Governance at a Crossroads

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Innovation in America

No ties were hurt when ChatGPT drew this picture. As a mater of fact, almost no ties were used during this project.

Dear readers, I have been busy completing a lengthy paper with research on the governance of artificial intelligence conducted over the past seven months. You can view the working paper by clicking here. Based on our findings, we are proposing a new model: the Dynamic Governance Model. Last January, the President issued an executive order directing the creation of an AI Action Plan in 180 days. This is our contribution.

The model advocates for an incremental, iterative process. Rather than imposing rigid, one-size-fits-all rules, it emphasizes a responsive system of standards, audits, and compliance frameworks that adapt over time. It acknowledges that today’s faster pace of innovation requires a regulatory framework capable of evolving alongside the technology. We intend to bring industry and government together through public-private partnerships and market-based solutions.

To help you consume it, I will start publishing segments or commentaries here on the Substack. I will start backward, with excerpts from the appendix explaining how we began.

The impetus for this work was developed during my term as an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard University in 2023. After a career in technology and business, I became increasingly concerned with polarization and radicalization and intrigued by technology’s role in furthering these issues. Initially, I had a techno-deterministic view of the problem, so I tried to fight it with technology—i.e., content moderation challenges would be addressed with better use of artificial intelligence to filter content, misinformation issues would be tacked with better content provenance and attribution schemes, and so on. Upon taking a holistic and systemic view of the problem, it became apparent that the socio-technical pieces of the puzzle were as important as the technical ones. This realization led to a journey of visiting the incentives that fuel the technology industry today and a view that reinvention of its business models and governance is needed to allow for a safe and ethical future of the banner technology of the 21^st century: AI.

The question then became how to do it without harming innovation and, instead, how to use policy to drive innovation. We focused on the United States of America, the home of the largest AI labs and the biggest of the Big Tech firms. This working paper was enabled by a 2024-2025 fellowship with the Technology, Innovation, and Regulation Program at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Drawing from primary research, including interviews with technology industry leaders, United States Members of Congress, and staff, and an analysis of 150 AI-related bills introduced by the 118th United States Congress, we have identified emerging areas of alignment between policymakers and industry stakeholders. This analysis also highlights opportunities for a unified national approach, despite the challenges posed by a fragmented legislative environment.

I hope you enjoy it!

Click this link to access the paper.