5 questions for crypto’s Sheila Warren

How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures

Feb 03, 2023 View in browser   By Mohar Chatterjee Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation. | Courtesy of Sheila Warren Happy Friday and welcome to the Future in 5 Questions. Today, we have Sheila Warren — the CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, the leading advocacy organization for cryptocurrency and blockchain groups. She’s also the co-host of Money Reimagined, a CoinDesk TV show and podcast. As part of her decade-long career in tech policy strategy, Warren founded the blockchain and digital assets team for WEF, the group that hosts Davos.  Read on to hear her thoughts about why crypto really matters, the ChatGPT hype cycle and why the government needs to let people play around with new technology. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. What’s one underrated big idea? That crypto governance is applicable across a variety of contexts. Decentralization and removal of intermediaries are things that apply across every industry, across every jurisdiction. It really is a fundamental element to how we build community. Given the focus from policymakers, the press and the crypto industry itself on financial services, I think we lose sight of the underlying, novel revolution in our ecosystem — which is fundamentally about a new way of governing ourselves and our communities. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? ChatGPT. There is no question that ChatGPT is fun as hell and there’s a tremendous amount of potential. For computer programmers, it is already becoming an invaluable resource. You don’t have to go to Stack Overflow anymore — you can just ask ChatGPT. But in many other areas of research and investigation, it remains juvenile. It’s all about what’s being fed into it, so it makes sense that the use cases are disproportionately skewed towards technologists and engineers. But if you talk to a sociologist or someone who studies literature, they will tell you that it's entertaining, you know, but it's not giving you actually useful information. It's a little bit like the early crypto days when people were like: “Blockchain for everything!” Now, it's like: “You can use ChatGPT for absolutely everything!” That is not true yet. And it may never be true. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Can I pick two? They go together. “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson. The book walks through all these spaces that I've lived and worked in. So like India, San Francisco, Davos and Boston. It talks about a vision of the future that I think is already upon us. It starts with this horrible climate disaster in India and then their government says, no one is coming to save us, so we're gonna take these fighter jets and blot out the sun to stop this heatwave. So the UN decides they need to have this ministry for the future that actually represents the future. It's a really critical read for anybody in tech or in policy. The other one is “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid. That book really changed the way I think about how we treat migrants as a society. By migrants, I mean people who are fleeing from somewhere. It's incredibly well written but really harrowing. The author doesn't really say what the impetus for the migration is, though it's implied that it's political in nature. But when I think about the polycrisis we’re in, I also think about the increasing number of climate refugees. I mean, right now, migration out of Sub-Saharan Africa is at an all time high. And people aren't aware of that.  What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? Using it. A running joke is that the government is a generation behind, in terms of what people are allowed to use. In the United States, we have rules out of the Office of Government Ethics that you can't engage with crypto, even if you're responsible for a crypto portfolio. This is true across different kinds of technologies like AI, biotech and certainly the blockchain. Government should recognize that it's extremely challenging to regulate an innovative space to begin with. It's even more challenging if you literally have not been able to play around with the technology. What has surprised you most this year? That there remains such an appetite and interest for understanding crypto and blockchain technology in the U.S. Congress, despite the events of November, the FTX situation, and all of that. If anything, our engagement has significantly increased. That there's a new Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion, led by a Republican is very interesting. I'm really appreciating the fact that there are so many folks in the government taking this so seriously.   JOIN POLITICO ON 2/9 TO HEAR FROM AMERICA’S GOVERNORS: In a divided Congress, more legislative and policy enforcement will shift to the states, meaning governors will take a leading role in setting the agenda for the nation. Join POLITICO on Thursday, Feb. 9 at World Wide Technology's D.C. Innovation Center for The Fifty: America's Governors, where we will examine where innovations are taking shape and new regulatory red lines, the future of reproductive health, and how climate change is being addressed across a series of one-on-one interviews. REGISTER HERE.     WHO’S WRITING THE RULES FOR AI? Who’s going to regulate the uses (and abuses) of AI in the future — if anyone? The main U.S. government effort right now comes in the form of the (voluntary) AI Risk Management Framework (RMF) from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. Europe has its own approach, embodied in its proposed AI Act. And naturally, there’s an elaborate trans-oceanic process to reconcile them. So what is, um… actually happening? The person running the show at NIST, Chief of Staff Elham Tabassi, tried to explain in an online forum hosted by George Washington University today. One takeaway: If you really want to know who’s going to write the rules, pay attention to the big companies in this space. Hanging over the proceedings was the fact that Microsoft President Brad Smith had just yesterday published a blog post about the company’s commitment to a responsible AI innovation framework — namely, its own framework. Tabassi noted that the major corporate players were already important parts of the conversation as NIST writes its rules: “both Microsoft and Google have been participants and contributors to the AI risk management framework,” she said, explaining that company representatives have acted as panelists and speakers at various workshops. She also said that NIST had studied Microsoft’s responsible AI document to build its framework, and she sees the two as already in “some alignment.” Reading Microsoft’s document, it’s clear the company sees its role in AI policy-making as still an active one. Smith addressed U.S. policymakers all but directly in sections of his post, pointing to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI and DeepMind within Google as the United States’ best bets to maintain “technological leadership” over China’s Baidu and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, which Smith called the “third leading player in this next wave of AI” — the other two being Microsoft and Google. (We reached out to Smith for more, but his office had “nothing additional to share at this time.”) Much of the debate over these roadmaps concerns not only how AI is used, but also what data is used to train them. The AI advances that have caught the public imagination rely on incredibly data-hungry learning processes, which raises questions about the quality, fairness and ownership of the underlying information. Microsoft’s vision for AI that is "responsible by design" does have some guidelines for data governance and management, but still leaves them (and us) tangling with a rather fundamental question: When technological superiority relies on building systems that need immense amounts of data to improve itself, what does responsible data collection look like in practice, at scale? One important caveat to this whole debate: the NIST framework is decidedly without any regulatory teeth. The agency is a standards bureau, not a regulator. Tabassi framed that as an advantage — a way to bring companies to the table, rather than having a tug-of-war. And for compliance, she’s banking on companies viewing “reputational harm” and “building public confidence in the products and services they provide” as incentive enough to follow NIST’s AI risk management recommendations. — Mohar Chatterjee Tweet of the Day Graf Zeppelin over Rio de Janeiro. | @RetroCoast on Twitter The Future in 5 Links Google's latest AI bet was announced in an earnings call yesterday. DeepMind’s AIs can now play Minecraft and navigate virtual 3D space.  Google’s focus on AI comes partly at the expense of disinfo-fighting Jigsaw. The Vulcan rocket expected to launch Amazon’s satellite constellation will maybe debut before the end of March. Artists might have won a round against generative AI. Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger (bschreckinger@politico.com); Derek Robertson (drobertson@politico.com); Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@politico.com); Steve Heuser (sheuser@politico.com); and Benton Ives (bives@politico.com). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter. If you’ve had this newsletter forwarded to you, you can sign up and read our mission statement at the links provided.   DOWNLOAD THE POLITICO MOBILE APP: Stay up to speed with the newly updated POLITICO mobile app, featuring timely political news, insights and analysis from the best journalists in the business. The sleek and navigable design offers a convenient way to access POLITICO's scoops and groundbreaking reporting. Don’t miss out on the app you can rely on for the news you need, reimagined. DOWNLOAD FOR iOS– DOWNLOAD FOR ANDROID.       Follow us on Twitter Ben Schreckinger @SchreckReports Derek Robertson @afternoondelete Steve Heuser @sfheuser Benton Ives @BentonIves   Follow us

To change your alert settings, please log in at https://www.politico.com/_login?base=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politico.com/settings This email was sent to rouf@idiot.cloudns.cc by: POLITICO, LLC 1000 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA, 22209, USA Please click here and follow the steps to unsubscribe.