To receive a a scheduled upcog programs and other discussions, festivals and more. Booktv every sunday on cspan2 or anytime online at booktv. Org. Television for serious readers. So now im done talking in just a second because i get to announce Jamie Susskind who celebrate the release of this book trend 11. The digital republic. T f Technology Revolution in the digital republic. 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 please join me welcoming to politics and prose, Jamie Susskind. [applause] thank you so much, and good evening and welcome. Thank you all for coming out tonight. Its lovely to be doing live events again. Im a british guest here in d. C. So im going to start with a story about another british guest in d. C. , a much more distinguished one than myself. In 2009 or so, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, gordon brown came here and he really had one purpose, he wanted to boost his poll ratings because he wasnt doing so well and he thought that a good way of doing that, would be to come and meet the glowing new president 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. Gordon brown got to the United States a ceremony which gifts were exchanged between the heads of government and gordon gave the president a series of carefully curated and carefully chosen gifts from the british people, things which were symbolic of our shared history, things which were very expensive and very valuable and a grand handing over ceremony. And then what happened was that the president of the United States, in turn, gave the Prime Minister 20dvds of classic American Films and regarded in the British Press as a snub and a blow to the heart of the special relationship between the two countries. So mr. Brown left d. C. Without achieving his aim and worst thing happened when he got home to london and settled down in number 10 downing street where the Prime Minister lives and decides to decided to make the best of a bad situation. So he rummaged through the dvds the obama had given him and wanted to watch and put it in his dvd player and of course, the dvd refused to play because it was coded only to work in the north america area and i think about 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 its not otherwise programed to do. It doesnt matter how powerful you are in conventional times and make sure this was the most powerful man in the United Kingdom. Technology will only 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 and our media through Digital Technology, all of the actions and interactions and transactions that make up a meaningful life, most of them this days require interacting with tech in some way. Every time we use a technology, we have to follow the rules that are embedded 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, longer than 280 characters, the tweet isnt just going to send. The system literally wont allow it. Youre not going to be able to compromise or negotiate about it. If you imagine taking your first drive in a selfdriving car and youre rushing to the hospital. You might want that car to go over the speed limit. But it may well refuse to do so. It may refuse to drive on roads in which the gps system were told it was trespassing or refuse to park in particular bays outside the hospital. The point is this, Digital Technologies contain rules 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 the rules of society. Writing the rules by which the rest of us have to live. Software engineers, i argue are becoming social engineers, and in my talk today, i want to explore some of the implications of this and what we can do about this. The first thing i want to emphasize, theres a myth will Silicon Valley and Digital Technology and the myth goes Something Like this, tech is a scientific realm of objectivity, of neutrality, of rationality, tech isnt political, tech is separate from politics. That logic has underpin add lot of the way that people think about Digital Technology, its assumed that there is something kind of scientific about the digital tech that increasingly surrounds us. But what i think is that if you look around, you can see the most Digital Technologies are in, in fact, saturated, soaked through with biases and prejudices and priorities. Its not necessarily because the people who run them, design them are overtly political people. When you create something that exerts power, its always going 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 theyve been trained mainly on male voices. There are facial Recognition Systems that wont see people of color or people with facial disfigurement because none of the Training Data contain faces of those kind. There are some scandals recently with facebook designating a particular racial groups as monkeys on its profile. Not because the people who wrote those algorithms were themselves, would ever have considered themselves racist, but it didnt give stuff sufficient attention on what they were training and ended up with something incredibly offensive. In some ways the debate has changed. A typical story i use today tell was google. Youll recall when you put in google, you type in a question and it will sort of end the question for you with suggestions. Three or four years ago, maybe five. If you tried typing in the words, why do jews, you would get unpleasant suggested questions, things like why do jews have big noses, why do jews love money so much, why do jews control the media. And what google would say, were not flitting around trying to create products that are offensive, its just that what the algorithm does, it reflects the questions that people have asked in the past. Its trying 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 defense because theres another way that you can Design Technologies like that, which is instead of repeating and amplyphying on making the world better. Google says its not something that can be done, were not social engineers. Were technical engineers, and if you do that now, youll find fewer. If youre someone who has a search algorithm or runs a giant platform on which people conduct democratic deliberation or if you engineer algorithms that decide whether people get jobs, whether people get mortgages, 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 some priorities and not others. The way i put it digital is political. If you design things that exert power in society, then the choices you make are always going to have to promote one group over another, its inherent. So, what i encourage my readers to do in my books, get out of the idea, get out of the sense that Digital Technology tech is around us and soaked through with politics, the two are unescapable. Let me yus just talk a little more about why tech is powerful. And i write three ways in which they excertificate power. The first one i described, tech contains rules which the rest of us have to follow. Think of the dvd that wouldnt play on Gordon Browns dvd player or social media platform that wouldnt let people post an article from hunter biden shortly before the election. The system contains rules and the rest of us have to follow them. There are two other ways in which digital exerts power. One is gathering data about us. Now, gathering data is auxiliary to power in the sense that the more you know about people, the easier it is to influence or even manipulate them and thats something that many Digital Technologies are trying to do and able to do in with increasing success. But actually, theres another element to data gathering which is more subtle. When you know that data is gathered about you, youre less likely to do something sinful or shameful or watched, and youre likely to behave yourself, and without forcing them to or compelling them or telling them to. I think that we are in one of these slightly strange historical period and people havent woken up to the fact that they are constantly being surveyed by 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 fit bit to load up she had only run 23 miles. And my favorite example, an audience member told me not so long ago, smart scales, and if any of you have them. Bathroom scales that connect to your iphone, i dont know why anybody would want it, it gives a running update of your inadequacy and youve gained this amount of fat this week and whatever it is, and its always a gain, but one of the ways the system is meant to be smart, they can tell who is standing on them, so it claims. So, this woman in the audience explained to me that a friend of hers and her partner had smart scales and the female went away for the weekend and surprised when on sunday morning she received an update on her iphone congratulating her on her significant weight loss. When of course, what happened is that the woman with whom her partner was having an affair had idly stood on the scales in the morning without thinking for a moment she might be telegraphing her presence to the one person in the world she didnt want to do it to. And the point being, we grew up, i think, in a world where we werent being constantly seen in the privacy of our own homes. Thats no longer true. You dont need to have someone physically eyeballing you in order for data to be gathered about you. Technology contains rules, technology gathers information and the other thing that technology do, filter and frame our perception of the world. We rely more and more on Digital Technology whats going on out there. You and i are capable of processing and holding a small amount of information at a time. Whenever we use an algorithmic news feed or log onto 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 as true or false or right or wrong or important or unimportant. What you see on your phone in the morning may be completely different from what the person lying in bed to you, next to you sees. And thats interesting, i think, i think its a change. And listen, you dont need to believe that, you know, facebook has a particular political agenda or social media platforms are biased against one political view, simply to note that technology is one way or another, framed perception of the world and sometimes might be in a way that we like and sometimes in a way that we dont like. Point is that its immense amount of power that lies in the hands of those 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 theres a new and strange form of power in our midst. Think of the big forms of power that have traditionally been talked about by political markets and the like. You have the power to move goods and services around and affect peoples behavior. Social norms of the kind that jon stewart mill will talk about on liberty, so we do things in order to avoid being shaped or criticized or whatever. You have the great clunky fist of the state, and the government surrounds and passes laws and 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 theres an entire new set of social forces which are here in Digital Technology because tech has power for the three reasons ive described and youll notice that none of those involve going through the traditional political process. Theres an argument to be made that the Tech Industry has power because it can influence people here in washington d. C. And that it has enormous amounts of money and cash and can influence policy in that way and think about when amazon was choosing where its new headquarters would be and you had the cities of america kind of bending over backwards to change the tax regimes to try to attract it. Other people made the arguments. My argument is focused on the technologies themselves. If you own and control powerful technologies, youre writing the rules by which the rest of us live. You are gathering data in a way that exerts power and filtering and framing peoples 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 these systems will be capable of in 10, 20, 30 years time only makes the point more acute. And so, i step back and ask, given weve got the new and strange form of power in society, how have we responded and our reaction to it. If you look at other people in society assumed positions of power or social responsibilities. You can see what we tend to do, what we tend to do is impose rules and standards and regulations on them. Think of people like lawyers, doctors, bankers, we dont we recognize that they play an important social function, but we dont just trust them. We dont just hope and kind of long for their goodwill and wisdom and hope they do the right thing. We place regimes, probably not enough in the case of the financial sector, but certainly with when it comes to lawyers and doctors, replace regimes of oversight on them and subject to certain standards of education and standards of ethics, and you know, its not just those, if you look at a pilot or a pharmacist or their other relationships in which the law imposes responsibility, you know, a parent owes legal duty to their child and dont arise out of a contract between them. They arise because society deemed one to be in a position of power and responsibility, visavis the other. The strange thing about the Tech Industry is that people are acquiring an enormous amount of power and social responsibility, but its not coming with corresponding responsibility. So, you know, you have to have more qualifications to be a pharmacist than you do to run a social media platform that might determine the health of a countrys democracy. It seems to me that something is probably slightly out of kilter there. And in the book i try to ask why. Whats going on here . Why is it that were not treating this in the same way as we might treat other industries and other professions . And the answer, i think, lies at the realm of ideas. We are beholdened to a set of ideas about Digital Technology which essentially frames tech as something that is both produced in and governed by the market. So, obviously, we know that capitalism generates extraordinary innovative power. We know that innovation takes place in free and open economies. But its a real stretch, i argue to say that the markets are also quite good at regulating the people who are within them. In fact, my Research Suggests that market forces, market pressures often bring out the worst in people rather than the best. And its important because the Tech Industry will say, you know, look, we dont need regulation or that kind of regulation because if we dont provide people with what they want then theyll go else war. Thats nonsense. At least when you have Enormous Network effects, the value of facebook isnt in its interface. The value of facebook is in the fact that there are more members than christianity. And if you start a rival platform, its better in terms of functionality, it has no value. There are all kinds of reasons when the ordinary market mechanism breaks down and the same is true of algorithms. Think about a moment ago, we see algorithms which are used to determine our access to loans, even jobs, even criminal justice in some sates, and theyre informed by the algorithmic systems. And if you imagine in a market economy that the market does its job and it roots out the economically inefficient algorithms, so that only those algorithms, which are actually commercially valuable will survive, will those be good for society or bad for society. Imagine youre a recruitment algorithm for a workplace or for a university, and what that algorithm tells you is that as a matter of statistical fact, people from this part of town, tend to do better at work than people from that part of town. People at this part of town tend to get higher degrees than people from that part of town. The obvious problem with that, even if its true, is that people in this part of town might be one racial group and people in this part of town might be another racial group and all of a sudden youve created an algorithm thats basically distinguishing people on the grounds of their race rather than the grounds of other stuff. Its