On the precipice of adulthood, I decided to study engineering, naively believing that technology would solve all the world’s problems. I eagerly founded the Carnegie Mellon Chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World and started working on projects spanning Jatropha biodiesel production in East Africa to composting on campus. After a few years working for biofuel startups both in Namibia and San Diego, I became disillusioned by the lack of political will needed to incentivize environmentally sustainable systems. I shifted my focus to building the capacity of individuals and organizations.
For five years, I held three roles in unison in the San Diego community. To pay my bills, I worked as a technology consultant helping businesses and not-for-profits automate their management systems using Salesforce.com. [t1] I freed up my clients’ time to better serve their constituents, while simultaneously disrupting their jobs. I also served as the Founder and President of the Next Generation of Service (NGS), an online alternative career center. Here, I witnessed the power of technology to connect people across time zones, while listening to anxious young adults wonder how to continually evolve their skills in a soon-to-be disrupted job market. On evenings and weekends, I served as live-in crisis support at a long-term recovery home. I assisted recovering addicts with online applications for SNAP, service jobs, and pre-paid bus passes, while watching them receive automatic rejections, presumably from an algorithm, with no explanation.
In all of these positions, I used technology to solve problems while staring down a potentially problematic future. It had become clear to me that our leaders, responsible for enacting policy and upholding democracy, needed civically literate engineers. In 2016, I packed up my station wagon and moved to Ann Arbor to get a Masters in Public Policy.
During graduate school I focused my studies on economics and data science. I wanted to learn how the data I had spent years collecting, manipulating and visualizing in Salesforce.com could be used to predict human behavior and in some cases “think.” I modeled future occupational scenarios for ~3.5 Million Truck Drivers (American Trucking Associations). And I hosted a Consensus Conference on Autonomous Vehicles convening 11 citizens to create a “citizen’s panel” to frame expert discussions on issues ranging from mobility, the environment, and cyber security. The event successfully empowered the citizen panelists to voice concerns and excitement over a technology about which they had never been consulted. I decided I wanted to spend the remainder of my career bridging the values of non-experts with a wide range of expert stakeholder groups. In DC-speak – I had decided to work in “AI Policy.”
After graduation, I joined IBM as a public sector consultant with the goal of seeing first-hand how the private sector approaches the implementation of algorithms built with taxpayer resources. While at IBM, I studied IBM Research’s work on bias in algorithms and explainability along with the IBM Design Studio’s AI Ethics in Design Guidelines and worked to operationalize this work on our machine learning and AI projects. I quickly learned that some of the most pressing questions in AI ethics cannot be answered by even the most well-intentioned engineers and in fact need thoughtful, nuanced, democratic discussion. I am hoping to be a resource for leaders on the Hill that are working to ensure that emerging technologies benefit all of us.
Anna is currently serving on the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee.