Comment by acdha
2 years ago
> The feds can't even handle basic matters like net neutrality or municipal broadband or foreign propaganda on social media.
Those aren’t capability issues but questions of political leadership: federal agencies can only work within the powers and budgets Congress grants them. We lost network neutrality because 3 Republicans picked the side of the large ISPs, not because government technologists didn’t understand the issue. Municipal broadband is a state issue until Congress acts, and that hasn’t happened due to a blizzard of lobbying money preventing it. The FCC has plenty of people who know the problems and in the current and second-most-recent administration were trying to do something about it, but their knowledge doesn’t trump the political clout of huge businesses.
Foreign propaganda is similar: we have robust freedom of speech rights in the United States, not to mention one of the major political parties having embraced that propaganda - government employees who did spend years fighting it were threatened and even lost jobs because their actions were perceived as disloyalty to the Republican Party.
> Why do you think they suddenly have AI people? Why would AI researchers want to work in that environment?
Because I know some of the people working in that space?
Well, exactly. Nobody expects the White House to do technical development for AI, but they've unable to exercise "political leadership" on anything digital for decades. I don't see that changing.
They're so captured, so weak, so behind the times, so conflicted that they're not really able to do their jobs anymore. Yes, there are are a bunch of reasons for it, but the end result is the same: they are not effective digital regulators, and have never been, and likely won't be for the foreseeable future.
> Because I know some of the people working in that space?
Maybe it looks better to the insiders. From the outside the whole thing seems like a sad joke, just another obvious cash grab regulatory capture.