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 o...
Mar 09, 2025•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Mar 09, 2025•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 06, 2025•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 03, 2025•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Direct...
Mar 02, 2025•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 28, 2025•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 23, 2025•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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), Dire...
Feb 23, 2025•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 16, 2025•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 09, 2025•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Yaë...
Feb 09, 2025•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Feb 02, 2025•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 28, 2025•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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."...
Jan 26, 2025•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Jan 19, 2025•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 18, 2025•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 12, 2025•11 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 05, 2025•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Dr. Ruha Benjamin , Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab . Benjamin was recently named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow , and she’s written and edited multiple books, including 2019’s Race After Technology and 2022’s Viral Justice . Last week she joined Justin Hendrix to discuss her latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto , published this year by WW Norton & Company....
Dec 22, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast This close to the end of 2024, it’s clear that one of the most significant tech stories of the year was the outcome of the Google search antitrust case. It will also make headlines next year and beyond as the remedies phase gets worked out in the courts. For this episode, Justin Hendrix turns the host duties over to someone who has looked closely at this issue: Alissa Cooper , the Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI). Alissa hosted a conversation with three individua...
Dec 15, 2024•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kate Starbird is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation Laboratory at the University of Washington, and co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. Justin Hendrix interviewed her about her team’s ongoing efforts to study online rumors, including during the 2024 US election; the differences between the left and right media ecosystems in the US; and how she believes the r...
Dec 08, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mass migration presents a challenge to democracy in multiple ways. Chief among them is that anti-immigrant sentiment often plays a major role in the advance of illiberal and anti-democratic politics. We've seen this play out in the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised a dramatic crackdown on immigration and the mass deportation of millions. But the scale of today's migration may be dwarfed by what's to come. How has the movement of people affected the politics driving t...
Dec 08, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robert Gorwa is the author of a new book titled The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation , published by Oxford University Press. (The book is available open access- download a free copy here .) It is an analysis of how and why governments around the world engage in platform regulation. The lessons he draws from case studies of key regulatory developments in Europe, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia help explain the adoption of different reg...
Dec 01, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast At its November 21st "Summit of the Future of the Internet," billionaire Frank McCourt's Project Liberty hosted a panel discussion featuring Congresswoman Nancy Mace , a Republican from South Carolina, on a panel with Congressman Ro Khanna , a Democrat from California, that was moderated by the media personality Charlemagne the God . Last month, Congresswoman Mace led an effort to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms at the US Capitol in response to the election of Sarah McBride , w...
Dec 01, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast During his recent campaign, President-elect Donald Trump made various promises consistent with the ongoing effort by Elon Musk and MAGA Republicans to target researchers and civil society groups that study issues such as propaganda and mis- and disinformation. Today's guest has looked deeply at this effort, conducting an analysis of over 1800 pages of primary documents to identify the strategic approaches employed by these parties, including the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponi...
Nov 24, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. Her new book , Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World tells a tale of rivalry and ambition as it chronicles the rush to exploit artificial intelligence. The book explores the trajectories of Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis and their roles in advancing artificial intelligence, the challenges posed by corporate power, and the extraordinary economic stakes o...
Nov 17, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast These days, if you see someone with their head bowed, you’re much more likely observing them staring into their phone than in prayer. But from digital rituals to the promises of abundance from Silicon Valley elites, has technology become the world’s most powerful religion? What kinds of promises of salvation and abundance are its leaders making? And how can thinking about technology in this way help us generate ways to reform our approach to it, particularly if we aim to restore humanist princip...
Nov 10, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s guest is Boston University School of Law professor Woodrow Hartzog , who, with the George Washington University Law School's Daniel Solove, is one of the authors of a recent paper that explored the novelist Franz Kafka’s worldview as a vehicle to arrive at key insights for regulating privacy in the age of AI. The conversation explores why privacy-as-control models, which rely on individual consent and choice, fail in the digital age, especially with the advent of AI syst...
Nov 03, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Tuesday, November 5th, the final ballots will be cast in the 2024 US presidential election. But the process is far from over. How prepared are social media platforms for the post-election period? What should we make of characters like Elon Musk, who is actively advancing conspiracy theories and false claims about the integrity of the election? And what can we do going forward to support election workers and administrators on the frontlines facing threats and disinformation? To help answer the...
Nov 02, 2024•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you’re trying to game out the potential role of technology in the post-election period in the US, there is a significant "X" factor. When he purchased the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.” So says today’s guest, a journalist who is one of the keenest observers of phenomena on the internet: Charlie Warzel , a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain . Justin Hendrix caught u...
Nov 02, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
