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

From January 10, 2022 (Episode 309): Joseph Uscinski (University of Miami) argues that the internet is not increasing the prevalence of conspiracy theories.

Links:

Don’t Blame Social Media for Conspiracy Theories—They Would Still Flourish Without It

Robert Atkinson is president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. He joins the show to discuss his new book, Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy, co-authored with David Moschella.

Topics include:

• Tech panic: speeding-uppers vs. slowing-downers
• Tech and privacy: try living in an analogue village!
• The wicked problem of content moderation
• Is tech progress bad for the middle class?
• Is tech driving market concentration?
• “Industrial planning”: dirty words?

Links:

Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy

Richard Morrison (Competitive Enterprise Institute) joins the show, in a crossover episode with the Free the Economy podcast.

Topics include:

• The history of podcasts
• The rise of micro media (find a thousand true fans!)
• Performative tech doomerism
• The idleness of romanticizing the past
• The quest for online community
• Conservatives in the Technium

Links:

Free the Economy

Why Conservatism Failed

The Quest for a Better Online “Community”