Latest / Paths of Curiosity in an AI World / Q2 - Power, Law, and Civic Life: When Algorithms Govern Your Life with Ramesh Srinivasan, PhD, MS

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Q2 - Power, Law, and Civic Life: When Algorithms Govern Your Life with Ramesh Srinivasan, PhD, MS · Paths of Curiosity in an AI World

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Pass of Curiosity in an AI world where we explore tomorrow's careers through the lens of AI.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Every time you open TikTok or YouTube, a system you didn't choose has already decided what you're going to believe today.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Rames Srinavasin has spent 20 years traveling to nearly 70 countries asking people how we can build technology that actually reflects our humanity instead of just someone's profit.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get curious.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Ramasrinvasin is a professor at UCLA and the founder of Digital Cultural Lab.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: He has spent his career studying how algorithms encode cultural and racial bias and asking whose values actually get built into the platforms that billions of people use every day.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: He is the author of several books, including Who's Global Village and is a regular contributor to CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: He has also served as an advisor to the White House and the European Union on how to build a digital future that is more equitable and human-centered.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Srinivasan, thank you so much for joining us today.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very happy to join you and thanks for putting this podcast together.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: So to start off, how would you describe what you do to your student self?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have quite a few students every quarter.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right now I have two courses with maybe 30 to 40 students in each.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in a way, I think of myself as a lifelong student because I'm constantly exploring and being exposed to ideas, possibilities, new ways of thinking about, in my case, technology and its relationship to the planet.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess I would describe myself as a lifelong learner, someone who's really curious.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I've learned a great deal in my own case, my own strange case, not through merely being in universities, but really by working with different communities around the world.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've worked in a couple dozen countries.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've been to nearly 80 countries.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And learning from people and places as they are, rather than based on my own worldview, has been deeply illuminating to me.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we're all students at all times, regardless of all these ridiculous and sometimes over-the-top titles.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you described yourself as a student.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Can you walk us from where you were as a student to where you are now?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Where I was as a student, so in my own case, I'll try to say this quickly.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was in high school, I was very, very interested in the humanities, the arts, the sciences, like almost everything.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't very good at chemistry.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I never felt like I was precise enough to measure things and gosh, put together and something might explode in my face.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: When I went to college, I went to Stanford in the late 90s, and I would say a huge influence on me was being a college radio DJ.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was a musician, very into the arts and music, and I think that gave me something of an activist consciousness because I was very influenced by like both hip-hop and punk culture.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm also not only a DJ in bands and things like that.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that sort of framed the way I looked at almost everything.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at anything I would study in terms of questions of who does or doesn't have voice.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at things more in an imaginary way, not imaginary meaning not real, but what is possible, what could be possible, rather than simply being a cynic or a critic.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I had a healthy skepticism of big corporate power, and that was very inculcated in me at a young age.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So this is all happening while I'm studying engineering at Stanford in the late 90s, where Silicon Valley wasn't as sort of brazen, I would say, in its sort of shameless peddling of, I would say, increasingly anti-human and anti-planet views.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, I didn't really feel comfortable simply taking all of my intellectual capacity and curiosity simply to be, you know, a middle manager at Google or what have you.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: No offense.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: I have two two of those two folks in those companies.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have quite a few friends there, and they're brilliant and they're amazing.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there are some amazing things that some of these companies have created.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I was I've I've always been interested in this bigger question that I think maybe all of us can ask, which is like, what is it all for?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Including technology.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what is what is X, Y, or Z for?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Who does it serve?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: What else made possible?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Those questions were with me in a less sort of explicit way when I was 18 years old, but had a huge influence on me.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because while I was taking engineering courses, which my parents kind of made to do engineering, I'm glad though.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's really great that I have that knowledge, you know, the technical knowledge.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: It gives me credibility these days as a publicly engaged scholar, um, and a writer and a journalist, and I think an activist and a storyteller and a podcaster and all these things.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say that, you know, taking other classes, I was taking classes in Complet and Anthropology and sociology and geography and economics, you know, I mean, almost everything and anything.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that would influence me.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I finished college, I worked at a startup out of the University of Amsterdam.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I moved thousands of miles away.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was working at a startup around AI, actually.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was completely different than this AI.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't all built on surveillance and the reduction of life to data.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Those are major changes that we're sitting through right now.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um so as I worked, you know, living in Amsterdam and working in an AI company, all these different reference points, and it was a startup too.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in the meantime, I was moonlighting as a Pyro Radio DJ and a college radio DJ into art.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So this had a huge influence on me.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the thing I would just say is remember who we are.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: We should always and cherish and connect to who we are as human beings, independent of all these titles, like I mentioned earlier, independent of all these shallow and flattened notions of identity, and recognize that as we are is always changing based on what we're exposed to and what we're experiencing.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Even the person that you're speaking to right now, Acadia, is different than who I was on some level two hours ago, when I was like grumpier and drinking coffee to try to wake myself up.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the biggest, I don't know if it's advice you're at you want me to state.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of like my the lesson I'm I learned and continue to learn, and I'm trying to always learn is to be true to who you are as a human being, first and foremost.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And forget about the rest.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Start with that.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's what matters.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So also I practice meditation sitting for about 30 minutes earlier today, and that also clears my head.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And these are all very helpful and useful things people can do because so many of us feel anxious and overwhelmed with information.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: We don't feel like we have power, you know, as we're sitting in a nation right now governed by an administration that I think the vast majority of us feel do not represent what we're all about.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, you did everything.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: While you were exploring, you know, having an engineering degree, but also drawn to arts and humanities.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was there one thing you wish someone had told you before you committed to a particular path?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm a big fan of liberal arts university schools.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Look, I know that sometimes it's fun to make fun of people who are a little over the top who you probably have friends.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I have friends who are at Oberlin and Wesleyan and Reed College and Pitzer and this and that.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I find that a lot of my friends, I have a lot of good friends who studied in art schools and liberal arts schools.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I went to Stanford, as I mentioned, and I feel they had they developed some of that, those critical chops of a humanistic approach toward inquiry.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So remember, when we say humanistic, I don't mean you have to major in the humanities.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean you have to be an English major.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: It means you are exploring and looking at everything from the sciences to technology to economics from a human-centered perspective, which is asking and answering big questions, you know, that people like Dr.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Cornell West, who joined our podcast, Utopias, has asked me, which is like, what does it mean to be human?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be alive?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that that is what guided me in a very uh incipient way, because I don't really feel like I was quite explicit like about these questions.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I think I was checking in with my heart uh and my spirit the whole time.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, like everybody, I've stumbled, I've fallen into traps, I've fallen into pits, I've had my ups, I've had my downs, but but I feel like that has been my guide along my own path.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, my own path being one of trying to learn, trying to be open, trying to look for and toward a world where quite honestly, my own purpose is less, has very little to do with academia.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's very deeply human, it's very spiritual, I would say.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Buddhist myself, so that also influences me, which is I truly wish and I will do everything I can in my own limited way, because I'm not powerful or that important, to make these digital technologies work for all beings rather than place the extremely limited number of people who are holding the reins of tech, either as investors or executives, which is representative of maybe one fiftieth of 1% of the global population, rather than create these schisms and you're either this or that.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't want an amplification of a feudal direction that technology is taking.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want these digital technologies that are not worth a penny without our data to leave us all feeling anxious, like we're not going to get jobs, that they're gonna destroy the only planet where we've known life to be, to live upon.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very personal and moral and spiritual calling for me.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not a righteousness, because it's just that our world and our we human beings and our planet are sacred and very powerful and very I've learned so much from all sorts of folks, including many, vast majority of who never went to college.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not even because like college college is great, but it's like many people don't even have that opportunity.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: So just encourage everybody and anybody to keep their eyes open and explore and be curious and look widely, look beyond, look in between.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Do not give into the polar polarization of cancel culture.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Do not give in things where you're like, I'm you're the you look like this, or you talk with this accent, so I'm just gonna dehumanize you.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is a big trap.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we can do so, so, so much better.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I personally am very dedicated to being in dialogue and support of any and all uh movements and figures who stand for that.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: When I was not in a very significant way, but when I was involved with Senator Sanders' 2020 campaign, part of that campaign because I believed in it truly.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the people in the US Congress that I try to talk to or influence are also similar, or having been a friend, though I'm not actively working with them now of the young Turks for over a decade for that reason.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Even though they rhetorically approach the world a little different, you know, kind of more yelling and all this.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I know that all online want that to not become something that enters our hearts so we no longer even treat others with dignity and respect.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think that is so wonderful.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: Our world could definitely use a more human view on everything.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And to do, I'll just say this one thing.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I just encourage anyone and everyone who's like checking this podcast out, just go study abroad.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great thing to do.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do independent research so you can actually explore things more deeply.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And often universities have money, even these days, with the attacks on universities by the Trump administration.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of universities have the money to fund independent research and things like that.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: But in my case, what blew my mind and opened me up was moving to Amsterdam, traveling around in India when I was like 20 years old.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then the big thing that changed my life is I had gotten into MIT for graduate school.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I had this job in Amsterdam that I mentioned.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: I traveled all the way from Amsterdam to Western China, backpacking with cassette tapes and physical film for six months almost.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then I traveling on the Silk Road, and that just changed blew my mind.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And people don't have to do that.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: But go somewhere new, be open to what happens, recognize that things just happen, and you don't have to force things to be.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe move away from the world being directed to you by your phones toward a more expansive worldview that has many different kinds of flows of information, including ones that are digitally mediated.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't but not have this be the start and end of your experience.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because well, if you see different cultures and you try to learn about them, you can be more accepting of them as well.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because the thing is, is I it's it's very well known now.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um these digital platforms are corporate and proprietary, and they're interested in ordering our worlds, ordering our experiencing, constructing a sense of desire, influencing our consumption, in many cases, overwhelming our dopamine, cortisol, and adrenaline receptors.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that so they're not particularly like representative of ways of experiencing reality that are, I mean, they're one way of experiencing reality, but they're reality that's being pushed forward algorithmically and computationally by these private corporations for their own benefit and not necessarily ours.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's my next question.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Say I'm a student scrolling TikTok right now, and I think the algorithm just knows what I like.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that wrong?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And how does a platform that claimed to be neutral end up showing different things based on race, class, or where we grew up?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, there's no such thing as neutral.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, anything, uh anything and everything is conditioned based on how we choose to see the world, or how a technology quote unquote chooses, or its designer, or the engineer who builds a learning algorithm, uh chooses to order information.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no such thing as neutral.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm obviously biased, just like you are, in terms of the questions you're asking, or how I'm choosing to answer that.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make us bad or problematic.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: It just means we're humans who are conditioned based on our our experiences.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: In Buddhism, we say causes and conditions.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is tied to causes and conditions, you know.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, okay.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: So given that, I think the question is not about saying that it's all doom and gloom when you scroll TikTok.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Many of my students, I know TikTok's algorithm has changed what it's making visible, especially since Larry Ellison has become involved with it, a very close friend again of Trump and very interested in a certain kind of censorship, no question about it.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of my students were able to be exposed to the genocide in Gaza, for example, uh, by looking at TikTok.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't seeing it on other platforms, especially not Twitter.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so we should just understand these platforms for what they are.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're conditioned and biased ways of experiencing the world.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, they will influence our desires, what we like, what we don't like.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: But there's lots of different forces that influence what we like, what we want, what we consume, what we think, how we feel.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Those are conditioned by different forces, whether it's who I speak to or what I see, in this case, with what I see.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just caution us to not assume that we like something and TikTok fills it or TikTok creates what we like.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's more the latter.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: But just to recognize that even our desires and fears and anxieties and thoughts are always conditioned based on how we experience information and the in this case the technologies by which we experience information.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you've studied this across nearly 70 countries.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: If a student here compares their feed to a student in a different country, are they living in the same reality?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, and that's also true if you a student in this country is sitting next to a student in this country.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, let me just let me just get to that.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I have uh traveled to over 70 countries.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've only worked in you know a couple dozen.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in and and and when I say work, I mean, you know, maybe a brief meeting or an interview or even participating in a conference, which is not really like working or doing field work in a country.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Critically important.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't write about people, I'm not like an anthropologist who thinks I can describe people better than they can themselves, as much as I write about how different visions and possibilities for people and places to transform and influence what technology is.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to your question, say you and I were both at UCLA where I'm a professor, um, and we're sitting next to one another.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: We could both be on TikTok, we could both be on acts slash Twitter, we could both be on Blue Sky, and we could be presented with completely non-overlapping worlds.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem at scale, is that you can't really have a democracy unless you have the capacity to have two things.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: One, the capacity to have dialogue, and that's very difficult to have any deep dialogue, let alone arguments or debates in any respectful way on social media.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other is you have to have some common basis of reality.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if I'm being presented with completely different versions of reality, in fact, ones that contradict one another, and I'm sitting right next to someone else, and we're both on the same platform, and maybe we're very demographically similar to the same age, same gender, blah, blah, blah.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: It still could mean that we have no overlaps.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, your reality is completely different than my reality, even though I'm sitting right next to you.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to make the point, this is not what the internet was supposed to be about.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is an argument I was raising in my first book, which is called Who's Global Village?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've read in three.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: The second one was co-authored with my friend Adam Fish.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, when we are no longer having any common basis of reality, and these digital technologies are essentially fragmenting us, algorithmically fragmenting us, then we are no longer able to use the incredible capacities of the internet to, in theory, publish anyone's voice.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we know it's not as simple as that, and make everyone's voice accessible.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: We that that whole dream is gone because of these platforms, right?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Platformization actually destroys the actual original dream of the internet to be a place that overcame, overcomes boundaries and borders and so on.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: But we've also known long before you know big tech and big tech platforms kind of took over our lives, we've also known for a long time that those creating content, even editing Wikipedia, you know, we love, I love Wikipedia, tend to be mainly male, mainly from the global north, mainly, you know, Caucasian.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a basis for an identitarian cancellation or a flattening of who these folks are, but just a recognition that we all have our worldviews conditioned based on who or what we are.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the internet's dream of everyone's voice equally mattering, and everyone's voice being expressed based on how the truth of their own voice, which could be a different way of thinking about information or knowledge, different way of thinking about a map, different way of thinking about environmental issues, a thinking way of thinking about religion.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that dream has not only not come to be, we've now dramatically headed in the opposite direction, which is why we see nativism, neofascism, neo-authoritarianism, xenophobia increasingly taking root on the level of the state.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think I hope it's just the last gasp for these folks.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But um that's why we see this emerging in many parts of the world, not just in the US.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: In India, now this is heartbreaking to me in some places in South America.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, in other places in the world too, and some parts of Europe as well.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why we see this kind of, you know, xenophobic immigrants thing, blah, blah, blah.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is just a retrenched, nativist, ignorant response to the and I have compassion for people who have these views, but I I recognize that they have these views because they are conditioned to see the world in ways that are not overlapping with others.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: You've sat with communities in Afghanistan, Egypt, and rural India and asked what they want from technology.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: What did they say that Silicon Valley would never expect?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if Silicon Valley expects it or not, or cares about it or not, but most people just want to live a life of basic dignity.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and I think it's there's also like something to like Maslow, Abraham Maslow, and hierarchies of needs.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of people um, as we saw with the you know, election and the incredible campaign of Zoran Mamdani in New York City, people want to be able to afford the basics so they can live a life of dignity.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Most people are interested in their own families, most people are interested in being able to, again, have housing, healthcare, food, you know, basic income, basic, you know, the dignity of work.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like these are what people want, everyday people want here and in Kenya and in I was just in Ghana, everywhere.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're actually much more similar in that on that level.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a basic universalism or humanism to wanting to live a life of dignity.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you know, also feeling like you can speak and share your opinion and learn from others in a fairly free way that is kind of a core core to a demo democracy, that also matters.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, for example, in my time in Egypt, I was living uh in Cairo 2011, 2012, 2013, in the middle of the Arab Revolutions, working with Al Jazeera at that time and stuff.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they the mot the motto for the you know Tahir Square Revolution was bread, freedom, and social justice.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: In that order.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Bread.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Bread was first.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I wrote quite extensively about the price of petrol, the price, which is a big issue right now as we record this because of the you know illegal, immoral attack on Iran.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's you know, there's there's um people are pretty similar, right?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like we, you you've got to figure out how you're gonna live in this world.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is so impactful.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, especially, and this is an important point.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is especially because these technologies have the capacity to create immense amounts of wealth, uh, partly because they replace what we do as human beings.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: These technologies, in this case, I'm talking about generative AI systems, right?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: But none of them would be worth a penny without our data, and none of it would be worth anything without living on top of an internet that U.S.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: taxpayers paid for.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yet and using our roads, like in the case of like, you know, these Amazon Prime vehicles, you know, etc., right?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uber, all of it.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't get paid anything for it.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a single country right now in the entire world where people get paid for their data.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Not one.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was just in Ghana like begging ministers of parliament to try to do that.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: I said, hey, you all in Ghana, which is Ghana's an amazing country, you all can lead the world.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: You all can lead the world, you know?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: We just need someone to lead.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Lead with dignity, lead with care, lead with compassion, you know, and um so that's the beta and switch.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're using our roads, not paying for it, people aren't paying taxes.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is this is ridiculous and nonsensical.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also because uh in many parts of the world, uh neoliberalism crushed the possibility of the state providing a check and a balance to privatized corporate power.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's been true.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's true across many industries, military industrial complex, finance, uh, healthcare, uh obviously fossil fuels, etc.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, big tech is big part is a big part of all this because here's a big thing to mention big tech's not just tech.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Big tech has taken over everything.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Military industrial complex is big tech.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's Palantir, it's Project Maven, it's you know, the Lavender system trained on dead gazins, you know.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: So uh tech has become a little like a you kind of a little gremlin that took over everything and anything.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the biggest taxi driver company is a tech comp tech company who obliterated taxi unionized taxi drivers fighting for living wages.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I know you've some of your guests have spoken with you about this.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I I just want to really remind us that uh these technologies, which are only worth anything because of all of us, have to support all of us.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's been throughout history, you know, proclamations by folk folks like John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, that advancing automating technology should mean that we would only work 15 hours a week.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday, we saw Sam Altman propose a four-day work week, and it was two days ago, actually.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that's kind of maybe cover for him now being investigated with some new investigations occurring, or open AI, that is.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um but gosh, there's so much we can do now to restore dignity and make this digital world sure work great for these companies, but not at the cost of the rest of us.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: How about that?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you've shaped AI policy for President Biden, the European Union, and governments across four continents.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: You just mentioned Ghana.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: How did your conversation with different people influence how you approached your own work or policy recommendations?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Great question.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for for me, you know, if uh I mean I would say the the congressmen in uh, you know, we've seen the U.S.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Congress do nothing when it came to social media, just photo ops, and we're looking at the same dynamic repeating itself.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: We do not want AI to go down the same path as social media, which is unregulated and divisive and polarizing, and also bad for people's mental health and loneliness and so on, right?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: It social media is great in some limited ways, but it shouldn't be become our social lives, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I would say Congressman Ro Kana, I think is very smart on these issues.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's someone I've been talking to for several years, often his staff as well.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I would just say, you know, we have to think about it in.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: I often think about policy in three around three levers.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Transparency.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: We should know what's being collected about us, by whom, how it's being used.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: We should have the right of opting surveillance and data collection as the default rather than the converse of that, which is what's happening.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Accountability, right?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Jobs, economic livelihoods, environmental issues, right?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: The environmental issues tied to generative AI are really not discussed.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the environmental issues are affordability issues.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the second accountability, and third, governance.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: We stakeholders should have power over designing these technologies in lots of ways, and we should be able to audit these technologies.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of jobs in the future that could be created.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: I can think of a dozen just off the top of my head.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not just me.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you ask some of my friends uh who are colleagues and scholars, and even public figures, like, you know, um, someone who's joined our podcast a couple times is Andrew Yang, who ran for president four years ago, a friend of mine.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: He thinks a lot about these issues as well, you know, from his own vantage point.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we can identify we can identify a lot of new jobs, jobs of the future.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: We can get to what you know, Darren Asamolu, the great MIT economist who just won the Nobel Prize friend and colleague of mine and ours, he argues that there's a difference between AI and technology that augments, that expands, and builds on human capacity, even human creativity, versus technologies that copy and mimic us to replace us.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's qualitatively like kind of the opposite of one another.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we could just go with the former rather than the latter.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, in the history of tech and the history of the internet, a lot of the great, you know, kind of uh writers, thinkers, inventors, you know, Doug Engelbart, uh Jay JCR Lickleiter, Alan Kay, who is still alive, other folks, they all were constantly extolling the power of digital technology to expand what we already do rather than replace us.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Len Kleinrock, who basically is the inventor of the internet, my colleague at UCLA, who's you know probably 80 plus years old, he is he's all about that too.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: So uh why don't we do that?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: So in this series, we've covered how algorithms can control wages and surveillance.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now you're saying they control what we believe.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the same problem?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very interesting question.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean they're they're they're similar.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the ability, the ways in which algorithms are able to they so basically the way a lot of algorithms work is they used patterns, data, patterns in data.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even mean history here, I mean just past patterns in data to predict and model and therefore construct the future, but they do it invisibly and they do it under you know the hood.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: So basically you have no idea how the world's being ordered, right?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people, I always say this, are directly, explicitly, intimately interacting with algorithmic systems, even if they're never in front of a single phone or computer screen.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because you go to the bank, you ask for a loan, how is that loan determined computationally?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a big problem.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: If patterns, especially dominant patterns, become the basis of governing and exposing and influencing one's life, that's a big issue.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, what we do know is that a lot of the algorithms that influence loneliness and mental health and social media are basically algorithms optimized for one major dependent variable, which is getting and keeping your attention no matter what.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's somewhat different than an algorithm that determines wages, that influences, for example, a courtroom system that makes a decision around the likelihood someone will commit a future crime and turns out to be incredibly racist.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those are probably examples you've covered in previous episodes.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think that, uh, but I think that algorithms that are driving content to you based on what will capture and grab your dopamine, you can imagine if we're all like dopamines out and we're all like, you know, then it will just mean we're kind of living like headless chickens without even knowing who one another are.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: So so algorithms are not the boogeyman.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: I want to also really emphasize this.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: An algorithm is just a way of ordering information.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: I always explain it in my classes or my students know this, write some piece of code that alphabetizes our last names.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's not inherently offensive, and as long as no one thinks of that as offensive.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: So an algorithm is this recipe or set of rules applied to a body of data.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: But if those algorithms are written by and for a few folks with the goal of just constantly trapping us or gathering our data or influencing our desire, influencing our beliefs, then you can imagine the devastating consequences that has for democracy or any sort of basic economic dignity.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we've seen, you know, Facebook, for example,'s algorithms directly complicit in multiple genocides.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Quite a lot of things can change.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, there's so much we can do right now.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think first of all, uh everyone should be have a right to know what's being collected about them by whom.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: They should have the opting out of data collection be the default.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think data brokers should be banned in this country.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people don't know this, but you know, you sure it's one thing for my data to be pulled from Instagram, but it's another thing for that to be aggregated with my credit card data.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Almost everything we do leaves what we call digital footprints or data traces, right?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that that data should not be aggregated.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there are these companies called data brokers that are it's a multi, I think, billion-dollar business that is in the business of selling people's data in an aggregated way.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's that should not be there.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Data retention, data, you know, when you're about you, you know, when you're 18 should not be available to third parties unless you deem it to be worthy of being accessible, say, in a couple years or even in five years, right?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, if data about you when you're 18 is available to third parties, whether it's the police or potential employers when you're 30, that seems very unjust and very unfair because our lives always change.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why should we be monitored?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: No one consented to this.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was no vote for any of this.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: So these are some of the basic things.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: We have to deal with the economics of these things because this data economy is basically pulling us apart and adding more economic insecurity to our lives.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why the affordability issues that you know folks like uh Mayor Mamdani and others have highlighted are very, very important to deal with.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you can think about ways to deal with the economic issues.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are lots of ways.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can pay people for their data, you can give us equity in these companies.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: If they're using our data, shouldn't we own some small part of these companies?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just some questions to ask.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think the environmental issues are massive as well here.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: The environmental issues need to be explicit.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: People need to understand that we are competing with data centers for our utility costs.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no question about it.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: When the president in his recent State of the Union, he acknowledged this issue in his own strange way, but he basically said, I'm going to make the data centers create their own energy.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not really sure if someone in rural Ohio or just here in the San Gabriel Valley near where I live, they're already very angry about data centers being there.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to stop them.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: You think they also want a fossil fuel fuel plant there to power the data for those companies?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the president keeps saying clean, beautiful coal, those are his words, not mine, are is what's going to power our AI.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm wondering what's the AI for?
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: Who is it for?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: What is it creating?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: For whom?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just uh should life be expressed by numbers?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's ask that question too.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is intelligence the same as correlation?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's another question.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I got lots of questions.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem is there's an absence of democratic governance and accountability tied to these technologies.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: When and we push that through and force that through, then everything's going to change so that these companies can continue to be lucrative, but not in the zero-sum way.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, what should this person do right now to create that more equitable world where it can support basic human dignity?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think first and foremost, try to live a life where treatures treats yourself and others with dignity independent of these technologies.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: Story should never be about technology.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, who who cares about technology?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about life and what life should be like, right?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I always am just kind of wondering why everyone foregrounds technology, including people, by the way, who are very well known as kind of quote unquote critics of technology.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like I'm sure you're familiar with Tristan Harris, the guy from um The Social Dilemma.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he makes all the problems with technology an apocalypse.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just like, uh why do we have to make it an apocalypse?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just stop it and transform it right now.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not sure if you the more and more we believe and buy into apocalyptic scenarios, Terminator, this, that, and the other.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, you maybe shouldn't even have kids, the world is aft this, that, and the other.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: The more it makes us paralyzed and unable to act.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: But give me a break.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: These this AI story is like less than five years old.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: The social media story is 10 to 15 years old.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us, including you, are older than that age.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there's no there's no reason we have to make this a Leviathan.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we just need to figure out the levers of power to transform these things.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just say to your question, live a life of dignity, whatever that means.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Treat others with dignity, engage with technology, with that as your moral compass, as your North Star.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: These are, by the way, not great pieces of advice that I always follow.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, these are pieces of advice I'm giving to myself.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm no better or worse.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also not worse, I hope, but I'm no better.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, we're all just human beings living in one incarnation on this planet.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: How do we wish for life to be?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let's ask and answer that question in our own hearts, and then we can engage, we can sandbox with technology accordingly.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: So finally, do you have any books or podcasts you'd point a student towards if they want to go deeper?
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we have the Utopias podcast.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: You I'm sure you're familiar with it.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: We've had so many cool guests on there.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a number of monks join us, including monks very close to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: I brought female monks on there.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've brought iconic female punk rock feminist icons onto the podcast like Kathleen Hannah.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working on, I've had anthropologists, philosophers, but people who know how to talk to a wider public.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've brought members of Congress on the podcast.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great way we're trying to reach people.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's called utopias, not because you to uh a utopia or utopias are a real thing, but that we it's more about recognizing we can move beyond cancel culture and kind of conceive of new horizons, new possibilities, fight for those, design those, imagine those, identify those in our own lives, not give in to the cynicism trap, not give in to you know, uh the goals of this administration is to which is to make us feel deflated and to lose hope.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, so that so that podcast is, you know, I encourage everybody to please check us out.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're on all the platforms.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: We also have a free version on YouTube.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have any ads still, we're managing to avoid that.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: We need everybody's support because we're super non-commercial and a labor of love, and we're not trying to be all like hip and fancy, you know, in the way we approach things.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to be like real, genuine, sincere, what you were asking me about.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's one way.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've written in several books.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: People can check uh my workout uh via my website, Ramesh Srinivasan.org.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can share the link.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have um my I've written three books that touch on a lot of these issues.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: On my website, is I'm constantly writing uh articles or involved in articles.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: I work a lot with journalists.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: I love journalists.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think journalists are so, so, so important more than ever now, especially with threats on journalism tied to big tech, but also threats of AI replacing journalists.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, via my website, you could Google me, etc.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it's really not about me.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's just I'm just one small voice that's trying to uh shine a small light on new horizons, new possibilities, new imaginaries, uh new ways of knowing, new ways of being.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that is really those voices are just constantly circulating on our podcast as well.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we would love for you all to share this.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, our dedication and devotion is first and foremost to our students in the U across the UC system, knowing fully well that as professors, we are also students, like we started our interview discussing.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm constantly learning from my students.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: They know tons of things I don't know.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like I would just say like, let's just all build together.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a breath of fresh air and uh recognize the impermanence and the transient nature of many crises that we face, and let's overcome them together.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have a great opportunity.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: And life is beautiful beyond these crises too.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: We can always remember that.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And there's lots of ways to remind ourselves of that.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I just can go outside and look at the sun, and that helps, you know.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Take 21 breaths in and out really helps.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: Just things like that.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Dr.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Srinivasan, thank you so much for joining us today.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed our conversation.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: I loved it too, and thank you so much for.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Reaching out to me and um and thank you for thank you for making all of this happen.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: This has been Paths of Curiosity in an AI world, exploring careers through the lens of AI.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Until then, stay curious.