77. Josh Fairfield - AI advances, but can the law keep up?

Powered by Moore’s law, and a cluster of related trends, technology has been improving at an exponential pace across many sectors. AI capabilities in particular have been growing at a dizzying pace, and it seems like every year brings us new breakthroughs that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. GPT-3, AlphaFold and DALL-E were developed in the last 12 months — and all of this in a context where the leading machine learning model has been increasing in size tenfold every year for the last decade.

To many, there’s a sharp contrast between the breakneck pace of these advances and the rate at which the laws that govern technologies like AI evolves. Our legal systems are chock full of outdated laws, and politicians and regulators often seem almost comically behind the technological curve. But while there’s no question that regulators face an uphill battle in trying to keep up with a rapidly changing tech landscape, my guest today thinks they have a good shot of doing so — as long as they start to think about the law a bit differently.

His name is Josh Fairfield, and he’s a law and technology scholar and former director of R&D at pioneering edtech company Rosetta Stone. Josh has consulted with U.S. government agencies, including the White House Office of Technology and the Homeland Security Privacy Office, and literally wrote a book about the strategies policymakers can use to keep up with tech like AI.