Niki Iliadis

My thoughts on the Senate AI Working Group's new AI Framework: “We have to wait and see what bills and roles are proposed based off of a lot of this but a lot of it is indeed promising. There's a strong emphasis on R&D, there's a strong emphasis on regulatory clarity, for example, and making sure that our existing laws are clear so that we can ensure easy, confident adoption of these technologies. There was clearly a thoughtfulness that went into this,” Mittelsteadt said. I'd estimate around 75% of the package is headed in the right direction: emphasizing engineering-based solutions, clearing up laws, and making targeted spending bets on talent and other discrete priorities. That said, elements such as AI export controls solutions in search of a problem and a recipe for policy failure. Too much is on the line to overzealously regulate. While action is needed on many fronts, with regard to export controls: “They've been there a broken record since at least 2016 about social media regulation, if not earlier. And when you cry wolf for going on 10 years about technology regulation, people stopped believing you,” said Matt Mittelsteadt, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “That's exactly where Congress is, and I think the most likely thing that we can expect is nothing."

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Delighted to be invited to contribute to Discourse Magazine's 'What's Coming in 2025?' For AI policy, there are no doubt countless trends to watch from regulatory activity in the states, to the work of the Trump White House's new AI Tsar. To pick just one development: Autonomous vehicle reform is among the most likely high-impact changes we see in the coming year. Already this tech both appears safe and is in active commercial operation. More critically, Elon Musk's unique interest in AV deregulation and sway with Trump could open the policy window to reform. https://lnkd.in/egZ3KGvr

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My thoughts in the The New York Times on Senator JD Vance's approach to AI policy. The senator appears split between four competing desires: In part he wishes to push a relatively laissez-faire, market-driven approach, In part he seeks big tech accountability and robust anti-trust action, In part he advocates industrial policy, a government-investment led approach to tech to ensure American enterprise competes with China, In part he seeks policy that would isolate the United States from foreign entanglements, even in Taiwan - our primary chip manufacturing partner. “Vance is of two minds and I don’t know if he can reconcile those things,” said Matt Mittelsteadt" While there are many policy variations that could take aspects from these competing ideological strands, such a clash of ideas will naturally undermine each other's goals. Given the present state of semiconductor supply chains, and our reliance on Taiwan, its difficult to square robustly investing in America's competitive posture vis-a-vis China with Taiwan disengagement . Likewise, its hard to square an activist posture on big tech accountability and a desire to let the market be. Again, no policy slate will ever be ideologically 'clean' and the best approach is likely blended. Still, these are fierce policy contradictions.

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Pope Francis' address on AI is one of the most articulate & coherent and texts I've read on the topic, articulating: 💫 The opportunities and hope ("We are radically open to the beyond" - what an inspiring phrase), 🗡 The need (and the great difficulty) to surgically separate man and machine, data and ethics, algorithms and actions - or risk grave social consequences 🔦 The dangers of generating dogma and drowning in echo-chambers ("the risk of being reduced to a repetition of notions, which will increasingly be evaluated as unobjectionable, simply because of their constant repetition") 🔔 The need for AI ethics ("“algor-ethics”, a series of principles are condensed into a global and pluralistic platform that is capable of finding support from cultures, religions, international organizations and major corporations, which are key players in this development.") 💡 The assertion that politics is necessary to ensure the world changing, exciting, responsible, wise use of these powerful tools - markets alone won't sort this out. Amen.

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Very excited that a project that first started in my early days in grad school is now finally out and published in the American Political Science Review. Check out Margaret Foster's summary and links below if you're interested in the manuscript, which introduces a Bayesian IRT framework for identifying theoretically meaningful latent dimensions within data. And a huge shoutout to my extraordinary co-authors on this, without whom this project would quite literally not exist -- Margaret Foster, Marco Morucci, So Jin Lee, and David Siegel.

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A nice write up about my new case study on Federal AI use rules and how they are suppressing the ability of agencies to manage AI risks/benefits in their contexts. Specifically, I discuss the federal governments deep translation capacity problems which are yielding life-impacting service , intelligence , and emergency response failures. Machine translation comes with error but could also fill gaps when the alternative is no translation at all. Unfortunately, one-size-fits all federal AI minimum "risk management" standards inhibit the ability to weigh risks and benefits in the context of a program/agency. The result: any benefits are lost and the many, many negatives of exsisting capacity failures locked in. https://lnkd.in/e-_s5H3q

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To all those who saw or followed our post about the new U.S. Congress dataset on Hugging Face for policy areas and subjects... At the suggestion of Marci Harris of POPVOX Foundation, our team at DreamProIT now created a new dataset that includes Congressional committees: https://lnkd.in/gzACiADG With this data set, it should be possible to suggest committees to refer any bill to. As with subjects and policy areas, automating recommendations would not replace the judgment of subject matter experts, but could provide a baseline to show what committee would be assigned based on prior precedents of the House and Senate Parliamentarians. #data #uscongress #library

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I spoke with Fast Company about the risks of AI-generated misinfo, and how social media platforms can learn from other countries' experiences as they prepare for the US election - including remembering the risk of post-election violence (Kenya!), disproportionate targeting of women leaders (Moldova!), and the use of deepfake audio (Sudan!). As I explain in the article, one my biggest concerns is "the cumulative impact of lower levels of misinformation and disinformation—content that doesn’t reach the threshold of violating various platforms’ content policies—and the impact on people becoming accustomed to hearing narratives that are false or misleading." Over time, these narratives erode trust in public figures and institutions in ways that threaten democracy, as well as long-term peace and security. More here:

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The Unfinished Project of #Enlightenment What Jürgen Habermas’s sweeping history of Western #philosophy leaves out. by Brandon Bloch "No  one in the world feels the weakness of general characterizing more than I.” So lamented Johann Gottfried von Herder, towering figure of the German Enlightenment, in his 1774 treatise This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity. “One draws together peoples and periods of time that follow one another in an eternal succession like waves of the sea,” Herder wrote. “Whom has one painted? Whom has the depicting word captured?” For Herder, the Enlightenment dream of grasping human history as a seamless whole came up against the irreducible particularity of individuals and cultures. The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, among the most influential thinkers of our time, grapples with much the same problem in his new work, the title of which reverses the order of Herder’s terms: This Too a History of Philosophy. Published in German last September, Habermas’s History spans over 3,000 years and 1,700 pages. It marks the apogee of a singular career. Like his eighteenth-century precursor, Habermas seeks a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the sweep of human history. “Philosophical problems,” he writes, are distinctive from merely “scientific” ones in their “synthetic force.” For Habermas, the fragmentation of modern life has hardly exhausted philosophy’s capacity for bold questions and architectonic structure. To be sure, the work pays homage to the legacy of postmodern critique. Wary of Herder’s pitfalls of “general characterizing,” Habermas eschews airy speculation for dense textual reconstruction. But this history of philosophy, no less than Enlightenment philosophies of history, is driven by a teleological intent, a principle that threads through history’s seeming randomness and contingency. For Herder, that principle was humanity’s “formation” (Bildung), a foundational concept of the German Enlightenment linking the moral development of the individual with the progress of civilization. For Habermas, it is instead a collective “learning process” (Lernprozess). History, in Habermas’s telling, is the story of humanity’s learning, a record of problems solved and challenges overcome. “New knowledge about the objective world” alongside “social crises,” he explains, create “cognitive dissonances.” These dissonances propel societies to adopt novel modes of understanding and interaction. ... https://lnkd.in/eBCMycfJ

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Well, folks: a new job has brought me back to Twitter/X. If you still use that platform, please follow me at @WittesNDI for National Democratic Institute (NDI) news and updates! (And if you think I would do better to put my energy into a different platform, leave your wisdom in the comments below!)

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In my latest piece in War on the Rocks, Nina Kelsey and I argue that the United States faces a closing window of opportunity to take the lead in managing a suite of strategically important technologies that require the balancing of three core imperatives - economic, security, and sustainability. Getting this right will pay dividends, while getting it wrong could be disastrous. Excerpt Below: “Today, the United States faces the unprecedented challenge of simultaneously navigating three escalating factors: a denser international economic landscape, a more fiercely disputed geostrategic environment, and increasing sustainability concerns. From this trifecta a new category of technologies — which we call fulcrum technologies — has emerged. These technologies are simultaneously critical to American security, prosperity, and environmental sustainability. This emerging policy environment presents many challenges and opportunities and is common to such disparate technologies as #AI, #biotechnology, #semiconductors, and #solar photovoltaics. Worryingly, existing U.S. policy approaches are not well adapted to dynamically balancing three critical imperatives at once.” Read the full article at https://lnkd.in/eEKsKAWc

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My thoughts quoted in Inside AI Policy on the GOP's stated intent to repeal the Biden AI Executive order and instead, in their words, "support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing." “Matt Mittelsteadt, also of Mercatus, said of EO repeal " The question is: what replaces it? The previous Trump administration pursued a light touch approach, but the AI context of 2020 is a far cry from 2024. While it's unclear what AI development promoting ‘human flourishing’ might mean to the Trump camp, known Trump policy priorities such as expanded tariffs, expanded border controls and a general ‘America first’ attitude could put the American AI industry at a competitive disadvantage and slow AI innovation and investment.” https://lnkd.in/dEG3C29X

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💡 New from Corinna Turbes & the Data Foundation: "In this new era of reduced agency deference [because of the Supreme Court's Chevron decision], Congress must be equipped to craft legislation and exercise other oversight functions, grounded in robust data, research, and expertise. This is precisely why the proposed bipartisan Congressional Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission (H.Con.R 49) is so crucial to quickly move forward to support the institution and identify strategies that enable improvements that improve our country’s data and evidence infrastructure in the years" ahead.https://https://lnkd.in/eeUW5b9Z

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What a week, y'all? With Murthy v. Missouri decided (and as we wait for Moody v. NetChoice), sharing four fantastic resources that explore where we are in the US right now on speech, information integrity, and content governance. 1. Summarizing the TLDR of Murthy, from Kat Duffy: https://lnkd.in/ewSFUjj9. 2. Discussing the complexities of the ruling and dissent, ft. Evelyn Douek and Professor Genevieve Lakier: https://lnkd.in/ed2jGGJ7 3. Exploring the larger impact of the hyper-partisan effort to delegitimize and suppress the work of independent researchers, from Renee DiResta: https://lnkd.in/egtFjZKT (+ her full book!) 4. Finally, taking the issue of jawboning more broadly, what are the guardrails we want on government/company engagement to strengthen free expression, access to information, and info integrity? We've been exploring this at Freedom House, drawing on our global research. Matt Perault did us all a service diving into the US nuances: https://lnkd.in/e9Am3U6H. (Bonus points to Knight Foundation for their series on jawboning: https://lnkd.in/e4SFFBY6)

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We've published some new research looking at voters' assessments of Harris' and Trump's character traits, including age, health, trustworthiness, and whether either candidate is more "presidential," among others. Worth a read ahead of both candidates' dueling battleground state tours, when we'll be looking for signs of movement on attributes where the candidates are currently neck and neck (specifically leadership and trust). My colleague Eli Yokley's assessment here: https://lnkd.in/e-a8TGaz See here for our latest head-to-head polling, current through 8/4 with Harris up 4pts: https://lnkd.in/ehK4dYbK

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Bloomberg's Eric Fan & Zach Mider published a major investigative piece on the scandalous H-1B visa program, with a deep dive into how the government _allocates_ them (randomly!) and the consequences. Report shows that IT Staffing firms (aka bodyshops or jobshops) + Offshore Outsourcing firms receive the majority of visas by rigging the random lottery. Surprise here is the very large numbers bodyshops receive. It is head scratching that USCIS allocates the visas randomly rather than using selection criteria to yield the "best" or "most deserving" pool of workers and employers. USCIS or Congress should fix. A random lottery is the _worst_ possible allocation scheme because it advantages the very firms - IT Staffing & Outsourcers - that pay the lowest wages and abuse the system. The solution is straightforward - use criteria to select. This is common sense. There are many options for designing criteria that are fair: - absolute wages (highest gets preference) - wage-levels (highest relative wage for the occupation and geographic location) - split the allocation across wages levels; i.e., 30k for level 4; 25k for level 3; 20k for level 2; 10k for level 1. Bloomberg does a public service by publishing detailed micro-data, including wages, on all H-1B visa registrations by employer and worker. Analysts should download and mine these data to advance an evidence-based policy discussion. https://lnkd.in/ettmzkYu

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Interesting report from Brookings in the US on Gen AI and the workforce, adds to the growing chorus of experts calling for workers to be more actively involved in decisions around AI, identifying the centrality of unions in representing worker voice https://lnkd.in/gXn5-9Yu

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A must read to understand how the fascist tech folk, many of whom are based in the bay, are pushing so much bad politics and policies federally, nationally as well as in CA, especially in S.F., Oakland and LA, and how they are different than the troglodyte conservatives and Republicans that we blue staters are used to. Well deserved shout outs to Gil Duran and Emily Mills, the two folk best chronicling these Network Stater fascists. https://lnkd.in/gBcDFSGN

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