Technology, Power and Truth: From the Invention of Writing to AI, Ars Electronica Fabian Scheidler
yeah thank you very much for the introduction and it's a pleasure and an honor to open the session um the tech the title is Technology power and truth from the invention of writing to Ai and I will start right away with the crisis of life on Earth that industrial civilization has created we that means industrial civilization has triggered the biggest species Extinction for the last 66 million years when the dinosaurs were almost wiped out we have in many parts of the world freshwater crisis equifirst being depleted and so on we lose about one percent of fertile land due to Industrial Agriculture and industrialization and so on and also with the oceans and forests you know much of that I won't bore you with that all this has been incorporated into a concept called planetary boundaries by the Stockholm resilience Center and they came up with nine planetary boundaries we already passed six of these boundaries and are about to pass the seventh one now all of this the Christ of life on Earth happens without climate change already and of course climate change makes um things much worse we are approaching tipping points in the earth system the stock um The potsam Institute of climate impact research came up with this concept of tipping points in the earth system some of them may be reached already in this decade including Greenland eyes Western Arctic Ice Shield the Amazon forest is also very problematic and if we reach these tipping points we could also hit the global heating point for the U.S system which would mean that the U.S system would flip into a different state called The Hot House Earth leaving many parts of the world uninhabited so we're in real trouble and all this happens in a world of no I I want to go to another point which is there um the club of Rome 50 years ago came up with the the report the limits to growth which basically said that we keep on business as usual on the growth path we will um yeah industrial civilization will finish in the 21st century now this report has been revised many times since then in 2022 as well and it was shown that the report and the Figures were quite accurate so if we don't change course we could see a made a drop in population industrial production food production in this Century now all this happens on a planet with extreme inequality 10 percent about uh the richest man in the world possess as much as half of the world's population the poorer part of the world's population and in recent times we have seen an accelerating Panorama of crises the financial crisis Euro crisis pandemic Ukraine war and so on and that also has contributed to Major psychological crisis according to a new study more than half of young people in the world say that humanity is doomed so that's a very harsh reality that we are facing psychological and that also means that at least in the Western World the very concept of progress that was still crucial for Western Civilization for centuries is about to collapse in slow motion ideological coherence is melting and we see polarization cultural Wars and so on and this also attributes to you it contributes to the crisis of the very concept of choose whom can we trust trust in media and politics is plummeting as you all know the crisis of Truth however predates the AI Day by debate and I will come back to that later so we are in trouble and we are in a transition phase and nobody knows where all this headed now all of the the things I mentioned have a major technological component the equal crisis of course is caused by fossil Fields but not only by fossil fuels it's the extractive model in in total the industrial growth model over development many geologists have talked about the anthropocene the age of men or humans but this notion has been challenged by the concept of capitalism which claims that it's not humans at such who have caused this situation but a certain social organization called capitalism now the social divide as well has a technological component the rift between those who own Technologies and the rest of us is growing all the time seven of the 10 richest people are mentioned are Tech billionaires and these Tech billionaires have doubled the fortune in the pandemic so the Gap is growing alter the crisis of Truth is related to technology media systems including traditional media social media and AI so we Face severe social and technological choices and we need informed debates and in order to have a rational debate we must first of all deconstruct the myth that there is no choice and the version of the myth goes like that the development of Technology follows a crazy Natural path driven by innocent human curiosity and inventiveness the one and only direction of that path is called progress what will be what can be done will be done now what I want to show in this lecture is that technological choices are rather dependent on power structures property relations economic and Military interest and of course idolities and this this also means if we want to change course and avert collabs we have to change not only this other technology but our social systems including power relations property relations key institutions and mindsets now at any given moment people invent stuff we are creative species the question is in which inventions are developed further promoted and put to large scale use and this of course is dependent on social systems and power relations and I will give just a few General examples of this one is the steam engine while the steam engine has been invented 2000 years ago by a guy called here enough Alexandria now in the social system of those days it was not very much of any use because it was not a growth Society at the end of the 18th century with full-fledged capitalism this situation was quite different the system already hit limits to growth there was a shortage in energy especially wood shortage for smelting in Britain which was crucial for British Military and so on prices went up and they had to come up with a new energy source which was known for a long time coal so it depended on the social structure whether this technology was used or not another example is the transport sector in the 1920s and 30s we had two competing concepts of Transport one was public transport on the other was the car now some car companies like GM and standard oil and Firestone and so on brought up rail systems across the U.S in 45 cities including New York City and Los Angeles and what did they do with this did they run public transport infrastructures no they didn't they destroyed this infrastructure to build roads and highways so that's the result of what happened we see public transport being crushed and that's the end state of U.S transport now and an addiction to
fossil fuel infrastructures and that is also very instructive for our situation today now let's come back to information Technologies and the question of who owns the truth let's go back to 5000 years ago where the trouble began in those days writing was invented now what was writing used for was it used for poetry or rational debate not was first of all used as a logistical tool to organize trade and slavery we've seen we have seen in those days the first city-states highly militarized the first class formation in History Society is based on centralized power and of course they needed bureaucracies and writing now in the third and second Millennia BC this tool was also used to propagate the ideologies of the upper classes their view their thoughts about the universe and if you have writing you have more power to propagate their views however later on the first Millennia we see writing was also used as a measure of counterpower for example by the early prophets who criticized King's property relations and the abuse of power and that means there is a dialectics of Technology tends to be used in the first place very much by the powers that be but it could be turned around and used as a counterpower now something similar or skipped an image this is the first image of slaves that we have from 3200 BC when writing was invented now something similar happened with the printing machine in early modernity what was what were the most widespread printed text in the 16th and 17th century of early capitalism where it was now taxed on rational debate it was Major religious propaganda like for example the Hammer of the witches with about 300 000 copies so um and what that means is that the question with technology is always who owns the technology who has the money and infrastructure to use and to control it I think maybe we could use a different microphone because there's always this kind of feedback should we use the other mic okay does it work okay I think it's better isn't it um now things change dramatically in the 18th century printing got much cheaper and widely distributed and educated middle class and the culture of debate emerged printing was used as a counterpower which contributed to the French Revolution and other Revolutions of the 19th century now again things changed in the 1870s when the rotary printing press was invented the problem was it was very expensive and only very rich people or corporations could use their technology and that led to a process of monopolization of the press with the great press Moguls of the times like William Hearst emerging William Hurst was the um model for the famous film Citizen Kane by Orson wells and in Britain it was Harold harmsworth in Germany it was Alfred tunberg who owned half of the German press and contributed uh massively to the rise of the Nazis now these people had the power to manipulate public opinion in favor of their interests of private capital and they also spread a crazy religious propaganda for nationalism to distract workers from the struggle from the class struggle and to mobilize for World War one and World War II now around 1920 the system faced a major problem after centuries of struggle people in the west had achieved Universal and equal suffrage voting rights for everyone and that posed a problem because people were the elites were very much afraid that people would vote out them and the system out of existence now at that time theories about what was later called a guided democracy emerged one of the major proponents was Walter Lippmann the first director of the Council on Foreign Relations major intellectual liberal intellectual of the time he published a book called public opinion and what he said is that humanity is in a way divided into two classes the upper 20 let's say who know how the system works and who who are intelligent and knowledgeable and the other eighty percent the wild that hurt as he called them who don't know how politics and Economics work and who must be guided and that means public opinion has be has to be shaped to keep the system running Edward Bernays the inventor of public relations had similar theories in the same time now this was the basis of property relations in the press and this ideology for the mass media in the 20th century I have to skip a lot of things because they were important challenges to that system in the 20th century radio and television the Golden Age of Journalism the upheavals of the 60s and 70s but at the end of the 20cm entry property relations in the media were about the same as the earlier in the century now the internet changed of course things dramatically at the beginning it was as you all know a decentralized traction structure which challenged established corporate and state media but then later on it was privatized turned into proprietary products and today it's dominated by the monopolies of big Tech in close collaboration sometimes with governments and AI of course contributes very much to that concentration of Power with big tag now when we talk about AI we first have to talk about the mythology surrounding AI when we hear about nursing slide Singularity disruption and so on AI will be smarter than humans we have infer first of all to understand that artificial intelligence in a way is a misnomer machines now to understand nor think as the philosopher John Searle once pointed out rightfully I think they are syntactic machines that means they process signs without understanding their meaning now this mythology is used in fact by Silicon Valley and others to distract from what is really happening with AI you will hear a lot about this in this session I think of course the manipulation of public discourse by opaque algorithms although AI doesn't understand anything it can seriously distort our understanding of reality Joffrey Hinton sometimes called the Godfather of AI said after quitting Google people will not be able I quote people will not be able to know what is true anymore now this is very much empowered by micro targeting with AI chatbots and so on this is a new quality of manipulation especially when people don't know that they are targeted but we have to face the fact also that the crisis of Truth has not started with AI just one thing that you all know the New York Times in 2003 claimed that Iraq was possessing weapons of mass destruction and this story this fake news story contributed to the war with one million dead so it's sometimes also major media which spread fake news it's not AI only it's not good bad AI whether it's good media and not not the other way around uh AI also is uh according to Naomi Klein maybe the biggest theft in human history it's a gigantic privatization of the work of billions of people and of public knowledge to train proprietary products without consent or permission AI of course is powering surveillance technology there's lots of military use drones autonomous weapons and so on but I want to highlight what a different aspect that is rarely talked about and that's the ecological and climate impact digital Technologies um digital Technologies are the fastest growing energy consumer in the world they have exponential growth with about six percent per year that means they double the energy consumption in 12 Years A tenfold increase in 40 years and if we go on like that it would be the equivalent of today's energy consumption in 58 years it's clear that we cannot go on on that track on a limited planet now Silicon Valley claims that AI will help us to save the climate make more rational choices and so on but indeed what many of the CEOs of those companies are doing is preparing for the worst Sam Altman for example the CEO of old may I remarked in 2016 I quote I have guns gold potassium iodide antibiotics batteries water gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in pixel I can fly to unquote so that's the mindset of some of these big Tech moguls now having said that I think that digital Technologies in the AI can certainly play a role in an ecological transition we need for example smart electricity grids and so on but it's a great but under the current economic framework they will likely have more destructive consequences than benefits now that means we have to change the framework so what we can do what can we do about all of this how to address the challenges of the crisis of life on Earth of extreme inequality and of the manipulation of public opinion we have to address all of them at the same time now the first thing I think we have to do is becoming able to make choices and that means to demystify technology it is not a crazy autonomous subject it is designed by people who have interest and it can be changed it's also about organizing Democratic processes of public information on choices about technological developments now what I want to propose is just some guidelines for such a discussion you might have other guidelines I I propose four guidelines one is saving the planet which means drastically reducing our consumption of raw materials energy water and land this is a must it's a dual dive we don't do that no civilization the other is setting one advancing Social Justice Means reducing income and wealth gaps very simple proposition then enhancing human well-being and health and fourth enabling well-informed public debates on these issues undistorted by power structures and vested interests now the key question here is which Technologies which property structures and which decision-making processes could help to bring all this about and I would like to highlight only two aspects of this one is property and ownership which is also the motto of this conference um let's go back to the rotary printing press when you introduce tools which can be used for mass propaganda then it's not very wise to leave that control over such means in the hands of a tiny Elite we shouldn't do that and the same is true for Silicon Valley today so I think we finally need to break up big tech companies we have to come up with the concepts for public ownership of key digital infrastructures the artistic director of the US Electronica government soccer refer to this as digital socialism and that also means transparent algorithms and I think also lots of regulations like a ban on AI chat Bots and things like that we also have to think about changing the business models of tech companies digital tools should not be designed as addictive drugs as they are right now I mean the business model is to keep people hooked on on Facebook or whatever to make more money this shouldn't be the case we shouldn't design addictive drugs digitally for profit seeking now the second point I want to make is quantity I talked about the limits to growth we live on a limited planet we have overshot its boundaries by far already so we have to ask a very fundamental question what do we really need in order to allow all humans and other species to live a different life now and in the future now this means we have to make choices where to employ raw materials energy work creativity and money we cannot have everything at the same time that's a very anthropocentric egocentric and childish idea however that's hard to accept for the hubris embedded in our culture and our economic system that depends on Eternal growth so the whole thing is about system change of course so in order to do that to make these choices we have to manage two things at the same time one is the redistribution of wealth and the other is the concept of sufficiency how much do we need to have a decent life so as for the social ecological transition in general there are many proposals I only cite the proposal for gloom Global Green New Deal by Robert pollin and Norm Chomsky which cost about five percent of global GDP it's sort of doable it's financed by taxing the rich and by demilitarization and for this kind of transition of course ownership again is key for let's take the energy sector if we have decentralized renewable energies owned by the public or by cooperatives they can produce energy with Renewables for the needs of the people they don't have to grow they don't have to sell more energy with the capitalist Enterprise should do so they are very much able to to fit into the concept of sufficiency we need of course public transport instead of private cars and all of that but we have to talk about something as well which has sometimes been named digital sufficiency the digital sphere is no exception from the limits to growth and from the idea of sufficiency so we have to ask what do we really need for the well-being of ourselves and the planet and that means also some sort of restrictions to digitalization we need a concept of basic Digital Services for all prime prioritized by social and ecological criteria so we have to ask do we really need 4K movies on our smartphones and self-driving cars I think they are utterly pointless in a way and we should focus on what people really need so to sum it up AI can play a probably modest role in steering us into a livable future but only under very different economic and political conditions and that means we should engage in changing our fundamental institutions of this civilization so thank you very much and well we have no q a session but thank you for listening anyway [Applause]
2023-10-03 23:37
