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Comment by Onavo | Hacker News Reader

> David Evan Harris is [sic] senior advisor for AI and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, and visiting fellow at the Integrity Institute. He previously worked as a research manager at Meta (formerly Facebook) on the responsible AI, civic integrity, and social impact teams, and was recently named to Business Insider’s AI 100 list for his work on AI governance, fairness, and misinformation.

Found the revolving door lobbyist.

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Except in this case he walked from corporate cash to an academic role. I’d be curious why he left the integrity division in Meta. Anyway, when someone like this expresses caution it causes me to listen.

I don't see why; the recommendations in the article are generic regulatory-capture plays, and this person has not really demonstrated a specific mastery of AI. Other versions of his resume list him as the Research Manager for "Social Impact" and almost all of his publications are for commercial media. In other words, writing these articles is basically his job.

This is in essence a sociologist's take on AI, which is why it doesn't bother to define "AI", demands international treaties which would violate American constitutional rights, and contains outright nonsense like "educating all suppliers of custom nucleic acids...about best practices" (as though someone in that business doesn't already know).

Academia != Nonprofits

I vaguely remember headlines about Meta firing its responsible AI team sometime around the whole Sam Altman debacle at OpenAI?

I once wrote an opinion in healthcare with my professor, just so that I could get a bullet point for my CV. We got published in Nature quite accidentally (I honestly just wanted to submit it to Bloomberg Opinions or something lol), and while the citations aren't much, it has since been cited by an industry body and a government report. But yeah, I just wanted an easy paper with a bullet point for my CV.

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