Josh Withrow

R Street Institute Fellow, Tech & Innovation. Opinions and puns are my own. @[email protected]

[Committee for Justice @CmteForJustice]

New at @TOTMblog :

“Artificial Intelligence, Natural Ignorance”

A Hayekian perspective on AI regulation, the knowledge problem, and why policymakers should be cautious about trying to direct technological change.

@andashleysays @Jeffrey_Depp

https://t.co/XVGejVj37Z

[Vance Ginn @VanceGinn]

Children should not navigate the digital world alone, which is why parents should be empowered, not government!

The ASAAct is big-government policy for politicians and regulators to take the place of parents because some people don’t trust parents.

Better path for government is educating parents and kids about online activity rather than pushing bad policy.

Empower parents, not government!

[Daphne Keller @daphnehk]

It’s baaaa-aaaack

[Adam Thierer @AdamThierer]

Two things can simultaneously be true about this new AI security executive order:

1) This represents a reasonable governance arrangement for frontier model security and its oversight, at least when compared with the far more intrusive ideas floated earlier, like the pre-vetting of models via a formal government licensing regime (aka, “FDA for AI”).

2) This represent as significant win for the military-industrial complex and the continuing fiction of “voluntarism” surrounding its inner workings. Thanks to open-ended EOs like this, the new growing AI-industrial complex will further concentrate power around AI – in both government and industry – and lead to more avenues for public officials to exert control over not just model security, but potentially many other aspects of algorithmic development and use, including content-related matters. After all, “security” is in the eye of the beholder (and future administrations and officials).

[James Czerniawski @JamesCz19]

🚨🚨 North Carolina Age Verification Bill Hearing Tomorrow AM! 🚨🚨 This bill is unconstitutional and would negatively impact NC consumers' online experience. A quick🧵:

[Adam Thierer @AdamThierer]

more equity stakes insanity on the way. Crony computational capitalism via "equity stakes" isn't real capitalism at all. It is just a softer version of Chinese-style central planning. It's fundamentally anti-free market and un-American.

This is also how big government gets its hooks into the AI economy in an even bigger way and comes to influence information systems at a deep level, and along multiple dimensions. The power of the purse is a formidable regulatory tool, especially once Uncle Sam is a formal co-owner of your business.

I especially can't wait to see how Gavin Newsom or the next Dem president uses these equity stakes to impose a mass DEI agenda on every company who cut these deals with Trump Admin. Hope you like a slice of social justice pie with your your equity steak, er.. stake.

Oh, the irony of it all!

[Jack Nicastro @jack_g_nicastro]

On behalf of @ITIFdc, @JosephVConiglio warns the @EU_Commission that its draft measures specifying Android's interoperability requirements under the DMA would threaten user privacy and discourage Google from continuing to invest and innovate in the Android ecosystem.

https://t.co/gLDsRW4HZL

[Joe Kane @thejoekane]

It is unconstitutional for the FCC to take regulatory action based on the content of broadcast speech.

[Juan M. Londoño @JuanMLondonoR]

The hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee on "From the Courtroom to Congress: Why Landmark Social Media Verdicts Demand Federal Action to Protect Kids Online" just ended, after 2 hours of mainly propping up two proposals: KOSA and reform/repeal Section 230.

🧵Some thoughts:

[Kay Jebelli 🇺🇦 @KayJebelli]

The implication here, that European policymakers could end up banning VPNs, is rather chilling.

Under the cover of targeting big tech, lots of our digital rights and protections in Europe are being eroded.

It's a major problem and more people should be fighting against it.

[Josh Withrow @JGWithrow]

"...the pattern is familiar from earlier moral panics over comic books, rock music, and video games. Each was sincerely felt. Each rested on weak social science amplified by strong public emotion. Each produced a policy that aged poorly."

[Jennifer Huddleston @jrhuddles]

New from @AdamOmaryPhD and me in light a variety of state and federal proposals for age verification for AI. The reality is that when it comes to chatbots and teen mental health, it's way more complicated and the wrong regulation could make things worse https://t.co/MwYYrZ2p7D

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Hate speech laws sound obvious until you ask the only question that matters:

Who decides what counts as “hate”?

Everyone imagines their side holding the pen. History suggests you should imagine your worst enemy holding it instead.

[Corbin K. Barthold @corbinkbarthold]

Helping my kids around a legally mandated age gate on Claude or ChatGPT would give me a chance to teach them about the limits of adult authority in a world where many adults -- especially the ones who run the government -- still basically think like peasants.

[Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair 🦥 @senatorshoshana]

Age verification is going great

[Josh Withrow @JGWithrow]

@jeffreywestling I have a distinct memory of a floating Leia popsicle in space, so grateful that's just the Mandela effect.

[Zach Lilly @ZacharyLeeLee]

Senator Hawley’s GUARD Act is a rinse and repeat of the unconstitutional age verification framework, this time lazily slapped onto AI. Notably different is a mandate to constantly reverify and store personal information, making this more overtly a CCP-style surveillance program.

[Adam Thierer @AdamThierer]

truly one of the most amazing developments in trans-Atlantic tech policy over the past 20 years is the way that Europe set out to regulate US tech giants into the ground, but only made them more dominant as a result.

This Economist headline really says it.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis has an awesome opening riff about how most people know the difference between right and wrong, but they justify acting immorally by appealing to "special exception." They know they shouldn't hit a friend, but what if that friend was being so mean? They know they shouldn't steal a seat a bus, but what if that person got up and created a moment's confusion and then the seat was up for grabs? Etc.

When I read this section, I thought a lot about contemporary politics and the way that people justify their politics, not by appealing to higher principles, but rather by appealing to "special exception" to argue that their admitted indecency is justifiable in context.

A lot of MAGA vice is justified by special exception. Trump's defenders rarely defend his crookedness directly. They don't say "it's wonderful to use trade policy to enrich the Oval Office, it's really awesome." They say: Well, look, it doesn't really matter, because the left is so dangerous, Biden maybe did something similar 3 years ago, Democrats would do the same in power, and so forth.

I heard something similar in that NYT conversation everybody's talking about. You even see it in the headline: ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why, hello, special exception. When you start arguing that stealing food and French paintings is justifiable in the context of political protest in an age of prevailing distrust, you're similarly not arguing *for* any kind of a universal principle. Nobody actually wants 300 million people stealing fruit from the grocery store. Nobody actually wants every Louvre visitor trying to rip a Manet off the walls. These virtues don't scale. (Because they're not virtuous!)

Sap that I am, I want us to get to a place where politics is about fighting for what is right and decent, not about justifying what sort of indecent behavior might be somewhat understandable or technically justifiable given the other side's vice or the prevailing levels of indecency. The point is to build the kind of goodness that scales.

https://t.co/iPF65NuyeU

[Elizabeth Goitein @LizaGoitein]

After his spectacular failure to push through a reauthorization of Section 702 in the dead of night last Thursday, Speaker Johnson is trying again—with a new proposal that’s almost identical to the one that failed last week. 1/18

[Max Gulker @maxg_econ]

Josh Hawley's GUARD Act is like a case study in basically all the ways bad tech legislation can be overbroad, unrealistic, play to public fear, and be motivated by the idealized 'good old days.' In other words, it's everything Hawley has been working toward his whole career.