Weekend listening: "Lessons from History: Technology and Policymaking"

My interview on the CSIS podcast, "This Does Not Compute"

A few weeks ago, I was invited to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. to sit for an interview with podcast host Caitlin Chin.

Readers may recall that Caitlin and I met when we were panelists at the Tech & Democracy Summit in March at the Consulate General of Canada in New York. We became instant friends, mutually interested in questions around disinformation, privacy, democratic backsliding and digital repression.

We thought it would be instructive (and fun) to have a conversation about where our research and ideas intersected, touching on disinformation, artificial intelligence, the decline of history and the humanities, and the effects on democracy.

That podcast episode was released this week, and so I thought I’d use this week’s newsletter to share it with you ⬇️

The episode came out well, and is worth a listen (if I do say so myself). Caitlin asked great questions, and we covered a wide range of subjects, including:

• My recent 5-week, 6-country tour with the U.S. Department of State, and how that intersected with questions of disinformation, digital repression and democracy;

• How lawmakers should think about regulating Artificial Intelligence, including building in counter-weights to manage seismic changes to society;

• Why historians and humanities scholars are critical to tech conversations, and why we need to create a culture of historical thinking within tech and policy worlds;

• What is a “public historian,” and what it’s like to have a career that operates at the intersection of public history, policy, media and tech.

Here’s the official episode description:

In this episode, Caitlin Chin sits with Jason Steinhauer, a public historian and bestselling author of "History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past." Caitlin and Jason discuss how policymakers and technology companies can incorporate lessons from history to address modern challenges like artificial intelligence, online disinformation narratives, and more.

The episode is also available on:

• Apple

• Google

• TuneIn

• Stitcher

• CSIS website

I hope you’ll listen, and I hope you’ll let me know your thoughts—either in the comments or through my website.

Enjoy,

-JS

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