Lucid Capitalism

I'm still buzzing from For the Long Term’s inaugural San Francisco Forum last week. Huge thank you to my fellow Generative AI and Labor Surveillance pitch competition judges - The Future of Workers Initiative founder Dr. Wilneida Negrón and Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read. 🏆Congratulations to Ed Marcum of Working Capital Fund for his winning pitch on CompScience! Caroline Winnett of Berkeley SkyDeck and Anik Bose of BGV made it a tough competition with their deftly delivered pitches of Ozaru.io and BoostUp.ai, respectively. Across incisive queries from audience and judges alike, a few key open-ended questions kept coming up: 🤖 Is augmentation the gateway to replacement? 📈 How are the economic benefits of productivity gains distributed? 🤝 How do we ensure protection for labor rights when employers are the paying customer for most workplace productivity and safety tools? The Forum’s full agenda covered a lot of ground beyond AI, from affordable housing and catastrophe insurance to DEI in portfolio management. My main takeaways: 👷♀️ Labor rights and workforce development are a through line: Worker voices are central to issues ranging from how we build thriving communities to how we ensure companies don’t privatize gains and socialize costs (shoutout to Dr. Wilneida Negrón for surfacing this point). 🔐 The antidotes to DEI backlash are leadership and logic: We need to maintain the courage of our convictions and ditch box checking exercises in favor of mathematical arguments, e.g. against concentration risk and autopilot re-upping with legacy managers. 🏛️ Systemic risk exposure requires system-level stewardship: Universal and long-term owners like For the Long Term’s membership view sustainability and diversity as fiduciary duties. They’re eagerly raising the bar on GP transparency and accountability. It’s an honor to be in community with so many State Treasurers and other public servants working through these crucial topics. Many thanks to Dave Wallack for inviting Lucid Capitalism to collaborate, and to Elena Botella of Omidyar Network for kicking off the partnership and enabling us to make the event a success. Finally, as always, grateful to my brilliant copilot Cecilia Young. #artificialintelligence #investment #sustainability

This may be surprising coming from the president of a foundation focused on technology and society: Technology isn’t always the answer. We can’t and shouldn't expect to code ourselves out of every challenge. Techno-optimist or pessimist, the notion of tech primacy has become damagingly central to our culture. This week I published an op-ed in ImpactAlpha, taking a stand as a techno-pragmatist. I advocate for a world where we prioritize asking better questions and focus on the needs of our communities rather than the potential of unknown technologies.  It's a world that will require bringing together a new ecosystem of players, ones that are clear-eyed about realistic outcomes and mindful of unintended negative consequences.  And it's a world where philanthropy and other mission-oriented capital have a crucial role to play in widening the lens of who gets to create technology, what problems get attention and funding, who has access to new technologies, and who benefits from them. I hope you will check it out! https://lnkd.in/e4MMi9A6 Mentioned: Code the Dream Te Hiku Media Mozilla #BlackTechFutures Research Institute Center on Rural Innovation Fast Forward Robin Hood Ford Foundation The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation Omidyar Network ex/ante Slauson & Co. Chloe Capital Visible Hands Lucid Capitalism Responsible Innovation Labs Worthmore

Hard to believe it’s been two weeks since Lucid Capitalism co-hosted a Responsible Tech Investing workshop for Confluence Philanthropy’s Advisors Forum in NYC. We focused on three key areas of AI harms, including algorithmic bias, climate risk, and labor exploitation.  The following day at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Compass Investors annual summit in Cape Cod, I moderated the “Navigating AI Risks and Opportunities” panel with Michael Kubzansky of Omidyar Network, Parasvil Patel of Radical Ventures,  Kate Simpson of TrueBridge Capital Partners, and Scott Pittman of Mount Sinai Health System. Amazing conversations, connections, and candid commiserations all around. 🌟 Actions to minimize Gen AI/tech harms:    ✅ Expect reporting & transparency on AI risks: model cards and data cards as a minimum    ✅ Be aware of liability gray areas: legal precedents have largely not yet been set!    ✅ Leverage capital to cultivate opportunities for responsible tech: investing in where the puck is going, namely SaaS focused on AI auditing, watermarking, data provenance… etc. 🌟 Paraphrasing a few thoughtful comments:    💜 AI innovation raises all boats for the private sector, but not necessarily for everyday people.    💜 You don’t need to be a tech expert to ask your VC GPs about how their portfolio companies integrate the voices of different stakeholders, like workers.    💜 The risks and harms we see today with AI, and tech more broadly, are not new. But the level of attention arising from Gen AI hype creates new opportunities for action. 🌟Thank you Alissa Black for being an incredible co-host and MC, Anita Dorett of Investor Alliance for Human Rights for the fireside chat, and a brilliant team of AI Harms mini-workshop facilitators:    💡 Bias: Damini Satija of Amnesty Tech at Amnesty International / Head of Algorithmic Accountability Lab at Amnesty International USA, and Cecilia Young     💡 Labor: Alexandra Mateescu of Data & Society Research Institute and Danica Yu of Ford Foundation    💡 Climate: Jenny Wong of Mozilla and Kaileen Diep    💡 AI Office Hours: Oomi Pammit #AdvisorsForum2024 #CompassInvestors

Getting good early vibes about co-hosting “Building Ethical Tech & Responsible AI” with Danica Yu of Ford Foundation, Alissa Black of Media Democracy Fund next week, June 11th, in New York City. Anita Dorett of Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR)’s Investor Alliance for Human Rights and I will be kicking off this 3-hour workshop with a fireside chat that will lead Confluence Philanthropy’s Advisors Forum attendees towards practical tools for ethical tech investing by the end of the day. Special thank you to a girlboss crew of co-facilitators that we are collaborating with, including Alexandra Mateescu of Data & Society Research Institute, Jenny Wong of Mozilla, Damini Satija of Amnesty Tech and Head of Algorithmic Accountability Lab, Amnesty International USA. Hats off to my Lucid Capitalism colleagues Cecilia Young, Oomi Pammit and Kaileen Diep for making this possible and our next stop on this ethical AI roadshow is Cape Cod. Stay tuned for photos!  #AdvisorsForum2024 on June 11 in NYC.

No one is surprised when *civil society* is enraged by tech’s negative effects on laborers, but are *investors* starting to feel the cost of eroded labor rights? Uber’s underwhelming first quarter earnings announcement yesterday, and subsequent share drop, signaled the capital markets repricing Uber’s model in an increasingly muddy regulatory space. Note that Uber’s recent Australian class-action lawsuit settlement completely wiped out their first quarter’s operating profit. And more expensive challenges from labor are on the horizon, including in the US. In particular, the recent DoL movement (RIN 1235-AA43) led Tim Taylor, a Partner at Holland & Knight LLP, to project that “...it’s going to be harder to predict litigation outcomes. It’s going to be harder to predict who is an employee.” Let’s see if this DoL signaling leads businesses to start pricing the risk of labor litigation into the projections they communicate with market analysts earlier in the future. Good luck to Uber in their upcoming lawsuits!

Loving the PE investor activism on behalf of workers. Every power spike brings new updates to incentive structures, and that’s why we value sustainable investing practices.

Loving the pro-worker stance that Omidyar and AFL-CIO are championing. I'm curious whether companies will respond to such arguments and evidence before we start to see results from the AFL-CIO-Microsoft partnership.

The provocative conversation between Eric Schmidt and Hilary Rodham Clinton called for broader tech regulation, especially revisiting Section 230. Speakers largely agreed that tech companies are responsible for protecting our online forums, and that we need to raise awareness about the (un)trustworthiness of digital content as AI shifts the landscape underneath our feet. It reminded me of a recent pithy piece by The Information’s Jessica E. Lessin, which argued: “Yes, regulators can be slow. Yes, they can miss key things about technology. But when they act, they can have a tremendous impact. And they seem to have fresh resolve to use that power.”  Thank you Safiya Noble, Ph.D. for putting Columbia’s event on our radar. Hearts out to Elyssa Lewis and Luis Lozada for their continued focus on mis(dis)information’s impact on election integrity!