[last updated 4/3/2025 – Check my Medium page for latest posts]
This a running list of all the essays and reports I’ve already rolled out on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. Why have I decided to spend so much time on this issue? Because this will become the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes. Every segment of the economy will be touched in some fashion by AI, ML, robotics, and the power of computational science. It should be equally clear that public policy will be radically transformed along the way.
Eventually, all policy will involve AI policy and computational considerations. As AI “eats the world,” it eats the world of public policy along with it. The stakes here are profound for individuals, economies, and nations. As a result, AI policy will be the most important technology policy fight of the next decade, and perhaps next quarter century. Those who are passionate about the freedom to innovate need to prepare to meet the challenge as proposals to regulate AI proliferate.
There are many socio-technical concerns surrounding algorithmic systems that deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However,
there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions. And that’s the case that I’ll be dedicating my life to making in coming years.
Here’s the list of what I’ve done so far. I will continue to update this as new material is released: Continue reading →
Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it will soon require Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or private drones, used for both personal and commercial purposes, to be registered in a national database. To facilitate this process, the agencies announced the creation of a new federal task force that will develop recommendations for a UAS registration process. Rules are to be published by November 20th (presumably to cover new devices sold before Christmas).
Here are some quick initial reactions on the proposed registration rules: Continue reading →
I’m keeping tabs on who filed “major” comments (more than a 10-15 pages) in the Federal Communications Commission’s “Future of Media” proceeding (GN Docket No. 10-25). As I noted last week, The Progress & Freedom Foundation submitted almost 80 pages of comments (single-spaced!) in the matter, so it’s something I care deeply about and will be tracking closely going forward.
Incidentally, the general consensus of those who filed (especially if you count “minor” comments) is fairly overwhelming:
Bring on Big Government! Seriously, I only found a handful of comments that object strenuously to government meddling in media markets or that raised concerns about the potential for the State’s increasing involvement in the journalism profession. Even many of the affected industries appear to be suffering from a bit of Stockholm syndrome here. Most of them just play up the good things they are doing but barely utter a peep about the dangers of federal encroachment into the affairs of the Press.
Anyway, for those of you who care to track the gradual federalization of media and journalism, I think what you see below is a fairly comprehensive listing of the major filings submitted thus far in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding. I’ll try to add more as I find them. You might also want to track what was filed in the Federal Trade Commission’s workshops on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.” Finally, if you care to learn more of this issue, I’m hosting an event on the morning of May 20th to discuss these issues in more detail.
Continue reading →
The “Cyber Privacy Act”? No it ain’t!
Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) has introduced a bill to create a take-down regime for personal information akin to the widely abused DMCA process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act established a system where copyright holders could as a practical matter force content off the Internet simply by requesting it.
McCotter’s proposal would similarly regulate every Internet site that has a comment section. He thinks it’s going to protect privacy, but he’s sorely mistaken. Its passage would undermine privacy and limit free speech.
I’ll take you through how McCotter’s gotten it wrong.
The operative language of H.R. 5108 is:
Any Internet website that makes available to the public personal information of individuals shall–
(1) provide, in a clear and conspicuous location on the Internet website, a means for individuals whose personal information it contains to request the removal of such information; and
(2) promptly remove the personal information of any individual who requests its removal.
The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the failure to abide by requests as it does unfair and deceptive trade practices. (Meaning: penalties.)
So if someone posts his or her name in a comment section and later regrets it, the operator of that web site would have to take it down. Sounds nice—and that is the right thing for webmasters to do when the circumstances warrant. But what about when they don’t? Continue reading →
It’s not the highest-toned debate the world of public policy has ever seen, but the WashingtonWatch.com discussion on Public Law 111-92, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, has now reached over 100,000 comments.
I’ve discussed the astounding level of commentary—and all the efforts to keep it civil—in a post on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.
I got some feedback from readers about my post last night regarding the irony of the FCC’s newly-created MySpace page containing some rather vulgar user comments. I wondered if the agency would continue to allow such comments when the agency regulates similar words when they are uttered on broadcast TV or radio. A few people asked me why the agency hasn’t bother using the comment management tools that MySpace puts at the public’s disposal. It’s a good question, and actually I’m not sure why they didn’t do that right from the start. Perhaps the agency is concerned about being accused of censoring public comment. [Incidentally, the White House and some federal agencies have MySpace pages, so perhaps I need to look into how those agencies manage comments.]
Regardless, the FCC now
has taken steps to deal with this. John Eggerton of Broadcasting & Cable and Kim Hart of The Hill point out that the agency has removed some vulgar comments on their MySpace page (namely, any comment with the F-bomb in it). And I assume the agency is now taking steps to screen comments going forward. For those who are not aware, MySpace empowers users (including government agencies if they choose to set up profiles) to require approval before new comments appear on their profiles (accessed by clicking “My Account” and then “Spam”). Here are the options:
Moreover, I should also mention that if people want to see the FCC’s MySpace profile but don’t want to see all the comments, they can always change their default view to MySpace’s “Lite View,” which hides all comments, third party applications, and some other sections of a page. To switch to Lite View, click on “My Account” in the upper-right corner of any MySpace page, then click on “Miscellaneous” to access the Default View setting. It’s another nice way that MySpace empowers users to control their site experience.
Regardless, this will be a difficult issue for federal agencies to manage going forward. If agencies are going to take the plunge and boldly enter the social networking world, they’ll need to understand that the vibrant exchange of views will sometimes entail some salty language and occasional insults. Yet, when they take steps to deal with some of the most offensive comments posted on their pages, accusations of censorship are bound to fly. It’s a tough position for agencies to be in since they want to encourage maximum public interaction and input, and yet some of that input is bound to get heated, even ugly.
So, here are some questions that both agencies and policy wonks will need to consider going forward. Continue reading →
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
- RSS feeds for all news from the agency (1 general feed + 48 issue-specific feeds);
- “FCC Connect” a page for Social Media Sites—so you can follow the FCC on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook; and
- A “crowdsourcing platform” to discuss the administration’s plan to transfer nearly $8 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers.
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting
all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason
not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →
Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs.” When he worked at the Post, he fought to keep anonymous and unmoderated comments off the WP.com site entirely because it was too difficult to pre-screen them all and “the bigger problem with The Post’s comment policy, many in the newsroom have told me, is that the comments are anonymous. Anonymity is what gives cover to racists, sexists and others to say inappropriate things without having to say who they are.”
But Feaver now believes those anonymous, unmoderated comment have value because:
I believe that it is useful to be reminded bluntly that the dark forces are out there and that it is too easy to forget that truth by imposing rules that obscure it. As Oscar Wilde wrote in a different context, “Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Too many of us like to think that we have made great progress in human relations and that little remains to be done. Unmoderated comments provide an antidote to such ridiculous conclusions. It’s not like the rest of us don’t know those words and hear them occasionally, depending on where we choose to tread, but most of us don’t want to have to confront them.
It seems a bit depressing that the best argument in favor of allowing unmoderated, anonymous comments is that it allows us to see the dark underbelly of mankind, but the good news, Feaver points out, is that:
But I am heartened by the fact that such comments do not go unchallenged by readers. In fact, comment strings are often self-correcting and provide informative exchanges. If somebody says something ridiculous, somebody else will challenge it. And there is wit.
He goes on to provide some good examples. And he also notes how unmoderated comments let readers provide their heartfelt views on the substance of sensitive issues and let journalists and editorialists know how they feel about what is being reported or
how it is being reported. “We journalists need to pay attention to what our readers say, even if we don’t like it,” he argues. “There are things to learn.”
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Running List of My Research on AI, ML & Robotics Policy
by Adam Thierer on July 29, 2022 · 0 comments
[last updated 4/3/2025 – Check my Medium page for latest posts]
This a running list of all the essays and reports I’ve already rolled out on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. Why have I decided to spend so much time on this issue? Because this will become the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes. Every segment of the economy will be touched in some fashion by AI, ML, robotics, and the power of computational science. It should be equally clear that public policy will be radically transformed along the way.
Eventually, all policy will involve AI policy and computational considerations. As AI “eats the world,” it eats the world of public policy along with it. The stakes here are profound for individuals, economies, and nations. As a result, AI policy will be the most important technology policy fight of the next decade, and perhaps next quarter century. Those who are passionate about the freedom to innovate need to prepare to meet the challenge as proposals to regulate AI proliferate.
There are many socio-technical concerns surrounding algorithmic systems that deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However, there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions. And that’s the case that I’ll be dedicating my life to making in coming years.
Here’s the list of what I’ve done so far. I will continue to update this as new material is released: Continue reading →