To give academics and others focused on ai their well-deserved (and long-awaited) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching an interview series focused on notable women who have contributed to the ai revolution. We will publish several articles throughout the year as the rise of ai continues, highlighting key work that often goes unnoticed. Read more profiles here.
Amba Kak is the executive director of the ai Now Institute, where she helps create policy recommendations to address concerns about ai. She was also a senior ai advisor at the Federal Trade Commission and previously worked as a global policy advisor at Mozilla and legal advisor to India's telecom regulator on net neutrality.
Briefly, how did you get started in ai? What attracted you to the field?
It is not a simple question because “ai” is a trendy term to describe practices and systems that have been evolving for a long time; I have been working in technology policy for more than a decade and in many parts of the world and I witnessed when everything revolved around “big data” and then everything revolved around “ai”. But the core questions we were concerned about – how data-driven technologies and economies impact society – remain the same.
These questions attracted me from the beginning in law school in India, where, amid a sea of decades, sometimes centuries-old precedents, I found it motivating to work in an area where “pre-political” questions, normative questions What is the world we want? What role should technology play in this? Remain open and debatable. Globally, at the time, the big debate was whether the Internet could be regulated at the national level (which now seems very obvious, yes!), and in India there were heated debates about whether a biometric identification database of the entire population was creating a dangerous vector of social control. In the face of narratives of inevitability around ai and technology, I believe regulation and promotion can be a powerful tool to shape technology trajectories to serve public interests rather than corporate bottom lines. or simply the interests of those who have power in society. . Of course, over the years, I have also learned that regulation is often completely co-opted by these interests and can often work to maintain the status quo rather than challenge it. So that's the job!
What work are you most proud of (in the field of ai)?
Our ai Landscape 2023 report was released in April amid a crescendo of chatGPT-fueled ai rumors: it was partly a diagnosis of what should keep us up at night about the ai economy, in part an action-oriented manifesto aimed at the wider civil society community. . It came to a time, a time when both diagnosis and what to do about it were missing, and in their place were narratives about the omniscience and inevitability of ai. We highlighted that the rise of ai was further entrenching the concentration of power within a very small sector of the technology industry, and I believe we managed to overcome the hype to refocus attention on the impacts of ai on society and the economy. ..and not assuming any of the this was inevitable.
Later in the year, we were able to take this argument to a room full of government leaders and senior ai executives at the UK ai Security Summit, where I was one of only three civil society voices representing the interest public. It's been a lesson in realizing the power of a compelling counternarrative that refocuses attention when it's easy to get carried away by curated and often self-serving narratives of the tech industry.
I'm also very proud of much of the work I did during my tenure as Chief Counsel to the Federal Trade Commission on ai, working on emerging technology issues and some of the key enforcement actions in that space. It was an incredible team to be a part of, and I also learned the crucial lesson that even one person in the right room at the right time can really make a difference in influencing policymaking.
How do you address the challenges of the male-dominated tech industry and, by extension, the male-dominated ai industry?
The tech industry, and ai in particular, remains overwhelmingly white and male and geographically concentrated in very wealthy urban bubbles. But I like to stay away from the white male problem with ai not only because it is now well known but also because it can sometimes create the illusion of quick fixes or diversity theater that alone will not solve structural inequalities and power imbalances. inherent to how the technology industry currently operates. It does not resolve the deeply ingrained “solutionism” that is responsible for many harmful or exploitative uses of technology.
The real problem we must face is the creation of a small group of companies and, within them, a handful of individuals who have accumulated unprecedented access to capital, networks and power, reaping the fruits of the business model of surveillance that fueled the Last Decade of the Internet. And this concentration of power is expected to get much worse with ai. These individuals act with impunity, even when the platforms and infrastructure they control have enormous social and economic impacts.
How do we navigate this? Exposing the power dynamics that the tech industry works hard to hide. We talk about the incentives, infrastructures, labor markets and environment that drive these waves of technology and shape the direction they will take. This is what we've been doing at ai Now for almost a decade, and when we get it right, we find it difficult for policymakers and the public to look the other way, creating counter-narratives and alternative imaginations about the appropriate role of technology. within society.
What advice would you give to women looking to enter the field of ai?
For women, but also other minority identities or perspectives looking to make critiques from outside the ai industry, the best advice I can give is to stand your ground. This is a field that will routinely and systematically try to discredit criticism, especially when it comes from non-traditionally STEM backgrounds, and it's easy to do given that ai is such an opaque industry that it can make you feel like you're always trying to push back from the bottom. abroad. Even when you've been in the field for decades like I have, powerful voices in the industry will try to undermine you and your valid criticism simply because you're challenging the status quo.
You and I have as much right to weigh in on the future of ai as Sam Altman, as the technologies will affect us all and potentially disproportionately affect people of minority identities in harmful ways. Right now, we're in a fight over who can claim expertise and authority on technology issues within society… so we really need to claim that space and hold our ground.
