Canadian federal court later ruled unreasonable, though the government appeals.
Whatever side one takes on the truckers, the mechanism ought to worry every American: a government decides who may use money, with keystrokes, not warrants.
A citizen frozen out of his bank by an authority he cannot see or cross-examine is not free.
This is where Wyoming stops being a spectator and becomes a party to the case.
The data centers are not coming; they are here, and more are coming.
Every month spent on cooling-water permits without legislating the privacy of the data is a month the real policy gets written somewhere else, on terms Wyoming did not negotiate.
On the right to private ownership of the data Wyoming must be first or it will be too late.
Florida offers a workable model, not a perfect one.
Its Digital Bill of Rights requires large data controllers to get consent before processing sensitive personal data, and gives consumers the right to access, correct, and delete their information.
These duties fall only on companies above a revenue threshold, so the protection is narrower than it sounds, but a floor is a floor, and Wyoming should build higher.
The framework Wyoming needs is not complicated.
Require real consent before a company collects sensitive personal data, not a box buried in fine print. Give people the same right over an algorithmic file that they hold over a credit file: to see it, correct it, delete it.
When an automated system denies someone a loan, a job, or a claim, it owes that person a plain explanation.
And the burden of proof sits with the company, not the citizen, since it is easier for the party that built the black box to open it than for the party locked out to pick the lock.
State law reaches only so far.
Data crosses state lines the moment it is sent, so no Wyoming statute alone can fully protect a citizen whose information sits on a server another jurisdiction controls.
Congress must eventually set a national floor, but the absence of a federal law is a reason to act now, not later.
None of this argues against the data centers.
These facilities expand the tax base that pays for schools and roads, and they bring jobs that let young families build a life here instead of leaving.
Wyoming welcomes that growth without apology. Growth and liberty are not in tension.
A state that writes clear rules for consent, access, and accountability does not scare off serious investment; it attracts it, because clear rules are what a company with nothing to hide should want.
Wyoming can have jobs and keep its self-respect. It only has to choose to write the rule first.
We did not wait in 1869. We must not wait now. Govern the data, or the people who hold it will govern you.
*Fred Harrison can be reached at: *Fred.Harrison@fjhlawoffice.com