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Manifestos are a form of manipulation, either (traditionally) from a position of no power or, more recently and especially in the context of AI’s febrile clatter into the future (think Dario Amodei, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen), a great deal of power.
Policy making, on the other hand, is a form of more or less open contest about a desired future state. Not so much manipulation as imagination, at least at its best and when it’s done well.
This is the argument at the heart of a terrific podcast from Tech Policy Press, the first in a regular series they’ve launched under the title of The Edge Dialogues, an attempt to discuss “ideas that are upstream of typical tech policy debates.”
This episode is basically about who owns the future and how do people and movements make a claim to shape futures thinking.
I’m not going to debrief the whole episode, which is fairly lengthy but well worth the listen.
But I wanted to extract from the discussion this brief interlude in which Dr Alondra Nelson sets out an argument in favour of policy making as an instrument of imagination-fuelled, collaborative futures thinking and design. She makes her argument in part by contrasting policy making as futures-shaping with the use of manifestos as a way of defining and mobilising in favour of a desired future state.
Dr Nelson is an impressive player in this debate.
She is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science and founding director of the Science, Technology and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, The lab examines emerging scientific and technological phenomena, where they meet the frustration and fulfillment of civil, political and social rights.
According to the podcast notes, Dr Nelson is working on projects around political economy of AI, democratic governance of science and research, cumulative impact of algorithmic systems.
She was previously a Professor of Sociology at Columbia, where she established the Division of Social Science, was its founding dean. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Acting Director and Principal Deputy Director for Science and Society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In that role, she was an architect of the White House blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights whose impact in the tech policy debates around AI has been wide and sustained. Nature magazine named her to a global list of 10 people who shaped science.
In 2023, she was included on an inaugural Time 100 list of most influential people in AI and was appointed to the United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence.
So basically, just very impressive.
I’ve extracted below from the podcast transcript a brief extract in which Dr Nelson lays sketches a powerful rendition of the art and craft of policy making as an instrument of strategic futures.
This is what she said:
“The authors of the AI manifesto [the Founders Fund Manifesto] I think have nearly everything to prove except proof that the vision will actually arrive. So we’re all kind of in this state of expectation.
There’s another way that we can think about futures, and I want to suggest, I think somewhat probably counter-intuitively, that policy is one way to do that.
Policy Shapes Futures
We tend to think of policy as the opposite of imagination, as the opposite of a future that is compelling, as a future that we want to share, as the brake on a car, red tape that makes us angry. But I think if you look closely at almost any policy, you will find a picture of a future that someone wants. So I like to understand and define policy as an articulation of a desired future state.
So it means that taking something as ordinary as like a regulatory code or a zoning code, you might think that when a city require sidewalks or buildings that mix shops with apartments, it’s not only just creating a policy or a rule or regulation, It’s also describing a future in which people walk to a corner store, they run into their neighbors along the way, that children are safer on the streets because there’s fewer cars.
Or we might even think about the rules that families make or the policies that we make and the ways that we make our families. When a parent says there can be no screens after a certain time of day, it’s in part because they’re picturing a future for their children who sleep through the night without blue light disturbing their rest, but who can also sit with a book or an article and imagine that future of intellectual life and engagement and discovery as well.
Each of these policies, city policy, municipal policy, federal policy, or the policy of a home, is itself a small forecast and that has people attached to it, who are investing and how it turns out. I think what sets public policy apart as a future from a manifesto narrative is everything that sits around it.
Policy often has to build public consensus, right?
There’s often comment periods, there might be hearings, people are weighing in. It invites the back and forth that the manifesto shuts down. It can be revised and over time, and I’m increasingly wanting us to take a page from software versioning and think about even government policy as having a kind of iterative life.
It might be a version one or a version two to sort of be honest about the sort of the fact that the work of policy making and of envisioning and crafting futures is never quite over…
I wanted to lift that up as a way of thinking about policy making, a policy white paper in this case [AI Bill of Rights] as a future. It set out five principles that automated systems should be safe and effective, a condition that benchmark that we are still trying to meet, that the news reminds us every day that we’ve not met, that they shouldn’t be biased against us, that they should protect our data privacy, that you should be told when AI is being used for consequential decision and that you should be able to opt out and reach a human being if something goes wrong. So the grammar of those sentences are about a future, about a desired future.
They speak not only to investors and venture capitalists, but also to a broader public, both about what they might imagine and about expectations they can have about what they are owed about AI systems. …
I hope that maybe sort of spreading your aperture, opening the aperture of what you think even policy is, that we can begin to realize that we have more examples than we sometimes realize. Sometimes difficult in the context of, I think the chaotic space of how AI is being sort of diffused through our lives right now often without our consent to imagine otherwise, to imagine a future that we indeed shape.”
Dr Nelson draws this part of the discussion to a close with these reflections.
“So what has happened to the future to return to that question I began with?
I want to offer a different answer from the Founders Fund. The future was always at the bottom a projection of investment returns. So it’s no surprise that it showed up first on a balance sheet, while other futures were being written all along, I think, in homes, in union halls, at city councils, in state legislatures, in kitchen table conversations about screen time, about whether or not AI should be in schools and more.
The [concept of a] manifesto began as a voice of people without power who were speaking into and for and with and about their futures. Its migration into the hands of some of the most powerful people of our time tells us something about its power as a genre, about the power of speaking into the world about the future. But we also have to reclaim that power as something that belongs to all of us.
The AI manifesto can be reimagined as a place of struggle, where some of the most consequential imaginaries and frames about what our future with these new technologies might look like if we’re allowed to play a role in it. Each of us has a claim on the future, and I want in this conversation for us to begin to think together about what that looks like.”
And that’s where policy as imagination, as the broadly inclusive, collective and accountable expression of a desired future and how it might be brought about, starts to look both apt and compelling right now.
That suggests two things to me.
One is the need to rapidly rescue the power and practice of policy as an indispensable instrument of future shaping and collective imagination as Geoff Mulgan might describe it particularly in the context of unsettling contest and complexity in all of our big policy debates..
And the other is to recognise that, as we “open the aperture” to accommodate a more expansive and creative sense of what policy making is and could be, we open up the discussion of where and how AI itself, one of the chief instigators of disruption and contention, can make a much bigger contribution.
That’s a discussion for another time.
But Alondra Nelson’s sharp framing reinforces the opportunity to experiment with ways to harness AI on every step of the policy journey – defining desired futures, being more creative about who gets to decide the questions we need to answer, never mind the answers, widening the circle of power and influence in the process, being more creative about policy making as a series of conditional releases contingent on new knowledge and rapidly shifting scenarios and powering a speed and depth of learning that is rapidly becoming a defining dimension of public accountability.
Note
These are the manifestos Dr Nelson mentions in her remarks:
Founders Fund Manifesto https://foundersfund.com/2017/01/manifesto/
Marc Andreeson’s techno-optimist manifesto https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Dario Amodei’s essay The Machine of Loving Grace https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
Statement from Palantir this spring https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312
Sam Altman’s essay The Intelligence Age https://ia.samaltman.com/
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