For Scientific American’s series on the upcoming U.S. presidential election, I wrote about the ways Kamala Harris or Donald Trump might govern artificial intelligence. I sought perspective from social scientist Alondra Nelson, who worked in the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and helped develop a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”: principles and practices to guide how the American public uses AI. Nelson offered several observations about the candidates, and here are a few about Vice President Harris that couldn’t fit in the main story.

Her early background: Harris’s combination of a “personal and professional background has brought with it clarity about the perils and possibilities of technology in general, including AI,” Nelson says. Harris, the daughter of a scientist, was born in a hospital in Oakland and lived as a child and adult in the Bay Area around San Francisco. “This gives the vice president a foundational familiarity with the worlds of science and technology, and this distinguishes her from any presidential candidate before her,” Nelson says. “As president, Silicon Valley will not be a distant curiosity to her but rather a culture and policy space with which she is quite familiar.”

California to the White House: Harris was the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017, and during that tenure, she established the Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit in the state’s Department of Justice. This was “the first unit in the nation to focus on protecting consumer and individual privacy in cyberspace, healthcare, finance and in situations of sexual abuse,” Nelson says, adding that the vice president understands that technology can “violate people’s privacy and the importance of enforcing state and federal laws to safeguard this privacy.” The Biden-Harris administration also adopted a strategy of seeking voluntary commitments from the tech industry that Harris had previously employed; Harris secured agreements with companies to abide by California privacy law “across all of the jurisdictions where they operate,” as Nelson points out. 

For more about what’s at stake for AI in the election, here’s my story. -Ben