Tech Talk: Reflecting on the Anniversary of the ADA — Talking Tech w/ Alex Givens & Ariana Aboulafia
Graphic for CDT’s podcast, entitled “CDT’s Tech Talks.” Hosted by Jamal Magby, and available on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and TuneIn. Dark grey text and app logos, as well as light blue text, on a white background.
CDT’s Tech Talk is a podcast where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. You can find Tech Talk on Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts, as well as Stitcher and TuneIn.
July 26 marks the thirty-third anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), perhaps the most important piece of legislation in the history of the disability rights movement. Since the passage of the ADA, disabled people have achieved significant advances in equality; but, the spread of technology brings new concerns and new questions to mind.
In this episode, you’ll hear from Alexandra Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), and Ariana Aboulafia, Policy Counsel for Disability Rights in Technology at CDT, as they discuss the ADA, its legacy, and some of the most pressing issues in technology policy for disabled people.
(CDT relies on the generosity of donors like you. If you enjoyed this episode of Tech Talk, you can support it and our work at CDT by going to cdt.org/techtalk. Thank you for putting democracy and individual rights at the center of the digital revolution.)
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
