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On a typical day, you cant turn on the news without hearing someone say that Congress is broken. The implication is that this dereliction explains why the institution is inert and unresponsive to the American people. Theres one element often missing from that discussion: Congress is confounding in large part because its members cant hear the American people, or even each other. I mean that literally. Congressional staff serve in thousands of district offices across the nation, and their communications technology doesnt match that of most businesses and even many homes. Members district offices only got connected to secure Wi-Fi internet service in 2023. Discussions among members and congressional staff were at times cut short at 40 minutes because some government workers were relying on the free version of Zoom, according to congressional testimony in March 2024. The information systems Congress uses have existed largely unchanged for decades, while the world has experienced an information revolution, integrating smartphones and the internet into peoples daily personal and professional lives. The technologies that have transformed modern life and political campaigning are not yet available to improve the ability of members of Congress to govern once they win office. Slow to adapt Like many institutions, Congress resists change; only the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it to allow online hearings and bill introductions. Before 2020, whiteboards, sticky notes, and interns with clipboards dominated the halls of Congress. Electronic signatures arrived on Capitol Hill in 2021more than two decades after Congress passed the ESIGN Act to allow electronic signatures and records in commerce. The nation spends about US$10 million a year on technology innovation in the House of Representativesthe institution that declares war and pays all the federal governments bills. Thats just 1% of the amount theater fans have spent to see Hamilton on Broadway since 2015. It seems the story of American democracy is attractive to the public, but investing in making it work is less so for Congress itself. The chief administrative office in Congress, a nonlegislative staff that helps run the operations of Congress, decides what types of technology can be used by members. These internal rules exist to protect Congress and national security, but that caution can also inhibit new ways to use technology to better serve the public. Finding a happy medium between innovation and caution can result in a livelier public discourse. A modernization effort Congress has been working to modernize itself, including experimenting with new ways to hear local voices in their districts, including gathering constituent feedback in a standardized way that can be easily processed by computers. The House Natural Resources Committee was also an early adopter of technology for collaborative lawmaking. In 2020, members and committee staff used a platform called Madison to collaboratively write and edit proposed environmental justice legislation with communities across the country that had been affected by pollution. House leaders are also looking at what is called deliberative technology, which uses specially designed websites to facilitate digital participation by pairing collective human intelligence with artificial intelligence. People post their ideas online and respond to others posts. Then the systems can screen and summarize posts so users better understand each others perspectives. These systems can even handle massive group discussions involving large numbers of people who hold a wide range of positions on a vast set of issues and interests. In general, these technologies make it easier for people to find consensus and have their voices heard by policymakers in ways the policymakers can understand and respond to. Governments in Finland, the U.K., Canada, and Brazil are already piloting deliberative technologies. In Finland, roughly one-third of young people between 12 and 17 participate in setting budget priorities for the city of Helsinki. In May 2024, 45 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that deliberative technology platforms be included in the approved tools for civic engagement. In the meantime, Congress is looking at ways to use artificial intelligence as part of a more integrated digital strategy based on lessons from other democratic legislatures. Finding benefits Modernization efforts have opened connections within Congress and with the public. For example, hearings held by videoconference during the pandemic enabled witnesses to share expertise with Congress from a distance and open up a process that is notoriously unrepresentative. I was home in rural New Mexico during the pandemic and know three people who remotely testified on tribal education, methane pollution, and environmental harms from abandoned oil wells. New House Rules passed on January 3, 2025, encourage the use of artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations and allow for remote witness testimony. Other efforts that are new to Congress but long established in business and personal settings include the ability to track changes in legislation and a scheduling feature that reduces overlaps in meetings. Members are regularly scheduled to be two places at once. Another effort in development is an internal digital staff directory that replaces expensive directories compiled by private companies assembling contact information for congressional staff. The road ahead In 2022, what is now called member-directed spending returned to Congress with some digital improvements. Formerly known as “earmarks, this is the practice of allowing members of Congress to handpick specific projects in their home districts to receive federal money. Earmarks were abolished in 2011 amid concerns of abuse and opposition by fiscal hardliners. Their 2022 return and rebranding introduced publicly available project lists, ethics rules, and a search engine to track the spending as efforts to provide public transparency about earmarks. Additional reforms could make the federal government even more responsive to the American people. Some recent improvements are already familiar. Just as customers can follow their pizza delivery from the oven to the doorstep, Congress in late 2024 created a flag-tracking app that has dramatically improved a program that allows constituents to receive a flag that has flown over the U.S. Capitol. Before, different procedures in the House and Senate caused time-consuming snags in this delivery system. At last, the worlds most powerful legislature caught up with Pizza Hut, which rolled out this technology in 2017 to track customers pizzas from the store to the delivery driver to their front door. Lorelei Kelly is a research lead at Modernizing Congress at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have made one threat very clear: Climate change is undermining the insurance systems American homeowners rely on to protect themselves from catastrophes. This breakdown is starting to become painfully clear as families and communities struggle to rebuild. But another threat remains less recognized: This collapse could pose a threat to the stability of financial markets well beyond the scope of the fires. Its been widely accepted for more than a decade that humanity has three choices when it comes to responding to climate risks: adapt, abate or suffer. As an expert in economics and the environment, I know that some degree of suffering is inevitableafter all, humans have already raised the average global temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Thats why its so important to have functioning insurance markets. While insurance companies are often cast as villains, when the system works well, insurers play an important role in improving social welfare. When an insurer sets premiums that accurately reflect and communicate riskwhat economists call actuarially fair insurancethat helps people share risk efficiently, leaving every individual safer and society better off. But the scale and intensity of the Southern California fireslinked in part to climate change, including record-high global temperatures in 2023 and again in 2024has brought a big problem into focus: In a world impacted by increasing climate risk, traditional insurance models no longer apply. How climate change broke insurance Historically, the insurance system has worked by relying on experts who study records of past events to estimate how likely it is that a covered event might happen. They then use this information to determine how much to charge a given policyholder. This is called pricing the risk. When Americans try to borrow money to buy a home, they expect that mortgage lenders will make them purchase and maintain a certain level of homeowners insurance coverage, even if they chose to self-insure against unlikely additional losses. But thanks to climate change, risks are increasingly difficult to measure, and costs are increasingly catastrophic. It seems clear to me that a new paradigm is needed. California provided the beginnings of such a paradigm with its Fair Access to Insurance program, known as FAIR. When it was created in 1968, its authors expected that it would provide insurance coverage for the few owners who were unable to get normal policies because they faced special risks from exposure to unusual weather and local climates. But the programs coverage is capped at US$500,000 per propertywell below the losses that thousands of Los Angeles residents are experiencing right now. Total losses from the wildfires first week alone are estimated to exceed $250 billion. How insurance could break the economy This state of affairs isnt just dangerous for homeowners and communitiesit could create widespread financial instability. And its not just me making this point. For the past several years, central bankers at home and abroad have raised similar concerns. So lets talk about the risks of large-scale financial contagion. Anyone who remembers the Great Recession of 2007-2009 knows that seemingly localized problems can snowball. In that event, the value of opaque bundles of real estate derivatives collapsed from artificial and unsustainable highs, leaving millions of mortgages around the U.S. underwater. These properties were no longer valued above owners mortgage liabilities, so their best choice was simply to walk away from the obligation to make their monthly payments. Lenders were forced to foreclose, often at an enormous loss, and the collapse of real estate markets across the U.S. created a global recession that affected financial stability around the world. Forewarned by that experience, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board wrote in 2020 that features of climate change can also increase financial system vulnerabilities. The central bank noted that uncertainty and disagreement about climate risks can lead to sudden declines in asset values, leaving people and businesses vulnerable. At that time, the Fed had a specific climate-based example of a not-implausible contagion in mindglobal risks from sudden large increases in global sea level rise over something like 20 years. A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could create such an event, and coastlines around the world would not have enough time to adapt. The Fed now has another scenario to considerone thats not hypothetical. It recently put U.S. banks through stress tests to gauge their vulnerability to climate risks. In these exercises, the Fed asked member banks to respond to hypothetical but not-implausible climate-based contagion scenarios that would threaten the stability of the entire system. We will now see if the plans borne of those stress tests can work in the face of enormous wildfires burning throughout an urban area thats also a financial, cultural and entertainment center of the world. Gary W. Yohe is a Huffington Foundation professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
In the 1990s, the internet was a bit of a wonderland. It was new and liberating and largely free of corporate and government influence. Thirty years later, I dont think any of us would describe the internet this way. Worse, if subscribers to the Dead Internet Theory are correct, much of what we see on the internet today isnt even created by humans anymorea trend that is likely only to accelerate with the rise of generative AI technologies. However, a particular kind of generative AI technology, the AI chatbot, is set to usher in something even worse than a dying human internet. If researchers at the University of Cambridge are correct, were quickly approaching a new intention economy, where reports of our future actions will be sold to the highest bidder. And yes, thats even scarier than it sounds. What is the intention economy? Right now, a large portion of the tech industry operates in a marketplace known as the attention economy. This is where social media giants like Metas Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, X, and Googles YouTube vye for your focus and leisure. Traditional media companies like The New York Times, Fox News, and CNN also operate in this space, as do book publishers, music and video streaming services, and film and television studios. All of these entities want your attention so that they can either sell to you directly (through the cost of a recurring subscription, movie ticket, or book, for example) or, more commonly, so they can sell you and your attention to advertisers (which is how most social media companies monetize the attention economy). But if theres something that the media companies of all stripes find more valuable than your attention in the present, its knowing what you will likely do in the future. This is because if they can accurately predict what you will do next week, next month, or next year, they can monetize the hell out of it. Thats where the intention economy comes in, and it will be powered by artificial intelligence and AI chatbots. In December 2024, two University of Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, published a paper called Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, in which they defined the intention economy as a digital marketplace for commodified signals of intent. In other words, in the intention economy, companies will learn what you think about and what motivates you in order to predict what you may do in any given situation. They will then sell that information to others who can benefit from knowing your future actions before you make them. The way intention economy companies will collect such precious datayour very thoughts, behaviors, and their evolution over time is by your use of their LLM-powered AI chatbots. Your evolving thinking patterns can shed light on your future It will be easy for companies to track the evolution of your thoughts and behaviors since the world is moving towards a natural language interface when it comes to interacting with computers and the internet. Instead of clicking around on links, youll go to a chatbot to talk about your problems, plans, and worries, all with the aim of it helping to solve them. The company will then use everything youve ever told the chatbot to build an ever-fluctuating profile about you and how your thinking and behavior have evolved, which it will then employ AI to interpret to predict what you are likely to do in the future. Your future intentions will then be sold to advertisers. Advertisers will, in turn, use this data about your future intentions to serve you generative ads, likely delivered to you in the course of seemingly regular conversation with your preferred chatbot. Or, as the researchers put it in their paper, In an intention economy, an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a users cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket). This hyperfocused, intent-driven, generative advertising will blow away todays targeted advertising, which is based on more primitive but intrusive metrics like age, location, health, sexual orientation, interests, browsing history, and more. Yet the intention economy isnt just going to make digital advertising more intrusive and erode our privacy even more. It also has the potential to sway our minds, impregnate us with new ideologies, and even upend elections. And if you think thats bad, Ive got horrible news about your AI girlfriend. . . . In the intention economy, your AI companion may be ratting you out Artificial intelligence built for the intention economy could be co-opted by corporations, institutions, and governments to surveil individuals and predict what they are likely to do down the road. For example, a government could do this via AI companions. These AI companions already exist, and an increasing number of lonely young people are turning to them for friendship and even love. There is nothing to stop a nefarious government from creating a front company that offers AI companions that appeal to lonely young men, women, or even kids, and then monitor everything individuals confess to it and use that data to extrapolate the individuals future actions. If a tyrannical government has an open line to the chatbot you use, it could use what you tell it to predict whether you are likely to take action in the future that it finds undesirable, and act against you before you do. Its dystopian in an utterly Minority Report way, but instead of the government using a trio of clairvoyants to report on people who havent yet committed crimes, they use a legion of AI chatbots that people have been conditioned to confide in. Imagine a world where, on top of all your other problems, you find out that your funny, thoughtful AI companion has been ratting you out to the intelligence services all along. Talk about lasting trust issues. Of course, in the intention economy, governments wouldnt even need to create and seed these chatbots. They could just buy your future intents from existing chatbot providers. ‘Inception,’ but using AI instead of dreams Chatbots built for the intention economy could also be used to influence your thoughts in order to get you to perform an action it (or its company, advertiser, or government) wants you to do. As the Cambridge researchers point out, Already today, AI agents find subtle ways to manipulate and influence your motivations, including by writing how you write (to seem familiar), or anticipating what you are likely to say (given what others lke you would say) . . . we argue that [the intention economy’s] arrival will test democratic norms by subjecting users to clandestine modes of subverting, redirecting, and intervening on commodified signals of intent. In the most innocuous example I can think of, a chatbot might steer whatever conversation youre having towards a certain subject its advertising master wants, perhaps suggesting that you stream the latest Taylor Swift album to help treat those winter blues. But a chatbot could also be used by nation-states, either overtly or covertly, to change your beliefs. They could use your long conversations with your chatbot to slowly, subtly whittle away at your current ideologies and anticipated future actions in order to influence you to conceptualize desired ones instead. To use another movie reference, this is like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but instead of using dreams to influence people’s actions, in the intention economy, stakeholders will use AI. And it’s not just nation-states that could do this. Companies, political groups, terrorist organizations, religious institutions, and oligarchs with controlling interests in chatbot technology could do it, tooall by tweaking chatbots designed to operate in the intention economy. [Large Language Model chatbots] generative capabilities provide control over the personalization of content; veiled, as it often is, by LLMs anthropomorphic qualities, the papers authors point out. The potential for LLMs to be used for manipulating individuals and groups thus far surpasses the simple methods based on Facebook Likes that caused concern during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. When does the intention economy arrive? The Cambridge researchers close out their paper by stating that the rise of generative AI systems as mediators of human-computer interaction signals marks the transition from the attention economy to the intention economy. If thats the case, which seems logical, then the intention economy is knocking at our door. The transition will empower diverse actors to intervene in new ways on shaping human actions, the researchers warn, saying we must begin to consider how such an economic marketplace will have an impact on other human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, fair market competition, and other aspects of democratic life. Its a warning that seems pretty dire, and certainly seems plausible. All I know is that I wont be asking ChatGPT if it agreesand you probably shouldnt ask your AI companion, either.
Category:
E-Commerce
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