The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Dr. Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she has served on the faculty since 2019. From 2021 to 2023, she was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She was deeply involved in the Biden administration’s approach to artificial intelligence. She led the development of the White House “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” which informed President Biden’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. 

To say the Trump administration has taken a different approach to AI and how to think about its role in government and in society would be an understatement. President Trump rescinded President Biden’s executive order and is at work developing a new approach to AI policy. At the Paris AI Action Summit in February, Vice President JD Vance promoted a vision of American dominance and challenged other nations that would seek to regulate American AI firms. And then there is DOGE, which is at work gutting federal agencies with the stated intent of replacing key government functions with AI systems and using AI to root out supposed fraud and waste.

This week, Justin Hendrix had the chance to speak with Dr. Nelson about how she’s thinking about these phenomena and the work to be done in the years ahead to secure a more just, democratic, and sustainable future. 

The goal of achieving "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, is shared by many in the AI field. OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” and last summer, the company announced its plan to achieve AGI within five years. While other experts at companies like Meta and Anthropic quibble with the term, many AI researchers recognize AGI as either an explicit or implicit goal. Google Deepmind went so far as to set out "Levels of AGI,” identifying key principles and definitions of the term. 

Today’s guests are among the authors of a new paper that argues the field should stop treating AGI as the north-star goal of AI research. They include:

• Eryk Salvaggio, a visiting professor in the Humanities Computing and Design department at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Tech Policy Press fellow;
• Borhane Blili-Hamelin, an independent AI researcher and currently a data scientist at the Canadian bank TD; and
• Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face.

A year ago, Europe’s Digital Markets Act—the DMA—went into effect. The European Commission says the purpose of the regulation is to make “digital markets in the EU more contestable and fairer.” In particular, the DMA regulates gatekeepers, the large digital platforms whose position gives them greater leverage over the digital economy. One year in, how has the DMA performed? Do Europeans enjoy more choice and competition? And what are the new politics of the DMA as European regulations are contested by the Trump administration and its supporters in US industry? 

To answer these questions and more, Tech Policy Press contributing editor Dean Jackson spoke to a set of experts following a conference hosted by the Knight Georgetown Institute titled “DMA and Beyond.” His guests include:

• Alissa Cooper, Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI)
• Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School
• Haeyoon Kim, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), and
• Gunn Jiravuttipong, a JSD Candidate and Miller Fellow at Berkeley Law School.

Could AI help design better, more democratic platforms and online environments for public discourse? What are the opportunities, challenges, and risks of deploying AI in contexts where people are engaged in political discussion? Today’s guests are among the more than two dozen authors of a new paper on AI and the future of digital public squares:

• Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and former Digital Minister
• Ravi Iyer, managing director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making
• Beth Goldberg, head of R&D at Jigsaw and a lecturer at Yale School of Public Policy

On this podcast, we regularly engage with questions about redesigning social media networks to make them more democratic, pluralist, and prosocial. One hypothesis people have about how to do that is through the decentralization of platforms and the introduction of middleware—tools built to give users more control over their social media experience and, thus, more autonomy in how they engage in public discourse. In this episode, you’ll hear a discussion with one entrepreneur building middleware for Bluesky: Rudy Fraser, the founder of Blacksky Algorithms and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Last week, Tech Policy Press joined the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (EL CLIP) in publishing a report and series of articles documenting how adult users use public Facebook groups to identify and target accounts that indicate they are children for sexual exploitation.

The “Innocence at Risk (Inocencia en Juego)” project, coordinated by EL CLIP with participation from Chequeado, includes a report from Lara Putnam, a professor of Latin American history and Director of the Civic Resilience Initiative of the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security at the University of Pittsburgh, and independent reports from journalists across Latin America investigating a pattern of behavior on the platform’s public groups in Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina. They published their reports in EL CLIP, Chequeado, Crónica Uno, El Espectador, and Factchequeado.

This episode features a discussion with Lara Putnam and Pablo Medina Uribe, who led the project at EL CLIP.

On January 22, President Donald Trump terminated all three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an intelligence watchdog charged with monitoring the United States government's compliance with procedural safeguards on surveillance activities. The PCLOB's independence is also of concern to the European Commission, which relies on its reports in its assessment of whether US intelligence practices are aligned with EU Data Protection Framework standards.

On February 24, two of the three terminated members filed suit against the government, arguing they were wrongfully terminated and must be reinstated. The outcome could determine the independence and effectiveness of the PCLOB going forward.

This episode explores what's at stake in this matter, and it features three segments, including:

• Excerpts from remarks by the remaining PCLOB board member, Republican Beth Williams, at the annual State of the Net conference on February 11 in Washington, DC;
• An interview with former board member Travis LeBlanc conducted just days before he filed suit against the government;
• An interview with Greg Nojeim, Senior Counsel and Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir hosts a roundtable discussion on the first systemic risk assessments and independent audit reports from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines produced in compliance with the European Union's Digital Services Act. Ramsha is joined by:

• Hillary Ross, program lead at the Global Network Initiative (GNI);
• Magdalena Jozwiak, associate researcher at the DSA Observatory; and
• Svea Windwehr, the assistant director of EU policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

This week, RightsCon, which bills itself as "the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age," descends on Taipei. To better understand the dynamics in the civil society community working on digital rights and tech policy matters in Taiwan, Justin Hendrix spoke to three experts:

• Liu I-Chen (劉以正), Asia Program Officer at ARTICLE 19
• Kuan-Ju Chou (周冠汝), Deputy Secretary-General of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights 
• Grace Huang (黃寬心), Director for Global Justice and Digital Freedom at Judicial Reform Foundation 

At the Paris AI Action Summit on February 10-11, remarks by EU and US leaders indicated significant divergence on how to think about AI. But on balance, nations are moving decisively toward innovation and exploitation of this technology and away from containing it or restricting it. In this episode, Justin Hendrix surfaces voices from the Summit, as well as reactions and discussion on these matters at this year's State of the Net conference on February 11 in Washington, DC, including comments by Center for Democracy & Technology vice president for policy Samir Jain, Abundance Institute head of AI policy Neil Chilson, and former Biden administration assistant director for AI policy Olivia Zhu.