Jen Pahlka

State Capacity for the AI Era

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“AI can’t be in the driver’s seat. But people can be in the driver’s seat if they choose to use these tools.”

Jen Pahlka, author of Recoding America and founder of the Recoding America Fund joins ChinaTalk to discuss:

• Why AI could help governments cut through regulatory cruft, but can’t replace the political will needed to reform it,

• How state-level competition and experimentation could accelerate government reform,

• Why even obvious bureaucratic fixes are difficult — nearly every dysfunctional policy has a constituency that benefits from it,

• The Recoding America Fund’s mission to build a cross-ideological coalition to modernize the government’s operating model.

Plus, we talk about 7,119 pages of New Jersey unemployment insurance regulations, why drastically cutting the defense budget might improve national security, and why the toughest questions about public programs aren’t technical, but fundamentally political.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.