To present AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time within the highlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews specializing in remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces all year long because the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that usually goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here.
Amba Kak is the manager director of the AI Now Institute, where she helps create policy recommendations to deal with AI concerns. She was also a senior AI advisor on the Federal Trade Commission and previously worked as a world policy advisor at Mozilla and a legal advisor to India’s telecom regulator on net-netruality.
Briefly, how did you get your start in AI? What attracted you to the sphere?
It’s not an easy query because “AI” is a term that’s in vogue to explain practices and systems which have been evolving for a very long time now; I’ve been working on technology policy for over a decade and in multiple parts of the world and witnessed when every thing was about “big data,” after which every thing became about “AI”. However the core issues we were concerned with — how data-driven technologies and economies impact society — remain the identical.
I used to be drawn to those questions early on in law school in India where, amid a sea of a long time, sometimes century-old precedent, I discovered it motivating to work in an area where the “pre-policy” questions, the normative questions of what’s the world we would like? What role should technology play in it? Remain open-ended and contestable. Globally, on the time, the massive debate was whether the web might be regulated on the national level in any respect (which now looks like a really obvious, yes!), and in India, there have been heated debates about whether a biometric ID database of the whole population was making a dangerous vector of social control. Within the face of narratives of inevitability around AI and technology, I feel regulation and advocacy could be a powerful tool to shape the trajectories of tech to serve public interests moderately than the underside lines of corporations or simply the interests of those that hold power in society. After all, through the years, I’ve also learned that regulation is usually entirely co-opted by these interests too, and might often function to take care of the established order moderately than challenge it. In order that’s the work!
What work are you most pleased with (within the AI field)?
Our 2023 AI Landscape report was released in April within the midst of a crescendo of chatGPT-fueled AI buzz — was part diagnosis of what should keep us up at night concerning the AI economy, part action-oriented manifesto aimed toward the broader civil society community. It met the moment — a moment when each the diagnosis and what to do about it were sorely missing, and as an alternative were narratives about AI’s omniscience and inevitability. We underscored that the AI boom was further entrenching the concentration of power inside a really narrow section of the tech industry, and I feel we successfully pierced through the hype to reorient attention to AI’s impacts on society and on the economy… and never assume any of this was inevitable.
Later within the yr, we were in a position to bring this argument to a room filled with government leaders and top AI executives on the UK AI Safety Summit, where I used to be one in all only three civil society voices representing the general public interest. It’s been a lesson in realizing the ability of a compelling counter-narrative that refocuses attention when it’s easy to get swept up in curated and infrequently self-serving narratives from the tech industry.
I’m also really pleased with a variety of the work I did during my term as Senior Advisor to the Federal Trade Commission on AI, working on emerging technology issues and among the key enforcement actions in that domain. It was an incredible team to be a component of, and I also learned the crucial lesson that even one person in the correct room at the correct time really could make a difference in influencing policymaking.
How do you navigate the challenges of the male-dominated tech industry and, by extension, the male-dominated AI industry?
The tech industry, and AI particularly, stays overwhelmingly white and male and geographically concentrated in very wealthy urban bubbles. But I wish to reframe away from AI’s white dude problem not simply because it’s now well-known but in addition because it may sometimes create the illusion of quick fixes or diversity theater that on their very own won’t solve the structural inequalities and power imbalances embedded in how the tech industry currently operates. It doesn’t solve the deep-rooted “solutionism” that’s liable for many harmful or exploitative uses of tech.
The actual issue we’d like to contend with is the creation of a small group of corporations and, inside those — a handful of people which have amassed unprecedented access to capital, networks, and power, reaping the rewards of the surveillance business model that powered the last decade of the web. And this concentration of power is tipped to get much, much worse with AI. These individuals act with impunity, at the same time as the platforms and infrastructures they control have enormous social and economic impacts.
How can we navigate this? By exposing the ability dynamics that the tech industry tries very hard to hide. We talk concerning the incentives, infrastructures, labor markets, and the environment that power these waves of technology and shape the direction it is going to take. That is what we’ve been doing at AI Now for near a decade, and once we do that well, we discover it difficult for policymakers and the general public to look away — creating counter-narratives and alternative imaginations for the suitable role of technology inside society.
What advice would you give to women searching for to enter the AI field?
For ladies, but in addition for other minoritized identities or perspectives searching for to make critiques from outside the AI industry, the perfect advice I could give is to face your ground. It is a field that routinely and systematically will try to discredit critique, especially when it comes from not traditionally STEM backgrounds – and it’s easy to do on condition that AI is such an opaque industry that could make you’re feeling such as you’re at all times attempting to beat back from the skin. Even once you’ve been in the sphere for a long time like I even have, powerful voices within the industry will attempt to undermine you and your valid critique just because you’re difficult the established order.
You and I even have as much of a say in the long run of AI as Sam Altman does because the technologies will impact us all and potentially will disproportionately impact people of minoritized identities in harmful ways. Straight away, we’re in a fight for who gets to say expertise and authority on matters of technology inside society… so we actually need to say that space and hold our ground.
