The Tech Policy Press Podcast

The Hippocratic oath, named for a Greek physician who lived ~2,500 years ago that some call the father of modern medicine, is one of the earliest examples of an expression of professional ethics. It is a symbol of a profession that has built in a number of protections for patient interests, with ethical frameworks and requirements that seek to assure they are maintained.

Today’s guest is Chinmayi Sharma, an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. Sharma thinks there should be a similar professional ethics framework in place for the developers of AI systems, and she’s written a substantial paper on the 'why' and the 'how' of her proposal. 

One topic we come back to again and again on this podcast is disinformation. In many episodes, we’ve discussed various phenomena related to this ambiguous term, and we’ve tried to use science to guide the way.

But the guests in this episode suggest that in the broader political discourse, the term is more than over used. Often, they say, lawmakers and other elites that employ it are crossing the line into hyping the effects of disinformation, which they say only helps propagandists and diminishes trust in society. To learn more Justin Hendrix spoke with Gavin Wilde, Thomas Rid, and Olga Belogolova, who with Lee Foster are the authors of an essay in the publication Foreign Affairs titled "Don’t Hype the Disinformation: Downplaying the Risk Helps Foreign Propagandists, But So Does Exaggerating It." 

In an introduction to a special issue of the journal First Monday on topics related to AI and power, Jenna Burrell and Jacob Metcalf argue that "what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science." The papers in the journal go on to interrogate the epistemic culture of AI safety, the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence how to debunk robot rights, and more.

To learn more about some of the ideas in the special issue, Justin Hendrix spoke to Burrell, Metcalf, and two of the other authors of papers included in it: Shazeda Ahmed and Émile P. Torres.

Last week President Joe Biden signed into law a measure that would force the Chinese firm ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok, or risk the app being banned in the US. The measure also included restrictions on the sale of personal data to foreign entities. What are the implications of these moves for US and global tech policy going forward? What will the inevitable legal challenges look like?

To learn more, Justin Hendrix spoke with Anupam Chander, law professor at Georgetown and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University; Rose Jackson, the director of the Democracy and Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council; and Justin Sherman, CEO of global cyber strategies and adjunct professor at Duke University.

Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce held a hearing: “Legislative Solutions to Protect Kids Online and Ensure Americans’ Data Privacy Rights.” Between the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), both of which have bipartisan and bicameral support, Congress may be closer to acting on the issues than it has been recent memory.

One of the witnesses that the hearing was David Brody, who is managing attorney of the Digital Justice Initiative of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Justin Hendrix caught up with Brody the day after the hearing, we spoke about the challenges of advancing the American Privacy Rights Act, and why he connects fundamental data to privacy rights to so many of the other issues that the Lawyers' Committee cares about, including voting rights and how to counter disinformation that targets communities of color.

This episode features two conversations. Both relate to efforts to better understand the impact of technology on society.

In the first, we’ll hear from Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and Rishi Bommasani, the society lead at the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models. They are two of the authors of a recent paper titled On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models.

And in the second, we’ll hear from Politico Chief Technology Correspondent Mark Scott about the US-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) meeting, and what he’s learned about the question of access to social media platform data by interviewing over 50 stakeholders, including regulators, researchers, and platform executives.

Last week, a federal judge granted a motion to dismiss and strike a lawsuit brought by X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, against a nonprofit research outfit called The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).  To learn more about why the ruling matters, Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; Imran Ahmed, the CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; and Roberta Kaplan, a partner at the law firm of Kaplan, Hecker, and Fink, which represented CCDH in this matter. 

On this show, when we talk about technology and democracy, guests are often talking about the relationship between technology and existing democratic systems. Today's guest wants us to think more expansively about what doing democracy means and the role the technology can play in it. Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the author of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life.

Last year, researchers at Human Rights Watch wrote about the global backlash against women’s rights. In multiple countries, they say, hard-won progress has been reversed amidst a wave of anti-feminist rhetoric and policies, and it may take decades to reverse the trajectory. It’s against that backdrop that today’s guest pursues concerns at the intersection of tech and digital rights with women’s human rights. Justin Hendrix speaks with Lucy Purdon, the founder of Courage Everywhere and author of a recent report for the Mozilla Foundation titled "Unfinished Business: Incorporating a Gender Perspective into Digital Advertising Reform in the UK and EU."

On Monday, March 18, the US Supreme Court heard oral argument in Murthy v Missouri. In this episode, Tech Policy Press reporting fellow Dean Jackson is joined by two experts- St. John's University School of Law associate professor Kate Klonick and UNC Center on Technology Policy director Matt Perault- to digest the oral argument, what it tells us about which way the Court might go, and what more should be done to create good policy on government interactions with social media platforms when it comes to content moderation and speech.