Happy Friday, and welcome to the latest edition of our Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with third-term Democratic Rep. Lori Trahan — an advocate for stronger regulations for tech companies who was once the only female executive at a Massachusetts-based advertising technology firm. Trahan is an active member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and has led on a number of tech transparency bills, including the bipartisan Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability (TDLR) Act, which she plans to reintroduce at the end of June. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? Making terms-of-service more understandable for everyday folks. It's no secret that terms-of-service agreements are unnecessarily complex. People don't have time to read — every single person in the U.S. knows that firsthand. But because these agreements are often the difference between our ability to access a website or not, clicking the “I agree” box to accept those conditions laid out has become a bit of a habit for those consumers. Companies purposely designed them to be that way, and the opportunity for abuse couldn't be more obvious. Last year I introduced the Terms-of-service, Labeling, Design and Readability Act, or the TLDR Act, to change all that, which I’m thrilled to be working with Senators Bill Cassidy and Ben Ray Luhan to reintroduce later this month. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? The nearly universal use of education technology post-pandemic is something that everyone, particularly parents like myself, should be worried about. Tech software platforms have been incorporated into our kids’ curricula so quickly that families and in some cases the schools or districts themselves don't know what it means for their children’s privacy, or the data that the companies are collecting on them. That's not to say that educational tech is bad. As a mom of two young girls I've seen the positives firsthand, but I also understand that we have to balance it with very real concerns about digital surveillance that could harm our at-risk students. That requires passing a comprehensive privacy bill that takes those concerns into consideration, which is why I fought for and secured the ed tech-specific protections in the American Data Privacy and Protection Act [the bipartisan privacy bill introduced in the House in 2022.] What book most shaped your conception of the future? The Kill Chain by Christian Brose. I was a freshman on the Armed Services Committee in 2020, and it was a must-read book if we were going to understand just how significant of a shift we were seeing from the physical battle battlefield to the digital one. I left my job as chief of staff on the Hill for an ad tech startup in the early 2000s, so I've been watching the industry's evolution for the better part of two decades. I remember the days when Silicon Valley was the place to be, that a job at Facebook or Google was the most coveted gig. But those days have kind of changed and we know how these online tools and algorithms can be weaponized, how our data can be used against us, how our children are being targeted as the next frontier of growth. And we know that Congress has failed to keep up. What could the government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? Transparency. What the European Union did with the Digital Services Act was so important, and it's a shame that the United States has fallen so far behind our allies on this issue. Fortunately the tide is finally starting to shift, particularly on the transparency front. I introduced legislation in 2021 to require independent researcher access to social media companies so we can get an independent picture of what these companies are doing well — and what they're doing badly — and how their algorithm changes affect that. I went a step further by introducing the Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act, which is comprehensive transparency legislation inspired by the EU Digital Services Act. At the same time, the Senate has weighed in on this issue with the bipartisan Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. It’s my hope that we can find a way to work together across both chambers to advance a bipartisan transparency bill. What has surprised you most this year? The explosion of interest in ChatGPT and competing AI systems. We'll see how it evolves, but I always try to remind folks that AI has been a regular part of our lives for years and ChatGPT is just a different way this kind of technology can be deployed. I'm glad that a lot of folks are using and experimenting with it. I think it's all about public awareness about the potential benefits and the harms that these powerful machine learning AI technologies have. And I'm also glad that both parties are using this moment to educate members. We’re holding hearings. We're starting to see proposals developed to bring transparency and accountability to AI. It underscores the importance of being vigilant against the risks that AI poses to exacerbate existing inequities, spreading disinformation or causing mental health harms. But it's also important to acknowledge that those harms are already happening at a massive scale due to similar technologies. So we need to regulate AI, but we certainly can't stop there.
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