Musings on AI Policy from a Former U.S. Senate Staffer

In this talk, Simons Institute Law and Society Fellow Serena Booth will first discuss the challenges of crafting specifications for AI systems; how easy it is for these systems to go rogue, whether through misspecification or other means; and her research studying both experts’ and nonexperts’ specifications. This technical research direction — of controlling AI systems — led her to explore the policy questions around designing and deploying AI systems. To this end, she will discuss her work in the U.S. Senate on AI policy. She will make the argument that consumer protection laws are an inalienable first defense for AI safety, and she will show how these laws have been successful in curtailing unsafe AI development and deployment to date. 

Serena Booth is the Simons Institute's Spring 2025 Law and Society Fellow, and an incoming Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Brown University. She was previously an AAAS AI Policy Fellow with the U.S. Senate, where she worked on AI policy questions for the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Serena received her PhD at MIT CSAIL in 2023. She studies how people write specifications for AI systems and how people assess whether AI systems are successful in learning from specifications. While at MIT, Serena served as an inaugural Social and Ethical Responsible Computing Scholar, teaching AI Ethics and developing MIT’s AI ethics curriculum that is also released on MIT OpenCourseWare. She graduated from Harvard College (2016), after which she worked as an Associate Product Manager at Google to help scale Google’s ARCore augmented reality product to 100 million devices. Her research has been supported by an MIT Presidential Fellowship and by an NSF GRFP. She has been selected as a Rising Star in EECS and an HRI Pioneer.

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Established in 2020, the Simons Institute’s Law and Society Fellowships enhance Institute programs that address technologies with profound impacts on human society and with implications for ethics, law, and policy, by supporting a researcher within each who is focused on addressing the broader societal implications of the techniques and technologies addressed within these programs. 

Law and Society fellows participate in the Institute’s programs and engage with visiting scientists. Additional contributions include an initial talk on the fellow’s work for visiting researchers at the Simons Institute, as well as a white paper on recommendations and findings. 

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