2024-06-13 –, Room A - IJzaal
Across the world, civil society, everyday people, and governments are responding to the AI hype with a real interest in building robust regulatory systems with updated laws responding to the opportunities and ongoing challenges that AI poses to our economy and society. One major area of necessary reform is the concentration of power, data, and resources built into the core infrastructure of AI that magnifies and exacerbates downstream harms—without addressing this concentration of power, AI will only continue the anti-democratic trends that we’ve seen run rampant in the tech sector to date.
At this critical juncture, we’re at a choicepoint: do we continue to let AI grow in scale unregulated, or do we harness the power of this emergent technology to build a new political economy of AI that allows for broad-based prosperity?
Together, we'll explore the different approaches that global jurisdictions from the United States and European Union to India and across the Global South have embraced to rein in concentrated power in AI. Join us to discuss:
- How is power currently concentrated across the AI stack and infrastructure?
- What are the regulatory mechanisms, including antitrust law and industrial policy, that governments across the globe can embrace to rebalance power?
- What can we learn from renewed commitments from around the world to govern AI and ensure a public interest approach to building AI?
- What engagement do we need from civil society and everyday people to create the conditions for these policies and regulations to succeed? How are movements and civil society in different countries reclaiming power from tech and building a world where all of us can thrive in the age of AI?
- What are the lessons and parallels we can draw from the international context to pave the way for a publicly oriented tech ecosystem that passes laws and regulations to constrain the unchecked power of AI and create more space to deliver AI as a democratically accountable public good?
- What does history offer in lessons on how to regulate information technologies to benefit society and deliver broad-based access and prosperity?
Becky Chao is the Research Director for the Build the Field team at Economic Security Project. In this role, she leads research that creates the conditions for policy change and paradigm shift in guaranteed income and marketshaping. Previously, she was the Director of Antimonopoly at ESP, where she organized resources, ideas, and people across policy, grassroots, academic, and philanthropic spaces to build a sustained, robust antimonopoly movement.
Her work has been driven by an interest in exploring how corporate power, law, and policy structure people’s lives and society at large and building a fair, democratic, and egalitarian political economy. She was previously a fellow and policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, where her research and advocacy focused on antitrust and tech/telecom issues, privacy, and broadband competition. Prior to joining New America, she worked on antitrust cases and merger review across a variety of sectors as an honors paralegal at the Federal Trade Commission.
Andrea is a consultant providing strategy and coaching for social justice organizations and leaders, focusing on labor, tech, and economic justice.
Andrea has three decades of experience as a labor organizer and campaign strategist. She has worked at Unite-HERE, SEIU, and UFCW. She co-founded and led United for Respect, a national organization building power for people working in retail jobs by centering their voices, experiences, and solutions in the national movement fighting for the future of work, our economy, and corporate regulation. Andrea has played a leadership role in campaigns that have won major victories with people working in the most unstable and precarious low-wage service jobs, from janitors to hotel and retail workers. Andrea leverages these critical advances and learnings for organizing and campaigning that challenge concentrated corporate power and leverages technology and internet-based activation to support working people build power and voice.