Chelsea Follett: Joining me today is my colleague Jennifer Huddleston. Jennifer is a technology policy research fellow here at the Cato Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of emerging technology and law with a particular interest in the interactions between technology and the administrative states. Her work covers topics including antitrust, online content moderation, data privacy and the benefits of technology and innovation. Her work has appeared in USA Today, National Review, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, RealClearPolicy and US News and World Report. And she has published in law journals including the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, George Mason Law Review, Oklahoma Law Review, and Colorado Technology Law Journal. She holds a JD from the University of Alabama School of Law and a BA in political science from Wellesley College. And she joins the podcast today to discuss the perceived dangers around new technology.
Chelsea Follett: The potential benefits, what policies we can implement to try to reap those benefits. Thank you so much for joining me, Jennifer.
Jennifer Huddleston: Thanks, Chelsea. Great to be chatting with you on the podcast today.
Chelsea Follett: So let’s start really big picture. We hear so much about the risks and downsides of technology ranging from fears of tech giants monopolies to the idea that AI will go rogue and actually destroy the world. So with so much talk about the dangers of technology, relatively under discussed are the potential benefits and the transformative potential of technology. What are some areas where you believe new technologies hold the promise to improve our lives?
Jennifer Huddleston: There are so many areas that we’ve seen already be so transformed by technology even over the last decade or so. Think about when we were faced with the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and suddenly so much of our lives shifted to having to work from home. Now imagine if that same thing had happened, not in 2020, but in 2010, how different would that have been? How much more limited would the options have been to stay connected to friends and family? How much more limited would the options have been even just to entertain yourself at home? How much more limited would it have been to be able to continue your education or continue to do your jobs? What we’ve seen is because the US has maintained a light touch approach when it comes to the technology sector, we’ve really empowered entrepreneurs and innovators to think about the products that consumers may need and to enter those products into the market.
Jennifer Huddleston: In a way that we as consumers may not have ever imagined before. So rather than dictating the way that technology needed to go and saying we must have this technology in this area. We’ve allowed the market to really supply those needs and as a result of that progress, many of us forget that these things weren’t always common. I often joke that the internet always tells me I’m old now because I’m a millennial and I still remember the days of having atlases in your car when you were going on a car trip rather than just pulling out your smartphone and assuming that you could get there via whatever mapping app you prefer. And I remember when you used to have to print out the map quest and that seemed like such a huge thing though that you could now get turn-by-turn directions rather than if you got lost having to pull over and find the atlas and things like that. It was a huge deal, if we… And then we went from printing out the map quest to having those GPS devices that we plugged into our car.
Jennifer Huddleston: And we thought how cool was this that we could pre-program where we were going. And now if you think about it, on the average day, if you’re going somewhere new, you don’t even look it up in advance, maybe you briefly look up how long will it take me to get there. But most of us trust that I can just check my phone 15, 30 minutes or whatever before and find my way to that meeting rather than the huge amount of planning it used to take to do something as simple as that.
Chelsea Follett: So we’ll get more into the right approach to regulating technology in a moment. But let’s talk about some of the bad proposals out there and some of the troubling approaches to regulating AI technology. You work on so many different hot button issues when it comes to technology, not just AI, but social media actually, so many areas. What are some of the dangers of over-regulating these technologies? And what are some of the proposals that we’re seeing? Because as someone who doesn’t specialize in this as you do, I’m hearing a lot of calls for more regulation from different areas and it’s bipartisan. It’s everything from President Biden saying we need to clamp down on AI, to people on the right like Nikki Haley saying we must de-anonymize social media and have more government control over that. It really seems to be a popular approach right now.
Jennifer Huddleston: So Chelsea, I’m gonna start with the question about AI and I’m gonna start by asking you a question. How often do you think you use AI?
Chelsea Follett: Maybe when it comes to ChatGPT every few days for something? I do actually find it’s more useful than Google for some things, but I’m sure that what you’re hinting at is that AI in subtle ways is incorporated in far more of what we use technologically than we’re even aware.
Jennifer Huddleston: Exactly. While we think of AI as this thing that just became really popular in late 2022, most of us have been using artificial intelligence without realizing it in our day-to-day lives. This is actually a technology that’s been long in development. So those Google searches you were comparing ChatGPT to also use AI, those mapping devices we may be using also are sometimes using AI. When we think about things like the fact that you may have a quick response on an email that’s just, okay thanks pops up when you see it, all of that is AI. So when we think about regulating AI, we often hear of it in two contexts, either in the context of ChatGPT and concerns about misinformation, or about copyright or about any other number of things that generally go back to long-standing fights we’ve been having over those issues anyway. Or we hear about it in this kind of doomsday terminator AI is going to be this horrible thing.
Jennifer Huddleston: When in reality we’ve all been using this for much longer than we realize. If you’ve ever tried to do a return and interacted with a chatbot and you notice that the chatbots are getting better at actually being able to provide information, some of that is because of advances in AI. Now the other really interesting thing there is there are also some advances in AI that many of us have never had to interact with but are hugely beneficial. Things like the ways AI can be used to help predict forest fires and combat those, especially those of us who had to deal with all that smoke in the summer from the Canadian wildfires. I think many people can see huge advantages of that. The way AI is being used in medical research to help go through studies to identify treatments that will better serve a particular patient’s needs. These are incredibly beneficial applications of AI.
Jennifer Huddleston: And because AI is such a general purpose technology, a lot of the calls for regulation are going to potentially lead to fewer of those beneficial applications, are gonna make those beneficial options harder and could even make it harder on many of the things we’re already used to. Many of the technologies that we’ve become accustomed to having might be caught up in this debate around AI. Now you mentioned there’s also this kind of bipartisan take on technology in general and we’ve seen a lot of criticism from both the left and the right. And I do think it’s an unfortunate moment that we aren’t thinking about what the alternative is and oftentimes we aren’t thinking about what these policies might do, particularly to people who have otherwise been marginalized. So when we think about an issue like anonymous speech, a lot of people immediately go to the negative experiences maybe they’ve had with people online who didn’t have to use their real names.
Jennifer Huddleston: But if we think about things like dissidents who are trying to communicate with journalists, or people who are trying to alert to social problems in authoritarian regimes, anonymous speech is incredibly valuable to those people and we have a very long-standing tradition of protecting that kind of speech in the US. And when we look at creating backdoors or de-anonymizing things, we’ve gotta realize that’s not just going to be a so we can go after the bad guys. When you start opening those kind of loopholes, it’s going to potentially be exploited by a whole range of people and have a negative impact on a lot of people for whom that’s really important.
Chelsea Follett: And this country was arguably founded on a tradition of pseudonymous and anonymous speech, think of the Federalist Papers.
Jennifer Huddleston: Right.
Chelsea Follett: Yeah, it’s a very long-standing tradition. So it’s very disappointing to see that now under attack and for so many different reasons from so many different people again, whether it’s AI or social media or just a fear of technology in general, it seems like there is this incredible distrust right now of new technologies. Do you think that’s mainly because of this misapprehension that these technologies are new when they may in fact be older than people think? Do you think it’s the pace of change or what do you think is driving this distrust of new technologies?
Jennifer Huddleston: Well, I think there’s some good news and some bad news out here. The bad news is disruption is naturally going to make us uncomfortable. When we have a new technology, particularly something like artificial intelligence and the generative AI models, that feels really disruptive, it feels really different, it doesn’t feel like what we’re used to. There are two things that go on there. One, there is just the natural discomfort of something new, but there’s also the fact that societal norms have to evolve and we have to learn how we’re going to incorporate this technology into our lives. This is something that’s gone on with other technologies in the past, whether it’s the camera, which now we’re all used to having a camera and being able to take pictures anywhere, but we had to develop norms around when we can take pictures. Do you ask someone to take a picture? There may be some cases on the margin where we have to have particular regulations around certain things.
Jennifer Huddleston: But we really focused on letting society evolve those norms. Same thing with even just general etiquette about when is it okay to be on your phone in a public space? What does that look like? We’ve all seen those negative experiences play out. And so in some cases with a technology like AI, we’re in that trying to figure out what some of our own personal norms and some of our societal norms are going to be like, and we’re watching that happen in real time. Which again, for those of us that are millennials or even younger as Gen Z and kind of grew up with the internet, it’s often the first real level of disruption of that kind that we’re experiencing. Now the good news is we’re adapting to new technologies faster than ever before. When you look at the level of adoption of something like ChatGPT, when you look at the comfort level that younger people have with new technologies, it seems to be a much quicker pace of a new product becoming socially acceptable.
Jennifer Huddleston: And becoming and developing these norms around that product than it was with other products. That’s a really good thing, and hopefully that also means that some of these panics, some of these concerns will be slower as well. But the idea that this panic is new or that this is unique is not just about our current technologies. When we’ve seen a lot of concerns about young people and social media recently, but before it was social media, it was young people and video games, before it was video games, it was magazines and comic books. And in one of my personal favorite headlines ever, we have headlines from back in the day of people complaining about young people reading too many novels and what was it going to do to the future of this country. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I talk to most parents, my kid is reading too many novels is not usually the moral concern of the day. But at the time, it felt very real to those people.
Jennifer Huddleston: And so if we believe in the ideas of a free society, if we believe that a free society can help encourage progress, I think we have to recognize that there may be some different choices out there. But that as a result, we really need to look at what do we do with what we have? Are we concerned because something is new and novel and disruptive? And that’s okay to be a little uncertain, but that doesn’t mean that we then call to remove that choice from other people.
Chelsea Follett: I think that’s a great point about how looking at the tech panics of the past can provide valuable perspective. I’ve also seen headlines of people fearing that radio would rot young people’s brains, that when cars started replacing carriage rides, it would forever kill romance. You can find a panics about the bicycle and how this was going to somehow destabilize society, often connected to panics about women riding bicycles in particular. There are so many panics throughout history about really anything new. Now that’s not to say that new technologies never do come with real challenges. I want to go over some of the fears and perceived dangers and get your take since you’ve worked so much on so many of these issues on the extent to which they actually are something that we need to be worried about, the extent to which they are actually new problems as opposed to old problems that we’re just dealing with with a new medium.
Chelsea Follett: And how we can contend with all of these challenges and issues while maintaining policies that are open and free enough that we can also reap the incredible benefits and potential of these technologies. So looking through your work, one of the things that you focus on is antitrust. There’s this great fear of technologies with a large technology companies potentially combining or having too much market share many people fear. Can you walk us through that concern and provide your take on it?
Jennifer Huddleston: Yeah, I’m sure you’re talking about the Myspace natural monopoly on social media here or maybe you’re talking about how Yahoo won the search wars, we all know AOL is the real concern of the day. All of these were very real headlines 20 years ago with a different set of technology giants and I… It’s easy to kind of giggle about them now, particularly for those of us who remember the rise and fall of some of those products. But what we’ve really seen is that oftentimes, innovation is our best competition policy, allowing a light touch regulatory approach that allows someone to see something completely different than the current market, offer that service, and then all of our lives end up changed. Whether it’s if we’re only looking for the next social media platform that looks like Facebook or Myspace or whatever, we might miss what’s actually going on in the way people are connecting with each other.
Jennifer Huddleston: If we were only looking for a traditional search engine to look like Yahoo or Google, we might miss all the ways that we’re now seeing search happen via voice, via AI, via all of these other technologies. So my first point is that innovation is often our best competition policy. My second point is when it comes to competition policy, we really have to ask this question of why is it that companies are popular? If a company is popular because it’s serving its consumers well, well, that’s not a problem, that’s something we should be applauding. That’s something that other companies should be trying to rise to the challenge of. We want companies to be improving consumer welfare and providing them services. When we think about incredibly popular products like Amazon’s Prime Program, people are choosing to engage in the Prime Program ’cause they’re finding the benefit.
Jennifer Huddleston: They like that in some cases they don’t have to go to the store and can reliably get a good in a certain amount of time. For small businesses, they’re choosing to put their products on that platform because they find that they are able to use it in a quality way. There are other platforms out there for small businesses or for users who don’t want to use Amazon, whether it’s getting in your car and driving to the physical store and sometimes because of when you need a product, that’s your best choice. Or whether you’re a small business and instead of offering your product via Amazon, you wanna open your own website or you wanna offer it via Shopify or another platform, there are a wide array of options out there to serve the individual business’s needs.
Jennifer Huddleston: So we’re continuing to see diverse competition. We should really only want to see antitrust or competition policy used if there is actual anti-competitive behavior going on. If consumers are being harmed by the anti-competitive behavior. We don’t want a competition policy that presumes big is bad. And we certainly don’t wanna see competition policy that focuses on competitors rather than consumers, because what we don’t want is a world where we have the government dictating that the Model T can’t put the horseshoe guys out of business because of how innovation has come along.
Chelsea Follett: That makes perfect sense. Moving on to another big issue, contents moderation is another thing you’ve worked a lot on, and this is an area that’s obviously huge and where we see concerns again on both the right and the left. Usually the concerns I hear from the left are about potential misinformation online and moderating that. The concerns I hear from the right are about political bias or perceived political bias in content moderation. And so you hear people of all stripes wanting to crack down or put more restrictions and rules on how private companies do content moderation for a variety of reasons. How big of an issue is this and what’s your take on it?
Jennifer Huddleston: Online content moderation matters for a lot more than social media. We often think about this in the context of, did Twitter or now X, sorry, [laughter] I’m not used to the new name yet. [laughter] take down a certain piece of content or leave up a certain piece of content in some cases, but this is actually much bigger. Some of your favorite websites are composed of user-generated content and you might not realize it. So when we think about the content moderation question, feel free to think about social media, but it’s also important that we think about a couple of other things as well. Think about Wikipedia and the service it provides. That’s all user-generated content. There’s content moderation decisions involved in what content gets to stay up on Wikipedia. Think about your favorite review site. Again, if you’re lucky enough to travel and you’re going to a new place and you’re looking for somewhere to stay or somewhere to go to dinner, you’re probably gonna go to your favorite review site and look not at what the Zagged guide has said or some famous travel reporter has said.
Jennifer Huddleston: You’re gonna look at what real people who have gone to that restaurant recently have said about it, and that’s going to give you a better picture in many cases. And it’s going to allow you to find reviewers who maybe have some of the unique needs that you have. Maybe you’re traveling with young children or you have someone with dietary restrictions. This is something that user-generated content can provide that we can’t necessarily see that we didn’t necessarily see in the more traditional only the experts got to provide this. But why this is really important, particularly in the review context, is well, if it’s a good review, most people would say that’s great, but what about those bad reviews? What happens when someone starts trying to get bad reviews taken down? We want these sites to be able to set rules that keep reviews honest, that make it where this is a useful tool for us, where they’re not being overrun by spam and also not being afraid that a lawsuit from someone who disagrees with a review is going to put them out of business.
Jennifer Huddleston: So this is another example of why we should be concerned about some of these online content moderation policies. When it comes to the kind of questions of misinformation or should the government be involved in bias? I think it’s important that we take a step back here and think, would I want the government if it was the person I most disagreed with, to have the power to dictate what was said on this topic? Because if we give the government the power to label misinformation, if we give the government the power to require certain things, stay up or get taken down, you haven’t just given the government that power when it’s the people you like in charge. You’ve given the government that power when it’s the people you don’t like in charge. So not only do we have First Amendment concerns here in the US from a legal point of view, we should also have some pretty big first principles concerns when it comes to some of these proposals around speech online.
Chelsea Follett: That’s a great segue into the intersection of new technologies and the First Amendment. I know you’ve done a lot of work on freedom of speech, obviously as two employees of the Cato Institute, we both believe in the potential of freedom of speech to promote human wellbeing, to let people hash things out in the marketplace of ideas. But I am curious if you could elaborate on that intersection between new technology and freedom of speech.
Jennifer Huddleston: One of the great things about new technologies, particularly new tech communications technologies, is how many barriers to speech they continue to remove, particularly for groups that might not have traditionally had a voice. So a lot of women have faced barriers to being able to get their voices out there in traditional newspapers or because the topics they wanted to write about were seen as not having an audience. When the internet comes along this provides a new platform for people to start a blog on just what they care about, to be able to start a social media account and have real conversations on an issue without having to go through an editor. It’s interesting to see the dynamics, and they’re not always positive, I understand people have had negative experiences, but people have had negative experiences offline as well. But we’ve really seen this removal of barriers that’s been particularly impactful for those who in the past would’ve faced the greatest barriers to getting their speech out there.
Jennifer Huddleston: Whether it’s a marginalized community or whether it’s someone who maybe is isolated because of their geographic location and would not have had the same opportunities as someone who grew up in a city. Before I worked in policy, I was a teacher in the rural Mississippi Delta. And I always think about the impact technology has on a region like that in the ability to see the world beyond just a small town, to know what opportunities are out there and to connect with people from around the world. But even for those of us that are in an area like Washington D.C. the ability to hear a greater range of viewpoints, the ability to be able to go to a local news source or what, even if that local news source isn’t a formal paper, it’s an individual who’s at the event that’s happening and find out what’s actually going on. The ability to have an interest, whether it’s, a particular book or a particular musical artist and find friends all over the world that enjoy that same thing when you as a teenager or an adult might think you’re the only person who cares about that topic.
Chelsea Follett: And the potential for human connection is incredible. And because you brought up your experience in the past as a teacher, I think that’s a good segue into another concern a lot of people have with new technology, which is its effect on young people. There are actually a host of related concerns there. People are concerned about online safety, online predators, harming children about the self-esteem of usually young women seeing photoshopped faces on Instagram and that kind of thing. Obviously that was happening in magazines beforehand, but people are worried about the effect on their self-esteem. There are so many concerns related to children’s safety and wellbeing online. What do you make of those concerns? To what extent are those new problems versus just old problems that are rearing their head in a new form and how can policy makers and parents and teachers react to that?
Jennifer Huddleston: Being a parent in the digital age is hard. There’s a lot of decisions that parents face that they’re going to come to different solutions for. In fact, parents with multiple children might face multiple iterations of this problem. ‘Cause when we talk about the question of youth online safety, it can mean so many different things. Some people are concerned about the amount of time their child is spending online. Some people are concerned about issues related to online predators who may be preying on young people online. Others are just concerned about particular types of content that may go against their family’s values that they don’t want their children exposed to. The good news is we’ve seen the market respond to a lot of these concerns and there are a lot of tools out there for parents and there are tools at all different levels of technology. So I mean, the first choice is just when do you allow your child to use certain technology?
Jennifer Huddleston: And that’s gonna vary from family to family. But even once you’ve decided to allow your child to have a device or to go on a family device, there are often things you can use to set time limits or to alert you to where the child is going or to provide certain features to keep the child from certain content or to keep the child from running up too much money in a popular game or things like that. So there we really have seen both platforms and device makers respond with these tools, but we’ve also seen the market respond in providing outside tools and civil society respond in providing great resources for parents at having these sometimes difficult conversations with young people around their technology use. But I think there’s another really important element here, and that is that we should look at education rather than regulation. And I don’t mean in the sense of creating a school curriculum necessarily, but how do we empower people to make the choices that work best for them because this isn’t gonna be a one size fits all decision and policy intervening here is going to be a one size fits all solution.
Chelsea Follett: That is a great lead into the discussion on data privacy, which obviously goes far beyond just issues with children. There are all sorts of rules. And then Europe has some different rules in the US on what sort of data can be collected on for users online. There are different excuse me, there are different rules for children in some cases and in and for adults, but there are also restrictions on what kind of data can be collected for adults. Now I think most libertarians and classical liberals and people of that ilk are concerned about privacy. Whenever there is a large gathering of data that data can be leaked to the government or to bad actors and all sorts of harms can resolve from that. How should we think about the issue and the challenge of data privacy in the digital age?
Jennifer Huddleston: When we talk about privacy, we talk about a lot of different things, and I think it’s important to make a distinction, there’s the privacy question that often comes up, particularly amongst libertarians about what does the government have access to? And there we need very strong protections not only for consumers, but also for the companies themselves, so that if they’re doing beneficial things with data, that they know what their rights are, they know what level of warrant versus a request they have to have so that they can protect their consumers and can keep the promises they’ve made to their consumers about their data privacy. When it comes to individual companies, we need to think about this as the fact that there’s gonna be a lot of different preferences when it comes to data and some of data privacy, but some of them we’re not even going to think about as a data privacy choice, even though we make them almost daily.
Jennifer Huddleston: So one of the examples I like to give is, if you’ve ever gone to a website and signed up for a newsletter, in order to get that 10% off coupon, you’re technically exchanging a bit of data, your email address for that 10% off coupon because you want the coupon, you want the free shipping. You see the direct benefit to you in that moment. Now you may later change your mind and decide to unsubscribe or take other actions, but that’s actually a privacy choice when you make, and many of us make that choice because we clearly saw the benefit at the moment that that was something that we wanted. If we think about privacy as a choice, what we start to see is that we make different choices every day. Even where we’re choosing to have a conversation is a data privacy choice in some ways.
Jennifer Huddleston: The other element when it comes to data privacy is that it’s actually not about our individual data. At the end of the day, when we are making, when we think about the value of data, you can’t just pinpoint data the way we can other property, individual data, while we deeply care about it, is oftentimes not that actually valuable. What’s been beneficial is the way that data can be used in all of these kind of aggregate and transformative ways to improve the broader experience and to improve the way services are provided versus that one individual data point. So when we hear sometimes, particularly in libertarian circles, the idea of, well, we should just treat data like any other piece of property, it doesn’t necessarily work that way because data doesn’t act like other property in many cases, it’s not as single is the value in the data isn’t tied to a single point, and even the data itself is often not tied to a single user.
Jennifer Huddleston: So if you and I are in a picture together, whose data is that? It’s a complicated question because is it the person who took the picture? Is it the people in the pictures? Is it the, location we were at in the picture? All of these are points of data when we start to apply regulation, this is where this gets complicated. Can you invoke a right to be forgotten that removes this picture? And if so, then what does that do to the person who took the picture’s speech rights, these are not easy questions and they’re questions that oftentimes are going to be better solved on an individual basis based on individual preferences rather than a one size fits all approach.
Chelsea Follett: There certainly are real challenges, but now that we’ve spent some time discussing those challenges and some panics that might be less warranted, let’s get back to the potential benefits which are very much under discussed. So let’s go through some of those forms of technology that we’ve been talking about and talk about the potential benefits. We spoke about some of the risks and perceived risks of AI. But what do you see as some of the greatest benefits?
Jennifer Huddleston: I’m very excited about what AI is doing and I’m very excited not only about the kind of fun that we’re seeing happen with it, but also the behind-the-scenes things that we’re getting accustomed to already. So the ability to quickly respond to something to have kind of built in grammar and auto checks and things like that. But I really am excited about particularly what AI may be able to do for accessibility. The ability to have realtime captions, the ability to have real time translation so that we’re able to better connect around the world with one another, I think are some really exciting opportunities. Not to mention some of the more industry specific uses that we may see some of the uses in healthcare, particularly in areas that have really struggled with having enough service providers where we may see AI be able to help, a lay person perform certain services or to by taking a picture and it being uploaded and scanned by an AI that isn’t going to replace a doctor in many cases, but could flag when someone needs to have that next level of care, particularly in an area where that may be a struggle.
Chelsea Follett: What about user generated content, not just social media, but you’ve already spoken about some of the potential benefits from being able to get reviews online from services such as Wikipedia. What other benefits can we get from crowdsourcing knowledge in this way?
Jennifer Huddleston: I don’t think it’s just crowdsourcing knowledge. One of the things I think is really fascinating that is oftentimes kind of negatively spoken about it is what we’ve seen creators do or entrepreneurial users do. We often forget how much the ability to engage in user generated content has removed the barriers to entry for a lot of speech online. And that means that we see people able to start businesses that may be very niche businesses, but because they’re able to open an Etsy shop and sell their products via a service like that, they’re able to have that opportunity. That’s to share a skill that’s really close to them or they’re able to tell their story in the terms of a blog or a social media account in ways that allows them to find that community that supports them, particularly per se, someone who may be dealing with a child that has a struggle and is able to connect with other moms, whether it’s in a Facebook group or through a, they’re telling their own story on a blog. It can be incredibly powerful to help know that you’re not isolated or to ask those questions that maybe you’re embarrassed to ask your friend who doesn’t have the same struggle.
Chelsea Follett: No, absolutely. I have young children and I’ve seen social media groups where local parents share events for children. There are different groups where parents connect with babysitters. There are all sorts of different groups out there now connecting people in different ways that are very helpful. You mentioned briefly Amazon and the potential of those sorts of services, but could you elaborate on the benefits you see from e-commerce and that kind of thing as well?
Jennifer Huddleston: One of the real benefits I think from what we’ve seen happen with e-commerce is that now if you’re someone with a really creative idea, you don’t have the huge expense of having to find a retail space, having to have a physical store and stop more inventory perhaps than you need it. You can really kind of determine the amount that you’re going to sell and really create your product in a way that directly reaches the consumers that you need. And this actually goes to one of the kind of interesting things of, we often hear targeted advertising used as this like negative scary term of and whatnot, but the idea that a small business can through internet tools, not necessarily through the platform that they’re selling on, but through things like internet ads, be able to find the people in the region of the country that might benefit from their product or be able to come to their store if that is a physical store in a way that before you were just kind of guessing and maybe you knew that was a really popular road with the consumers that were likely to buy your product.
Jennifer Huddleston: But it can actually be incredibly beneficial, particularly to small businesses, given how much lower the cost is. And given the ways in which you can help have less waste in that you’re making sure that you’re targeting the areas that are of interest.
Chelsea Follett: That makes sense. What about social media? We touched on this a little bit, but what do you see as some potential benefits of this form of media?
Jennifer Huddleston: I think we’ve seen so much creativity on social media and it’s really interesting to me to look at what people are doing creatively. I kind of talked about that kind of creator, entrepreneurial user, the way we’ve seen, video editing skills get on social media, improve the way that we’re seeing particularly Gen Z do different things on in terms of the way they’re able to engage in storytelling and things like that on social media, I think is incredibly fascinating. And I think it’s gonna be really interesting though also to see how social media evolves that we’re not necessarily thinking about the same platforms and it’s gonna depend on that platform, what the huge benefit is. But I think one of the things that’s underappreciated is how much knowledge is out there now when you don’t know how to do something and you want someone to teach you, you can find people who are going to be able to explain it in a wide variety of ways. So maybe the first person you go to on a YouTube video you don’t understand because they are explaining how to change this tire the way they would explain it to an engineer. And then you go to someone who explains it in a different way and you’re like, that way really clicks with me. And I think that’s been one of the great things is having this not only wide array of knowledge, but this diversity of ways that we can learn.
Chelsea Follett: I know that you’ve done a lot of work on, in particular how women can benefit from various new technologies. Could you elaborate on that?
Jennifer Huddleston: We hear a lot about women in tech and the need for more women in tech and that’s certainly an important part of this conversation to have. But I think we also need to think about some of the technologies that we don’t think of as tech and how they’ve benefited women as well. When we think about not only things like social media and the way that it’s removed some of the areas to speech, but the way that many of us who may be responsible for getting the kids to and from a place for dance lessons or soccer practice or things like that are now able to as I was saying earlier with the mapping example, have all of that at the palm of our hand. And it takes some of the burden of having to find a map for everywhere that there’s a soccer tournament each weekend off of an individual.
Jennifer Huddleston: The way that women have been able to connect and share both resources as well as struggles that they’ve had online has certainly been powerful. But I think that we should also be really excited about some of the innovations in terms of things like autonomous vehicles. As I was mentioning, again of if you’re responsible for driving carpool, like the ability to have that time to more either back in your day or more thoroughly connect with your, with the children while you’re driving carpool, I think is something many people would value. And so technology certainly gives all of us time back in our day. But I think, while we, whether or not it’s fair, it’s up for debate, women oftentimes bear a lot of the burden of household chores that have really been improved by the presence of technology. And going back historically, this is part of what really enabled women to seek further education. The fact that there were, that they were able to spend less time on housework helped embrace the education particularly of young women, but also of society in general. There was an ad back in the day about put the tractor in the field and the boy in the school kind of thing. This really has been a story of how technology provides us all with more opportunities to do what we love and to spend time with the people that we care about, thereby allowing us all to embrace whatever our ideal is.
Chelsea Follett: Right. Giving you back more time to spend on education, employment, leisure, whatever it is that you want. And I’m glad you brought up that tractor ad because that just also drives home that while this is particularly helpful or has been particularly helpful for women historically, technology has also benefited everyone. We always like to end this podcast on a positive note since it’s the Human Progress podcast. So I would just ask you to summarize succinctly why you identify as a techno optimist of sorts.
Jennifer Huddleston: Because I think while we’ve always been afraid of technology, we ultimately recognize that our lives continue to get better and that if we allow innovators and entrepreneurs the opportunity, they’re going to actually show us things that we could not have dreamed of. So while we may be amiss about where’s my flying car and where’s my jet pack, the reality is a lot of the technologies that we don’t think of as technology anymore are, would have really improved our lives. And in some ways that’s the ultimate technological optimism is when we cease to think about it as a technology anymore and just think of it as something that’s there.
Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much for talking with me, Jennifer. This has been very uplifting and fascinating.