LAS VEGAS — The annual CES in Las Vegas kicked off with a media preview Tuesday night, featuring its famously hyped-up cavalcade of new gizmos sprawling across the floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort’s convention center. Worker-assisting robotic exoskeletons! Emotion-detecting VR headsets! But if you look past the eye-popping tech demos, you can detect a new and very strong current running through the tech industry’s flagship annual trade show: The future is no longer just a matter of building cool stuff. The tech world is, maybe more than ever, very interested in the policy world. The official CES lineup this year is laden with appearances from policymakers and wonks, including Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and a slew of policy assistants and members of the House. The industry spent a few years going through the Washington wringer, yes. But over the past year it’s also been re-embraced by Congress as a font of American competitiveness, and you can see a fairly strong, bipartisan effort to make common cause between politics and technology. Granholm and DoE official Vanessa Chan are here to discuss how the government and the tech industry can work together to build sustainability. An advisor to Bitcoin-loving Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) is making the case for “Making America #1 in Blockchain and Financial Innovation,” and a group including Reps. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) are here to lay out tech priorities in the newly formed Congress. Overall, nearly every issue this newsletter covers will be discussed this week with a specific mind to how Washington and private industry might sync up. There’s no question the tech world’s endless expansion is brushing up more and more against the regulatory state — in part because regulators and politicians are getting savvier about the implications of new technologies and new uses of data. (As my colleagues wrote yesterday, that will have huge impact on Elon Musk’s grandiose plans for an “everything app.”) That much was apparent during a preview speech by the Consumer Technology Association’s VP for research, Steve Koenig, last night. In running reporters through the industry group’s chosen “Tech Trends to Watch” for the year, he touched on how automation is transforming logistics and labor, how global competition overlaps with green tech and how virtual reality is insinuating itself into everything from heavy industry to telehealth. The inevitability of a rapprochement between government and tech after the past several years of “techlash” was on display particularly during a panel this morning titled “The New Digital Utilities: Cybersecurity, Cloud and AI & Robotics.” The short version: These technologies are actually freaking private industry out — and companies know they need help. “We’re going to be playing defense against things like ChatGPT for quite a while… It's inconceivable to me that the bad guys won't start using generative AI to generate very high yielding [phishing] lures at scale,” said Dr. Robert Blumofe, EVP & Chief Technology Officer at the cloud computing company Akamai, adding that “The federal government can actually play a positive role” in setting standards to fight them. “It’s not often that you hear us say that,” quipped Veronica Lancaster, the CTA’s Vice President of standards programs. Specific threats aside, even the name of the panel itself was revealing. A “utility” has a specific meaning in the world of computing, of course, but it’s also a word used to describe something so essential to the functioning of society that it’s held in public trust. When everything from hospital records to the nuclear command and control system becomes vulnerable to hackers, cybersecurity itself becomes a utility. When AI could transform law and education, or statecraft itself, it enters into the realm of utility; the list of comparisons stretches from finance and blockchain to the aforementioned automation and labor. Where that public trust enters into the equation, policymakers are going to have their say — and there are plenty of them on the ground in Las Vegas this week. Stay tuned through this Saturday for our coverage of Washington’s different approaches to tech policy, tech’s role in global competitiveness, and what’s in store on the Hill this year.
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