Summary
Digital Future Daily (DFD) is a newsletter produced by Politico. Sign up to get DFD in your inbox at the link below.
DFD’s tag is”How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures”.
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Enter silicon. The agency said on Thursday that it will phase out using animals to test certain therapies, in many ways fulfilling the ambitions of the FDA Modernization Act 2.0.
To replace animal testing, the FDA will explore using computer modeling and AI to predict how a drug will behave in humans — and its roadmap cites a wide variety of technologies, from AI simulations to “organ-on-a-chip” drug-testing devices. (For the uninitiated, organ-on-a-chip refers to testing done on lab-grown mini-tissues that replicate human physiology.)
The FDA’s plan to integrate digital tools into a field that’s long been defined by wet lab work marks a substantial change.
Looking at the collision of tech developments and policy shifts, Nate Soares, president of the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), doesn’t sound optimistic: “Right now, there’s no real path here where humanity doesn’t get destroyed. It gets really bad,” said Soares. “So I think we need to back off.”
Wait, what!? The latest wave of AI concern is triggered by a combination of developments in the tech world, starting with one big one: Self-coding AIs. This refers to AI models that can improve themselves, rewriting their own code to become smarter, and faster and do it again — all with minimal human oversight.
AI skeptics are a lot less optimistic. “The product being sold is the lack of human supervision — and that’s the most alarming development here,” said Hamza Chaudry, AI and National Security Lead at the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which focuses on AI’s existential risks. (DFD emailed Reflection AI to ask about its approach to risk, but the company didn’t reply by deadline.)
Digital Future Daily, – March 27, 2025
In Trump’s Washington, Europe’s tech regulation is a regular object of scorn. But there is one piece of American tech policy that’s united European diplomats and U.S. industry: A rule issued in President Joe Biden’s final days in office that sorted the world into three tiers for AI chip export, with more than half of Europe left off the top rung.
Under the Framework for AI Diffusion, 17 EU countries were designated Tier 2, setting caps on their access to chips needed to train AI, while the rest of Europe was set for Tier 1, with no import restrictions. Countries listed in the second tier are treating it as a scarlet letter.
“We’re going around town trying to explain that we have no idea why we ended up in Tier 2,” said one European diplomat, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive talks. “If this has to do with cooperation with the U.S. on security, we are NATO allies, we are more than willing.”
About
DFD Welcome
By POLITICO STAFF 04/04/2022
Your inbox needs a new tech newsletter.
Wait, really?
Yes. Our idea is simple: The next version of our world is already being built, and it’s growing so fast that it can be hard for Washington, or the tech industry, or anyone, to keep track.
Imagine fully alternative trillion-dollar economies. Virtual landscapes that rival the physical world for their claim on our time and attention.
These aren’t sci-fi. They’re being built now, they’re attracting billions of dollars of investment and they’re already reshaping power both inside and outside national borders.
Don’t just take our word for it. Thanks to virtual platforms like the metaverse, decentralized economic systems like Bitcoin and increasingly complex AI decisionmaking, our world promises to be meaningfully different in just a few years.
Much control of this new world will lie outside what we think of as the corridors of power — and even outside the hands of today’s tech titans.
Washington regulators aren’t famous for their cutting-edge tech savvy. The tech industry doesn’t love oversight. And blockchain-based platforms like crypto are explicitly designed to evade central scrutiny and the overweening power of today’s Internet titans.
So who’s drawing the roadmap to this future? Who’s minding the store? Who are the emerging power players? What ideas are driving them? How will their decisions affect everything from daily life to the global economy?
We’re going to track that.
By bringing POLITICO’s signature brand of pragmatic, power-savvy reporting to these questions, we’ll be offering a unique—and uniquely useful—look at questions that are addressed elsewhere as primarily business opportunities or technological challenges.
We’ll look at who benefits and who’s at risk in the explosive growth of crypto; why the blockchain could change politics as fast as it changes the economy; who’s guarding the public interest as the metaverse evolves. We’ll keep an eye on AI and other transformative technologies—and, crucially, how our existing power structures are keeping up, or not.
Tech leaders will get an honest look at how Washington sees them. Regulators and lawmakers will get a window into the edge of a world they’ll be expected to understand. And readers across the board will get insight into how this is going to change the whole idea of accountability and civic life. We also hope it will be — to use a very analog concept — fun.
Any good newsletter builds a community as it goes, so please reach out. What do we need to know? Who should we talk to? What questions need answering? Scroll to the bottom for our contact info.
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