Raffi Krikorian has led the platform team at Twitter, directed Uber’s self-driving efforts, worked as the top tech executive at the Democratic National Committee, and presently serves as the CTO of Emerson Collective. He’s taking that broad expertise and setting his sights on AI ethics.
Krikorian, whose new podcast Technically Optimistic will feature his conversations with everyone from Senator Michael Bennet to former Google ethicist Tristan Harris, sat down with Tech Brew to discuss his take on the often controversial intersection of technology and politics. Spoiler alert: It’s not all doom and gloom.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What, in your view, is the role of the tech industry when it comes to how society is navigating complex and ever-evolving policy issues?
I think power has shifted and evolved through the centuries…Now it’s moving to people that wield technology, people who are deploying software.
I mean, no judgment on the folks behind OpenAI, but they’re influencing 100 million people within months. It’s a fairly powerful thing to do. Mark Zuckerberg did that exact same thing…In my mind, the ideal play is this notion of checks and balances…We need to be beefing up government’s ability to actually regulate, but at the same time, we also need to be beefing up civil society and nonprofit groups and others in order to have a strong voice in the conversation…That, sadly, is not what’s happening today.
We are in this moment where technology’s power is being flexed pretty strongly, which sort of leads us into this weird imbalance. I’m optimistic that we’ll get over that point. But I think the role should be that we’re enabling tools to be given to a society that actually allow us to do things better and more efficiently, more effectively, more innovatively.
What are the biggest challenges the tech industry is grappling with today?
I do think it’s this question of values alignment…I think that we are all operating in a space of commercial incentives, or at least a lot of us are. And therefore, there are real questions: “Are your values to increase shareholder value?” Which, don’t get me wrong, I completely understand why you’re doing that. Or are your values to do societal good? The Holy Grail is that we can get those two to align. But in a vast majority of cases, they don’t align. And because they don’t align, they get this massive tension…The exact same thing is happening with AI right now, where it’s this race…I get emails from Google once a week telling me about a new Bard feature, and OpenAI is constantly iterating in the background. And they feel the need to have to do that because they’re living in a world where they are portraying that this technology is inevitable, which, again, they have to do for shareholder value…[It] becomes a competition to get us to the place where as many people are using it as possible…So it’s this core tension of financial incentives and values that are being driven right at each other. It’s a train wreck.
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How has the tech/regulator power dynamic changed over the course of your career?
I was at the DNC when Mark Zuckerberg was brought up in front of Congress the first time, and I remember being horrified with my DNC tech colleagues on the kinds of questions that were being asked, which were some of the most naive tech questions, I mean, literally confusing Twitter and Facebook.
If you fast-forward to just a few weeks ago, when Sam Altman was there, the questions are starting to get real. Does that mean that the senators have gotten smarter or their staffers are getting smarter? Yes. I won’t say which one it is! But there’s definitely been an increase in technology talent inside the government so that they can start having these conversations…At the same time, I would say the tech side has gotten way smarter even faster, unsurprisingly. Sam Altman played the Mark Zuckerberg playbook of “please regulate us,” but did it so much better than Zuckerberg did. They’re actually learning how to play this game properly. And I won’t say it’s nefarious; they’re just learning how to interact better with government.
As we approach another election cycle, what’s important for the tech world to keep an eye on? What will you be watching?
Disinformation is clearly the thing that I’m most interested and concerned about…I worry that we are in this active debate where we’re trying to remove guardrails when we might actually need more guardrails when it comes to our information ecosystem.
On the positive end, I’m actually starting to see some really interesting uses of things like AI in the political tech cycle, like fundraising tools…Every citizen in the US needs to be engaged in our political system in some way, and [these tools] might actually help you find the path to being engaged with the right people, the right candidates, the right issues, the right causes.
Update 07/11/23: This piece has been updated to include Krikorian's affiliation with Emerson Collective.