YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Susskind

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-07-21
most recent: 2022-07-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In an algorithm which For one reason or another, can tell whether you are more or less likely to pay back your debts by looking at whether the people who are in your Facebook network, Facebook friends, have themselves paid back their debts. Now, it might well be that, statistically speaking, if you are friends with lots of people who haven't paid their debts, you are statistically more likely yourself not to pay your debts. But it seems to me a moral question there, a policy question about whether that kind of algorithm should be an appropriate and usable kind of algorithm. When I apply for a mortgage to house my family, should the fact that my brother happened to be or my sister or my friend happened to be a bankrupt, should that affect my chances? And as a society, we might well say no, that's not discrimination law. That's not something really that the law has much answer for just now. And so let's be wary, I think, of just asking whether existing laws should apply.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not one of the protected characteristics in law. But you can well imagine a recruitment system or a university admission system inadvertently or indirectly discriminating against people based on where they come from. Perhaps its system would say, well, actually, people who come from that part of town tend not to do as well as people who come from that part of town. But the first part of town might be somewhere where there's more poverty. And as a society, we might say, well, actually, that's the bit of town. We should be prioritizing. We shouldn't be entrenching the inequality. But discrimination law has no answer to that. So I think that discrimination laws are great, but we may need to extend them in the future so that I talk about this quite a lot in the digital republic. A lot of what we need to do is make sure that our laws are fit for purpose and are consistent with our norms. Another one, for instance, is, you know, Facebook have to...”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, of course it should. I mean, if any company is using a technical product that is unfit for purpose in some way, then whether it's because of a fault with the hardware or the software, That doesn't mean that the state shouldn't be interested in the outcomes that those systems generate and whether they are consistent with our norms or not. The reason I say norms is because discrimination law, as it currently exists, and I practice as a discrimination lawyer, I'm not 100% convinced that it will be sufficient to meet the challenges and problems that algorithms can raise. So for instance, It's not unlawful in the UK just now to discriminate against someone based on class.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, exactly. I think we share the same instincts. It's just that I'm maybe more optimistic than you. I look around and I do see countries that are doing, I mean, the fact that some do a better job than others is to me suggestive of the fact that there are good and bad ways of approaching this issue. I wouldn't have written this long book if I thought it was impossible. I definitely don't think it's the job of one politician. I agree with you on that. But do I think one country can make a difference? Yeah, I absolutely do. At the very least, it can make a difference to the people who live within it. So, I mean, the UK is a decent example. If the UK passes the online safety bill, you know, there are bits of it I agree with. There are bits about it I disagree with. But the UK will have at the very least a more protective regime than its neighbors in Europe. And it will have made a difference.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just Mark Zuckerberg deciding finally that Trump had crossed the line, but rather decided in a way that is as part of a reasonable and proportionate system for such decisions. I think that's the best we can hope for. And so I think that some platforms would expel him, some platforms wouldn't. But all I care about is that they're doing so in a way that is consistent with rules and that those rules are acceptable in a democratic society.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is a great example of the kind of issues I was talking about at the beginning. It strikes me as problematic that any platform should have an unfettered ability to remove a president of the United States, regardless of whether you like him or not, regardless of whether you agree with it as a decision or not. So what should the state do when it comes to regulating that? I am uncomfortable also with the idea that the government should be ordering platforms directly what to do with particular individuals or particular bits of content. So what do you do? I think that the answer, and it's a bit of a fudge, but the answer is that you require platforms to have in place rules, procedures, and systems that are public, transparent, and properly enforced and can be appealed against, if not, to govern situations like the Trump situation.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can give quite a short answer to that. I think in the end, they'll have to be compelled. Makes it sound very kind of brutal, but of course, you know, we all have to obey laws. I think tech giants will give up power, but only to the extent that it's in their interest to do so within the marketplace. Beyond that, you're going to have to make it a matter of law.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To social media, there hasn't been decades of kind of development of it. And so we're all kind of stumbling and fumbling in the dark. Two final differences. One is a question of scale. Facebook has more adherence than Christianity. 94% of 18 to 24 year old Americans use Facebook. 94%. There's no television channel or newspaper that can come anywhere close to that. And so the kind of planetary scale of the challenge just raises different policy and regulatory questions and issues. And rather than give you a final point, I'll just leave it there. But I'll say that there's certainly lessons to be drawn from Regulation of the media in the past, but the challenge is quite different”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The media that we engage with just now are two way rather than one way, and that affects the way they work. Secondly, if you and I read The Guardian on a particular day, we will be reading the same thing by and large. That's not true of when we look at our newsfeed on Twitter or on Facebook. And so that requires a slightly different approach. Thirdly, there is a degree of customization. It's linked to the first two points. These systems gather data about us and then they present information to us in a way that is tailored, that is not the case in broadcast and newspaper realms. Fourthly, in the newspaper industry and in the broadcasting industry, there are longstanding and acceptable norms, accepted norms about what constitutes a good journalist. We know what good journalists do. They tell the truth, they check their sources, they give people a chance to comment. That same mature set of norms doesn't exist when it comes to”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So broadcasters, they have to have a license, and that license is dependent on them satisfying a number of quite serious requirements about being fit and proper and about how they conduct themselves. And Ofcom regulates that. We don't really have something similar for newspapers. In this country, newspapers are much more boisterous and partisan than news channels generally are. Obviously, in the last year or two, there's been a sort of move to try and create more of a kind of American style broadcast media system, but we'll see if that works. So I think there are lessons to be drawn, certainly from the way that we regulate broadcast media. And to a certain extent, from the restraint that we show in the newspaper realm. But I do think that there are a number of really key differences between social media platforms and the forms of media that came before. Just to name a few off the top of my head, the newspaper never read you back. The TV never watched you back.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are definitely analogies in the sense that I think every time a society undergoes a revolution in the technologies that it uses to store and communicate information, then big political and social changes follow. So the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of the broadcast press, the broadcast media, the mass media of the 20th century, and then finally the invention of the internet. Each of those was brought with them social and political upheavals. There's a few chapters in the book about why regulating the internet or regulating social media in particular is not the same as but can perhaps learn a bit from how we regulate traditional media. And just to make things more complicated, you'll know that in this country, you know, actually the printed word newspapers is much less”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the market individualist mindset, I think, became entrenched. And we're going to have to unlearn a lot of the things that that generation in the 90s took for granted as being a naturally good thing. I do think there was another turning point in 2016, but in a sense, a good one. I mean, a lot of nonsense is written about what happened in 2016 with Brexit and Trump and the like. But what it did was it raised the question of the power of digital technology to the top of the political agenda. And that, I think, is a good thing.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I suppose if I'm to remain true to my diagnosis, that what's really gone wrong in the last 20 years is the way that we think about digital technology. We think as market individualists rather than as, in my view, Republicans, that would mean I probably wouldn't point to a particular turning point. What I would say is that from the 90s onwards, there was a very cozy consensus that the internet would work best if basically a lot of it was left purely to market forces. Interestingly, that's not true of platforms who in America had protections, additional legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But I won't get into that. But basically, no, I think what we are faced with is a sort of generational problem in the way that we think about technology. Everything seemed to be going well for a while.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would mean that if Facebook did something undesirable, it would risk losing a million users overnight, not just one. You know, if I stop using Facebook, no one cares, Facebook especially doesn't care. But if everyone in my data union was threatening to walk out, that would make a difference. It's a very simple analogy, but the point is, collectively, there is power, individually, there is only weakness.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fight for ourselves. And yet the kind of politically is so seductive for companies and governments to say we want to give more power to individuals. We want to give people autonomy and control. But actually. Autonomy and control are almost impossible in this world. And if we're going to rival in the world of digital technology in particular, and it's a kind of fallacy to think that individual freedom relies on us all acting as individuals, no, individual freedom can be secured through collective action. So just to take a very simple example, if we had data unions negotiating on our behalf with Facebook,”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem here, I don't believe, is people being complacent because I believe that the wrong mechanism is being used to mediate between people and the powerful. Correct mechanism wouldn't be giving people the responsibility to read and understand and choose every time they interact with the digital product. That should be done at the collective level through systems of certification, of accreditation, of regulation. So when you walk into a building, it's not like some bloke at the door presents you with a series of schematics and you can do the equations in your head about whether you think the building's going to collapse while you're inside it or not, whether you think it's structurally sound or it's engineering is on point. You rely on the fact that their building is going to be in some way certified as safe for habitation, that the people who built it will have been certified and qualified engineers and architects. And you don't click eye consent. You just go. And I think a lot of the same is true of tech. We shouldn't have the responsibility as individuals to”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, another great question. Why do we click accept? First is that When we click accept, we're normally clicking accept to a really good economic bargain. So I give something that's basically if not much use to me economically, a little bit of data. I give that to Google or Facebook. And in return, I get these amazing products. You know, Google, my portal to the web, Facebook historically has been an amazing way of linking a vast number of people. So it's a very seductive commercial bargain. But of course, there are other reasons why we click accept. We can't be bothered to read the terms and conditions. We don't really have a choice. We have to use the system for work or convenience, et cetera, et cetera.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is also this, I think, part of what I'm trying to do in my book, Raoul, is to disrupt the idea that any kind of regulation is anti-business, which I think a lot of governments are very, very There is, however, growing a much more difficult argument to rebut, which I think will be the main block to reform it in the future. And it's what I would call digital nationalism. I think there is a palpable sense in the corridors of power in Russia, in China, in America, in the EU, that developing faster and faster artificial intelligence systems is going to be the key to geopolitical dominance in the future. And they may also consider that having essentially a deregulated system is the best way to achieve that dominance. I don't really disagree with the first premise. I do disagree with the second one, but I think it's going to be the main roadblock to kind of main mental roadblock to countries realizing that they have to regulate properly. That said, look at what's happening in the EU. There's a draft artificial intelligence act. There's a draft digital services act. There's a draft digital platforms act. These are big, substantial bits of regulation, many of which are Republic.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A certificate in its window saying that it's been health and safety checked if that restaurant doesn't have such a certificate, you'll maybe just marginally less likely to eat there. The same is true of technologies. We're much more likely to engage new technologies if we feel that they have been safety checked and made accountable and representative in some way. There's also the point that regulations level the playing field. One of the interesting things about the GDPR is it doesn't just govern the way that we use data. It set rules that were common across the EU. So data users in Germany could exchange data with people in France and Spain knowing that the rules are the same. Again, that's good for economic activity.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good question, Raul. I'll gently challenge the premise. I don't think all attempts have failed. I think that, you know, in Europe, for instance, we have things like the GDPR governing data usage is not a perfect law by any stretch and it's definitely not future-proofed, but it is a damn site better than what they have in the United States. There are all kinds of political reasons why countries aren't so good at regulating tech. I think the worst and most pervasive myth is that regulation is kind of anti-competitive, that countries or blocs that regulate will be less innovative. That's not in my experience or according to research really right. But regulation encourages economic activity when it's done right. So you're much more likely to go out, when you go out for a meal, you're much more likely to eat in the restaurant which has”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patchwork of different laws, suitable different rights and duties and standards to govern the tech industry in a way that holds it accountable just like we would hold any other powerful group in society accountable.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we currently do in the tech industry. The law does something different. It imposes duties on those people. So a banker owes his clients fiduciary duties in relation to the monies they hold. A doctor owes their client a duty of care. A parent owes fiduciary duties to their children. The law can create all kinds of different duties, right? And it can specify the content of those duties. Sometimes those duties are contractual in agreements, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they are just imposed on us. So a doctor owes a duty of care to his patient or her patient, even if they haven't signed a contract saying that. That's a duty that the general law imposes. And so what I propose in the book is a kind of...”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try and give a, I mean, I've been giving a horribly long answers, which is why you've run out of time. I'm sorry, Nina. I'm sorry, listeners. I'll try and give a short appropriately loyally answer. When people, there are lots of people in society who have positions of responsibility. So a parent has responsibility to their children. A banker has responsibility to the people whose money they hold. A lawyer has responsibility to their client. A doctor's has responsibility to their patients, responsibility to their patients. The law looks at these people and it doesn't say Let them use their good judgment about what's best.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better if more and more people did that. So that's the nitty gritty. That's the kind of thing that would be expected of citizens. The airy flowery one, it's simply to say, as I did at the beginning, that we need to completely reorient how we think about digital technology. We need to stop thinking about it just as consumers, but rather start seeing it as citizens. I want people to bring the same skeptical, hard-nosed common sense approach that they do to powerful technologies as they currently do to powerful politicians.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That process began with a deliberative mini public which reached a set of conclusions that were eventually put to the Irish people and accepted. So I think there are a lot of tech problems, big and small, which I would like to see governed by deliberative mini publics, whether it's city and judgment on a particular decision that a platform's taken or in the oversight of a merger or an acquisition or in deciding what kind of moderation rules would comprise a reasonable system of moderation, whatever it is. I think ordinary folks can and should be more involved because right now they're basically not involved at all and it's done by closed doors in the corporate boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Participating in these things though is a bit of a burden and it would be like jury duty. But I'd like to see it. I unashamedly think our country and countries would be”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And putting them in what's called ideal deliberative conditions, so providing them with balanced information, providing them with access to experts, providing them with moderation. And what research shows is that if you take ordinary folks and you put them in ideal deliberative situations, they normally do a really good job of finding answers to tricky moral problems, not necessarily answers that everyone will agree with, but they're much better under those conditions at deliberating than they are in ordinary conditions of day-to-day life where they don't have the time span or the attention span or the information necessary to be the best possible citizens. And so I think we could do, and so deliberative mini publics have been used recently in all kinds of interesting ways, but the most obvious example is in Ireland in relation to the legalization of abortion there.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a kind of grand and flowery answer to that and then a much more nitty gritty one. Maybe start with the nitty gritty one. I believe that there is an underused method of democratic organization known as deliberative mini-publics. And the ancient Greeks used these a lot. And basically it's basically a form of democratic engagement, which isn't like a referendum or an election. What it involves is gathering together a smallish group of people.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“States are becoming kind of little cauldrons, little laboratories of experimentation. And I think that's probably a good thing.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some point meet and achieve something useful on tech regulation. I don't know if that's the case. I mean, I know that the Biden administration takes you really seriously. And certainly in the kind of federal agencies that are responsible for governing this sector, whether it's in terms of antitrust or data transfers or the like, they're trying to be more activist, but there do need to be different laws. I mean, the US, I think, is the only advanced democracy in the world that doesn't have omnibus data protection legislation. It's mad. Once you gather personal data about people in the States, if you're a private company, there's basically no restraints on what you can do with it as long as it doesn't fall into specific categories of data like health data. The laws do need to change. Actually, what's interesting is that in the States, you're increasingly seeing state level efforts. This has been some interesting movement in California, some interesting movement in Illinois.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I'm trying to do in the book with the philosophy of republicanism is that I'm trying to say that actually this isn't a left-wing or right-wing doctrine. Republicans are hostile to concentrated power. That should appeal to Republicans to capital our Republicans who worry about the power and size of the state. It should also appeal to capital Republicans in the kind of Theodore Roosevelt tradition because he was a great small Republican thinker and president. But it should also appeal to Democrats who are concerned about overmighty corporate power. I'm trying to say there's something there for everyone in a way that maybe with issues like abortion or gun control there just isn't and I may be forlorn in this put and paul more cynically perhaps the horrible partisan inclinations of both sides will at”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How it works, if it works. I think the situation in the US is more difficult. I think the congressional gridlock means and kind of partisan bickering means that it's very hard to get anything done. And there's always the looming threat of First Amendment challenges as well for anything that relates to social media. I am pro politics. I believe that if there's a civilization, a species we are to have hope, it has to be through politics and political structures, mainly democratic ones. I try not to throw my hands up in despair, although I often do. But no, I mean, I don't disagree with you. If we're so bad at governing that we can't get anything right, then we're unlikely to get this tech stuff right. But, you know, my contribution is to try and make things a little clearer. Here's what we should do and why we should.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Regrettably, in some places, I think that is probably true. That doesn't mean I don't think it's a valuable exercise to try and think about what an ideal situation, a digital republic would look like. But I would say that some countries have done better than others. And if you look at someone like Europe, they are the European Union. They are busily legislating on these issues in a way that not everyone will agree with, but in a way that is doubtlessly very sophisticated. And they've really been playing catch up in the last five or six years, but they've been doing it well. Even here in the UK, things like the online safety bill, which is going through Parliament just now, it's a pretty advanced piece of legislation that a lot of countries will be looking to the UK to see.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, there is a very basic rebuttal to my book, which is to say politics is, that's all very nice in theory. These would all be very nice laws, but politics is so useless, so corrupt that it'll never happen in practice.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, the real question is what kind of regulation is best? Because we already do have regulation, it's just that that regulation is geared towards making markets rather than protecting citizens. Those, I think, are the main reasons why market individualism has thrived. I think final point, loads of people have become really rich and powerful through it. Any system that seeks to dismantle that is going to come up against resistance.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's some truth in that, but it not entirely. Markets, particularly sophisticated markets like the tech market, do not appear in nature, or at least not very often. The market itself is a construct of laws, laws relating to property, laws relating to corporations, laws relating to contract and tort, laws relating to intellectual property, without which we wouldn't have the modern tech industry. And a lot of people take these laws for granted. They say they want to deregulate, but they don't want to deregulate these laws. They just want to deregulate the laws that try to protect the public interest rather than those that protect the private interest of those who own and control technologies. So there's a kind of ideological point there that even now I sometimes find myself slipping into the question of regulation versus deregulation.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being the kind of cornerstone of the internet and spreading around the world. It's been seen as a form of soft power for the United States that people use American products, use American protocols, use American software, use American hardware. And again, that dissemination of American soft power is often best effected through the market. There's a third, I think, and more deep reason, and here, you know, I have to put my philosopher hat on. I think a lot of, I think there's been a real success in the market individualist community, shall we say, of making the market individualist ideology seem like nature, like the natural state of affairs is the market's economy, and that anything interfering with it, such as regulation, is a kind of alien intervention which needs to be justified.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many answers to that question. It's such a good question. The first is that we have capitalism to thank for a lot of the explosive productivity and creativity that has created the tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley. Now we know through the research of people like Mariana Matsukata that actually a lot of what looks like private sector innovation is in fact a combination of private and public sector innovation. So the point can be taken too far. But there's no doubt that capitalist principles of competition and the like have led to explosive productivity in the generation of technologies. So people rightly and understandably regard it as a good thing. Secondly, there has been an advantage, I think, in American policy circles, a perceived advantage to having what are essentially American capitalist principles.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is why Desmond Tutu once said, you know, if the elephant is standing on the tail of the mouse and you say you're neutral, the mouse isn't going to thank you. And Ellie Viesel, the great Holocaust survivor used to say that neutrality favors the oppressor. The basic point is that neutrality and justice, neutrality and rightness are not always the same thing. And so for years, you know, folks myself included argued that, well, instead of engineering that in a neutral way, Google could in fact design a system that maybe reduced the prevalence of racist or otherwise unpleasant stuff on their platform. And for years, Google said, no, no, no, we're neutral. We're neutral. And then eventually just started doing it. And the world didn't fall in.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The engineers at Google didn't like Jews, it was because that algorithm neutrally and faithfully reproduced the searches that other people had done. Indeed, it was simply reflecting back to us things that previous searchers had found useful. And that was always the Google Defense. But in that case, it seems to me pretty obvious that neutrality, a neutral system, is also a kind of undesirable or unjust system. doesn't make the world better. Instead, it kind of amplifies injustices and makes them worse, which is why”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Political and are usually not neutral. But what about the technologies that actually genuinely do strive to be neutral? A good example is Google. So you'll all know that Google Autofill system where you type in something and it tries to sort of anticipate the end of your query. This problem with Google for a number of years where it was returning unfortunate results in the auto fill box. So if you typed in why do Jews, it would complete the sentence with have big noses or control the media or love money so much. And the reason that happened was not because”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Previously, only humans could produce. And so I recommend Nina's work when it comes to that. So those who say that technology is neutral, I have two responses. The first is that technology often isn't neutral. So if you design an algorithm that allocates jobs or insurance or credit or punishment to the criminal justice system, we know that algorithms are often riddled with biases because they're trained on faulty or sometimes not faulty data sets. So for instance, you know, there are voice recognition systems that don't hear the voices of women because they've been trained only or mostly on male voices. Face recognition systems that don't see people of color or people with facial disfigurements because they have been trained only on white faces or faces without facial disfigurements. Choices which seem like engineering or data choices are actually”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing I should say is that your research on deepfakes, your book Deepfakes, has been important in my thinking. It's cited in the book. And anyone listening, if you're interested in issues about the synthetic creation of speech and personality and the like, you should read Nina's book, particularly in the week we've just had where the headlines, for instance, have been dominated by this new Google chatbot, which persuaded one of its creators, one of its engineers, that it had achieved sentience were really just scratching the surface. I just today on Twitter saw a university professor who'd been playing around with an AI tool to generate university-level essays answering essay questions. And he was saying, you know, it's not perfect, but it's now kind of surpassing that of his weaker students. We are just at the cusp of a world where machines, even though they don't think like we do, in fact because they don't think like we do, are able to produce stuff.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We rely on technologies to filter and determine what we see of the outside world, what we think is true and false up or down, right or wrong. And, you know, even if that isn't exercised, that power isn't exercised and afarious way, it is a kind of power because any of us can only ever handle a very small amount of reality. And those who choose which slice or chunk of reality were given are able to affect our hearts and minds as profoundly as anyone in the past. So I think if you combine those three capabilities, you see that what we're dealing with is not just technologies that are more powerful and technical terms, but they're technologies that have real power in political terms too. And that's new.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not right. In fact, I think if most people were more aware about how much data was being gathered about them, I think there'd be much less likely to do so many things that the outside world might consider sinful or shameful or wrong. The third way the digital technologies exert power is by framing our perception of the world. We increasingly rely on them, whether it's social media platforms, search engines, digital personal assistance.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like the scooters we hire on the pavement won't go above a certain speed, or Twitter will not post a tweet if it is longer than 280 characters. When we interact with computer code, it contains rules that we don't have a choice about following or not. We have to. And so increasingly we're surrounded by these rules, right? And those who write them are increasingly writing society's rules. So software engineers are becoming social engineers. Second way, the technologies exert power is by gathering data about us. This is kind of two subpoints. One is that data can be used to influence or manipulate us. The other is that sometimes just knowing that we're being watched is enough to make us change our behavior altogether. And it's a bit of a catch-22 because you'd think, you know, the more you know and understand about digital technology, the freer you might be.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Power is the ability. I mean, power has many definitions, but let's call it this. Let's say it's the ability to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do or not to do things they might otherwise have done. Technologies have the ability to do that in three ways. The first is that they contain rules that we all have to follow. So if you imagine taking a drive in a self-driving car and you're dashing to the hospital for some reason, you might want that car to go over the speed limit just by a little bit, just to get you there on time. But the car might well refuse to do that. You might want to drive across a particular road, but the car might refuse because its GPS systems tell it tell you it's trespassing. You might want to park in a certain bay close to the hospital entrance. And again, the car might refuse to do it.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not so much about all of us being philosophers as all of us being vigilant, being on guard, being willing to spend a little bit of time thinking about and challenging digital power. And the reason I know it's possible is that we do do that when it comes to conventional politics, not perfectly. Some people are better citizens than others. But we all know that it's our duty to a certain extent to turn out and vote, to try and keep up to date with political affairs. And all I'm trying to convince people of is that the digital is also political. The politics doesn't just end with parliaments and courts, that the devices and machines that increasingly surround us are vectors of power as well. And once you see that, then, and that's what I try to show in the book, then maybe the heightened demands of citizenship that Republicans expect.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't expect every citizen to kind of have at their fingertips the philosophical precepts of the Republican philosophy. But that's not what I'm asking for. I am asking for more, though, from people. I mean, my view is that for too long we have all interacted with technology purely as consumers rather than as citizens, you know, asking what can this product or service do for me rather than in addition what is it doing to society. And as you know, in the book, I propose various ways that ordinary people might be more involved in the political process in order to make sure that digital technologies are truly governed according to the values of the communities that they affect. But that's in many ways what I'm asking for is a kind of very basic thing, which is an indignant spirit as the philosopher Adam Ferguson put it. He was an 18th century Republican thinker.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Individuals, you and I, should be negotiating and bargaining with tech companies as to what rights we have vis- ⁇-vis them. I say nonsense. I say where there's a strong imbalance of power, leaving individuals to fight for themselves sounds like good, liberal or libertarian policy, but in effect, it just lets the powerful become more powerful. The book is about a different way of thinking. It says that we have to try and escape the idea that in order to tackle the growing power of digital technology, we should be doing it alone as individuals, even if that is kind of phrased in terms of individual empowerment, individual autonomy, individual dignity. These are all covers, in my view, for the fact that if we're to have any success in regulating big tech, it's going to have to be collective.”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And market individualism basically holds that we're likely to reach the right outcomes if everyone pursues their own self-interest and they interact with each other, self-interested economic individuals bargaining for individual gain. But I think that that ideology has failed. I think it's failed in its own terms. I think that the regulation which has been built around that ideology is plainly not succeeding in protecting us. The best and most obvious example clicks up on our screen 50 times a day. It's notifications asking if you agree to this or that use of your data. I mean, if you step back and think about it, it's completely farcical. No one reads that. No one could read it all. If they did, they'd be met with terms that are so vague as to be useless. And yet that's at the heart of the market individualist belief that”
2022-07-21 · Intelligence Squared · Breaking the Power of Big Tech, with Jamie Susskind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT