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 fiv...
Oct 01, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. ...
Sep 27, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Sep 24, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 C...
Sep 24, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, Scie...
Sep 17, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a...
Sep 10, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 scienc...
Sep 03, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ho...
Aug 27, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Aug 20, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Indian legislators approved a data protection law that will govern the processing of data in the country. The bill creates a data protection board and gives the government new powers, including to request information from companies and to issue orders to block content. While there is still work to do to determine how the law will be administered, it joins a range of new tech policy laws and regulations enacted against a backdrop of the increasing centralization of power in India’s gov...
Aug 13, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lots of voices are calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. In the US, at present it seems there is no federal legislation close to becoming law. But in 2023 legislative sessions in states across the country, there has been a surge in AI laws proposed and passed, and some have already taken effect. To learn more about this wave of legislation, I spoke to two people who just posted a comprehensive review of AI laws in US states: Katrina Zhu , a law clerk at the Electronic Privacy In...
Aug 06, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast A unique collaboration between social scientists and Meta to conduct research on Facebook and Instagram during the height of the 2020 US election has at long last produced its first work products. The release of four peer-reviewed studies last week in Science and Nature mark the first of as many as sixteen studies that promise fresh insights into the complex dynamics of social media and public discourse. But beyond the findings of the research, the partnership between Meta and some of the most p...
Aug 02, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In today’s podcast, Justin Hendrix talks with director, writer and actor Alex Winter, whose new documentary, The YouTube Effect , is in select theaters now and will be available on streaming platforms on August 8th. The film's creators assert that "the story of YouTube is the great dilemma of our times; the technology revolution has made our lives easier and more enriched, while also presenting dangers and challenges that make the world a more perilous place."...
Jul 30, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s guest on the podcast is Ifeoma Ajunwa , the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Director of AI and the Law Program at Emory Law School, and author of the Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace . from Cambridge University Press. The book considers how data and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace, and whether the law is more equipped to help workers in this transition, or to provide for the interests of employers....
Jul 23, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Artificial intelligence will likely impact every type of job. But this summer, Hollywood actors and writers have raised substantial concerns about the ways in which generative AI systems may be used to replace aspects of their human craft. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are currently joined in a dual strike, hoping to make progress on a range of labor grievances with the studios and streaming companie...
Jul 23, 2023•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most urgent debates in tech policy at the moment concerns encrypted communications. At issue in proposed legislation, such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill or the EARN It Act put forward in the US Senate, is whether such laws break the privacy promise of end to end encryption by requiring content moderation mechanisms like client-side scanning. But to what extent are such moderation techniques legal under existing laws that limit the monitoring and interception of communications? ...
Jul 16, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tomorrow's virtual worlds will be governed, at least at first, by today's legal and regulatory regimes. How will privacy law, torts, IP, or even criminal law apply in 'extended reality' (XR)? Drawing from the discussion at a conference hosted earlier this year at Stanford University called " Existing Law and Extended Reality ," this episode asks what challenges will emerge from human behavior and interaction-- with one another and with technology-- inside XR experiences, and what choices governm...
Jul 09, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook , which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Hand...
Jul 06, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alex Hanna , the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and Emily M. Bender , a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, are the hosts of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 , a show that seeks to "break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation." Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex and Emily about the show's origins, and what they hope will come of the effort to scrutinize statements about the potential of AI that are often fantasti...
Jul 02, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, Canada passed the Online News Act, legislation that requires tech platforms to remunerate Canadian news outlets, and the platforms are not happy. In response, Google announced it will remove links to Canadian news outlets from its products. Meta also said it would remove Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram. The Act itself has yet to be implemented- it has to first go through a regulatory process to sort out how it will work. So, these moves by the platforms may be a t...
Jun 30, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past few months, there have been a range of voices calling for the urgent regulation of artificial intelligence. Comparisons to the problems of nuclear proliferation abound, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some want a new international body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But when it comes to AI and global governance, there’s already a lot in play- from ethics councils to various schemes for industry governance, activity on standards, various international agr...
Jun 25, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month, Justin Hendrix traveled to RightsCon, the big gathering of individuals and organizations concerned with human rights and technology organized by Access Now. The sprawling event had hundreds of sessions on a wide range of themes, but one topic discussed across multiple tracks was the importance of encrypted communications, especially to groups such as political dissidents and journalists. A key panel at RightsCon featured Signal President Meredith Whittaker , who spoke out abo...
Jun 18, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the United States, it’s fair to say that federal, state and local governments have struggled in the era of digitalization. Decades in to that era, there is still a gap between the policy outcomes we seek and what citizens often get when they engage with government agencies and services online. At its worst this gap means people aren’t receiving critical services that sustain their lives; and at the very least it reduces faith in government to be able to solve problems right at the moment when...
Jun 11, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, a group of very important people, including the U.S Secretaries of State and Commerce and trade representatives from President Joe Biden’s administration, met with top European Union officials in the heart of the Swedish Lapland for the fourth Ministerial meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, or “TTC”. Pressing needs were tackled, new initiatives were launched, commitments were made, and cooperation was deepened on a range of tech policy issues, at least according to th...
Jun 04, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s show has two segments both focused on generative AI. In the first segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Irene Solaiman , a researcher who has put a lot of thought into evaluating the release strategies for generative AI systems. Organizations big and small have pursued different methods for release of these systems, some holding their models and details about them very close, and some pursuing a more open approach. And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Calli Schroeder and B...
May 28, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, the Supreme Court released decisions in Gonzalez v. Google , LLC , and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh . In this episode we’ll discuss what it tells us about how the Court is thinking about social media and intermediary liability, and what it might tell us about future cases the Court may hear. I’m joined by an expert who follows these issues closely, and has shared his expertise with us on this podcast before: Anupam Chander , a law professor at Georgetown University....
May 21, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode features a discussion with Nick Seaver , a professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation from the University of Chicago Press. Nick is an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. His book is the product of ethnographic observation and conversations with developers working on music recommendation algorithms and other systems designed to understand and cater to user pr...
May 14, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Justin Hendrix speaks to writer Malcolm Harris about his book, PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD , which considers the historical antecedents for the project of Silicon Valley.
May 07, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Recently Justin Hendrix caught up with Gus Hurwitz , a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and the director of the Governance and Technology Center. He’s also the Director of Law and Economics Programs at the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland based think tank that focuses on antitrust law and economics policy issues. Hurwitz told Hendrix he’s leaving Nebraska at the end of the semester for a new position that is soon to be announced. The conversation covered...
May 03, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the course of its investigation into the insurrection at the US Capitol, the House Select Committee on January 6th spoke to hundreds of witnesses, including social media executives with insight into the role that platforms played in propagating the false claims that motivated violence that day, and in connecting and facilitating the movement and organization of people that sought to overthrow the election. One of the individuals that testified to the Select Committee was a former Twitter offi...
Apr 30, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
