UNBURDENED: How Harris can regulate A.I.

A.I. activist Sneha Revanur on what the next president needs to do to ensure a safer future and make technology work for all Americans

When we talked to A.I. activist Sneha Revanur earlier this year, the one point she drove home is that regardless of what anyone thinks about the value or virtue of artificial intelligence or how far off the likelihood of it radically changing the world for better or for worse may be, we need to take it seriously as a political issue now.

I don't want us to have to wait for an A.I. Chernobyl to start taking this seriously on a political level.

Revanur heads up Encode Justice, an organization that mobilizes young people worldwide to pressure governments to take action to regulate A.I. efforts in the public interest. The organization has in the past influenced the Biden administration’s executive order on A.I., and since has worked to pressure international bodies to cooperate on A.I. regulation.

With private firms driving the technology and their charismatic CEOs driving the conversation around it, so much A.I. development is taking place at a real remove from the people who will be most affected by it — the generation growing up now. That’s why Revanur, who is still a college student, is concentrating on organizing youth: they’ve got the most at stake.

We asked Revanur — who finds U.S. policy response to A.I. inadequate to the task — to think about what she would want to hear from a Harris administration that’s finally ready to completely rethink technology policy to make sure the artificial intelligence applications of the future serve the needs of human beings — not just the consolidation of wealth. It’s blunt advice — but it’s the beginning of a humane vision for the future of technology.

For more on Sneha Revanur, her organization, and what she’s already doing to build a safer technological future, read our full interview at the link below.

Meet the college student trying to protect you from an "A.I. Chernobyl"

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UNBURDENED is The Ink’s interview series named after Vice President Harris’s catchphrase, where we ask some of the smartest policy minds out there to envision a bold, aggressive Harris agenda to materially improve people’s lives — unburdened by what has been.

Previously: Relations with China, featuring Jane Perlez; Border security, featuring former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson; debt and education and economics, featuring Astra Taylor; and foreign policy, featuring Matthew Duss

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Address the threat of disinformation

Americans are quickly hurtling towards a world where they are forced to question the authenticity of everything they see online. We already live in a world where AI-driven algorithms spoon-feed us content we already agree with. 

The collective, threadbare scrap of American trust in the media will not withstand the world we are moving towards. Perhaps most concerningly, the same companies that built those algorithms and the platforms that house them are the ones that seek to dominate the production and distribution of all A.I.-generated content. 

We must prevent a world where the same few companies control the entire cycle of American media: the systems creating that content, the platforms that Americans consume that content on, and the algorithms that determine which of that content they are fed.

Democrats failed to prevent massive concentration of tech power in the 2000s and 2010s. There’s no room for the same errors now. A future Harris administration should continue to support competition policy and support new anti-trust legislation like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act.