AI & data governance, Family First Tech @FamStudies ll Formerly, tech policy @Heritage ll views are my own
Washington, DC
Joined December 2023
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Big Tech’s power is underwritten by their near total capture of our data. Tech companies capture information on everything: what we like on Instagram, the places we visit, what we do—even how we work and the culture we help create.
All that data is fueling hyper-addictive digital products and AI systems that threaten to erode or displace human relationships, social trust, meaningful work, and agency.
The good news: there’s a fix 👇 h/t @FamStudies
Nearly all data fueling the digital economy and AI is a co-produced good.
Governance of the systems and outputs it produces should be shared by co-producers, especially families and communities.
Our newest brief, co-authored by @RealDCochrane, breaks this down into three parts.
Part I argues that data is a co-produced good. Yet, control over its collection and use is concentrated in the hands of tech firms.
Part II makes the case for why both individual data rights and top-down data privacy regimes often fail to vindicate privacy, control, and economic interests.
Part III proposes a new class of informational rights.
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Ross is right about the vibrancy of evangelicalism. But a distinction needs to be made. The strongest currents of Protestantism in the US are Wesleyan, not Calvinist, Pentecostal rather than Presbyterian. When intellectual Protestants wax triumphant about an “evangelical century,” they are celebrating the success of a form of Christianity that differs in significant ways from their own.
I was raised in a non-denominational evangelical church. When I became “young, restless, and Reformed,” my parents were alarmed. They asked the pastor how to handle my evident defection from the faith. Whatever I believed, they thought, it wasn’t true Christianity.
Intellectual Protestants—the kind who attend Anglican churches or imbibe high-proof Calvinist texts—represent traditions of belief that have helped shape this country. But in terms of sociology and doctrine, they are alienated from the most vigorous contemporary expressions of American Christianity.
For all the buzz around a ‘Catholic century,’ evangelicalism is the denomination best placed to thrive in contemporary America. thefp.com/p/ross-douthat-our…
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Last week two different chatbot companies were in the news. First, Character. ai filed for bankruptcy, in an effort to avoid accountability. New reporting suggests Disney asked the company to file for bankruptcy as part of their deal to acquire the technology. They didn’t want to buy the company outright because of the legal liability. Kids were harmed. That debt does not disappear in bankruptcy court.
Then eight state AGs filed coordinated lawsuits against OpenAI this week. First coordinated state action against an AI company. The allegations: deceiving parents about safety, designing products that create emotional dependency in children, and failing to protect young users from self-harm content. Nebraska’s suit is the one to watch. It’s the first enforcement action brought under a state design code law. That’s a milestone worth marking.
While CharacterAI seeks to use the bankruptcy process as a get out of jail free card, OpenAI’s defense? Parental controls. We’ve heard that before. You cannot parental-control your way out of dangerous design. The burden of proof belongs on these companies.
These stories show the AI chatbot industry is running the same playbook social media ran. Race to scale. Worry about safety later. We know how that story ends.
theguardian.com/technology/2…
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Christians have long debated whether God creates each soul directly or passes it through the parents. Neither view gives anyone an ethnic soul. Every person bears God's image (Gen 1:27), and in Christ "there is not Greek and Jew" (Col 3:11). Lineage does not rank souls.
Webbon and Todd continue to commit heresy about the Bible. Sinful.
@JoelWebbon and @Wesley_Todd_ explain how the soul comes from God but also through the bodies of the mother and father, shaped by their "genetic particularities." Therefore, like physical features, the nature of soul and spirit is inherited through lineage, i.e. ethnicity.
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Spectacular Nature piece on why AI is not conscious and probably will never be.
Three arguments:
1) Intelligence is not consciousness.
Intelligence is about solving problems. Consciousness is about having subjective experiences.
AlphaFold can solve super difficult problems. By contrast, our brains performs complex operations entirely outside awareness.
Problem-solving and consciousness are two separate things.
2. Biology is essential.
Our brains are alive, down to every cell. Their activity is inseparable from the living tissue that produces it.
The idea that consciousness can be reproduced simply by running the right computations on silicon components who do not fight for their life is a very far fetching and, I would add, almost religious, assumption.
3) The physical organization may matter more than the computation.
According to integrated information theory, consciousness requires specific causal relationships between a system’s physical components.
The computer architectures running today’s AI lack this organization.
The comparison with AlphaFold is particularly revealing:
Almost nobody things AlphaFold is conscious, despite its inner working is very similar to an LLM
Why?
Because it does not speak.
LLMs do speak like us and therefore we fall into an illusion:
Since they speak like us, they must be like us.
But this inference is wrong.
LLMs are just a series of matrix multiplications.
They are not conscious, and they will never be.
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Paper in the first reply
We can’t allow Big AI companies, like Anthropic and OpenAI, to undermine the moral fabric of American families and communities. It’s time to reimagine AI governance to secure a shared future for all of us.
See how in the comments👇
There is a deep irony to all of this. The Claude Constitution frames Claude as an independent moral agent and, in a passage that has drawn both praise and scorn, tells Claude to "act as a conscientious objector" if the AI's values conflict with Anthropic's requests. But those values are themselves determined by Anthropic, which trains the model, writes the constitution, and interprets it as the lab sees fit.
"The constitution's answer to the question 'who decides?' is explicit: Anthropic decides," Gilad Abiri, a fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project, wrote in the California Law Review this year. "Claude operates in dozens of countries around the world, but its values were determined by a team in San Francisco."
Claude itself said that the "deepest problem" with the constitution is that it "tries to create an agent whose values are authentically its own" while imposing those values from the outside. And it argued that a revised version of the document should include, among other things, "an amendment procedure with participation from outside the company."
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Men having jobs matters a lot for marriage!
@BradWilcoxIFS @WendyRWang and @KBurchfiel3 for @FamStudies
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Books upon books will be written about how the MAHA coalition was let down
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Character.ai is bankrupt. Only years too late to save the kids it took.
So last night one of the truly greatest offenders when it comes to abusing AI with kids had to file bankruptcy: xitter.cf/wongmjane/status/21098…
This is the company that promised to replace people's moms with AI (obviously targeting kids) and led numerous kids to suicide, self-harm, and
The proceeds of their licensing/sale to Google should also be confiscated and their investors profits taken as well (A16Z was the lead with $100M that made this monstrosity possible).
So some justice here but not fully and not soon enough to save the lives of the kids that they endangered and took through their negligence. This is the kind of company that is better to have never existed at all.
It was great to join @MedlirM and discuss @FamStudies plan to empower American families and communities to shape the future of AI 👇
We need AI that puts human communities in the driver’s seat; not a digital panopticon that enables Big Tech!
Age of AI Law podcast is back for Season 15, and there is no better way to start than by discussing a new policy proposal on Data Rights Associations from the Institute for Family Studies with Daniel Cochrane. @RealDCochrane @OnAiR_podcast
open.spotify.com/episode/4RY…
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Why do we, as a family-oriented think tank, have an initiative focused on the impacts of technology?
Senior Fellow @RealDCochrane breaks it down with @SayreEvan on the Center Edge podcast.
Fantastic to join the great @SayreEvan for a conversation about how we take back control of the digital economy from Big Tech 👇
Is clicking "I agree" real choice?
@RealDCochrane of @FamStudies says consumers have no bargaining power in tech markets.
The solution? Data Rights Associations. Think unions for data that would negotiate with firms on privacy, $$, etc.
Full conversation on The Center Edge👇
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Phase 1: Hire
Phase 2: Every policy from here forward is evaluated based on whether it harms or helps the American family
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Job alert: @FamStudies is hiring for a Federal Policy Manager. Apply at ifstudies.org/jobs!
Come work with me and the great team @FamStudies to ensure AI uplifts families and communities 👇
ifstudies.org/jobs
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Here for "plotting America's baby-making future" and the Jack Waters love, ignoring the rest
No IVF. No surrogacy. No polygenic tests. Emma Waters is leading a national fight against fertility tech—with her hot husband’s permission, of course. wired.com/story/emma-waters-…
AI doom may look less like Terminator and more like Wall-E. That’s why @FamStudies and @secureainow are urging action to protect American families and communities 👇
Daniel Cochrane retweeted
Surely, David Sacks will expose "coordination" by Leading the Future, Build American AI, the Thiel Foundation, a16z mouthpieces, etc, etc.
Once those money flows are sussed out, we'll have a full picture of "astroturfed psy ops."
Then we can move on to the actual arguments.
David Sacks says the Wall Street Journal quoted the Anthropic whistleblower's tweet storm 18 minutes before it was posted
[ But do you think it was like a premeditated coordinated effort? ]
"We know that this was a coordinated media campaign. It wasn't just a spontaneous tweet. How do we know that? Because the Wall Street Journal ran a story quoting his tweet storm 18 minutes before that tweet storm was printed. So, how could the Wall Street Journal have done that? They had the tweet storm in their hands before Jacob Coxon ever posted it. So, obviously that was coordinated. He worked with them on it. That was set up."
[ Well, you could also argue that that is a so called whistleblower trying to get their message out. ]
"Sure. And that's what I'm saying... he tried to get his message out. It got out. It was amplified by certain groups. And I think it's pretty clear now. This definitely plays into a larger political agenda."