JD Vance last month dressed down the Euros at Grand Palis AI Summit. Here, an old tech hand reckons with memories of AI policy efforts. Sees surprising devolution.
By Jack Vaughan
Booted footsteps in the hall at night. Coming closer as in an old radio drama — but real. The steps still resound in corners of Europe. Where some memories of oppression are hard-wired.
The bootsteps might be KGB, Gestapo or Stasi. These were secret police, compiling dossiers and worse. The US has had its secret agencies tracking its citizens.
But nothing on this scale. Conservative estimates suggest the East Germany that hosted Stasi surveillance fielded one agent or informant for every 66 citizens.
And that’s an important backdrop to the European Union’s steadfast efforts to maintain personal privacy online, particularly to curb social media companies’ blanket harvesting of individuals’ web browsing data. Google, Facebook, Microsoft have all felt the sting.
The EU passed the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], trying to apply some policy to a technological armada whose basic defense was based on a motto like “what’s a little data between friends?”
Green Pastures of Harvard University
In 2019, I had a chance to cover a meeting of the AI World Society held at Harvard. It was just about the 1st Anniversary of the GDPR’s passage, and the shining intelligence of the European view was manifest.
Paul Nemitz, a principal advisor at the European Commission in Brussels and one of the architects of the GDPR, espoused the merits of governmental data policy, and predicted AI would be the next bridge to cross.
[I wrote about this in “GDPR privacy concerns still brewing on law’s first birthday” for SearchDataManagement.com.]
In fact, recent EU efforts seek to rein-in Generative AI data gathering. There’s more. They have worked toward banning AI systems considered to pose Unacceptable Risk. That would include certain forms of biometric surveillance.
The EU AI Act challenges social media companies to disclose their data policies and to, for example, outright ban AI surveillance systems using networked biometric technology as has been seen today in China.
Thinking back on that AI meeting at Harvard, I recall how striking was the juxtaposition of the measured, reasoned European bureaucrat, and America’s Web 2.0 Cowboy Hero Scrum. That’s a moniker I am applying to a group that complained about restrictions on their businesses, and that, is looking to dramatically change the discussion in line with efforts of the new Republican president.
Malaise at the Grand Palis
Walking Cambridge St in that 2019 Spring, it was clear policy or regulations seemed antithetical to US tech heavyweights. After all, they built stunning internet communication platforms, and their own fortunes, on a philosophy of ‘move fast and break things,’ of not asking for permission nor apologizing when those things break.
What’s a few ID thefts, old folks’ scams, or Tesla auto-driver decapitations in the grand scheme, right?
On that day, I didn’t walk away from the Harvard symposium with the notion that deep Data Privacy was coming to the USA. The American culture was going to be more freewheeling.
But I never quite expected that, five years down the road, the US Vice President would so rebuke a European audience, mocking any interest in safety, and warning that the US will not stand caution.
Last month, at the AI Summit at the Grand Palis in Paris, JD Vance did just that. It was his first foreign speech in his new role. The NY Times’ David Sanger deftly summed it:
Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.
There’s a mix of the predictable and surprising in these remarks and diplomatic breakdown. And it raises questions for a viewer seeking the way forward.
For this 20th Century man, Vance’s harshness easily evoked memories of “The Ugly American,” that 1950s proto-figure that represented American self-centeredness and an ignorant arrogance. That novel predicted but did not prevent the US’s long Viet Nam war.
Vance’s dress down makes a 2Oth Century fellow wonder too, did any sense of history inform Vance? Did he know this was a Continent that still hears the steps of full-scale oppression? If he did, did he care?