Highlights
Earlier this month, the Institute for Family Studies welcomed Daniel Cochrane to our team as Senior Fellow for the Family First Technology Initiative, where he will focus on AI and data governance. Daniel is a founding member of the Alliance for a Better Future’s advisory council. He previously served as a senior researcher at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person. Daniel has provided expert testimony before multiple state legislative committees and government commissions, and he's been widely published in media outlets ranging from Fox News to Politico. To help our readers get to know him a little better, Michael Toscano, Director of the IFS Family First Technology Initiative, asked Daniel a few questions.
Michael Toscano: You are joining the Family First Technology Initiative at IFS. What does family-first tech mean to you?
Daniel Cochrane: Family-first technology means prioritizing the well-being of American families, especially the social and economic conditions necessary for their flourishing, as the primary goal of innovation. It also means envisioning a future with strong families at the center, where technological innovation safeguards children, empowers parents, uplifts workers, and revitalizes the social fabric of American democracy.
Toscano: Your research and policy work will be particularly focused on AI and data governance? Would you explain to our audience what that entails?
Cochrane: Fundamentally, it entails two things. First, it requires ensuring that the AI systems that shape consequential decisions and social domains like the household, school, workplace, and public square, are aligned with the interests and values of children, parents, workers, and citizens within the context of human-scale communities and institutions.
Second, it requires empowering human communities to decide when, why, and how their data is collected and used. The terms under which data is accessed and used to train models or generate outputs directly influence how AI systems behave in context, the quality and trustworthiness of their outputs, and whether the people producing the data are afforded meaningful privacy and benefit proportionately to the value tech companies derive from the information collected.
Toscano: When most people think about data, they don't necessarily think about family. What is the connection?
Cochrane: “Data” is just another word for information. Every time we share a photo of a child, post an article, engage with a piece of content, communicate with a friend, visit a website, or purchase a product, we reveal information about ourselves and those around us. The data we collectively generate now fills countless data centers and shapes the contours of our digital lives. Data is the food that AI and the entire digital economy run on. Like human food, low-quality “data ingredients” yield suboptimal or even harmful outcomes. Similarly, adverse incentives driving the production and processing of “data food” promote business models that are fundamentally corrosive to America’s social fabric.
Restraining commercial surveillance and securing a future for the family starts with reasserting digital rights to privacy, agency, and ownership over data.
Big Tech companies along with countless digital services we use every day profit by rendering our lives legible to corporations and governments. This commercial surveillance-driven business model threatens to undermine the bedrock institutions of family life and civil society. For example, AI-powered social media platforms and anthropomorphic chatbots use our data to pinpoint individual vulnerabilities, keeping us addicted, giving us the illusion of “companionship,” and allowing powerful tech companies to surveil, shape, and monetize our lives.
IFS and other organizations have long argued that Big Tech’s surveillance business model is especially harmful to kids whose brains are highly susceptible to the addictive design and toxic material served up by social media algorithms and AI chatbots. In the hands of Big Tech, our data is a threat to the American family and the future of self-governance. But in the right hands and under the proper conditions, data could be a powerful tool to unlock family-first innovation, and to hand power back to parents, small businesses, workers, and communities.
Reining in commercial surveillance and securing a future for the family starts with reasserting digital rights to privacy, agency, and ownership over data at the level of human-scale communities and institutions.
Toscano: In our brief time together as colleagues, I’ve learned that you are broadly interested in philosophy. What philosopher do you think can teach us the most about the moment we are in, especially related to technology?
Cochrane: Friedrich Nietzsche is perhaps the most important philosopher for understanding the Silicon Valley tech bros. Many of the techno-elites are co-opting religious terms and categories as a kind of will to power, manifested in their ambition to transcend the limits of human nature and to summon forth a “god” of their own making.
Toscano: Finally, what's a fun fact about yourself for our readers?
Cochrane: I’m probably the biggest coffeeholic on this side of the Mississippi!
