Hello, and welcome back to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm
Sam angel N, a staff editor at The Federalist Don't Forget. You can
email any comments or questions for the show to radio at the Federalist dot com,
follow us on Twitter at fdr LST, and make sure to subscribe wherever
you download your podcast as well. Today I am joined by Jake Denton,
a research associate in the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation. I hope
you guys enjoyed the show. So last time we try to record this there
were some technical difficulties, so we're doing it again. Jake Denton, welcome
back. How are you doing doing great? Thanks for having me, no
problem, Thanks for coming. So you have a recent piece out at the
Heritage Foundation titled the Tech Trajectory, and you break down and how technological saturation
affects childhood psychology, how people develop and interact with the real world. Can
you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, you know, so this
piece I wrote with a colleague of mine, Brenda Hafera, and it's essentially
about the addiction ladder, going from kind of that six month old who gets
the iPad for the first time to the you know, grown adult who's depending
on it for work and for pleasure, or something like a dating app,
and so you know, what does it look like throughout that trajectory, what
are the stages of addiction? And you know what we essentially laid out in
the piece is that, you know, even the most harmless application, something
like angry birds or ATHLETs teaching the child and outphabet is ultimately what leads you
to those unhealthy practices down the road, whether it be abusing social media,
something has like a social crutch. You're at a bar, you don't want
to talk to some when you look at the social media. That's all downstream
of that first exposure to the device. And it's kind of manifested in very
interesting ways in terms of our society, where these pieces of technology are supposed
bring us closer together, but we've never been further apart. You know,
it was supposed to make life easier, but you know, many people are
very depressed. Suicide's gone up. You know, kids are all having eating
disorders and psychological issues, and we act as though these came out of thin
air, but it's very obvious that it's correlated to our use of these devices
in a very unhealthy manner. So tech isn't going away though, Like it's
just going to keep becoming more and more integrated into every aspect of our life.
So how do we get around that. Is there a way to facilitate
healthy psychological growth in a technologically saturated world? I don't know if there's a
way to get around it, but there's a way to avoid it, right,
So, like it is a part of the experience, and I think
it's ingrained now in our technological kind of environment. These apps aren't going to
fundamentally be redesigned. They're not going to change their color schemes, they're not
going to kind of edit the sounds that you hear, the haptic virations,
like all these things are set in stone. But you could change the way
that you use these devices to be healthier. And we can do things like
what you see in Utah right now with a potential bill that's going to impose
a curfew on kids use of social media, where you know, around bed
time you can't log into Instagram, and like, there are ways in which
we can try to avoid these negative outcomes, and you know they are avoidable.
I think is the big thing here is there's a lot of kind of
dumerism around this stuff, and that you know, we're just headed towards cyberpunk
and things are going to be horrible and we can't correct course, but we
absolutely can. You know, a lot of this comes from the tech companies.
They don't want you to think that things can change. But it's pretty
much as simple as putting a goal or an outcome on a piece of paper
and making them do it right. That's why we have Congress and all the
time. Yeah, all the tech exists to make those changes and accommodate for
that preferred outcome. So this into something like the bedtime, screen time,
whatever cut off. What regulation or legislation do you think it help get through
this issue? So one of the big things are they just these like general
child safety kind of pieces of legislation. Cosa is supposedly going to maybe here
a vote here very shortly, and you know, tech would make you think
that this is the end of tech. You know, it's the typical you
know, boy who cried Wolf scenario where you know, if Costa fassays,
the whole world will burn down. But really, Coast is a very modest
proposal. It's just putting stricter baseline settings for kids making social media platforms.
Essentially, if you dumb it down all the way instead of you know,
these loose settings that allow you know, you and I to make an account
and you know, run wild on social media, they start strict and the
parent in theory can then scale them outward as they grow, and eventually they
unlocks the full scope of settings and they can use it just like you or
I. Starting out in a more healthy, controlled environment and warming them up
to how to use this tech is so much better than just handing them the
device and saying, like, see where it takes you. They have to
be guided. I don't think we can just continue to allow kids to explore
the Internet without a nap, right. I think there needs to be a
shepherd. There needs to be red lines, and we have to make sure
that they just don't wander off the trail, because that's how you end up
with the kid going on TikTok and seeing the strangling challenge or the challenge as
yet yeah, like the Superhero challenge, jump from a tense story building and
see if you can fly? Like that's what the kids are watching and it's
resulting in bodily harm, death, depression, and we act as though it's
like just a natural state of the Internet. They're going to see this content
and they're going to their lives are going to be horrible, and you know
there's no undue button. Well, please just avoid it from the beginning with
these types of measures and so give them a controlled environment. I think it's
probably like the legislative mandate, like don't have them just go crazy, right.
I feel like to a certain extent, the Internet was always going to
be rather at its inception, the Internet was supposed to be more of a
wild West type institution, but that clearly didn't last for long. Yeah,
you know, it's funny. I think there's still some like sense amongst people
that the internet's the wild West. There's certainly places where it is. Well.
I think it's that feeling. That sense is because of the horrific things
that we consume, but it's all on purpose, Like it's not the wild
West. It's controlled, it's been conquered, and they're feeding you there.
You know. Preferred message, whether that be like state propaganda or whether it
just be deprave pop cultural kind of short form videos like on tik shok,
like it isn't the wild West anymore. There are leaders, there are people
who are deciding what you consume, and they're just choosing to give you horrible
things. And so all of the negative of the wild West still exist without
any of the prim fits. Right, there's nowhere to escape, there's no
adventure, there's no gold too much exactly. Yeah, So I think in
anyways we got the worst of both deals, and that defines like our current
digital environment. So what do we do with TikTok then? Because it's the
most popular social media app in the world. It seems like Congress is still
you know, waffling on what to do with it. It seems like it's
going to be around for many, many years before we actually take any action.
So what should we do? Yeah, you know, and that can
almost all be credited to their lobbying effort and the way that this is very
extensive and aggressive, and the way that the CCP really just has a stranglehold
on our government. You know, even floating something like a TikTok band nearly
like flip seats, right, because you're just doing all these spends and these
uh that's insane, almost lushing someone else because of TikTok. Yeah, like
it's crazy you're willing to question whether or not this app is actually good for
the country. So we're going to make sure that you don't come back to
Washington. And you know, TikTok's not alone in that this is something that
happens across the board. But the fact that it's a Chinese own company and
it's a platform that could shape our election based off of the content they send
and also based off of their lobbying spends, and there's no debate at this
point, like it's obviously a national security risk, and it's obviously causing massive
impact on the minds of our children, and we're just sitting here is like,
Okay, we need one more smoking gun to warrant intervention. We need
five more dead kids before we decide that this is really an issue. We
had everything we needed to justify a complete and total ban of not just TikTok
but by dance operations as a whole in the United States nearly two years ago.
Yet here we are it's still operational. And oh yeah, it's not
just TikTok anymore. They're building fulfillment centers where they're going to be buying giant
parcels of land, just like the farmland issue. But now they're going to
have massive logistics center that will almost certainly host trucking units just like Amazon,
to allow for them to you know, ship on their own mainland United States,
collecting all sorts of consumer data data on our roads or infrastructure. Not
what I would like to see from a country we might go to war with,
exactly right. It's like, why would we, in like any situation,
think this is okay? And then look at what they're doing and just
the consumer market as well. They're adding a Spotify competitor, so they're going
to do music streaming and they'll certainly undercut Spotify and Apple Music. And then
they're also adding in a you know, text microblogging type feature as well to
go after Twitter. And it's like, meanwhile, you know, Elon's building
X in this everything app. TikTok's like quietly doing it on their own too,
and they have a way bigger user base. And so how this unfolds
there's really no telling, but it's inexcusable. Just sit on your hands any
longer with us. So what do you think about the X situation? Personally?
I think it's one of the dumbest marketing gutnicks I've ever seen. You
took a gold bar and turned it into on, So it makes no sense
to me. Yeah, you know, I think there's this temptation to like
make everything black and white, like it's a black rock or blackstone, right,
you see everyone there's a great graphically those around Twitter all the times of
the legacy textile brands, Berberi, Gucci, whatever, the minimalist stuff.
Yeah, and how like we went from this grand elegant branding to just brutalist,
horrible modern branding, and you know, X kind of fell for that
trap, and so I think it's important to like critique the branding and like
we don't want all of our things to be ugly and modern. Like we
could still have the blue app and everyone will be fine. But like,
fundamentally it's probably in that positive in terms of like the ideological foundation of this
new venture, something that's going to operate independently in theory of these like legacy
organizations, whether it be in finance or in tech an environment maybe where like
free speech can actually exist on the Internet and you know, they're not pressured
by advertisers or special interests. Like the SPLC. You know, they could
just moderate content how they see fit, which is closer to what the American
public actually wants. And then you know, on the financial side, So
it's coming to a time where Elon, you know, a former co founder
of PayPal, is watching one of his creations turn into another weapon of the
regime. You know, de banking is running rampant. PayPal just like quietly
changes their terms of service a few months ago, and it's like, we're
gonna enforce content moderation. We're gonna find you from your own personal yeah if
you say a mean word. And it's like, okay, where does this
end? Well, hopefully it ends with Elon, you know, building a
parallel infrastructure where you get banned on PayPal, they empty your account. Maybe
you can go to x and have that peer to peer kind of financial system
alternative, and you know, maybe there's a video platform that doesn't fall under
YouTube suppression. It's like there's a lot of promising things coming from this transition,
and you know, separated from the ugly because it can be tight.
So I think, you know, I'm generally optimistic about what Elon's up to.
It's still way too early to tell it. It's like, it's crazy
for a lot of people to realize this. We're not really even at a
year yet of Elan owning Twitter. It's been a decade. Yeah, you
know this. The conversation of purchasing started early, but his changes really didn't
start taking place until just you know, a handful of months ago, when
the personnel changed and those elements, and so it's very early stages and all
signs point to it being a positive. So it's just important that he doesn't
stray off course or get distracted by another shiny object and app on the sidelines
you could go after, but generally speaking, way better than what we had
with Twitter. So I'm enthused by the direction that that Elan's taken it.
The WATCHDOGO on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack
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get your podcast. No, totally, I remain pretty skeptical, though.
I feel like there's always going to be just because the nature of tech and
the people who are drawn to work in Silicon Valley. I feel there's always
going to be that you know, managerial class hold out that's just trying to
knife them anytimes. Anytime you get leaves to go work on the rockets.
But you know, I don't know the guy to go to the rockets.
So at the end of the day, I trust the people who are far
smarter than me. You know, there is like no world in which we
have like a reconstruction of Silicon Valley, right like this, this class of
coders they went through that indoctrination class that we all went through at university too,
and watched our peers just like go off the rails. They all went
through that same thing. Now instead of working on Wall Street or instead of
working you know, in DC, they went to Silicon Valley, which is
an even kind of coopier environment where like, even if you're not involved in
the working world, like the politics is everywhere, it's very off the rails,
and you know, you're in San Francisco walking, you'd think that you
like, it'd become as far right as possible, but it just seems to
really hypnotize a lot of these people. And I mentioned a big paycheck goes
a lot of way. It goes a lot of the way to like de
radicalize you. I think, so right, It's like if you're living in
the penthouse while everyone dies on the street from fed all overdoses, like you're
high enough up where you don't smell the horrors of the real world, but
everything's still burning below you. So you hope that one day the flames get
high enough where they decide to put it out. But all signs point to
this being a long term problem, and it's important not to get optimistic about
this. Like fantasy scenario where we red pill a bunch of coders and come
to Silicon Valley to save us. The real fix is the rare one in
a million where a billionaire decides he wants to stand for something and fix it.
And then the more plausible realistic one is having Congress do their job and
not let you know, a bunch of twenty somethings d platform every conservative on
the internet or to shadow band, right. So uh, it's you know,
it's kind of the realistic part of the situation where unless Congress gets serious
about this, it's going to get worse. And so we can't get sucked
into the fantasy land like save your scenario because Elon is one guy, and
like you know, you look at the bench, there's not a whole lot
of other people that are going to get into the game and change things up.
So we have momentum. Congress now is an opportunity to capitalize on it.
And you know, it's great that we have X. X is now
a model your platform should behave similar to X. You know, make your
platform the public town the digital town square. And I think that is the
model, and we know it can be executed like it used to be this
argument of well we would do that change but it's just not possible. We'll
look at X like going to gain so now you have to do it too,
and that's hopefully where we start to take things. But who's to tell
what you know, this next election cycle is almost primed to be defined by
technology, right. It's like it's true ai X all these different first one
yeah, and so like you're going to campaign entirely online. It's going to
bring in a new class of younger people who get the platforms and tech policy
you know, in just a few congresses is going to look radically different.
We're going to you know, evolve a lot as these kind of older members
get replaced by younger members who are more warm to these pieces of technology.
And it brings you a little bit of optimism and a whole lot of fear
because you know, if you got to Washington using the tech, are you
going to be incentivized to kind of crack down on it and fix it question?
There's it's a tech policy is a very interesting space because every day could
take a different direction. So do you think anti trust law or reinterpretation of
it or just applying it to new situations could help alleviate a lot of the
things. I think it's really a no brainer, And honestly, the difficulty
right now is just informing people of like the dynamic of Silicon Valley. There's
a lot of pushback on breaking up big tech because of this hypothetical where we
handicap innovation. You know, if you break up Amazon, who's going to
deliver my package overnight? Or you know, if you break up Google,
where's the next YouTube? And I understand where it comes from, but it's
just very out of touch. You're applying the kind of concepts of the physical
world to this digital landscape. And the reality is you look at a company
like Google, when was the last time they created something right? Like almost
all of their consumer products that have reached market or acquisitions, they didn't make
YouTube, they didn't make Google pronos right like these were purchases. They went
to another company that was doing something cool and made it their own, and
it just basically entrenches them in our way of life. And you know,
you look at Facebook and you know they're going really heavy in this kind of
like metaverse vr sphere, which seems very unlikely to succeed, but hypothetically,
you know, they acquire that one workout company where you know, you can
do your workouts in the metaverse, and maybe they get a deal with a
business company like a business service provider where your meetings are done in the metaverse.
Suddenly they've entrenched themselves in this like a whole other pillar of our society
that's like increasingly digitizing. And what the argument is like, we just have
to wait for the next person to come along and unseat that. It's it's
possible, and so it's kind of just waking them up to like the realities
of the situation. And you know, there isn't this other solution to it
truly is just antitrust or accepting the horrors of like four companies running the entire
country. And we already see how that's going. It's not something we any
of us really want to live in. So you just have to hope that
they start to understand that the digital world isn't the physical world. And you
can't just use the legislation or the laws from fifty sixty seventy years ago and
apply them to tech that didn't exist. You have to modernize. And that's
really all we're asking. And it's not like we're trying to get them to
bend the entire system. It's like, understand the environment that we find ourselves
in now and adapt, you know, step up to the plate and do
something for the American people. So I mean, for what it's worth,
you know, monopolies kind of seemed to be the trarectory of history, Like
that's just kind of how the world has been. Totally agree that it's not
good. But I'm very curious as to whether or not there will be the
how do you activate that political will to wake people up to it. If
people are about to lose their elections because of TikTok, who's to say that
Amazon wie step in and bludgeon them. And you know, that is the
exact same situation we find ourselves in. Anytime you try and radically change tech
or even just put a ripple in that Silicon Valley kind of cesspit, you
have crazy spends and all these congressional districts. You know, around October November
of last year, the Merger filing theme Modernization Act was getting a little bit
of traction. Sounds very complex, It would sound like some radical blow up
to antitrust law. It really just increased the merger fees for you know,
multi billion dollars mergers, this like Microsoft Activision type dynamic. And you saw
just tens of millions of dollars getting spent in critical districts like do not vote
on this modernization of antitrust law because it will destroy innovation and kill your favorite
company, China will take us over. And it worked, you know,
it was that measure was something that almost every single elected Republican has put in
their stump speech at sometime right that I'm going to get to Washington and hold
big tech accountable. That's holding big Tech accountable, it's making them pay for
these multibillion dollar mergers. Yet we got roughly like thirty nine Republicans to vote
in favor of it, and it ultimately, you know, was only put
through due to the Omnibus bill. It wasn't even passed as a standalone piece
of legislation. And if you can't do that, what are you going to
be able to do? Right? And so it's all kind of goes back
to like big business and this like interest in shaping our legislative trajectory. And
the American people have to realize that there's something very wrong about a company that's
based in Menlo Park, that has offices in uh, you know, every
major country, going to Iowa or Ohio and spending five million plus dollars to
influence the outcome of their election. Like what business as this tech company run
by a bunch of crazy people have in the way that Ohio is represented in
Washington, and it should make people sick that that process is being compromised by
these people who not only have no investment in their community, fundamentally hate what
that community stands for. You know, they would be more than happy to
bulldoze that entire district and turn it into a parking lot or favillas for illegal
immigrants. And yet we just let it keep going and we let it work.
I think more concerning, right, like, we actually fall for the
advertisement it plays on the TV, and we're like, we're not immune to
propaganda. We call the office, right, well, please don't. We
don't want China to be the tech overlord. And it's like we have to
we have to also, we have to reject that spend, We have to
reject that propaganda. And then also just snap out of this trance that like
things can't get better, because the minute we actually have probably pressure here in
Washington and we actually get this America first public policy that shape silicon value in
a meaningful way that's in service of the American people, things get better.
So I think, you know, be optimistic about the way things could go
and be willing to fight for it. So let's draw down into this China
tech hegemony. Do you think that if we know trust bust so to speak,
it would give China another foot or an additional lead over us? Or
do you think that the diversification of big tech would actually strengthen America's situation.
So if we continue on as normal and we allow for companies like TikTok or
Bite Dance generally speaking, to come over here and operate with a huge advantage
because they don't follow any of our laws, they are allowed to do literally
whatever they want and know for certain that they will face no regulatory scrutiny.
It really doesn't even matter, right, Like they're going to win regardless.
And so you know, you have to do a couple of things here.
You have to push China out of the US tech market. We can't allow
them to just operate here with no laws or guidelines. So that's step one.
And then you look at the current landscape. You know, is it
really much better than like a China run digital landscape anyways? Like they're still
doing horrible things with our data, They're still abusing the American people. I
would argue that, you know, it's just a little bit better marginally to
have a US company abuse you than a foreign one, but at least the
veil of some more accountability. Yeah, and so going in and breaking that
up, and you know, dislodging the stranglehold of just a couple of companies
over the entire valley is huge. I mean just looking in terms of labor,
right, I mean, having every coder under one company, you know,
the top one hundred people who doing who are doing AI and development under
one ceiling would raise flags for anybody because it's like the best minds are just
working towards one single goal. Just lot ically speaking, it's it's crazy,
we're going to naturally develop at a slower pace. China has this like completely
different mindset where they have you know, ten year, fifteen year, twenty
year goals and they're deploying the labor and the companies in the direction to accomplish
them. We're just subservant to the visions of these monopolies and whatever they choose
goes right. And so when they're driven entirely by just upping revenue and shareholder
value, they're not going to push us in the future we want. They're
going to just maroon us in this like twenty twenty landscape where we're getting propagandized
with short form video, We're getting crazy amounts of data scraping. Like the
innovation is going to be how can we hook you for more time on the
device? Not like how can we cure cancer with AI? Or how can
we you know, get to space again? Like we're not putting our best
minds to you know, best use, We're instead just letting them. Yeah,
like how can we push more ads? Like that's what values doing right
now? Yeah, And so like to fix this it requires breaking it up.
And if you are that person who's like, I'm not breaking up big
tech because I want innovation, you need to realize that the thing that's going
to bring the best innovation and really push us light years beyond China and the
rest of the world and give our kids the best future they could imagine it
is breaking them up and unleashing the full force of Silicon Valley to accomplish those
things. Interesting, So, the foreign presence, though you know, Facebook
or Meta, whatever you want to call it, has, like you said,
it is establishment. Basically every major country would it not behoove them to
rather than not behoo us to not have them broken up so they could just
focus wholesale on America's digital influence across across the globe, because you know,
TikTok isn't going to get broken up in China. It's just going to be
one entity that the CCP backs entirely. Yeah, so you know, you
would think that Facebook would be a perfect comparison between TikTok and like the way
that TikTok's in service and CCP. Facebook could be in service of us and
it could be this great propaganda tool that we deploy everywhere. But the problem
is they operate far closer to that global entity than they do. An American
company billion address might be in California, Your CEO might reside here. He
might look like you and I, But when push comes to shove, he's
far more eager to comply with the asks of the CCP or any other adversarial
nation than us, because he knows when he comes to Washington, he can
just look our congressman in the eyeslide to them directly, and never get held
accountable. If you do that overseas or in another one of these markets,
we're going to like ban you from operating where and so in theory, it
would be great for us to have these monopolies where it's like the information flows
completely through us. There is no benefit for the American people. And it's
one of those kind of styops really that's run on the American people, right,
because they're trying to convince you that in the situation where we break up
or dislodge a face Book or a Google stranglehold over information flows, we'll just
be subjected to China's. Well, the reality is we're not consuming pro American
content, right, We're consuming horrific things those challenges we mentioned earlier. You
know, there is no benefit at this current in this current tech landscape to
having a Facebook or to having an Instagram have a huge market share. Instead,
you know, you're just subjected to horrible things for the sake of profit.
And so I think you have to almost take a step back and assess
the current state of things and realize that even if we pivoted somehow, it
would still be worse than breaking them up. Even if we correct the course
and all these things, like, the damage has been done and it would
almost be better to have these new entrants to the market that give you like
an actual pro American message or family values are spread on the platform, because
that's really where things are headed, right, Like we need a platform to
emerge that pulling people from the darkness, and it's like, uh, you
know, giving them an alternative to fighting videos or you know, drug content,
Like there has to be something else. And so until you break things
apart and let it kind of sort through, that we're going to just be
stuck here. So there already is you know, these alternative platforms. You
know, you have Parlory of Truth, Social, you have GAB, you
have I mean GABS, you know obviously a bit more eccentric, but there
are you know, alternative platforms people can access for pro American, pro family
conservative speech. Why do you think it's so hard for them to get off
the ground because it doesn't seem like they're really going anywhere and they're kind of
foundering out, Like they can reach like a couple million people, and that's
that's it. We have unified this political battle we find ourselves in with the
cultural battle when they're really like two standalone issues. And you know, all
of these platforms were built upon a free speech environment for political speech, and
you know, GAB tele Graham all these different platforms, like they provide that
free speech alternative, but they don't merge over like beauty influencers, travel bloggers
and strict Yeah, and so you're scrolling through and it's horrible. You're just
consuming, like things are never going to get better, like the administration's corrupt.
All you're getting into political content and Truth tried to do this. They
tried to bring over music influencers, but they were all like conservative music influencers.
And you know, you bring over a comedian, but his jokes are
about politics, and like you do all those things, and you're really just
locking people into a single content stream. The reason you can scroll through Twitter
or x now is because it's broken up. You get two political tweets,
a beauty tweet, travel tweet, like the average users getting a huge scope
of content. Interesting, It totally makes sense. It's until you can post
a picture of your dog without getting taught about the twenty twenty election, it's
not going to take off. So I mean totally tracks. Let's pivot two.
AI. What are your thoughts on the influence of artificial intelligence in censorship
within what implications have for free speech? Should we be scared of a terminator
situation. Yes, So when it comes to censorship, AI is very interesting
because it really just enhances the efficiency of the existing system. Right, so
it's expedites that manual review process where you're looking for mean words, and just
streamlines it. So instead of going through as a person and clicking through everyone
who said, like the election was rigged or these types of bigger censorship efforts,
it just manually bypasses the manual review and automates the whole thing, just
flags anyone who matches a certain set of criteria and so far more efficient,
flag far more content than any person could do, and so censorship reaches a
new level. It really just accelerates. So, I mean that's huge.
But when you look at the broader landscape of AI, the really interesting thing
that we're finding ourselves and as like, it really just depends on who's leading
the ship. You know, this tech could be used for an infinite array
of purposes. You could use it for, you know, making censorship more
efficient, or you could also use it to write your emails. You could
use it to streamline healthcare, Like, no shortage of how you could use
this. Yet we're using it for very silly things, and so it almost
goes back to that whole point we had earlier where until you dislodge the stranglehold,
like we're going to misuse our tech and our talent for things that really
don't matter. So, what are some instances in which AI has been implemented
effectively business medicine, Because my understanding is that the more we automate the health
industry, the worse it gets for everybody. I can think of probably three
people at most who have benefited from telehealth. Everyone else is just horribly annoyed
with it. Horribly annoyed with the automation. Yeah, you know, I
think that's where we'll feel it first. Is this like customer service omit and
it's going to be horrible. Like also we can get worse out. Yeah,
Like we already hate the current customer service kind of offering. It's going
to get way worse because they aren't going to emotionally relate to you at all
when you're frustrated. It's going to give you this like canned respond to try
and de escalate the situation, and like that is probably the first line of
kind of introduction, right, Like that is where you're going to feel it.
See it first, those jobs are just going to disappear. We're not
going to outsource the India, We're just gonna have how I do it?
Excuse me, but you know, long term, like think of a slide
deck creation, like these kind of silly points of your day to day where
like your artistic ability doesn't define the content or the merits of like the business
recommendations here in like the consulting world, but it limits how seriously you're taken
because you just cannot figure out how to layer those colors correctly. The AI
is going to be able to come in and make you a beautiful slide deck,
and it's going to make your presentation be taken seriously. And maybe those
changes are adopted quicker because it's something as silly as you know, color theory
is, you know, actually properly executed. And so there are just areas
where like we as humans aren't universally good at these things like design, and
AI will just eliminate that store point. Maybe it makes you write your research
paper ten times faster, not because it's writing the research for you, but
because it's pulling the correct scholarly journals and you have to use these stupid keywords
and you're sifting through millions and millions of pages, it just highlights the three
that you should look at the first, right, So like those things great
application, it's going to enhance human output and it's going to make us better.
And then you have the kind of silly things where it's like customer service,
like do we need it maybe, like it's debatable at best, but
you know, actually like deploying it in meaningful ways that enhances your day to
day and then driving those moon shots in the right direction of giving them the
proper funding to where like clinical research is enhanced, or you know, we
have these crazy advancements and like robotics because of an epiphany that it had on
some equation that now enables development, like it can just make us better,
but instead we're going to be profit chasing and we're going to be trying to
cut costs and people clicking on ads exactly. And it's just like we get
locked in the current thing rather than using this tech to shoot us into the
future. And honestly, like China is going to be much more eager to
use this tech to you know, go for those moon shots to try and
get out of this kind of the shadow of the United States, and we're
going to just play with the lead, try not to lose, and just
like bolster our current system. And that's not sufficient. You have to be
making those moon shots. You have to be trying to actually accomplish new things
and push for something better. But yeah, as you know, we've kind
of the theme of this, we're just gonna get more ads and like maybe
they're personalized now they're wonderblee. Yeah, the algorithm gets better. Yeah,
like you're the crocs that recommends you are that your perfect color and the foot
it's in looks more like yours? And like, is that really a benefit
of AI? No, Like, in reality, it makes things way worse
than they already were. So guide this tech in the right direction. What
are those moonshots in the US? You know we already have In China,
they're basically moving all of their manufacturing two artificial intelligence based systems. Whether or
not the robotics is there, I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, but they're
far more focused on, like you said, getting out of our shadow and
becoming or at least displacing US as the hedgemon. What should the US focus
on when it comes to AI projects, you, the moon shots are going
to look very different because philosophically, we have very different goals, right.
I think like in the United States, are moon shots should be about enhancing
human flourishing, you know, ending unnecessary suffering. We should use this for
clinical research to have those breakthroughs that have stalled for so many years, right,
Like it's inexcusable we having cure cancer. I think a lot of people
just go and complacent and just accepted the fact that we hit that wall and
it's just never going to get better. Like AI could be that revolutionary breakthrough
that we need in order to just end that needless suffering that millions of Americans
have to go through. And so like we're going to go for that.
China might choose to do things like increased manufacturing output, and like there's merit
to that. Don't get me wrong, but I would rather have those manufacturing
jobs, right, And I think like it goes back to that Tucker Carlson
Ben Shapiro debate that always goes around Twitter, like every two weeks of you
know, do automate away the truckers or for the purpose of enhancing GDP be
more efficient or do you keep that kind of revenue stream for those high school
educated men who can't aren't going to learn to code, right, Like they're
just going to be on welfare if you get rid of the trucking industry,
and like, we're going to have to grapple with those in a way that
China isn't because they're just looking at the number. They don't really care about
their people the way that we should be caring about our people. And so
we shouldn't be blinded in this race to the bottom, right, Like the
tech should just enhance human flourishing and the human experience. And like, if
we just get sucked into this US versus China dynamic, which is very important,
we can't afford to let China win. But if we played by their
rules and we just are purely looking to get the best tech possible and don't
really care how it ends, it's going to look way worse than it needs
to be. So I think, like, you know, go into this
battle, win the battle, but stick to our own principles and our own
morals, and things get better for us. What risk do we run with
job displacement? Do you think it'll be a nap To esque situation where huge
parts of the country are just kind of gutted, or do you think it's
far overblown? Kind of like how ATMs didn't displace bankers. I think it's
probably a lot further out than people are comfortable accepting, you know, like
the timeline wise, Yeah, Like I think the displacement happens. It's just
like a debate over when, right, Like robotics has to catch up for
the manufacturing, and I think that's like generally been established in the public domain.
Like people agree that the robotics thing is lagging behind and we're not going
to have this big manufacturing revolution the way that you know, the sci fi
movies would suggest. But the email jobs, like people are already feeling that.
Right, if you're just like a middleman for information, it's pretty easy
to just cut you out of the workforce. And so it's kind of like
not to say they're meaningless, but they're kind of meaningless positions and these kind
of corporate landscapes, corporate environments that the least yeah, and so like those
people are going to probably get axed a lot quicker, and like we shouldn't
just be okay with let's throwing them to the wolves, right, so there
is going to have to be like a very serious conversation about what do we
do with these people who get automated out because if they go downstream and they
go to like, let's say the retail industry, you go from like kind
of low level white collar job of answering emails or phones or whatever to retail.
Those retail cashiers can't compete with someone of the competency of just like wondering
above them. Right, It's like once you get down to those lower pillars
of the pyramid, those leaps are way bigger, right Like, in terms
of competency, think about when we introduced the computer to the cashier environment instead
of just pressing like that typewriter, mechanical cashier, Like, now you have
to have a decent understanding how to navigate a computer interface. And in the
early stages, like it displaced a lot of people. And where do you
go if you can't be a cash register worker? Right, Like, if
you aren't if you're a cash teller, like, there isn't a whole lot
of other jobs below that rung where you could go. And so you don't
want to start a domino effect where it's like the level above you comes down,
displaces you, you go down because what did those people do wrong?
Right, Like they graduated high school, maybe they went into a trade industry
and like in theory their life was set, but just because someone else's job
was automated away and they came down to tier, like now they're losing their
job, and like, we're just gonna have to really think about the American
worker and what this is going to do to the dignity of work. And
I don't think we're having those conversations right now in Washington's a little concerning.
We've talked about it for like maybe two seconds with that POSEI development where it
said, you know, doing anythink it's crazy we haven't stopped and asked,
should automate a way fulfilling jobs? Yeah? And it's like, okay,
does Hollywood horrible? Yeah? But like should films just be artificially generated from
a text query into a chat GBD style box, Like no, that's probably
like just as bad, if not worse as like a woke Hollywood, Like
we don't need computer animated everything. So like those types of conversations need to
have like a bigger constituency here in Washington, and they currently do and as
part of what we're doing, we're trying to like normalize those conversations, make
like lawmakers think critically about that, but it's for it. It's almost as
like trying to teach them Chinese, and like a single sitting you can't look
to this like future without just getting caught up in like a blade runner or
like pop cultural paradigm where like instead of you know, seeing the current state
of things and making a prediction or a leap of where they're headed, you
just jump to like a sci fi scenario. And it's helpful for like understanding
doomsday scenarios, but in terms of like actually an acting policy, it's a
huge distraction. And like they're far more comfortable commission eighteen month studies, thirty
six month studies, whatever than actually just like putting pen to paper and making
a rule or a law. We would rather, you know, sit back
and see what the experts say and then come back to the drawing board and
over and over and over again. And it's like maybe just like take a
shot, take a stab at it. You know, what's the worst that
could happen? Because right now, like we're just letting these companies do whatever
they want. And we all universally accept like that can't go on, right,
Like, at some point they will have to have guardrails in place.
There would have to be a regulatory framework to make sure that development doesn't go
awry. And it's like, why not starting now when it's at least in
it's early stages, it's controllable, you know, if we have to take
a step backward to become in you know, accordance with the guidelines, Like
it's not a devastating below. It seems logical, like every person throughout the
country would think that would be the approach. But instead we're like, let's
let this thing get bigger and stronger and faster and the leaps to be even
harder to catch before we put pen to paper. And that's just not like
a viable strategy for this. Well, we're very bad at being proactive,
always reactive, and when we react, we always missed the mark more from
than not miss the market absolutely. And you know, you think that lawmakers
would just be so excited that they could shape the rest of the world.
And like you think not only the rest of the world, like the future
right, like healthcare debate, huge impact everything. It's not going to shape
the future the way the day I will, Like they could truly define the
rest of time on earth by like putting pen to paper in this early stage,
Like they could create an environment that Gide's ai in a director that gives
us our wildest dreams and you know we truly unlock our full potential. But
instead we're like, it's kind of scary to you know, get out in
front of this thing and maybe mess up. So you know, we're just
not going to do it, because what if, you know, my bill
fails and I don't get reelected, And it's like you can't legislate in this
dynamic, especially in tech, with the fear. You have to be bold,
decisive and you know, take a shot. You could have seventy confidence.
Maybe that's as good as you're going to get with this type of thing,
and you have to be comfortable with that and take that leap. Very
a few people are comfortable with that. What would you tell to the you
know, the cowards and Congress who are too afraid to actually take a risk
that could shape the future in a positive direction, uh that you know,
if you don't step up to the plate and if you don't roll the dice.
In these early stages, the native impact of a wrong decision today is
far more inconsequential than doing nothing and letting this thing just like go unchecked and
just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, because that explosion of a bad
decision on your end or from the corporate end is going to be increasingly more
impactful as it as it gets bigger. And so like we're talking kind of
like tiny setbacks in this stage where like name me one company right now that's
like really commercially integrating AI. Like if we were to put a guardrail in
place, it wouldn't blow them up. But if we wait for this to
be our entire life, right like social media, is we someone regulated social
media at all, And it's like now people freak out when we try and
make new rules for social media. If we do the same trajectory for AI,
it's gonna be devastated. You're going to have like the business world asking
like who's going to come send emails like the AI is doing all of that,
like where are the workers exactly? And you think back to like the
colonial pipeline kind of comparison, they had to like call people out of retirement
to go manually turn on the pipeline because no one could figure out how to
do it in their current workforce. Everyone was trained digitally and no one had
that like field experience, and the same dynamic is going to happen. And
so if you don't like put these guardrails in place early, and you have
to blow this thing up later down the road because it's gotten out of control,
Like you're going to have those situations where okay, now we don't have
like entry level coders there, they've been automated away. You know, you
just regulated this. There's this unintended consequence where like we can't have AI code
these things, who's going to come do it? And okay, so we're
going to pause all development here until we can train people again. And you
just don't have to. It doesn't have to be like that, right,
like it's it can all be avoided, And I think people don't understand that
here in Washington. That just building a strong foundation of like universally accepted computer
science concepts like AI explainability, just having to be open enough to where you
can audit its decision making process could radically change the course of AI development and
oversight and allow you to actually keep track of what's going on, and like,
show me the AI Explainability Bill, right, Like no one has put
a pen to paper to do that. Every single one of their briefings is
telling them to do it. No one's doing it because it's scary, Like
what is explainability? Like it's a big word. When you put aie in
front of it, it's like even more daunting, and it's just like you're
not a technologist, You're never going to be a technologist, but like it
is the obvious thing to do, so you need to do it. And
they're just going to have to get comfortable with it because these conversations and these
policy like conundrums are just going to get bigger and bigger. And if you
can't handle social media, if you can't handle TikTok, and you can't handle
AI, what are you going to do in twenty thirty, twenty forty when
you know you still are on the compounds and compounds, Yeah, you're on
your fifteenth term and you know you've never acted on tech and your constituents are
sitting there like, man, is this ever going to get better? And
in that dynamic where you know you just let this thing compound. No,
it's just going to keep getting worse. So I think, you know,
it's easy to be blackpilled, and you know, I think this is just
going to get worse. We're in the very early stages and like in the
very early stages of the digital revolution altogether, not just AI, Like,
we're only twenty or so years into this kind of paradigm we find ourselves in.
It's not too late to dislodge from this current trajectory where we just consume
and consume and consume. We can reshape tech and Silicon Valley to be in
service of us. But you know, the longer you wait, the harder
it gets. And that battle is going to come sooner or later. So
why not do it when you stand a chance? Right? Like it's the
logical thing, but just not even a thought. A lot of people here
have for sure, But what's the reason to be optimistic in your mind?
I think that you know, my generation, in particular Gen Z is waking
up to this. You know a lot of my peers are having those conversations
of you know, why is the digital environment like this? Like why do
we have to just be okay with being bombarded with advertisements? Or subjected to
Chinese technology or horrible data privacy protections, like we are coming to the realization
that this is at an environment we want to live in. And then you
look to Washington and you know, we don't have a voice. There's just
a generation of lawmakers who haven't sent a tweet. You know, they have
a Twitter account, so people think that you know, they're sitting there sending
them off. It's their communication staffer. You know, if you've told them
that my direct messages were being monitored by the FBI and hand it over it
was proven in the Twitter files. They maybe pick up on what Twitter is,
but everything else is foreign to them. They don't understand what a direct
message is. And that is only going to last for so much longer.
The pressure is mounting for lawmakers who can get here and actually understand these critical
conversations about the digital environment. And you know whether or not that means they
come here and they make things worse because they're beholding to the tech companies or
they dislodge it. It's yet to be seeing because we don't we still don't
have a generation of people who've grown up on this tech in Washington. But
you know, there is a huge movement of folks that are you know,
single issue voters on tech, and eventually it's just it has to give.
And so what it looks like it's really tough to say, but you know,
as things get worse, it's going to be a lot harder to just
do congressional hearing after congressional hearing and never advance legislation or never hold the CEO
accountable for just like lying to your face over and over. People are just
getting fed up. And you know, I travel for work where we go
speak at these family policy conferences and I talk to parents and they're they're just
so confused. How could you know my congressman in Washington be okay with my
kid contemplating suicide because the TikTok they saw and like, it is very hard
for them to get over that, and that there's such little disregard for that
whole element of the family's life, that digital element, that one of these
days someone's going to have to come to Washington and change it. Whether it's
the current congressman who has that profound realization or someone new. It's tough to
say what comes first, but people are feeling it, and I think,
you know, it's it's got to give. It's at some point. So
that's probably the optimism is you know, even if it's getting worse, it's
applying pressure and maybe that makes someone do something. Right. Thinks the only
be bad for so long before people react exactly. I think like, uh,
you know, if you just consider the last couple of years, whether
it be censoring, you know, COVID where you were locking your house,
you couldn't get actual news. Right. We saw on the Facebook files which
were released. It's another smoking gun. It's like our fifteenth one from yeah,
the last like Congress, right, we have a lot of smoking guns
right now. They're just like piled up in the corner. There's Biden administration
staffer, could you take down this meme? Like it's harmful for our pro
vaccine narrative and like there were a lot of families that never got to see
that meme And should your life decision be shaped by that meme? No,
But like it wasn't the only meme that was taken down. It wasn't the
only piece of content. And it's part of this bigger effort to just control
what we consume. And you know, as the stakes rise and you know,
as these conversations, whether it be in tech or health or really just
family value type policy battles emerge, they can't be decoupled from tech. There's
a single point of failure within these social media platforms where if you can't get
your message that counter perspective out there, they're just never gonna, you know,
give and so things just snowball. So I think that's the biggest part
of this is at some point they're going to have to take this seriously,
because every issue gets worse when tech isn't a viable platform for us to communicate.
Definitely. Well, Jake, it's been great having you. Thanks so
much for coming. Where can people find you and find your work? Absolutely
thanks for having me. I'm on Twitter at real j Denton. You can
find me also on the Heritage Foundations's website. Just type in tech or Jake
Denton and all of our writings are up there. From eye to TikTok.
Fantastic. Well, we'll all to have you back again soon and look forward
to reading your work. As always, be lowers of freedom and cots for
the fray. I see you next time.