PROGRAMMING NOTE: Digital Future Daily will be offline for the holiday until Tuesday, January 3, when we'll return to our regular publishing schedule and a three-day report from the 2023 Consumer Electronics show. Through the second half of this year, we asked some of the most influential and creative thinkers on tech and policy to give us their take on the “Future in Five Questions.” For this final edition of DFD in 2023, here are some of the most interesting responses they gave us — offering us a window into how futurists are thinking about AI tech, how politicians approach tech (and how they might do it better), and even which books you might want to pick up next year to think about the future differently in your own way. On artificial intelligence: “...The overhyped part [of AI is when] people somehow jump from that to the fundamental intellectual enterprise of AI, which is understanding the human mind — building a true artificial ‘general’ intelligence, as it’s called sometimes. To me, it's like the kid who scampers up to the top of the tree and yells, ‘I'm on my way to the moon!’ The moon is still very far away.” — Oren Etzioni, researcher and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI “Nearly every government in the world is trying to craft regulations or best practices to help mitigate the harms of AI. But AI or ML is many different kinds of technologies, applied in many different kinds of contexts. It is an incredibly holistic technology… we need more collaborations between government, civil society and industry, so that everybody is up to date.” — Kathy Baxter, architect of Salesforce’s ethical AI practice “Truly understanding what's happening inside a computational model requires grappling with some complicated math… that’s one of the things complicating our conversations around the social consequences of algorithmic systems. Often people in power will try to intimidate others by saying, ‘Oh, this is hard computational stuff, you wouldn't understand it, just trust me.’ But that's a power grab. That's not engaging in democracy. That's edging people out.” — Meredith Broussard, associate data journalism professor at NYU On tech’s role in geopolitics and security: “When most people think about ‘tech,’ they envision social media firms or the internet. But the hardest part about technology is the hardware on which it all relies… Other countries have done a lot more to nurture the companies building the chips on which all computing depends. In key East Asian countries like Taiwan, Korea, and especially China, tax treatment, regulation, and permitting are easier. Building manufacturing facilities there is just more straightforward, which is why so much manufacturing of high tech equipment has moved to East Asia.” — Chris Miller, associate professor of international history at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and American Enterprise Institute fellow “Semiconductors have often been called the new oil — the oil of the 21st century. I actually think that’s a misguided characterization, because there are alternatives to oil. There is no alternative to chips. They’re irreplaceable to the modern economy.” — Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and chairman of the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator “We're witnessing the elevation of technology to the same level of geopolitical importance as trade and military alliances. We are seeing that technology is the new power paradigm.” — Dario Gil, director of research at IBM What politicians think needs to happen on tech: “Pass a national privacy law. Privacy is so foundational to everything technology related. We’ve made more progress on this front in the last few months than we have in any Congress before but that doesn’t mean anything until we get something across the finish line. After the Supreme Court’s appalling decision overturning the right to an abortion, many women realized their app, geolocation, and search data could be used against them because there’s no federal privacy law.” — Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) “Congress is slowly getting into [the spyware issue], that’s important because authoritarian governments have used it for years to target journalists and activists, and the U.S. government has a long way to go to get this whole industry of commercial spyware under control and protect Americans, including U.S. government officials, from the threats of hacking.” — Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) “Defending the open internet… we can’t just sit and watch as the character of the internet changes to one which is fragmented, heavily censored and weaponized towards cyber-warfare. Democracies must do much more to actively promote and defend the idea of the open internet.” — Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs and former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom On the book that shaped how they think about the future: “[Lawrence] Lessig’s ‘Code,’ which was the first time I actually realized that the code is actually the vessel that determines what can happen in it. Lessig said ‘code is law,’ and Professor Latanya Sweeney at Harvard, who worked at the FTC, says ‘code is policy’ — that if you don't have the right code in place, it determines what can happen. It really helped me understand that A, it's a system, and B, that it doesn't necessarily need to be that way.” — Jenny Toomey, head of the Ford Foundation’s Catalyst Fund “[Robert Heinlein’s] ‘Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.’... There’s a lot of nitty-gritty detail in the book that felt very real to me at the time. There’s a classic scene where [the protagonist] and another person are trying to walk across a part of the moon in spacesuits, and they're running out of air, and they're trying to swap air canisters, but the threads don't match, so they're trying to improvise fixes with tape. It's a very tense scene, but it has a verisimilitude about it that you didn't always see with science fiction of that era.” — Neal Stephenson, author of “Snow Crash,” “Necronomicon,” and other sci-fi bestsellers “Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry of the Future’... It’s not quite science fiction, and it's not so far in the future that it feels like you can put the book down and think it was just a fantasy that’s never going to happen.” — Zvika Krieger, consultant and Meta’s former director of responsible innovation
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