was a replacement of the US Digital Service. That organization, founded during
the Obama administration to empower agencies across the executive government
with technical support, was substituted for one reportedly charged with
traumatizing their staff and slashing their resources. The problem in this
particular dystopia is not the machines and their superhuman capabilities (or
lack thereof) but rather the aims of the people behind them.

One of the biggest impacts of the Trump administration and DOGE's efforts has
been to politically polarize the discourse around AI. Despite the administration
railing against "woke AI"' and the supposed liberal bias of Big Tech, some
surveys suggest the American left is now measurably more resistant to developing
the technology and pessimistic about its likely impacts on their future than
their right-leaning counterparts. This follows a familiar pattern of US
politics, of course, and yet it points to a potential political realignment with
massive consequences.

People are morally and strategically justified in pushing the Democratic Party
to reduce its dependency on funding from billionaires and corporations,
particularly in the tech sector. But this movement should decouple the
technologies championed by Big Tech from those corporate interests. Optimism
about the potential beneficial uses of AI need not imply support for the Big
Tech companies that currently dominate AI development. To view the technology as
inseparable from the corporations is to risk unilateral disarmament as AI shifts
power balances throughout democracy. AI can be a legitimate tool for building
the power of workers, operating government and advancing the public interest,
and it can be that even while it is exploited as a mechanism for oligarchs to
enrich themselves and advance their interests.

A constructive version of DOGE could have redirected the Digital Service to
coordinate and advance the thousands of AI use cases already being explored
across the US government. Following the example of countries like Canada, each
instance could have been required to make a detailed public disclosure as to how
they would follow a unified set of principles for responsible use that preserves
civil rights while advancing government efficiency.

Applied to different ends, AI could have produced celebrated success stories
rather than national embarrassments.

A different administration might have made AI translation services widely
available in government services to eliminate language barriers to US citizens,
residents and visitors, instead of revoking some of the modest translation
requirements previously in place. AI could have been used to accelerate
eligibility decisions for Social Security disability benefits by performing
preliminary document reviews, significantly reducing the infamous backlog of
30,000 Americans who die annually awaiting review. Instead, the deaths of people
awaiting benefits may now double due to cuts by DOGE. The technology could have
helped speed up the ministerial work of federal immigration judges, helping them
whittle down a backlog of millions of waiting cases. Rather, the judicial
systems must face this backlog amid firings of immigration judges, despite the
backlog.

To reach these constructive outcomes, much needs to change. Electing leaders
committed to leveraging AI more responsibly in government would help, but the
solution has much more to do with principles and values than it does technology.
As historian Melvin Kranzberg said, technology is never neutral: its effects
depend on the contexts it is used in and the aims it is applied towards. In
other words, the positive or negative valence of technology depends on the
choices of the people who wield it.

The Trump administration's plan to use AI to advance their regulatory rollback
is a case in point. DOGE has introduced an "AI Deregulation Decision Tool" that
it intends to use through automated decision-making to eliminate about half of a
catalog of nearly 200,000 federal rules . This follows similar proposals to use
AI for large-scale revisions of the administrative code in Ohio, Virginia and
the US Congress.

This kind of legal revision could be pursued in a nonpartisan and nonideological
way, at least in theory. It could be tasked with removing outdated rules from
centuries past, streamlining redundant provisions and modernizing and aligning
legal language. Such a nonpartisan, nonideological statutory revision has been
performed in Ireland -- by people, not AI -- and other jurisdictions. AI is well
suited to that kind of linguistic analysis at a massive scale and at a furious
pace.

But we should never rest on assurances that AI will be deployed in this kind of
objective fashion. The proponents of the Ohio, Virginia, congressional and DOGE
efforts are explicitly ideological in their aims. They see "AI as a force for
deregulation," as one US senator who is a proponent put it, unleashing
corporations from rules that they say constrain economic growth. In this
setting, AI has no hope to be an objective analyst independently performing a
functional role; it is an agent of human proponents with a partisan agenda.

The moral of this story is that we can achieve positive outcomes for workers and
the public interest as AI transforms governance, but it requires two things:
electing leaders who legitimately represent and act on behalf of the public
interest and increasing transparency in how the government deploys technology.

Agencies need to implement technologies under ethical frameworks, enforced by
independent inspectors and backed by law. Public scrutiny helps bind present and
future governments to their application in the public interest and to ward
against corruption.

These are not new ideas and are the very guardrails that Trump, Musk and DOGE
have steamrolled over the past six months. Transparency and privacy requirements
were avoided or ignored, independent agency inspectors general were fired and
the budget dictates of Congress were disrupted. For months, it has not even been
clear who is in charge of and accountable for DOGE's actions. Under these
conditions, the public should be similarly distrustful of any executive's use of
AI.

We think everyone should be skeptical of today's AI ecosystem and the
influential elites that are steering it towards their own interests. But we
should also recognize that technology is separable from the humans who develop
it, wield it and profit from it, and that positive uses of AI are both possible
and achievable.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech
Policy Press.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

Signed Copies of Rewiring Democracy

[2025.09.08] When I announced my latest book last week, I forgot to mention that
you can pre-order a signed copy here. I will ship the books the week of 10/20,
when it is published.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

New Cryptanalysis of the Fiat-Shamir Protocol

[2025.09.09] A couple of months ago, a new paper demonstrated some new attacks
against the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Quanta published a good article th

--- BBBS/LiR v4.10 Toy-7
 * Origin: TCOB1: https/binkd/telnet binkd.rima.ie (618:500/1)