The Tech Policy Press Podcast

The 13th installment of the Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House finds that "while advances in artificial intelligence offer benefits for society, they have also been used to increase the scale and efficiency of digital repression." Justin Hendrix spoke with two of the report's authors- Allie Funk and Kian Vesteinsson about their findings, which unfortunately do not represent a change of trajectory from prior years.

While US Senators are busy holding hearings and forums and posing for pictures with the CEOs of AI companies, the European Union is just months away from passing sweeping regulation of artificial intelligence. 

As negotiations continue between the European Parliament, Council, and Commission, Justin Hendrix spoke to one observer who is paying close attention to every detail: the Ada Lovelace Institute's European Public Policy Lead, Connor Dunlop. Connor recently published a briefing on five areas of focus for the trilogue negotiations that recommence next week.

In Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant has written a new history of perhaps one of the most famous movements for worker rights and power in the face of automation. The book sets the record straight on the Luddites, and unpacks what today’s workers can learn from them. 

The ubiquity of cameras in our phones and our environment, coupled with massive social media networks that can share images and video in an instant, means we see often graphic and disturbing images with great frequency. How are people processing such material? And how is it different for people working in newsrooms, social media companies, and human rights and social justice organizations? What protections might be put in place to protect people from vicarious trauma and other harms, and what is the ultimate benefit of doing this work?

In their new book, Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives, University of California Berkeley scholars Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampros set out to answer those questions.

In 2019, journalist Kashmir Hill had just joined The New York Times when she got a tip about the existence of a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone with a photo. But the company was hard to contact, and people who knew about it didn’t want to talk. Hill resorted to old fashioned shoe-leather reporting, trying to track down the company and its executives. By January of 2020, the Times was ready to report what she had learned in a piece titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” 

Three years later, Hill has published a book that tells the story of Clearview AI, but with the benefit of a great deal more reporting and study on the social, political, and technological forces behind it. It's called Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy As We Know It, just out from Penguin Random House.

Today’s episode features two segments, both of which consider the scale of technology platforms and their power over markets and people.

In the first, Rebecca Rand delivers a conversation with University of Technology Sydney researcher Dr. Luis Lozano-Paredes about a community of drivers in Colombia who have hacked together a way to preserve their power alongside the adoption of ride sharing apps.

And in the second, Justin Hendrix speaks with Columbia University Law School Professor of Law, Science and Technology Tim Wu, who recently spent two years on the National Economic Council in the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Competition and Technology. The conversation touches on privacy legislation, ideas about competition and scale, and Wu's observations on the landmark antitrust trial between the Justice Department and Google, which wrapped up its first week of testimony on Friday. The conversation took place at the All Tech is Human Responsible Tech Summit, hosted with the Consulate General of Canada in New York, on September 14th.

This episode features two segments on the subject of disinformation. 

In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Dr. Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, on recent research that looks at whether AI can write persuasive propaganda. 

In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Dr. Kirsty Park, the Policy Lead at the European Media Observatory Ireland, and Stephan Mündges, the manager of the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University and one of the coordinators of the German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory, about the report they authored that looks in detail at baseline reporting from big technology platforms that are part of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.

One of the problems we come back to again and again on the Tech Policy Press podcast is the problem of how to govern social media platforms. 

Today’s guest is Paul Gowder, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and a founding fellow of the Integrity Institute. Gowder is the author of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms, a book that he says takes an institutional political science approach to the problem of tech platform governance, arguing “that the goals of effective governance capacity development and of global justice” can come together, and that we can build “worldwide direct democratic institutions to exercise public authority over the operations of the big platforms.”

This episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Alina Leidinger, a researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam about her research- with coauthor Richard Rogers- into which stereotypes are moderated and under-moderated in search engine autocompletion. In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Associated Press investigative journalist Garance Burke about a new chapter in the AP Stylebook offering guidance on how to report on artificial intelligence.

This episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand considers the social consequences of "machine allocation behavior" with Cornell researchers Houston Claure and Malte Jung, authors of a recent paper on the topic with coauthors Seyun Kim and René Kizilcec.

In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Tom Kemp, author of a new book out August 22 from Fast Company Press titled Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy.