Michael Anton Dila is the Director of the Policy Futures Lab at Americans for Responsible Innovation. He is a Partner at Torch Partnership, where he shapes strategic conversations that help organizations confront their “wicked problems,” and an advisor to Helpful Places. Previously he was Director of Oslo for AI, and a director at the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Innovation Network. I start all the conversations that I do with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s also why I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.What a great question. Having just recently made a plan to go to Romania at the end of September, where my father’s family are from, that sense of fromness is probably readily to my mind. I’ve always identified with my Romanian heritage, although I frankly do not really know much about it, more strongly than with my mother’s heritage, which is more confused and has a number of different parts and pieces, but in ways that are probably not fair to my mother, in all honesty. On the other hand, the thing that springs to mind, which again is not without its contentiousness among those near and dear, is that often when people ask where I’m from, the first thing I say is Chicago. Now, I was born in Chicago. I lived there all of six months, but I identify as being from there, and I identify always first as being an American, in spite of the fact that at this point, as I close in on 63 years in the fall, I have lived far more of my life in Canada than in the US, and I am also a Canadian citizen. But I always say first that I’m an American. So those are only some of the things that we think of, or that I think about, when we think about where we’re from. Other thing, I’m just going to say for fun and s***s and giggles, because I know this connects us in some way: I’m going to say that I’m from planet conversation, so we can dig into what that might mean. I think I am from there too. I’m really curious, from your position in Canada, what does it mean to be American? How do you think about that, if I dare ask that question? Well, it’s certainly not something that stands still, particularly these days. I will say that I know there are people who do say this. I’ve never said that I’m ashamed to be an American. I’ve never felt that. I have certainly felt like identifying as an American is not always an easy thing. It’s not always to identify with something that I think of as uniformly and unquestionably good — to the contrary, and more and more so. I think that’s just, to me, being part of an educated, ethical and conscientious person, to acknowledge that the place we call America, the country we call America, the way we think about what that country is and its history, has, as certain poets have said, a long and terrible history of violence, among other things. And yet I’m also mindful that we have a constitution that enshrines the idea of pursuing happiness as a central civic good, which I think is probably not a bad place to start. It’s certainly not sufficient and not a good place to end, but there’s that. I think the thing, interestingly enough, about thinking about being an American from the perspective of Canada and living as a Canadian: there’s a long history of Canadians thinking that they’re different from Americans, which certainly they are in important respects, and in many times that they’re better than Americans in certain kinds of ways. And there are certainly merits to that point of view, and reasons for that point of view. On the other hand, Canada also has an unfortunate and long history attached to colonialism, the legacy of which is still very much a real thing, the way the legacy of colonialism remains a present thing in all of the places in which it operated. And so I guess where that lands me up is, no matter where one is, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. So you indicated you grew up and you were born in Chicago. Where did you do your growing up? Where was childhood? So childhood and home. When I think of, well, where did I grow up? I used to identify home and where I grew up as the same. When I was four and a bit, we moved to Montreal from California. My dad had been in the navy during Vietnam, and when he got out we moved to Montreal, and that’s where I grew up, which was an incredibly lucky place to grow up. An amazing city. Many, many things that I think of as core to my identity certainly come from having grown up in Montreal. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? What you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, questions like this trigger very specific memories for me. So as a teenager, a young teenager — maybe I was 13, maybe I was still 12 — it was the absolute zenith of the fame of Jacques Cousteau. And we had some family friends who had a couple of sons, one of whom was considerably older than me. This family also had a VCR, which at the time was very unusual. And the family recorded the Jacques Cousteau National Geographic specials, and so I would go over there to watch with this guy Andrew. And at the time I wanted to be, when I grew up, an oceanographer, and more than that, a shark specialist. And Andrew, who I say was probably, I don’t know, five, six years older, also wanted to be an oceanographer. I don’t remember if he had a specific intention, or as specific an intention. But then a couple of years later some prick named Steven Spielberg made a movie called Jaws and ruined everything. And so I would likely be an oceanographer, and a very famous one at that. Famous, successful, celebrated, all these things. Maybe already have a mind of their own. But for Steven Spielberg. So thank you very much, Mr. Spielberg. Yeah, thank you. And Peter Benchley, for writing the book. Yeah. But the thing that I really like about the story, and telling the story, is Andrew Bowen, the guy who I used to watch these videos with, did indeed go on to become an oceanographer, and worked and works his entire career at the Woods Hole Institution. Has, as an engineer, helped design the submersibles that went down to the Titanic, among many other things. And has had many, all of the experiences I at one time dreamed of having. I cannot imagine that life. But I feel very cool. It feels cool that he does, and that I have some connection with that. Yeah. That would make that alternate timeline, or the loss of that alternate timeline, really palpable — that the person you were there watching it with actually arrived. Yeah. And I think there are ways in which that pattern — I was going to say that theme, not exactly that theme, but that pattern — has shown up way more than once in my life. I wanted later in my teenage years, young post-secondary school years, to be an actor, or involved in theater and film. And again, I have many friends from those days who did in fact end up having careers doing that. Certainly not in the case of oceanography, but for sure in the case of theater and film and that experience. I do think that there are things that I learned on my way that have definitely stayed with me and are part of my personal and professional life. So catch us up. Where are you now, and what’s the work that you’re doing? Well, because people are just listening to our voices, I expect they don’t have the benefit of seeing behind me the illustration of the Capitol building, which is fitting, because I’m sitting in an office in Washington, DC. In fact, our office is directly across the street from the White House. And I started work here in February at an organization called Americans for Responsible Innovation, and was led here on a couple of different paths. But I had begun to be actively interested and involved in questions about the governance of technology, particularly pertaining to AI, over the last four or five years, and was following that path. I wasn’t sure where it would end up, but it ended up here, at an organization that is doing policy advocacy around emerging technology, and AI is certainly the focus. And what we are trying to do here is generate ideas, frameworks and blueprints for what we think both the content and the institutional forms of governance of AI ought to look like. So, heady stuff. I play very much a stewarding role, in that I work within our policy department, and part of my role here is to help all of those smart people become masters at their work. So I am very much engaged in helping give them tools that they don’t have that might be useful in doing their work — tools from other places, other than traditional policy and think-tanky, more academic sources. And so I’ve been doing that almost seven-ish months. Lots and lots more to do. It’s a pretty exciting space to be a part of. It could be both exciting and frustrating, but I was going to say at times boring, in the sense that although there’s a lot of conversation, as anybody knows, about this, there isn’t as much movement in the space, particularly in the US and North America, on actually creating new kinds of regulation, and even or especially new kinds of institutional homes and structures that might be adequate to the work that I think is ahead of us. I guess there are two things bouncing around in my head, which is always the case. The first is, I want to ask you where’s the best place to start to try to make this conversation about AI governance tangible or real. What’s the doorway in, to understand what you’re actually trying to do and what the solution might look like? I’m super attracted to and really feel th
