Siliconsciousness: Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together on AI

0:00To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on sign up at the DSR Network.com. That's code DSR26 at the DSR Network.com. Slash by. Thank you and enjoy the show. Welcome to Siliconciousness, the DSR Network podcast focusing on the artificial intelligence revolution, politics, and policy.

1:02Hello and welcome to DSR Siliconciousness. I'm David Rothkoff your host. This week we are joined. This we are every week by somebody that we want to talk about AI, implications of AI and related issues. And I am super happy that this week we have with us, a dear friend, and a very smart person, Rohini Kosoglou. And I've been given an intro for you, Rohini, that are you seated? Yeah, I can see you're seated. So I'm going to read the whole thing. It says here, Rohini is a leading national expert on domestic policy, invention of the White House Congress, and multiple presidential campaigns. Mike condolences. She is a venture partner at Fusion Fund, a firm focused on early stage tech and healthcare investments. That's better. You're doing better. Most recently, she was a policy fellow at Stanford University Institute for Human-centered artificial intelligence. Well,

2:02it seems on point for what we're doing here. Kosoglou served in the White House as deputy assistant to the president and domestic policy adviser to the vice president during the Biden Harris administration for over a decade prior in the US Senate. She served as chief of staff and negotiated the passage of multiple bills into law, including the Affordable Care Act. Kosoglou was also a resident fellow at Harvard University Institute of Politics, which is a running joke because every time somebody gets kicked out of the government, that's where they go. And a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. We are both serving life. In that regard, she serves on several boards and advises across public and private sectors. I just want to make sure everybody gets all this. Hi, Rohini. How are you doing? Hi, hi, David. You didn't have to read it out, but you didn't. No, I did. I thought it was great. It gives people a sense of the scope and how we can talk to you

3:02about so many things. But let me start with one thing that you and I have talked about in the past, but I'm kind of interested in because you've done a lot of work in AI and you've done a lot of work in the Valley and you go to Stanford, which is super fancy. And we get all these smart people, but they're wearing flip flops and it's cool. But one of the points that you have made is that somehow Democrats have lost the Valley. You know, they've lost, you know, there are all these roller guards, but when you say roller guard or when you say tech guru, nowadays you think, oh, they must be a right wing nut or they're a Republican. They're not, when I was in the Clinton administration, I know you were in the cradle at the time, but when I was in the Clinton administration, we were thinking, oh, there's this new tech boom and they're all these cool tech people and they're going to be so cool and different. And you know, you know, turn that to Bill Gates.

4:06But it wasn't turned out, but something has happened. And it matters whether these guys are playing for one team or the other or both. What happened? Yeah, well, I think some of them, some of the big names that we've heard have been public about their different thought processes over the years, switching from Democrat to Republican and particularly in this Trump administration. It is so challenging in the context of AI because it's moving so fast. Crypto is also adjacent to this in terms of the feeling and the investments out there and how administrations were handling it. I think what's hard about all of it is that at the end of the day, you know, for Democrats, we have to get past an anti or for this. Like this is happening. And I think the question is what do real governance frameworks look like where you want innovation and you want to make things

5:07easier for people that want to make life better for people in our economy. And then you also have the other side of this, which is we still have to protect consumers. And the question is how do we live in both of those spaces? And we need to do both. And I think what's been really hard is we have not been crystal clear about making that the goal. And so without really talking about making life easier for people that want to use AI or other tools to make things easier for people in society, like when you think of like the startup entrepreneurs, all of those people, a lot of them when I talk to them, like they just feel left behind in these conversations about, you know, when they're trying to raise money, when they're trying to move what is breakthrough technologies forward, they people have run into the government and they either feel like they run into a permitting process, they run into bureaucracy process, all of these things. And it's that feeling of are the

6:09Democrats with me on making life easier. And so I think you can do both. It's just been really hard to articulate that. And certainly people have made decisions about where to put their dollars, where to have access and things like that, which has been unfortunate. Yeah, but you know, I mean, is it really just that simple, you know, the Republicans, Donald Trump, I mean, Trump's whole approach to governance is if you donate money to my campaign, I'll do whatever you want. Yeah. But one of one subset of that is that the Mark and Dresons and the Peter Teals and Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison, who've all sort of signed up to be team Trump on AI. What their prescription is for AI is let us do whatever we want, no rules. And in fact, let's write rules that ensure that there are no rules. And Democrats occasionally say things like while we have to protect IP or we need to protect children or let's not have autonomous

7:16weapons platforms going off and killing people like in the movie Terminator. And so they're then viewed as, you know, being heavy handed regulators. Is that the dividing line? Is there not a subset to that? And I'm, you know, tipping the hand of where I think the answer goes, which is if the federal government doesn't regulate things, that doesn't mean they won't get regulated, you know, the get regulated in states, the get regulated in cities, that creates a patchwork, that's actually worse for companies that want to grow. Isn't, isn't, isn't there a problem of the federal government sitting this out that these people realize? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, as you've seen them shift over the years, I think a lot of them would say, well, we've tried it in earlier administrations. We've been really supportive of different democratic administrations. And yes, there is an extreme, which I think in terms of access and the paying for certain dinners

8:22and things like that to get your point across, which seems really not in the spirit of what government is supposed to be doing. But what I would say is that the, we've not necessarily, even in the intervening time provided any framework of things, you know, our, our current leadership has not necessarily, nor do they have to about what they want to see happen with innovation. If you remember, I believe it was 2023, 2024, there was Senate, you know, convenings that the leadership was doing across academia and all of, and, and different companies to hear everyone's perspective. But again, what's so hard is, particularly around regulation, when big companies ask for things, there really is a layer where sometimes they are trying to lock in what is essentially a monopoly for themselves and block out early startup players. And so you also have to be careful about that. And so the actual expertise, I mean, people forget in, in the government

9:24at the time when the last administration was in place, only 2% of people had really AI-related backgrounds in terms of understanding the technology even at that level in order to regulate it. So, um, so there was a lot of different things happening. I don't think it's easy to, um, you know, we're not here to castigate blame. Well, sometimes, you know, we are, yeah, no, go ahead, go ahead. But I think what is more concerning in all of this is that they're at least what I see even on the venture side is there's just when I go out to Silicon Valley and, you know, in this bicostal space that there's so much capital flowing to the people at the top that, um, soon, you know, we're talking about billionaires and how much money billion have billionaires have compared to the average person. And soon they're going to be trillionaires. And we are in a time period where also connected to this is the Supreme Court, you know, making it easier and easier to not disclose

10:30money in politics. There's there's more court cases coming up this summer. And it's, it's really scary to think about this much capital flowing and people being able to influence things at a trillionaire level, um, in a way that feels something that we can't really wrap our, um, arms around. And so all of these things keep me up at night for sure. Well, I mean, are these tech guys, the robber barons of this era? I mean, you know, is that, I mean, should we see it that, I mean, the, the first trillionaires going to be Elon, we saw him fuck the government up to a fairly well. But, you know, we see Peter Teal and, and, and what's his psychic car? You know, they go, they go out there and Peter Teal's like talking about the anti-Christ and carp is talking about, you know, AI is a good thing because, you know, it'll keep women in the kitchen. And it's like, what the fuck? You know, are these, I mean, is this a class of people that we really need to worry

11:32about having that much power? Yeah, I think any society should worry about, I mean, that's literally why they, they talk about oligarchies and, and things like that where people, um, they're the, the disparity, and we see this in other countries too, where the disparity is so wide between the people at the top and the people, um, that, or consider middle class that'll soon, you know, in the future, be considered at the bottom. And the lived experience at that point is so far from reality. Um, it becomes almost next impossible to figure out how to help anybody have economic mobility at that point. And so, I think what worries me connected to all of this is that we don't have, as we're, we're having these conversations about, um, you know, whether we stop something or do something or what we should do, there's this, the growing inequality makes it harder to sit down, even with the people at what would be considered the top, because their own lived experience is going

12:35to be so out of touch with what the rest of society needs, that it's hard to then have a dialogue about how to lift up the rest of the country. This podcast is underwritten in part by the US Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. Its editorial content is completely independent, and the views expressed are exclusively those of participating experts. It is presented live without editing. For further information about the UAE's efforts in the areas of artificial intelligence and technology, go to the website of the embassy at www.uae-embusy.org and search for UAE-US Tech Cooperation. We thank them for their support, we thank everybody who's supporting this podcast for their support, and we look forward to it developing and growing over time because the issue is so important.

13:39Before we get to what a sensible, balanced, pro-growth, pro-healthy AI strategy looks like, which is ultimately where I'd like to go with this. You go and participate in classes and things that Stanford and other places, and one of the things that I see is that when you talk to under 30, under 25 students, the group that should be the most open-minded, inter-technological advancement, comfortable with technological advancement, they've almost become binary on AI. They've almost gotten to the point where it's like, AI bad. It is a threat to us. And so, first of all, am I overstating that? Secondly, how do we deal with that? It's the opposite of what you would expect, right? Normally, the olds are against progress,

14:43and the younger people are for embracing it. What's going on here? Yeah. Well, I will tell you this, which is so much of it comes down to, I've spent my career last few decades thinking about really the heart of policy, and so much of this is a matter of dignity, and where people see themselves in the future. And what you're seeing in society now is young people not being able to see a future that they can be part of. And for older people, I mean, just as an example, I saw statistic very recently that 29% of parents, like right now, are, they think it's way more important to say, but for a down payment for their child, for a house, than it is to pay for tuition, for college. And what that tells me, and it should tell many people- Are you doing that? You have kids. Are you seeing them for their house?

15:48I mean, we've not had that conversation. Our oldest is 13. He's got to rough it out somehow, but I do think that there's a lot of anxiety going on. I mean, we'll talk to any parent today. By the way, that is, I mean, you know, we should make some money. We should start a bank, because you know, how there are these tax-free things where you can save for college. Yeah. They should start up tax-free accounts where you can save for its down payments. Yeah. Yeah. That would be really good, right? Yeah. Any bankers listening out there, Rohini knows how to do this, call her. Yes, exactly. Just play on different people's anxieties. So that's exactly many people become millionaires in society and billionaires. But I do think that we have to take a step back, like the solutions that we're trying to propose to people. You know, AI has exacerbated a lot of things in society, both in terms of anxiety,

16:48and also we have a very fragile ecosystem. There is no question like across whether it's our safety net system, like do people have health care for most people in America, your health care is tied to your job, for other people, they're paying essentially over a mortgage for their health care every month with high deductibles. So this is not necessarily a system that is, you know, there is fragility that that is definitely inherent. And so for young people, what they're looking at is, you know, right now you can talk to anyone and they're applying for jobs and they just get this immediate bounce back. And it's like an AI system has just like not even scanned your resume. They apply for these things and they keep hitting send. And it's different. I think we have to acknowledge that the world for them looks really different. And it can be really cruel. And we have to have these kind of acknowledgments because as more people

17:49at the top keep doing well or older people, it's going to be harder to relate because you're only going off of your own set of lived experiences. So telling kids like just try harder or learn AI and it'll all figure itself out, that user experience that they're experiencing is real. Yeah, I think, you know, you're really onto something which I most people don't talk about, which is the cultural impediments or the social impediments to embracing technological change. Because technological change involves dislocation. And if you have a society that is prone to anxiety because dislocation causes pain, then you tend to shy away from it. And it's almost as if we as a society are leaning away from this next phase of technological transformation in the world in every way possible. We don't provide people with free education like every other country in the world. We don't provide people with free health career like every other country in the world.

18:51We don't set up standards, science and math and other kinds of standards that ensure that kids are up to meeting these challenges. We are dismantling the Department of Education. We are dismantling social programs that help people. We're making it harder for people to come here and study. We're getting rid of research and development programs. It is really, you know, we're sort of embracing Darwinian capitalism at precisely the moment that the countries that are leaping ahead are doing the opposite, whether that's China or Europe or, you know, places like the UAE or Singapore, all of those places are taking literally the opposite approach to what we are. That seems to me that there is an opportunity for a Democrat to stand up and say, I am pro-growth, pro-sanity, pro-regulations that ensure the growth, pro-investment in people,

19:55pro-investment in science, pro-investment in tech, pro-investment in infrastructure that would be very, very different and what is called for at this moment. And yet, do I hear it? No, I don't. So what's going on? Well, I do think, I think next year we will start hearing some of these. You know, there's a lot of people I think thinking about running for president that are still trying to flush out what they want their different platforms to be or, you know, whether they'll even want to impress them. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day, a very serious person. And they were like, well, we have 18 or 19 people that we're tracking at this point. And that's just the politicians. And I was like, just the politicians, what are you talking about? And he said, this is a very serious person, who you know? And he said, well, you know, there's some celebrities that are thinking of it. And I'm like, what the fuck? What is going on here? We're at the world is at the beginning of a dislocation, a transformation

21:03bigger than the industrial revolution that could mean whether the US rises or falls. And we are completely disorganized. Yeah. Sorry. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. I mean, listen, the, the, I mean, we, we have to be open to lots of different ideas from people. And that is what a primary is for. And so, yes, we could be in a world. I guess actually we'd end up at like 30 people. So the 18 to 19 kind of tracks with, well, then you throw in Colbert and Michelle Obama and Kim Kardashian and whoever else is. Right. Right. So, but I do think that the, you know, as somebody that has done presidential campaign sitting on the other end of trying to flesh out, you know, you don't flesh out everything. You don't have to necessarily have a position on everything, but this will be around when we talk about AI job displacement, all of those issues. There's a fine balance because the way people

22:08experience job displacement may not look the exact same in the sense the last time when we've had it in the past, like when you think of manufacturing, it's not a plant shutting down. And so the experience you get can feel very alone and isolating. And so, even those, even that acknowledgement that people may be experiencing this, you know, people are getting laid off sometimes, you know, 20 years, just on a Zoom call, right? And so we have to really think about what this means. You're wondering why I asked you here today for this Zoom call, right? Exactly. And so, and so we really need to think through what, what are we going to do about this? Because also, you know, remember, AI can also, when you pull the curtain back, it can just be exacerbating workers rights issues. It could be exacerbating other spaces too. What I can tell you is that even from my time in Stanford, I mean, we were ruthless about

23:09keeping human centered AI at the forefront. It's literally in the name. It's how, you know, and going across schools and using the best expertise. But on the flip side, you know, the way that people will present pitches to venture companies, venture funds about trying to get funding, you know, they would say, well, we talked to the CEO and if this helped drive productivity. And there's a lot of other lingo that they use, which is really, yes, they are automating processes. But they're also, it's possible to automate people too and workers. And so those things are getting funded. So we have to be realistic about, you know, not just designing policies that way, but even in the words of, you know, future presidents able to understand that this is already happening too. And that we have to be thinking about the worker at the center and what their life looks like because I agree, like, yes, there will be future employment that looks different in

24:10ways that we can't necessarily describe or predict. That's what technology does. But there will also be displacement and it just, it won't look the same as manufacturing, leaving the US or things like that. America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first, nearly three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us. Will we let them or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures. Let's stop Washington to keep us in the lead. Learn how at americacures.com, paid for by Farma. It's tax season and at life lock, we know you're tired of numbers. But here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. One hundred million. That's how many data points life lock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed. One last big number.

25:15Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. What's also interesting, right? To AI two and a half years ago, chat GPT launches. Before that, there was a community of AI people. They'd been working on this for decades. That had accelerated in this century. There had been some big breakthroughs. But the average person was not aware of it except from Terminator movie, right? Then all of a sudden, chat GPT, everybody becomes aware of it. But as you said, 2% of people in Washington knew about it. None of those 2% I don't believe 95% of them actually knew much, right? So now, we're getting to a completely different point. I don't think people fully get this. But for example, the leading candidate or one of the two leading candidates for Congressional seat in New York City is a guy who's the AI guru of the state legislature who's running on his

26:17knowledge of AI. Because when younger voters, and then in 2020, eight election as I often point out, half of the voters will be born since 1990. For that group of people, AI is not the internet. It's not, it's not what millennials or boomers thought of at the internet. AI changes whether you have a job, what a job looks like, how you make money, whether what competition looks like, who is looking at you, what the news is, what healthcare is, what science is, what it changes everything. And so all of a sudden, you've got this issue that nobody knew about two and a half years ago that could very well be central. Am I overstating that? Is it, I mean, answer this question. Do you think there can be a Democratic candidate or a Republican candidate for president in 2028, who does not understand the centrality of AI and

27:22make it the core issue? I think you could get decently far only if it really depends on how much the public is experiencing at the time. And so, you know, I'm sure take any poll right now. We know that AI is deploying in different places. I just mentioned to you the statistic about the parents and things like that. But at the same time, I'm sure every poll says, oh, affordability is number one. And that is actually a direct result of lots of different things interacting, social safety net, things happening in the world. And so we're always going to be tied to these different reactions from the public about what the American dream is, whether they're experiencing it, whether they feel like it's completely out of reach, all of those, you know, again, like they're placed in the world and that anxiety about whether they have one. And then

28:23this piece of AI that's actually just happening in the private sector and the government's decisions about how they want to move things forward or what they want to protect. So there's a lot that happens behind the scenes and most people don't even know. So they feel what is so challenging about the issue is they just feel like things are happening to them. There's very few people that feel like, oh, I'm on the, you know, it's a very different life for people. For example, like working at a tech company in San Francisco or Seattle versus people that are, you know, in some other city or suburban or rural locations that they're just, you know, still very cautious about what they should be doing and using and issues about security, data, all of those things. So it's different experiences in different parts of the country, for sure. Yeah, but, you know, I'm the first to acknowledge that I'm an old, right? I was in the Clinton administration, but I also have a big believer that political leaders are strongest when they don't have to explain who they are.

29:26They're strongest when somebody looks at them and says, ah, you know, and that's, you know, you have all these national security dams who were in the CIA or they were in the military, the Abigail Spanburg or Mikey Cheryl, Lisa Slotkin and so they don't have to go and say I'm tough as other Democrats do because they're tough. And, you know, I think going forward with affordability as the issue, I think affordability is an issue, but honestly, I don't think it's very sexy as because it's kind of negative. I think growth, opportunity, where is the future, et cetera, et cetera. That's a, that's a better issue. Saying that you're for those things is one thing. But if somebody is able to convey that they get where the economy is going because they have been a leader on issues like this and at the same time that they're not a tool of volunteer or whatever, that, that to me is going to be a sweet spot. And the analogy I think of is 1992. Bill Clinton picks Al Gore as a running mate. They're these two young guys comparatively

30:35for politicians. They go get on a bus. They drive across the country after the, after the convention. And, and the Al Gore is talking about the information super highly seems kind of dated. But people are like, oh my god, these guys are about the future of the economy. They're young, they look like it. They feel like it. They seem to understand it. And they want. And I think, you know, Barack Obama, when Barack Obama ran, he was like, he didn't look like any other candidate we'd ever seen before. So he sort of embodied progress in a different kind of a way. And it's hard for me to imagine how you end up with a candidate who embodies progress, who doesn't grapple with these issues. Yeah, I mean, I do think, you know, there is, there's no question that in your painting of the future, you, you can't not think about, you know, how, what does it look

31:35like when I say that that family has a, you know, that the people in the family have access to a job, a meaningful job that can pay their bills, all of those things. AI will be part of it. It doesn't necessarily have to be the driving thing in the speech, or like your initial stump campaign, but it certainly is going to be things that will be asked. It will be a question because it's, it's currently shaping our future, whether we realize it or not. And so you can imagine a world in which, you know, to your, to your friends point, 18 or 19 people, there are 18 or 19 plans on what they would do to govern, uh, things like that if they got into the White House. And so I could definitely see it, but I, I don't know if we're necessarily at the part yet when we're acknowledging, unless people feel like, oh, I've directly either lost my job or my job is at risk because of AI. I feel like there's more, I can sense it a bit more from people that I know who are

32:35out on the West Coast and how some of the tech companies are talking about AI. There are other companies that are, but right now it appears that we're in a time where a lot of companies are making the decision to just not hire as many people versus, um, ones that, um, decide to do big laughs. There's definitely still happening, but again, that's why I think we can't look at previous, um, uh, periods of history because it, it won't look the same, right? It's not going to be one, a factory moving to Mexico or things like that. And so we have to be a lot more sensitive to how this is happening with people. And there's more danger involved when the person experiences it alone, right? This is how it took so long to do something like the Affordable Care Act. When you suffer something in healthcare, you're like by yourself, you're with your family, like nobody else is experiencing it at the same time. And so it just makes it so much harder to get a full groundswell of this is what we have to do. Well, I, you know, I don't know on this particular

33:39podcast talk about politics that much. And I think we need to talk about it a little more because I think, frankly, the issues are interrelated. One of the issues I'd like to talk about and we don't have time now in this podcast, but I would like to invite you back is to talk about the intersection of AI and healthcare because I think that's really important issue. But in the context of all of this, we do have a stark difference between one party that has said, um, we're going to embrace corporate interests. We're going to move against regulation. We're actually going to move against progress. And a lot of areas where four fossil fuels were not for green energy. We're, you know, we're, for, you know, selling gas cars and not electric cars were, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And we're not pro education. We're not pro science. We're not pro investment in those things. They seem to want to take us back to the economy of 40 years ago. Some, the alternative,

34:42and frankly, I think the only answer to affordability or abundance or any of the other words that people are throwing around is actually seeming to understand where the opportunity is in the future alive and seeming to have a way to get there. And to be honestly, I think part of the AI agenda to go back to your very first point is everybody gets educated from the time they're in pre-K all the way through college and it's affordable or it's free. Everybody has health care so that when there are dislocations and upheavals such as we're going to see coming forward, it's going to be very different from what we've experienced in the past if lots and lots of companies disappear and all your health care has tied to your company. And so, you know, we're finally going to have to bite the bullet and be like the other 34 OECD countries. And that's part of this. But part of it is how do we invest in the technologies? The future? How do we regulate them? And so far, somebody's got to emerge that's got a vision for that. And to my money, that's what the contest

35:46is going to be about. We'll talk about it as we go. And I hope we can talk about it with you regularly because I think you're very smart. And you've got a lot of insights from multiple perspectives. There's not a lot of people who get AI, get politics, get investment, get business in the way that you do. So I hope you'll come back again. But for now, thanks, Rohini. Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me. And everybody, you know, keep watching us each in every week. Subscribe on Substack. Support us by going to the DSRnetwork.com and click on membership and helping to support this kind of independent coverage. Listen to our other AI podcast on energy and climate. And everything else we're doing here. But for now, thanks everybody. Bye bye. This was Siliconciousness, a production of the DSRnetwork.