Transcripts For RT Documentary 20240713

Especially i think theres theres what i call the creepy line and the policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it i would argue that implanting things in your brain is beyond the creepy line of. At least for the moment. At the end of the 20th century Silicon Valley industry titans like steve jobs and bill gates made a promise that would forever alter how we perceive the world it spans the globe like a superhighway it is called internet and suddenly youre part of a new mash of People Programs archives i believe its the personal computer and the internet are sure to manatee into the Information Age laying the groundwork for a moment to innovation at the dawn of the 21st century there would be a new revolution a new generation of young geniuses. Made a new promise beyond our wildest dream use the idea is that we take all the worlds information and make a whole new small to everyone limitless information Artificial Intelligence machines that would know what we wanted and would tend to our every need the technology would be beyond our imaginations almost like magic yet the concept would be as simple as a single word search. This was the beginning of google and less than a decade later facebook they would make a new promise to humanity what i think so interesting about google and facebook is they were founded at american universities Stanford University you had 2 students larry page and sergey brin decide they wanted to create the ultimate Search Engine for the internet across the country you had in the case of Facebook Mark zuckerberg who was a student at harvard decided he wanted to create a social media platform basically to meet girls and to make friends and hence we got facebook you never think that you could build this company or anything like that right because i had interest in College Students or i did an average building stuff because we thought it was cool it was all about promise it was all about the shiny future was all about the free flow of information but there was also a certain idealism behind it i think that a company like google we have the potential to make very big differences very big positive differences in the world and i think we also have an obligation as a consequence of that facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately there was also a very dark side the goal there which or it was it should make it our lifes rarity but certainly there are real in the that existed realized. Google handy. 65 percent of all internet search in the us and even more overseas. In the early days google was just a Search Engine all the Search Engine was initially was an index to whats on the internet the internet was pretty small back then they had a better index than other indexes they were around theirs was not the 1st Search Engine page famously said that the point of googles to get people on to google and off of google out into the open web as quickly as possible and largely they were really successful but that the success of google led to in many ways the success of the open web and this explosive growth in startups and innovation during that period google had developed this Incredible Technology called page rank unveiling what was known to the back row about them and it was just leaps and bounds ahead of Services Like yahoo altavista and quickly became the clear winner in the space just from a Technology Basis and what page does is it spiders around the internet instead of being a Directory Service like yahoo was its taking pictures of web pages and analyzing the links between the web pages and using them to make some assumptions about relevance and so if youre looking for some history of Abraham Lincoln and theres a bunch of links to process the web pointing to a particular site that must mean that this page is the quote unquote most relevant. Now they had to figure out how do we make money off this weve got an index how do we make money well they figure out how to do that its Pretty Simple all you do is track people searches your Search History has a very very informative thats going to tell someone immediately whether youre republican or democrat whether you like one breakfast cereal versus another thats going to tell you whether youre gay or straight its going to tell you thousands of things about a person over time because they can see what websites youre going to and where do they go did they go to. Porn site they go to a shopping site and they do website looking up how to make bombs this information essentially are Building Blocks they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is a real its detailed its granular and it never goes away you go has more of it doubled its profits in the last year selling internet advertising with microsoft and yahoo gunning for its Search Engine users fortunes can quickly change. This was really the 1st large scale mechanism for targeted advertising for example i want to sell umbrellas well google can tell you exactly you know who is looking for umbrellas because they have your Search History they know so they could hook up the umbrella makers with people searching for umbrellas basically send you targeted ads and that is where google gets more than a 90 percent of its revenue. If you look at how they structured the company it was structured so that the founders of the company would always have controlling shares and would always determine the direction in the future of the company anybody else who bought into the company was simply along for the ride in terms of making money so there was this idealism that they said motivated them and their corporate motto was. Dont be evil. When the dont be evil slogan came up it was during a meeting i think in 2003 if i recall right people are trying to say what are googles values and one of the engineers who was invited to this meeting said we could just sum it all up by just saying dont be evil whats so interesting about this term that they were not going to be evil is they never defined what evil was a neighbor even give us a sense of what it meant but people latched onto it and sort of adopted it and trusted it because of course nobody wants to be associated with an evil company so people gave the term evil their own meaning. Even their home page indicates to you that youre not being manipulated and they sort of broadcast to you the idea that this was a clean simple reliable on us interface and that the company that produced it wasnt overtly nefarious in its operations so there were no ads on the whole on the front page for example which was a big deal and so everybody in that initial phase of excitement of course was more concerned about exploring the possibilities of the technology then concerned about the potential costs of the technology it was always kind of a generous thing were going to give you discreet tools going to give you these things that you can years. And then Google Search this is so google was saying no actually were going to keep your data and were going to organize a society you know how to improve an optimized world. There are a couple trends i think lead google off of its path of being the the place that just match people with the best information on the web and lead them off into the internet and that was the birth of smartphones steve jobs unveiled the i phone and the rise of facebook and this notion that time spent on a site where users are doing lots and lots of time on facebook became really important metrics that advertisers are paying attention to and so googles response was basically to deviate from that original eat those and becoming a place where they were trying to keep people on google so they very rapidly started to branch out into other areas they were getting a lot of information from people using the Search Engine but if people went directly to a website. Thats bad because now google doesnt know that so they developed a browser which is now the most widely used rouser in the world chrome by getting people to use chrome they were able now to collect information about every single web site you visited whether or not you were using their Search Engine but the. Even thats not enough right because people do a lot of things now on their mobile devices on their computers without using their browser you want to know what people are doing even when theyre not on line so google developed an operating system which is called android which mobile devices is the dominant operating system and android records what we are doing even when we are not on line as soon as you connect to the internet android uploads to google a complete history of where youve been that day among many other things its a progression of surveillance that google has been engaged in since the beginning. When google develops another tool for us to use it and theyre doing it not to make our lives easier theyre doing it to get another source of information about us these are all Free Services but obviously theyre not because huge complicated machines arent free your interaction with them is governed so that it will generate revenue. And thats what google docs is and thats what new maps is and literally now more than 100 different platforms or google controls companies that use this surveillance Business Model the 2 biggest being google and facebook they dont sell you anything they sell you we are the product that will google will tell you is were very transparent theres a user agreement Everybody Knows that if youre going to search on google and were going to give you access to this free information we need to get paid so were going to take your data the problem is most people dont believe or dont want to believe that that data is going to be used to manipulate you. In the troubled 19 seventies a group of killers rampage 3 parts of Northern Ireland that was coordinated loyalist attacks protect the only population in belfast tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes come up with strike and put these attacks was that the or you see the Police Actually took part in the attacks so instead of preventing it they were active participants in the burning of coal streets in belfast at the take more than a 100 innocent civilians with blood that has to live you can see in years and we found out more i was surprised about the extent and of the currents which the collusion was involved in some of those cases the killers would later be named the then a gang i think it went to the very very top i think it is. The water where all the tastes and you thought was going on and give the go ahead. The world is driven by shaped by one person that there is. No dares thinks. We dare to ask. The commonality between facebook and google even though theyre different platforms is mass theyre driven by math and the ability to collect data you sign on you make a profile about yourself by answering some questions and then some information such as your concentration or major at school. Contact information about phone number is instant messaging screen and anything you want to tell interests what books to a movie and most importantly who your friends are the founders of these companies were essentially mathematicians who understood that by collecting this information you not only could monetize it and sell it to advertisers but you could actually control and steer people or nudge people in the direction that you wanted them to go. Now where them basically comes up with how certain things should react so for example you give it some inputs be it in the case of google you wouldnt enter in a query a search phrase and then certain math will make decisions on what information should be presented to you algorithms are used throughout the whole entire process in everyday life everything from Search Engines to how cars drive the variables you decide and when you have a human factor deciding what the variables are its going to affect the outcome i want you to imagine walking into a room. Control room with a bunch of people or 100 people hunched over a desk with little dials and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a 1000000000 people. This might sound like science fiction. But this actually exists right now today our ethical presuppositions are built into the software but our own ethical presuppositions are built into the software as well so whatever it is that motivates google are going to be built right into the automated process is that. I used to be in one of those controllers i was a design at the cystic google where i studied how do you ethically fear peoples thoughts because we dont talk about it a handful of people working at a handful of Technology Companies through their choices will steer what a 1000000000 people are thinking today were. Google is essentially is a gigantic compression algorithm and what a compression algorithm does is look at a very complex environment and simplifies it and thats what you want when you put a term into a Search Engine you want all the possibilities sifted so that you find the one that you can take action on essentially and so google simplifies the world and presents the simplification to you which is also what your Perceptual Systems do and so basically were building a giant perceptual machine thats an intermediary between us in the complex world the problem with out is that whatever the assumptions are that google operates under are going to be the filters that determine how the world is simplified and presented. So when you want to find something a term a person you google like its a really fast no doubt about app are you getting to that answer your question the algorithm that they use to show a search results it was written for the precise purpose of doing 2 things which make it inherently biased and those 2 things are number one filtering that is to say the algorithm has to look at all the different web pages it has in its index and its got billions of them and its going to make a selection lets say i type in whats the best dog food it has to look up all the dog food it has in its database and all the websites associated with those dog foods thats the filtering but then its got to put them into an order and thats the ordering so the filtering is biased because why did it pick those websites instead of the other 14000000000. 00 and then the ordering is biased because why did it put purina 1st and some other company 2nd it would be use less for us unless it was biased thats precisely what we what we wanted to be biased so the problem comes in. When were not talking about dog foods but were talking about things like elections and running for president. Because if were asking questions about issues like immigration or about candidates well again that algorithm is going to do those 2 things its going to do the filtering so its going to do some selecting from among billions of web pages and thats going to put them into an order it will always favor one dog food over another. One. Music service over another one comparative Shopping Service over another and one candidate over another the Google Search algorithm is made up of several 100 signals that we try to put together to serve the best results for each user just last year we launched to work under the changes to get at them so by some counts we change over to out of it im almost every day almost twice so were now its possible that theyre using unbiased algorithms but theyre not using unbiased algorithms to do things like search for unacceptable content on twitter on you tube and on facebook those arent unbiased at all theyre built specifically to filter out whatevers bad. What happens is the best technical people with the biggest computers with the best benefits to those computers become more empowered than the others and a great example of that is a company like google which for the most part is just scraping the same internet the same bit any of us can access and yet is able to build this huge business of directing what links we see in front of us which is an incredible influence on the world by having the bigger computers the better scientists and more access as. We feel like we are on the cutting edge of what societies grappling with that any given time where do you draw the line of freedom of speech and so on the question precisely is whats good. Bad according to whose judgment and thats especially relevant given that these systems serve a filtering purpose they are denying or allowing us access to information before we see and think so we dont even know whats going on behind the scenes the people who are designing these systems are building a gigantic unconscious mind that will filter the world for us and its increasingly going to be tuned to our desires in a manner that will benefit the purposes of the people who are building the machine. What these algorithms basically do is they create bubbles the for ourselves because the algorithm learns this is what Peter Schweitzer is interested in and what does it give me when i go online it gives me more of myself i mean its narraway in your vision and its finally my vision its leading me to a view of the world and it may not be facebooks you know the world but its the view of the world that will make facebook the most money theyre attempting to addict us and theyre addicting us on the basis of data the problem with that is that you only see what you already know and thats not a good thing because you also need to see what you dont know because otherwise you can learn. Facebook this morning is defending itself against accusations of political bias an article posted monday on the tech news site gizmodo said facebook workers suppress conservative leaning news stories in its trending section and that creates a terrible dynamic when it comes to the consumption of information and news because it leads us to only see the world in a very very small and narrow way it makes us easier to control and easier to be manipulated. The. I think would so troubling about google and facebook is you dont know what you dont know and while the internet provides a lot of openness in the sense that you have access to all this information. The fact of the matter is you have basically 2 gatekeepers facebook and google which control what we have access to news organizations have to be prepared that their home pages are less important people are using theyre using facebook as a home or using twitter as their own home those news streams are their portals into the world of information google and facebook started out as Internet Companies and it has changed they morph into Media Companies theyve morphed into a Telecommunications Provider and at least in the us Media Companies are regulated newspapers are regulated Telecommunications Providers are regulated Internet Companies social Media Companies like google and facebook are not the roles have changed studies show now that individuals expect the news to find them. And we turn to them and the number one thing that we were out with our company with that money and arent interested in it they are to make anything and everyone should be informed that their baby and you need to create a different format to fit and their lives. Are so much. Misinformation and its very well and it looks the same when you. Page we can lose. So much of what we do in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market. Both google and facebook announced they are updating their Company Policies to ban fake news sites from using their Advertising Networks both tech giants have come under scrutiny in recent weeks for presenting fake news during a president ial election well fake news is not even really a description of anything anymore its a weapon it gets tossed around if theres a real news story that somebody doesnt like they just dismiss it as fake news its kind of a way of trying to get it to go away and its being misused is being used as a way to dismiss actual factual ever. Its that something is happening right now in the news youll see a lot of concern with socalled fake news stories there are 3 reasons why we should not worry about fake news stories fake news is come pet it to you can place your fake news stories about me and i can place my fake news stories about you is completely competitive there have always been fake news stories theres always been fake t. V. Commercials and fake billboards that has always existed and always will 2nd is that you can see them there visible you can actually see them with your eyeballs because you can see them that means you can weigh in on them you also know that theres a Human Element because usually theres a name of an author on the fake news stories you know you can decide just to ignore them. Generally speaking most news stories blog most advertisements are not actually read by anyone so you put them in front of someones eyeballs and people just kind of skip right over them the 3rd reason why fake news stories are not really an issues is because of something called confirmation bias we Pay Attention to and actually believe things if they support what we already believe so if you see a fake news story that says Hillary Clinton is the devil but you love Hillary Clinton youre not going to buy it youre going to say thats ridiculous on the other hand if you happen to think Hillary Clinton is the devil youre going to go yes i knew that so you dont really change peoples opinions with fake news stories you know you you support believes that people are ready have the real problem is these new forms of influence that number one are not competitive number 2 people cant see and number 3 are not subject to confirmation bias if you cant see something confirmation bias cant kick in so were in a world right now in which our opinion is believed. Attitudes voting preferences purchases are all being pushed one way or another every single day by forces that we cannot see. The real problem of manipulation of news and information is secret its what google and facebook are doing on a regular basis by suppressing stories by steering us towards other stories rather than the stories were actually seeking and thats the real manipulation thats going on shaken news is the shiny object they want us to chaise that really isnt relevant to the problems were facing today we use google so extensively the average person does you know multiple queries for a day and some more than others and over time you dont realize that its impacting you and we already know that people are not necessarily Fact Checking on their ad and they they rely on the Media Companies they rely on me a they rely on Companies Like google to give them answers about the World Without necessarily looking at is that true facebook has become the number one source of news for americans well gee what if they were biasing the news toward one cause or another one candidate or another would we have any way of knowing that of course not ah. During the Great Depression which almost remember there was most of the family were working. There wasnt it was bed you know much worse objectively day but there was an expectation of the things were going to get better. There was a real sense of hopefulness there isnt today todays america was shaped by the 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power. Reduced democracy attacks. Engineer elections manufacture consent another prince holds according to no im chomsky one set of rules for the rich office its a real shame. Thats what happens when you put her into the. Narrow sector of will switch which is dedicated to increasing power for chills just as youd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks about the modern civilization of america. That it. Took. A little bit. In the stories that shaped the way county russia was handed a 4 year ban on participating or hosting major Sports Events along the scandal on tampering with athletes medical data. Britains conservative party swept through its biggest election victory in more than 3 decades for the Scottish National party also winning big north of the border getting renewed impetus to independence goals. And off the 6 hours of talks in paris the leaders of Russia Ukraine france and germany agreed to implement a full ceasefire in Eastern Ukraine and to think it. Alone