Title:GTA Spotlight: Mark MacCarthy, Adjunct Professor

Meet Mark MacCarthy, Mark MacCarthy, Adjunct Professor;
Culture, Communications and Technology and Philosophy Departments

Please introduce yourself.

I’m Mark McCarthy, and I’ve been teaching at Georgetown since 1999. I teach courses in the Communications, Culture, and Technology program, and also in the Philosophy Department. In 2019, I retired from running the public policy operation for a technology trade association, the Software & Information Industry Association. Throughout my career I have worked at the payment card company Visa, a public policy consulting firm, Capital Cities ABC, and on the Hill as a professional staff member for a Congressional committee. I’ve taught at Indiana University, Notre Dame, and University of Maryland. I have a PhD in philosophy and a master’s in economics. Currently, I’m associated with the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology, and I’m a non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution–I write commentary for them from time to time on tech policy. I’m the author of a book on regulating digital industries and how to promote privacy, competition and free speech on the internet.

How should we teach students to navigate the AI world responsibly?

It’s going to sound funny, but one of the major things I think students need to realize about artificial intelligence, at least how it’s approached these days through machine learning, is that it is just mathematics. I was talking to an NVIDIA employee a while back, and he surprised me by saying that AI chips and everything that we produce is all just mathematics. It’s just matrix multiplication. I think that’s a healthy theme to keep in your head, because it’ll prevent you from wandering off into these speculations about the consciousness and independent agency that are the stuff of science fiction and fill far too many tech policy discussions these days. It’s not that I don’t think those issues are interesting and ultimately important, I do. In the philosophy department, that’s the whole last part of the course I teach on ethical challenges of AI. But when you’re dealing with the pressing policy issues that these new technologies raise, it’s important not to focus on these ultimate existential questions about the nature of consciousness and the area of moral responsibility, but to focus a little bit more on these systems as tools that have to be brought under human control in some fashion.

What do you wish more people knew about the technology industry?

The key thing that they need to know about the technology industry is that it is an industry. There’s far too many ways in which people looking at the industry from the outside might be seduced into thinking that it is a charitable organization designed to do good for humanity, or that it’s a governmental organization designed to overcome coordination problems, or to promote the public good. These are profit-making companies, and they’re aimed at producing goods and services that we would value, so that they ultimately can make some money. I think it’s very hard, with all of the discussion about the promises and the challenges of artificial intelligence, to forget that the way in which these technologies are going to be inserted into our lives is through profit-making companies. And you have to recognize that they have an interest in making sure that you perceive their products as valuable and useful, and that they are not simply in the business of seeking to benefit mankind. It’s not to say that there are no institutions that are focused on that. In an ideal world, the government would play that role. The executive branch, the judicial branch, and the Congress would all be focused on trying to make sure that these new technologies are brought to the public in a way that creates public benefit. To assign that role to companies is to misplace their function in the system.

Is there something that you could pinpoint as the biggest ethical challenge you expect for AI in the near future?

I think it’s the problem of establishing human control over the systems. Not because I think they’re chock-full of human agency and can go off on their own to fulfill their own desires and wants, but just because they’re enormously complex pieces of machinery, and the kinds of tasks that we want them to do are not simple tasks. This has come to the forefront in discussions of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons. Anthropic, one of the major companies, has said that they don’t want their technology to be used to make autonomous weapons, but on the other hand, their technology is being used right now to target people and physical structures, in times of war. They do this by integrating large quantities of information that can’t possibly be assimilated by a single human being. They seem to think that this is posing fewer moral issues than a situation in which that information is gathered, and there’s a straight line to a decision to kill someone or to attack a structure without any human intervention. If you put a human being at the end of that link, especially in times where the human has to make a lot of decisions. It’s not clear that that structure really does impose any effective or meaningful human control. So, how do you take advantage of these immensely powerful systems that can integrate large volumes of information and still maintain the human element of control to make sure that the decision ultimately satisfies our requirements for ethics, morality, and good policy? That’s the major challenge I see for AI in the near future. Autonomous weapons are the extreme version of that, but you see it over and over and over again in other contexts. Think, for example, about the medical context, where more and more of these decisions could potentially be made by artificial intelligence machines, and taking the doctor completely out of the loop. Keeping the human being in full control is the major challenge.

What is your favorite app or website, and why?

I’m afraid I’m very boring on this one. I find the current chatbots to be extraordinarily useful tools, and I don’t see much to choose between the big three: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. I think all three of them provide major advantages over other information-seeking tools. I recommend constant use of those tools as ways of expanding your ability to process information, to understand issues, and so on. As with all tools, they have their limitations, and you have to be careful. You often will be in a situation where you know more than the machine. You often find that they elide the truth, bend it, or shape it, or just get it wrong completely. So you have to be a little bit alert for how you use those systems, but they are enormously valuable, and if you’re not using them on a regular basis, you are missing out on one of the major advantages that has come about in the last 3 to 5 years.

What is one piece of advice you would give to a Georgetown student that is interested in technology?

Well, of course they should take my class. The best thing they could do is get informed about the ethical challenges of these new tools. But also, a real computer science course that explains in enough detail how these systems work, that would be enormously helpful so that you can follow some of the tech discussions at a deeper level. The last thing I’d suggest is you’re in Washington, D.C–there are a couple of ways in which you can take advantage of that fact. One is going to events at Brookings, or other think tanks, or industry-organized events, or congressional hearings, or discussions held at regulatory agencies. DC is the center of the U.S. government, and because of that, there’s an enormous concentration of discussion among the tech policy community located here. Plug into that in some fashion, and, and get yourself informed. The second is, because of the tech policy community here, there are enormous opportunities for internships in these think tanks, industry organizations. regulatory agencies, congressional committees. Georgetown students looking for a leg up in tech policy should take advantage of the fact that they live here, where many of those decisions and organizations are based.

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