Named Financial Times book to read in 2022. Jamie provides a definitive guide to the great political question of our time how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful technologies . Without further ado, please join me in welcoming to politics and prose. Jamie suskind suskind. Thank you so much and good evening and welcome. Thank you all for coming out tonight. Its its lovely to be doing live events again. Im a british here in d. C. , so im going to start with a story about british guest in d. C. , a much distinguished one than myself in, 2009 or so, the Prime Minister of the united, a guy called gordon brown, came here. And he really had one purpose. He wanted to boost poll ratings because he wasnt doing so well. And he thought that a good way of doing would be to come and meet the glowing new president s of the United States. Barack obama, and bask in some of his reflected glory and bring it back with him to the United Kingdom. Things didnt quite go to plan, though when gordon brown got here to the United States. There was the traditional ceremony in which gifts were exchanged between the heads of government and and gordon gave the president a series of carefully curated and carefully chosen gifts from the british people, things which was of our shared history things which were very expensive, very valuable. And there was a grand over ceremony. And then what happened was that the president of the United States, in turn, gave the Prime Minister 20 dvds of classic American Films and this was regarded in British Press as a snub and a a blow to the heart of the special relationship between the two countries. And so mr. Brown left dc without achieving his aim. But the worst thing happened when he got home to london and settled down in number downing street, where the Prime Minister lives, decides to decided to make best of a bad situation. So he rummaged the dvds that the obamas had given him, and he found one that he wanted to watch. And he put it in his dvd player. And of course, dvd refused to play because it was coded only to walk in the north american area. And i think this story a lot because it contains one of the really one of the most important principles of our age, which is that you cant get a computer or a digital system of, any kind to do something that is otherwise programmed to do. And it doesnt matter how. Powerful. You are in conventional terms. And make no mistake, this was the most powerful man in the United Kingdom. Technology will ever obey its design. And those who do the designing are the ones who determine how they work. The reason this is important is because more and more of our lives on mediated through Digital Technology. All of the actions interactions and transactions that make up a meaningful. Most them these days require interacting with tech some way and what it means is that every time we use a technology we have to follow the rules that are embed added into it. We dont get a chance to negotiate. We dont get a chance to bargain. The code enforces itself. So if you write a tweet, for instance, that longer than 280 characters, the tweet just isnt to send. The system literally allow it. Youre not going to be able to or negotiate about it. If you imagine taking a your fast drive in a selfdriving and youre rushing to the hospital, you might want car to go over the speed limit, but it may well refuse to do so. You may refuse to drive and roads, which is gps systems told. It were trespassing. You might refuse to park in particular bays. A hospital. The point is this Digital Technologies contain and when we interact with them, we have to follow those rules. And in my work i argue that those who write the rules that are coded into Digital Technology are increasingly writing rules of society. Theyre writing the rules by which the rest of us have to live. Software engineers, i argue, are becoming social engineers. And in my talk, i want to explore with you some of the implications of this and what i think we can do about it. Because the first thing i want to emphasize to you is this there is a myth about, silicon valley, and about Digital Technology. And the myth goes Something Like this tech is a scientific of objectivity, of neutrality, of rationality. Tech isnt political. Tech is separate politics. That logic has underpinned a lot of the way that people think about Digital Technology. Assumed that is something kind of scientific about. The digital tech that increasingly us. But what i think that if you look around can see that most Digital Technologies are fact saturated soaked through with biases and and priorities. And its not necessarily because the people who run them or design or own them are over political people. Its just that when you create something that exerts power, its always to have an effect on some groups rather than others. So to consider some of the mistakes that we sometimes see with Digital Technology, there are Voice Recognition systems that literally dont hear the voices of women because been trained mainly on male voices. There are facial Recognition Systems that wont see people of colour or people with facial disfigurements because none of the Training Data that theyve been trained on contain of those kinds. There were some scandals recently. Facebook designating particular racial groups as monkeys on its profile, not the people who wrote those algorithms themselves would ever have considered themselves racist, but they didnt give sufficient attention to the data on they were training that product and up with something that was incredibly offensive and ive been talking about this for a few years. And in some ways the debate has. A typical story that i used to tell google. You will recall that when you use google and you type in a question, it will often give you an answer. It itll sort of end the question for you with a number of suggested. And so three or four years ago maybe five if you tried typing in the why do you would get a number of quite unpleasant suggested questions. So things like why did have big noses . Why do love money so much . Why the control the media . And what google would say about these results was, look, were not sitting around trying to create that are offensive. Its just that what the algorithm does is that it reflects the questions people have asked in the past. Its to be useful. Its trying to give people what in fact, they want. Now, i dont doubt for a second that thats true. Right. But i also do question whether its a defence because, there is another way you can Design Technologies like that, which is instead of repeating and amplifying injustices that already exist in the world you can engineer things that reduce the injustice in the world or that make the world a little bit better. And for years google said no, this is something we cant be done. Were not social engineers, were software engineers. And then eventually, after a while they did change it. And youll find now that you type in questions on google there are far of what ive just described and course the sky didnt fall in. The point im making is this if youre someone who designs a Search Engine algorithm or runs a giant platform on which People Democratic deliberation or if you engineer that, decide whether people jobs, whether people get mortgages or whether people get housing, whether people get insurance, the choices you make about, those designs are going to help some groups and not other groups. Theyre going to emphasize priorities and not others. The way i put it is that the digital is political. If you design things that excite power in society, then the choices you make are always going to have to promote one group over another. Its inherent. And so what i encourage my readers to do in my is to get out of the idea, get out of the the Digital Technology. Somehow this objective or scientific thing detached from reality. Tech is all around us and it is soaked through with prints with politics. The two are inescapable. Let me just talk a little bit more about why i say tech powerful. I argue my book that there are three ways in which Digital Technologies exert. The first is the one that ive already described. Tech contains rules which the rest of have to follow. Think of the dvd that play on Gordon Browns dvd or the social media platform that wouldnt let people post an article about biden from the New York Post shortly. The last president ial election. The system contains rules the rest of us have to follow. But there are two other important ways in which Digital Technologies exert power. One is by gathering data about us now gathering data is auxiliary to power in sense that the more you know people, the easier it is to influence or even manipulate them. And that is something that many Digital Technologies try to do these days and able to do with increasing amounts of success, but actually theres another element to data gathering which is more subtle, which is that when you know that data is being gathered about, you, you are less likely to do things which others would perceive as sinful or shameful or wrong. If you think being watched. Youre more likely to behave yourself. And thats a kind of power in itself because it basically gets people to change their behaviour without forcing them to or telling them or even telling them to. And you know. I think that we are in one of these slightly strange historical where people havent quite woken up to the fact that they are constantly being surveyed, their own technologies. So you had the woman, for instance, who posted her marathon time on twitter, you know, saying, isnt it great how quickly i ran it only for her fitbit upload to the public the fact that shed run 23 miles or you have the my my particular. Favorite example is one that an audience member me not so long ago which was there are these things called smart scales if any of you have them theyre basically bathroom that connect to your iphone. Ive done it why anyone would ever want it because what it does is it gives a sort of running update of your inadequacy and you know, youve gained this amount of fat this week or whatever it is and it is always a gain. But one of the ways in which these systems are meant to be smart is that they can tell whos standing on them. So it claims so this woman in the audience was explained me that im a friend of hers and a partner had a set smart scales and the female half of the couple went away for the weekend and was therefore surprised when on the sunday morning she received an update on her iphone congratulating her on her significant loss. When, of course, what happened is that the the woman with whom i partner was having an affair sort of idly stood on the scales in the morning without thinking for a moment she might be telegraphing her presence. The one person in the world she didnt want to do it to the being we grew up. I think a world where we werent being constantly seen even in the privacy of our own homes. Thats no longer true. You dont need to dont need to have someone physically eyeballing you in order for there to be data gathered about you. So technology contained technologies, gather information. The third thing the technologies do is they filter and frame our perception of the world. We rely more and more on Digital Technologies to know whats going on out there. You and i are only capable of processing or holding a very small amount of information at a time. But whenever we use a Search Engine or a news feed, algorithmic news feed or log on to social media, we are presented with a small slice of information about society and which slice were presented with matters. Because it determines what we see true or false or right or wrong or important or unimportant. What you see on your in the morning may be completely different. What the person lying in bed to you next you sees. And thats thats interesting. I think i think a change and listen you dont need believe that you know facebook has a particular political agenda or social platforms are biased against one political view simply to note that to technology is one way or another frame our perception of the world. And sometimes might be in a way that we like. Sometimes it might be in a that we dont like. The point simply that its an immense amount power that lies in the hands of who happen to engineer these systems. And so stepping back and this is really the kind of premise of my book, i think were moving into a world now where is a new and strange form of power our midst . Think of the big forms of power that have traditionally been about by political scientists and the like. So youve got that youve got market power the power of the market to move goods and services around and to affect peoples. Youve got things like social norms of the kind that John Stuart Mill would talk about in on liberty. So we do in order to avoid being shamed, in order to avoid being criticised, whatever you have, the great clunking fist of the states, you know, the government bosses us around passing laws tells us what to do and a lot of political theory looks at these kind of social forces and analyzes the world through them. I argue that in our time there is an entirely new of social forces, which in here Digital Technology, because has power for the three reasons ive already described. And youll notice that none of those three reasons involve going through the traditional political process, there is an argument to be made that the industry has power because it can influence. People here in washington, dc, there is an argument to be made that the Tech Industry has power because it has enormous amounts of money and cash and can influence policy that way. So think about when amazon was choosing where its new headquarters be and you had the cities of the america kind of bending over backwards, change their tax regimes to try and attract it. Other people make those arguments. I think theyre important but my argument is much more directly focused on the technologies themselves. If you own and control powerful technologies, you writing the rules by which the rest of us live you are gathering data in a way that exerts power. You are filtering and framing perception of the world. And to me that is an awesome and growing form of power. Crucially growing, because we literally have just started this phase of history. What systems will be capable of in ten, 20, 30 years time only makes the point more acute. And so i step back and i ask, well, given weve got this new and strange form of power in society, how if we responded to it, whats whats been our reaction to it . And if you look at other people in society who have assumed positions, power or social responsibility, you can see what we tend to do. And what we tend to do is rules and standards and regulations on them. So just think about people like lawyers or doctors or bankers. We dont we recognize that play an important social function, but we dont just trust them. We dont just hope and and kind of long for that goodwill and wisdom and hope. They do the right thing we place regime probably not enough in the case of the sector but certainly when it comes lawyers and doctors, we place regimes of on them. We subjected that to certain standards of education sets and standards of probity, certain standards of ethics. And, you know, its not just if you look at a pilot or a pharmacist or a or there are other relationships in which the law imposes responsibilities. You know, a parent owes duty legal duties to that child and they dont arise out of any contract between them. They arise because society has deemed one to be in a position of power and responsibility vis a vis the the strange thing about the Tech Industry is that people are acquiring enormous amount of power and social responsibility, but then is not coming with corresponding responsibility. So know you have to have more qualifications to be a pharmacist than you do to run social media platform that determine the health of a countrys democracy. It seems to me that something is probably slightly out of kilter, that and in the book i try to ask why you know whats going on whats going on here . Why is it that were not this in the same way as we might treat industries and other professions and the answer, i think, lies at the realm of ideas we are beholden to a set of ideas about Digital Technology, which essentially only frames tech as something that is both in and governed the markets. So obviously, we know that capitalism generates extraordinary, innovative power. We know that innovation takes place in free, open economies. But its a real stretch. I argue to argue to say that markets are also quite at regulating the people who who who are within them. In fact, my Research Suggests that market forces, market pressures often bring out the worst in people rather the best. And this is important because Tech Industry will say, well, you know, look, we dont need regulation or that kind of regulation because, you know, if we dont provide people with what they want, then theyll go elsewhere. But thats nonsense. Not least when you have Enormous Network where you know the value of facebook isnt in its its little. The value of facebook is in the that more it has more members than christianity see so if you start an alternative rival platform it might be better than facebook in every way in terms of its functionality but if there are only a hundred members of it has no value. So there are all