The Biden White House’s AI Weltanschauung

“What we’re going to have to prepare for...is the potential impact of AI on our ability to tell what’s real and what’s not."

(A reminder that you’re subscribed to semi-regular email updates from me, Nancy Scola, a Washington D.C.-based journalist who focuses on technology, politics, and policy.) 

Happy post-Thanksgiving to those who celebrated. There seems to be a sense this is a hard holiday for the vegans among us, but I don’t find that to be the case at all. Give me some Field Roast, stuffing, and cranberry sauce (the kind where you can still see the lines from the can) and I’m happy.

I also got to run a 5K Turkey Trot back home in New Jersey, where the pump-up music was Eminem and Guns N’ Roses, and a middle-aged runner was blasting “O.P.P.” along the course. I tell you, it’s a fun state to be from. 

I’ve also been teaching lately. I love teaching journalism. It reminds me how deeply I care about this profession. But it also clues me in on why my professors often looked run over by a bus. 

I’m writing mostly to share a recent story of mine, out in Politico Magazine. It’s a profile of White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed that’s a look at both the intensely skeptical way the Biden White House is approaching artificial intelligence — part of a broader reaction against an industry many inside the institution find painfully arrogant and dangerously concentrated —  and the evolution of Democrats vis-à-vis Silicon Valley in recent decades.

POLITICO illustration/Photos by AP, iStock

Reed made his name in Washington as the head of the aggressively centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and now, as the piece puts it, “at 63, Reed finds himself on the same side as many of his longtime skeptics as he has become a tough-on-tech crusader, in favor of a massive assertion of government power against business.”

David Axelrod’s a fan of this turn of events, but others aren’t so sure; the profile’s sparked interesting discussions on everything from what degree of expertise policymakers should bring to the AI debates to who deserves to have the ear of the White House here.

I hope you might give it a read, and let me know what you think. 

Beyond that, a few recent developments on topics I’ve written about in the past:

• I’ve long been interested in what Uber’s supplanting of old-school cabs can tell us about the interplay between technology and cities, and I recently had the pleasure of moderating a discussion at Takoma Park, Maryland’s neat People’s Book on the compelling new volume “Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City” by Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen. And so I was intrigued to learn via DCist that the next iteration of Uber in Washington is…taxis.

• The Biden re-election operation is weighing whether to get on TikTok, a platform whose political potential I dug into here. It’s a pickle for the campaign; the platform has a ton of baggage, but it’s also where the young people Biden needs to vote for him are hanging out. 

• Courier, the left-aligned news operation I profiled last year, is expanding its reach to include, per Semafor, “a new slate of national contributors and newsletters, video series, op-eds and podcasts that largely focus on ‘explaining, exposing, and fighting back against threats to our freedoms and democracy.’”

Finally, some pointers to what I’ve been reading or otherwise keeping an eye on this fall:

• U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is "taking the pen away from Facebook, Google and Amazon,” argues New York Times’ editorial board member Farah Stockman admiringly.

• Dan Ariely’s work is often drawn on in the field of user-interface design; in this remarkable New Yorker piece, Gideon Lewis-Kraus explores just how much stock should be put in Ariely’s research.

• The Supreme Court doesn’t seem to have bought into the idea that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which is setting itself up as a chief regulator of digital payments and more — is unconstitutional. But as with anything having to do with the court, we’ll see! 

• California Senator Laphonza Butler, who replaced Dianne Feinstein, is finding that her work for Uber has irked some of her would-be allies in labor. 

• “[I]t’s impossible to miss the differences in [Michael] Lewis’s treatment of [Sam] Bankman-Fried, a socially awkward young man afforded near endless empathy by the author, and Michael Oher, the socially awkward young man whom Lewis treats as a nearly mute spectator in his 2006 book, The Blind Side,” writes Bloomberg Businessweek’s Max Chafkin. Also not to be missed: this careful study of the Lewis approach by Samanth Subramanian.

• C-SPAN and others are pushing to get cameras into the courtroom for former President Donald Trump’s election conspiracy trial this spring.

• Social media traffic to news sites is going off a dang cliff. 

• I’m having a great time reading Adam Nagourney’s “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.” For one thing, it’s a terrific reminder that the New York Times has been ‘transforming’ for about as long as there’s been a New York Times. 

• The FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon has been de-redacted, and an agency official uses X to explain exactly what was behind the black boxes.

• I’m a sucker for any “let’s make a magazine!” origin story, but this is a particularly neat look at Wired’s chaotic start.

• “During our tenure at Facebook, jawboning was incessant.” Two former Facebook employees recount the ad hoc pressure placed on them by government. 

• There’s some serious shakiness at the core of Democrats’ digital campaign infrastructure, with NGP VAN laying people off and the Biden campaign nosing around ActBlue alternatives.

• My old Politico colleague Mike Farrell is launching Compiler, “a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to the news shaping our digital future.” Sign up for updates here.

I hope you’re enjoying this stretch before the winter holidays — much like I hope you’re enjoying this newsletter. If you are, go ahead and ‘like’ it below; it helps other people find what we’re up to here. Have a friend or colleague interested in technology, politics, and policy? Tell ‘em to subscribe. 

And thanks, as always, for reading. 

—Nancy