Lawfare Daily: Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler on AI Regulation
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler joins Lawfare Tarbell Fellow Kevin Frazier and Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein to discuss the latest developments in AI governance. Building off his book, “Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age?” Wheeler makes the case for a more agile approach to regulating AI and other emerging technology. This approach would likely require the creation of a new agency. Wheeler points out that current agencies lack the culture, structure, and personnel required to move at the speed of new technologies. He also explores the pros and cons of the Bipartisan Senate AI Working Group’s roadmap for AI policy. While Wheeler praises the collaboration that went into the roadmap, he acknowledges that it may lack sufficient focus on the spillover effects of more AI development and deployment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the Lawfair Podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of Lawfair at Patreon.com slash Lawfair. That's Patreon.com |
| 0:16.4 | slash Lawfair. Also check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:27.0 | We don't know what's coming next with AI, but we do know that it's coming. |
| 0:37.0 | And we need to be in a situation where we've got the tools to deal with it. |
| 0:47.0 | It's the Law Fair Podcast. |
| 0:51.0 | I'm Kevin Frazier, a 2024 Tarbell Fellow with Law Fair and assistant professor at St Thomas University College of Law. |
| 0:58.0 | With my law fair colleague and University of Minnesota Law Professor Alan Rosenstein and our guests Tom Wheeler visiting |
| 1:05.0 | fellow at Brookings and the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission. |
| 1:09.3 | The Web, which created the ability to go out there and scrape all this data in order to feed large language models and |
| 1:20.8 | Create AI is now being eaten by its offspring. |
| 1:27.0 | Today we're talking about Tom's book, TechLash, an ongoing efforts by Congress to regulate AI. |
| 1:33.4 | Tom, your book TechLash came out in October of 2023, |
| 1:39.0 | and in that book you argue that today is not the fourth industrial revolution and instead you call for a new |
| 1:45.9 | era of public interest oversight that embraces a more agile regulatory ecosystem. |
| 1:52.1 | Can you tell us a little bit more about this agile |
| 1:54.8 | approach to regulation and whether advances in AI have changed your thinking at |
| 1:59.4 | all? Well let me answer the last part of the question first. And AI has not changed my thinking about the need for agility in regulatory oversight, but it has heightened the urgency of us getting there. |
| 2:20.0 | So the what I posit in TechLash and the subtitle of which is who makes the rules in the digital |
| 2:30.0 | gilded age is I draw the analysis, the analogy between the Industrial Revolution and the |
| 2:37.8 | digital revolution and how in the Industrial Revolution it was the Industrial Barons who made the rules until the government decided to step in and have become a countervailing force on behalf of the public interest. |
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