By Rob Pegoraro
LAS VEGAS—Former Vice President Kamala Harris showed up at a conference about artificial intelligence this week to urge the people most invested in it to work on two more organic features: trust and empathy.
In a roughly 45-minute talk at the HumanX conference here, Harris voiced support for the potential of AI to transform society—comparing it at one point to the electrification of rural America—but warned that strained relationships between industry, government, and people could squander that potential.
“If we don’t figure this out, I think we are losing this very specific moment in time,” she told her interviewer, Nuno Sebastião, CEO and co-founder of the financial fraud-detection firm Feedzai.
Much of the problem, Harris said, is due to a communication breakdown between Washington and Silicon Valley. “Right now, that’s a really bad relationship,” she said, noting that the last decade has eroded decades of government support for research and innovation.
.Gov Gripes
The government deserves some of that blame, Harris said, in the sense of failing to appreciate the utility of AI and of data in general. She cited her experience as California’s attorney general, when she fought to set up a data portal called Open Justice that made the vast reserves of data from the state’s Justice Department available to researchers and advocates.
“Government has a way of collecting extraordinary amounts of data,” she said. “And then we put it in a box, in a room, and we shut the door.”
Bureaucracy in state and federal offices can slow things down further. “It can actually be antithetical to…its purpose.” And it doesn’t help when officials reply to tech with a version of “What is that? What language are you speaking?”
Harris did not share any second thoughts on the Biden administration’s approach to security, capped off by a lengthy executive order—since repealed by the Trump administration—that attempted to elevate safety and privacy standards for AI systems.
In her first notable public appearance since a brief speech at the NAACP’s Image Awards ceremony in February, Harris didn’t mention the current administration at all. Except, perhaps, for a lesson that she credited to her mother. “We cannot conflate disruption with destruction”—a possible brushoff of Elon Musk’s “DOGE” government-disruption project.
Tech’s Trust Gap
As for tech-industry types, Harris said they don’t help this relationship when they decide “that government poses one thing and only one thing, which is an impediment to innovation.” Or, in some cases, even wonder if it’s even that necessary.
She saved her strongest words for an even more frayed relationship: the one between tech firms and their customers and users, who she also described as “the people who are not in that room.”
They often feel little agency in their interaction with tech services, an issue she brought up in a story about watching the Oscars at home with her husband, Doug Emhoff. She realized she was out of her favorite junk food, and opted to Doordash a giant bag of Doritos. “I was willing to give up whatever might be the tracking of Kamala Harris’s particular fondness for nacho cheese Doritos for getting a big bag of Doritos as I watched the Oscars,” she said. (We trust that Harris and Emhoff tipped well.)
Those feelings of mistrust are strongest relative to AI, Harris noted: “The polling tells us, I think, it’s 70% of the American people don’t trust AI.”
AI fueling misinformation and disinformation is part of the problem; Harris cited “incredibly harmful” lies about federal responses to Hurricane Helene but didn’t mention that much of it was spread by Musk. But fears about job loss loom much larger.
Work’s Worth in an AI Economy
“Our identity, in many, many ways, is connected to the job we do,” she said, quickly adding: “I, for example, right now am unemployed.” The audience LOLed.
“There are some people with a very big bully pulpit who have been very dismissive on this point, [saying] ‘get over it, it’s happening,'” she continued. “Let’s start with a little more empathy and a little more respect for the righteous fear that people have about losing their everything.”
Instead, Harris urged them to consider the people not in the room. “Can you articulate your vision of the future in a way that other people can see themselves?” she said. “Excuse my language, don’t bullshit me; I need to…see myself in your vision of the future.”
Proposals to replace paychecks lost to AI with a Universal Basic Income scheme don’t cut it. “You know what people hear when you talk about UBI?” Harris said. “You want to take my job and put me on welfare.”
But she ended the talk optimistically, saying she wished her mother, a biomedical researcher, were alive today to see how AI is advancing things in that field and others. AI developers, however, need to work harder to involve other people instead of expecting them to sit back and appreciate their work.
“Let’s please understand there are many stakeholders in this work,” she said. “Your enthusiasm about this will be shared if people know what you know.”
