Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Future in Five Questions. We’re devoting this last Friday of our newsletter’s year to the tech thinkers, policymakers and developers who taught us the most about the digital future. This year saw profound upheavals in artificial intelligence, politics and enforcement … and with Silicon Valley set to effectively take power in Washington, it’s worth taking a beat to review: On AI When I started looking at AI from a policy standpoint in D.C. in February of 2018, AGI was something that people whispered about in dark rooms, and those who did [speak about it] out loud were considered quacks and charlatans. So to hear industry leaders say they think it is actually around the corner absolutely surprised me. I didn’t think we were there. — Kara Frederick, director of tech policy for the Heritage Foundation I’ve been dismayed at the gusto with which “generative AI” has taken off, with policymakers talking about it constantly, I just think it’s the wrong category. Either we should talk about automation or deep learning in general, or we should talk about some particular application. — Helen Toner, artificial intelligence researcher, director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and former OpenAI board member My problem is that once you call it “artificial intelligence” instead of “pattern recognition,” it conjures dangerous robots that are threatening our existence, or automating human jobs, or beings that are more powerful or more intelligent than we are. That’s never panned out … these are incredible tools that make my life better on a daily basis, but you see that we pour all this money into them as if they’re going to create some new consciousness or end humanity, or that they’re somehow equivalent to nuclear bombs. It’s just incongruous.
— Ben Recht, engineering and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the arg min Substack On the election I think my biggest surprise this year was how undecided I was walking into the voting booth on Nov. 5. And the second biggest surprise was how calm I felt walking out … It turns out I’m much more afraid of a future where the U.S. continues to fearfully wrap itself in red tape and carefully policed narratives than I am of a future where ambitious ideas, including really bad ones, are debated loudly. — Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute and former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission Democratic voters’ hostility to tech is overhyped. The burst of vaguely Luddite thinking comes mainly from some astroturfed nonprofit groups and academics that got outsized influence in Democratic circles post 2016. I think that’s about to fade away as this approach is an electoral dead end. The left has traditionally been pro-technology dating back to the French Revolution. — Justin Slaughter, vice president of regulatory affairs at the crypto investment firm Paradigm On tech policy enforcement I asked 40 or 50 young people over the past few weeks when I was back in Colorado about what would happen if TikTok went away. With one exception — there was one person who got really agitated and said “how dare the government do this” — everybody else said they’ll go to various other platforms. I think it’s overhyped that TikTok is a necessity for our young people, and I think allowing our major rival access to so much data about who we are is terrifying. — Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) In the United States, there’s woefully little antitrust precedent or even a conception of a software platform, and little ability to define one. That sucks, but that’s primarily our problem. I admire the EU’s hit-and-miss effort to design policy that understands an iPhone isn’t a truck, or even a railway. I think Silicon Valley is sincerely outraged [by EU laws], but largely because they’re surprised foreign politics and policies don’t work as ours do. — Matthew Ball, venture capitalist and author of “The Metaverse” We urgently need constraints on large capital, which is warping the use of every technology both old and new. I don’t think we’re doing enough good even with picks and shovels, much less AI. Have you noticed how many people are unhoused in your city? How many lack access to clean water, air, good education? These aren’t new problems, but we are failing at them badly, same as we are failing to constrain digital data collection and misuse of information. — Damon Krukowski, independent musician, organizer for United Musicians and Allied Workers, and author of the Dada Drummer Almanach Substack On their favorite books
Robert Wright’s “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” and “The Evolution of God” had a big influence on me. “Nonzero” is all about the logic of positive-sum, win-win games in steering human history … “The Evolution of God” applied that same lens to the history of religion. The Christian message of loving thy neighbor emerged during a period of regional globalization, for example. Yet we can’t take this analysis for granted, as if there were an inevitable arc to history in favor of economic interdependence and peace. Interdependence can also be weaponized,
globalization can impose costs on workers who aren’t automatically compensated, and economic integration can creep into forms of political integration that undermine popular sovereignty and invite a backlash. — Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation I’ve always loved the 1959 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel “A Canticle For Leibowitz” by Walter Miller … Miller’s optimism isn’t naive. The cyclical nature of the novel’s narrative — the rise, fall, and rebirth of civilization — serves as a sobering reminder that progress isn’t inevitable or irreversible. It’s a call for stewardship of our technological capabilities, a theme that’s increasingly relevant in our era of rapid AI development. — Caleb Watney, co-founder of the Institute for Progress
“Wrong Way” by Joanne McNeil [is] incredibly bleak but it is one of the more realistic stories of a woman working in the tech industry that I’ve read for quite a while … The woman has the “great honor” of working for a self-driving car company that, surprise, is not really self-driving. The cars are actually driven by humans who are contorted and squished up into the vehicles, in a very obvious Mechanical Turk metaphor. It isn’t a story that ends with a “hooray” collective moment of solidarity and worker triumph. But I do think it offers a look at what kind of horrific AI
present or future could take shape if we don’t have collective action. — Tamara Kneese, director of the nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab
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