The Road to Unfreedom - Timothy Snyder

[Music] what falls to me as the last speaker and as a humanist as a historian is to try to address this question of us and them in a slightly broader way or to draw out some of the early arguments that been made and to crystallize them and conceptualize them to give us a sense of where we actually are because frankly it's rather extraordinary that late in the second decade of the 21st century at the Harvard School of Government at a cosmopolitan gathering like this we should be thinking about us and them at all that is really not the way it was supposed to have gone and I think it might be helpful if we start by remembering what the politics of us-and-them has been in the last hundred years at least in the northern hemisphere in the Western tradition which is what I know something about because it's not just that notions like black and white or ethnicity or citizenship Americanist German assess has been discussed it's not just that those things are plastic and elastic and change it's also that who is us and who is them at a much higher level is also very flexible it may be that us and them is always with us but what the US is and what the them is is subject to change over time and the institutions that helped to form these changes are also subject to change so I want to start by making a very basic point about liberal political theory and us in them liberal political theory begins from the assumption that we are living in a three-dimensional space and that the US is created at some real or usually mythical contractual moment where those of us who are in this state form some kind of a contract or a constitution in which we agreed to be us by following certain rules indefinitely right a real or mythical moment of such a kind is at the beginning of a liberal notion of the polity and the liberal notion of the state so there is a pre politics to liberalism and the pre politics is we can become an us by agree to become on us the pre politics of totalitarianism is very different and it's striking to me as an observer of this conference as an observer of the world in general how the pre politics of totalitarianism is returning without us necessarily noticing that this is the case because we spent so much of the last 25 years convincing ourselves that history is over that there are no alternatives our vocabulary of discussing political alternatives and political alternative political concepts has been significantly I think impoverished so we may not notice this but the totalitarian pre politics of us in them has been creeping up on us what do I mean by this well um just for old times sake let me talk about communism for a minute so both communism and fascism have in common a different pre politics which says nature is such that there is always an us into them right the liberal pre politics is says that we we gather ourselves in a three dimensional space and as against nature we say here we are according to human rules communism and fascism both say no by nature there is always an us-and-them that us and them is irresolvable and it crosses political boundaries it's it's inside the state and outside the state so the way the communism works is it says that nature leads to technological change which leads to classes which leads to class conflict and that leads to a world where conflict is inevitable because inside my country outside my country there are classes which must be in conflict and that kind of argument can be used if you're in power for example in the Soviet Union to justify planned famine to justify terror to justify show trials fascism has a different account of how nature means that there must always be conflict fascism says that nature is such that there are just different races in the world that's just the way things are that's the way it always has been that's the way it always will be Minnie fascists would add in addition to the races there are also Jews or some other supernatural conspiratorial being who organized the world the way that it actually is again this means that there is permanently an enemy both inside and outside and the enemy inside is also the enemy outside so if you have a Jewish minority inside your country that Jewish minority represents a global threat right it's not inside it's also outside and if there is a nation next to you that Nate destroying that nation or overcoming it is part of an eternal global struggle for land and dominance so what I'm stressing here is that this is a perfectly coherent pre politics it has a very strong um and I would like to think resonant history at least in our memories from from both communism and fascism and it's worth stressing that this is also highly theorized so for example Carl Schmitt for reasons which are slightly mysterious to me remains a very influential political theorist says quite clearly that politics begins with the definition of friend and enemy right that is the opposite of the liberal notion the liberal notion says politics begins when we all agree to practice certain rules and that creates a we xem it says let us make a more or less arbitrary decision as to who is a friend and who is an enemy and then start from there he's the most interesting Nazi legal thinker as I'm sure you know the most important philosopher in the world right now is probably Yvonne aleem who is a Schmidty and fascist who is the favorite of the President of Russia who says that politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy again we start politics our pre political notion is friend and enemy we start with us in them we don't start with the state we don't start with rules we start with friends and enemies we start with us and them so um what I'm what I'm trying to stress here is that there is a historical arc here which is worth following this was suggested in the in the previous panel as well where the the history of us and them can help us to see where the US and them of the present is going and I'll close by saying something about the future so the first globalization is what brought us these nice things fascism and communism we say globalization as though was the as though ours is the first it's not right ours is repeating in an odd way ours is repeating the first globalization of the 1890s through through the 1940s in the first globalization there was also a liberal consensus there was also optimism that export-led growth would lead to an Enlightenment there was also optimism that technology was going to have to lead to enlightenment all of that turn did make a long story short this turns out not to be true fascism and communism arise from the shock and from the inequality of the First World War and the Great Depression the culmination on the end of the first globalization is the Second World War know very briefly summarizing what comes next after the Second World War there is a reconsolidation of liberal theory on slightly different premises and this was also mentioned in the previous panel um we were going to have Keynesian economics to deal with shock Keynesian economics is basically a psychological theory it says that we should not subject the population to shocks because then they will change the political regime before the market can correct itself maybe theoretically markets always correct themselves but before they can correct themselves the shock will lead to a political change which will do away with the market so Keynesianism is basically a psychological improvement on market economics the second basis for the reestablishment of liberal political thought was the welfare state which was meant to deal with radical inequality the kind emerged in the 1920s and the third new basis was economic integration chiefly that of the European Union the European states which had never existed estates only as empires saw their empires collapsed during now for the second world war and they reestablished them they reestablished states are really established them on the basis of integration now in this history which I've just given you in the last 90 seconds but I hope not entirely unsatisfactorily there are a couple of periods the first period the first globalization roughly the 1890s through through 1940s the second period the reconsolidation of a liberal order roughly 1945 to 1980 nine maybe a little bit later what I'd like to do in the remainder of this talk is ask about the historical period that we're in now because it seems to me as a historian the rules of the game have changed dramatically and yet the premises of the discussion are surprisingly similar the terms and the concepts that we're using today seem to me very often to be 20th century concepts whereas it strikes me that we are we are disconcertingly in a different world and that a lot of what we're doing is working our own experiences back into the concepts of the 20th century to try to suggest to ourselves that things haven't really changed when maybe they really have the way that I'm gonna frame this is the shift from a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional world that where we are now is some is a place which is quite quite quite powerfully characterized not so much by media that word is too broad but by spending time on the Internet and I'm not looking at you sir in particular I just am talking about the Internet that the experience of the Internet has changed the way that we engage with the worlds so it's just such a profound degree that we are afraid even to talk about it right so I'm going to take that burden off your shoulders and I'm going to talk about it right now so the internet was supposed to liberate right just like in the first globalization in the second globalization we have these fantastic technologies which was supposed to automatically enlighten and the internet was number one what has actually happened as the as Internet penetration has spread from roughly 20% in 2005 to roughly 55 or 60 percent now we have seen during those 11 years every single year arise in authoritarianism and a decrease in democratic regimes I'm just gonna follow the qualifications of Freedom House in the one place where people find good news which is Africa you have the lowest international levels of Internet penetration in the United States of America people on average now look at screens and the paint on democratic demographics the Internet for an average of almost 11 hours a day right that is most waking hours which means that it doesn't actually make sense to apply if that's true it doesn't make sense to apply political concepts from our three-dimensional world in which people are no longer living right and I say that to you members of this you know international elite and I'm sure you're all familiar with the research which shows that if your iPhone is actually visible to you it makes it less likely that you will remember what's going on right now right I'm sure you know that right I'm sure you're aware that the fact that you have your iPhones on your table makes it less likely that you will remember the lecture that you're listening to right now you're familiar with this research I have no doubt and yet you all have your iPhones on your table right this is the three and two dimensional world that I'm going to try to talk about so um where I want to go with this is to suggest that the way that we have been thinking about the two-dimensional world the way that we've been thinking about computers and the internet maybe started entirely from the wrong premise um if you remember you know that the classic way that we were thought we were taught to think about computers was something called the Turing test do you remember what the Turing test is the the great computer scientists one of the great minds the 20th century Alan Turing sets up this test which says how do we know when a computer can think how do we know when there's artificial intelligence and the answer is if the computer behind a screen can answer our questions in a way that we can't distinguish it from a person then we can say that de facto it has consciousness okay now the interesting thing about that is that that test assumes that we are reasonable skeptical people consistently asking questions like scientists of computers that turns out not at all to be the way that we engage the digital world not at all that turns out to be a flattering image of us which is not it all true what was the first computer program to pass the Turing test it was a very very primitive program in the 1960s which pretended to be a psychoanalyst in other words we believed computers are real when they ask us about our feelings right and that is the most profound truth about us what has happened with the internet and social platforms in the 21st century is that they become better and better at asking us about our feelings and drawing us into a world where it seems like our feelings matter but of course they don't matter to the robot on the other side at all which brings me to what I would the what I want to discuss about cyber and politics and where we seem to have going I'm gonna focus on on the 2016 American elections here because it seems to me that you know America is still a reasonably important country we are still something I mean whenever I hear my colleagues refer to America as a democracy I always put asterisks up you know in the air but we are still are something that resembles a rule of law democracy so I'm going to focus on on this example but I'm going to try to speak more generally about some of the mechanisms by which cyber changes the way that we see us in them and by the way before I get to this I want to make I want to make up my own little point lest I forget about the actual US and the actual them there's an us in them which we haven't talked about at all in that are the computers as such right the machines on your table are actually them you just invited them into your lives right your neural circuitry is interacting constantly with the code that people have written in order to manipulate your mind right to such an extent that you can't even stop doing it even when I'm talking to you about it right so that but that is a them that is actually them I mean much more than any human out there that is actually them and into them that gets into this three-dimensional world the familiar experience that we've had in this conference of someone asking a question which doesn't actually interact with what was just said because that person spent the spent the session on his computer right and he thinks that it's interactive but it but it's actually not that's the two-dimensional world interfering with a three-dimensional world and it's that them interfering with the us here right because everyone feels that disjuncture oh that person was somewhere else but they think they were here right and that's weird I'm just pointing that out I know I'm not taking advantage of the fact that somebody's not in the room or anything like that okay so what are some of the specific ways that cyber changes this question of us and them what are some of these what are some of these mechanisms what are some of the ways that cyber matters um I'm gonna make three brief points and then I'm gonna make sure you guys have enough time for dinner the first is that it makes the them non-existent so the them is always to some extent distant or maybe mythical but in the world of cyber the them doesn't really have to exist so let's take the them of the Syrian refugee right there aren't any Syrian refugees in Hungary although it was the major electoral issue in Hungary there aren't any Syrian refugees in in Indiana although Mike Pence has promised to ban them and by not any I mean like two dozen or fewer okay so they're defacto there aren't any there aren't any actual people but and we heard we heard a similar line of argument about brexit where there actually are immigrants people did not vote for brexit where there weren't immigrants it was a salient issue why is that why is there such a paradox because people do interact with the other it's just not the real other the people who are voting for brexit were not in contact with real immigrants but they were in contact with cyber immigrants they were in contact with tropes and memes and BOTS who were telling them to be afraid of immigrants it's not the absence of contact it's the contact with a them that is not actually them at all at least not in the real three-dimensional world um so that's one thing which happens which is that you have them but the them is not actually existent like it's not actually it's not actually human the second thing that happens is that us ceases to exist us ceases to exist in a normal sense let me give you a few examples the first I've already suggested in a joking way which is the self disintegration of self self cyborg ization right if you are taking part for example in a public gathering like a conference and you spend your time on your phone or on your or whatever because you just can't help yourself because you're addicted in your cyborg if that's what you do you are disintegrating yourself and in a in an important human way because it means that you're not actually in the US that might have been I mean that the research on this is actually all very categorical and very strong you're much likely more likely to miss remember or not remember things that happened during the conference itself including your own participation right so the the choice not to be with a physical US is a choice that we now make all of the time I realize I'm ratcheting up the guilt level you know as the speech goes on but i but it's worth it's worth being aware of the elephant in the room right the elephant in the room are those little flat screens which you as a cosmopolitan intellectual elite are nevertheless carrying imagine what it's like if you're not part of that elite okay so that's one way is that is is the self cyborg ization the second way that the us the us becomes non-existent is that across very often across the screen you think the thing on the other side of the screen is also like you right so it's in me plus that thing on the other side of the screen isn't us but what if the thing on the other side of the screen is actually a bot which very often it is so for example in the case of brexit 20% of the political conversation was carried out by BOTS and people did not know that right so you think there's a we here oh I'm talking to the sympathetic thing that's telling me about all those dangerous immigrants you think it's a we but it's not you're actually all alone in fact you're more alone than alone because you're in the company of code which is making you feel like you're not alone which is not only desperately sad but is politically significant because it probably caused the brexit vote right so that's another way that the we in US doesn't really exist um a third way is it's slightly less sinister although it's pretty sinister is the human troll so consider the example of Russian intervention in the American elections in 2016 Tennessee GOP had 10 times more followers than the actual Tennessee Republican party heart of Texas which was a Texas secessionist site had more followers than the Texas Republican and Democratic parties put together the people who are in who were interacting with those sites thought they were interacting with Americans but they weren't they were interacting with Russians when Michael Flynn who was our national security adviser for whatever was 23 days but never when Michael Flynn is passing on content from 12 different Russian sites he thinks he's interacting with Americans but he's not right there's something wrong with his we or there's something wrong with the we of hundreds of thousands actually tens of millions of people thanks tens of millions of people who think that the we on the other side is another American in this case but it's actually it's actually not the next way that the US becomes non-existent is that is that we win those of us who spend time on the internet think that we know more because we've interacted with knowledge but in fact we know less this is a very familiar phenomenon right Pete the more time you spend on the internet the more the more you think you're an expert on the given subject the less you know and that the reason why that's less of it that makes us less of an us is that it's only the the things that we actually know that are correct about the real world this is about polarization can unite us if you think one thing which is false and I think another thing which is false that does not unite us right being wrong does not overcome polarization having actual factual knowledge does and the anecdotes here of course overwhelming like that the twenty biggest fake news stories in the United States were more widely read than the twenty biggest news stories in the six weeks go before the American election fairly significant those sorts of things okay um so what that where this comes down is that in an odd sort of way you know there's there's this there's this kind of paradox which is that the US doesn't really exist and the them doesn't really exist either and all you're left with is the sense of US versus them that's it an empty sense of us versus them which nevertheless motivates people to do things but you know what you're left with is what I would call the kind of dark globalization where it's not that kind of normal and functional US democracy projects its norms around the world but rather the Fisher's and the emptinesses and the gaps in the flaws in American society are openings by which people can penetrate unseen whether it's Russia or whether it's Cambridge analytic I which from the point of view of an American citizen is also just a bunch of foreigners right there were no US citizens in Cambridge analytic in any position of authority so you can pick your foreign actor but either way it's a foreign actor um you're in a dark globalization where you you can think and this is the thing about polarization the u.s. you can think the Democrats are the enemy right what were the Russian BOTS firing on election day in this country what hashtag were they firing on on election day war against Democrats that was the Russian robots hashtag on election day in the u.s. hashtag war against Democrats you can think that the enemy is inside your country but it's a foreigner who's teaching you that that's true it's a foreigner there's helping unit who's teaching you that that's the case so what do you what do you then do about this ok conclusions two words the first is if we are going to pick whether cyber is moving us towards liberalism or whether cyber is moving us towards fascism I think if that of those are the choices I think it's pretty clear that fascism is the answer right it's not exactly like the original fascism there's not mobilization to get your bodies out in the street for example there's not so much control there's not so much interest in territory but it's it's it's if you had to pick that seems to be the better analog than more liberalism right so this this whole story the internet tells about itself about enlightenment I think that that we should not be starting from that presumption let me put it that way um the second thing I say is and I'm gonna end on a you know I'm gonna end on a slightly hopeful note um is that it's very important not to trade the happy internet story for another determinist or e which says it has to go all wrong I mean just because it is going all wrong doesn't mean that it has to go all wrong the history of Technology is also a human history so the printing press caused a third of the people in Europe to die but now we like the printing press right radio help bring about fascism but now we like radio someday we're going to like the end you're not - but in order for the Internet to be productive of liberalism or democracy we have to see the Internet as something with which we're going to interact historically the story that it's all good is wrong the story that it's all bad is also wrong but if we don't if we don't engage with it historically I think we can see pretty clearly which way it's bringing us Thanks that was just fascinating and surprising I'm only gonna get one and then I'm gonna turn this over to you but the obvious question given the stakes of what you're talking about and given what we've witnessed in the last couple of weeks as lawmakers and regulators try to get their arms around what we're looking at and the complexity of it is how much faith do you have in regulatory institutions certainly we're seeing what the Europeans are doing in regulators here in lawmakers here to move us in the direction of thinking differently for starters and acting differently and putting up some guardrails against what you are know days that is a significant challenge to democratic systems yeah so I don't have faith in anything but I I think that the the I mean not on this earth anyway but I think that the right what worries me is that the regulative response both Visa Visa Silicon Valley and also visa vie Russia is reactive right so you have one group of people who says it's Silicon Valley's fault and another group of people will say it's Russia's fault there's a there's a little tiny bit of overlap and everybody's right in all of this right I mean Facebook did not have to be designed the way that Facebook is designed it didn't have to be quite so totalitarian Twitter doesn't have to have the libertarian ideology that it has which says the truth will always out in the end which is ridiculous but but you know and and and we didn't have to be so foolish and this is what a lot of Road unfreedom is about we didn't have to be so foolish as not to understand what that Russia could do to us the things that they'd been perfecting in Estonia the European Union and Ukraine over the previous decade why did we assume that that wouldn't have to us when we have so many vulnerabilities but it's the reason why I start with with theory is that I want to get strongly away from the assumption that democracy works on its own and it's just these kind of problems from the outside from California or from Moscow right I think we have to seriously ask ourselves doesn't democracy need a three dimensional space right I mean doesn't the Greeks thought so the Swiss thinks so right so is it really possible for us to live to have just a two dimensional space and have democracy and if not maybe we should spend less than 11 hours a day in front of screens right it's I mean fine dust honestly it's like it's like obesity in America like you say everything except exercise more right if you exercise more that would also be good for the Internet so no it's it gets really simple the less time people spend in front look if Americans spent eight hours instead of 11 hours a day in front of screens I'm pretty sure the presidential election would have gone a different way and and and so reso so saying that that like maybe democracy actually requires a three dimensional space and this is what I wanted to say at the end but I forgot thinking about the Internet as a space right right now the inter we treat the internet like a land of exception at least in the u.s. we're kind of everything is possible we don't treat it like a public space at all I mean it's we have rule if you go out look out at Harvard or Harvard Yard or whatever there are rules about how we think about public space and we don't say that's repressive we just say that's public space I think we have to think about the Internet as being a public space and decide what the conventions are going to be inside that public space I mean if we were gonna insist on spending our waking lives in there then we which please don't but if we have to you know then we I think we have to think about it as a space which has a form just like the three-dimensional space has a form whose responsibility is it to create revive and make attractive again that three-dimensional space yours I mean everybody's that's that's what citizenship means I mean that's the room I love the word responsibility that's practically the last word that I use in Road unfreedom because I don't democracy demands a lot of the physical human being and we what we've gotten accustomed to doing is like thinking of surrogates for this right like so the the in the US especially we think well capitalism is going to do the work of democracy for us which is just wrong right there is just no reason to think that that was true but the idea that the market is going to bring about democracy means that you and I and everyone else doesn't have to take responsibility for it so I mean it sounds it sounds banal and almost naive but the person who makes democracy attractive is the person who actually goes out and does something for it do you in this year when we have actually seen more citizens taking to the streets in many cases participating actively and in a present way in in protest or an activism or initiatives than we've seen in a long time just that in any way counter the trend line that you're mean I'm one of those people and I've helped to organize some of those marches and I think it's a really good thing but a it's not really it's not it's not nearly enough right and be the interesting way that it proves my point I think is this III honestly think we should only use the Internet to get ourselves off the internet and so we if you take for example the strikes in Oklahoma the teacher strikes in Oklahoma was you may not know like if you're not from this country but in Oklahoma public schoolteachers make thirty percent less in real terms and they did ten years ago it's part of a general crisis in this country they they don't have unions because that's another part of the crisis of this country but they could strike because of social media but the point is you use social media to organize the strike not to sit at home and say wouldn't it be cool if we struck right right behind you Thank You professor I want III don't know if I really understand the cyber politics the pre politics of cyber politics I mean I understand the liberal one I mean an agreement on rules that we are going to abide with the fascism and communism of em versus us that it's a irreconcilable so why does what's the pre politics of cyber politics that you think conduces us towards fascism yeah no thank you so what the the way that I was trying to argue this and you have to you have to indulge me if it's a little fuzzy around the edges because I'm trying I'm trying to conceptualize new things I think it's important to try to conceptualize new things and not just kind of wait around and pretend that we're still in the 1990s because we're not what I was trying to say was I deal typically here's liberalism ideal typically here's fascism or totalitarianism and then ask about this new environment which one is it more like and the answer is I think the pre politics of the Internet is more like the pre politics of fascism because I think when people sit down on the screen they're expecting to be affirmed they're expecting to feel like they're part of an us which starts with the things that they think and feel already as opposed to actually the two things that liberalism requires as if as opposed to actually having to hear the other talk to you and as opposed to having to interact with the physical world out there right so that's here in in the cyber world I think your us comes from the expectation that what you already think and feel can be can be affirmed and that's I don't want to say it's exactly like fascism because you don't have to get on the streets but it seems more like fascism than it does seem like liberalism and I'm gonna give you just a little anecdote about like one of how I came to this or part of how it came to this it was I so I've been canvassing for a long time you know talking to prospective voters of both parties for a long time in this country in a lot of states one of the things that struck me in too sixteen over and over and over again as I talked to hundreds of people was a new discomfort that people had in actually speaking to me like that classic encounter when you're on the doorstep and somebody says I'm going to vote for him I'm gonna vote for him this thing where people didn't want to look me in the eye and where it was almost physically palpable that they just wanted to run back down to their basement and get back on the computer so they could have their own views recycled back at them again I realized I can't prove anything this way but that but that experience was a very powerful one for me I mean actually people tell me like I got to get back to my computer now right like this is lasting too long yeah thanks hmm so this is I'm gonna I'm gonna take this opportunity that had to take a better shot at your first question rather than being so so general so one of the first things I think we have to do is X actually invigorate three-dimensional physical politics so to treat to treat marching for example is something which is normal to treat strikes as something which is normal to treat organizations civil society organizations which actually meet in the in the in the 3-dimensional world as something which is normal and necessary as opposed to something that we're afraid of or seems or seem slightly strange I think that has to happen and as you say there has been some of that in the last year but to recognize that that's not just nice or some kind of emergency measure but that may be an essential part of the whole system as we've come to extend it that the second thing which I know has to happen and I'm every time I have a conversation with a slightly different demographic than is in this room I make it their responsibility and that is I believe that young people have to resect schewe lies sexuality I think factuality has to become cool factuality has to become like the war reporter has to become the hero of the day the person who actually goes out there and figures things out as opposed to sits at home and like gets things fed through their pupils of what they already believe and has their neural networks messed up um that's what I think we have to have like the notion that it's actually heroic to figure out the world that it's hard that you're working against the odds but that you're actually doing something which is extraordinary I think that has to happen the revalorisé ation of factuality that's a long term thing and again I don't think we can do without that one because the polarization um that you know the professor Levitsky was talking so persuasively about that's a real thing and you can't it's very hard to beat it in the world of fiction the only way to beat it is to slightly enlarge the world of factual 'ti right I mean one way to talk about as I see it one way to talk about polarization is the spread of unreality right that there's a certain amount of space in conversation then the unreality is taking up more and more and more of that space if we can make unreality take up less of that space it's more it's more likely that we can have conversations then in terms of how how to regulate the internet there clearly some ways of thinking about this that could be pursued like do robots have free speech I don't think so right if I unleash a thousand social BOTS am i engaging in the act of free speech I don't believe that I am I think that has to be seen differently um is fake news a business activity that should be taxed I think it is right it's entertainment it creates advertising revenue I think it should be categorized as such in tax or thinking a little bit more ambitiously if journalism is a profession then perhaps fake journalism is a negative externality right like if we care about clean water which we should shouldn't we also care about information streams is it too much to think that that that deliberate mendacity that deliberate production of fake news is a kind of negative externality which should be internalized or along along the same lines it couldn't couldn't we make the point that journalism of the real kind has has actual costs you have to employ people who have a staff whereas just making stuff up does not have costs and therefore it would be a legitimate intervention in the sense of Industrial Policy right to care about the journalists and I mean this varies I mean there's one reason why this is very serious which I didn't mention which is local news so there's an international consensus that the death of local reporting leads to people talking about as we've done today about the media as opposed to reporters when they're no longer reporters in your little town then you start to think this is not about me this media is not about me and then you become vulnerable to the conspiracy theories which we've seen happen in in the US so finding a way to tax or incentivize or whatever and turn some about revenue back to supporting local news making begin I say I emphasize that because that's not a reaction like it's a production of something which we don't need which we don't have now and then there are other things one could do on the platforms themselves like what about what if Facebook asked you what algorithm you had like do you feel like being do you feel like being lied to today you know now you know do you feel do you feel like following investigative like because there's a difference there's a difference between the stuff that we like when we get it and the stuff that we would choose to have and the way that Facebook works now is a kind of like ice-cream model like here's this here's some ice cream here's some more can be s'mores good but if I ask you do you want five quarts of ice cream right or do you want a fruit salad you'd probably say I want a fruit salad right so maybe we should have the option at the beginning when we start the interaction to say I prefer this algorithm you know today I want investigative reporters tomorrow maybe you can lie to me but right now I want investigative reporters right so there are tweaks that we could make in the interaction itself I think that would that would matter there's a gentleman over there yes long time ago I had written an article I can't remember the author but now I realize how profound he was he said in human society we amplified our forces muscle and so on with tools and then we made the tools independent of us eternal combustion engine and so on then we extended our senses and then we've made our senses independent of us and he was predicting that there would be a time when we would extend our minds and then we would delegate our minds you've talked about the cyber world you talked about artificial intelligence algorithms are we at a point while we're transitioning our mind to what we have automated and therefore becoming a transitional species so I hope not I so I'm in the US in them like I have an us in them I haven't no I haven't us in them and I'm a human right I'm just I'm gonna lay down my priors right here I'm a human being I am a human being I'm on the side of humans and what what worries me about code right so this whole question of like we're not to the point where robots see here's here's the thing about our historical moment the robots can't feel but they can make us feel weird an incredible or an incredible point of vulnerability because we're not yet at the question not at the point where we have to ask am i hurting the robot's feelings but the robot can hurt your feelings anyway it seems to me that therefore we're at this very powerful asymmetry right where we do stuff in the real world we're convinced of things by entities that literally are unable to care about us right that is that's where we are and that's what I find troubling is that darkness on the other side of the screen so for example um so so take for example like all the people who believed that Hillary Clinton had a pedophilia ring in a pizza restaurant in Washington DC they were convinced of that largely because of a cluster of Russian mob activity and those Russian BOTS do not care whether a human being then goes to that pizza restaurant and fires a gun all right to say that they do not care is in some sense an understatement because they of course they can't care they're just little bits of code out there somewhere in space right so the thing the thing which really troubles me about our present condition is that we're all about feeling you know we're in this we're in a cultural moment we're feeling is first and what the machines are able to do is to figure out in some fairly systematic way how and what we're going to feel right so we're I don't actually think we're delegating our intelligence so much as we're delegating our were delegating our emotional lives um we're allowing or allowing things that aren't us in a profound sense to tell us who we are that's what worries me something slightly different so I mean I'm happy to talk about that that other dystopian I just I don't think that's where we are right now I think it is the mark of a great conference when you both answer questions and then you turn answers into questions thank you professor Snyder for giving us so much to think about [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: CID Harvard

Views: 49,233

Keywords: Timothy Snyder

Id: p03X8Vk7zdI

Length: 42min 30sec (2550 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Gay-_-Jesus]

I get the point, but have you seen the “them” we’re up against right now?