Ideas - BBC Reith Lectures: Artificial Prosperity

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Artificial intelligence could make some of us rich — but leave some behind. In part two of the BBC Reith Lectures, Oxford professor Ben Ansell argues that AI can increase inequality, while appearing to increase prosperity, leading to skepticism about democracy.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. Our temptation as we face these new insecurities will be to tighten every screw, plug every hole to protect us and prevent the horrors of anarchy from seeping in. But inadvertently, we may end up summoning tyranny instead. Invertently, we may end up summoning tyranny instead. Ben Ansell is a professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University.

He is author of the book Why Politics Fails, and he's the BBC Reith lecturer. We might find ourselves tempted by the demand for order above all by a demagogue who exploits our fears to bolster their hold on power. The Reiths are the BBC's flagship lecture series, each one delving into the critical issues of our time. The theme of this year's talks is the precarious state of democracy around the world. Ansell argues that the world is becoming both less democratic and less safe. We had lulled ourselves into a false sense of security about our security. We ignored human suffering when it didn't threaten Western lives, wealthy cities and affluent neighborhoods.

And then reality threw a brick at our heads. Introducing the second lecturer from Berlin is the BBC's Anita Anand. Now last time our lecturer looked at how we might improve democracy. Now he's going to be assessing our safety in its broadest sense and asking if we are becoming too complacent about threats both from home and abroad. And this is a place that really understands what our lecture is talking about. Berlin's geopolitical location between Western and Eastern Europe has often placed it right on the front line. And Berliners have long been mindful of vulnerability. Vulnerability that reaches back to Red Army soldiers or the Stasi. Let's hear what the

Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions from Nuffield College, Oxford, has to say, will you please give a warm welcome to the BBC 2023 Reith lecturer, Ben Ansell. A quarter of a century ago, when I have to say I looked a little younger than I do today, I had a brick thrown at my head. I was walking to the petrol station about 300 meters from my house in Manchester, and two teenagers asked me for a cigarette. And unusually for once, I didn't have any, so I replied honestly, but it seems unsatisfyingly. I walked away, and then I felt a brick hit my right ear. And I still recall the supposedly soothing words in the ambulance, well, it doesn't look like you're hemorrhaging. And weeks afterwards, my inner ear would trick me about the direction of gravity. Months later, I would bristle on the street when unknown strangers passed by at night.

Months later, I would bristle on the street when unknown strangers passed by at night. Years on, I still felt a profound sense of insecurity. Because security from fear, from violence, is the most fundamental thing that each of us desires. And it's also the very first job of our governments. A world without order, a world of anarchy, it's one where we can have no certainty, no reprieve from looking over our shoulders, for bricks perhaps, no time to relax, to dream, to create. It's an empty world of dashed hopes. But in grasping for an escape from anarchy, we face the abiding risk of tyranny. And nowhere has that uneasy dance been more evident than here in Berlin. Because in Berlin, the shadow of insecurity crept

under every door. Every museum, every tourist site bears witness to man's inhumanity to man. The cataclysms of the 20th century, of totalitarianism, of the Holocaust, they're barely decades old, still waking nightmares for older Berliners. And the Cold War, of course, runs like a concrete scar through Berlin's midriff. But now, now the city is at peace. Berliners are free to say what they want, to believe what they want, to meet who they want. Berliners can now devote their time to the deeper questions of modern life, how to open new bars and restaurants without pushing up rent prices. Today, for those of us in wealthy countries, from Germany to Japan to Britain, yes, I hope we still count as wealthy, when we walk out of our

front door, we know we'll come home,. When we walk out of our front door, we know we'll come home, to the same home, with the same possessions in it, healthy, uninjured, well, almost always uninjured. And we live in a protective bubble of security. And we often can't see that bubble. And each of us in this room feels near invincible daily. But I hate to put it to you, we're all just bags of fluid protected by a thin membrane of skin.

And yet, madly, we're happy to get into canisters of metal moving at incredible speeds or to wander through clouds of pathogens to jostle shoulders with unknown others. It's a wonder really that any of us are alive at all. But the bubble, the bubble seems to work. It protects us from the capriciousness of anarchy and the cruel intentions of others. Today, when I walked here along Unter den Linden, I didn't expect that people on the street might attack me. And perhaps that's because in Berlin, few people are destitute enough or desperate enough to do so.

Perhaps instead they're deterred. They're deterred by cameras, by police, by the threat of punishment. Because let's say I did get unlucky, as I did that one time in Manchester. Well, then the security state will come alive. I can approach a police officer to report the crime, and they will turn the ignition key of the criminal justice system which will in turn investigate, prosecute and incarcerate the criminal order once transgressed is restored. Alles ist in Ordnung. At least that's the idea.

And sometimes in the rich countries of the world all these pieces of the security jigsaw do fit together. But not for everyone. Because the bubble that I live in, it's not universal. My trust in the criminal justice system, I treat it like a birthright. But that trust is naive. Because the police who we employ to protect us sometimes end up predating on us. because the police who we employ to protect us sometimes end up predating on us. The London Met, the world's first civilian police force formed by the citizenry to protect the citizenry,

have in recent years had officers kidnap, rape and murder those very same citizens. In the United States, the killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd have confirmed suspicions of endemic police racism. The forces of order who we trust to protect us, they often abuse their authority. And increasingly, I think we all recognize the corruptibility and inequality of our day-to-day security in the bubbles of the West. And then we turn our eyes to the East, because less than a thousand kilometres away, a land war rages in Europe once more, and we see our bubble of international security burst apart. Now, a decade ago, the psychologist Steven Pinker argued that mankind had listened to the better angels of our nature. War and violence, if still tragically common, were in terminal decline, becoming obsolete. But maybe those weren't angels we were listening to,

because interstate war never went away. The late political scientist, Bear Bromola, he cautioned us against the false optimism we might have about the state of global security. By his reckoning, 2016 was the most violent year since 1945. And the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War has proven illusory. Wars have raged in Iraq, in Syria, in Sudan, in Yemen. Civil wars still flare up throughout Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia. flare up throughout Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia, and of course, most recently, we've again witnessed the violent polarizing tragedy of Israel and Gaza. And so the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, it shouldn't have surprised us. After all, the Russians had occupied the Donbass and annexed Crimea in 2014, and yet we were surprised. In the Western mind, the revival of interstate war

felt dissonant. That the city of Kiev, superficially like any other Central European metropolis, could be peppered with rockets. That the glorious theatre of Mariupol could be bombed into a skeleton. Those felt to us like misplaced memories of a different era. We had lulled ourselves into a false sense of security about our security. We ignored human suffering when it didn't threaten Western lives, wealthy cities and affluent neighbourhoods. And then reality threw a brick at our heads. Now, perhaps these memories are fresher for Berliners. London is protected by the English Channel,

America by two oceans, but Berlin sits prone at the end of the Great Eurasian Plain that stretches all the way to the Urals. So violence from abroad, or indeed from Berlin, knows no natural boundaries. And the ruins of tyranny and destruction that contour Berlin, then, they're not remnants of an extinct peril. They're reminders that our security bubble can easily burst. And that places us on the horns

of a terrible dilemma. Our temptation as we face these new insecurities will be to tighten every screw, plug every hole in the ship of state, to protect us and prevent the horrors of anarchy from seeping in. But inadvertently, we may end up summoning tyranny instead. We might find ourselves tempted by the demand for order above all by a demagogue who exploits our fears to bolster their hold on power. Or we might constrain ourselves inadvertently layering rule upon rule like layers of bandages until we accidentally mummify ourselves. So our task then is to find a balance, to secure security without abandoning the core principles of liberal democracy. And to do that, we will need to trust

one another. So what then is trust? The political philosopher Jan Elster defines trust as lowering one's guard. When I interact with someone else, I do so without taking precautions. And if we completely trusted one another, well, then we could unlock our doors without fear of theft. We could hitchhike across Eurasia without fear of theft. We could hitchhike across Eurasia without fear of assault. We could scrap our nuclear weapons without fear of war. We could walk to the garage without fear of bricks. But we don't, in fact, trust everyone at every time. Our trust is conditional and it's contextual. And we distrust others for two reasons. First, they might indeed mean us harm by lying, stealing, or cheating.

But second, they might actually mean us well, but simply be incompetent, unable to fulfill their promises to us. And that, I think, explains why we often don't trust politicians. It's not that they're liars, it's just that they're incompetent. Complete trust comes about when we choose not to monitor other people. And Elster provides the example of not reading your spouse's diary. So trustful marriage is one where you don't have to lock your secret journal away. But when it comes to our security outside of the household, well, then we have different levels of trust. We move away from a pure trust to a more sceptical trust.

When we're unsure of other people's motives, we need certainty about what they might do. And there is a nice way of doing this. We could get to know people. We could become friendly and hence have more certainty that they mean well. That would be nice. But the not-so-nice way is to remain sceptical, to trust, but verify. And that means monitoring others.

Rather than assuming good faith, we assume nothing, except that if people know that they are on camera, hi there, then they'll behave. Our technologies today, from facial recognition to drones to artificial intelligence, they allow us to create that kind of sceptical trust. But think about it. Notice what we've lost by doing that. We've lost the trust that comes from friendship and from contact. And can we really be sure that this new technology won't itself fall

into the hands of those who mean us ill? Because now we have a new problem of trust. To paraphrase the Roman poet Juvenal, who monitors the monitors. We may need to be just as skeptical about trusting our so-called protectors. So let's dig a little deeper into the challenges we face in securing security. We have to strike a balance between two enemies of security, between anarchy and tyranny. And let's start, as human society itself did, with anarchy. A world of anarchy, it's not one where no one is enforcing order. It's one where there is no single entity with a monopoly on the use of force. So civil wars are anarchic. International politics is anarchic. And so was our daily life, at least for most of us,

before the origins of national police forces. Before 1800, there was no police force to call on if you had something stolen or harmed. It was instead a self-help system, and not the nice kind of self-help like mindfulness and scented candles. This was vigilantism. When the first modern police force, the first modern civilian police force, was not founded until the 1820s in London. Germany's first civilian police force was

founded here in Berlin in that momentous year, 1848. But until the 20th century, even in Europe, criminal laws were rarely uniformly enforced throughout every country. And in the rest of the world, even today, anarchy has often barely been conquered at all. Let me give you an example. This summer, I traveled to Rio de Janeiro. I stayed in a hotel on the Golden Smile of the Copacabana Beach. From the 14th floor swimming pool, which I realize sounds ridiculous, I could turn around and look at the lapping waves of the Atlantic on one side, or I could swivel all the way around and stare at the steep hillsides of Rio and see the favelas there. One and a half million people live in those favelas, in shanty houses with jerry-rigged electricity. And if you'd like to see the

favelas on Google Street View, well, you're out of luck, because just like the taxis and Ubers of Rio, Google's image-capturing cars won't enter them. Security in the favelas such as it is is provided by local drug gangs. But the favelas are not anarchic simply because the drug gangs are in charge, because often nobody's in charge at all.

Indeed, some police officers have formed militias in the favelas that have got into the extortion and drug business there. And in the past decade, Rio's police have killed over 10,000 people. So in the favela, it's not that there is no one you can trust to protect you. It's that you don't know who you can trust or for how long. But curtailing anarchy doesn't end our problems because when we aim for security, we might end up oversteering like a drunkard on a narrowboat. And then we find ourselves again prone to bad actors, the very ones who we employ to protect us. Our second enemy, tyranny, replaces anarchy. And the word police has its origin here in Germany, in the rather ominous phrase, well-ordered police state,

this encompassed everything from regulating measurements to what clothing you could wear on holidays to how old a child had to be to get a funeral. And the state has always sought this kind of authority over us, an inward conquest of our minds and our bodies. But in our contemporary liberal era, we shrug away these as impingements on our freedom, and indeed for good reason. Until, that is, we feel insecure. And then we may find ourselves granting tyrannical powers to our protectors that we wish we hadn't. Not a well-ordered police state, simply a police state. We exchange anarchy for tyranny. In America, this means police forces who increasingly predate on and profit from the citizens they are supposed to

protect, fining them for the most minor of infractions. When the US Department of Justice investigated the police force of the city of Ferguson, Missouri, they found that it essentially ran a protection racket. Let me give you an example of one especially egregious case. The police arrested a black man they found cooling off in his car after playing basketball. After he questioned why they wanted to search him, they arrested him at gunpoint. And first, they charged him with not wearing a seatbelt, though he was sitting in a parked car. And then they charged him with using a false name because he gave his name as Mike when it was Michael. He was fined, sent to court, and lost his job. All for what? And in Europe too,

we've also been willing to curtail freedoms in dealing with asylum seekers. The Danish government strips new arrivals of their jewellery. The Greek government has physically pushed boats back to the Turkish shore. And in the UK, our hostile environment meant to dissuade illegal immigrants means that banks, landlords, employers must all check the documents of anyone seeking their services. Even me, as a professor, I am obliged to report on my PhD students. So when I ask for papers, please, it's not just a request for more academic publications, rather darker in tone. Now, all of us felt the tyrannical hand of government

during the COVID-19 pandemic, and politicians were asked the unimaginable to keep citizens at home for 23 hours a day, solitary confinement experienced collectively. And that was draconian. But most of us understood and obeyed. But it has left farcical memories of police officers fining people for drinking coffee on a walk, of Italian police drones chasing sunbathers down a beach, and tragic memories, too, of families kept from dying relatives, of students fined £10,000 for hosting a soiree while politicians partied away from the public eye. And that's because tyranny is always arbitrary. Some face the wrath of the state, others enjoy the privileges of immunity. And when we set aside our rights and our rules, well then security becomes unevenly

enforced. So how then do we know if in our quest to curtail anarchy we've edged too far into tyranny? Because in Western democracies our COVID era tyranny was temporary. The state ended social distancing rules and it hasn't brought them back even with new COVID-19 waves. But for several years that was not true for Chinese citizens. China implemented three full years of a zero COVID strategy and at first that literally meant sealing citizens into their apartments with is that was not true for Chinese citizens. China implemented three full years of a zero COVID strategy. And at first, that literally meant sealing citizens into their apartments with blowtorches. And previous threats to our security in the West have also led to long-lasting tyranny. The US Patriot Act following 9-11 massively increased state surveillance. It lasted almost

two full decades. But it could be worse. Licensing laws created in the UK during the First World War, restricting drinking times at pubs, well, they lasted 91 years. Oceans rose and fell before you could get a drink after 11pm in a British pub. How then are we to strike a balance between anarchy and tyranny? What does a successful future of security look like? Well, our key task must be to ensure that the technologies that we use to better protect us from anarchy do not themselves overwhelm our rights and our freedoms. Because our abilities to monitor each other have expanded exponentially, tied to the processing power of microchips. We can now see everything.

But can we really trust ourselves with that power? Now, today's digital panopticon is not entirely new, because every British teenager growing up in the 1990s, like yours truly, remembers CCTV cameras outside of the off-license. Hi there, Mr. Security Guard. But nowadays, facial recognition software can cross-reference these images, and that can be crucial as a deterrent or to investigate crimes. It's even used in wartime to identify Russian soldiers in Ukraine. But that technology can easily fail us, and sometimes it simply doesn't work.

Live facial recognition was piloted at London's Westfield Shopping Centre. But of the 42 suspects that it identified, only eight were accurate. And that's the kind of predictive power you would associate with a pseudoscience like phrenology. But these technologies are getting better, and dictatorships can use them not to protect people but to strip them of their freedoms. For example the Putin government employs facial recognition technology to identify Russian protesters against his invasion of Ukraine and authoritarian use of facial recognition is especially advanced in China. Now you may have heard of the so-called social credit system that monitors Chinese citizens and potentially blacklists them from flights and from universities. But that policy so far is embryonic.

It's not yet an all-judging digital eye. Where the Chinese government does use more advanced technology is to monitor protesters, particularly the Uyghur residents of Xinjiang. And there's now a perverse symbiosis between the Chinese government on the one hand and Chinese software companies who train their algorithms on protests. And in turn, they receive more lucrative government contracts to better finance more tyrannical algorithms. So we may want to use facial recognition to curb anarchy, but the risks of it falling into the authoritarian hands of ill-meaning governments are profound. We have a choice to make. We could throw our hands up, follow San Francisco, simply ban the use of facial recognition software. But at a minimum, we need to tightly control access to and use of these databases. And we could also flip the problem, and we could use the digital panopticon

to prevent the people who protect us from exploiting that power. So police body cams are one possible solution. One study found that they halved homicides committed by the police, but body cams have limits. Now, police unions will argue that wearing cameras over restrains them, prevents them from doing their job. But on the other hand, the police officers who murdered George Floyd or who witnessed it, well they were wearing body cameras too. So even the panopticon of constant video recording cannot always restrain bad actors. Now it's not only new technologies that can destabilize our security. New technologists are often equally challenging. My one-time colleague at the University of Minnesota, Colin Kahl, became the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense.

He was tasked with American support for Ukraine's defense against the Russian invasion, and that meant dealing with Elon Musk. the Russian invasion, and that meant dealing with Elon Musk. Now, according to the New Yorker magazine, Karl had to beg Musk to maintain access to his private satellites, known as Starlink. And Musk apparently shut off Starlink when the Ukrainians planned a drone submarine attack on the Russian naval fleet. So even the American military, the most powerful guarantor of security on earth, ended up reliant on the caprices of a billionaire. New technologies, they force us to think about how to protect our liberal democracy from tyranny. The Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us it's just as important to protect liberal democracies from actual tyrannies. Now arguably Vladimir Putin launched his fatal and one hopes futile attack because of a misunderstanding about that fundamental element of security,

trust. Not trust in Putin, I don't think anyone in this room is naive enough for that, but Putin's misunderstanding about trust among western allies. And trust is most effective when we can rely on shared knowledge of each other's motives. And perhaps Donald Trump's posturing around NATO had convinced Putin that the Western alliance was fractured and distrustful, but that was a mistake. Now, NATO's powers seem to come from legal obligations to defend one another, but in reality, these are unenforceable. Who do you call if America doesn't show up to protect you? What mattered instead was a trust in how other NATO members would behave. And that trust,

that trust is built on a shared commitment to liberal democracy. Not money, but politics. Because there was a common misconception that economic ties would enable peace, that the coupling of China and Russia to Western economies would make warfare obsolete. But we can't trust someone just because we trade with them. Real trust, real security comes from being able to let down our guard, and that we can only do with our allies, with those who share our common commitments to order without tyranny, liberty without anarchy.

And ultimately, the future of our security depends on like-minded states, to order without tyranny, liberty without anarchy. And ultimately, the future of our security depends on like-minded states determined to preserve the principles of liberal democracy, both from the sirens of authoritarian populism at home and from the cynical despots of autocracies abroad. And in Berlin, where both threats are living memories, that message must ring clear. So, I began with a story about a brick. But Berlin's story, of course, is about a wall. A wall of division, of despair, of distrust. A wall built in international anarchy that symbolized tyranny. But that wall came down.

And as we seek for security between the perils of anarchy and tyranny it's up to liberal democracies it's up to us to prevent new walls from rising Thank you. at Oxford University and author of the book Why Politics Fails. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common.

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Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. podcast. The final Reith lecture comes from Atlanta, Georgia. The talk focuses on prosperity. Ansel argues the relationship between democracy and prosperity is a two-way street. In general, democracies make people better off. But when things stagnate, or people see the rich gain and the rest lose, support for democracy can only decline.

Here, once again, is Ben Ansell. So 25 years ago, I had a uniquely American experience. I took a Greyhound bus across the country. I flew from London into New York late at night, and when I awoke the next morning, I walked out of my hotel into an immense canyon of skyscrapers, arching towards the early morning sun. Everything was, to these British eyes, unimaginably large. The buildings, the cars, even the cockroaches that greeted me in the shower of the YMCA.

Everything spoke of a gleaming prosperity, of ambitious and outlandish dreams fulfilled so that morning i boarded the greyhound embarking on a 66 hour odyssey across the continent from stop to stop i was able to follow mark mcguire and sammy soza chasing the all-time home run record i saw america's largest truck stop in Iowa, the endless fields of the prairies, the vast monoliths of the Rockies. We even stopped for gambling in Reno, the biggest little city in the world. And after almost three days, I arrived in the splendor and squalor of San Francisco. So then, at the end of the 1990s, with the stock market booming, this fine city here hosting the Olympics, near full employment, the Cold War apparently won, America seemed at the precipice

of a permanent prosperity. So two years later, in 2000, I moved to America and I brought the bad times with me. So first there was a contested presidential election, then the dot-com crash, then Maguire and Sosa were hauled to Congress to testify about steroid use, inequality and house prices both spiked upwards, and global temperatures too by half a degree Celsius from 2000. And then a housing crash and the deepest recession for 70 years, and America, once lazily indifferent about politics, started to tear itself apart. So was that great prosperity I had seen just an illusion? Perhaps America had sacrificed its long-run wealth for immediate sugar rush temptations like dot-com stocks and condo flipping. Maybe the economy had been falsely

pumped up, you know, perhaps like a baseball player on steroids. And when it came to climate change, short-term thinking was even more prevalent. As temperatures crept up inexorably, what was the national response? A booming SUV market that grew from 20% of cars sold in 2000 to half by 2020. And what's more, American prosperity had been very unequally shared. Not everyone was traveling on the same bus. In the 1970s, the richest 1% of Americans brought in just over 10% of all income. And I know that sounds like quite a lot, but by 2014 that had doubled to 20%. And the poorest half of Americans? Well, their share of the national pot had collapsed from 20% to 12%. And today, 75 years after Martin Luther King Jr. graduated from Morehouse College right

here in Atlanta, huge racial disparities persist, black Americans still earning 20% less than their white counterparts, with that gap actually widening since the year 2000. Now, let me be clear. Americans are rich, on average, a third richer than citizens in other G7 countries. There is prosperity, for sure. But is it a sustainable and shared prosperity? Now, here today in Atlanta, these questions feel even more urgent because we might be at the beginning of a new era of even greater prosperity through artificial intelligence because our harnessing of computational power could make our exploitation of fossil fuel power seem childlike. Or perhaps things go wrong. The same tech leaders developing these new AI algorithms have warned about a malign AI that ends up eradicating rather than emancipating humans. So I am become AI destroyer of worlds.

But more likely, instead of destroying us, AI will simply accentuate the gaps in wealth that mark human life, with the spoils of algorithmic innovation captured by a smaller and smaller elite. And if the existential threat of AI is overhyped, that's not so for our shared climate. Now, our current prosperity is the air of an exponential exploitation of fossil fuels that set off the carbon emissions that are unsustainably pushing up our global thermometer. And even if we can mitigate climate change, and perhaps we can in the wealthy world, the vast majority of our fellow humans,

they live at latitudes that may become unbearable and then unlivable. So our generation is the one that gets to make a choice, core to the survival of our species. Can we remain prosperous, become ever more so, without ending up in a dystopia? Are our democracies up to these challenges? And as we try to secure a sustainable shared prosperity, we face two enemies. And the first enemy is our short-termism.

To become or stay prosperous, we have to take on costs today for gravy tomorrow. And that's how any investment works, right? You save now to spend later. But that produces what I call a prosperity trap, because we abandon our long-run goals, unwilling to take short-term hits. And think of climate change abatement. The costs and hassles all come to us today through higher taxes or more expensive energy. And the benefits, well, they accrue to our children or our grandchildren. And I love them and all, but it's not me who gets the payoff. And so we end up bulking at acting today. And maybe we delay because we think, well, something will just turn

up. It's not just each of us who faces this prosperity trap. Collectively, we also struggle. And politicians, they face the harsh vagaries of the electoral cycle. From the moment congressional representatives are elected, they're chained to the phone, soliciting new contributions to their re-election campaign. So it's hard for them to look beyond two years. But despite the electoral roller coaster, our democratic governments are still our best vessels for long-run thinking. They've been the handmaidens of technologies that define our world, but didn't have obvious short-term profitability, from radar to lasers, short-term profitability, from radar to lasers, nuclear fission to the internet. And even today,

the biggest contractors for tech firms, from SpaceX to DeepMind, are government agencies. So the choices that we make as citizens set the terms of play and a nice profit stream for even the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley, not that they always thank us. The second enemy of prosperity is inequality. So we might get richer in aggregate through technological innovation, but who gets rich? Well, that's fundamentally a political question. The economists Daron Asimoglu and Simon Johnson argue that technologies vary in who they benefit, so some forms of automation can improve the jobs and the paychecks of workers. And the personal computer is a good example. It's complementary with the creative skills that we have as humans. So a word processor,

it can't write its own memos or articles or this year's Reith lecture. Well, at least until Jack GBT came along, so good luck to next year's lecturer. But other types of automation, they simply replace workers, like self-service tills at supermarkets. So grocery workers lose their jobs, but no one else finds their job any easier to do. So at best, you save a few minutes, and at worst, you keep swiping your orange juice over and over again

until the barcode registers. When technologies complement what workers do, they make us all richer, but when they substitute for workers, well then they might only make the managers or shareholders of a company richer. But technology doesn't live in a political vacuum. Technological innovation creates a windfall, but how we share that windfall, well that's for us to decide as a democratic polity. We're not bystanders in the development of new technologies, from carbon capture to artificial intelligence. We, we are the main players strutting the stage. We can influence whether innovation happens and who gets to benefit.

So let's wind the clock back over a century. gets to benefit. So let's wind the clock back over a century. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil once stood colossus-like across the entire nexus of energy distribution in America, much like some tech firms dominate our interactions online. But like the colossus, it was a wonder of the ancient world. Politicians busted that trust. And competition enforced by the government ultimately loosened Standard Oil's stranglehold on the price of oil. So we have done things like this before. But sometimes our inequalities, economic and political, can even prevent innovation from happening in the very first place.

The economist Lisa Cook, raised and educated right here in Georgia, has shown how the patents for inventions claimed by black American innovators collapsed in the late 19th century as the Jim Crow system of racial oppression and lynching intensified. But inequality can also provoke political backlashes, and nowhere is that clearer than with globalisation. So two decades ago, I visited tech companies in Bangalore in India, and executives there talked really excitedly about a book by the American writer Thomas Friedman, who had told them that the world is flat. And I was amused by this at the time, because in Friedman's own telling,

he'd first heard this idea from a different Indian tech leader in the very same city. But regardless of the provenance of this idea, it was wrong. Since Friedman's book was published in 2005, the world has become not flat, but rather lumpy.

Businesses threatened by Chinese imports slashed industrial jobs across America and Europe, and that then led to a backlash against global elites' perceived disregard for the economic health of their communities. So the flat world has been replaced by regional protectionism and subsidies, sometimes led by populists denouncing globalism. But that populism has not proved that much of a solution indeed over the last century populist governments have ironically presided over much lower rates of economic growth than their establishment enemies so 15 years of populists makes you about 10 percent poorer so we face

a fundamental challenge to get and keep a truly shared prosperity. And prosperity itself is already difficult because it requires us to bear costs today for riches tomorrow. But the shared part, well, that's even harder, preventing elites from monopolising all the gains of innovation and making sure that that innovation is democratically sustainable. But it's not hopeless, not at all, because we've solved these problems in the past. And so let's look at how we might do that again with some of the huge challenges that we face on the road to shared prosperity. And let's start right here in Atlanta with something as simple as affording a place to live. Now, Atlanta is a huge metropolis. It's roughly the same area as Massachusetts, perhaps the only similarity between the two regions. And there ought to be plenty of land to build on.

Yet house prices here in Atlanta have tripled over the past decade. And that seems odd because Atlanta doesn't lack land. It's not Manhattan in so, so many ways. But Atlanta is not alone. Since the 1990s, there has been an enormous global house price boom. The average house in London costs over 10 times income.

In Vancouver, 14 times. In Shanghai, 50, 5-0, 50 times. So why can't we seem to do anything about it? Newer generations see their parents' modest three-bedroom suburban ranch house as an unaffordable, unimaginable dream. And worse, the housing boom also harms our prosperity because it diverts money from technological to residential investment and it prevents people from moving to growing cities with well-paid jobs.

And we hold up our hands and we say, too bad, but we are not powerless. At the end of the Second World War, returning GIs in America were provided with low interest, no down payment mortgages targeted at newly built homes. In the 1960s, the British state built 200,000 new houses every year, half of all construction in that time. The Austrian city of Vienna built so much public housing in the 1920s that even today 60% of the Viennese live in state subsidized housing, which is why they can afford such fancy pastries. Now I'm sure a lot of people in this room wouldn't want to live in state subsidizedubsidised housing. And yet many of you do. Because if you have a mortgage backed by Fannie Mae

or you take the mortgage interest rate deduction on your income taxes, then guess what? The government is also subsidising you. But governments and politics can also make housing even less affordable by restrictive zoning or planning rules. And sometimes in America, that has been a deliberate way of enforcing racial segregation through redlining, as happened here in Atlanta.

And it's still used today to keep poorer citizens out of wealthier neighbourhoods. But even when they're not trying to keep others out, it's hard to get people to support house building because the short-term costs of new developments, streets dug up, strains on schools, they loom large. While the benefits of new housing, well, they're in the future.

They go to new arrivals, not old neighbours. We need new housing to have shared prosperity because we don't want future generations unable to afford the houses that we grew up in and loved. But that means we have to take the task of building homes seriously, and that takes political courage. It means taking on the most powerful vested interest of all in politics, existing homeowners. Okay, and I can feel politicians shuddering at the idea, but there are

ways of sweetening the deal. One novel idea is street votes. So your whole street gets to vote on a new zoning plan for that street, and if it passes, then everyone on the street gets rights to develop following that plan and potentially benefit from the rising values following development. Or the street could just vote it down, but the important part here is that the decision's made on your street, not in City Hall. So housing is a crisis of our present, but what about the starker future challenges of climate change and artificial intelligence? To avoid the direst risks of climate change, of arising temperatures that we can't mitigate, we will first need to overcome the shadow of the present. And that's not going to be easy

because reducing emissions means restricting people like us, the democratic public, from doing things we like to do. And today's a defining moment in the politics of climate change because right now pollsters can find enormous support in the abstract for net zero policies. But when we come to specific policies where the short-term costs veer up suddenly, well then politics seems to get rather harder. In London, a recent parliamentary by-election was swung by discontent with the expansion of an ultra-low emission zone.

In the Netherlands, the Farmer Citizen Party came from absolutely nowhere to win the most seats in the Dutch Senate on, get this, a policy of removing a ban on nitrogen producing insecticides, which seems like a pretty niche manifesto policy. They do seem like small-bore policies, but the thing about them is they hit particular groups. They hit drivers or farmers with limited incomes to absorb the cost, and the proponents of such policies often preach about the importance of climate change and air pollution as if a sermon

alone should stop all opposition. But politicians need to accept that there are short-term costs to achieving a long-run net zero future. It's no use berating people, especially when they can vote you out. So the most effective policies are going to be those that give with one hand while they take with the other. So in Switzerland, for example, their carbon tax falls if the country meets its emissions targets. So that's a nice incentive to burn less gas. In British Columbia, the proceeds of their carbon tax are used to reduce business taxes, provide tax credits to low-income families, and tax rebates to every resident. So if you want to cut carbon, you need to learn to cut deals. Now, let me finish with the technology that could pose the greatest challenge of all

to our shared prosperity, artificial intelligence. A successful AI could free us from the chains of our mundane lives, or it could enslave us capriciously. So our task then is to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can accomplish our greatest goals without seeing us humans as an irritating obstacle, and we are kind of annoying. So as the previous Reith lecturer Stuart Russell argued, we need to make artificial intelligence human compatible. But the thing is, it's even harder for us, the humans, to make collective decisions about how we are going to regulate AI.

So we also need to make humanity AI compatible. And one reason to take back control is that AI is often used to replace humans rather than serve goals that are useful to humans. And replacing us often goes wrong. to humans. And replacing us often goes wrong. Now, artificial intelligence algorithms can produce a really uncanny mimicry of human language, but they often lack context or content. So recently, there was an article written, not by expensive journalists, no, no, but by AI on the MSN news website. And it recommended an unusual destination for travellers who were headed to Ottawa in Canada looking for a meal out. It directed them to a local food bank. Okay, so AI has a pretty dark sense of humour. We need an AI that complements human skills rather than replacing them, because

otherwise we may find ourselves newly obsolete, say for those few people programming the AI, and we may be collectively more prosperous, but that prosperity will be far more unequally shared. So who's going to make this call? Well, it's all well for me to stand here and say, AI should be developed in a certain way. But currently, decisions about how to develop AI are made by those doing the developing. We're in an era of that most oxymoronic phrase, self-regulation. And it's true that major tech figures from Elon Musk to Bill Gates worry about a malign artificial intelligence. They do.

But the short-term incentives of tech firms for profit margins mean that we'd be naive to trust technologists to solely regulate themselves or to think that they wouldn't charge us a fortune to restrain the very algorithms that they've created. So perhaps we should take a hint instead from this year's most celebrated drama about a wreath lecturer. You're wondering what it is.

70 years ago this fall, Robert Oppenheimer delivered his wreath lectures as humanity faced another Promethean moment. He spoke of science as a pilgrimage towards understanding over the long centuries, culminating in the exploitation of the power locked in the subatomic world, a power that Oppenheimer himself, of course, mastered. But after creating the atomic bomb, he spent the rest of his life concerned with the political question of how to prevent its further use. And spoiler alert, that did not make him popular.

But humanity has so far never again played with atomic fire, and not because we couldn't, but because we chose not to, collectively. And in part, this was the deterrence of mutually assured destruction. But much of our success came from regulation and from cooperation. After the creation of the bomb,

the US government and its atomic agencies made sure to have oversight and control of any further innovation. As the Cold War ground on, hostile superpowers were still able to agree on non-proliferation and ultimately nuclear arms reduction. So surely the international challenges today of regulating AI, it can't outweigh those of two superpowers nonetheless choosing to control their Promethean urges. So our governments cannot leave governing AI just to the algorithmists. If AI does create unimaginable fortunes, it'll be the role of democratic governments to make sure that people benefit too. And currently our governments have woken up to AI's existential risk. But they're neglecting its enormous economic and political risks.

And it's not obvious we should be much happier about being ruled by big tech CEOs than by a runaway AI. So citizens of democracies, we have the right and the power to ask our governments to look past the short-term costs of regulating AI to our long-run welfare and to make sure that the resulting prosperity is truly shared. And we need shared prosperity not just for its own sake, although who wouldn't want to feel a little richer? We need it because without inclusive economic growth, it's hard to achieve the other things that we care about, from security to solidarity. It's no coincidence that richer, more equal countries tend to have lower crime, or that they're better able to support effective public education and health systems. And most critically of all, prosperity goes hand in hand with effective democracy. Richer countries are

more likely to become and stay democratic. When there's more to go around, it just gets easier to address the trade-offs that we need to make in functioning democracies for the fortunate to support the unfortunate and for deals to get cut. Economic stagnation, by contrast, well that just makes every decision harder. Dissatisfaction with the economy spills over to distrust of politics. Populists trounce mainstream parties, rule breakers denounce rule makers, and disagreement becomes chaos. So democracy and prosperity go hand in hand. And the central role of democracy in underpinning America's prosperity was best described by another, I have to say, rather more famous European political scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville, who travelled across America two centuries ago.

So that means at least he avoided the greyhound, though possibly not the cockroaches. For Tocqueville, America's capitalist energy, its equality and its democracy were inseparable. But he too warned that the vast inequalities created by the technology of his day might weaken the basic equality of American democracy. So if we in America, in Britain and beyond are to preserve our democratic future, to make ruling ourselves really meaningful, well, it's up to us to create and secure a shared prosperity and to take democratic control over our destiny. It's up to us. Thank you. These featured Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford University and author of the book Why Politics Fails.

You can find all four Reith lectures on our website at cbc.ca slash ideas. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. This series was adapted for Ideas by Matthew Lazenrider. Special thanks to Laura Lawrence and the BBC World Service. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval.

Our acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad.