Tech Prom Tech Talk - Episode 4
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Transcript
Welcome to a special edition of CDT's Tech Talks. I'm Jamal Magdi, and it's time to talk tech.
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT.
In this very special episode, we're taking you inside one of the most anticipated nights in tech policy, Tech Prom. Each year, Tech Prom brings together leaders from government, civil society, industry, and academia to celebrate progress, exchange ideas, and chart the future of technology in service of democracy and human rights. In this episode, you'll hear short interviews from the event floor, conversations with some of the most brilliant minds currently shaping the technology and policy landscape. We ask them about their work, what opportunities and challenges they see on the horizon, and what gives them hope for the future of tech. So grab your headphones and join us as we step into the energy, insights, and optimism of Tech Prom twenty twenty five. Welcome to CDC's Tech Talks. I'm here with Ashwin Khazarian. Koban's wife, Keegan. Helen Toner. Tim O'Reilly. Renee Durest from Georgetown. So tell me a little about how you got connected with CDT and involved in our work. I think I actually
met people from CDT. They were one of the first people I met when I started working in tech policy in DC in 2016. It was either a panel one of your speakers was on or was it the one of the first coalition meetings before I really understood what coalition's meetings were. I believe it was something about encryption that I went to. And I realized very quickly that not only are your experts one of the best experts in the field, and I always should read their opinion on a bill or an amicus brief when I'm trying to figure out what I feel about it. But, also, they were one of the most fun people to be around at these things. CDT, it always just seems has been a fixture
of DC. Ever since I, had just put a a a twinkle of tech policy in my
eye, CDT was here. And, Tech Prom has always been the place to mingle and and see everybody. I've I always look forward to this event. I'm I do privacy work. Right? So I've always been most closely affiliated with the privacy work stream at CDT, and I count many of those folks among my friends and some of my best friends, work at CDT. At CSET, we work on emerging technologies and national security, so trying to understand kind of what do progress and technology mean for the national security community in lots of different ways. And, of course, the boundaries between that and the work that CDT does are are very porous. So whether it's looking at democracy, looking at privacy, looking at kind of big tech regulation, which is traditionally not thought of as a national security issue, but has sort of started to overlap more more. Lots of lots of friends and colleagues who, you know, work at CDT or work with CDT. In the early days of the Internet, we were all sitting there going, how do we make this thing a force for good in the world?
And nobody knew what what, you know, what to do, so we had to make it up as we went along. So we worked in in, you know, in in parallel circles. I was on the board of the Internet Society and, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I was very involved in, in the open source movement and just really thinking about how do we have, an Internet that was participatory, was open to innovation. And, of course, it hasn't entirely worked out as we all all thought. But I think that's sort of part of a cycle, and you you end up with a new technology gives you this immense optimism and then eventually, you know, people win and it becomes, same old same old.
Yeah. So, gosh, I got to know Alex and the folks at CDT maybe five years ago, four, five years ago, I think. I hope that that's correct. Okay. Now you're gonna tell me you only existed for three years. No. No. We're going on thirty. We're at thirty. Good. Good. Good. I've only been in tech policy for about six years. Before that, I was more in the, applied sort of research space. So it's about five I guess it would have been five years ago then at, Stanford Internet Observatory. And we would have convenings and, CBT folks would come, you know, to our we stayed adversarial abuse at, at Stanford Internet Observatory. And so we would look at a lot of different things, influence operations, child safety on that front in the realm of things like, you know, CSAM and, exploitation type content. And we would engage with folks who were also working in the policy space on the issues where we did empirical research, and we would want to turn those research projects that those findings into policy outputs. And so we would engage with folks at CBT, and that was how we connected with that was how I personally connected with you all several years back. What are some of the biggest opportunities you're seeing in the tech policy space right now? I think one of the biggest ones is in the times where there is so much technological change and a lot of litigation happening in that space. Finding new talent and training new talent and convincing
the general public and the new generation of what is the right balance in technology and rights. And I think CDT does such a great job of it. I was actually just talking to someone how there's a lot of your alumni here at the event and I think that's one of the greatest things. Right? Like, you have trained and you have found all this great talent, but now is in government, in industry, in other civil society groups having an impact. Certainly,
it's a it's a time of a lot of change in The US, in policy, and I think that means an opportunity to rethink how we connect, how we push for change, and how people actually engage on these issues. Obviously, it's a time also of, enormous growth in new technologies, And so that's something that tech policy people have always been here to adapt and shift to. And, we I think with AI and other new waves of technology, that means that we're,
again, faced with the opportunity to adapt old discourse for new, domains. And I think that's always the position that we find ourselves in as technology people, taking stories that we've told about, about, other technologies and shifting them to meet the new moment. I'm really excited about getting a report out from a workshop we hosted in July. Kind of a sci fi sort of topic. It's about automating AI r and d. So can you have AI that, like, improves AI or what does that look like? And we got a really great group of folks together, lots of different perspectives in the room and, you know, working on writing something up to share sort of the findings.
So, yeah, excited to put that onto the world. The thing I'm I'm probably most excited about is my wife, Jen Talka's work, which is on really figuring out how we get away from policy and into implementation. Because one of the big problems in almost all of the tech policy work is it's often carried out by people who have no sense of implementation. And, and and so literally congress passes laws and don't ask, did they work? They don't understand why they don't work. They don't understand what it takes to implement them. And so, you know, reconnecting
policy and implementation, I think, is is probably one of the most important things we could all be working on. Well, you know, there's a lot of momentum right now. I think there is a ton of energy around child safety at the moment. A lot of bipartisan, efforts to find something that is around that. There is some, anti job voting legislation that is beginning to emerge that I think is interesting. I don't know how good it's gonna be yet, you know. Just like with the child safety stuff, you know, I think it's positive that it's happening. The devil's in the details with a lot of it. I think that means that there's opportunities for organizations like CDT, for academics like myself to get in there and try to help shape that, to try to, move policy forward. I work on things like middleware, so I'm excited about potential for, you know, giving users more agency, things like, interoperability movement on that front. So I think it's gonna be interesting to see what actually has the potential to pass and how we can make sure that that is as good as possible, possible, that protects civil liberties and while at the same time, you know, does something to protect kids. What makes you the most optimistic about the future of technology and its role in supporting democracy and human rights?
What gives me the most optimism is that I actually believe in legal structures that exist in The United States. The first amendment, the fourth amendment, I believe that these structures and all these years of precedent that our civil society has created, CDT was part of it, CDT has been around for a while. It definitely has is gonna hold on. We just have to keep fighting for it. So I believe in our foundations. We just have to make sure we defend them. Just the people who do the work every day, that's what the organization that I work for,
is a is a professional association. It represents the people who do the work of privacy. And that's really what gives me the most hope is the fact that there is a cadre of trained people out there who are trying to look out for the best interest of consumers
and think about how how to do things the right way, whether that's because that's what the rules require or just because that's the best thing to do. And and we see that as, AI governance takes off as its own profession, its own field. We see new people coming on and the same people adapting and pivoting to be able to answer some of those big questions, kind of have a principles based practice in try trying to tackle it and do things the right way even as we, go through different shifts in policy. I think we're basically living in the future right now, and I think there's a lot about that that is kind of disconcerting and may creates uncertainty, but there's a lot that's really exciting. I mean, self driving cars heading around Washington, DC, like, getting that that last bit of training data so they can operate. The I don't know. I I feel like there's just tons of possibilities and so many different ways things could go and so many of them are amazing. So I I don't know. I don't have, like, a particular concrete vision. I just I just think that we're clearly living in a time of huge change, and it's really exciting and invigorating to live in that time. I think it's really just the human spirit. It seems like,
you know, the optimism gets defeated. You know, we have what Corey Doctorow calls in shitification. You know, the very people who once were idealistic, are somehow forced by the system to become extractive, but the the human spirit does not get crushed. We keep trying. It's really this idea that we can keep trying to make things better. I like there's a wonderful poem of Rilke that I like to quote where he says, what we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated decisively
by successively greater beings. He's talking about Jacob wrestling with the angel in the old, testament. You know? Couldn't win, but became stronger from the fight. My background is in tech. That's where I didn't like I said, I am relatively new to the policy space, only about six years. But prior to that, I had been in tech since, you know, had a couple startups. I was in BC back in 2011. So my background is in technology and so I have always been optimistic about the potential of tech to solve problems, to improve people's lives, to move the ball forward, right, to to to create better outcomes for people, provide them with tools to improve their lives, their economic circumstances, their enjoyment of the world even. And I think, you know, right now, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world. A lot some of the technologies that have come out and become popular and become democratized, like AI, for example, generative AI in particular, have some pretty profound implications economically, socially, and I think that I am optimistic about their potential, but also at the same time with that power. I think that that also means that we need to recognize the pretty profound transformations that they can have, and that's where I think the role of folks like CDT and the role of folks who sit in the policy space or who sit in that space that bridges empirical research with policy, the role that we can play here is saying, here's a technology that has, powerful potential, including positive potential, while also at the same time, here are the areas where we should be considering downsides and worst case risk scenarios, and this is how we should be thinking about how to have those benefits while at the same time, taking into account these risks. And that's what I think is so important about the work that you all do.
Thank you for listening to Tech Talks presented by the Center for Democracy and Technology. I've been your host, Jamal Magby. Tech Talks is edited by Jacob Kaufman and produced by Drew Corby. Check out more of CDT's work by visiting us online at cdt.org and on various social media at sendem tech. That's c e n d e m tech. Thanks for talking tech.
