| Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of our regular feature The Future In Five Questions. This week I interviewed Paul Barrett, the deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and the author of a report published last month on “Safeguarding AI: Addressing the Risks of Generative Artificial Intelligence” in which he brings his decades of expertise studying the intersection of big business, tech, and the public trust on generative AI. We talked about what the FTC can do to protect consumers in the age of generative artificial intelligence, the (at least near-term) folly of driverless cars, and why the metaverse is underrated. Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? I think that as a result of all the hype surrounding generative AI, many people have forgotten about 3D immersive technology. Some version, or versions, of the metaverse are on the way and will be hugely influential. A lot of what we now think of as social media will be moving to 3D. We already have one application that's pretty popular — gaming. That’s a harbinger, although I don’t think it’s an easy leap to transfer the gaming experience to the rest of life. 3D is obviously appealing if what you're doing is chasing around other avatars and trying to chop off their heads, or whatever. Still, I think gaming does provide a proof of concept, that it can work and it can be very engaging. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Driverless cars. Consumers are simply not going to get comfortable anytime soon with autonomous automobiles. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder. Snyder's analysis of how autocratic movements gain power, in part by eroding people's trust in each other and in public institutions, points to the continuing dangers facing democracies in the U.S. and around the world. What could the government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? The first step for the government is to enhance the consumer protection authority of the Federal Trade Commission and make it clear that the commission can require greater transparency from digital companies, and give it resources to actually execute on this, and impose certain procedural requirements for them to follow through on the promises that they make to consumers. That's a very well-established area of authority for the FTC, and I think it would be a good foundation from which the government more generally could extend oversight that now is lacking when it comes to digital companies of all sorts, whether it's social media companies or AI companies or anything else. What has surprised you most this year? The speed and degree of fervor of the attention to generative AI in just the last five or six months. AI has been around for a long time and in all kinds of applications, both routine and controversial. But I think the introduction of this latest flavor of AI has shown people just how profound the changes are that this technology could impose on all aspects of business and society at large.
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