Machines can’t have the “divine spark” of humans, but Americans can make machines “with our values,” a Heritage Foundation technology expert said last week at the National Conservatism Conference in the nation’s capital.
“Conservatives must offer our own affirmative vision for AI,” said Kara Frederick, director of Heritage’s Tech Policy Center, referring to artificial intelligence in her talk at the Capital Hilton.
That vision would include “genuine American values,” “transparency,” and “self-government,” Frederick said during a Tuesday breakout session of the conference called “High Tech and the Nation” that also featured a Polish sociology professor and a former State Department official.
If the U.S. can design technology for the rest of the world that incorporates American values, it “will create a bulwark against Chinese LLMs that integrate those core socialist values in their models,” Frederick said.
Frederick, a former Facebook official who worked on counterterrorism and intelligence issues for the social media giant, was referring to so-called large language models, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that allows advanced language processing.
The Heritage scholar, a regular guest commentator on the Fox News and Fox Business channels, proposed a digital bill of rights to “enshrine the ability of families and individuals to process and compute as they see fit.”
“The machines are here, AI is here,” she said. “We are the image bearers of God, after all, and we can bend the machines to our will. Indeed, we should.”
In a talk focused on social media, Andrzej Zybertowicz said participants in the digital revolution must reverse “the civilizing process” by making “the real” more attractive than the cyber again.
“The digital revolution demands us to understand a much more complex situation but devoids us of the mental capacities of dealing with them,” said Zybertowicz, an adviser to Poland’s president and professor of sociology at that nation’s Nicolaus Copernicus University.
New communication technologies have succeeded in degrading our social life and internal psyches, he said, in part because they’re based on systems of simple pleasure.
Families, communities, nations, traditional values, and loyalties are all real, but hyperindividualism is digital, Zybertowicz argued.
He outlined five categories that account for how the “digital infosphere is algorithmically [and] structurally poisoned”: overload, structure of knowledge, addiction, multitasking, and haste.
The situation “has made our minds susceptible to accept various crazy ideologies,” Zybertowicz warned.
If society confronts the “cyberlords” of social media, he said, it can reach “real communication” and “real understanding.”
Mike Benz, the former State Department official who now directs the Foundation for Freedom Online, said he would focus on NATO’s influence on the censorship industry because the alliance was holding its 75th anniversary summit the same week in Washington.
Many believe that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in charge of the censorship industry, Benz said, but “the story really begins with NATO.”
When the internet arrived in 1991, about the time the Soviet Union dissolved, Benz said, both the U.S. military and NATO still prized free speech. So it took NATO by surprise in 2014 when eastern provinces of Ukraine began flirting with becoming part of Russia, he said. Russia then invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region.
“This is really when the military began to take a much more active role in the media,” Benz said, particularly “to stop enemy propaganda” in a kind of hybrid warfare.
He said NATO scholar Mark Galeotti coined the term Gerasimov Doctrine, named after a Russian general and essentially holding that war “was no longer about tanks, it was about tweets.”
This marked the beginning of NATO’s funding of billions of dollars worth of “psychological operations and online disinformation,” Benz said.
Benz said the transatlantic military alliance funds nearly every major participant in what he called the censorship industry, either directly or indirectly with “military pass-throughs like our National Science Foundation.”
To restore democracy in America and encourage it around the world, he argued, “we need to bring the military and intelligence use of AI to heel.”
