Sarah Myers West

speaker

68 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Sarah Myers West’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Excerpt · Can the US regulate AI without slowing innovation? · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

And there are some domains where the use of AI poses just an unacceptable risk and it can't be used at all.

This approach, I think, has some benefits, some detractions.

I think one of the benefits is that it allows for that attunement to the actual context of use.

One of the detractions, though, is that a lot of AI is not developed for a particular use case, but is general purpose technology and thus needs more scrutiny before it's out in broad use.

In the US context, we largely have not taken that kind of like broad strokes approach to the AI sector, but it is one of the paths forward that some policymakers have considered.

So there have been a variety of different states that have passed laws that attempt to wrap their arms around this complicated issue area.

One set of approaches focuses on trying to mitigate the farthest out catastrophic risk

This is the type of law that's been passed in California, in New York and elsewhere.

I think one of the limitations of that approach is that by and large, it exempts most of the uses of AI that are already in deployment from scrutiny.

It only applies to AI systems that are above a certain size and scale.

That means that most of the harms that people may be feeling in the here and now

aren't really getting very much attention it's sort of a mitigation against future facing more catastrophic risks but it can be equally existential if ai is used to you know like i said earlier to deny your health insurance claim and and that is an area that needs much more attention

So as you mentioned, the National Institute for Standards and Technology has historically played an important role in the tech sector in providing evaluation frameworks for assessing AI systems.

And one such framework is the risk management framework.

These are really designed in ways that are meant to just inform businesses.

that are not binding.

They don't have the kind of friction that's going to force companies to behave in certain ways or change the incentive structures.

And I think what we're seeing now in the dynamics around AI is a lot of companies being allowed to grade their own homework.

And that is not going to be meaningfully protective of the frontline impacts that communities are feeling across the country.

The Trump administration's stance toward AI has been, if anything, to take an already stepped back approach to this sector to the farthest extreme.

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