Innovation Files: Where Tech Meets Public Policy

Facial recognition technology has faced widespread allegations of discrimination in recent years, leading some cities to restrict its use—but exactly how valid are these claims? Rob and Jackie sit down with ITIF’s vice president and director of the Center for Data Innovation, Daniel Castro, to discuss why many of the claims are misleading, and how facial recognition can make public and private services more accessible, efficient, and useful.Mentioned:Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification  (FAT, 2018).Jacob Snow, Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots  (ACLU, 2018).NIST, NIST Study Evaluates Effects of Race, Age, Sex on Face Recognition Software (NIST, 2019).Related:Daniel Castro, Note to Press: Facial Analysis Is Not Facial Recognition (ITIF, 2019).Daniel Castro and Michael McLaughlin, Banning Police Use of Facial Recognition Would Undercut Public Safety (ITIF, 2019).Daniel Castro and Michael McLaughlin, The Critics Were Wrong: NIST Data Shows the Best Facial Recognition Algorithms Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist (ITIF, 2020).Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, ITIF Technology Explainer: What Is Facial Recognition? (ITIF, 2020).

Long before Walmart and Amazon, there was A&P—The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company—which started as a mail-order tea business in the Civil War era before displacing Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the 1920s to become the world’s largest retailer. Its pioneering innovations made the mom-and-pop grocery business more efficient and less expensive, and in so doing it pitted consumer and civil rights advocates against small-business groups. Rob and Jackie sat down with historian and economist Marc Levinson, author of The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, to discuss the life and times of the company and how the debates around its growth resemble the antitrust debates we are having again today.Mentioned:Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University Press, 2008).Marc Levinson, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton University Press, 2020).Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (Marc Levinson, 2019).Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind, Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (The MIT Press, 2018).

IBM shaped the way the world did business for decades, driving the government’s technological innovation, competing to build the first PCs, and adapting to service economy. Few people know IBM’s fascinating history as well as Jim Cortada, a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota and the author of IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon. He spent 38 years at IBM in sales, consulting, managerial, and research roles. Rob and Jackie sit down with Jim to discuss how IBM’s strategies led to its biggest successes and failures, and how these decisions shed light on global history.Mentioned:James W. Cortada, IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon(The MIT Press, 2019).James W. Cortada, The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries (Oxford University Press, 2003).Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Belknap Press, 1993).Robert D. Atkinson, “Who Lost Lucent?: The Decline of America’s Telecom Equipment Industry,” American Affairs Journal, 2020.Aurelien Portuese, “The Digital Markets Act: European Precautionary Antitrust“ (ITIF, 2021). 

When it comes to the innovation economy, there is no hotter issue these days than antitrust. Technology companies, in particular, are on the firing line as an increasingly vocal populist movement seeks to refashion late 19th century antitrust laws to guard against monopoly power and slow down disruptive innovation in the digital era. In these conditions, there is a risk that the so-called “precautionary principle” will take hold at the expense of economic dynamism. Rob and Jackie parse the debate and weigh the best options for policymakers with Aurelien Portuese, ITIF’s director of antitrust and innovation policy.Mentioned:Aurelien Portuese, Antitrust Populism: Competition Policy in the Digital Era (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Robert D. Atkinson, “Freedom, Fairness or Flourishing: America’s Fundamental Economic Policy Choice,” American Compass, April 1, 2021.Related:“Dynamic Antitrust With Aurelien Portuese: Discussions on the Future of Competition and Innovation,” ITIF webinar series, March 12, 2021.Aurelien Portuese, “Precautionary Antitrust: A Precautionary Tale in European Competition Policy,” in Law and Economics of Regulation, edited by Mathis, et al. (Springer International Publishing, 2021), DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-70530-5.“Schumpeter v. Brandeis v. Chicago: The Antitrust Debate of Our Times,” ITIF webinar, June 15, 2021.About ITIF’s Schumpeter Project: Competition Policy for the Innovation Economy 

Throughout modern history, public financing has made possible some of the most important and impactful innovations society has enjoyed—from refrigeration to the Internet—and the spillover benefits have been incalculable. But what are the optimal ways for the public sector to intervene in the innovation process to maximize those benefits and solve big problems? Rob and Jackie explore these questions and the implications for science and industrial policy with Dr. Richard Lipsey, emeritus professor of economics at Simon Fraser University.Mentioned:Richard G. Lipsey and Kenneth I. Carlaw, “Industrial Policies: Common Not Rare,” Discussion Papers dp20-11, 2020, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.

When it comes to national innovation ecosystems, Norway has been a standout performer. After discovering oil, it vaulted from being one of Europe’s poorest countries in the 1950s to become a high-wage, high-cost nation with strengths in B2B products, heavy industry, shipping, and shipbuilding. Now it is pivoting toward renewable energy—including offshore wind and electric vehicle technologies—while broadening and deepening its national innovation ecosystem to encourage new firms in a range of industries to scale up and compete globally. Rob and Jackie discuss the secrets of Norway’s success with Hege Barnes, regional director for the Americas at Innovation Norway.Mentioned:World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), also known as the Brundtland Report.Colin Cunliff, “Omission Innovation: The Missing Element in Most Countries’ Response to Climate Change” (ITIF, December 2018).Stephen Ezell, Frank Spring, and Katarzyna Bitka, “The Global Flourishing of National Innovation Foundations” (ITIF, April 2015).

There is a deep disconnect between the U.S. education system and the workplace. How can policymakers bridge the gap and create clear pathways to good jobs? How do technical schools, community colleges, employers, governments, and universities fit together as pieces of the workforce education puzzle—and how can new education technologies help deliver the training workers need? Rob and Jackie discuss the challenges, opportunities, and policy solutions with Professor Sanjay Sarma and Bill Bonvillian of MIT, authors of the new book Workforce Education: A New Roadmap.Mentioned:William B. Bonvillian and Sanjay E. Sarma, Workforce Education: A New Roadmap (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, February 2021).Joe Kennedy, Daniel Castro, Robert D. Atkinson, “Why It’s Time to Disrupt Higher Education by Separating Learning From Credentialing” (ITIF, August 2016).Related:Robert D. Atkinson, “How to Reform Worker-Training and Adjustment Policies for an Era of Technological Change” (ITIF, February 2018).

The “techlash” is a story of extreme pendulum swings—from an era in which splashy product launches earned gushing media reviews to a relentless crisis narrative in which the tech industry is viewed with harsh suspicion. How has this happened? Is it a case of pack journalism run amok, or have tech companies contributed to the narrative with predictable formulas for handling a PR crisis? Rob and Jackie discuss all this with Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a former research fellow at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and author of the new book The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communications.Mentioned:Nirit Weiss-Blatt, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communications (UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021). Patrick Grother, Mei Ngan, and Kayee Hanaoka, Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 3: Demographic Effects, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Interagency Report 8280, December 2019. Related:Robert D. Atkinson, et al., “A Policymaker’s Guide to the ‘Techlash’—What It Is and Why It’s a Threat to Growth and Progress” (ITIF, October 2019).Doug Allen and Daniel Castro, “Why So Sad? A Look at the Change in Tone of Technology Reporting From 1986 to 2013” (ITIF, February 2017).Michael McLaughlin and Daniel Castro, “The Critics Were Wrong: Data Shows the Best Facial Recognition Algorithms Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist” (ITIF, January 2020). 

There is an inordinate amount of hype and fear around artificial intelligence these days, as a chorus of scholars, luminaries, media, and politicians nervously project that it could soon take our jobs and subjugate or even kills us off. Others are just as fanciful in hoping it is on the verge of solving all our problems. But the truth is AI isn’t nearly as advanced as most people imagine. What is the practical reality of AI today, and how should government approach AI policy to maximize its potential? To parse the hype, the hope, and the path forward for AI, Rob and Jackie sat down recently with Pedro Domingos, emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Washington and author of The Master Algorithm.Mentioned:Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, 2015).Robert D. Atkinson, “The 2015 ITIF Luddite Award Nominees: The Worst of the Year’s Worst Innovation Killers” (ITIF, December 2015).Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1990).Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osbourne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” (University of Oxford, September 17, 2013).Michael McLaughlin and Daniel Castro, “The Critics Were Wrong: NIST Data Shows the Best Facial Recognition Algorithms Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist” (ITIF, January 2020).“The Case for Killer Robots,” ITIF Innovation Files podcast with Robert Marks, August 10, 2020.

In the final weeks of the Trump administration, Rob and Jackie sat down with Dan Wang, a technology analyst and China expert at Gavekal Dragonomics Research, to discuss the successes and failures of Chinese industrial policy and to evaluate the impact of U.S. export restrictions. In the previous four years, there weren’t many Chinese tech companies that the Trump administration didn’t sanction or at least threaten. What did that achieve in the technological race with China? What was the impact on the American brand writ large? And what should the Biden administration do next?Mentioned:Dan Wang, “New U.S. Restrictions Will Help Make China Great Again” (Bloomberg Opinion, December 18, 2020).Dan Wang’s website, danwang.co. Related:Stephen Ezell and Caleb Foote, “How Stringent Export Controls on Emerging Technologies Would Harm the U.S. Economy” (ITIF, May 2019).