The Download: how NYC tackles tough problems, and China’s AI standards
It’s a reality of politics that is often overlooked: once a law is passed, it needs to evolve from an idea into a plan with a budget and a staff, and from there it needs to actually reach the lives of millions of people. Moving from policy to implementation has always been a hard part of governing. Today it’s easy to assume technology can make it easier. But is that actually true?
New York City is something of a test lab for strategies to confront some big problems that plague the modern state. Akin to a country in the budget and bureaucratic complexity of its government, it is, and has been, dealing with the key question of how to make government work for people today. But it is finding that sometimes the solution to doing big things also involves doing a lot of small things, sometimes with the lowest tech possible. Read the full story.
—Tate Ryan-Mosley
Tate’s story is from the next magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on October 25. It’s all about society’s hardest problems, and how we should tackle them. If you don’t subscribe already, sign up now to get a copy when it lands.
China’s plan to judge the safety of generative AI
Ever since the Chinese government passed a law on generative AI back in July, it’s been unclear how exactly China’s censorship machine would adapt for the AI era.
Last week we finally got some clarity. On October 11, the Chinese government released a draft document that proposed detailed rules for how to determine whether a generative AI model is problematic.
