Marc Rotenberg

The State Department is offering a stellar picture of how AI can and should be used, diffused, and experimented with in the federal government. Agencies like State fundamentally depend on the human. Diplomacy is centered around relationships, rapport and common understanding - things robots cannot easily replace. What robots *can* replace is the tedious work holding back this essential relationship building labor. These are the very tasks State is trying to automate. Other human-centric agencies should look to this model, borrow what works, learn from what doesn't, and try to lean into the experimental process of discovering how AI can be best used so that we can maximize the value of our public services and use our ever-limited budgets to maximum effect. https://lnkd.in/eKH9uz3N

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👉Here's a shoutout to thank the U.S. Department of State for the declassification of thousands of documents from Strobe Talbott's State Department Papers in their Freedom of Information Act Virtual Reading Room - https://lnkd.in/ePFKt8Ww 👉I'm grateful to the National Security Archive George Washington University for submitting the Freedom of Information Act Request that brought the processing and the final release of Talbott’s State Department Papers starting in 2019 under FOIA Case F-2017-13804. 👉Since then, about 4000 documents have been made publicly available in the State Department’s Virtual Reading Room – and the collection is still growing as more evidence is being released on a monthly basis. 👉Here's how to use the FOIA search site: Go to the field "seach terms," type in "Talbott," and you obtain 4464 hits. You can then sort the documents chronologically in ascending or descending order or according to release date - and you have the option to refine your search and to use additional search terms such as "NATO" which bring 1024 hits for instance. You can download each document and save them on your computer to create your own archive. 👉The Talbott papes are unique in the way they shine new light on U.S. foreign policy in the post Cold War era. They give us an opportunity to see pivotal issues through Talbott's lens including NATO enlargement, the relationship between NATO and Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, NATO's peacekeeping efforts as well as Talbott's nuclear diplomacy toward India and Pakstian after both countries had tested nuclear weapons in the late 1990s. 👉The Talbott papers are a key source to teach post-Cold War history. They help us to get an archivally informed understanding about the historical origins of Russia's war against Ukraine and the current NATO-Russia confrontation. 👉More posts to come.

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A nice write up about my new case study on Federal AI use rules and how they are suppressing the ability of agencies to manage AI risks/benefits in their contexts. Specifically, I discuss the federal governments deep translation capacity problems which are yielding life-impacting service , intelligence , and emergency response failures. Machine translation comes with error but could also fill gaps when the alternative is no translation at all. Unfortunately, one-size-fits all federal AI minimum "risk management" standards inhibit the ability to weigh risks and benefits in the context of a program/agency. The result: any benefits are lost and the many, many negatives of exsisting capacity failures locked in. https://lnkd.in/e-_s5H3q

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