From visions of AI paradise to the project to defeat death, many dangerous and unscientific ideas are driving Silicon Valley leaders. Justin Hendrix spoke to Adam Becker , a science journalist and author of MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity , just out from Basic Books....
For a special series of episodes that will air throughout the year, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is hosting a series of discussions intended to help us imagine possible futures—for tech and tech policy, for democracy, and society—beyond the moment we are in. Dubbed Through to Thriving , the first episode in the series features a discussion on how to build community and solidarity with Ellen Pao , currently the co-founder of a nonprofit called Project Include , which focuses on...
Last month, a group of researchers published a letter “Affirming the Scientific Consensus on Bias and Discrimination in AI.” The letter, published at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back policies and threatening research aimed at protecting people from bias and discrimination in AI, carries the signatures of more than 200 experts. To learn more about their goals, Justin Hendrix spoke to three of the signatories: J. Nathan Matias , an Assistant Professor in the Department of Commu...
On Monday, April 14, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will kick off its trial against Meta . In process for years, the case is over whether Mark Zuckerberg’s company has an illegal monopoly over social media and whether it should be forced to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. To prepare to cover the arguments, Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to two experts to better understand the issues at play. William (Bill) Kovacic is a Professor of Law and Policy and Direc...
On April 4, The New York Times reported that the European Commission is considering finding X, formerly Twitter, as part of its ongoing DSA investigation, which began in 2023. Tech Policy Press has discussed at length the extent and quality of transparency from platforms under the DSA, but there is limited insight into how the Commission is conducting its investigations into large online platforms and search engines. In most cases, the publicly available documents on cases are just press release...
Across the United States and in some cities abroad yesterday, protestors took to the streets to resist the policies of US President Donald Trump . Dubbed the "Hands Off" protests, over 1,400 events took place, including in New York City, where protestors called for billionaire Elon Musk to be ousted from his role in government and for an end to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has gutted government agencies and programs and sought to install artificial intelligence systems t...
On Tuesday, March 25th, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar discussion to talk shop with others on the tech and democracy beat. We gathered seven colleagues from around the world to explore how tech journalists are grappling with the current political moment in the United States and beyond. In this episode, you'll hear the first session of the day, which features Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir in discussion with Rina Chandran , Rest of World; Natalia Anteleva , Coda Story; An...
On Tuesday, March 25th, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar discussion to talk shop with others on the tech and democracy beat. We gathered seven colleagues from around the world to explore how tech journalists are grappling with the current political moment in the United States and beyond. In this episode, you'll hear the first session of the day, which features a discussion with Michael Masnick from Techdirt, Vittoria Elliot from Wired , and Emmanuel Maiberg from 404 Media. This session explore...
Every now and again, a story that has a significant technology element really breaks through and drives the news cycle. This week, the Trump administration is reeling after The Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he was on the receiving end of Yemen strike plans in a Signal group chat between US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other top US national security officials. User behavior, a common failure point, appears to be to blame in this scenario. But what are the broader con...
Last week, President Donald Trump ordered the firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency that enforces federal consumer protection and competition laws and that, under former President Joe Biden , turned up its scrutiny of the tech sector's biggest companies. The two commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter , plan to challenge Trump's firing, which they said will only benefit billionaire tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos ...
What is necessary to develop a future that is less hospitable to authoritarianism and, indeed, to fascism? How do we build collective power against authoritarian forms of corporate and state power? Is an alternative form of computing possible? Dan McQuillan is the author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence , published in 2022 by Bristol University Press.
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 de...
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 " L...
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 conte...
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 L...
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 f...
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 Ci...
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 F...
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...
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 Freed...
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...
Over the last two decades, as Berlin reinvented itself as a "creative city," social media both mirrored and shaped shifting social landscapes—offering new possibilities while also reinforcing inequalities. How did digital media practices reshape urban life? And what can Berlin’s story tell us about the broader relationship between technology, culture, and the places we live? Today’s guest is Jordan H. Kraemer , the author of a new book that tries to answer these questions and more. It's called M...
As Donald Trump ’s second presidency enters its third week, Elon Musk is center stage as the Department of Government Efficiency moves to gut federal agencies. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with two experts who are following these events closely and thinking about what they tell us about the relationship between technology and power: David Kaye , a professor of law at the University of California Irvine and formerly the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, and Yaël Eisenstat ...
Justin Hendrix speaks with Jathan Sadowski , a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; co-host of This Machine Kills , a weekly podcast on technology and political economy; and author of the new book The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism from the University of California Press....
If Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s efficiency and performance achievements stand up to scrutiny, it could have big implications for the AI race. It could call into question the strategic approach that the biggest US firms appear to be taking and the wisdom of the current American policy approach to AI. To discuss these issues, Justin Hendrix spoke to Karen Hao , a reporter who covers AI. In recent years, she's reported on China and tech for the Wall Street Journal, written about AI for The Atlanti...
From Executive Orders on AI and cryptocurrency to "ending federal censorship," President Donald Trump had a busy first week in the White House. Justin Hendrix discussed the news with Damon Beres , a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the technology section. Beres wrote a piece reflecting on Trump's inauguration titled "Billions of People in the Palm of Trump’s Hand."...
This episode features two segments. First, we hear from Nikki Gladstone , director of Rightscon , the annual conference organized by Access Now on issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. And in the second, you’ll hear from Robin Berjon and Sean McDonald , two of the folks behind Free Our Feeds , a new effort to raise a public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky’s underlying tech (the AT Protocol) resistant to billionaire capture....
Today- Friday, January 17, 2025 - the US Supreme Court delivered its order upholding the constitutionality of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April 2024. The Court found that the Act, which effectively bans TikTok in the US unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it, does not violate the First Amendment rights of TikTok, its users, or creators. The decision clears the way for a ...
Last fall, Cornell University PhD candidate Cristiana Firullo gave a presentation at the Trust and Safety Research Conference at Stanford University during a session on understanding algorithms and online environments. Titled "The Cursed Equilibrium of Algorithmic Traumatization," the talk focused on the work Firullo is doing with her colleagues at Cornell to try to understand why social media recommendation systems may produce harmful effects on users. Audio reporter Rebecca Rand spoke to Firul...
Even as the new year ushers in a new administration and Congress in the US at the federal level, dozens of states are kicking off new legislative sessions and are expected to pursue various tech policy goals. Justin Hendrix spoke to three experts to get a sense of the trends unfolding across the states on the regulation of AI, privacy, child online safety, and related issues: Keir Lamont , senior director at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) and author of The Patchwork Dispatch , a newsletter on...
