March 2016

The first-ever head of a small federal privacy watchdog is resigning this summer, a year and a half before his term ends in 2018. The surprise announcement from David Medine, chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), will leave a hole at the top of the five-member board, which has been instrumental to shining a light on the National Security Agency (NSA).

President Barack Obama said that Medine’s tenure took place “during an especially momentous period, coinciding with a concerted examination of our national security tools and policies to ensure they are consistent with my administration's commitment to civil liberties and individual privacy. “Under David's leadership, the PCLOB's thoughtful analysis and considered input has consistently informed my decision-making and that of my team, and our country is better off because of it,” President Obama added. The privacy board has served as a crucial tool for critics of the NSA’s expansive surveillance powers in the years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks about the agency. Medine came to the PCLOB after stints at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He had also worked in the White House’s National Economic Council, the Federal Trade Commission and the law firm WilmerHale. His resignation will take effect July 1. The privacy board said that Medine will leave his post to work at a development organization focusing on data privacy and consumer protection issues for people in developing countries. Medine said that he will continue his work on the board until he leaves office. It's unclear whether the executive order analysis will be finished by the time he leaves.

[Commentary] Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley pioneer who died recently at age 79, was many things: a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and refugee of Cold War Eastern Europe, a keen scientific thinker with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, an innovator who became CEO of Intel, and a bestselling management theorist. Yet the side of Grove’s success that has received scant notice—even though Grove himself repeatedly acknowledged it—is the huge debt that he and the industry he led owed to US public policy.

Grove came to the United States just as massive federal investments were transforming the nation into the world’s scientific superpower. He then flourished at two public institutions, City College of New York and the University of California Berkeley, that were part of a spectacular post-war expansion of higher education. These enormous public investments both promoted fundamental research and educated a new generation of innovators who could exploit that expanding knowledge. In the wake of Grove’s death, observes Wired, “The tech industry has come together to mourn the loss of Andy Grove,” as well it should. Yet in addition to celebrating Grove’s many achievements, the industry should also be celebrating the farsighted policies that helped make those achievements possible—policies that are now not just widely forgotten but under broad assault. Even more important, the industry and its allies should see in Grove’s remarkable life an inspiration for reviving the active government role in the knowledge economy on which future Andy Groves—and American prosperity more broadly—depend.

[Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University. Paul Pierson is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley]

[Commentary] The voices of women – and their creators’ ingrained concepts of modern womanhood – are leading the AI frontier. But we have no reason to believe that the male-dominated technology industry understands us at all. Siri and her cohort, for example, know how to respond to health crises such as suicidality but do not know what rape is. These robot women have no answer for questions about domestic violence, like a community of real women would. Siri’s makers had apparently not thought about emergencies primarily relevant to women. In fact, Siri even insists she has no gender – but women’s speech is more than just voice sound – it purportedly involves word choices, too. They conditioned a woman and then attempted to neutralize her. The industry wants to use women’s voices but still has no plans to actually listen to them.

If empathy is core to the future of artificial intelligence, worry not – the Singularity is still quite a way off, no matter how many terrifying Holocaust-denying, racist, anti-feminist white millennial-bots Microsoft “accidentally” spawns.