What Biden’s Top A.I. Thinker Concluded We Should Do
About this episode
Alondra Nelson, who as deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy led the 'Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,' explains what she concluded government should do about AI. She argues the blueprint — built through consultation — focuses on foreseeable, already-arriving harms rather than speculative existential ones: unsafe systems, algorithmic discrimination, data privacy violations, opaque decisions, and opting out of automated systems. She defends this pragmatism against both AI doomers and boosters, arguing existing law already covers many AI harms but enforcement lags. Nelson and Klein discuss the EU's AI Act, China's centralized approach, and why she believes in a 'public option' for AI infrastructure plus major investment in government technical expertise so regulators aren't captured. She resists the framing that AI governance is only about unknown unknowns, insisting policymakers can and should act on the visible harms AI is already producing.