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Beth Simone Novick She joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about her book, Rebooting, AI, and the Race to Save Democracy. She is a professor at Northeastern University, where she leads the Burns Center for Social Change. She also founded Innovate US, a training program for public sector workers. It has grown into one of the largest AI training efforts in the country. Before that, she ran artificial intelligence for the state of New Jersey and worked on technology policy for the federal government under President Obama.
I admit that I had not read the book before we sat down to talk. My reading backlog is at about 160 books at this point, which is a really embarrassing number, but Reboot had jumped near the top of the list by the time we were done.
The messy middle
Most of what is said about AI publicly falls on one of two extremes. Either He will destroy us or save us. There is very little space between them. Novick wrote Reboot because she believes the messy middle is where the real story is. Both dystopian collapse and utopian utopia make headlines better than anything accurate, so that’s what’s covered. It distorts the way people think about these tools even before they use them. Her point extends beyond artificial intelligence as well. Things like Flock cameras, Ring doorbells, or blockchain are not inherently good or bad. What matters is what is built above them and who makes those decisions.
Novick pushes this dual-use idea further by comparing it to nuclear technology. The same science can build a bomb or a power plant. She argues that we spend most of our energy rehashing the bombshell conversation. We spend almost none of it wondering what a power plant should look like. What do we intentionally choose to build because it actually matters, rather than just building whatever company we find profitable?
Who owns the decision?
Decision making is where this gets political. Who actually has influence on AI policy right now? Some of this influence occurs in public, through lobbying and testimony. Some of that happens during closed-door dinners that most of us have never heard of. Novick doesn’t think it should come down to who has the most money or the loudest microphone. “When it’s positive, we call it targeting,” she told me. “When we don’t like it, we call it manipulation.” This framing problem shows up everywhere, from search results to airline prices, and in how a city defines what its residents actually want.
Novick also rejects the idea that you need a technical background to have a say in any of this. Just as you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car safely, you also don’t need a computer science degree to use AI responsibly or think about how to regulate it. She backs this up with real examples of AI already being used to make government more participatory rather than less, along with her own case for why she remains optimistic about the direction this is headed. I will leave the details of the episode.
Watch or listen to it and let me know what you think.
(Tags for translation) Artificial Intelligence
