Technology: Liberator or Oppressor

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello good evening welcome uh I'm tamandra Hartness I'm pleased to be your host for this evening's open Talk uh which is part of the science Museum's open Talk Series so thank you for joining us online the focus of this evening's discussion is technology uh the impact it's going to have on the economy on our social structures even on our own state of mind because emerging Technologies perhaps if you like including the one we're using this evening to talk to each other have influenced the way that uh human society and the economy and even the way we see ourselves is changing and will continue to change it and one thing we particularly want to look at tonight is the way that it's influencing inequality or division in society is the way that technology is taking over work going to contribute to a wealth Gap is it going to contribute to polarizing in politics is it going to divide us or has it got the potential to bring us together as you might say it's doing for us this evening uh before I go on I would just like to say if you want to use captions to watch this evening's discussion you can use the CC button below the screen because live captions will be provided by stage text so with the CC button will give you captions if you want to watch them so in this virtual event as part of the science Museum's open Talk series we have a panel of experts journalist economists and technologists to come together and discuss how digital technologies will affect uh that society and the economy and what we might do about the Technologies and their governance in order to promote social cohesion equality and democracy so first of all I'm going to introduce tonight's speakers then I will have a little in conversation with each of them separately and then they will come together for a panel discussion and we have a couple of questions sent in by uh some of you which I will put to them as part of that so let me introduce them one by one first of all Martin Bryant warm welcome to Martin Martin is the founder of the technology and media consultancy big revolution uh I like that no no lack of scale and ambition there also the author of the UK newsletter precede now and the Ed that's seed as in the seed that you'd plant but I like what you did there with the with the words and editor of the social media industry newsletter geek out so welcome Martin then we have Nick cernic uh Nick is a writer and academic he's the author of the two seminal books post-capitalism and a world without work which might give you some hint as where his thinking goes with uh with technology also senior lecturer in digital economy at King's College London and finally Joanne McNeil who is a writer and editor and an art critic and the author of lurking how a person became a user which I'm I'm fascinated to hear more about so uh so I'm going to start off just by having a little individual chat to each of them starting as I started introductions with Martin so thanks for joining us Martin uh I've got a few questions to to get us started off uh one thing is let's go straight in on the question of politics because digital technology is playing an Ever greater role in politics uh you could just say that in one way we do a lot of our politics stay through digital technology but it's also been used in ways that we might be less happy about uh not only owners even especially in this country but certainly in other countries and perhaps even by some states to try and influence politics in other states and this is something that's quite hard for individual governance governments to keep control over so are the big tech companies now a more important political influence than politicians it can certainly feel like that can't it can sometimes feel like they're the police we need especially when you've got governments elected governments in power actually doing the work of putting that in misinformation out there um in that case you've got uh you've got to say you've got Facebook Etc actually having to do the work of cleaning up and they're not doing that because they care about democracy as an organization although they obviously employ people who very much do care about democracy um they're doing it for business reasons um we've only uh had to see uh Twitter recently and uh the uh the mess Elon Musk has made there as he took over and uh how that really uh scared advertisers so you need a clear uh clean platform uh with as little uh misinformation on there as possible to keep advertisers happy and users want that as well they don't want um loads of uh trash flying around there so and you know a lot of that trash comes from politicians suddenly these days and I think we're going to see this role continuing for quite some time except for where regulation steps in to stop that and sadly when it depends where you look you know we've got them in the UK the Online safety bill which looks to regulate social media to an extent but but in the states uh you have to look at um a couple of uh bills coming through in Texas and Florida that actually uh essentially bans social platforms from policing um certainly policing uh what could be viewed as political opinions so uh there's this whole thing in the states uh this concern that uh social media companies are all left-wing and they're all uh Banning right-wingers and it's not actually true if you look at the detail but uh certainly uh it's easy for people to draw that conclusion and uh so if they were basically uh legislated out of uh moderating quite so much I I hate to think what the platforms would be like if it'd be pretty horrible but um we might get to that point so uh so watch this space I suppose so do you think it's a positive thing that you could say that large tech companies are becoming quite interventionist in shaping at least the tone and the mood if not the content of political discussion I mean it's it's useful in one way but it's also not very it doesn't make me feel very comfortable because uh you know it it it really speaks to a democratic deficit where um people feel they're not being represented um uh anymore uh and this is right across a political Spectrum uh I think I think people would probably agree that um they can see that uh but um yeah it speaks to a bit of a problem where um companies businesses corporations are having to uh keep things clean and keep things from getting too out of hand because the politicians can't do it themselves um and as a extension to that because the the politicians are generally elected um the people themselves can't do it so uh yeah it's not a sustainable situation it's it's quite a worrying one interesting well I think we'll come back to that with with the other two later on I wanted to ask you particularly about the rise of deep fake technology the ability to create audio recordings or even videos in which one person appears to be saying or doing things when in fact that person wasn't doing them but their likeness has been grafted on I suppose what do you think is the threat of that in the kind of political discourse for example we've just been discussing well it's clearly oh um we already have but here's the thing we already have people living their own realities um which aren't necessarily real you know the Q Anon for example is a great example of a shared delusion uh a shared illusion of how the world Works um and uh the people who follow that believe um a whole set of things as our completely detached from reality but you see certain politicians in the states playing to that because they know they can get votes from it um Donald Trump for example been playing into that and many others as well um and uh so so on one hand we don't need deep fakes to create these kind of um detached sets of realities uh really it's a sense that um we used to rely on mass media and that gave us a shared reality um it wasn't necessarily reality but it gave us a shared view of the world it gave us a share a shared Viewpoint from from which to at least base our our experiences and our our lives around um that we could all kind of agree on uh to it to a to an extent um what the internet has done is basically allowed us to uh go off in all in all our own directions and uh dig our own tunnels through the information and uh deep fake certainly uh adds to that I mean just this week uh Microsoft announced um something called Vol e which can recreate a voice from just a three second snippet of audio uh and you could basically get a voice to say anything and it can recreate uh the sound quality of uh where they were when they said it uh and that kind of thing so uh so these tools are getting better all the time um I think sometimes we overstate how good deep face can be there was a a really convincing Tom Cruise deep fake a while back but that required a lot of effort to get right it's not something that you could just do at home it's even required a Tom Cruise impersonator to be part of it so uh so yeah the technology is getting better definitely something to worry about but um we don't need deep fakes we're already down that hole I mean it's been suggested that there's something in the very nature of interacting on social media which tends to polarize arguments and even people who face to face in a room might agree on a lot of things and might be able to have a very civil disagreement on the things that they disagreed about and go away still liking respecting each other as soon as they're on social media they become very attached to their own identities and group loyalties and become more and more polarized is is that something that you worry about is it is it an inevitable part of interacting in this way through technology it doesn't have to be it's just that uh technology so the way social media has developed has been to adminant to emphasize numbers to emphasize you know getting you know gaming the algorithms so you're seeing more and uh certainly um particularly on Twitter elsewhere as well uh the way to do that is to be inflammatory and to um to kind of dunk on other people and start arguments and certainly uh as soon as if you're posting something your opinion and then somebody comes with a completely opposing opinion and uh challenges your thought your immediate thought is to go on the defensive and so it it it's it it's built into the incentives are there um in terms of the way the um platforms reward engagement uh the incentives are there to just become increasingly inflammatory to each other um it was interesting Washington Post piece uh yesterday about the idea of bridging algorithms which could be used to promote content that um people can agree on or at least uh agree to an extent on rather than um things that polarize people because uh if you if you just game it for engagement then you're going to to get that um certainly we've seen um things like uh uh Instagram uh giving you the option to switch off likes if you if you don't want that kind of that mental strain of the the engagement you just want to post and and not worry too much about comments and engagement um but uh but then we've seen Elon Musk kind of go the other way with Twitter and want more and more metrics under the tweets so uh so yeah so it's a difficult one uh but I think we're becoming uh certainly a lot of Professionals in in the space uh around social media are becoming more advanced in their thinking about how we can um uh Bridge some of these and find more common ground and hopefully we'll get that well certainly so far this discussion is only too reasonable and moderate so I don't think we're going to drive huge numbers of haters on YouTube that was great thanks I will come back to you Martin and certainly some of those topics I think would be interesting to discuss with all three of you but for now I'm going to move on to Nick sernik uh hi Nick and uh and particularly want to start off and I know that a lot of your work has been around the impact of Automation and mechanization um and AI probably on the economy and on the world of work so I'd like to start off with some questions around that and particularly the the question of within country income inequality I mean we're kind of used to the idea that across the world people in some countries live on less are paid less have a lower standard of living but the the rise of within country inequality of income and living standards is becoming a real problem and the the impact of technology on that is something that's often blamed in that if you don't have a lot of workplace skills and you're not very mobile uh but you have a useful productive job and a robot comes and can do that job cheaper then then where does that leave you so is that right should we be blaming the robots for increasing economic inequality well I think it's a little bit more complex than that um I think robots do have a role to play but perhaps not through automation per se so if we look at some of the major factors behind within country uh income inequality is things like globalization it's things like de-industrialization uh the rise of global trade these sorts of things have had a major impact on the levels of inequality and also the sort of deregulatory phase that we've seen with neoliberalism all of that though relies upon technology so globalization for instance relies upon things as simple as the shipping container to be invented but it also involves you know complex information communication Technologies to to organize these things globally so I think technology has had a role in terms of inequality but not necessarily through Automation and I think one of the reasons why is because actually in a lot of developed world countries we haven't seen a lot of Automation in in recent years you could look at productivity statistics for instance which are sort of the economic expression of Automation and productivity growth in a lot of countries has been dwindling since the 1970s and in fact in the UK it hasn't grown virtually at all over the past 15 years or so since the 2008 crisis so what you see is there's actually relatively little automation one of the key reasons why is because particularly in a country like the UK you've also had wage stagnation so workers are not seeing real terms pay increases it was you know you would get a 30 pay increase in real terms over the course of a decade that stopped in 2008 and we haven't seen real-term pay increases since then which means that for most companies when they're looking at well should I you know buy this fancy expensive technology to automate something or should I just get a whole load of cheap workers to do the same job for them it makes more sense to get a bunch of cheap workers to do it so I think you know in a weird way you get high inequality in a country like the UK leading to low automation so you get low wages and low productivity um I think you know well obviously I was actually going to ask go ahead so I was going to ask you that because I have heard the argument that in fact when you have large availability of low paid workers that's a disincentive to get technology and for example I think agriculture in the UK is relatively primitive in terms of the machines that you can use simply because the UK has had access to a lot of low-paid agricultural workers whereas other parts of Europe have automated a lot of Agriculture so that suggests there's an argument that more automation would be good for low-paid workers because you would get more productivity and that would drive wages up so is it the other way around should we be out on the streets clamoring for more robots well I think I think more robots is an expression of worker power so if workers have the capacity to get higher wages if they have the capacity to act uh ask and get better conditions in their workplaces then there's more incentives for employers to also automate that work you know there's a sort of struggle on going between workers trying to get one thing and employers trying to get the other thing um so I think you know Automation and productivity as an expression of that is is a big part of that comes from the struggle between workers and employers so that I've also heard it said that there's a difference between this Industrial Revolution and previous ones in that in previous ones uh there would be not necessarily unskilled but jobs that were very physical I had very physical skills then you would get a machine that could do those and those workers would with the rise of productivity then those workers would go off and find new jobs in New Industries uh and I've heard different suggestions about what's different about this one some people say well the difference is just that you get multi-skilled robots like like the Baxter robot which is humanoid and can be trained to do pretty much anything a human body can do uh so there's no limit to what jobs the robots can take over and also that in fact what's more revolutionary really is artificial intelligence that can take over mental jobs so I remember having a discussion with my solicitor who was very worried about steel workers and I said to him well you better watch out because there's a robot solicitor in New York that can do traffic uh fine appeals so you might be out of a job as well and he was rather shocked I think so where do you see it going from here I mean is this really a very different situation from I don't know the the early mid 20th century is it different in kind or is it simply that different types of jobs are going to be given up to machines yeah I think I think it's definitely true that there are different types of jobs that are being automated um manufacturing and agriculture are major sectors where we can automate a lot of that work but there's also interesting examples of the limits of that um so you know a couple years ago elongate to um really push Automation and Tesla factories for instance and he ran into a huge amount of problems simply because he was trying to automate things that couldn't be automated with the technology that we have so other automobile manufacturers had already come across that and they realized well we can't fully automate the factories but Elon Musk didn't know that and he tried to push for automation too much so even within manufacturing I think we have this situation of automation not being able to do everything Now new technology can do a lot more mental work generative AI I think is one of the more you know interesting examples in the past year um you know as a lecturer I now have to think about well how can I make my you know assessment questions so that students can't simply get an API for them uh it is a real live possibility now and they can have a sort of plausible um you know plausible example made from these AIS so it is possible now to do a lot of these things but they're still quite Rough Around the Edges um there's still a lot of work that still can't be automated and in particular I would say care work is one thing that can't there doesn't seem to be any anything on the horizon that would be um possible to automate it so if you go and look at what governments think is going to be job growth sectors in the future is care work it's it's home care workers it's social care it's nurses it's doctors it's things like this because that stuff can't be automated and because we have aging populations which means we need more more care work so I think if you look at what the future of jobs is going to be it's going to be carrying not coding and I think this is a really big um you know it will have an impact on inequality as well because low wage work very interesting okay well this is great and again you've thrown up lots of questions uh that would I will come back to with all three of you together but for now I'm going to move on to Joanne McNeil hi Jan hi uh and I mean you've you've taken in a way a broader look I think at how interactive with technology might reshape us and our our thoughts and our feelings so can I start off with what a broad question which is about the way we deal with technology and the way that technology is increasingly geared not just to do practical things for us but to interact with our our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions and in some in some ways it seems to be designed to get us to do things to try and and persuade us or influence us without already knowing do you think we've got to the stage where technology is manipulating us emotionally that's a really great question and to begin to begin maybe it would be helpful for me to just make a few distinctions when we talk about technology that's incredibly broad we could be talking about food processors cars a lot of innovation but then we could go to the internet and the internet is also quite broad we use what I would consider capital I internet the internet but over history we've had arpanet milnes many types of networks that have connected people and then right now we are communicating on a website the web being another technology uh specific to the internet of an application that was developed in 1991 and then we have social media that I I would say that online communities have existed since the dawn of the internet but social media is its own flavor of online community as as we see it now we see it as a lot of corporate Enterprise such as Facebook Twitter twitch Tick Tock um on the other hand they're non-commercial applications like Mastodon I'm I I do enjoy Mastodon MSA and so I my writing typically deals with the web and social media um and with social media uh when again we're talking about Facebook and Twitter and twitch and Tick Tock and a lot of these massive corporations yes I think you are seeing that the elements of persuasion the manipulation the sense of the lack of control because they're designed to get you very very engaged to make sure that you don't uh click away they need that advertising money their corporations and I I think going back to what Mark was talking about again with issues of uh you know the the their size and in contrast with governments this is something that was Mark Zuckerberg's agenda from the very beginning his internal motto from years and years ago was companies over countries so what I what makes me hopeful is that the web is uh very uh we're again we're on the web so the web is an example of a non-commercial application that can Thrive and Thrive for decades and I I would love to see uh social media that has a lot of those values from the beginning of the web that is decentralized that is that isn't about selling ads or uh having an enormous scale like again there is scale when it comes to the scale of the web is very decentralized because we all kind of you know I own a URL I mean every different URL it has a different own or you know it's a very different way of operating I I am enthusiastic about the potential of social media I could replicate these early um the early promise in the web that's that's good I like to hear some optimism I mean this is how this is the positive way isn't it that digital technology generally and the web in particular has talked about that it's bottom up and it's it's peer-to-peer it's flat it's now it I mean Martin was talking about the old age of mass media where a few editors decided what was a news story and everybody got that story and now obviously that still exists but at the same time you have things that go viral because millions of individuals decide that this is worth passing on just to a few people that they know and it passes on again pass on again and then you get Charlie bit my finger see my half a billion people uh and no editor no news editor ever sat down and went well this is an important story and it it must get out what about the building of communities because again Martin was talking about the negative side that so the fragmentation of social media means that people can find just a few people who share their world view and say right well you know we have the correct world view and everybody else is wrong but I guess the positive side of that is that people who might feel alone and isolated can find people where they feel they belong and feel part of a community and that can counteract the loneliness that's often talked about us on society is is that something you see in the promise of social media and the web generally yeah I mean the promise was always about trade-offs too because I I think one company that fascinates me a great deal is Reddit because it it offers an experience very similar to what the web was like in its early years where you have elements of anonymity you have people just Gathering talking with strangers as opposed to their old their their well-known their co-workers their family members uh and you see people being very confessional on Reddit about moments in their life that are that are they might have reasons not to want to discuss with people closest to them that would be sexuality debt I mean you name a very personal question um and something like IVF you might be very much stigmatized to discuss this if this is something that you're going through your friends might not really understand but the possibility to go to this to an existing online community that is in many ways imperfect and is a corporation uh go there have that that sense of community there is something very meaningful and and and Humane about that and I I I guess the tricky thing is that every time you do participate in these faces you are making a choice like it's not that easy to unearth someone's real life identity from their Reddit screen name it's not very difficult to kind of and and if you are on Reddit you're just uh subreddit away from the worst trolls in the world so it's just like you know it's these are things that your um people make choices about and I know that there there are ways that people kind of create barriers to communities where they might start at a subreddit and once you've been really active you might get a direct message like Hey we're actually hanging out on this Discord server so come join us here and that's where we have the real the really in-depth conversations and and that's that's just the nature of being on the internet in 2023 I mean one area where that is a source of concern is teenagers growing up with that as part of their normal social interaction being virtual on the on the web on the internet on social media and the obvious concern is that uh there's increasing rates of mental distress amongst teenagers and depression anxiety and so on and that this has tracked the rise of social media and therefore is it that social media is causing or contributing to this but I know if you ask teenagers they they may say oh well sometimes I feel bad when I look at whatever but they may also say I do it because it connects me with my friends and this is really important so what do you think is is this could we make this a better experience for Young People by changing the way these platforms and social media work or is it just the nature of Teenage life that there will be good and bad parts and there's nothing we can do what do you think oh yeah this I mean I I I'm not a parent of a teenager so I I hesitate to to introduct too much but maybe it is for the best that I can just think about my own experience as a teenager and you know every parent worries that their child is running with a wrong crowd perhaps or I mean that's a pretty relatable experience and there absolutely are many wrong crowds I've watched going back to Reddit where yes there are lovely places where you might connect with people about a deep secret that you're kind of you're not really feeling you're feeling uneasy about but then there are also communities for what is known as Pro Anna the pro-anorexia sites I was following a lot of the cryptocytes that seem to use a lot of the same language as the pro Anna Community Sports to suffer suffer suffer and you will have the best life possible and just just wait it out wait it out I know it hurts but you're there's a reward coming for you and it's really striking to see that in in action and it's it's something that I I'm still not quite sure how to write about because it's happening real time and it's not even hidden it's right there on Reddit I can see it um and what I think is missing in these interactions is a real sense of community a real sense of the shared identity that that brings people together that sense of if you communities that an online community that owns you you own the space somehow or you have something you're invested in it that that is something that again Mastered on this super complicated and I I hate to be like this like Pro Mastodon voice necessarily because it's it's all the jokes about Macedon they are correct but there is something again that that offers that promise of yes yeah if you got a couple bucks if you've got a little bit of time maybe it is worth it to get off of these big social platforms that even if they seem like a neutral space they they have their own agendas and they can also disappear overnight too well quotes and then you lose all your circle of friends well this seems like a really good point in which to open up a discussion to all three of you and and throughout maybe the wider question about where the technology brings us together or whether it's dividing and fragmenting us and whether in I mean are we at a point where this is the choice that we can make and and we can actually do things about going in a direction of bringing us together or going in the direction of pushing us apart Martin let me come back to you initially on this and then maybe see what everybody else thinks yeah um I think that uh well it's important to talk about the division that social media and online life in general can can cause it technology has done so much in the last 30 years to bring us closer together to make the world smaller to make possibilities uh happen just like that you know you can you can you can send out an email and change your life um doing this by suddenly doing business with somebody on the other side of the world who'd never heard of you five minutes before you know these things ideas fly around the world and we we take it for granted now we completely don't really think about it but that is something that wasn't there uh just three decades ago and now it's just normal life and so the power that has given us to change the world in positive ways we should always remember that and not worry and not get dragged down by by the division uh and instead use that power we have to find ways to heal the division to root around the division because they'll always be division you know that's that's human beings but um to make it less of a problem um I think the power is there for us if we just remember how much power we've we've given ourselves through the internet over the last uh 30 years what do you think Nick are you optimistic about using digital technology to bring people together yeah I I am about as potential I would say I think the reality is maybe not um quite as good but I I do think as well I think technology gets blamed for a lot of things that have different causes um I think it's become quite easy to blame technology when in fact there's other um sort of fundamental issues one example simply is you know the 2008 financial crisis there's this massive economic crisis followed by Decades of austerity across Europe and across you know most of the developed world any time in history when that sort of thing has happened you've had massive periods of political polarization emerge afterwards it's no surprise that it's happening again now and I think technology gets blamed for something which has plenty of historical parallels already well there you go so it's not Technology's fault at all so so coming back to you Joanne I mean do you you're very keen on Mastodon which I must admit I have not ventured into yet because I struggle to keep up with the existing social media I have do you think this is something that we could address by the kind of Technology we use is this something where we do need to make these choices and say look let's let's try not to use these these technologies that emphasize disagreement and outrage and let's try and build technologies that do bring us together oh absolutely and just to follow up on next Point yes I I think a lot of what's discussed as issues with technology broadly has to do with just deprivation and everyday life and we're at a moment where there is greater access to the internet to gadgets to access it or cheaper but you know everything else in the world is so much harder to have housing food uh General all the the necessities of life are harder or farther and farther out of grasp um so acknowledging that acknowledging the darkness uh we can look to these online communities to the web to the internet for aspects of harm reduction it doesn't have to be worse it doesn't have to be we don't have to be accessing spaces that are known to promote viral content I would say if an organization if a community if a a religious group or a school committee has all of their meeting notes on a Facebook group if you have you know a couple hours this week you know just take it off off Facebook bring it create a website you know just spin something up yourself just those tiny tiny little changes if you if it's available to you if you have the hours if you have the capacity just a little bit a little bit of tweaks that some of us can make but again I I never want to put it on the individuals because I I know we're all very stop for time and and many of us don't have the capacity and many of us can just use these free services but if if you do well that was something yeah I was there I was going to ask you that is one of the problems here that because it takes a certain amount of Technical know-how and because the technology itself is developing so quickly and changing so fast is this inevitably going to be something where a few people have that option and that control and are shaping if you like the environment in which the rest of us are living because obviously there are some people who just go oh well I just thought I'd run up a little app that does this and then you can all come and play on it and then there's the Schmucks like me who uh can just about log into this kind of a platform and send some emails and certainly can't create something so I am very reliant on other people is is this a problem oh is this the new ruling Elite is effectively going to be the people who can write code I I can definitely just quickly respond to that with if you are looking at alternatives to something like Facebook my suggestion is anything that creates a website so maybe you can't you know HTML actually is not that complicated I mean but then again I'm saying this or again recognizing that people are have time crunches in their lives HTML people make it sound a lot more complicated it is it really is not but if you're just looking for a very easy option look for something that creates a website so Eventbrite is Eventbrite yeah I I don't know what their deal is maybe it's it might go sideways that company but it creates a website that everyone can go to without accessing Facebook or Google um something like a classic example would be these newsletters newsletters sub stack is a very political organization I do not agree with the political the politics of that organization I don't agree with most of its celebrity sub stackers but what substock does is it sends a newsletter to your inbox and email is non-commercial email is uh is decentralized email is also mostly Gmail and that's its own pack of of it's oh instead of issues but it's going to your inbox it's not going to Facebook um and so those kind of when you're making these decisions look for something that goes to someone's inbox or goes to the web because those are the two long time applications that no there is no Zuckerberg of email there is Gmail again we'll deal with that song If we can catch that someday but uh email as a as a whole email is decentralized email is really great what what do you think Nick is this is the new ruling Elite going to be people who can create the platforms and uh and and in which the rest of us will just live or or they are they the Vanguard of the new technological Revolution and either way where do the rest of us Schmucks line up I mean I'm I'm a a fond of RSS feeds um so you know I I miss those all decentralized days as well um yeah I mean platforms have a huge amount of power um precisely because decentralization for all its benefits also has a lot of limitations for users I mean html is easy but it's also a hindrance for a lot of people to be able to you know actively use a build their own website um these sorts of things LED people to centralize on platforms it's one of their major benefits and the result has been these massive companies that have emerged over the past 15 years or so and I think the really fascinating thing which I don't think is fully appreciated is the ways in which once they've built up a sort of centralized platform within one area they can then reach out into other areas I would say this particularly the case for Amazon Google and Microsoft who are now heavily invested in education they're heavily invested in health care they're heavily invested in the military they're heavily invested in providing services for government more broadly they are in many ways the infrastructure of our modern society and that is a huge amount of power not to mention the profits that are accruing to these companies so that is um I think a real it should be a real concern not just for us as individual citizens but also for governments because governments are now having to face up to the power of these companies and you know if you're the United States government you can still sort of exert some power but most other countries have almost zero power over what these companies are able to do so yeah I do think it's something we need to um really think about and consider you know how can we rein in the power that's occurring to these companies I mean this is something you you started to raise at the start isn't it Martin the the fact that in some ways some of our public life is shaped more by these companies than by governments and this raises the question of well where does that leave democracy if if a few people quite possibly on the other side of the world are shaping the whole environment in which we live and the nature of of the discourse is is that inevitable do you think just because it's a high-tech world and you need high-tech knowledge or is there some other way it could work oh and we're seeing the flaws in that um right now with Elon Musk with Twitter I've mentioned it a few times but it's such a fascinating case study where he clearly one reason he he didn't want to buy it at various points but I think one reason he was attracted to buying it was the sheer power he would have over the so-called Public Square and this idea that he would be you know the the man who decides who can have a voice on his platform Etc um and uh he's been handling it really really badly and I think it's probably more complicated than he imagined and he got rid of all the people who uh were you know the experts in in uh moderation and in making sure that the platform was safe and uh all of that laying off tons of really great smart people who've been in lots of good research um and uh and just said you know you know what we can do we'll just build a great product and um it's it's the um the this idea that uh certainly you get in Silicon Valley that the people who can code the people who are the engineers they are the builders and they are far more important than anyone else you can get rid of everyone else get rid of the comms team doesn't really matter what the media says about us get rid of the trust and safety team get rid of it all because in the end it's all about the engineers and he's a great example of how it's not really working out if you do that and the world is far more complicated than that now um I'm really you know I'd love to see things like um we've heard about Mastodon for example I'd love to see things like that take off but certainly uh Mastodon um as a rival to Twitter or an alternative to Twitter grew in popularity uh as uh the chaos uh unfurled at Twitter but uh um certainly recent numbers seem to have shown that um that early those are those sign ups from Twitter uh haven't really stuck around a lot of them and are they certainly not using Mastodon as much as a lot of them seem to have gone back to Twitter because there's something to be said about the the fact that you've got lots of people in one place you've got um you've got the uh the convenience of a product that is is built by a single team Etc whereas um in Mastodon and the fediverse which is part of um it's a bit more complicated to get your head around it's a bit more complicated to sign up Etc centralized Technologies where people have more power are just more complicated and are that bit harder to use and until the people who work on those kind of Technologies can really get over them uh then uh I think we're going to see this kind of uh this problem of people like Elon Musk people like Mark Zuckerberg being the kings in our world in many ways and uh that's not healthy for anyone even them well this this brings me on really to another thought which is that we sometimes talk about oh are we controlling with technology or is the technology controlling us uh this idea that because it's designed to keep us engaged and to get us to do things and because it's fun to my advertising that it is designed to not control our Behavior perhaps but but nudge our behavior in a certain way but is this the wrong way to think about it I'm throwing this out really to to any of you so so dive in is should we be thinking Less in terms of the technology controlling us and More in terms of people controlling the technology which then shapes the way that we use it that was as for anybody just just dive absolutely it Tech is is um uh is just is detached from people it's crazy because uh people create technology and certainly now you know you don't build a software product a social media app for example and then just leave it you're constantly working on the algorithms you're constantly working on the product adding features learning how users uh use it um and uh so in the end it's all about the decisions that uh people make and that's not only what are we going to see in the feed for example um and uh what um what uh what kind of user experience are we going to Foster what kind of users are we going to encourage it's also how do we deal with things like the unintended consequences it was a really interesting article uh last week at the Wall Street Journal about how um Facebook wanted to de-prioritize political posts but uh because they thought that would make users happier but actually was it also it as a as a byproduct of that something they didn't expect to see was that um a lot more the the trusted media organizations got de-prioritized in the feed as well so and then you don't know what that's going to do to user Behavior so these things are complex beasts and the technology kind of becomes an individual in itself in a way um something that you you can't necessarily fully understand um do do the the stuff at Tick Tock fully understand the tick tock algorithm and all its um implications of every decision they make no that's why they have people who research it and work on it constantly and observe um but in the end it's all down to people and the decisions they make and we should never forget that and we should never um give people a uh a free ride on a free pass on that um in the end it's down to platform operators and users as well in the end we as users are an important part of this as well um you know if we choose to use technology badly then you know that's on us so yeah um don't say it's ever just the technology that's a problem although the way you were talking about it just then you did start to talk about uh particular apps and platforms almost as if they are social actors in their own right and not completely under the control of the people who make them which you know takes us back to DJ Fogg and his you know writing about computers as persuasive Technologies the idea that as the technology develops we will start to relate to computers as if they were other social beings I.E other people and the computers will start to have the kind of influence on us that other human beings have so it's almost perhaps the spice of yourself you're suggesting there is some truth in that I mean what do you think Nick and Joanna is should we actually think about Technologies as social actors maybe not quite like a person but not just as a as a passive object s go ahead if you want oh no God so I'll just say I'm hesitant to give agency to technology I don't I don't think it can be considered a social actor in any sort of meaningful way um it does have unintended consequences though and I think that's effectively what we're sort of discussing here you know does somebody fully understand a recommendation algorithm and you know what all the possible outcomes are of it no um but it's designed in a particular way to have certain outcomes and to do certain things increase engagement um and it broadly fulfills that sort of function with you know some edge cases that don't necessarily fit into that or do some you know unintended things but I don't think that's the Technology's fault per se I think it's the fact that any technology that we build digital or otherwise always has these other possible uses and other possible sort of emergent phenomenon associated with it um it's just it's just the nature of technology that they can't be fully designed by their design there's there's an excess within them yeah well just to go back to some earlier points I don't see any good Arguments for social media at scale not at the scale they are not at the scale of Facebook not at the scale of Google in fact I would say that every issue you see every head every scandal that Facebook has every every Scandal involving Facebook since it's beginning has to do with its scale it has to do with the company that's taken on responsibilities that are impossible uh that's created all this these like negative externalities um very classic point to to look at would be the issue of content moderation like why on Earth is content moderator for Facebook a job in the first place like if we look at meta filter a very small web-based community long running since you know I think it was founded in like 1999 still running they don't have they have content moderation issues which are pyramid peer mediation because it's a community these are people that you know maybe they have to kick off some a member Who's acting a little bit rude or Rowdy um but Facebook how to moderation means something totally different Facebook is like you've got these people paid minimum wage of that uh removing the heading videos because you've just AI can't do that uh even though people are always going to say that AI can solve these questions it's actually something you do need a human mind to make these quick decisions is this improper or not um I think this job shouldn't exist I think this job shouldn't exist and that Facebook shouldn't be as large as it is I think the only reason Facebook is as large as it is is it grew into Obama years and antitrust policy in the U.S was just kind of taking a nap um now we see a lot of the the FTC stepping up and trying to solve some problems that should have been solved 10 years ago but at the scale of this company makes no sense whatsoever and so what again like I would like to see scale as we think of the web at scale which the web again we're all you we're all on the web right now I spend all day on the web pretty much um but the scale it's not like one Corporation the World Wide Web corporation that we all like some cyberpunk dystopian Corporation though are all kind of like forced to enter that runs every aspect of Our Lives no that's not what it is so I think it's just a matter of we need to break these companies up and uh because they because social media because online community should be a community skill as opposed to corporations go I'm actually going to take this opportunity to jump in with a question that somebody sent in uh in advance uh because I think this is kind of relevant to what you've just started talking about uh somebody called Lucy wrote in and said could any of you recommend some good ethical tech companies to invest in so while we're thinking about well okay how could it be done and some initiatives so maybe I don't know if you all feel equipped for that but but if possible maybe if each of you could make a suggestion of some some ethical tech company people could put their money into Martin this is kind of your field isn't it yeah yeah it's a different one because a lot of the companies that would prioritize ethics over anything else are often not the kinds of companies you can invest in they're not necessarily raising funding rounds and uh and all of that et cetera they're they're more kind of community efforts and they're more um social uh businesses rather than um rather than the kind of businesses that are looking to uh grow uh through VC funding and Angel Investing Etc so so yeah it's a difficult one I mean there are some out there um any at the moment that spring to mind um that uh kind of fit what we're talking about unfortunately nothing really Springs to mind unfortunately and there is that that problem that you've got this huge kind of independent um surge of you know there's the Indie web movement and there's there's people building you know building on the FED verse Etc um and and all of this going on but um it's kind of quite detached from in many ways from uh the kind of in the tech investing world and uh certainly there was a there's a a reporter a while about that the um the uh the the guy who started Mastodon was actually knocking back VC investment offers he's like no no no it's not how this works no no put your money away yeah well yeah maybe but maybe that is an opening for someone who wants to start a company and be ethical maybe maybe there's a lag and Nick I don't know if you're allowed to even as a as an economics professor are you allowed to recommend specific companies to invest in or does that breach your ethical code as a lecturer yeah I mean I think Martin's totally right that you know most ethical companies um aren't accepting investments in the in sort of VC sense but donations for instance signal I think is a really good company um and and service um that's important as an alternative to something like WhatsApp um and they accept donations so you can donate to a company like signal okay with Joanne do you have any you'd like to push people towards yeah I'd say again investors and support donate donate so Wikipedia Foundation I mean there's another one like there are opportunities to support these independent non-commercial truly ethical uh products they are so Lucy this is you have to you have to donate um and that means that your reward will be in having contributed to a better digital future rather than in whatever investors get dividends she said betraying a complete Financial ignorance uh well I'd like to go back to something that we kind of touched on a couple of times earlier which is about the capacity of the of digital media to keep us informed and and let us know I mean there's they say that was it all human knowledge is three clicks away in the age of the internet and which actually joyfully I went and looked at I thought where does this come from is this just one of those ghost figures that somebody said once and survives and in fact no it's a study done at Stanford University where they've got some humans in a lab and said we're going to put you on this webpage want you to find this fact minimum number of clicks and uh the optimum that a machine could do was three clicks and the humans averaged four so there you go fun fact uh but so so again this is this joyful promise and I certainly find it's true I mean as a as a journalist and writer it's absolutely transformed my capacity to find things and people but then there's also as we also touched on earlier the idea that you you get completely wrong things and they become taken as fact because they're on the internet and because it's very hard some times to tell whether a source is trustworthy so is it is there a balance there are we are we getting more benefit from information than confusion uh are there again other things that we could all be doing to try and make uh digital technology a source of better knowledge and better understanding and reduce the amount of confusion and conspiracy rabbit holes that we that we go down uh Nick so let's just start us off on that sure um I mean I think I find like you said I find the internet transformative in terms of the um uh the quality and quantity of information and and the ease with which you know you can research any possible topic um I think the real issue here is not necessarily an overloading of information but rather having these sort of centers of authority and legitimacy so you know newspapers perform that function for the longest time and um you know the six o'clock news would provide that function for the longest period where it was just an authoritative source that would condense down this information into you know what is the most important stuff you need to know and we're telling the truth you know we're telling the sort of objective um facts as we see it I think what we've really lost is not necessarily you know an overloading of information but that sort of communal legitimacy applied to particular institutions whether it be newspapers or whether it be the news um I think we've had a breakdown of that sometimes for good reasons you know I think questioning State media particularly in a you know more authoritarian countries is a very important you know step to take but also you have actors who are very actively trying to delegitimize what have been taken as legitimate sources um you know New York Times is supposed to be the gold standard of Journalism and you have a lot of attacks on their journalism um as a way to sort of delegitimize that and I think what we've ended up with is you know this we lacked that sort of shared source of legitimate authoritative you know news about the world or knowledge um so we end up with I don't want to say like you know Echo Chambers or sort of dispersed communities because I don't think that really exists I think we we're bumping up against each other in more ways than we ever have but we do end up with you know sort of very polarized senses of what is a legitimate source of information you know is it some you know conspiracy theory from Q Anon or is it the BBC News um but I think that's the real issue for me and is that something that technology could solve or is this something happening in society and technology is just the form that it takes I I think it is largely a social phenomenon I think you know the the glot of information that we have from the Internet is the the sort of supply side of possible conspiracy theories but what never gets asked about is why do we have a demand for conspiracy theories nowadays um you know why are so many people prone to taking up conspiracy theories and I think again that has a lot to do with people trying to understand the world you know conspiracy oh and then the next been attacked by a hostile hacking force or possibly just as Internet has has it does look kind of suspicious though doesn't it uh while we went to get Nick back maybe Martin what are your thoughts on this on information and confusion yeah yeah so one thing that's uh interesting is um if you look at something called Community notes from uh Twitter it started off being called bird watch but it's been renamed Community notes and this is um basically crowdsourced fact checking um because I think I think we can all be better online citizens when it comes to kind of information health and help to mak

2023-01-14 16:44

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