Do you see AI being used more extensively in future campaigns?

We need to be starting long-term, authentic conversations today with every American in order to get to the next presidential election in 2020. That means developing a deeper appreciation of the different issues that interest people. I think that artificial intelligence and machine learning will help us to better understand and segment audiences on a scale that’s not been done before, even by some of the biggest companies in the world.

Are companies like Twitter and Facebook doing enough to tackle fake news and its influence on political campaigns?

No, I don’t think my former employer or Facebook are doing enough here. It’s certainly a very difficult problem. At the heart of it are things like fake accounts, hijacked accounts, and trolling accounts. We’re now seeing outside researchers doing some really interesting work to try and identify the bots spreading fake news.

How can we get more transparency in online political advertising?

Part of the answer is greater clarity from social platforms. They need to make it obvious who is paying for political ads online and how much they’re spending. This would fix a lot of the problem, but there needs to be some formal regulation of online political advertising too.

Digital voting systems are vulnerable to hacking. What can be done to make them more secure?

From a technology standpoint, I think it’s going to be a combination of open-source software with verifiable code and paper trails. If we had a lot of academics willing to help us with verifiable code, and paper trails to show what the electronic machines actually recorded, we’d be in a much better place. I would love to see national standards that every state would need to follow when purchasing voting machines.

Given your experience at Uber, when do you think we’ll all be heading to the polls in driverless cars?

Hopefully, a whole bunch of people will be using them to vote in the 2024 presidential election.