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 ideas the personal computer and the internet are sure to manatee into the Information Age laying the ground. For unlimited 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 ideas that we take all the worlds information and make. 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 imagination its 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 didnt just College Students write an average building stuff because we thought it was cool it was all about promise it was all about the shiny future it 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 facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately there was also a very dark side the goal though it was it should make it our lives very deep but certainly there are real really that exist. Realized. Google handles 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 google to get people on to google and off of google out into the open web as quickly as possible and largely theyre 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 in 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 cross 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 are 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 than doubled its profits in the last year selling internet advertising with microsoft and yahoo gunning for a 3rd change in 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 this meeting so we could just sum it all up by just saying dont be evil it was 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. Sort of adopted it and trusted it because of course nobody wants to be associated ready 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 august 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 or not 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 society you know how to improve enough to muscle well. 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 led 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 course 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 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 she would 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 in literally now more than a 100 different platforms that google controls companies that use the surveillance Business Model the 2 biggest being google and facebook 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. Geysers financial survival. Housing bubble. Oh you mean theres a downside to artificial mortgage through dont get carried away thats cause report. Join me. Im sure. So what weve got to do is identify the threats that we have its crazy. Let it be an arms race in a. Very Dramatic Development that only. Exists i dont see how that strategy will be successful betty if. You sit down and talk. 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 concentration or major at school. Contact information about phone numbers instant messaging screen anything you want to tell interests what books to 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. Basically comes up with how certain things should react so for example you give it some inputs in the case. Google you dont 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 unethical 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 sift our data i used to be in one of those control waves i was a design at the cystic google where i studied how do you ethically fear peoples thoughts because what we dont talk about is a handful of people working at a handful of Technology Companies through their choices will steer what a 1000000000 people are thinking today what google is essentially is a gigantic compression algorithm and what 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 do you google egg it to really ask no doubt about are you getting to that answer to 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 companies 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 obviously when were not talking about dog foods but were talking about things like elections. 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 then its going to put them into an order it will always favor one dog food over another. One on one Music Service over another. One comparative Shopping Service over another and one candidate over another the 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 a work under changes to or algorithm 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 did 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. We feel like we are on the cutting edge of the issues but 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 and bad according to whose judgement 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 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 view of 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 side 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 manipulate. The. I think whats 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. Theyre using twitter as their own those. Are their portals world information. But 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 u