RAD Collective's Bryce Rogers urges democratic AI governance
Bryce Rogers of the RAD Collective describes AI as the product of millennia of human information transfer, arguing it feels alienating because companies trained on our collective achievement to out-compete and spy on us. He urges the Council to center constituent voices over executives.
I thank the council for leading the charge on local AI legislation by convening this historic hearing.
My name is Bryce Rogers.
I'm a resident of the 34th Council District.
I thank Council Member Gutierrez for representing me.
I'm co-lead of the Resisting Automated Disempowerment Collective, or RAD Collective, a New York City grassroots community advocating for city and state AI policy that protects human life, joy, and democracy.
The great strength of humanity is our ability to transfer information to one another.
We are blessed with expressive hands, faces, and voices, but have also constantly sought to augment our inherent communicative capabilities via technology.
To collaborate on complex and abstract topics, we developed language and systems of measurement.
To convey information farther than our voice can reach, we built postal services, telegraphs, and telephones.
And to transmit messages across time, we've developed oral histories, library collections, and recently digital archives, the evolving means by which each generation inherits their predecessors'infrastructure and wisdom.
Through these technologies, humanity has accrued the wealth of information upon which artificial intelligence is predicated.
AI distills the meaningful patterns from very large bodies of training data, not just navigating the information as a search engine does, but digesting it, converting our species'informatic endowment into an inquirable, oracle-like machine.
I can't shake the feeling that this could have been beautiful, but it just doesn't feel like us.
These companies trained their products on millennia of our predecessors'dogged achievement, only to deploy their tech to out-compete us, to spy on us, and to replace us.
All of this is to say, democracy is the only righteous path forward.
AI is built on the work of many, and its fate oughtn't be dictated by a few self-raised
regulating executives, regardless of how their spokespeople reassure us over Zoom.
In this spirit, we again thank the Council for convening this forum of local democracy and implore you to foreground the diverse constituent voices of New York City in your legislation.
Rad wrote a letter to the Council that I'd love for you to check out if you haven't already.
We look forward to advancing the moral frontier of AI policy together.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.