Hi you,
First things first: mark your calendar cuz we are going live April 28th at 5:00pm PT with a guest you don’t want to miss. Kelly Boesch is an artist at the cutting edge of AI creation and the profound ethical discussion around it. RSVP to add this one to your calendar and be part of the conversation!
Now that you’ve done that…
I want to introduce you to a young person who is passing protective bills for young people. That sentence shouldn’t be remarkable. But here we are.
Arielle Geismar is a tech ethics activist, Forbes 30 Under 30, and host of Tech Unfiltered. She helped lobby the Maryland legislature to pass a law requiring social media platforms to collect less data on minors, then helped stop the federal government from freezing state-level AI regulation for an entire decade. She did all of this before she was old enough to rent a car without a surcharge.
I asked her on to talk about why AI is an inherently political issue, why AI should be treated like any other consumer product, and why the “we can’t regulate innovation” argument is both a myth and a distraction. Before you press play, here’s a taste of what we get into:
1. If social media was actually designed for social connection, the metrics would reflect that. Did this help you see your friends? Did you learn something? Did you feel less alone? That’s not what gets tracked. What gets tracked is shares, engagement, time on screen — what Baratunde called, mid-conversation, addiction metrics. And the moment you see that, you can’t unsee it. What a platform measures is what it’s actually for.
“We should be able to use technology… not like technology is using us.”
2. From there we got into regulation. The asks Arielle’s been fighting for aren’t radical: be responsible when interacting with minors, don’t track 14-year-olds’ location data, build explicit pathways to mental health resources when the content warrants it. These are not stressful requirements. And the alternative isn’t a free market, it’s a $100 million lawsuit and years of legal entanglements. That costs more and builds less than the guardrail would have. You can go a lot faster on a roller coaster if there are actual rails.
3. She also said something that I think is the real headline of this conversation: Young people understand this tech better than anyone. They’re uniquely fine tuned to how it affects their lives. So they should have a say in how it’s designed and regulated.
“We’re tired of consistently inheriting problems that we didn’t make, and that we’re being told we’re whining when we’re trying to solve.”
This is a PACKED conversation, so you’re gonna want to watch the whole thing. Then come back and tell us in the comments: What regulations would you put in place immediately if you had a magic wand (or a functional congress, whichever feels more plausible to you)?
Stay free,
Baratunde
Thanks to Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for production and editorial support, and the entire Life With Machines team.
