With help from Christine Mui Hello, and welcome to today’s edition of the Future in Five Questions. For today, I spoke with Jenna Leventoff, a senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union whose work is focused on online speech and access to devices. We discussed the potential constitutional pitfalls of regulating AI deepfakes, the dystopian future of author Hanya Yanagihara and why she thinks the government should ensure every person has reliable access to a computer. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? Section 230 [of the 1996 Communications Decency Act], which is both underrated and underappreciated. A big part of my job is trying to fight congressional attempts to repeal Section 230. Congress says Section 230 is a liability shield — and they don't seem to realize that Section 230 is why we have the free and open internet that we have today. Section 230 is why I can go online, and I can post about my political beliefs, politically organize, I can create content and reach an audience like I’ve never reached before. All of these things are only there because of Section 230. If we didn't have that, the internet wouldn't be a hospitable place for creativity, education, politics or collaboration. Another one is more broad, and this stems from my experience working as a lobbyist for many years: congressional pay. A lot of people on the Hill don't make a living wage. That’s bad for policy and for diversity. If you're not making a living wage, you're not going to stay and we lose this institutional knowledge, and people who actually understand how technology works. You’re losing people who are helping their bosses understand how this technology works. And it’s a diversity issue, because it’s so hard for some people to stay on the Hill if they don't have a financial backstop. People can't take these jobs that are so beneficial for society because they can't afford to. Our policy landscape would be a better place if we could have a wider variety of people. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? AI is both overhyped and a little bit under-hyped. I do a lot of work on deepfakes. Policymakers think deepfakes are new, and shiny and scary. But in most cases deepfakes are just speech. In Congress they’re itching to ban deepfakes and they're not stopping to think about if they would do the same thing for spoken words that aren't AI-generated. At the same time, AI is being used to make these life-changing decisions about people. Contractors are using it to determine Medicaid benefits, and there's faulty identity matching that flags people as criminals when they're not. I think the focus within AI is a bit misplaced. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “To Paradise” by Hanya Yanagihara. I was really surprised when I was reading it, how it related to my work thinking about the internet and speech. Part of the book is basically a separate novel, which takes place in this post-pandemic dystopian world where the internet is banned. I took a screenshot of a particularly powerful passage in the book, part of a conversation between two characters wishing that they could do things that aren't allowed in this world, like travel. One character says, why would you even want to think about something that we're not able to do? And then he goes on to say, and I’m paraphrasing, “'I asked my grandfather about the internet, because he was alive before it was banned.' And my grandfather said, 'The problem with the internet was that it often allowed people to exchange that information, untrue things, dangerous things. And after it was forbidden things became safer, because everyone was receiving the same information at the same time.'” Think about that for a minute. Is that what we want for society? There are so many harmful things online. But don't we want the world to be a place where we can make our own decisions and see information? There are so many attempts to stop people from seeing things that could be harmful, but it can go too far. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? The government should be making sure that every person has access to a computer or a tablet. Across the country, 10 percent of households don’t have a single computer. That's not even considering how many schools give computers to their students without which they otherwise wouldn’t have a computer in their house. And it doesn't count how many households rely on one computer split among an entire family, no matter how many members are in it. If you think about that for a second, we spend so much time trying to make sure that people are connected, but you can't connect without a device. Sure, a lot more people have phones, but think about trying to work remotely on your phone. It's so infuriating to me that so many low income households have to decide who can use the computer at any given point. We need to make sure people have a device, and a good device, and to make it a bigger part of the political conversation. What surprised you most in the past year? What Congress did and didn't pass this year. On the one hand, the TikTok ban just sailed through Congress even though it's clearly unconstitutional. It’s going to prevent hundreds of millions of Americans from speaking out. I really thought that the Congress wouldn't want to pass something that's similar to what courts have already struck down, but they did it. Then, Congress hasn't appropriated more funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program. The ACP is so vital. Like, for all the efforts that, you know, again, to regulate the internet, or even to make sure that people have access to it. What good is the internet if you can't afford it, or if you don't have a device? If you build it, they're not going to come. I was truly shocked Congress didn't fund the ACP. I'm an optimist at my core and I really believed that it was coming together at the last minute.
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