Future Politics | Jamie Susskind | Talks at Google

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[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: Please join me in welcoming Jamie Susskind. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] JAMIE SUSSKIND: Thank you all, very much. There's a story that's told of an encounter that took place in the 19th century between the great Prime Minister William Gladstone and the scientist Michael Faraday. And Faraday were showing Gladstone the invention of electricity, which Gladstone hadn't seen before. And the prime minister was looking at it curiously. And he said to Faraday, well, what does it do? What use is it? And Faraday gave an explanation as to what he thought the scientific implications of it were and how it marked a great advance in that respect. But Gladstone wasn't convinced. And he kept asking, more and more rudely, well, what use is it? What use is it? And eventually, Faraday turned around to the prime minister, and he said, well, sir, in due course, I'm sure you'll find a way of taxing it. What that story shows, to my mind, is a phenomenon that's the same today as it was in the 19th century, which is that there are lots of Gladstones in the world who know a lot about politics, but not much about technology. And equally, there are a lot of Faradays in the world who know a lot about science and technology, but don't immediately see the social implications of their work. And to my mind, the Gladstones and the Faradays are remaking the world that we live in. They're the most important people on the planet just now, when it comes to politics. And I want to start, if I may, with just four examples of simple technologies that are emerging that we'll all have heard of. The first is a self-driving car. I want you to imagine you're taking a journey in a self-driving car. And you ask that vehicle to speed up, to go over the speed limit. The vehicle refuses. You ask it to park illegally on a double-yellow line, just for a moment so you can nip into the shops. The vehicle refuses. In due course, a police car comes along, its sirens blaring and is asking you to pull over. For whatever reason, you don't want the car to pull over, at least not yet. But it does against your will. Now I want you to imagine you are using a virtual reality system, one which enables you to experience things which otherwise would be inaccessible to you. And you ask that system to let you, for whatever reason, experience what it was like to be a Nazi executioner at Auschwitz or to perform a particularly depraved sexual act which society would condemn, by and large, as immoral. The system refuses. Now let's think about an invention or a development which took place just a couple of months ago in relation to chatbots where a Babylon system was said to be able to pass the Royal Society of General Practitioners' general exam better than the average score of its human practitioners. Imagine living in a world where chatbots are not just better at talking about medicine and diagnosing conditions, but are better at talking about politics than the rest of us as well. And finally, think of the stories that we've all heard of the soap dispensers that won't dispense soap to people of color because they've only been trained on white hands, the voice recognition systems that won't hear women because they've only been trained on men's voices, the passport recognition system in New Zealand that declined to issue a passport to a man of Asian extraction there because it said that his eyes were closed in his photograph. These were previously and, too often still are, seen as technical problems-- the ones that I've just described. But to my mind, they're political. The self-driving car example is an example of power plain and simple-- a technology getting us to do something we wouldn't otherwise do or not to do something we would otherwise have done. The virtual reality example goes right to the heart of the question of liberty. What is permitted in society? What should be permitted in society? And what should be forbidden? The chatbot example goes to the heart of democracy. In a world where deliberation takes place increasingly by machines, or could do, what place is there for us in the systems that govern our lives? And finally, the examples of the soap dispenser and of the voice recognition system and of the passport system go to the heart of social justice because they deal with how we recognize each other in society, how we rank and sort each other, and how we place each other in the great chain of status and esteem. Power, freedom, democracy, justice-- these concepts are the currency of politics. And increasingly, I argue in "Future Politics," they're the currency of technology. And what I say is that, like it or not, social engineers-- forgive me-- software engineers such as yourselves are increasingly becoming social engineers. You see the two are just the same in my mind now. I struggle even to distinguish them. Technology, I say, is transforming the way we live together. And what I hope to do in my talk today is briefly sketch out how I think it might be doing that. But the overarching thesis is clear. The digital is political. We can no longer be blind to the social and political implications of stuff which previously in the past was just seen as consumer products or as commercial or technical matters only. I thought I'd begin by outlining the three main trends in technology, which lead me to the conclusions that I reach in respect to politics. And you don't need me to spend much time on these, but I'll just rattle them off anyway. The first is increasingly capable systems. In short, we are developing systems-- call them artificial intelligence, call them what you will-- they're increasingly able to do things which we previously thought only human beings could do. And they can do them as well as us, and they can do them better in some cases, whether it's lip reading, whether it's transcription, mimicking human speech, detecting lung cancers and diagnosing and predicting survival periods. Almost every game that we've invented, computers now do them better or equal to human beings. And the simple thesis is that progress isn't going to slow down any time soon. Some people say it's increasing at an exponential rate-- so increasingly capable systems. But the second point of importance is not just that our systems are increasingly capable, but they're increasingly, they're everywhere. We live in what's being called the era of the glass slab where, principally, our interaction with technology takes place on computer screens, or iPads, or phones through the medium of a glass slab. But what's said is that, in the future, technology will be dispersed around us in our architecture, in our utilities at home, in our appliances, in our public spaces, even on our clothes and inside our bodies-- the so-called internet of things or ubiquitous computing. Which means that, increasingly, sensors' processing power and connection to the internet will be distributed all around us in items and artifacts that we previously wouldn't have seen as technology. So the idea of the glass slab will gradually fade away. The distinction between online and offline, real and virtual, meet space and cyberspace will lose some of its meaning and, certainly, lose a lot of its importance. So we got increasingly capable systems and what I call increasingly integrated technology. And finally, we have an increasingly quantified society. Now, what's said is that every two days, we generate more data than we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. And it's predicted that by 2020, there'll be about 3 million books worth of data for every human being on the planet. This is obviously unprecedented. And what it means is that, increasingly, what we say, what we think, how we feel, where we go, who we associate with, what we like and dislike-- almost every aspect of our lives, in some sense, will be captured, recorded as data, stored in permanent or semi-permanent form, and made available for processing. Looking at the crowd in this room, a lot of this may seem natural and normal to us because it's what we've grown up with. And all of these trends have been increasing through our lifetime. But to my mind, it marks a pretty substantial shift in the state of humanity. It could be as profound for us as the scientific revolution, the agricultural revolution. Because it's only just started. We're only 5 or 10 seconds into this stuff in the historical perspective. And if you think about what might be around the corner 10 or 20 years down the line, then it would be mad to assume that the consequences for politics, for how we live together, wouldn't be profound. Because we've never had to live alongside non-human systems of extraordinary capability before. We've never known what it's like for digital technology to be integrated seamlessly into the world around us. There's never been a human civilization where every facet of its social and private life has, in some way, been recorded and stored as data. And our duty-- whether we're Gladstones, or Faradays, or just citizens-- is to try and understand what the implications of that are for future of politics. And so I thought what I'd do today is just go through four of the most basic concepts in politics-- power, democracy, freedom, and justice-- and say how I think that the digital is political and how your work as software engineers will increasingly make you social engineers too. People often say that big tech companies have a great deal of power. And it's true, they do. And that's only likely to increase in the future. But I think there's often a conceptual confusion that people come across, which is that they mistake purely economic power for political power. And I don't think the two are the same thing. In politics and political science, it's said that a very basic definition of power is the ability to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do or not to do things they would otherwise have done. And let's adopt that as our working definition for a moment. Now, I suggest that technology, digital technology, is capable of exerting power in one of three ways. The first is in the way that we saw with the self-driving car example at the beginning, which is basically that, whenever we use a technology, whenever we interact with it, we are subject to the dictates of the code of that technology. So when you use an online platform or a piece of software, you can't ask it to do something that it's not programmed to do. It can only do what it's programmed to do. And to take another prime ministerial example that often springs to mind-- when Gordon Brown was prime minister, he went to the US, and President Obama gave him 25 DVDs of classic American films. This was, for some reason, seen as a great insult to the British people, in and of itself. But if that was insulting, what then happened when the prime minister went and sat down at home, popcorn in hand, was that the DVDs wouldn't play because they were coded for US DVD players. And the digital rights management system on those DVDs simply forbade it. Now, we know about that technology, and we understand why it's happened. But to the untrained eye, it looks like a glitch. But it's not a glitch. Technologies-- we can only do with them what the code is, what the programmers say we can do with them. It's a very simple fact about technology. And this was acknowledged very early on when we started using computers and internet. And people started saying well, that means code is law or, at least, code is like law. But things have developed since then, quite recently. The first is that, whereas we used to think of the code that was inside our technology as a kind of architecture-- people that used to talk about software architecture. And the language we use reflect that-- so platforms, and portals, and gateways-- as if it was a metaphor for physical architecture. That's no longer going to be the case in the future. Increasingly capable systems means that the code that animates our technology is likely to be dynamic. It might be capable of learning and changing over time. It might be remotely changeable by its creators. Or it might do so on its own basis. So the code that used to control us in the early days of the internet and on cyberspace with more of, like, dumb architecture, but in the future, it's more likely to be more dynamic. The second big change is that code is no longer just power or law in cyberspace. It's in real space, too. And that's because of increasingly integrated technology. When we go around our daily lives and interact with technologies, we can't shut down or log off like we might have been able to in the past. If that distinction between real and virtual, or online and offline, or cyberspace and meet space, if it does dissolve, and if people are right about that, then code is going to be able to exert power on us. Technology is going to be able to exert power on us all the time. And there's no way of getting away from it. So that's the first way that I would say, simply, technology can be used to exert power. The second and third ways and more subtle. The first is through scrutiny. The more you know about someone-- what they like, what they fear, what they hate-- the more easy it is to influence them. It's the basic premise behind all online advertising and all political advertising as well. If it's the case that society is becoming increasingly quantified, that all of our thoughts and feelings and inner life is becoming better-known to those who make and govern technologies, then it'll be easier to influence us because they'll have more information about us. It's a simple point. There's a deeper and more subtle way, though, that people gathering information about us allows them to exert power. And it's the disciplinary effect. When we know we're being watched, we change our behavior. We police ourselves. We're less likely to do things that society would think are sinful, or shameful, or wrong, or that might land us in hot water. Google's not a bad example. Because one of the things that Google apparently does is, if people search for things related to child pornography, they're reported to authorities. That, in itself, the dissemination of that fact is likely to and does change the way that people behave. So the second way that technology exerts power is by gathering information about us, which can be used to influence us or by causing us to discipline and police ourselves because we know that information is being gathered about us. And the third is the most subtle of all and possibly the most powerful of all. And I call it perception control. We, all of us, rely on other people or other things to gather information about the world, distill it into something sensible and comprehensible, and present it to us in a digestible form-- so like a filtering. Otherwise, all we'd know about the world is what we immediately perceive. Now increasingly, we rely on technologies to do the work of filtering for us, whether it's when we go out and look for information, such as in a search function, when information is gathered and brought to us in a news function. Increasingly, we're subjecting our immediate sensory perception to technologies as well with augmented reality-- over our eyes, over our ears, over our bodies in haptic form or virtual reality too. And those who control the flow of information in society exert a great deal of power. Because you know that the best way to stop people from being upset about something is to stop them knowing about it at all. Or the best way to get people angry about something is to tell them over and over that it's disgusting and that it's wrong and that it has to be punished. And the work of filtering, presenting to each us the world beyond our immediate gaze, is increasingly done by technologies. And so when I say that technology is powerful, I'm usually referring to one of those three things-- the ability to force us through code to do something, the ability to gather information about us, the ability to control the way we perceive the world. And there's nothing necessarily nefarious or wrong with any of these. It's just a helpful, I think, way of thinking about how technology can change the way people behave, how it can exert power. The other important implication, however, of technology flowing on from how it exerts power on us is how it affects our freedom. Now, the great debate that we've all heard for 20 years is how increasing technologies of surveillance will potentially lead to states and maybe tech firms having too much power over people because they watch us the whole time and are capable of regulating us. That's an important debate. It's not the one I want to necessarily talk about today. Because I think that the effects of technology on our freedom are actually a little bit more subtle. So I would ask the people in the room to ask themselves if you've ever streamed an episode of "Game of Thrones" illegally or you've gone to take a second helping from the Coke machine even though you've only paid for one or if you've dodged a bus fare, here or abroad, by jumping on a bus and not paying for a ticket and jumping off again? 74% of British people admit to having done these things. It's not because they're all scoundrels. It's because there is this hinterland in the law where people are allowed to get away with things from time to time without being punished as long as it's not constant, as long as it's not egregious. That's why so many people do it. I suggest, in a world of increasingly capable systems and increasingly integrated technology, those little bits of naughtiness will become much more difficult. Whether it's because your smart wallet automatically deducts the bus fare when you jump on the bus, or the "Game of Thrones" episode, it just becomes impossible to stream because the digital rights management technology becomes so good, or because you need face recognition software to get that second helping of Coke. And if you think that's petty, you should know that, in Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park, facial recognition software is already used to make sure that people don't use more than their fair share of toilet paper. And if that's the world that we're moving into, then that hinterland of naughtiness-- the ability to make little mistakes around the edges, like getting your self-driving car to go over the speed limit or park illegally-- becomes a lot more difficult. I think that has implication for freedom. The more profound implication for our freedom, though, is what I call the privatization of it. Increasingly, we use technologies to do the things that would traditionally be considered freedom-making, whether it's freedom of speech-- an increasing amount of important political speech takes place online on online platforms-- whether it's freedom of movement in the form of self-driving cars or whatever it is that comes next, whether it's freedom of thought, the ability to think clearly and rationally, which is obviously, affected by the systems that filter our information for us. The good news about technology, obviously, is that our freedom can be enhanced by these technologies. The interesting point, though, is that, whereas in the past, for most of human history, questions of freedom were left to the states and were considered political questions to be decided on by the whole of society. Nowadays, they're increasingly privatized. What you can do on a political speech platform, what you can do with a self-driving car, how Facebook or Twitter filters the news that you see-- these aren't decisions that you and I-- maybe you-- these are decisions that most of us take. They're done privately. And they're done by tech firms, often, acting in what they perceive to be the best interest of their consumers. But they're ultimately, just now, a matter of private decisions taken by tech firms and their lawyers. And I think we need to think through quite carefully what the implications of this are, just in political terms, looking at the long run of human history. Because what it first means is that tech firms take on quite a significant moral burden when they decide what we can and can't do with their technologies. That was previously a matter of societal debate. So the VR system I think is a good example. When you get a Virtual Reality system that is supposed to be customizable in some way or give you lots of different experiences, should it be up to you, the individual user, to decide which experiences you want, depraved or otherwise? Should it be up to the tech firm? Should it be up to society as a whole? The traditional answer given by human beings is that society, as a whole, the limits of what is right and what is moral and what is forbidden. Right now we don't live in that world. The second thing is that, obviously, through no wrongdoing, tech firms are not answerable to the people in the same way that the governments that set laws are. The third difference between a tech firm and a state is that, in the state, the law develops over time in a public and consistent way that applies to everyone. Whereas, tech firms do things differently. Google might have a different policy towards hate speech than Twitter does, a different policy than Facebook does. And some people would say that's a good thing-- for reasons I'll come on to in a second. And others would say it's a challenge to the development, the overall moral development of society, of shared values between us all. Just to take two examples that have troubled political philosophies since time immemorial-- one is the question of harm to self. Should we, as grown up adults, be able to harm ourselves? So if I ask my self-driving car to reverse over my head, should it do that because it's my autonomous decision that I'd like it to do that? Or my automated cooking system in my kitchen-- if I want it to make a curry for me that's so spicy that it's likely to send me to hospital, but it's my choice-- should it do it? Or should systems be designed to protect us? The idea that systems, beyond our control, should be designed to protect us might seem anodyne in this room. But to John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and other philosophers like that on whom our legal system and its principles are often based-- that would have been anathema to them for the same reason that suicide stopped being illegal not so long ago. Because people are generally thought to be able to do things which harm themselves and should be free to do that. Even more so, the question of immoral acts-- there are very few laws left on our statute books which stop us from doing things which are considered immoral or disgusting. In the privacy of your own home, you can do almost any sex act apart from something which causes very serious harm to yourself or to others. And so free speech-- you can anticipate, in the future, free speech and free action campaign, again, to say, if I want to simulate sex with a child on my virtual reality system in circumstances where it causes no harm to anyone else, I should be allowed to do that. And actually, a governing principle of English law for centuries has been, if something doesn't harm other people, you should be free to do it. Now, there might be disagreements in the room about whether that's right or wrong. The interesting point for me is that, right now, that decision is not going to be taken by the states. It's going to be taken by companies. And that marks quite a profound shift, I think, in the way that politics is arranged and the way that political theory needs to proceed. Now, in the book-- I won't bore you with this too much-- I try to outline a series of doctrines, of ways of thinking, that can help us to think clearly and crisply about what's at stake when we limit and don't limit people's freedom. So I've got this idea of digital libertarianism, which some people are going to adopt, which is the idea that, basically, freedom is freedom from any form of technology. If I don't want to have technology in my house, I should be free not to have it. There should be no requirement of smart devices, small utilities. And any piece of code that restricts my freedom is unwanted. More likely is that people will adopt a position of what I call digital liberalism, which is that the rules that are coded into technology should try to maximize the overall freedom of the community, even if it means minimizing the freedom for some. A particular doctrine, which I think will appeal to free marketers, I call digital confederalism, which basically means that any company should be able to set its own rules so long as there's always a sufficient number of different companies so you can switch between them according to your choice. People will say, that's the way to maintain freedom-- lots of different little subsets. Digital moralism-- the idea that technology should encourage us to be better people. Digital paternalism-- the idea that technologies should protect us from ourselves and our own worst instincts. Or digital republicanism-- for centuries, humans have demanded that, when power is exerted over them, that power should not be unaccountable. That power should be answerable in some way, even if that power is exerted benevolently. It's why the American and English Revolutions, to a certain extent, both happened. It wasn't just people's frustration that the monarch was behaving badly. It's that they could behave badly at any point. So a freedom which relies on the benevolence of someone else is no kind of freedom at all. And digital republicanism, therefore, means that, in any technology, whenever power is exerted over you, you should be able to have a say in it. You should be able to customize it, to edit it according to your principle of the good life, to your vision of what's right for you. These are all ideas that are new and strange, but I think we're going to have to grapple with them, whether we're Gladstones or whether we're Faradays, if it's right that so many of our freedoms are now going to be in the hands of technologies and people who make them. Democracy-- we all know the ways in which technology has affected democracy as we currently experience it. It's changed the relationship between citizens and other citizens, allowing them to organize like the MoveOn, or the Occupy, or the Arab Spring movements. In some places, it's changed the relationship between the citizen and the state, enabling a more collaborative form of government-- e-petitions, online consultations. It's definitely transformed the nature of campaigning between party and activist and between party and voter. Activism is obviously, almost entirely done online now-- the organization of it, the central organization. And Cambridge Analytica, and the Brexit, and 2016 American referendum show that, increasingly, big data and the technology surrounding it are used to pinpoint each of us based on psychological profiles or profiles of what we like in order to influence us in a particular way. Now, everyone gets very upset about this stuff or very excited about it. And I think it's right to. But it's ultimately an example of what I call faster-horses thinking. The reason I call it that is because when Henry Ford, the inventor of the automobile, was asked what did people tell you they wanted, he replied, faster horses. It's sometimes difficult for us to conceive, in politics, of systems that are so radically different from our own. And instead, we just think of technologies as augmenting or supercharging what we already have. And so the changes that I've just described to democracy are all profound. But they don't change the nature of democracy itself. They work within the system to which we are presently accustomed. And I wonder if that's going to be sustainable or true within our lifetime. I suggest there'll be four challenges to the way that we currently think about democracy. The first is the one that I described in the introduction. If bots get to this stage where they are good enough to debate in a way that is more rational and more persuasive than us, or even if they don't, how-- and a lot of political speech takes place in online platforms-- how on Earth are we supposed to sustain a system of deliberation in which you and I have meaningful say when, every time we speak, we're shot down or presented with 50 facts to the contrary. Now, remember that, in the future, bots aren't going to be disembodied lines of code. They'll have human faces. They'll be able-- if the sensors are there to detect human emotion-- they'll be persuasive and real-seeming. So deliberation, which has been part of our concept of democracy since Greece, could be completely disrupted by a technology that's already underway. No one really talks about that that much. I think that's something that could be a problem within 10 or 15 years. And that's pretty profound. Second big challenge is, we're now entering a time where, easily, it's foreseeable that we could have full direct democracy where, basically, using a smartphone or whatever replaces it. We vote on the issues of the day directly with no need for politicians. Or wiki democracy, where we edit the laws ourselves-- some model of it. It's absolutely not technically infeasible in the course of our lifetimes. We need to re-have the debate about whether that's desirable. How much democracy is too much democracy? Why is democracy valuable in the first place? I don't think we're ready for that debate. I don't think it's one we've started happening. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the natural offshoots of the populist movements that we see just now is a demand for more direct accountability for political decisions-- people will vote using stuff in their pockets. Data democracy-- it's going to become increasingly weird that we consider a system legitimate on the basis that we put a tick in a box once every five years-- an almost inconceivably small amount of data is used to constitute the government of the day. I think there's a theoretical and philosophical challenge to be made about a system which uses the abundance of data, which really reflects the lives that we actually lead and the role that that should play in legitimizing governments. That is to say, if a government doesn't pay attention to the data that actually exists about its people, how can it be really said to represent them? It's interesting question. It's one that we haven't currently got to yet. I suspect it will rise in salience. And the final question is going to be about AI democracy. It's not a tool not to consider as we entrust Artificial Intelligence systems with more and more valuable things-- trading on the stock market, robots conducting operations. One was appointed to the board of a company in Singapore-- that we might ask, what role should AI's play in the decision of public policymaking, in the decisions made by public policymakers? Which areas of politics would we be better served with systems taking the decision on our behalf, perhaps, according to principles that are agreed democratically? Or should we each have an AI system in our pocket which votes in our behalf 10,000 times a day on the issues of the day based on the data that it has about us and what it knows about our preferences and our lived experience? We're just at the cusp of these questions. But the system of democracy that we have is a very old one. And it would very much surprise me if faster horses was all we got, if the disruption we've already seen to democracy was the last we saw of democratic disruption. That would seem to me to be against the grain of how the digital really is becoming political. Final concept-- social justice. When political theorists talk about social justice, they tend to be one of two things. First is distribution-- how should benefits and burdens be distributed in society? Equally, according to some principle of merit, to the best, disproportionately, to the most needy? These are all arguments that philosophers have had and politicians have had for generations. And in the past, they were settled by the market, which distributed goods among us and by the state, which kind of intervened and regulated the distribution of those goods. Increasingly, it's algorithms that are being used to distribute goods in society. 72% of CVs-- or resumes, for an American audience-- are never seen by human eyes. The systems that make decisions about who gets jobs have profound distributive consequences for who does well and who doesn't in society. Mortgages, insurance, a whole host of other distributively important things are affected by algorithms. For example, the fact that algorithms now trade on the stock market has caused a ballooning in the wealth that flows to people who use those automated systems-- mostly banks. That has distributive consequences. So what political philosophers typically thought of as a question of political economy-- the market and the state-- that question of social justice is increasingly entrusted to the people who write those algorithms. That's the first way that technology is going to affect social justice. But there's more to justice than just the distribution of stuff. When we see the slave kneeling at the feet of the master, or the woman cowering before her husband, or the person from a black or minority ethnic community having insults hurled at them, the injustice there has nothing to do with the distribution of stuff. It's what's called an injustice of recognition where we fail to accord each human being the dignity and respect that they deserve. Now, in the past, it was really only other people who could disrespect us in this way. In the future, as we've seen, it can be systems, as well. If you think of the frustration you feel when your computer doesn't work today, imagine what it's going to be like when one doesn't even recognize your face because it's the wrong color or because it doesn't hear your voice because you're the wrong gender or because it doesn't let you into the nightclub because your face doesn't meet the right specifications that the club owner has set. Technology is increasingly used in questions of recognition. And I think that's a profound importance for social justice. The other way that technology affects justice is that it ranks us. Today, we all know what the currency of social status is. Increasingly, it's likes, it's retweets, it's followers. People who, half a century ago, would not have held high status in society, now hold high status in society. And the reason they do is because of a particular set of algorithms designed by people like you have been set which decide what the key factors are. Who's in and who's out? Who's up and who's down? Who's seen and who is unseen? Who's great and who's nothing? Now, there's nothing inherently nefarious about this, nothing inherently wrong with it. But it used to be that only people, and our social norms, and occasionally laws like the Nuremberg laws or the Jim Crow laws, which specifically discriminated against people, were the things that decided the politics of recognition. Now that's done by technology. And it's increasingly in the hands of people who aren't politicians and who aren't necessarily philosophers either. So just stepping back-- power, democracy, freedom, justice-- these used to be words that just politicians and political philosophers used in their day-to-day discourse. I say that they have to be words that software engineers use in their day-to-day discourse and that tech firms know and are familiar with and understand. I'd like to close with two quotes that have always stuck out to me. The first is this-- and you might have heard it-- "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." The second is this-- "We're not analyzing the world; we're building it." And essentially, they mean the same thing. What they say is you can talk, and you can think, and you can debate. But the real people who create change are those who go out and do it. The first quote is from Karl Marx, it's from his "Theses on Feuerbach" in 1845. It was a rallying cry for Revolutionaries for more than a century after it was published. The second quote is from Tim Berners-Lee who couldn't be more different from Karl Marx and his politics, his temperament, or indeed, his choice of facial hair. But the point's the same-- the digital is political. Software engineers are increasingly social engineers. And that's the message of my talk. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: Thank you very much, indeed. We do have time for questions. AUDIENCE: So what do you think of the increasing tendency of governments to abdicate responsibility to tech firms to make decisions? The classic example, in the last week I think, the EU has said we want tech firms to make the decision and take things down within an hour. Do you think that's a good trend? JAMIE SUSSKIND: I'm not sure what you mean by the abdication of responsibility. AUDIENCE: Or the delegation, if you want-- where the government could choose to regulate, but instead choose to say you must decide. JAMIE SUSSKIND: The message I have is this. If it's the case that there's going to be-- that tech firms are going to be taking decisions that are of political significance, in due course, people are going to expect to know what those are, to demand transference, to demand accountability, to demand regulation. Tech firms essentially have two choices-- not mutually inconsistent. They can try to get it right themselves and articulate why they think they're trying to get it right to set out, clearly, the way their algorithms work insofar as is possible in the market system to justify them by reference to principles of justice or principles of democracy or freedom. The more of that that is done privately and willingly by tech firms, the less likely it is that the state is going to come barging in and start regulating. And we've actually seen that. I think tech firms are increasingly becoming answerable to the unhappiness or the perceived unhappiness of their consumers about the way that things are working. But I think if the state just came trundling in and started regulating, the tech firms would say the same as any private corporation have said since the invention of the state, which is, I can't believe these fools at the center of government are trampling all over matters that they don't understand-- these Gladstones. But we have to find a compromise between the Gladstones and the Faradays-- the people who know a lot about tech and the people who know a lot about politics. And I think if tech firms assume responsibility, they're less likely to face regulation which they consider to be dumb or ill-informed. AUDIENCE: Thank you. So when you said-- and I think it was in the first quarter or half of the talk regarding the privatization of policy through the use of tech in these firms-- where does open source fit into this and free software and that whole movement? Because one would argue-- and I think a lot of people would probably agree with me-- that open source is a political movement of tech. So before it was really known in the private world that tech would become political. So where does that fit into this whole picture, and how does it change the equation? JAMIE SUSSKIND: It's a great question. And the answer is it obviously doesn't fit into the very simple dichotomy that I gave. But I think it's also fair to say that, although the open-source movement has become incredibly important in many respects, most people don't know what it is. Most people, when they use technologies, don't have the opportunity to customize or edit those technologies or to understand the rules that govern them. If more tech was open source, that would definitely resolve some of the tension between what appears to be private entities exercising a kind of public power if they're using code that can be at least seen and understood by its consumers. I just don't think it yet characterizes a lot of the technologies of power that I described. AUDIENCE: OK, thank you. AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm also going back to the issue of privatization. And I think, in some ways, we could argue that there's a benefit here that, with an increased number of actors making decisions, we get pluralism, and that's not a terrible thing. But I think that maybe-- I wonder if you can reflect on whether this claim of privatization is as solid as you suggest. A lot of these technologies were funded by public bodies, by the state. And I wonder if we need to revisit the genesis of a lot of these technologies. Because we often forget that these were funded by taxpayers, and that they're not strictly private architectures or private systems. JAMIE SUSSKIND: I think it's a really valuable and important point. There are two reflections I would make. The first is the fact that a technology derives from public investment doesn't necessarily mean that the public retains a degree of control or transparency or accountability. It's the use and the application of the technology that matters for political purposes, for the ones that I'm describing, rather than the genesis of them. The second point that I maybe I didn't make strongly enough in my speech is that, a lot of time the alternative to technologies being controlled privately is technologies being controlled by the state. And there are huge, enormous risks with that. The modern state is already the most powerful and remarkable system of control that humans have ever invented. The idea of endowing the state, through regulation or nationalization or whatever it is as some people suggest, with further power in the form of awesome technologies of surveillance, of force, and of perception control is not something that I would welcome inherently. So actually, the big political tension I say, for the next half century or so, is going to be how much of this stuff is best left to the custodians in the private sector acting responsibly? And how much should be brought under the aegis of the state? But it's certainly not a kind of state/good regulation/good privatization/bad dichotomy. I'm not just saying that because I'm at Google. I think the argument is often forgotten by those who criticize tech firms, that the state can act in a pretty heavy-handed way when it comes to technology as well. There's a balance to be struck. AUDIENCE: I guess you probably part answered my question just now. But my question is, in a similar sense about the-- like what option does the regulator even have? And I'm thinking now of a global scale. So the status quo as I see it-- and tell me if you disagree-- regulation is always playing catch-up with technology. And the question is, if the regulator wants to turn this around, what option would they even have? Because if one country would start trying to invert this and basically try to have regulation be the default, and as a technologist, you would basically have to seek an exception for every single thing you want to do rather than what is now-- like, technology companies invent new paradigms that affect society, and then regulation catches up. So obviously, if one state started trying to invert this, tech firms would probably move away from that country and do their innovation elsewhere. And there would always be sort of islands of deregulation as there are islands of tax harbors and that kind of thing. So if you think it from that point of view, what's your view on that? JAMIE SUSSKIND: Well, you've identified two problems that the regulator faces. One is you're always behind. The technologies are invented first, and then you're kind of playing catch-up to try and understand their implications and, if necessary, regulate them. The second is the problem of multinational corporations. If you're just one country, it's very hard to set a rule that others don't follow, which might place you at some kind of disadvantage economically or commercially and incentivize that firm to leave. There are other problems too like the problem that regulators sometimes don't have the best people, the best people are in the private sector. I know that with the regulation of finance, for instance, that's a consistent problem. So there's no doubt that the task for regulators is formidable. What are their options? Well, they've got to do their best. Tech firms, I think, shouldn't just see it as a matter of we'll do whatever we like until we're regulated. I think the whole system would function better if purely commercial considerations didn't just motivate the policy set by tech firms. And increasingly, they don't. I wouldn't, for a second, suggest that they always do. The problem of international movement of capital or of competitive advantage is a tough one. The EU is actually not a bad counterpoint to that. The GDPR, say what you like about it, it's a kind of regulation, and it applies to every country in Europe. And that makes it easy for them to act in concerted fashion. I would welcome-- I see technology like climate change as one of those issues that benefits from international collaboration and cooperation. Partly, the way we think about it though is we think about it as an economic problem. Like, the power that tech companies or the problems that can be caused by technology are just matters of economics. And this is actually part of the mindset that I want to try and change, which is, we have to start seeing them as political problems. And I would hope and encourage, for the part of states, that they don't deregulate or create Wild Wests out of a desire to attain an economic advantage. Countries do do that, though. There's just no doubt about it. So I hold my hands up, and I say the task of the regulator is formidable. I think there's so little regulation just now, though. And technologies are becoming so much more persuasive and so much more powerful, something will be done. As I said earlier, the more that tech firms are involved in that proactively and sensibly the better it will be for them, for the states, and for the people who use the systems. AUDIENCE: Hi. I have a question more about the concentration of power and the accountability which people demand after that. Increasingly, companies like Google or Facebook, they've become public utilities where we use search or a social network on a daily basis. And that is the concentration of power. Do you think, in 20 years from now, we will see a Google or a Facebook that's held accountable, maybe, inside the state, and we actually vote on how that's regulated? JAMIE SUSSKIND: Well, I certainly don't think nationalization, public ownership of things like Google or Facebook would be a good thing. I also am not sure if public utility is-- I think it's the best word we've probably got just now to describe the kinds of status that these companies have within our modern economy and within our modern society, but I don't think it accurately describes it. Most public utilities don't exert power over us. We rely on them. We rely on the water company, the electricity company, but they don't get us to do things we wouldn't otherwise do. They don't influence elections. They don't determine matters of social justice or what is and isn't permitted. So I think the public-utility analogy is helpful only up unto a point. Do I think that, in the future, it's possible they would be nationalized or part of the state? I guess so. I think it would be not sensible. But again, I think the regulatory environment, the regulatory future, is up for grabs. AUDIENCE: So you talked briefly about how people still have this mindset of faster horses when it comes to technology a lot. What are the hallmarks or what time scale do you expect this public mindset to shift from just thinking of technology as like a step change rather than like a big step forward and a revolutionary aspect of technology? JAMIE SUSSKIND: It's a really interesting question. And I'm not going to give you a defined timescale because I think, again, it's up for grabs. I think what I try to do in my book is to sound the fog horn and say we need to think about this stuff, not just as consumers, but as citizens. We need to not think about it like faster horses but to see the fundamental revolutionary change. A, some people are going to disagree with that thesis. B, a lot of people aren't going to be interested in it. They're just going to be interested in interacting with technology as consumers, which is what most of us do most of the time-- that looks cool. This is a cool new function-- without necessarily seeing the huge broader picture. So I don't have an answer to the question as to when I expect, if at all, public perception of this stuff to change. I do think that market forces are likely to result in the transformations I described. So insofar as the political classes paying attention, I think, easily within our lifetimes, we're going to see the big question of politics change from what it was in the last century, which was, to what extent should the state be involved in the functioning of the economy? And to what extent should things be left to the free market? That was, like, the big ideological debate of the last century. I think the big ideological debate of our lifetime is, to what extent should we be subject to digital systems, and on what terms? And I see, over the course of our lifetime, the debate shifting that way because I see it as almost inevitable if the technologies develop in the way that people predict they will. AUDIENCE: You said a few times, you'd like to see technology companies, technologists, get more involved in politics. In a lot of people's heads, that's equated with lobbying, which tends to be seen as a bad thing. Can you talk about maybe some of the positive ways you can see technologists or technology companies get involved in politics? JAMIE SUSSKIND: In fact, I think that analogy perfectly demonstrates the change in mindset I think we need. Powerful companies in the past-- say, like, the great monopolies of the early 19th century-- had power in the political process. But they exerted it indirectly through lobbying and through campaign finance. What's different about technology is that it affects us directly. If you're a tech firm, you don't need to go through the government in order to exert power over people or to affect democracy or affect freedom or justice. That's what's so profoundly different about technology. And so I say that people who work in tech firms do work in politics because their inventions, their algorithms, their systems are the ones that are actually changing the way that people live and changing the way that we live together. So it's not Mark Zuckerberg should run for president. It's Mark Zuckerberg is already, in a sense, some kind of president because he affects all of us in ways that he should know about more. And so he should take that power, as I'm sure he does, responsibly and seriously. So what I don't want people to go away thinking is I'm saying that we need technologists to step into the political process more, although, there should definitely be constructive engagement. The point is that, if you work in technology, in a sense, you already work in politics. AUDIENCE: So what's the positive improvement that you'd like to see? JAMIE SUSSKIND: The positive improvement I'd like to see is the Tim Berners-Lee idea of philosophical engineers. He's the one who said, we're not analyzing a world; we're creating it, and we're philosophical engineers. Well, sometimes. The arc of a computer science degree is long, but it doesn't necessarily bend towards justice. Just like people who know a lot about politics shouldn't be assumed to know a lot about technology, I think that people who work in technology should have a good grounding in the values and principles that they are-- whether they know it or not-- embedding in their work. And that's why I wrote the book in many ways. It's a book about tech for people who know a lot about politics. It's a book about politics for people who know a lot about tech. AUDIENCE: Hi. So my question is, considering that, in private companies, the end goal or the incentive is usually to make their users happy-- which is starkly different from what the state cares about, which is to promote the general well-being of their citizens-- it's hard for me to think of things like filtering content as an exertion of power rather than an enabler of their users to exercise their freedom as they would like. And so I guess my question is, when you're saying that technologists should be these social engineers, do you think that requires a fundamental shift in what we're prioritizing in adopting this more paternalistic approach towards, oh, we think this would be good for our users rather than, this is what the evidence shows our users like? JAMIE SUSSKIND: Again, a great question. And if I may, I'll unpick it. Do I think there needs to be a change in priorities? My first answer would be to dodge and say I don't know. Because most of the algorithms that you describe are not made public. And if you look at what Jack Dorsey said to Congress the other day-- and one can applaud him for bringing it to the public's attention-- he basically said we got it wrong. 600,000 accounts, including the accounts of some members of Congress, were wrongly deprioritized from political discourse at quite a sensitive time. The answer to that, to my mind, would be a Twitter algorithm that people are capable of understanding and that people are capable of critiquing rather than a one-paragraph explanation from Twitter which says what their policies are and says "and many other factors" at the end. We, the users, are not in a position, either to know whether the algorithm actually embodies the values that are stated and, to a certain extent, what the values are. So the first thing, and one of things I talk about in my book is, the more transparent companies are, the more people will be comfortable and justifiably comfortable, just as they are with governments that become more transparent, that the people who exercise power over them are doing it in a responsible way, even if it's just a small amount of power. The second thing I would say is that you correctly identify that the intentions of the state are different from the intentions of a private company operating within a market system. The difficulty with the market-system approach to tech, to just letting the market do its job is, first of all, you get monopolies. And so even if I don't like Facebook, if I want to be on a social-networking system-- there's no point moving to one, which is just me and my mum, even if it's superior in loads of respects because there's a network effect there, and Facebook has dominated it. The second is you'd also-- it relates back to the first-- we don't always know the principles on which companies are competing. The difference between the way that news is ranked in one system and news is ranked in another system is apparent only from what we see. But we don't always know what we don't see. And so I think it's hard to say that people are empowered fully to make decisions like that if, A, they don't have a choice, because there's a monopoly, and B, they actually aren't shown the full basis of their choice that they have to make. You are right though that a pluralist system where people have a choice of moving between systems of competing values according to their values would definitely be one solution to the problem of what might be perceived to be too much power concentration or too much unaccountability. That's one answer. SPEAKER: We do have more questions, but we're unfortunately out of time. So thank you again very much, Jamie Susskind. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 11,325
Rating: 4.7790055 out of 5
Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Future Politics, Jamie Susskind, Future, Politics, technology on politics, politics impacted by technology
Id: PcPJjOJO1vo
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Length: 57min 40sec (3460 seconds)
Published: Thu Oct 18 2018
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