When Did Common Sense AI Policy Become Radical?

A couple of months ago, I joined the Canadian government’s AI strategy task force. Out of thirty members, I was one of only four focused on safety. Everyone else was there to talk growth. It reflects a pattern playing out all over the world: we’re going all in on AI, and regulation will only slow us down. It’s hard to overstate how quickly this shift happened. Just a few years ago, even Elon Musk was calling for an industry-wide pause on AI development, and the Biden administration was developing an “AI Bill of Rights” – one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive frameworks for AI regulation I’ve ever seen. The architect of that initiative was Dr. Alondra Nelson. Today, she leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study and is fresh off a stint on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral transition team in New York. I wanted to have her on to wrestle with an urgent question: how do you make a technology safe when nobody seems particularly interested in regulating it – and what might happen if we don’t? Mentioned: Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People , by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy The mirage of AI deregulation , by Alondra Nelson (Science) International AI Safety Report 2026 , by Yoshua Bengio et al Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can listen to When Did Common Sense AI Policy Become Radical? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

When Did Common Sense AI Policy Become Radical? is an episode from Big Tech by The Globe and Mail.

This episode is 00:37:35 long.

This episode was published on Feb 24, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Big Tech when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.