EP 05: Lawrence Lessig on Corruption, AI, and the Need to Rethink Everything

When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me:

Thank you for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy.

I was lost without it, but now I'm found!

Endless gratitude

Man did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.

Thanks for listening to The Rip Current podcast! This episode is available immediately to paid subscribers, and free subscribers get it a week later. Send it to someone in your life who thinks about technology, democracy, or corruption.

At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.

Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe