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Beth Simone Noveck joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about her book, Reboot, AI and the Race to Save Democracy. She’s a professor at Northeastern, where she leads the Burns Center for Social Change. She also founded Innovate US, a training program for public sector workers. It’s grown into one of the largest AI training efforts in the country. Before that, she ran AI for the state of New Jersey and worked on tech policy for the federal government under President Obama.
I admit I hadn’t read the book before we sat down to talk. My reading backlog is somewhere around 160 books deep at this point, a genuinely embarrassing number, but Reboot jumped near the top of the list by the time we wrapped.
The Messy Middle
Most of what gets said about AI publicly sits at one of two extremes. It’s either going to wipe us out or save us. There’s very little room in between. Noveck wrote Reboot because she thinks that the messy middle is where the real story actually is. Dystopian collapse and idyllic utopia both make for better headlines than anything nuanced, so that’s what gets covered. It skews how people think about these tools before they’ve even used one. Her point extends past AI, too. Things like Flock cameras, Ring doorbells, or blockchain are not inherently good or bad. What matters is what gets built on top of them and who’s making those decisions.
Noveck pushes that dual-use idea further with a comparison to nuclear technology. The same science can build a bomb or a power plant. She argues we spend most of our energy relitigating the bomb conversation. We spend almost none of it asking what the power plant should look like. What would we deliberately choose to build because it actually matters, instead of just building whatever a company happens to find profitable?
Who Gets to Decide
Decision-making is where this gets political. Who actually has influence over AI policy right now? Some of that influence happens in the open, through lobbying and testimony. Some of it happens over closed-door dinners most of us never hear about. Noveck doesn’t think it should come down to whoever has the most money or the loudest microphone. “When it’s positive, we call it targeting. When we don’t like it, we call it manipulation,” she told me. That framing problem shows up everywhere from search results to airline pricing, and in how a city decides what its residents actually want.
Noveck also pushes back on the idea that you need a technical background to have a say in any of this. Just as you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car safely, you also don’t need a computer science degree to use AI responsibly or weigh in on how it should be regulated. She backs that up with real examples of AI already being used to make government more participatory instead of less, along with her own case for why she’s still hopeful about where this is headed. I’m leaving the specifics for the episode.
Give it a watch or a listen and let me know what you think.
I have a passion for technology and gadgets and a desire to help others understand how technology can affect or improve their lives. I also love spending time with my wife, 7 kids, 3 dogs, 5 cats, a pot-bellied pig, and sulcata tortoise, and I like to think I enjoy reading and golf even though I never find time for either. You can contact me directly at tony@xpective.net. For more from me, you can follow me on Threads, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
