Jamie’s Background
AI could reshape everything from jobs, to elections, to the future of our kids. We need someone in Congress who understands this issue well enough to fight for the right policy. Jamie Joyce is that candidate. She's been invited to present to government agencies, her work has been recognized by the country's largest AI labs, and she's endorsed by one of the world's most prominent AI ethicists - as well as by Epstein survivors (for calling out how Congress got the Epstein Files Transparency Act wrong in three way). For the past five years, she's also poured her energy into the Oakland and Berkeley community, hosting over a thousand neighbors at a cost-free venue for everything from weddings and memorials to fire safety meetups and book talks.
Jamie came from a humble background. Her mother dropped out of school at 13 to go to work. So Jamie built her expertise the hard way, through years of meticulous research and hands-on work in tech, and she's used every opportunity that's opened up for her to push for a government that actually works for people.
Nearly every challenge ahead, from the economy to healthcare to national security to education, now has a technological angle, but Congress doesn't have the expertise to both navigate this and defend us against an expanding surveillance state or AI's downstream harms. District 12 has the chance to send someone who brings that expertise: not just for this district, but for everyone in the country who needs a representative who won't be duped by the tech industry.
Making a Plan to Address AI Impact
We're entering a new era, one defined by AI and technology, and Jamie's mission is simple: make sure a people-centered democracy survives the transition.
Recognition of her work in AI: Jamie has spent years in the AI field, leading projects in autonomous research, fact-checking agents, and AI-powered formal reasoning for evidence-based policy. The Future of Life Foundation named her an "AI For Human Reasoning" fellow. She was interviewed for "The AI Doc" alongside the biggest names in the field. OpenAI and xAI have both invited her in to present her work internally. Her work has been cited in a published scholarly work by Anthropic AI researchers - specifically writing on the topic of democracy. World-renowned AI ethicists, activists, movement builders, and even some top CEOs count her as a trusted confidante. She is endorsed by one of the most world-famous AI ethicists.
Understanding the debate about AI: Jamie has been mapping the debates about AI for years (building databases of papers, public commentary, and government policy), but she doesn't just study AI issues - she works with it every day, and she knows we both need to take action now and need to make a plan for the longterm.
What she is bringing to the table: The part of the MAD Act (which Jamie authored) that is dedicated to AI is 240+ pages of serious policy, including: immediate red-line regulations, interim safeguards, hammer provisions, and a mandate forcing the government to build a real plan for AI's impact across 19 domains (from jobs to the environment) with the process to draft evidence-based policy. AI/LLMs/ML are great tools, but we need to be sure it works for people - not against them. Jamie wants people to keep building, but do it with guardrails to prevent harms.
Why this matters: Most politicians get briefed on AI, but Jamie has worked in and around the field. She's been building with it, documenting its harms, and tracking the debate for years. If elected, she'll bring that hard-won expertise to Congress because America doesn't need another campaign promise. It needs a plan for AI that actually works.
Jamie’s Work In and Around Government/Democracy
Jamie has a passion and expertise in governance systems. Over the past decade, Jamie has worked in "civic/democracy tech," which is the global movement of technologists working to modernize government and make it more transparent, accessible, and effective. Here are some highlights:
Jamie’s Background in Building Tech for Democracy: Jamie has led technical teams through a nonprofit she founded which focuses on making sure democratic systems survive the 21st century. Her teams have been contracted or tasked to build intelligence products for PhD researchers, non-profit organizations, think tanks (one working with a U.S. senator), a U.S. city, AI companies, and members of the general public. Her work has included drafting legislation, building decision-making models for local governments, modeling civilization-scale policy debate, authoring intelligence briefs, designing AI research tools, and pioneering an entirely new method called "Scaled Democratic Reasoning” - a new form of logical reasoning at scale.
She co-launched Democracy's Library at the Internet Archive: The Internet Archive (best known for the Wayback Machine) sought Jamie out to launch a massive effort to digitize and open up U.S. local, state, and federal government documents. Jamie got to work diagnosing challenges with records management at every level of government and wrote a lengthy landscape analysis. The Superintendent of Documents of the United States flew from D.C. to California to join her and the Archive when she presented this work. This expertise is what, in part, informs her perspective on how we can get more Epstein files.
She created a database mapping the entire U.S. government: including working with her team to document hundreds of executive branch agencies in order to understand available levers of change, government mandates, and the records they hold.
She's read hundreds of bills, written her own, and taught students from 32 universities how to logically deconstruct legislative text through educational internships.
At USC Dornsife's Center for the Political Future, the director personally asked her to build an internship program teaching students the political decision-making models that she invented.
She's given dozens of talks, including in multiple countries on modernizing democracy for the 21st century, has written several articles, and is contributor to two books (one on the future of democracy).
Last year she moved to D.C. for 3 months to negotiate with DOGE to protect agencies. One agency she wanted to protect was NARA, and it seems that NARA was never cut by DOGE. She was then asked to deliver an internal government briefing about the importance of digitizing declassified records. A government official at NARA wanted to thank Jamie for this advocacy with a private tour of the U.S. Treaties Vault, where she got to view, in person, the Treaty of Paris (which is the document that Benjamin Franklin signed to end the Revolutionary War). This is not the only internal government briefing Jamie has been asked to make.
The Foresight Institute (which has backed multiple future Nobel laureates) named her a Collective Intelligence fellow.
Jamie’s Social and Community Service
International Environmental and Humanitarian Work: Before working in the “democracy field,” Jamie was COO of an international environmental and humanitarian organization, overseeing projects in over 20 countries. She also served on the board of Wikitongues, the nonprofit fighting to preserve all 7,000+ of the world's languages. Projects she oversaw included:
providing job training to women in Kirkuk, Iraq to enable women to find independence
enabling pre-teen girls to attend school in Malawi
providing technical education to 5 schools in Kenya
funding solar panels distribution programs in subsaharan Africa to curb health impacts of kerosene lamps
and many more
National Work: During the COVID pandemic, Jamie was the volunteer coordinator of the nation’s largest civilian PPE manufacturing effort, which won an award from the government.
Community Work: Today, she sits on the board of the Sand Mandala Foundation, which funds artists. From her home in Berkeley, she manages a historic building as a part-time job which she opens up as cost-free venue space for the community: silent meditation retreats, choir practice, birthday parties, community theatre, weddings, art shows, and memorials. Jamie is also a community archivist. When she lived in Orlando during the Pulse Shooting at a gay nightclub, Jamie launched the World Wide Web Peace Project to capture the voices of local Orlandoans’ response to the shooting and their support for the LGBTQ community. Jamie also went to local mourning sites and sealed letters, notes, and cards in plastic to protect them from the Florida rain. She also helped collect these artifacts to donate to the local historical society.
Her memberships have included: the Rotary Club, the Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, the Office of Intellectual Freedom, Nation of Makers, the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the C2PA. She's a Wikipedia editor. She's volunteered for the Human Library. She was an advisor to Atlas Computing. And she co-founded Canonical Debate Labs.
Jamie has always fought for a better world. She's not stopping anytime soon.
Jamie and Health
At one point in her life, Jamie’s greatest accomplishment was being “one of the nicest patients” to her nurses.
In her early 20s, Jamie dealt with chronic hospitalization due to a severe, incurable ailment. She would sometimes not be able to drink water or eat food for up to 5 days, relying instead on intravenous feeding and wracking up almost a hundred thousand dollars in medical debt in the course of a year, cumulatively. She underwent multiple procedures and experimental trials, and had to take 18 pills per day, but still, her incredibly painful and debilitating condition only worsened over time. With a tip from a friend, Jamie began researching the medical literature on her condition and only found one Japanese pescatarian study linking the condition to food. Jamie then switched to a vegan diet, and has remained in remission for 9+ years.
Jamie understands what it is like to be too sick to work, too sick to care for yourself, and to need help, but can’t afford it. Jamie also has a personal relationship in knowing what it means to care for a disabled loved one. During her summers in high school, Jamie cared for a cognitively disabled child: changing his diapers, feeding him, and keeping him safe. When her older brother was medically induced into a coma, Jamie stayed by his side in the hospital for 17 days, reading to him and sometimes sleeping on the floor of the waiting room, while raising money from friends and family to pay his medical bills. For Jamie, having quality healthcare and at-home support should be something that our nation collectively provides to those in need.
Since resolving her own condition and now needing no medications at all, Jamie pours back her energy into community. When she bounced back from her hospitalization stays, she threw public events, poetry readings, hug marches, and volunteered for charity before moving into the charity sector to work full-time. She also thanks every doctor, nurse, and medical researcher she meets for doing some of the most important work in the world.
What Jamie Stands For & Against
Jamie isn’t just making campaign promises, she has already written legislation about the issues she campaigns on. Read more about her bill, The MAD Act, and vote for Jamie so she write more legislation as a Congresswoman and give power back to people!
✔ getting more Epstein files (via the MAD Act)
✔ deleting the surveillance state (via the MAD Act)
✔ refusing AIPAC money and pro-Israel PAC endorsement, ending the genocide in Gaza
✔ investigate foreign influence on campaign-adjacent organizations (via the MAD Act)
✔ reining in ICE (via the MAD Act)
✔ funding electoral reform (via the MAD Act)
✔ putting the President in check (via the MAD Act)
✔ protect our environment and invest in energy infrastructure
✔ stopping executive overreach and corruption (via the MAD Act)
✔ pass legislation based on rigor, evidence and the people’s will
✔ be an ally to LGBTQIA+
✔ end foreign influence in our elections (via the MAD Act)
✔ improved education for all, higher wages for teachers, and more resources for classrooms
✔ protect the right to work and retire with dignity
✔ affordable healthcare and housing for all
✔ develop a real plan for AI’s impact (via the MAD Act)
✔ improving social welfare and social services, including getting homeless people the support they need
✔ getting dark money out of our elections (via the MAD Act)
Jamie & Education
Jamie's mother left school at 13 to go to work, so college was never a given in her house. She graduated high school with a 4.0+ in the four-year Laureate Scholars program. However, she only applied to exactly one college (UCF) because it outright offered her a scholarship.
Her undergraduate sociological thesis identified statistical correlations between the slang terms people use for police officers, their past experiences with police, their demographics, and their likelihood of calling police across a series of hypothetical scenarios. The hypothesis was to see how reliably language could predict behaviors, explained by past experiences.
She completed her undergraduate thesis, but left before finishing the degree. She experienced severe health issues, but when she was healthy again, Jamie chose a new, autodidactic path.
She began studying the history of logic, American history, semantic standards in content-analysis software, media formats in government, analyzed hundreds of deliberation-mapping systems, and read hundreds of pieces of legislation. She then founded a collective intelligence organization to put all of this into practice. After she developed her organization’s ontology, data format standards, and analysis methodologies, Jamie later architected an assembly-line content analysis process to produce structured data to train machine learning models how to deconstruct media, and then later tinkered with prompt engineering - crafting meticulous 20+ page few-shot prompts to produce output data which could be used to fine-tune AI models to improve analysis outcomes for stages in her content analysis system. This was used in her work automating research, fact-checking, and analysis workflows with her team.
Her later work included directing a team to map the entirety of the U.S. government’s departments and agencies to understand how the system functions, and writing a landscape analysis of the United States government federated knowledge management system for the Internet Archive, and tinkering with LLMs to code.
As stated above, Jamie’s work has been recognized by receiving multiple fellowships, being invited to present to government agencies and Frontier AI labs, and her and her team’s work has been cited in a scholarly paper about the future of democracy. As of late, her PhD staff has begun submitting their own papers for peer-reviewed publication in order to introduce Jamie’s autodidactic scaled standard for logical reasoning (and the accompanying methodology) to the academic field. Jamie has also won a grant to create educational programs to improve fact-checkers' standards, and has taught students from more than two dozen universities how to logically deconstruct legislation. Jamie has been a contributor to a few published books in her field.
Jamie is also an award-winning artist and “maker,” and uses 2.5MeV electron beams in a particle accelerator to make Lichtenberg figure art with her physicist friends. She has also been seen at events with the compressed deflagrated MAPP gas cannon she built. Her next art projects relate to lightning bolt triggering with rockets and melting steel with thermite.