Scaling Laws: Matt Abrams on Trust and the Migration to the Digital Age

[Intro]

Alan Rozenshtein: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor and research director at Lawfare. Today, we're bringing you something a little different, an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. It's a creation of Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law, where we're tackling the most important AI and policy questions from new legislation on Capitol Hill to the latest breakthroughs that are happening in the labs. We cut through the hype to get you up to speed on the rules, standards, and ideas shaping the future of this pivotal technology. If you enjoy this episode, you can find and subscribe to Scaling Laws wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on X and Bluesky. Thanks for listening.

Intro Voices: When the AI overlords take over, what are you most excited about? It's, it's not crazy. It's just smart. I think just this year in the first six months, there have been something like 1,000 laws. Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's gonna work, how everyday folks are gonna use it? AI only works if society lets it work. There are so many questions have to be figured out and- Nobody came to my bonus class. Let's enforce the rules of the road.

Kevin Frazier: Welcome back to Scaling Laws, the podcast brought to you by Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law that explores the intersection of AI, policy, and of course, the law. I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation in Law Fellow at Texas Law and a senior editor at Lawfare.

Today, we're joined by Matt Abrams. Matt is a technologist, investor, and co-founder of One Billion for Trust, and he's focused on one of the defining governance questions of the AI era: how to build and maintain trust. After decades working across enterprise technology, AI, healthcare, and venture capital, Matt is now helping lead a new initiative that's aimed at building trust in information, institutions, and in one another.

The timing of this conversation is hard to ignore. As I recount at the outset of this episode, public trust in nearly every major American institution has fallen sharply. So what does this mean for the rest of society, and what does this mean for us as stakeholders in AI policy and governance? It's a big question, and we try to provide some answers. To get in touch with us, email scalinglaws@lawfaremedia.org or follow us on X or Bluesky. And with that, giddy up for a great show.

[Main Podcast]

Matt, welcome to Scaling Laws.

Matt Abrams: It's great to be here, Kevin.

Kevin Frazier: So I wanna start off, unfortunately, on a bit of a depressing note. So I've got a, a few stats, unfortunately, that we have to address. First, of adults under 30, 61% say that AI is going to worsen people's ability to think creatively, 58% say it's going to erode their capacity to form meaningful relationships, and just 14% of adults under 30 expect AI's effects to be positive on society. Now, if you thought that was bad enough, I'm gonna keep going. More generally, only 15% of Americans say they trust AI companies to make decisions about how AI is developed and used. And at an even higher level of abstraction, just 17% of Americans now say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right. And the final depressing coda to all of this: Only 34% of Americans say that most people can be trusted.

Matt, we've got a crisis of trust, in particular with high notes of distrust in tech, and you and I hit it off at the Ashby Workshops sponsored by Fathom, and I thought, "Matt, I've gotta have you on," because I love institutions. I love a functioning society. I think we all love those things, and yet it seems as though we can't acquire it. So who are you, and why are you so focused on trust as a policy inquiry and as a broader inquiry for us all to tackle?

Matt Abrams: Kevin I, I hope that you are as well still a, a naive optimist as I am. So despite all those stats, I, I call myself a naive optimist because I, one, I don't think I could bear with the, the opposite and, and there's not much point, and I, I don't wanna be a cynic. So-

Kevin Frazier: Amen.

Matt Abrams: With all those stats you threw out there Matt Abrams, I'm out here in Central Oregon. And I, I, I would say the reason why I'm so focused around these arenas is, is it goes back to, to where I grew up in, in deep Southern Oregon. And “Lumbertown, USA” it was called in the '80s, and it was the eye of the spotted owl debate and, or the epicenter of the spotted owl debate. And I grew up, you know, to a father who was a Orthodox Jew, a mom who was a good Methodist. I grew up going to church and to Sunday school.

Of a father who was a doc as well, and seeing loggers who that's all they knew how to, to do was cut down a tree, come into the ER where my dad worked on because a radical environmentalist would've put a spike in the tree, and the chainsaw would hit that spike, kick back, cut them up. And then a tremendous period of automation during that time where the mills were, were going through that, but they weren't telling the workers that, "Hey, you're losing your job to a lot of automation," not just they were pinning things on, on the environmental aspect.

And so I, I grew up around this perspective of seeing multiple sides and perspectives. And that is something which I think has been a defining piece throughout my life as to how do we engage in trust and trusted conversations with tr- trustworthy individuals and have trustworthy information on which to, to make decisions on.

After 9/11, that became sort of the, the, the Moby-Dick for me when I had a friend who was ostensibly a smart, smart guy, Duke Law School grad, who was sending around email chains. I mean, think pre-Facebook, maybe the very early days of Google. It was more Yahoo then. And even back then, you know, him sending around these, these misinformation that were bullshit verses from the Quran, you could spend ten minutes either researching back then or your own logic to say, "Hey, this isn't real."

And that led to, to really me driving forward as to how do we have high quality, trusted and trustworthy information? And I differentiate trust versus truth, by the way, and I wanna call that out. Trusted, trustworthy information on which we can have debates and dialogue to make decisions, whether in our personal lives or behind the firewall in enterprises.

And fast-forward, that led me to even if we have high-quality information on which to have debates and dialogues, we've lost the ability to do so because we're just demonizing one another. And so what are the solutions that exist to solve for not just the trust in information, but the trust in one another as well? So it's a, it's a quick nickel summary there, but, you know, at the end of the day, this is, this is what we've got. You know, it's our job to, to make it better.

Kevin Frazier: And I'd say it's a nickel summary that's worth a dime. And something that you and I share in common that you may not have known is I'm from Beaverton and I fancy myself-

Matt Abrams: I did not know

Kevin Frazier: A, Oregonian scholar. I, I've, you know, published my own substack before Appleseed AI, before any Scaling Laws nonsense, before Lawfare. I was writing a substack called “The Oregon Way” that focused extensively on the manifold issues that populated throughout the state as a result of what folks in Oregon call “downstate issues,” right? So there's this idea-

Matt Abrams: Yeah.

Kevin Frazier: That there's just Portland, and then there's everywhere else. And that-

Matt Abrams: That's right.

Kevin Frazier: Mentality really did a tremendous amount of damage to Oregon's political ecology for a long time, such that folks don't even know about the Spotted Owl Wars anymore. You may have heard there was a congressional candidate a few years ago who got asked about the Spotted Owl Wars, and they didn't know what it was. And-

Matt Abrams: Wow.

Kevin Frazier: I think that it, it's just wild. A- and for those folks who are thinking, "What the heck are these two Oregonians nerding out about?" This was the issue, and it's emblematic of you know, folks that have experienced challenges with globalization, let's say, in the Rust Belt or any sort of automation throughout the rest of the economy.

And what I appreciate about your narrative, Matt, is that you were experiencing the human side of that technological change and seeing and hearing about different experiences. And we have a lot to get into, but I think a lot of this circles back to just that question of, have you been exposed to the actual problems you're trying to solve and to the plight that others are facing? And if you haven't, then you're operating in a artificially removed environment, and you're not able to build that trust and really connect with other humans.

Matt Abrams: I, I think 100%, absolutely. I would also add to it, though, that and, and guilty as charged, even as a kid you know, I think that we, we tend to view the world through black and whites, right or wrong, yes or no, so on, these very binary aspects. And I think that's human nature in, in some respect because it probably gives us comfort in relation to being able to choose a team, choose a side, you know, choose sources, whatever it may be.

And I, and I think you know, whether it's the spotted owl debate, whether it is in relation to, you know, coal miners in, in West Virginia, whether in relation to, pick whatever it may be, everything in general are shades of gray and, and nuanced, and we've lost, we don't have nuance engines. We don't have context engines which allow us to debate and have the dialogue or interrogate information, you know, with one another around, "Oh, it, it..." Like, people are not binary.

And so all that frames part of our discussion today as well as to like that, yeah, I d- you know, on our Oregon, Oregonian roots, I tell folks that, "Look Oregon has always been a, a state where you're either pro-business or pro-social and, and never the two shall meet." And I've never understood that as to why that is because it, we're handcuffing ourselves and, and this happens broadly across society. So.

Kevin Frazier: Well, and I think too, this has particular parallels for the tech discussions we're going to get into because we don't have those opportunities to necessarily engage with folks in a lot of these AI questions in particular. You're either pro data centers or you're not.

Matt Abrams: Totally.

Kevin Frazier: You are either pro AI-

Matt Abrams: Yep.

Kevin Frazier: Or you're not. And what people are often not accounting for is a lot of this debate isn't necessarily going to be resolved on the facts. A failure to address that fear of being left behind, that people experienced in Lumber town, USA, in Oregon and throughout the West, that people experienced in Colorado, that people experienced in West Virginia. It's playing out now, that fear of being left behind. And if you haven't encountered people who are experiencing that, it's easy to gloss over their concerns by just saying, "Oh, they don't know the facts," and if only they knew the facts, then we could resolve this debate.

So before we get all the way into the tech stuff, let's just zoom out again back to the question of this moment in distrust. How is this moment in distrust distinct from, let's say, Watergate, or let's go even further back you know, the printing press. You pick the analogy. Why is the distrust we're experiencing now, again, I mentioned that only 34, 34 percent of Americans say that other Americans are trustworthy. Why are you so concerned and animated about this tech, this distrust moment as compared to prior waves of, of, of a lack of trust?

Matt Abrams: I, I think it's, it's distinct in some ways, and, and a-again, nuanced. It's not distinct in, in other ways at all. It's distinct now in, in the respect that, versus Watergate and, and probably our most timely aspect is that, one, everything across society is, is losing trust you know, simultaneously. The existing institutions that we have known, everything is being changed. Like, we're going through this, you know, it's that massive S-curve inflection point that isn't just, you know, in Watergate, it was specific to politics in this respect, but people still had trusted information sources in which they were, you know, reviewing or, and we had, you know, back then it was a, a few t-television channels, right?

Now we are all, it's the flood the zone aspect where we're all flooded. We're overwhelmed with information wherever it may be. Up is down, left is right. We don't know where to go to, so on and so forth. So there's this, you know, broader unease and, and, and the pace and speed at which everything is happening. We haven't developed from, I would say, a, a human species perspective to even get to a point where we can interrogate that information at the speed that things are happening, so on and so forth. So that's, that's one aspect.

Two, it isn't so different in, in some respects. This goes way back to Plato's time and the and the Republic and the allegory of the cave. Like, he was contending with this. To if you look at the Renaissance and the printing press and the distribution of material, you know, so on and so forth, is that, look, people talk about the Renaissance, but the early days of the Renaissance as well, it was, it was bloody and, and ruthless, and it took probably two hundred-plus years until we developed as a human species a set of epistemic sources and methods and processes and systems and what Jonathan Rauch calls the “constitution of knowledge,” that we developed that over, you know, literally centuries so that we could have trust across our societies and which led to human flourishing. And the digital world is just taking a wrecking ball to all of those institutions, if you will, that if we were to design those institutions for the digital world today, they would not look as they do now.

And so, optimistically, I look at, look, we've been here before. Even the, the, you know, the human species has, has been through this. This is just our time, whether we like it or not, for how do we develop the epistemic systems and methods and practices and culture? Because I think at the end of the day, people are, look, whether it's conspiracy theories that result from things or, you know, people are trying to f- to, they're unmoored. So when they're unmoored and they don't have a bearing in a navigational environment, they will grab onto anything. And in the information environment, I tell people it's, you know, people will crawl through the s- through the desert looking for water, and they'll drink the sand because they don't have any oth- other alternative. And that's what we're in in the digital and information world.

But I'm incredibly optimistic, and then I think this is probably a… A both frustrating but incredibly optimistic aspect is there are so many incredible entrepreneurs and people that are doing amazing things right now that, of building trust. And oftentimes it's hyperlocal. Oftentimes it's, it's, it's at that community level where I would argue trust and relationship building and community is flourishing in many areas that people don't hear about. We hear about all the bad and the negative, so on and so forth, and so I'm not even quite sure that in some respects even the data that you presented at the outset, that that is to be trusted in, based upon the nuance of, of geographic domain. And that isn't in relation to country aspects, it's from hyperlocal on up. So, this is, what's old is new again.

Kevin Frazier: Yeah. And what I, I love about your historical deep dive is to keep in mind that when the Constitution was written, for example, information traveled at the speed of a horse. One of my favorite statistics is that,

Matt Abrams: Or the, or the speed of a ship

Kevin Frazier: Or the speed of a ship. And in, in that, in that domain, right, we had the Battle of New Orleans was fought in the War of 1812, despite the war being over. But that news just didn't get to anyone fighting that-

Matt Abrams: That's right.

Kevin Frazier:  Battle in time, and so boom, we have, you know, this whole battle gets fought because information doesn't move fast enough. And now information moves so quickly that we don't know how to respond in kind and how to just sit and digest all of that information.

And one of the things that Alan, co-host of the show, and I have talked about, for example, is think about an executive officer, whether it's the governor, whether it's the president. It used to be the case that if they wanted to promulgate a executive order, they would need to physically go walk to their general counsel or to their team. They would need to sit and deliberate for a while about how best to implement or effectuate whatever the goal of that policy was. They'd need to bring out a, a pen and a quill you know, a, a, an ink just to write that executive order, so on and so forth.

There was so much friction, and now all of our technologies are about removing that friction. And in some ways that should be celebrated, and I wanna get to that in a second. But in a lot of ways, as you and I have discussed, this sort of constitution by way of a physical world wasn't preparing us or isn't easily adjustable to a digital one. And so where else are you seeing this transition from a physical world to a digital world manifesting and causing some of these issues about connection and trust?

Matt Abrams: I think it's such an important framing because if we were… And, and I, I will frame this as I do view this as a hypothesis. I am not, it's not binary for me in terms of my thinking around this, that to your point, the Constitution was made in a physical world for a physical age when that inflow of information and decision-making, so on and so forth, was, was at a different speed and, and, and symmetry, if you will. And that has effectively, in my mind, been replaced with, with terms of service in the digital world.

And where I see it playing out is that we, and, and, and I was just reading a piece, I think it was out of Wired, on a study that, Don't quote me specifically on this. I think it was one in eight applications for military service members evidently have been found to have foreign code from China or, or otherwise in these, in these mobile applications. And this is… The, the framing I would say is that this is the quartering of, of soldiers in our digital homes. When Amazon or Google or Microsoft or Oracle or pick your other cloud provider or Anthropic or OpenAI, there is no requirement for any form of digital border control.

 And so, and part of that is an economic piece because look, the reality is they've spent a shitload of dollars on CapEx to build out pre-AI, these data centers and cloud, you know s- you know, capabilities, so on and so forth. And with AI, that's even gone higher, and they don't have any requirement or economic incentive to block the users who sign up for their cloud services, for their AI, AI services, so on and so forth. And so, what, from a constitutional perspective, our, our physical home and our privacy, so on and so forth, was enshrined for us and our life, liberties, you know, et cetera.

Very simply, and, and I'm not a lawyer, so, this is just a simplistic common sense framing for me is, we have shredded the Constitution writ large in relation to digital terms of service, which have taken away our, our digital home privacy, which force us to quarter, you know, enemy soldiers within our digital environments. And companies are reaping massive amounts of dollars from that with no consequences.

And so, we have to change how we think about, and you know, I, I view this as to it, it's, it's fascinating to, to see in terms of, of, of EU versus U.S. regul- regulatory aspects and arguments. And we talk extensively about border control writ large right now. Nobody talks about digital border control. And that, like, what does that mean? What does that look like? And I think that these are important topics to what are the, what are the economic incentives? What are the structures?

What are the requirements? In the digital world, we haven't had requirements. This includes for, for software developers. As Bob Lord has said, Bob was the former CISO at Twitter and Yahoo. He says there are more requirements to be a beautician in the state of California than there are to be a software developer. And yet our software and our digital ecosystem is critical infrastructure, and it is our new home, but we don't treat it as such.

Kevin Frazier: You know, I will leave it to the next set of scholars to dive into Third Amendment jurisprudence and scholarship. I think it's a, a fascinating inquiry, and I hope some of our more nerdy legal scholars listening to this treat that as an invitation to host a symposium and invite you as a speaker. But I, I-

Matt Abrams: Or, call, call me and I'd, I'd love to have a, a one-on-one call. Like, tell me where I'm wrong. Educate me.

Kevin Frazier: There we go.

Matt Abrams: Tell me-

Kevin Frazier: There we go.

Matt Abrams: Yeah.

Kevin Frazier: The, the Third Amendment, I will say, is one of the least studied amendments. So there's, there's plenty of threads to go down. But to the broader point about this question of digital borders, right? We're talking in the middle of July. There's a lot of conversation right now about open source. There's a lot of conversation around the Export Control Reform Act and the extent to which we can prohibit access to things hosted in the cloud for folks who are non- non-U.S. citizens or otherwise stationed abroad.

And so that is a, a, an emerging issue, but w- what I think you're drawing on, too, is the fact that we didn't anticipate the digital world becoming such a rival to the physical world, and did not expect that private parties operating in that digital domain would begin to have so much power and so much control such that they were impacting the physical domain.

And to, to just nerd out for a second, and I try not to do this, but I wrote a paper called “Anti-Constitutional Rivals,” and the whole idea was if you go back to the founding you can go and you can see that the founders were very concerned about other entities exercising authority over individuals, and this included mobs, this included militias, but it even included things like corporations and churches, and that's why we have a whole chartering process of corporations, was to make sure, hey, you are within-

Matt Abrams: But-

Kevin Frazier: The domains of the state ...

Matt Abrams: But-

Kevin Frazier: Yeah.

Matt Abrams: I'll, I'll push back. It used to be a requirement for, to be a corporation, you had to show what you were doing for the public good.

Kevin Frazier: No, and I agree with you on this.

Matt Abrams: That doesn't exist anymore

Kevin Frazier: That doesn't exist anymore. So not only were you subject to the powers of the state and therefore subject to the powers of the people, but also having a more explicit tie to what are the ends that you are going to advance that align with the public interest. And I think now we've gotten so much away from what is it you're trying to actually build for? To your point earlier, we were, we were discussing there's a hell of a lot of slop, and folks don't like slop, especially when building that slop requires a data center in their backyard. Or perhaps it's perceived that building that slop requires more of their personal data. The question, understandably, is what the hell is this all for?

And this is my kind of chief concern with a lot of the AI companies right now is their enunciation of what they're actually building for is incredibly imprecise, very vague, and then they'll just throw out something like, "Oh, well, we're gonna cure cancer." Yeah, you know, I see how you're trying and you're making some investments and so on and so forth, but the American people deserve a much more compelling story about what it is you're actually doing to advance the wellbeing of the general welfare than just “we'll cure cancer at some point.” Do you agree with me? Where am I going wrong? And then we'll get to the positive stuff because I know you have some good examples there.

Matt Abrams: Yeah, I mean, I, I generally agree across the board, and I think this is built on, that tech, while in some ways has been tremendous for us all and opened up creativity and new opportunities and, and economic, you know, prosperity for some, the, at, at, at the end of the day, there has not been trust that has been created nor, so pre-AI, there was not trust created across the the tech industry to the general public writ large. And that includes the fragmentation of, of how, how workers were viewed. If you weren't in software and you were doing the trades, for instance, you were viewed and I, I'm firing for effect here, you were viewed as lesser than. And that was, "Hey, you gotta be in the in club in, in relation to tech and be a software developer."

And, and remember, all of these folks were preaching that it was software, software, software and STEM, STEM, STEM, and that's what you have to do if you're gonna have a livelihood. Well, now that's pivoted and like, "Oh, now we're gonna have the software developer apocalypse." So as, as these tech oligarchs, if you will, and whether, you know, people view oligarchs as pejorative or, or positive, that's, I will let folks translate on that. It's just a reference to the monopolistic aspect here where, guess what? This is where now you told us one thing, and now something else is happening. And we're fighting for our privacy, we're fighting for our data rights, we're fighting for our data ownership we're fighting for algorithmic choice and so on and so forth, and they never built any trust out of that from a broad societal standpoint.

And so, the narrative as, as well with AI is to your point, it's, it's been, you know, horribly, you know, put out there. I think a lot of it was, is, I, I, I am an optimist where I think that there will be a tremendous amount of jobs that are created, and we're not focusing on what those jobs can and should be. And and, and I'll fire for effect here perhaps in this respect. Engineers do a really shitty job of telling stories Engineers do a really shitty job. Like, you know, we have a lot of Steve Wozniaks running around, but not many Steve Jobs. And, and without Steve Jobs, there would be no Apple. Woz would have built the best homebrew club kit computer, and no one would have heard of Apple.

And we have in the Zuckerbergs of the world or the, or in the Musks of the world, it is this perspective of telling these narratives and stories that do not resonate or are not clear with the everyday person because they don't understand how does the, the lumber worker, how does the coal miner, how does the farmer, how does the doctor, how does the “insert here,” whatever profession, it's much more of a, "Hey, get out of our way and we're gonna tell you what to do, and this is the world we wanna create, and we don't need your input, and we're gonna automate everything."

And that, and everyone should l- you know, so I think it's a terrible narrative that's been put out there when in fact there could be so much positive aspects of, in, in many respects, a JFK type aspect as to, "Hey, we're at this, this S-curve inflection point, this evolutionary tipping point. Look what we've developed." Now from a JFK-like perspective, we choose to go to the moon. What's, what's the world we wanna build? Not have shoved on us and not have thrown at us. And I think that's the frustration where people don't feel like they have agency, and this started with, with social media. And it's just amplified, you know, now.

And people are hungry for being able to problem solve and have agency and feel empowered and back to the constitutional freedom. And all those are implied there, and instead they're feeling plastic freedom. They're being told, "Hey, look at everything you have," and this kind of thing. And it's plastic because they recognize that we don't have the freedom or agency in this digital world that, that we thought that we should have. So there, there's, there's more there, and I may be rambling a bit, but I think it's, again, it's complex and complicated as to the aspects around this.

Kevin Frazier: I think that this also begs a bigger question, which is I wa- I was nerding out recently on the difference between a trustee model of elected representatives versus a delegate model of representation. And the understanding was, at the founding, you would want to elect a trustee, someone who you thought could represent your community and advance the best things for your community. Now, there has been a shift over time, not only to a delegate model of representation, where people want them to specifically do what a community asks them to do, regardless of whether they think that's in the best interest of the broader community, so not asking them to defer to their own judgment.

We've since moved to a model of what some people call a personal delegate model of representation, where people will only support what their elected official does if it's what they want them to do, regardless of whether a majority of the voters or the rest of the community may contest that view. They're instead just advocating for adherence to their own personal values. And that's where I see that trust component coming in, because people don't trust their officials to be able to have that awareness of what's going on and representing their views faithfully.

But instead, it's just this atomic vision of democracy that I think is really concerning and can be perpetuated when you spend so much of your time exclusively online or only in these plastic environments that you referred to. So that was my own rant and ramble, and now I wanna talk about how we get out of this. But do you have an, an initial response there?

Matt Abrams: Yeah. I mean, look, I'll go right to the... and it's the next part of how to get out of this and, and that as you know, I'm, I'm deeply involved in, in citizen or civic assemblies and, and DelibTech, deliberation technology. And that includes, you know, where AI fits in as part of that. And for those who are not familiar with, with citizens or civic assemblies, it's a very old idea, you know, but it's in, I'm simplifying, think jury duty for, for, for issues. And it's civic issues, but it's also can be used in business settings. It can be used in organizational settings writ large. But think of it in this way that, you know, a random set of citizens is, is called up on an issue.

Take, there's we did a citizen assembly on youth homelessness here in Central Oregon. There's one being done in Connecticut right now on property taxes. And random set of citizens get called up to be part of those delegates, those assembly members. But it has to be statistically representative of the demographics of the community, whatever the size of that community is. That is not how jury du- jury, you know, duty works. It's not, you know, statistically representative. And so, in this case, I have seen personally and, you know, as to the trust that this builds.

You know, in Central Oregon here, we're at the d- on the dividing line of what's called the Greater Idaho Movement, where the eastern portion of the state wants to secede to Idaho, in part because they don't trust Portland, they don't trust Salem. Like they, they don't feel representative and, and they're not necessarily wrong in some respects. In fact, they're right in aspects. They need to be heard and, and understood. But it's, they're, the solution aspects around this is we, we haven't developed the mechanisms or the systems to say, "How do we sit down and as citizens together, have the agency and the power to make the decisions for our true representation here?"

And this is where the trust building that happens in these citizens and civic assemblies is tremendous and incredibly proven. And, and, you know, I'm happy to go, you know, in, into detail in this respect, but those are the types of solutions. And, and on the delib- or deliberation tech side, or, or we talk about bridging algorithms and, and, you know, right now we have algorithms which are putting us in our bubbles and our silos and reinforcing our belief systems and our, and ensuring that, hey, my belief system is not gonna be impacted.

So back to your point on, hey, I'm electing this representative or here's my choice, and they don't specifically follow my belief system. This is something where how do we change and how do we require from a technology perspective or standardizations as to how do we encourage bridging and healthy dynamics and healthy conversation instead of the worst of us and, and incentivizing the village idiots?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, it well, so to go down the con law route again, at the foundation of our Constitution is a republican form of government. And three things if you look at Federalist Paper 10, three things really define a republican form of government. Number one is deliberation. Number two is cutting against sort of a impassioned response. We wanna make sure we have cool deliberation. And number three is making sure that we're countering interests. We're countering things like factions, right? And we wanna make sure-

Matt Abrams: That's right.

Kevin Frazier: We're bringing in enough groups. Well, in the 18th century, we didn't have AI to do things like make sure we could actually scale deliberation to entire communities to be able to engage in these conversations all at once. We didn't have AI tools to assist with countering our own impulses and our own biases to point out how we could think through issues in a way that's more reflective of their impact on broader society.

And so, what I think is a really exciting moment right now is to ask how can AI actually advance the core aspects of republican governance rather than advance republican governance as we know it today? Because I think that's a big differentiating factor that people just struggle to have the imagination to think about what a future republican governance could look like.

Matt Abrams: Look, I'll gi- I'll give it, you know, perhaps the simplest example that I have this, this dream on is that I want to see from an AI perspective us focusing on what is, I’m, I, I won't assume, but in some part I will, that the audience is familiar with SimCity, the video game. SimCity allowed us to simulate what is this, this city gonna look like when you build it out, so on and so forth.

We are not, and have not focused on, and this is where AI I think has, and, and, and I wanna separate out AI, AI is not just LLMs. It's not just transformer models. It's, there's a lot more beyond it, but we, but so I don't wanna equate AI when we talk about it to just generative AI, so on and so forth. That said, is that there's so much of an opportunity for us to be able to use AI, not just in relation to bridging algorithms and deliberation and how do we encourage the healthy communities and, and folks like, whether it's Demnext, whether it's folks like Google Jigsaw, Polis, others doing some remarkable stuff here. But this is where, what does a SimCity 2.0 look like?

Imagine if we as, as citizens, imagine if, if whether it's our e- you know, existing representatives, so on and so forth, could actually, I want to understand, "Hey, we are proposing putting this new process or this new legislation in place." Well, what are the incentives? What are we trying to solve for? And are we actually g- going to get the intended consequences of that, or is it gonna lead to unintended consequences? How do we have these simulated environments and this predictive, just as we're doing this with drug discovery, why aren't we doing this with our, our form of Republican governmental aspects, so on and so forth, in liberal democracy writ large? And I think this is some of the power for us to really lean into, is to building out that type of capability, those type of, of civic engineering solutions that they don't exist today

Kevin Frazier: And I, I love that because I've had this debate actually with a couple of AI skeptics in particular, which AI has many flaws, but one of the things-

Matt Abrams: Yep

Kevin Frazier: It's continually improving on is simulation. And I think that future generations are gonna look back at this era and ask, "Why the hell were you not mandating that your legislature simulate the likely outcomes of that piece of legislation? And if they don't achieve stated outcomes X, Y, or Z, then they can't pass it, or maybe they need a super majority to pass it." The fact that we haven't expanded our regulatory technology to include the advances in technology we're seeing in other domains is just bonkers to me.

But I wanna transition to how we can make sure that we realize this JFK moment. I am a big fan of a piece by Harry Law of the Cosmos Institute, who highlighted the fact that being a part of a republican form of government involves having formative experiences. Even if we had an AI model that could perfectly express our values and beliefs and so on and so forth, if you and I don't go out and engage with those people, if we don't go meet those other Oregonians and learn what it was like to go through the Spotted Owl Wars and so on and so forth, then we still don't have that glue that binds us all together as a political community.

And that's something I'm increasingly concerned about because I go and I talk to folks in SF, and they live in one universe where, you know, spinning up agents is a normal activity that, that makes sense. And then I go and I travel to Morgantown, West Virginia, and if I said “spinning up agents,” they would look like I just had 15 Mountain Dews or something.

And I worry that we're going to see a further separation of these political communities such that it's gonna be really hard to say “these United States of America,” as opposed to “these very distinct communities based off of very different technological paradigms.” So do we need national service? Do we need a CCC? What is it that can help restore this glue? Because yes, we can have AI improve deliberation, but ultimately, I still think we need that human-to-human connection, and I would really love your thoughts on, on how we can manage that.

Matt Abrams: There are plenty of others who have spoken on this besides myself, so, and, and some things I'll repeat from others I, I have a tremendous amount of respect for. On the national service question, yes, I think that there should be required national service. I think, and, and national service doesn't mean military service. That just means service, and that could be back on the citizen assembly front. That is service. The, the, the, the friend of mine who I brought on as executive director to, to lead it up here, he was 25 years of Air F- Air Force Special Operations, and he opened it up with saying that he always felt it was disingenuous for being thanked for his service when folks from NGOs, from the State Department, from the intelligence community, for the press was n- they were never thanked for their service. And he opened it up saying, "I want to thank each and every one of you assembly members for your service here." And so, I think people are hungry for that as well. They're hungry for that.

Again, we're all, y- every human being wants purpose. They wanna be able to contribute. They wanna be able to, to not just be along for the ride, if you will. I th- I, I inherently believe that. Some don't. I inherently believe in, I think, what Scott Galloway refers to unremarkable people, and that, I think, is the power of, of this country. And I think that we're at this moment where, and, and you and I have discussed this. I, I use the phrase “civic engineering.” I wanna see an army of civic engineers that is helping build the new country. And, and we discussed that if my son goes to West Point and West Point was created as a, as a, by an engineer to go train the next generation of engineers to go build the new country. And we are at that pivotal point of what does the country look like that we all want to see? I, I believe that people the, the common things that bind us generally is around the, the broad aspect of freedom.

And I think when you really get down to, to the freedom aspect, a good, a very good friend of mine who was arguing with his father, who were, they were first gen- generation immigrants from the Soviet Union. He was outlining that, that he-- To his father, he said, "Look, freedom and what this country stands for is for you to believe in something that I might not agree with." And that's a beautiful thing in some respects, and we, we tend to, to be afraid or run from that.

And this is where the engineering, the country we wanna, we wanna create, what is the, what are the solutions? Trust is at the foundation of it. Like, if we, if we don't trust one another, if we don't have trust information, like, we don't have freedom. If we don't have, you know, epistemic, you know, systems and structures, if we're not giving people purpose and agency. And so there is this, this moment where I think that we need to lead into, and again, I call it the civic engineering thesis, what are the solutions to solve for and build trust in information, trust in one another, trust in our institutions, and reimagine and not expect that we're going to have a billionaire who's gonna solve our problems because they were able to create a company that landed a rocket with, with chopsticks. Phenomenal, but this country's always been about bottoms up and people working to solve our problems and create something amazing.

And so, look, I'm, I am back on the naive optimist. I'm a naive optimist because we are always on this journey of, can we live up to the potential of what the Founding Fathers created. They knew that, that we weren't where, you know, all men are created equal. They knew that, that we were not. That was an aspirational what is our potential? And I think it's really important to for all of us, and we, and, and this starts at by ourselves. It starts at a community level, ground up. What can we do? These little things to leave things better, to work on improving, to chi- chip away at the wall. So as Clint Smith says, “we'll be that much closer to the other side,” and we've gotta change the mindset there. Instead of this, It, it is tiresome to, to be warring, to be arguing, to be hating, to be fearful. All right. So what can we do to, to, to flip that?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah. And I love that idea of building, right? People wanna contribute. People want to go and help construct new communities, new institutions, new ideas. We're seeing that in so and so, so-called proto towns across the U.S., right? Because people are just hungry to go create new things and to be parts of communities that don't feel so bound by the status quo.

And now we have the technology and the opportunities to ask even larger questions, and the challenge for us is to just really take that seriously because I think that as much as I'm supportive of, for example, President Biden's Moonshot for Cancer, great. Obviously, fuck cancer. Everyone hates cancer. But that moonshot didn't involve a whole of society approach of STEM education, of new engineers, of new schools, so on and so forth. We need moonshots that are tangible for people that result in that meaning and purpose, and-

Matt Abrams: And-

Kevin Frazier: That’s a big-

Matt Abrams: By the way, im- imagine, imagine, and, and granted this was when the, the frontier models were just emerging as well, but imagine that Cancer Moonshot if the frontier labs had partnered on that and how society would feel about, would, would we be having the same sort of AI data center debates Versus, "Hey, we just created this thing that can do these cool, you know, deepfakes or cool, you know, Lego videos," or whatever it may be. Who the fuck cares? Like, like let's solve real problems that affect everyday people, that people can feel and touch and understand and make their lives better, and your narrative is then solved for you. The trust is solved for you.

Kevin Frazier: Exactly. Exactly. Well, and I think having new institutions like data trusts and data co-ops that say, "Give us your data, and then we'll build tools for you," would be so transformative. But Matt, I'm getting the sense that you and I could talk for many, many hours, and it would be maybe several days if I were hanging out with you at Crux in Bend drinking a stout that is way too strong. Even in the summer, I will drink an Oregon stout because I miss them so much. But Matt, thank you so much for joining Scaling Laws. This was a hoot.

Matt Abrams: It was great to, to be on here, so thanks, Kevin.

[Outro]

Kevin Frazier: Scaling Laws is a joint production of Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law. You can get an ad-free version of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material subscriber at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. You can also follow us on X and Bluesky. This podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our music is from Alibi. As always, thanks for listening.