Instant Genius - How technology is changing politics – Jamie Susskind

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Jamie Susskind explains how the politics of the future will be shaped by the technology influencing our lives today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Jason Goodyear, the commissioning editor of BBC Focus magazine. In this episode, Barrister and author of the book Future Politics, Jamie Susskind, talks to online editor Alexander McNamara about the challenges government's face when confronted with new technologies, how AI is changing the way will interact with politicians, and what government will form on Mars. But first, just a quick reminder

that we really want to see your reviews of this show so we can get an idea of how we're doing. And if there's anyone you want us to speak to, please let us know on Twitter at At Science Focus. And now, here's Jamie Suskind on the Future of Politics. So your book is called Future Politics. Can you give me an idea of where we are with politics now and what is happening and how we got to this point that we are now?

Well, my book isn't really about where we're. are now because I think there's plenty of writers much more qualified than me commenting on that. And in a sense, it's trying to lift our eyes beyond the crash and thunder of the everyday news cycle that we've seen. It feels for the last couple of years to the bigger challenges that are lurking around the corner. And my argument is that the great political transformation that we're going through is mainly the result of changes in digital technology. And that the changes wrought by those technologies could be as profound for the way we live together as the invention of script or the agricultural revolution. So for where I'm standing, the challenges of

Brexit and Donald Trump and of nationalism and the like profound that they seem at a kind of generational level in the long run may prove to be significantly less serious than the challenges posed by digital technology. That's not to say that we haven't already started to see some of the effects of tech on the way we live together. And I think some of those are obvious relating to the internet and mobile phones and the like. But we're really just getting started. In the grand sweep of human history, we've only lived with digital technologies for just

a microsecond. And the mind boggles to imagine where they'll be in a few decades time. So, you know, you mentioned there things like Trump and Brexit. And that's, we've seen, you know, things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that technology has been used in a sense to, to sort of manipulate, but not so much manipulate, but just sort of tweak people's preferences and things. Is that just the beginning of how politics is going to change because of technology, or is there something else that's going to be a bigger sea change in it?

It's just the beginning. The broader point that I make in future politics is that those who control the most powerful technologies will increasingly control the rest of us. And certainly one way that they might be able to do that is through gathering data about us and using that data to influence or manipulate us. So it is said that Cambridge Analytica had 5,000 data points about 200 million different Americans in the Trump campaign in 2016, and that enabled them to target individual voters with a great deal of psychological specificity, you know, with messages which were tailored to be attractive to those individuals. And obviously, that's a new development in politics because that kind of insight into what makes people tick as gleaned from their data is not something

that politicians of the past had access to. But even on its own terms, we're in very, very early days with that kind of technology. The amount of data that we produce is growing exponentially. we produce more every two hours now than we did from the dawn of time until 2003, as well as the systems that are capable of analyzing that data are also growing extraordinarily more capable and in some respects in exponential rates as well. But I think, again, if we just look at Cambridge Analytica and the like and think that's going to the effect of technology on politics, I think we're missing a beat. And in future politics, I look at power, I look at democracy,

I look at justice and I look at freedom. And under each of those heads, I argue that technology could play a transformative role. And again, I think it is easy to look to focus on the latest manifestation of technological impact on politics and say, this is what the future looks like when really it's just the start. So you say that there's four different things that that's, does that mean it's like the data companies? Are they the ones that really hold the power and the influence in this situation? It might be the data companies, but in truth, it's whoever owns or controls the relevant technologies at a given time in the future.

So it might be a big tech firm which gathers data. It might be a government which gathers data. It might be a government which buys data off intermediaries who themselves buy that data of tech companies. In the United States, for instance, it's unconstitutional. for the US government to gather data through widespread surveillance and keep it, that is not unconstitutional for the US government to buy that data, which it does regularly from intermediary companies whose sole job

is to gather data together from the various diverse sources in which has gathered and package it so that you can create a profile of individuals, which the government uses for its own ends. So it's fluid who the power might reside within the future, although I regret that it doesn't increasingly look like if things continue as they are, it will reside in the hands of us as citizens. The power that has, does that mean that we are essentially

becoming more quantifiable as people? As you say, there's 5,000 data points on each of us, as you say, Cambridge Analytistic had. That's obviously going to be more, politics and politicians and the people with the power, they're going to be able to use that in a way to sort of condition our thoughts and our political leanings? Yes, to a certain extent, but that is not the full extent of why technology is a form of power.

There are two other ways that are important too. One is the fact that we increasingly live around technologies and live our lives through them. Cisco say that there'll be up to 50 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020. And what that means is that we are subject to the rules that are coded into those technologies. So when you use a self-driving car for the first time and you ask it to go over the speed limit, or you ask it to park on a double yellow line, or you ask it to take you to somewhere which as manufacturers think that you shouldn't be visiting, it might well refuse to do that.

And you can't ask a technology to do something that is not coded to do. And so increasingly those who write the code will write the rules by which the rest of us live our lives. And that's a form of power that's quite distinct from the ability to gather data. Another form of power that's distinct from the ability to gather data and influence us is the power to control our perception of the world. Because you and I are only able to perceive a small slice of reality using our senses. And we rely on others on third parties to gather and sort information about the world out there and present it to us in a digestible form. In the past, that had been the work of the mass media. In the future, I think it will increasingly be done by technologies in an automated way, generating news, presenting it to us, and deciding which slice of reality we see.

And obviously, that is a very important function in society, because it determines what we know about and what we care about and what we believe is true and false and right or wrong. And so those who write the algorithms that determine which part of the world we see and which part we don't see, and in the future, it'll look much less like a Google word search and much more like a conversation in natural language with an Amazon Echo when we try to use a search function with technology. Those who write those algorithms and control the answers that we receive about the world will hold a great deal of power in society. And these are new functions. These are not political functions. and I think they are political, that our forbearers in human civilization would have recognized. They're created, or at least radically transformed by digital technology. And so, yes, it is about data being gathered about us.

And yes, that data can actually itself be used to determine what we do and do not see when the world is framed for us. But we can't limit the power of technology to that. Just like we can't limit it to brute power alone, because it does have effects on democracy and freedom and justice, which are conceptually separate from power as well. What do you mean when you say brute power alone? The ability to get us to do things we wouldn't otherwise do. And so I think that increasingly technology will have that power to get us to do things we wouldn't otherwise do,

and those who control the technologies will have power over the rest of us. That's subtly different from saying that those who own and control particular technologies will be able to affect the democratic process, which they will, or be able to determine the extent of our liberties, which they will or be able to determine importance, questions of social justice, which they also will.

One of my goals in writing the book, both as a lawyer and as political theorist, is to have conceptual precision about what we're talking about when we talk about technology. So I do have a section on power where I say, this is how technologies can get you to do things you wouldn't otherwise do, but I also am interested in those other three concepts as well.

So it's sort of like, where is the self-driving car will stop you, physically stop you from parking on the yellow line, if you do a search, a news algorithm will bring you sort of softly in a way stories that it thinks it ranks. That sort of thing. Exactly.

Power takes different forms and it can be in the form of persuasion or influence or manipulation or it can be in the form of force or coercion, which is much more closer to the self-driving car example. The truth is that in the future

the world will be thick with technology, and thick with power, there will be all these new ways of getting us to change our behavior, some of which will be hard like the self-driving car, and others will be soft like the influence and manipulation or persuasion of an online perception control device or mechanism. I mean, when it comes to rules and technology, I always think this is really interesting. I think it's something we don't think about enough. There's this great story about Gordon Brown going to the United States in 2009 or 10, and one of the gifts that President Obama gave him

was a group of DVDs of classic American films. And when the Prime Minister, the most powerful man in the land, sat down in Downing Street later that week to play the DVDs, he discovered that they wouldn't play because they'd been coded to work only on the North American DVD players. And it goes to the broader point that you can't get a technology to do something that is not coded to do even if you're the Prime Minister, in the future, if these technologies surround us, if we live our lives through and with them, we'll increasingly be subject to the rules that are written into them. And that could be quite a profound political change, because those rules, unlike the laws, are not necessarily written by legislators. They're not necessarily written in public. They're not necessarily developed in a consistent form over time, or even designed for the public interest as opposed to the interests of their manufacturers and creators.

So it's a new form of power in society, power of code, that we haven't had to live with before. Who gets to essentially, who decides these? There are some things like the parking on a yellow line. That's a sort of rule that's made when we make the rules of the road, which is kind of in the physical, political world. Who creates those rules externally? And if the technology creators, they're coming out of the rules a bit more. where does those boundaries start to merge, as it were? It's a good question.

So you have laws, laws of the land that are written in Parliament and enforced in courts of law. Then you have code, which is written privately by software and tech companies and embedded in our technologies. Sometimes the code deliberately or otherwise is engineered to reflect the law. So digital rights management technology might reflect the law of copyright, the Gordon Brown DVDs, or if the self-driving car sets the speed limit of the vehicle at the legal speed limit, that would be another example. There are other times where code serves purposes other than the law, where it enforces rules and norms, which for whatever reason, the manufacturer of those products or those technologies wants to enforce such rules. So there's no legal rule that communicating on Twitter requires tweets of no more than 280 characters. That's a choice made by Twitter's engineers. Likewise, there's no legal rule that you have to obey community guidelines on Facebook or on Twitter or Reddit.

But those are rules of private code that are enforced by the private entities themselves. So we increasingly live alongside sort of private rules as well as public rules. sometimes the two overlap and sometimes they don't. And I actually find this is one of the interesting developments in digital technology, which is that a lot of the rules, the important rules that are going to be written about our lives will not be written using normal political principles, but rather will be written by software engineers or public policy people in tech firms who aren't necessarily trained in the moral or ethical principles needed to write rules. And they're not necessarily subject to the checks and balances in the form of, say, transparency or accountability or

answerability that we would expect of those who hold power over us and who write rules that we have to live by. So just to make that real, a few months ago, one of Facebook's companies called Oculus, which is a virtual reality company, came out with a development in its product, which said that it would allow arena-style experiences for those who use the VR products. And so I was imagining what you might do with that VR experience. And it was around about the time of the anniversary of the First World War ending. And I wondered if you might recreate aspects of the First World War, for instance, going over the trenches and charging the German positions.

And then I wondered, well, what if you wanted to use that technology to defend the German positions instead of attacking them? or looking to the Second World War, what if you wanted to defend the beaches on D-Day rather than storm them? What if you wanted to experience being one of the terrorists of 9-11, plotting and flying the plane into the Twin Towers? These are all things that you could recreate using virtual reality, and you might have different views on it than I have about whether that should be permitted. And these are questions of liberty and what we should and shouldn't be free to do in society.

But what's really interesting is that those decisions increasingly will be taken by tech firms, not by laws or by Parliament or by you and me, but by those who manufacture the technologies through which we live our liberties. And that, again, is an interesting development. They're the ones who are essentially making these choices. And I guess as a company, I guess most companies, their ultimate goal is to have, you know, turn a profit and to exist. So does that mean that sort of financial goal is going to start to sort of feed even more into the world of politics? I know that politics and finance are quite linked, but that sort of corporate mentality is going to shape politics more as technology becomes more important. You've hit out what I think is a really profound point, which is that technology develops according to the logic of the market, what sells supply and demand. And that's fine.

and you and I are accustomed to looking upon technology primarily as consumers, and tech companies are accustomed to looking on technology primarily as vendors. Now that digital technologies are increasingly assuming political functions, the function of free speech, which we exercise in online platforms, the functions related to the health of democracy, power functions, which get us to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, justice functions like distributing things around society, using algorithms that distribute jobs or mortgages or insurance or whatever it is.

Now that tech is colonizing the world of the political, is it acceptable for that technology to be developed and judged solely by reference to market principles? And my answer is no. Market principles are alone, are inappropriate to judge what are essentially now political functions, political technologies. And so increasingly, I think rather than seeing the marketization of politics, we will have to see the politicisation of markets where we impose political norms and standards

on big tech firms and the like that are increasingly performing whether they know it or not, indeed whether they like it or not, political functions. So does that mean that we should sort of be starting to put a more political spin on how we see technologies and big companies? You know, whether it's the point of like voting in leaders or having an informed decision about what they do. input that we as citizens could do to sort of help bridge that gap? So yes, we do need to start looking at technology as citizens rather than consumers.

And we need to recognize that the digital is political and act accordingly. And here's where political philosophy comes in handy because we have all these ideas and thoughts from the past about what to do when someone, be it a prince or a conqueror or a priest assumes great power over the rest of the population. And in the future, I don't say today necessarily, but in the future, the way things are heading, those who control very powerful technologies could assume equivalent functions.

We will in due course need some forms of regulation, although I'm not satisfied just now that our politicians are particularly well placed to make that regulation in a way that does more good than harm. We will need to bring some of the principles that we have in politics into the tech. So, for instance, the principle of transparency, you don't need to elect the board of Facebook or Twitter necessarily, but it would be good to see the inner workings of their algorithms

so they can be opened up for scrutiny and public criticism by civic-minded individuals for the same reasons that we make laws in public and courts sit in public because they enable people to spot difficulties before they become tragedies and enable us to put fences at the top of cliffs rather than ambulances at the bottom. And so even if we don't necessarily have a say in the algorithms or the products that are developed by these companies, a little bit more transparency about the rules that increasingly govern our lives, would be consistent with our political principles from the past. Likewise, we might have to end up breaking up tech firms, not according to how much economic power they have, but according to how much political power

they have, making sure that no particular entity becomes so untouchable and has so much effect on our lives that we couldn't do anything about it if things went wrong. So in the book, I propose a host of different solutions to the rising politicisation of technology, but at the heart of them is the simple idea that we as citizens need to start seeing it as citizens and not just as consumers. So does that mean things like the recent regulations, the EU GDPR regulations? Does that mean that things that's sort of like, that's us trying to sort of rest back a little bit of that transparency and that sort of control, as it were? Absolutely.

And the GDPR is not an unproblematic law, but, and I should say, you know, as a lawyer, I have actually read the GDPR from start to finish. and let me tell you, it is not an interesting document. But it's an important one, even if it's imperfect. And it represents a step forward in us trying to control the flow of data in society. So who may gather data under what circumstances and what may be done with it once it is gathered. Compare that state of affairs in Europe to the wild west of data use in the United States. And you see the difference that laws can make. in the US, and there are talks of having a GDPR, but no such thing exists just now.

And the use of data out there is entirely different from the way it is in Europe. Now, critics of the European model would say that is why the US has been so much more successful in generating businesses based around the use of data because there are fewer regulations and fewer rules. They might well be right about that. But from a political perspective, the GDPR absolutely stands as an example of a law which we've introduced to try and curtail the awesome power of technology. From that, I sort of think that you've got the, as you say, the wild west of the US there

approaches for data and then the much more rigid European one. If you go even further around the world, you can see different values and opinions in sort of society and not just in technology and how you should do things like, you know, the US is the death penalty, for example, whereas in Europe it's outlawed. When we've got that much more technology sort of very much deeply ingrained in the politics, is that going to sort of, they're going to be a problem when there are much bigger societal issues rather than just the very deep technological ones? Let's be clear, different societies, because of their different histories, economics,

politics, religion and morality are always going to treat technologies differently. And even within societies, I expect the rise. of new ideas and ideologies, new fault lines and divisions between those who would see technology one way and those who would see it another way. And I try to sketch out what some of those might be in future politics. But the fact that those differences exist and always will exist is no reason not to start debating them and start discussing them and start organizing around them. Because right now, the principal logic by which we govern technology, as we've discussed earlier, is the logic of the market. and we do that quite unthinkingly.

And what I would like to see is a world in which we're at least thinking about it and arguing about it and debating about it. And it might well be that some countries do it differently from others. And that might be a good thing. And we can all learn from each other just as we do in other aspects of public policy. We can learn from our mistakes and we can learn from other successes as well. What it does mean, though, is that I think the slightly utopian vision of, you know, international standards for the governance of technology, are going to be difficult. It's going to be particularly difficult in a time

where countries are becoming less cooperative rather than more cooperative, as I think defines this particular period of political history. So we need to ask what we can do on an individual nation state, or perhaps at a super state level like the EU. But if we wait for global governance, I think we'll be waiting a long time.

I guess sort of in this day and age, the world is broadly democratic, but there are lots of different varieties of democracy in it. I guess the same sort of thing will happen with technology as it gets deeply ingrained into the world of politics. Well, quite. And the world's becoming slightly less democratic

in the last few years. All the social science suggests that. But look at how technology is used in China. Look at how it's co-opted by the authoritarian state there. And look at how that compares to the way technology is used in Europe or the United States, where you still have government abuses or government co-option. of technologies, but on a slightly more transparent and a slightly less authoritarian manner.

So the way that a technology develops and is used will always be affected by the culture into which it is born. Just like, you know, people thought that the internet would create a more decentralized network like society because it was a decentralized network like technology. That's not the way technologies work. They take on some of the habits and forms of the societies in which they're born, which is why they're saying the internet has come to be dominated by large companies and by governments and states, because we live in our time, a political moment in human history, aware of democratic capitalism, where nation states and companies are some of the most powerful entities in human civilization. And so it's not surprised,

perhaps, that the internet has come to reflect their power in the way that it has ended up. With the idea of the technologies taking on, you know, where they're based and the people that shape them. That brings me on to the idea of AI, which I know that you mentioned quite a bit in the book and about how AI is influencing politics. And obviously that AI is created by the creator and their old influences and everything goes on there. How is artificial intelligence going to shape politics in the future? That's a big question. Well, let's first of all distinguish between two different concepts. There are lots of writers, many of them very distinguished, who look at artificial intelligence and talk about where it might end up, which is systems that

possess general intelligence, consciousness and creativity, and which becomes so powerful in a sense that they end up keeping us as pets, as someone once put it. And really, there's no room for human politics in such a world. But that's not exactly the world that I'm focused on. I'm focused on the interim period between now and the time where we reach that world, where we are developing artificial intelligence systems that are extraordinarily capable, but usually in a very narrow field of focus. So we have AI systems that can diagnose lung cancers better than doctors, or diagnose skin cancers better than the best human doctors, or beat the best human players at games like chess and go, or they can lip read or mimic human speech or synthesize human speech

better than human experts can. But these aren't systems that are intelligence in the way that we are. They are just very, very capable. And I try to assess the impact of those on politics and I think that they could have a number of effects. One is in the democratic process, becoming involved, for instance, in deliberation. So if we already have a chatbot, it's said chatbot is a kind of machine that can answer natural language questions using natural language and converse with you. There's a company in the United Kingdom which says it has developed one that can answer questions for the Royal College of General Practitioners' examination with greater accuracy than human doctors can. So a chat board answering medical diagnostic questions better than doctors, it's not unreasonable to ask if they might eventually reach our levels of political sophistication. And so conversing with bots online could become the norm for better or worse.

There'll be questions about whether you might have an artificial intelligence system in your pocket, which you'll have. advises you the way to vote based on the data that it's gathered about you and the way that you've told it your norms and values work. You might have artificial intelligence systems taking on public policy functions that are boring and banal like running a traffic system or controlling this distribution of water or more profound ones like affecting the flow of money in the economy. In questions of social justice, we increasingly use powerful algorithms to make important decisions already. So 72% of CVs are never read by human eyes anymore. They're scammed by algorithms and put to the bottom of the top of the pile. Algorithms are used to determine whether we get insurance, whether we get a loan or

credit. And these are important social justice functions. They determine who gets what, which is one of the main questions of politics. And so, again, how those artificial intelligence systems are trained, who writes the algorithms and what data they're fed, will have professional. found importance for the welfare of society and for the public good. Again, it sort of rises back to that question is the idea of the people who are creating these algorithms, should there be some sort of political imperative to make sure that it's impartial and unbiased in any way? Yeah, so software engineers are social engineers now, whether they like it or not.

And in the future, that will be even more true. Impartiality is one principle, but there might be other principles that you need to adduce as well. So impartiality is a good principle for a system that decides between two competing claims like a judge, but it might not be a good system for deciding whether people should be recruited. For instance, if you believe in positive discrimination, you might believe that a system shouldn't be impartial as between the rich, privileged white man and a person who doesn't share any of those characteristics from a less traditional background for that workplace.

You say the opposite of impartiality should apply there. a different principle of justice should apply. So algorithms embody principles of justice, and it's important that the engineers who write them have some idea of what those principles are or might be, and that the rest of us see them for what they are, which is distributive mechanisms, just like the market or the state.

And then with those, the AIs that we have, will they be able to learn enough about us to be able to sort of, you know, themselves manually help influence or even make political decisions for us as people? It's quite hard to get from is to a ought. So machine learning systems, which is the dominant system of AI that we have just now, learn from data that they are fed,

and they can do things like detect patterns and learn skills, but that doesn't necessarily teach them about what's right and wrong. However, there are some ways of bridging that gap. So, for instance, a self-driving car, which is driving along a motorway, and this is a very famous problem, but sees a child in front of it, and has a choice about whether to swerve or to hit the child,

but if it swerves it kills two adults in the car next to it. One way that that machine might learn to answer that question is by learning from the data that's input into it. And that data might say that in the circumstances where this has happened in the past, humans have done this option predominantly rather than that option. And so that's one way that you can get from is to aught. But I don't necessarily know if we want our machines to replicate our decisions, or rather if we want to try and teach them higher ideals

than the rather rubbish ones that we tend to live by. And also, I don't necessarily think that would be a machine that is politically innovating. I think it would just be mimicking us rather than leading us. So I'm less actually interested in machines that make moral decisions for us, partly because I think it can distract from the true point, which is that most machines do exercise moral functions increasingly,

but those moral functions ultimately can be traced back to the work of human beings who design and engineer them. And we can't forget that many of the problems we identify with technology are actually problems with people. And you don't see that changing in the future? Not in the immediate future. When we get to the stage where our AI overlords govern us like pets, then things might be different.

I don't think we're there yet. That's reassuring to know. I've got a question which is very hypothetical one for you, which is this. So say, you know, in the future we're going to go to Mars and we're going to land and we build a colony on Mars. Do you think that by the time we get there and, you know, just assuming it's 2050, and you've got a completely free reign of like creating the political system in there or more of the function of it, What do you think it would be and how it would be created? That's a ridiculous question.

Political philosophers would have a lot of fun with that question because there's different schools of thought in political theory. One is that humans are by their nature a sort of social animal and that we are always bound eventually to form social or political communities of a particular kind wherever we go, whether it's Mars or if it's in a state of nature. there are others who say that the particular political and social forms that we end up with are quirks of fate and quirks of geography and history that are very difficult to map and have a little constancy over time. My suspicion with the Mars colony is that it would be end up being

sponsored by a big company, you know, it would be the Virgin Mars colony or the Tesla Mars colony or by a big country, a Chinese or Russian or American colony. And in the first instance, at least it will probably bear the imprint of that corporation or that company, it would never be a truly virgin institution, virgin in the small V sense. That was Jamie Suskind, whose book, Future Politics, living together in a world transformed by tech, is out now. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

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