Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of The Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with Tom Wheeler, a visiting fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler’s tenure at the FCC covered the Obama-era establishment of net neutrality as well as major data privacy rules, and now at Brookings he’s analyzing how those battles will play out in the era of AI and virtual reality, as in a study we covered in DFD last week. Today he talks about how the U.S. government should position itself with regard to those rapidly-oncoming future technologies, why the AI boom might be slightly overplayed, and his concern over letting Big Tech take the wheel like it did in the previous era of the web. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? How virtually everything associated with the internet, smartphones, and digital applications was made possible by the American taxpayer, yet the government that created the revolution has failed to meaningfully oversee the results. The packet data concept that is the functional heart of the internet was developed by Paul Baran at RAND Corporation under a Department of Defense contract. Another DOD project, from the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) built the first iteration of the internet. The software algorithm that became Google was developed under a grant from the National Science Foundation. The computing power of microchips was opened after being sequestered by AT&T Bell Labs as the result of a Justice Department consent decree. The lingua franca of the internet was developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn while working at ARPA’s successor DARPA. The first operational installation of a cellphone network was paid for by the Department of Transportation to put pay phones on the Amtrak Metroliner. Every underlying technology in a smartphone can be traced to development supported by the taxpayers of the United States. The story of a couple of geniuses and their dog in a garage coming up with an immaculate innovation is a great image, but that creation began long before thanks to the support of American citizens. American government activities, appropriately, began the digital revolution and American government oversight of its results is just as appropriate. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? The feeding frenzy over artificial intelligence. I found in my files the other day an April 2022 tweet that went viral. Citing LexisNexis data, it proclaimed, “There have been more stories about AI published worldwide so far this week (13,841) than there were in the entire 1990s (13,221).” Without a doubt, we are just at the beginning of the AI era. Like the internet era that proceeded it, there will be both wondrous and fearful results. While the potential for apocalyptic results may exist, over-focusing on the potential of an AI apocalypse distracts from dealing with the very real and very current effects of AI. We cannot afford to continue in the AI era the practices that we allowed in the digital platform era that violated personal privacy, harmed competition and the innovation it drives, and spread bile and untruths. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Way back in 1970, Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” got me hooked on the impact of technology on commerce and culture. I was fortunate to get to know Alvin in later years and to be invited to what one could only describe as his “salons” that brought together individuals with various perspectives, not to discuss technology per se, but the effects of technology. I told the story in my book “From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future” of one such evening when, after an hour of spirited dialog, our discussion had not touched on any specific technologies but was pursuing the consequences of new technology in almost philosophical and theological terms. It was because of Alvin Toffler that I first began to realize that it is never the principal technology that is transformational, but its secondary effects. The practical implication of this should also define governmental oversight. For something like AI, for instance, it is what is enabled that requires oversight. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Oh my! I guess I’d begin by asking that policymakers become as expansive in their thinking about the effects of new technologies as the innovators who developed those new capabilities. When it comes to government understanding the effects of new technology, we too often define 21st century developments in 20th century terms and then propose 19th century solutions. One example of this is the oversight of digital platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and others. Phil Verveer, Gene Kimmelman, and I several years ago proposed the creation of a Digital Platform Agency with focused expertise to deal with the new digital challenges. The headline was a new federal agency, but the most important part of that suggestion was the replacement of old-style top-down industrial micromanagement with agile risk-based oversight patterned after the multistakeholder process used to create technical standards; but this time applied to develop agile and enforceable behavioral standards. What surprised you most this year? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but the fact that we have not learned from the experience of allowing digital companies to define the rules for their marketplace behavior. We are now decades into the era of digital platforms and into the AI era, but have yet to successfully deal with meaningful oversight of the activities of the tech companies.
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