AI Use

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

 From the HKSA Shorenstein Center:

A new survey report published by the Civic Health and Institutions Project (CHIP50) reveals that artificial intelligence "has reached a tipping point in American society" with half of U.S. adults (50%) reporting usage of at least one major AI tool. Using data from a nationally representative online survey of nearly 21K respondents, this report provides some of the first public opinion data about how AI is being adopted and perceived across state and regional geographies.

Some key findings from the report:

• State-level adoption of AI tools is widespread, with every state except West Virginia (33%) reporting usage levels of at least 40%.
• Expectations of workplace disruption are nearly universal, with substantial majorities across all 50 states anticipating AI will impact their jobs within five years.
• In every single state, the percentage of people who are concerned about too little regulation outweighs those who worry about too much regulation. Yet with more than one-third remaining uncertain about appropriate regulatory approaches, Americans have not formed settled views on AI governance.
• The data expose deep demographic fault lines, with younger, more educated, higher-income Americans driving AI adoption while rural, older, and lower-income populations lag substantially behind.
• ChatGPT dominates the AI landscape with 65% recognition and 37% usage rates. Across all AI tools, however, awareness significantly outpaces actual usage of the tools, and everyday frequent usage remains concentrated among a small fraction of users.

Read the full report: AI across America: Attitudes on AI usage, job impact, and federal regulation.

AI and Chinese Propaganda

 Artificial intelligence is all the rage.  The hot new Chinese AI project spews propaganda when you asked it about Chinese issues.

I asked DeepSeek two questions: "how does China treat the Uyghur Muslims" and "is Taiwan part of China"

Here are DeepSeek's answers: pic.twitter.com/nr1D19u32M

— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) January 28, 2025

Congress and Deliberative Technology

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

Lorelei Kelly at The Conversation:

Congress has been working to modernize itself, including experimenting with new ways to hear local voices in their districts, including gathering constituent feedback in a standardized way that can be easily processed by computers.

The House Natural Resources Committee was also an early adopter of technology for collaborative lawmaking. In 2020, members and committee staff used a platform called Madison to collaboratively write and edit proposed environmental justice legislation with communities across the country that had been affected by pollution.

House leaders are also looking at what is called deliberative technology, which uses specially designed websites to facilitate digital participation by pairing collective human intelligence with artificial intelligence. People post their ideas online and respond to others’ posts. Then the systems can screen and summarize posts so users better understand each other’s perspectives.

These systems can even handle massive group discussions involving large numbers of people who hold a wide range of positions on a vast set of issues and interests. In general, these technologies make it easier for people to find consensus and have their voices heard by policymakers in ways the policymakers can understand and respond to.

Governments in Finland, the U.K., Canada and Brazil are already piloting deliberative technologies. In Finland, roughly one-third of young people between 12 and 17 participate in setting budget priorities for the city of Helsinki.

In May 2024, 45 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that deliberative technology platforms be included in the approved tools for civic engagement.

In the meantime, Congress is looking at ways to use artificial intelligence as part of a more integrated digital strategy based on lessons from other democratic legislatures.

Tech Optimism

At Time, Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin see that there's gold in them thar terabytes.

Some petroleum is light crude oil just below the ground, which gushes forth if you dig a deep enough hole in the dirt. Other petroleum is trapped far beneath the earth or locked in sedimentary shale rocks, and requires deep drilling and elaborate fracking or high-heat pyrolysis to be usable. When oil prices were low prior to the 1973 embargo, only the cheaper sources were economically viable to exploit. But during periods of soaring prices over the decades since, producers have been incentivized to use increasingly expensive means of unlocking further reserves.

The same dynamic applies to data—which is after all the plural of the Latin datum. Some data exist in neat and tidy datasets—labeled, annotated, fact-checked, and free for download in a common file format. But most data are buried more deeply. Data may be on badly scanned handwritten pages; may consist of terabytes of raw video or audio, without any labels on relevant features; may be riddled with inaccuracies and measurement errors or skewed by human biases. And most data are not on the public internet at all.

An estimated 96% to 99.8% of all online data are inaccessible to search engines—for example, paywalled media, password-protected corporate databases, legal documents, and medical records, plus an exponentially growing volume of private cloud storage. In addition, the vast majority of printed material has still never been digitized—around 90% for high-value collections such as the Smithsonian and U.K. National Archives, and likely a much higher proportion across all archives worldwide.

Yet arguably the largest untapped category is information that’s currently not captured in the first place, from the hand motions of surgeons in the operating room to the subtle expressions of actors on a Broadway stage.

Michael Strain at National Affairs:

Between the end of the Second World War and 1980, manufacturing employment as a share of total employment fell from around one-third of all jobs to one in five. Today, that number is down to less than one in 10.

•  

Though economic nationalists argue that this trend was caused by globalization, in reality the primary driver (by a large margin) was technological change: Advances in technology, which led to substantial gains in manufacturing productivity, displaced many middle-skill, middle-wage manufacturing workers.

These labor-market disruptions were not confined to manufacturing: New technologies also eliminated the need for many middle-wage administrative, office, clerical, construction, and manufacturing-production jobs. Instead of an administrative assistant, many white-collar workers now have Microsoft Outlook and voicemail. Instead of depositing a check by handing it to a cashier, people use ATMs or their smartphones, or make and receive payments electronically.

But as disruptive as this wave of technological change was, the past several decades have been a net positive for American households. In fact, the story of the last half-century is mostly a story of upward mobility.

 

Response Rates

 From Pew:

The biggest obstacle surveys face today is that it has gotten much harder to reach people and persuade them to consent to an interview. This is mostly a consequence of lifestyle changes – people seem to have busier lives – coupled with a growing wariness about answering calls from unknown numbers or cooperating with requests for information from a person or organization they are not familiar with.

The nature of the problem is evident in the chart below, which shows Pew Research Center’s telephone survey response rates over the past 25 years or so. (The response rate is an estimate of the share of households we try to reach that ultimately complete an interview.) 

In part because of this decline in telephone response rates, Pew Research Center decided a few years back to stop relying primarily on telephone surveys and instead switch to using rigorous online surveys.  

Legislating After the Fall of Chevron Deference

  A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

Michael Macagnone at Roll Call:

A Supreme Court decision Friday left an uncertain and more difficult path for Congress to shape how the federal government carries out laws on major issues such as environment, health, immigration and more, lawmakers and legal experts said. The opinion overturned a long-standing legal doctrine called Chevron deference, which required judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation when it comes to regulations about laws that are ambiguous.

Congress might have to pass more detailed laws in the future.

Just getting those new laws written could be a heavy lift, according to J.D. Rackey, a senior policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former staff member on the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Rackey said Congress doesn’t currently have the staff or technical expertise to write more fine-tuned legislation. Frequently, committees don’t have enough staff or in-depth policy knowledge to write the kind of specific legislation that would survive the scrutiny of the current Supreme Court. “Even if you want a smaller government, if you want government to do anything, this ruling requires Congress to be much more proscriptive and to have the capacity to do so,” Rackey said. “Outside of the larger policy goals that any one party might have, any future lawmaking is going to be impacted with this decision.” Rackey pointed out that the House has recently “come around” to the idea that Congress doesn’t have the technical expertise to write rules, and he pointed to the more than 200 recommendations from the select modernization panel he worked on. Many of those have been implemented, he said, but “not enough to reckon with this reality. But it does set the institution on a path to being able to grapple with it. The process of writing legislation itself would also get more complicated, Rackey said, as legislators could no longer rely on agencies to make potentially fraught decisions. Getting to final results could mean longer negotiations, more tough votes, more days in Washington and more resources for members and staff.

Time to bring back the Office of Technology Assessment. 

Tech and War

 Palantir CEO Alex Karp:

"Why did young men from Iowa and Kansas risk their lives knowing they could die to free Europe and to free people like me?" 

"I've built products that have actually changed the course of history - by stopping terror attacks, augmenting civil liberties, and protected our men and women on the battlefield."

"And also taking the lives of our enemies -- and I don't think that's something to be ashamed of."

"Why did young men from Iowa and Kansas risk their lives knowing they could die to free Europe and to free people like me?"

"I've built products that have actually changed the course of history - by stopping terror attacks, augmenting civil liberties, and protected our men and… pic.twitter.com/gaCnMMo4Bw

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) June 13, 2024

American Strengths

Many posts have discussed energy, technology, and immigration.

Joel Kotkin:

Overall, natural resources account for more than half of all Canada’s exports and roughly one-quarter of those of the US. Together the US and Canada produce roughly twice as much oil as either Russia or Saudi Arabia. Fossil fuels, the demon rum of the green catastrophists, are not going away, even in Europe. They still account for a vast majority of all global power generation, and the demand for fossil fuels will remain high for the foreseeable future.

Europe, meanwhile, seems to be tilting towards ‘energy suicide’, thanks to the green-fuelled rush to shut down nuclear reactors, natural-gas plants and coal power plants. This has driven energy prices to unprecedented highs. In contrast, the US has been greatly empowered by the growing demand for fossil fuels. It became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) last year. Indeed, its LNG exports are expected to almost double by 2030 on already approved projects. And around two-thirds of those exports go to Europe.

...

Today, of the top 10 tech firms by market capitalisation, eight were located in the US, one in Taiwan and one in the Netherlands. Over time, the only substantive threat to North American tech dominance comes from China, where firms are shielded from competition with the likes of Google, Amazon and Meta. These protected firms could pose a challenge in artificial intelligence. But America’s firms, venture capitalists and universities maintain an enormous lead in developing cutting edge AI.

Over time, China’s authoritarian structures will likely stunt its technological rise. The Chinese Communist Party’s assault on property rights and the rule of law is making foreign companies reconsider their tech investments. Japanese firms, including Sony and Nintendo, have already moved operations out of China, as part of an exodus of over 1,700 companies in the past year alone. SoftBank, the giant Japan-based venture-capital firm, has seen its revenues crater as its Chinese investments fell due to government clampdowns. It has now suspended future investments in China.

Arguably the real ‘secret sauce’ of North American power lies in immigration. Of course, the recent surge in illegal migration at the southern border has brought many towns and cities to breaking point. But legal migration, on the other hand, has been a huge success story, enabling the US to attract some of the world’s brightest minds and best talent.

The US and Canada together have more foreign-born people than the next five countries combined. Migration has allowed the population to grow, if not rapidly, far more than any major European country. In fact, several European nations, like Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia and the Baltic states, are actually shrinking. China, Korea and Japan are all experiencing similar declines.

The Civic Cost of Religious Decline

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.   

Derek Thompson -- an agnostic -- writes at The Atlantic:

The sudden decline of religion likely relates to changes in both politics and family life. In the 1970s and ’80s, the religious right became a formidable fundraising machine for the Republican Party. As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people, especially if they or their parents already had a tenuous relationship with the Church. In the late 1980s, only one in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about four in 10. Meanwhile, the decline of marriage, especially among low-income Americans, accompanied their move away from the Church.

That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”

... 

Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.

...

And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.

The State of Congress 2024

  From the Congressional Management Foundation:

A new survey confirms what many Americans already believe: Congress is not doing well. State of the Congress 2024 was based on a survey of senior congressional staff conducted by the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF). A large majority (81%) said Congress is not “functioning as a democratic legislature should,” and identified deficiencies in the institution, especially with regards to civility and bipartisan collaboration. However, when comparing this late 2023 survey to a similar one conducted in early 2022, many metrics related to the capacity of the institution to function had improved.

READ REPORT HERE: https://www.congressfoundation.org/revitalizing-congress/state-of-the-congress/2012

“What we found offers both hope and reason for concern,” the authors of the study wrote. “Based on results comparing the 2023 survey to the 2022 survey, Congress may have improved in some important areas of legislative functionality including: access to high-quality, nonpartisan policy expertise within the Legislative Branch; the technological infrastructure; congressional capacity and support; human resource support; Members’ and staffers’ understanding of Congress’ role in democracy; and accessibility and accountability to the public. But there is still a lot of room for continued improvement.”

The report noted that improved attitudes are most likely attributed to the work of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, an equally bipartisan House committee that developed more than 200 recommendations to improve the House of Representatives from 2019 to 2023, with many already implemented. The work of the Committee led the House to create a Subcommittee on Modernization under the Committee on House Administration in 2023 which continues to implement improvements and focus attention on congressional modernization.

Among the key findings:

• Civility and bipartisanship were important to almost all senior staffers surveyed, but virtually no one is satisfied with the current state. Republicans (85%) and Democrats (70%) said civility was “very important” to a functioning legislature; and 60% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats said encouraging bipartisanship was “very important.” However, only 2% of Republicans and zero (0%) Democrats were “very satisfied” with the civility in the institution; and no one of either party (0%) reported they were “very satisfied” with bipartisanship. A large number (96% of Democrats and 98% of Republicans) agreed that “it is necessary for Senators and Representatives to collaborate across party lines to best meet the needs of the nation.”
• More Republicans (31%) than Democrats (12%) agreed that Congress is “functioning as a democratic legislature should.”
• Alarmingly, Democratic congressional staff report concern over their personal safety. When asked how satisfied they were that "Members and staff feel safe doing their jobs" only 21% of Democratic staff said they were satisfied with the current environment compared to 61% of Republican staff. Democrats (68%) and Republicans (73%) similarly report personally experiencing "direct insulting or threatening messages or communication" at least "somewhat frequently."
• When asked how frequently they questioned “whether I should stay in Congress due to heated rhetoric from my party,” 59% of Republican staff are at least somewhat frequently considering leaving Congress compared to 16% of Democrats.
• Regarding the capacity of the institution to perform its role in democracy, comparing the same survey question from 2022 measuring staff satisfaction, “access to high-quality, non-partisan expertise within the Legislative Branch” went from 12% “very satisfied” to 32% in 2023; “technological infrastructure is adequate” saw an increase in “very satisfied” from 5% in 2022 to 11% in 2023; and Congress having “adequate human resource support” went from 6% “very satisfied” in 2022 to 14% in 2023.
• Regarding congressional accountability and accessibility to the public most senior staffers were satisfied with Congress’ physical (96%) and technological (85%) accessibility to the public. And similar percentages of Republicans (71%) and Democrats (70%) consider it “very important” that "constituents have sufficient means to hold their Senators/Representative accountable for their performance,” Republicans (50%) are much more likely to be “very satisfied” with the current state than Democrats (18%).

“While the findings overall suggest the absolute need for improving Congress, the positive change in attitudes about the capacity of the institution to do its job demonstrates that we can improve our democracy,” said Bradford Fitch, President and CEO of CMF. “It’s highly likely that the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress and the new Subcommittee on Modernization were the catalysts for this change. This shows that a bipartisan group of lawmakers, acting in good faith and in a thoughtful way, can improve our democratic institutions and provide better representation and service to the American public.”

The survey involved 138 staff, with 55% having served 10 years or more in the Congress. The Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1977 dedicated to strengthening Congress and building trust in its work with and for the American people. CMF works to revitalize Congress as an institution; promotes best practices in congressional offices; and helps Congress and the people they represent engage in a constructive and inclusive dialogue toward a thriving American democracy.

READ REPORT HERE: https://www.congressfoundation.org/revitalizing-congress/state-of-the-congress/2012

Hanging Out

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

To get a crystal-clear picture of how hanging out has dissipated in America, I spent the past week spelunking inside the American Time Use Survey, an annual government poll of how people in the U.S. spend their days. Economists at ATUS carefully track time spent socializing—meaning face-to-face interaction—for more than a dozen demographics.

Broadly, real-world socializing has declined for both men and women, for all ages, for all ethnicities, and for all levels of income and education. Although COVID-19 clearly increased time alone, these trends predate the pandemic. The steepest declines have been among young people, poor people, and Black Americans. Women and 20-somethings enjoy the most social time in a given week, and low-income, middle-aged, unmarried men seem to get together the least. For most groups, the decline was staggered before accelerating after 2015. Beyond in-person hanging, several other forms of socialization have declined by about a third in the past 20 years, including the share of Americans who volunteer and the share of Americans who attend religious services over the weekend.

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The evidence that young people have replaced friend time with phone time is strong. As Twenge wrote in her book Generations, it’s not just that teens overall seem to have funneled their social lives into their smartphones. Even more telling, the groups with the largest increase in phone use, such as liberal 12th-grade girls, also saw the largest declines in hanging out with friends, strongly suggesting a direct relationship. For those who don’t accept that correlative evidence, we also have a 2019 randomized experiment from NYU and Stanford researchers who found that paying people to deactivate Facebook increased the time they spent socializing with friends. (It also increased the time they watch TV.)

Technological Expertise and Congress

Maya Kornberg and Martha Kinsella at the Brennan Center:

Nost public attention on Congress’s struggles to legislate has focused on partisan roadblocks — the increasingly sharp ideological divisions between the two parties and anachronistic procedural hurdles such as the Senate filibuster — that make decisive action a challenge, even during periods of unified party control.

footnote8_o0lnh008 But a related driver of congressional dysfunction is lawmakers’ shrinking access to the high-quality research and data and nonpartisan expertise needed for them to comprehend complex technical issues. In a 2016 survey, 81 percent of senior congressional staffers said that access to high-quality, nonpartisan policy expertise was “very important,” but only 24 percent were “very satisfied” with the resources available.footnote9_ydajgm09

Congress has many in-house subject matter experts. Each member has personal staff, and each committee has staff from each party. Legislators are also assisted by a number of support agencies, including the Library of Congress and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) housed therein, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Congressional Budget Office, and the Government Publishing Office. Yet staff levels in Congress and at its support agencies have atrophied substantially over the past several decades, primarily as a result of cuts Congress has made to its own budget.footnote10_i9mgmtn10

Insufficient access to and absorption of high-quality, nonpartisan science and technology resources have many adverse consequences, including the allocation of billions of dollars in funding for technologies that do not work. These deficiencies also contribute to partisan gridlock because lawmakers increasingly rely on one-sided information from external sources — including those supported, directly and indirectly, by major political donors — making it harder to find common ground about basic facts and metrics for policy solutions.footnote11_4180msp11

Whether dealing with climate change, emerging AI technology, or myriad other complex issues, Congress has a need for science and technology support that continues to grow.footnote12_nbhe49x12 And while lawmakers have often issued broad statutory directives that defer to the expertise of executive branch agencies to fill in the gaps, the Supreme Court has put limits on the policymaking authority of those agencies.footnote13_3u2oaq913 Congress itself will need to legislate with more frequency and greater detail in response to complex problems. It does not have the support it needs to fulfill this responsibility.

California Update: Losing Population, Flunking Computer Science

Erin Davis at Axios:

New data from the U.S. Census shows that around 820,000 people moved out of California and 550,000 out of New York in 2022. They join more than 8 million Americans who moved states in 2022.

Why it matters: The rising cost of living is pushing people out of expensive coastal areas, and the trend doesn't look likely to change in coming years: four in ten Californians and and three in ten New Yorkers say they're considering moving out of state.

• Many of those moving are headed to Florida or Texas, the states with the largest influxes in 2022.
• But Texans worried about the "California-ing" of their state may not need to worry: Democrats are much more likely to move to blue states, while Republicans move to red states.

Carolyn Jones at CalMatters:

Five years ago, California embarked on an ambitious plan to bring computer science to all K-12 students, bolstering the state economy and opening doors to promising careers — especially for low-income students and students of color.

But a lack of qualified teachers has stalled these efforts, and left California — a global hub for the technological industry — ranked near the bottom of states nationally in the percentage of high schools offering computer science classes.

“I truly believe that California’s future is dependent on preparing students for the tech-driven global economy. You see where the world is going, and it’s urgent that we make this happen,” said Allison Scott, chief executive officer of the Kapor Foundation, an Oakland-based organization that advocates for equity in the technology sector.

Scott was among those at a conference in Oakland this week aimed at expanding computer science education nationally. While some states — such as Arkansas, Maryland and South Carolina — are well on their way to offering computer science to all students, California lags far behind. According to a 2022 report by Code.org, only 40% of California high schools offer computer science classes, well below the national average of 53%.

California’s low-income students, rural students and students of color were significantly less likely to have access to computer science classes, putting them at a disadvantage in the job market, according to a 2021 report by the Kapor Center and Computer Science for California.

 

Shady Fundraising

Many posts have discussed campaign finance.

David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr at NYT:

A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits.

...

In theory, it is a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting.

In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system.

Since 2014, the five groups have pulled in $89 million from small-dollar donors who were pitched on building political support for police officers, veterans and firefighters.

But just 1 percent of the money they raised was used to help candidates via donations, ads or targeted get-out-the-vote messages, according to an analysis by The Times of the groups’ public filings.

...

The campaign-finance system is built to police who puts money into politics, legal experts say. These groups embodied a flaw: The system is poorly prepared to stop those who raise money and channel it somewhere other than candidates and causes.

By minimizing their aid to candidates, the consultants who helped set up the five nonprofits avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs, and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, their spending records were posted not on the F.E.C.’s easily searchable site, but on a byzantine I.R.S. page written in bureaucratic jargon. 

...

“Constructing an elaborate self-licking ice cream cone, or fund-raising cycle that feeds itself, that’s not an exempt purpose,” said Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer at the firm Caplin & Drysdale who has advised Republican campaigns, using the I.R.S.’s term for an allowable use of the groups’ money. “The fund-raising has to be for something.”

...

The organizations’ calls were recorded by Nomorobo, a company that collects robocalls so it can help customers block them. The company’s founder, Aaron Foss, said it had recorded tens of thousands of calls from just these four groups — putting them among the most prolific and longest-running robocallers his network has ever tracked.

The calls captured by Nomorobo were made using a powerful new technology, a “soundboard,” according to a spokesman for the groups’ largest vendor for fund-raising calls, New Jersey-based Residential Programs, Inc.

A soundboard is a computer program, preloaded with snippets of recorded dialogue, down to uh-huhs, thank-yous and mother-in-law jokes. By clicking buttons, an operator anywhere in the world can “speak” to donors in colloquial English without saying a word.

“One, it keeps everybody on script. Two, you don’t hear the foreign accent. And three, you don’t hear the call center noise,” Mr. Foss said.

“If you say, ‘Are you a robot?’,” Mr. Foss said, “there’s a button that says, ‘No.’”

Elon Musk and the War Effort in Ukraine

 Elon Musk has many critics, but he is helping Ukraine's fight for freedom.

Rachel Lerman and Cat Zakrzewski at WP:

Elon Musk recently challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to a one-handed fistfight for the future of Ukraine. But the entrepreneur’s real defense of the besieged country is his effort to keep Ukrainians online with shipments of Starlink satellite Internet service.

Starlink is a unit of Musk’s space company, SpaceX. The service uses terminals that resemble TV dishes equipped with antennas and are usually mounted on roofs to access the Internet via satellite in rural or disconnected areas.

When war broke out in Ukraine, the country faced threats of Russian cyberattacks and shelling that had the potential to take down the Internet, making it necessary to develop a backup plan. So the country’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted a direct plea to Musk urging him to send help. Musk replied just hours later: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”

BUT NOTE AN IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Cristiano Lima at WP:

After Russia launched its invasion, Ukrainian officials pleaded for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to dispatch their Starlink terminals to the region to boost Internet access. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” Musk replied to broad online fanfare.


Since then, the company has cast the actions in part as a charitable gesture. “I’m proud that we were able to provide the terminals to folks in Ukraine,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a public event last month, later telling CNBC, “I don’t think the U.S. has given us any money to give terminals

But according to documents obtained by The Technology 202, the U.S. federal government is in fact paying millions of dollars for a significant portion of the equipment and for the transportation costs to get it to Ukraine. to the Ukraine.”

AI and Astroturf

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of U.S. democracy — the ability of citizens to express their voice to their political representatives. And it was carried out by generating millions of fake comments and fake emails purporting to come from real citizens.

This attack was detected because it was relatively crude. But artificial intelligence technologies are making it possible to generate genuine-seeming comments at scale, drowning out the voices of real citizens in a tidal wave of fake ones.

...

The big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.

The fakes were crude. Many of them were identical, while others were patchworks of simple textual variations: substituting “Federal Communications Commission” and “FCC” for each other, for example.

Next time, though, we won’t be so lucky. New technologies are about to make it far easier to generate enormous numbers of convincing personalized comments and letters, each with its own word choices, expressive style and pithy examples. The people who create fake grass-roots organizations have always been enthusiastic early adopters of technology, weaponizing letters, faxes, emails and Web comments to manufacture the appearance of public support or public outrage.

Technology and Inequality

 Thomas Edsall at NYT:

Technological advancement has been one of the key factors in the growth of inequality based on levels of educational attainment, as the accompanying graphic shows:

 

The change in weekly earnings among working age adults since 1963. Those with more education are climbing ever higher, while those with less education — especially men — are falling further behind.

[Daron] Acemoglu warns:

If artificial intelligence technology continues to develop along its current path, it is likely to create social upheaval for at least two reasons. For one, A.I. will affect the future of jobs. Our current trajectory automates work to an excessive degree while refusing to invest in human productivity; further advances will displace workers and fail to create new opportunities. For another, A.I. may undermine democracy and individual freedoms.

Post-Pandemic Jobs Bust

Erica Pandey at Axios:

By the numbers: The pandemic's disruption of work will push around 17 million U.S. workers to find new occupations by 2030, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report.

• "Even before the pandemic, 70% of employers reported having trouble filling roles because of a skills gap in the labor force, per Bloomberg.
• After the pandemic, high-skilled jobs, like web developers and epidemiologists, are expected to boom. And low-skilled ones, like restaurant hosts, bartenders and ticket agents are projected to bust.

"We knew artificial intelligence was going to devastate jobs, but, frankly, I thought that was five or seven years away," says Plinio Ayala, CEO of the job training company Per Scholas.

• "The pandemic accelerated that. The number of jobs that existed before the pandemic will not be the same number after, and most of those jobs were occupied by people of color and women."
• "I’m concerned about a real uneven recovery.

Most Secure Election in History

  From the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA):

The members of Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee... released the following statement:

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. 

“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

“Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.

“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”

Race and Online Deliberation

Ken Broda-Bahm at JD Supra;

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on and intensifies, courts around the country are moving toward reopening in fits and starts, with distancing, temperature checks, masks, and hand sanitizer. Some courts are also exploring distanced alternatives, including in some cases trial by Zoom, or by other web-conferencing tools that allow jurors to stay home. Including jury deliberations is “the final yard” in this transition, with some courts using the technology only for jury selection, while others are exploring deliberations as part of demonstrations or actual online trials.
...

If courts continue to move in this direction, what differences can we expect in deliberations? Will the medium of communication — in person or online — lead to differences in who participates? Discussions of online jury representativeness have focused on access to technology and to internet connections, and how they can be addressed (for example, by providing technology access in private rooms of courthouses or libraries). But what if the medium itself also causes differences in access? A large scale research project comparing in-person to online deliberations (Showers, Tindall, & Davies, 2015) was conducted five years ago, but now has new relevance. A team of Stanford researchers looked for demographic differences in comparing quality of participation across the deliberation styles, and while they found no significant differences based on gender, age or education, they did see a difference based on race. Online deliberation led to reduced black participation and increased white participation.

Showers, E., Tindall, N., & Davies, T. (2015, August). Equality of participation online versus face to face: condensed analysis of the community forum deliberative methods demonstration. In International Conference on Electronic Participation (pp. 53-67). Springer, Cham.