Latest / Ethical Machines / How Society Bears AI’s Costs

Transcript

How Society Bears AI’s Costs · Ethical Machines

0:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what phrase I'm really sick of that I just keep here to get it again with great power comes great responsibility.
0:07
[SPEAKER_00]: This line from one of the original Spider-Man movies and it's so annoying with great power comes great responsibility.
0:12
[SPEAKER_00]: People keep saying it and saying it as though with this new profound thing.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But it does have the advantage of being true, and it's the kind of thing Karen doesn't say this, but my guest today, Karen Young, who's an interdisciplinary presorial fellow in law ethics and informatics at Birmingham Law School and School of Computer Science, she doesn't say the phrase thankfully, I don't think she does, but she does argue the point, and she argues that that's what the conversation is about today.
0:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Karen's main point is that the way that
0:39
[SPEAKER_00]: big tech companies are operating now, whether it's social media companies, whether it's the AI companies like Google, or an anthropic, or Microsoft, open AI, is that they are consolidating wealth and power.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: AI, the people who make decisions about how AI should be developed and deployed, are consolidating wealth and power.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be bad, arguably by itself, or maybe it's not if they're really benevolent, although then we've got other kinds of concerns.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But,
1:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Karen thinks they're doing a tremendous amount of harm.
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They are creating environments of misinformation.
1:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They are eroding social solidarity.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Doing a bunch of things to us, that's bad for society.
1:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing that's really bad is that they're not held accountable.
1:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and caring things that we should have some kind of say in how powerful technologies like AI are developed, deployed, etc.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We should have given that the way this technology is deployed and the kind of impact it has on our society and our lives, we should have some say in how all this is supposed to unfold.
1:40
[SPEAKER_00]: We ask a bunch of questions together and explore a lot of different issues around this.
1:44
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the more interesting ones I think is right, but who's responsibility is this?
1:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it the responsibility of those AI companies?
1:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it the responsibility of government?
1:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it the responsibility of our ourselves to build the kind of culture that shapes those companies and the right kind of way?
1:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And does this sort of our view on this change if we go from let's say the US where innovation is king to Europe or Karen is where innovation isn't necessarily held to be as important as preserving social goods.
2:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the conversation wide-ranging, really important, really interesting as always.
2:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, if you want to more from me, go to my sub-stack at ReadBlackven.substack.com.
2:22
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have guests who recommend, or maybe you even want to be on on this podcast, I don't know, email me at eemacreadblackven.com, and I'll have a look, we'll see, they do me chat.
2:33
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, enough about that, let's go talk to Karen.
2:48
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so Karen, you've got this sort of concern about AI.
2:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's capable of lots of things, lots of maybe amazing things you think I don't know.
2:55
[SPEAKER_00]: But what do you think is that it's really good at consolidating wealth and power?
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that right?
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So that you think that's something that AI is doing.
3:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And presumably, I suspect you think this is a bad thing.
3:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, I don't think AI is doing that.
3:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people are doing that and there are people who are making with decisions about AI development and investment and trajectories of deployment.
3:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think actually people are ultimately to problem not really the technology and I think of the incentives that people face in the kind of global capitalist order that we live in.
3:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of money is going into these big AI companies, whether it's open AI or Microsoft or Google.
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: There's their poor and billions into AI, and that's the issue.
3:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's slightly more complicated than just a lot of money is being invested.
3:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's probably helpful to think in terms of political economy and the incredibly fast and rapid emergence of,
4:01
[SPEAKER_01]: big tech dominance in the global economy and the fact that they're effectively controlled of big AI labs that at least we see in the newest, the three US dominated and because they have extraordinary monopoly power, that is determining the trajectory in which AI is emerging into the lives of ordinary people.
4:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, not quite pushback, but let me be a cranky capital
4:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, what's the issue here?
4:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This would be putting on my cranky capital.
4:33
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the issue here?
4:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're upset that there are really smart people who have figured out some amazing things with technology.
4:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, as a result, they're gaining power and money, but that's what they deserve given that they're doing all this innovation.
4:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you saying that?
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not AI, it's the people, it's not the people, it's the system, the system is capitalism, we're going to over throw capitalism.
4:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it the fact that there are a crew in so much money in power?
4:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it the fact that other people have less power as a result?
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it a sort of you're thinking of it as a finite resource?
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And if so, is it necessarily those companies responsibilities to help the people who are not part of that AI ecosystem or something?
5:15
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's a bunch of questions, but what's the big deal here?
5:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, unless it's just like, I'm, unless you're saying capitalism is bad, let's move on.
5:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't take capitalism as bad, per se.
5:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a lot more nuanced than that, but I certainly think that it's really useful to think about the incentives that are powering and driving the patterns of development and the impact that the technology is having,
5:43
[SPEAKER_01]: in a contemporary world and the general trajectory of travel.
5:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it's a combination that is founded on the assumption of a global capitalist order, which is indeed the order that we live in.
5:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And so because of that, the incentives that companies face is to invest money in order to maximize shareholder returns.
6:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's designed to do that, but the trouble is, of course, there are market failures where the harms are imposed on other people, and the capitalist system doesn't actually encourage those costs to be internalized by those who've actually generated them.
6:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we see that dynamic being played out in space, in the digital tech industry, and this has been exacerbated
6:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, do you need me some examples?
6:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So, just spell out to me the ways in which the wealth of power is getting consolidated at the expense of other people, or at the expense of society at large.
6:50
[SPEAKER_00]: What's there's lots of talk about things like, I think a job law stuff, is a job law's issues, is it?
6:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what are we talking about?
6:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it's a really good place to start.
7:00
[SPEAKER_01]: What are the potential downloads or the advocacy effects that I'm worried about?
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess,
7:06
[SPEAKER_01]: When we start with the early forms of AI, where we saw a big tech platform emerging and always excitement about the content that was becoming available and the way in which they could operate as intermediaries connecting people who wouldn't otherwise be connected to do this job and that job and the other.
7:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We particularly saw two dynamics became apparent, and firstly, the way in which we saw a fragmentation of the public sphere and the rise of misinformation, and we saw a lot of adverse effects, particularly for young people in terms of content harassment, bullying, distress, but particularly the lack of equipment to
7:48
[SPEAKER_01]: truth because it became possible for anybody to speak and the fact checking behind that speech became not so important anymore and so we saw little pockets of communities emerging where they talk amongst each other and I'm certainly in my own filter bubble.
8:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
8:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I know only one person you voted for Brexit but there are a hell of a lot of them out there.
8:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is one of the things that happened when the internet emerging, of course, that was already being powered by machine learning in the distribution of content that you were reading online.
8:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That consolidated the power of the big tech platforms.
8:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think what's really,
8:28
[SPEAKER_01]: crucial in this whole economic model that has emerged is that the core infrastructure is owned and controlled by a handful of extraordinary powerful and wealthy firms in which most people
8:46
[SPEAKER_01]: don't actually have any say whatsoever.
8:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So a couple of key players are really determining what happens, what goes on and they are the gatekeepers into what goes on their platforms and what doesn't go on and their decisions about direction of travel investment and deployment determine where everybody's lives end up moving because this technology has become so prevalent or internet
9:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't totally know what to make it.
9:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's take a concrete case.
9:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's take it that you're em, at least implicitly, referring to a specially Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: At least that's got to be a prime example of the kind of thing that you have in mind to work.
9:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Zuckerberg has doesn't I think he has a controlling share in Facebook, meta, whatever the hell they call it now and lots of decisions.
9:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just up to him.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Just up to him.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever he wants, that's the way that it goes.
9:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's true.
9:36
[SPEAKER_01]: The, the, the, the, the, the big tech companies now.
9:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, that's
9:40
[SPEAKER_01]: That's good all that matter they spoke, that Microsoft incredibly hard by Microsoft.
9:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the chip companies are really all the enablers of AI are also coming in on the act.
9:50
[SPEAKER_01]: But their decisions are certainly having a lot of influence about the direction of travel.
9:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And who wins their losses.
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know what, so what do we make of this though?
10:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So suppose I say,
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, they've got a ton of power.
10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They're a private company, they're a public-y health companies, but they're not in government entities.
10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this is something like, LATS sucks.
10:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But what's the problem now, what's the problem?
10:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that it looks like there's non-government entities that almost have the power to shape civil society in the way that government does, or with the kind of power that government does, but they're not governmentities.
10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, government is at least in principle representative, whereas these companies are not, they are companies that are aiming to satisfy their shareholders.
10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, but so I guess not what's the problem.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It does feel like we're in a shitty situation where you have these sort of mini kingdoms, but that are sort of part of the country.
10:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess I just don't, so, sorry, I know I'm fumbling here in its sense, but is the solution supposed to look like regulation?
10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: You reference something like we don't have a say, so what would it mean for us to have a say in how these companies operate?
11:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, meta, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
11:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't own any part of their company.
11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should they listen to us outside of market pressures?
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so what are you imagining?
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you imagining a different way that these companies would be forced to operate or something on those lines?
11:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so let's just assume for the sake of argument that we begin with a market economy.
11:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is okay.
11:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So in other words, let's assume that that's ethically acceptable.
11:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though we don't get a choice in it.
11:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's that they step into the conditions on which under which we cooperate.
11:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm presumably not a throw in the rule of law and democracy and the markets still operate in those contact and I'm very happy to accept the general liberal principle that everyone is free to do whatever they like, provided they do no harm to others.
11:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Very happy without one for me.
11:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So, question is, is there any harm being done by this?
11:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we've already identified that there are certainly some collective homes going on, but I think what we see here at market failures,
12:05
[SPEAKER_01]: in a number of different ways that arise and the number one market failure is the acquisition of moment-opily power that according to economic theory allows the incumbents to be lazy, and to make decisions without constraint.
12:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly in the way that you can put it quite nicely, without accountability to the people that are effective because they have so much power, they can be indifferent to those effects.
12:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think,
12:33
[SPEAKER_01]: that is one of the really problematic features of the dynamics that's going on.
12:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there is market failure.
12:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is an exploitation.
12:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is car without accountability.
12:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think as you put it, I think this is our sheety situation.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I say it's a shitty situation or one thing I intend to talk about is it feels to me like there are potentially cases in which lots of people are harmed, but no one's rights are violated, not in any obvious way.
13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that at least maybe I'll take my mind in 10 seconds, but I can see myself thinking, this is an academic thing to say, right?
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: What a non-committal academic thing?
13:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I can see myself thinking.
13:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Meta doesn't have an obligation to promote my well-being.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: They have an obligation to respect my legal rights, property rights, blah, blah, blah, blah.
13:24
[UNKNOWN]: But
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to create a product.
13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I may or may not enjoy it.
13:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say I enjoy it enough.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And it causes in me the pressure to our anxiety, some of those lines.
13:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't breach any legal obligation.
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure that they ought to have a legal obligation not to create content that would upset me.
13:41
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you articulate such a policy regulation?
13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you implement it?
13:44
[SPEAKER_00]: How would you police it?
13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That seems so objectively vague and squishy.
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And what makes it a shitty situation,
13:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bad situation if they're doing illegal things and they need to be prosecuted, but they're not being prosecuted and or they're going out of prosecution because they've got really smart lawyers.
14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a bad situation.
14:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's shitty if we don't even have legal grounds to go after them and we shouldn't have legal grounds could go after them.
14:07
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I'm having mind with.
14:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Really shitty situation.
14:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I like to use the analogy with
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: corroded and poisoned, but knowing the visual surface any specific harm, but if that process keeps going, there will be no ground on which we can stand and together.
14:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So I like to think of in some of my collective harms, and what I refer to as the, if you excuse the mouthful, the sort of the socio-technical foundations of freedom that are recollectively, so the basic
14:46
[SPEAKER_01]: political and cultural infrastructure that we have here the two taken for granted because of limitations on what with actually
14:55
[SPEAKER_01]: possible in terms of the enabling decision-making and the spreading of content and activity automatically simply wasn't there.
15:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't so easy to erode the grounds if you like, because we just didn't have the tools.
15:09
[SPEAKER_01]: But now we have the tools and the ground upon which we stand is being changed without us noticing paying attention or taking it seriously.
15:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I worry about.
15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: One is, I think a fair request to the other is not fair.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The undefined, maybe it's fair, I don't know.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Clearly fair request is, can you say more about what you mean when you say, there's social technological ways, methods, whatever it is of undermining our freedom.
15:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to hear more about that line.
15:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The second request, which might be unfair, because I'm based on your accent, is, do you think Europeans have a different view?
15:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I could see someone saying, yeah, look, read.
15:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, you're an American, so you think,
15:54
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we do about rockin' to pass laws against this kind of thing?
15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's capitalism, blah, blah, blah, blah, but in Europe, we've got different views about the collective good and what we would have government do in support of the collective good or at least in defense of the collective bad.
16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so they want you to speak to the...
16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: as though there were the European perspective, I know there's not, but something along something else.
16:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So first thing, social check-in on it.
16:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, underpinnings for freedom and second, your versus American perspective.
16:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so I guess to use a simpler example, let's just leave AI out of this and just think about the power of communicating without intermediaries on the internet, which has now become commonplace, easy to people.
16:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It used to be a tweet.
16:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know where you call it anymore, but people put content and nonsense and hate speech and all that sort of stuff out there.
16:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way that they're
16:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things in the all-style media ecosystem, which I certainly do not wish to defend as perfect, and it had been any problems that I don't but at least editorial gatekeepers cared about the facts and a shift through, and they would not allow things to get published that were blatantly lies.
17:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is an assumption that we used to hold true in an animal world.
17:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And we just took that to be the way the world works.
17:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the internet came and completely uphenders those basic assumptions upon which people may public announcements to the world.
17:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And they changed epistemic foundations so that actually it becomes much less easy to be confident that what we are seeing
17:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And it also means that it's increasingly possible at the same time for these echo terms where people simply decide, I'm only going to listen to X, Y, and Z, and all the other stuff are not going to hear, which is why I didn't know it when he voted for Brexit, right?
17:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I was already listening to the kind of liberal news channel that I'm familiar with, but lots of other people were saying things were completely going to do to the things that I was used to hearing.
18:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had no idea of just how
18:11
[SPEAKER_01]: significant, those people were in terms of their capacity to vote for Brexit.
18:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a kind of example.
18:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope that helps.
18:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think so.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me see if I can tie two thoughts together and tell me if I'm tying them together in the right way.
18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You would said that we've reached a sort of sociotechnical level that means that we that entails the undermining of people's freedom.
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And I take it that the social technical progress includes prominently social media and the way in which it undermines
18:43
[SPEAKER_00]: freedom as a collective or individually is that a condition for being free is that you have a grip on a reality.
18:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you don't have a grip on a reality, then you can't actually exercise your autonomy, I don't know, or accurately, otherwise.
18:55
[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
18:56
[SPEAKER_01]: If you voted for a politician based on a total bunch of lies, then actually you voting in an informed way.
19:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, there's the danger of various propaganda strategies trying to undermine the integrity of elections and so on it goes.
19:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So, in terms of the democratic environments and political culture, there are definitely threats there.
19:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that what AI's enabling is it's actually also going further than just the realm
19:33
[SPEAKER_01]: opportunities for engaging in meaningful work and meaningful relationships with other people.
19:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that AI is enabling that trajectory of destabilizing and corroding their kind of basic foundations for social, it's not even further than freedom, but social solidarity has been a road as well.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: To what extent, and maybe this is a false dichotomy, but I'm not offering anybody to see what you have to say about it.
20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: To what extent is it a cultural problem versus a government slash legal slash regulatory problem, or something along those lines?
20:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I could see someone saying, as I've said earlier, this is a shitty situation.
20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not caused by government, and it's not clear that government regulators, regulations, et cetera, is the appropriate solution.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like they're having a really large impact on our culture and
20:31
[SPEAKER_00]: you don't get to the kind of culture that you want through laws and regulations and that's the thing.
20:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You get it through soft power.
20:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You get it through local to non-local enforcement of social norms or something on those lines.
20:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's on the collective us and the collective us has been, I don't know, restaurant on its laurels.
20:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been lazy, we've said that, but I like scrolling.
20:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I like, I like, I like, I like tweeting.
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
20:59
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's a failure, it's not a failure of government.
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a failure of our culture to write to the moment.
21:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And the only thing that we have could really do is, I don't know, try to push different kinds of cultural norms as opposed to saying something about it's the market.
21:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's capitalism.
21:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something blah, blah, blah.
21:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think ultimately there's a serious cultural problem, particularly in the development culture of the tech industry.
21:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will say I think and this could be in terms of the fact that I'm from Europe and Europe and the US, I actually have faith in the role and importance of legislative change to shift cultural norms of acceptability.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So in terms of discrimination and sexual harassment once those things will continue to just find part of having fun.
21:48
[SPEAKER_01]: somebody says, that's still part of that because you are now on your side, but in your week, I know I do as you try and know.
21:56
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not okay.
21:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Those things are totally not okay.
22:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And the law play a really important role in shifting understandings of what is culturally acceptable.
22:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that the law actually does have an important role to play.
22:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also think I think just like you at the leadership, really matters.
22:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't
22:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a, a further reason for this, which I hope we'll talk about is the big tech government, mutual, what's packed really that's going on.
22:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It used to be called the industrial complex.
22:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't quite come up with a name for it, but it's a sort of digital tech industrial.
22:36
[SPEAKER_01]: They're taking industrial color, but it's not industrial.
22:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between what big tech.
22:47
[SPEAKER_01]: and what the nation state wants because, and this is what I think is really interesting.
22:51
[SPEAKER_01]: What's different from any other big pharma, big agrochemicals, big whatever you like, big tobacco, and what's different is the commodity that is the
23:04
[SPEAKER_01]: focus that excitement and hype is packaged as intelligent.
23:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that we're giving you pleasure in the form of tobacco or fauna that will solve your health problems and diseases.
23:17
[SPEAKER_01]: We're offering you intelligent.
23:21
[SPEAKER_01]: intelligence in a box and you plan out and if you have more intelligence than the next day or their next country my goodness you will outperform them any dimension because not is only that intelligence but it's intelligence that's generic in its application so whatever sector you're working whatever social sector whatever industrial sector economic sector in a military sector
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: by goodness you will prevail of your competitors.
23:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's incredibly seductive for government, as it is for private firms, and given the context in which the AI development trajectories is portrayed as a race, and the race is to be the most intelligent and whoever is the most intelligent will have the most
24:16
[SPEAKER_01]: power control and money, it's impossible for leaders to resist that, okay, we'll just keep letting you poor money and do whatever you like because nobody wants to hamper their own capacity for superiority and the political environment.
24:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So this, I think, really does make it different and makes it even harder to mobilize against that kind of logic.
24:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So if I have one issue is your more optimistic than I am that government can play a role in shaping the culture in the right kind of way.
24:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I suppose if I were again, if I were from Europe, I'd probably have that sort of view.
24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I think about France's outlong of sending work emails after hours or you don't have to read them or something like that.
25:04
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a bit so how French is that?
25:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They may as well have mandated everyone has to have a
25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, yeah, and that seems, oh, that's right.
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see a culture, certainly like America, where you're supposed to be available around the clock, what you reach a certain level of seniority with an organization, there's no such thing as your private time, not really.
25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no, I'm available.
25:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I can do a phone call.
25:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I can happen.
25:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I can respond to some emails at 10 o'clock at night or whatever.
25:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's that cultural expectation, and you can see in France said, no, that's just not who we're going to be.
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're just going to make that illegal.
25:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: which is amazing.
25:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't they cherish the ability for the collect to say no?
25:41
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't like that.
25:43
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't want it.
25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna put some lines in the sand and say as the French do, no.
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
25:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if there's anyone who's going to say no, it's going to be a threat and not just because of the word, I do see how that that could happen there, not here, not we can't agree with anything.
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: We'd have the opposite.
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: We'd have everyone has to respond to you.
26:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a requirement.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to work harder than anyone in China.
26:11
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the requirement, which is probably impossible.
26:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem reporting out is that, one reason why it's going to be really hard to get those kinds of things is not just because of the sort of, at least in America, the culture of keep government away, minimal government and pension, blah, blah, blah.
26:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But also that they're embedded with the artificial intelligence.
26:32
[SPEAKER_00]: They're still in Valley, more generally, because they are, because they're part and parcel of their national security posture.
26:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So it needs to be portrayed in that way, and you've got a very particular administration right now.
26:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So things are worse than they've ever been, but even the less infantile politicians that you've previously had.
26:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a low bar of your business.
26:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We're still willing to buy that narrative.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
27:02
[SPEAKER_01]: From the American head, that didn't mean to me.
27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we're aware where we know things don't look good.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, honestly, hey, I think it's not that's not great.
27:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you say a little bit more?
27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you really think that I don't know all this fight for intelligence?
27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it BS in your view?
27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we really, is there really no intelligence arms race?
27:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I certainly think that there, and in fact, the political economy, we try to demonstrate that there is a dynamic of fear or in which the AI races dominated by the US and China.
27:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a little trick like the race to them between the Soviets and the US back in that.
27:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's very similar in terms of that cold warm mentality to poor money because we're going to bloody well beat the Chinese.
27:51
[SPEAKER_01]: You know that logic, do you hear just everywhere?
27:53
[SPEAKER_01]: We can't put guardrails on this because the Chinese will do it.
27:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't do what Chinese will do it.
27:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's used as a kind of, it's not to do anything because heaven will be the Chinese will do it.
28:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this becomes the kind of
28:07
[SPEAKER_01]: mutually fulfilling circle of inferno, otherwise the Chinese would do it, and then we'll be completely suffigated.
28:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so what does this all leave us if you wave the magic wand and certain things changed, what's changing up or to put it slightly less dramatically,
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: If you could sort of direct people, push for this kind of thing, do what are we pushing for, what should we be fighting for?
28:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't.
28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I would like ideally to see some collective red lines being reached at the global level, particularly in relation to
28:44
[SPEAKER_01]: or tonless workings and that sort of thing, for example.
28:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can't even agree on that, because you have a classic prisoner's dilemma.
28:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
28:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And nobody wants to say, well, we won't use those because you might, and then I'm really in trouble, right?
28:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I will go really sharp.
28:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are some basic things I wish that we could collectively agree to at the global level.
29:02
[SPEAKER_01]: In the absence of global agreement, then I think that different communities need to decide what they want for themselves and stick to it.
29:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think Europe should have the courage of its conviction and stand up to Trump and say too bad if you don't like our digital tech regulation.
29:20
[SPEAKER_01]: This is having here and if you want to serve your products into the European market then they're going to have to comply with these requirements.
29:29
[SPEAKER_01]: and work for the GDPR, and it's a big market, the US tech firms don't want to miss out on access to that market.
29:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just wish that they would say, you know, like the French, no, believe.
29:41
[SPEAKER_01]: These are our guardrails, and if you don't like it too bad, you can sell elsewhere, but then they also need in Europe to stamp up investment in their own home-grown digital tech industry.
29:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where we're not seeing that level of commitment because of the sense in which there isn't enough money to go around.
30:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a kind of wanting to have your cape, but not have to invest in the cape that we need in order to sort of grow it.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I wonder if there's other cultural element here, which is that for what I gather, maybe this is anecdotal, but it's not just a money issue, it's a culture issue, because
30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: the free-wheeling wild west americans.
30:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we'll reckless but we'll reckless innovators.
30:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And Europeans tend to be a bit more conservative, a bit less, let's take over the world, kind of stuff.
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not just a lack of funds, it's a kind of there's the American entrepreneurial spirit, Silicon Valley spirit blah blah blah that I don't know, the of course is a startup community in London, but is it like the startup community in San Francisco
30:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so there is a really interesting, I think, cultural difference in terms of worshiping at the shrine of unfettered innovation.
30:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And they got the whole human mentality.
30:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
31:01
[SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of, they're kind of, they're kind of, they're kind of a rather little damaged, the collateral damage is associated with just industrial revolution and so on and so forth.
31:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's just the name of the game.
31:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And we want to be on the side of Twitter.
31:13
[SPEAKER_01]: and the legal agencies.
31:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that varies a much stronger sense of social solidarity and a focus on the community relational dimension.
31:24
[SPEAKER_01]: In Europe, it was a bit like don't say up to five o'clock.
31:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Or whatever it is.
31:28
[SPEAKER_01]: They were productive if we did, but that's what we want to be sitting around drinking wine and eating roasted vegetables.
31:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is a different attitude to rampant, unfettered innovation is not something that is considered sacred because some innovation is bad.
31:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And those things you probably couldn't say in the US because even if some innovation is bad, you wouldn't know
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: innovation is like the it's the thing.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is this is going to anecdotal my we have some friends who have spent a lot of time in Europe lived in Europe for many years they're America they live in Europe for many years and lots of traveling and they relatively recently said to my wife you're very or European about your work which is to say she doesn't take it that her work identifies.
32:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not her identity it's like
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: She goes to work.
32:16
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants to do a great job.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: She works really hard at work, but it's not her source of identity or source personal identity.
32:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not
32:23
[SPEAKER_00]: what her life revolves around, it's that's the thing that I do from not quite nine to five because it's America.
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a thing she does, but what's really important is the other stuff family and friends and blah, blah, and these friends of ours, and I've heard this a number of times that in America it's totally standard to ask a complete stranger or someone that you've just met at a party.
32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do you do?
32:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas in Europe, that's just not the kind of thing because that's not no one really gives a shit.
32:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not who defines you.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And so again, it's part of it is, which I think is healthy, by the way, right, to be like, yeah, I do that stuff so I can pay the bills, but
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I care about the theater or whatever the hell it is, I don't know.
33:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe this is more caricature than characterizing, but if it is, if at least broadly, I don't know, gestures towards the truth about, or a truth about difference of European culture versus American culture, we take our work to be part of our identity.
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we wanted with chief and have an impact in blah, blah, blah, blah, whereas I think Europeans are more like a chief and have an impact.
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that'd be nice, but that's like,
33:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope, however you say, re-re-zonedetra, or whatever the French would say, there's the most French I've used in any conversation that I had never taken French.
33:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I did the accent.
33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, so I feel like that's another part of a cultural difference where it's not just lack of money, it's not just lack of cultural difference around the altar of innovation.
33:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also, Europeans don't take their work as personally seriously as Americans do.
33:51
[SPEAKER_00]: especially the sort of wealthier Americans who are involved in the innovation game business generally.
33:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there certainly are a lot of cultural differences in terms of identity, although would they, I think European professionals do still identify very centrally with their professional work, but they not to the extent that I suspect Americans do.
34:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I've only got a very limited sample of Americans go for something like that.
34:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, all the time it doesn't matter,
34:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's much less laser fair in Europe, where people care about collective decision-making collective values and the features of their shared environment.
34:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Those things matter like the know email after five o'clock or whatever it is.
34:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there is a kind of
34:42
[SPEAKER_01]: deep-seated cultural and political recognition that those decisions really do need to be made collectively.
34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And having said that, I still think that's extraordinary.
34:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to say apathy, but I don't think it's true if the ordinary person, I don't think the ordinary person understands what's going on and what's at stake.
35:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's part of the mystique and the hype associated with AI particular because it does some pretty cool stuff right now the fact that it does pretty cool stuff doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make our lives.
35:15
[SPEAKER_01]: better and in what way.
35:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's where the big wedges and we've even seen a little bit of adapting the AI to text off bubble because of the wedge between adoption and hard-earned increases in productivity where you see AI adoption.
35:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a big gap between the capability of a technology to do cool stuff.
35:37
[SPEAKER_01]: and to turn that into genuine, real-world benefits, just not just productivity benefits, but welfare enhancements to people's lives that actually make our lives better.
35:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And more work-living than it was before AI.
35:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a deep, badly-laden question.
35:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And kind of wish people think about that question more than just getting excited about the technology.
36:01
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we want to live instead of, hey, here's a cool technology.
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this.
36:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's totally right.
36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a conversation recently.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: That actually would be a podcast episode that I don't know.
36:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it'll at least be for this one or not.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was with David Polgard of all tech as human.
36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: We were talking about how the tech industry has a totally impoverished conception of what constitutes well-being.
36:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Like either one they don't have a conception at all.
36:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
36:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Or they confuse it with short-term pleasure.
36:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
36:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I enjoyed scrolling for five minutes or whatever it is and that's what we'll be in consistent and whatever they enjoy.
36:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, time on site, remember years ago before AI hit the sun, some dude from Stanford was saying, the look, kids spend more time gaming than with their friends.
36:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm thinking, that's not an indication that the games are better than the kids.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me ask you one other question.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: One last question that I think pulls together some of the stuff that they've been talking about.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've talked a little bit about capitalism.
37:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We've touched touched on job loss for a moment.
37:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we've talked about well-being.
37:12
[SPEAKER_00]: What are your thoughts on, do you think that we're getting to a place where jobs are lost and actually there's this weird thing where this is also, you'd hope you by the likes of Silicon Valley.
37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't have to work anymore.
37:22
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll go off to new creative things.
37:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice jobs can be automated.
37:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That's assume that to the sake of our commitment.
37:27
[SPEAKER_01]: What does that mean for how we live and work as a community?
37:32
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm no longer employed.
37:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's say we automate education and research.
37:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have a job anymore as an actor.
37:41
[SPEAKER_01]: The question of how am I going to support myself and feed my family as well as how am I going to occupy myself and do something that I feel is worthwhile and meaningful.
37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just don't feel like the tech dudes have got an answer for that.
37:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I see they know that a popcorn and watch Netflix because that doesn't sound like my idea of eternal fun.
38:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Just for one weekend, not every day, every day you can blow your brains out.
38:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, what we're not doing is think, what kind of a world
38:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we want to live in?
38:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And how do we want to live in there?
38:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Those questions are just not being out.
38:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is a problem.
38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but there's a matter because productivity's increased and inflation's increased, that's long as, yeah, it's all a matter.
38:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
38:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like you've hit the neighborhood and that's exactly why I'm trouble.
38:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And but I don't know how, I don't think there are any quick fixes, but I guess the first places for people to be a little bit more alive to what is going on and for there to be
38:45
[SPEAKER_01]: and tend to seriously so that we might think about collectively acting in a way that really in fact consciously and intentionally make choices about the future trajectory of the way in which we wish to live and the way we wish to live with these digital technologies and those decisions are not being made collectively in any Western country that I can see Europe is doing a little bit of gesturing but they're running scared of Trump and
39:14
[SPEAKER_01]: moving and a positive direction.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Great.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, not positive, though.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much.
39:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Just but such a fun conversation and enlightening.
39:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been fun.
39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not the last that we were going to get, but it was fun anyway.
39:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks everyone for listening.
39:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoyed the episode.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to thank a few people who make this all possible.
39:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Delano Alexander, he's my producer.
39:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He does such an amazing job on everything that he touches.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Garrett Lane is the sound engineer.
39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: That's honestly, he's just, he's too good for me.
39:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Authamia Jairam has joined us recently.
39:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He's helping us find the best guests to bring on to this podcast.
39:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ashley Wasselenko helps us organize all this.
39:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Get people on the schedule, get people's bios, headshots, it really keeps the train on the track.
39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So thanks guys, really appreciate all the hard work you do.