Tech Policy Podcast

Sayash Kapoor (Princeton) discusses the incoherence of precise p(doom) predictions and the pervasiveness of AI “snake oil.” Check out his and Arvind Narayanan’s new book, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference.

Topics include:

• What’s a prediction, really?
• p(doom): your guess is as good as anyone’s
• Freakishly chaotic creatures (us, that is)
• AI can’t predict the impact of AI
• Gaming AI with invisible ink
• Life is luck—let’s act like it
• Superintelligence (us, that is)
• The bitter lesson
• AI danger: sweat the small stuff

Links:

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

AI Existential Risk Probabilities Are Too Unreliable to Inform Policy 

AI Snake Oil (Substack)

Geoff Manne (International Center for Law & Economics) and Corbin Barthold (TechFreedom) discuss the many, many flaws in the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta (Facebook). 

A crossover episode with the Washington Legal Foundation / TechFreedom Tech in the Courts series.

Topics include:

- The ontology of Facebook

- Social networking: it’s not 2008 anymore

- The FTC’s made-up market

- The WhatsApp Catch-22

- Has Facebook been enshittified?

- Product design by government: bad idea!

- Growing startups: hard, actually

Links:

The Feds Unfriend Facebook: Why the FTC’s Meta Antitrust Case Should Fail

Tech Policy Podcast 357: The Amazon Antitrust Case

Tech Policy Podcast 353: The Google Search Antitrust Trial

Tech Policy Podcast 302: Epic v. Apple

TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold, Ari Cohn, and Santana Boulton partake in a summer doldrums bitchfest about recent and upcoming Supreme Court internet speech cases. 

Topics include:

• SCOTUS ducks in Moody v. NetChoice
• Hey, let’s *not* reward bad-faith legislating
• Justice Kagan: progressive traitor (and we love it)
• Justice Alito is mad
• What’s next for online speech?
• SCOTUS ducks in Murthy v. Missouri
• Judge Terry Doughty: incompetent boob
• The censorship industrial complex that wasn’t
• SCOTUS takes up Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
• Texas tries to age-gate XXX
• Is porn getting more extreme?
• The seven dirty words

Links:

Tech Policy Podcast 350: When the Government Yells at Social Media

Tech Policy Podcast 373: Porn and the First Amendment

Project 2025 Co-Author Caught Admitting Secret Conservative Plan to Ban Porn

Is AI a miracle? A threat? Will it free us? Enslave us? Both? Neither? What’s the future of AI and governance? AI and art? AI and elections? AI and social media? AI and the economy? AI and the world?

Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast: AI and Everything. On this special episode, we present highlights from more than a year of conversations with leading experts on the state of the AI revolution.

Featuring Adam Thierer, Samuel Hammond, Liza Lin, Arnold Kling, Brian Frye, Joseph Tainter, James Pethokoukis, Robert Atkinson, Alice Marwick, and Ari Cohn.

Links:

Tech Policy Podcast 327: The Collapse of Complex Societies

Tech Policy Podcast 337: China and Domestic Surveillance

Tech Policy Podcast 346: Who’s Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?

Tech Policy Podcast 355: Conservative Futurism

Tech Policy Podcast 361: AI, Art, Copyright, and the Life of Brian

Tech Policy Podcast 363: AI and Elections

Tech Policy Podcast 369: AI and State Capacity

Tech Policy Podcast 375: Tech Facts and Fallacies

Tech Policy Podcast 377: AI and Wicked Problems

Noah Smith (Noahpinion Substack) discusses techno-industrial competition with China and Russia.

Topics include:

• American industry: we’re #2 :( 
• Allies: no longer a luxury
• NEPA sucks
• A brief lesson about nickel
• The death of state capacity: greatly exaggerated?
• Will information destroy liberalism?
• Clowns to the left, clowns to the right
• Hey, let’s *not* be divided and poor

Links:

Noahpinion (Substack)

People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone

Happy fun Cold War 2 update

Three holes in the U.S.’ economic strategy against China

How liberal democracy might lose the 21st century

Liberalism is losing the information war

Brandon Kirk Williams (Lawrence Livermore) discusses quantum computing—the science behind it, its potential applications, the geopolitics surrounding it, and more.

Links:

The U.S. Must Win the Quantum Computing Race. History Shows How to Do It

The U.S. Needs a Strategy for the Second Quantum Revolution

Alice Marwick (UNC-Chapel Hill) discusses her new paper, “Child Online Safety Legislation: A Primer.”

If you’re wondering, the article Corbin quotes at the top of the show is Zephyr Teachout, Ending Big Tech’s Child Exploitation (Compact Magazine).

Topics include:

• Moral panic in the technical sense
• The Kids Online Safety Act: not about kids, not about safety
• Once more, with feeling: correlation is not causation
• “Harmful content”: no one knows what it means, but it’s provocative
• Care about kids? Center them, not technology

Links:

Child Online Safety Legislation: A Primer

Tech Policy Podcast #342: Save the Children (From State Social Media Laws)

Berin Szóka (TechFreedom) and James Dunstan (TechFreedom) discuss the FCC’s recent orders on Title II common-carrier regulation and digital discrimination.

Topics include:

• A hundred years of telecom law in four minutes
• The craziest story in the history of federal regulation
• FCC: Huzzah for crappy Internet (like in Europe)!
• SCOTUS: Congress must tackle major questions!
• Disparate treatment vs. disparate impact
• The FCC crams an elephant in a mousehole

Links:

Zombie FCC vs. Schoolhouse-Rock Supreme Court

FCC Revives Common Carriage for the Internet

TechFreedom’s brief in the digital discrimination litigation

TechFreedom’s comments in the FCC’s Title II proceeding

Net Neutrality Legislation: A Framework for Consensus

Arnold Kling discusses his recent article in Reason magazine, “Not Even Artificial Intelligence Can Make Central Planning Work.”

Topics include:

• Why central planning is impossible
• The importance of prices
• What is AI good for?
• Will AI know us better than we know ourselves?
• What markets will AI disrupt?
• Social media and tribal gang-sign flashing
• The myopia of the revanchist right

Links:

Not Even Artificial Intelligence Can Make Central Planning Work

David Brin’s Transparent Society Revisited

Mir McLuhanism

The Revanchist Right

Tech Policy Podcast 368: How the Government Gets Your Data

Renée DiResta (Stanford Internet Observatory) discusses her new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.

Topics include:

• Social media influencers: the new media elite
• How do ideas take root?
• Influencers as exploiters of asymmetries
• Bullshit: an investigation
• Could platforms have stopped Stop the Steal?
• Fixing the expert class
• Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
• The future of social media

Links:

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

Influencers, Bullshitters, and How We Lost a Shared Reality

Renée DiResta at Politics and Prose (DC), June 13

Renée DiResta at the Commonwealth Club (SF), June 17

The New Media Goliaths (Noema)

Agents of Influence newsletter

Tech Policy Podcast 293: The Supply of Renée DiResta Should Be Infinite