Pod Save the World - Nowhere to hide: Facebook, encryption, and privacy

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

Tommy talks with Wired editor in chief Nick Thompson about the insane amount of data that Facebook and other tech companies collect on us and what we can do to erase or prevent it. Then they talk about how to use encryption to protect your communications and scary new developments that allow you to make fake videos of real people.

Welcome back to Pottae of the World. This is Tommy D. Tor. I was thinking about calling a listener's Worldos. I'm getting some nods from the crew in the back. I don't know that that's going to stick. I don't know that anyone wants to be called a Worldo or PSD Dubbs. No, we're going to go with Worldos. Anyway, the topic today is technology and privacy and national security.

Thanks to Facebook, these issues have exploded into the consciousness. And we're talking about how much data these companies are collecting. on us, how much they're tracking our movements, our texts, our phone calls. It is, it is frightening stuff. So we talk through all the specifics, how you can protect yourself. And we also go back to a debate from 2016 about encryption and the way individuals can communicate privately without any risk of those messages being intercepted by governments or companies in the best ways to use those types of apps to protect yourself. And lastly, we talked about a frightening trend in the creation of fake news that they're calling deep fake news, which is where you can actually actually,

superimposed someone's face onto a video and make it look like they actually said something they never said. There are terrifying implications for politics and anybody who doesn't want to have words put in their mouth by someone with a computer. So this stuff sounds frightening, but there are solutions to this problem. There are ways you can protect yourself. There's things the government can do to mitigate the risk posed to all of us. And we talk through it all today on POS Day of the World. Nick Thompson's the editor-in-chief at Wired. And here's the interview with him. My guest today is Nick Thompson. Nick is the editor-in-chief at Wired. He has written extensively about politics, policy, the law, and technology. And now, thanks for our good friends at Facebook,

those areas are colliding in a very public, very messy way. So, Nick, thank you so much for being here to help me sort this out as a almost Luddite. All right. Thank you, Tommy. I'm delighted to be here. Okay. So the term national security is, it's like overly broad and overused. But I want people understand that there are personal and national security implications to these issues. For all the talk of like Russian interference or government surveillance, we're all a lot more likely to get hacked by a non-state actor or to willingly hand over NSA-like volumes of information about ourselves to corporations. So my goal today, I think, is to help people get what's happening, how they can protect themselves, and then frighten them about the next

scary technology-induced debates. So let's start with Facebook. You guys wrote an incredible cover piece on the last two years at Facebook that everyone should read. And since that piece, reports that Trump's political data and targeting firm Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to unethically collect data on more than 50 million people have woken up a lot of people, including Congress, to their data collection and privacy practices. And I think, you know, folks outside of Silicon Valley were surprised not only by how much data they collect, but also by how much you can learn from that data. Can you start by just talking a bit about what Facebook is or was collecting and what elements of that collection might surprise people? Yeah. So Facebook's business model

is to collect as much information about you as possible and then to use that information to sell you targeted ads. And it's one of the most effective advertising mechanisms that's ever been built by mankind. And that's why Mark Zuckerberg has turned this into a massive power full business. And people don't understand that, right? There's a real disconnect between what we think of Facebook doing, which is connecting us to our friends in high school, being a source of information, being a place we talk to people about whatever we talk to them about, and what it's actually doing, which is collecting as much data about you as possible and then selling you ads. So it's been a real surprise as people have started to understand this, if they started to look at

the privacy settings, if they started to look at what Facebook actually collects. So Facebook has just launch this feature where you can download your data. And, you know, so I did that this morning. And what does Facebook happen on me? Well, they have a list of every IP address I've ever used to log into Facebook, which is actually a really good data set of where I've been at every, you know, every moment of my life where I've logged into Facebook. They have, they have, Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's crazy. So they have a list of all my IP addresses. They have a list of, you know, of course, everything I've ever posted, all of my contacts, you know, continuous access to my address book, which I've authorized.

And then they have incredibly complex lists of my interests, the advertisers I've interacted with, the kinds of advertisements they'd like me to see. And that's all stored, which isn't that surprising. But the next level of data, which I think does surprise people, is when they realize that Facebook isn't just collecting information about everything you do on the platform. They're also collected information from around the web, right?

Because people have Facebook pixels, Facebook logins on all kinds of sites. they buy information from data brokers. And then they also collect as much information as they can from other apps. So the example that really struck people is on Android phones, if you opted in during a certain period of time, it's no longer possible. They were tracking every phone number you called and how long those calls lasted, which you can understand why, right? They're trying to recommend friends to you.

And if they can see who you're actually talking to, they can do it more efficiently. But it starts to weird people out when you realize, oh, they're not just collecting everything that you do on Facebook. It's actually outside of Facebook that they're getting stuff too. Yeah, that is weird. Well, your reporter, reporters at Wired wrote a great piece about how to read your Facebook data. Yeah.

And was deeply offended that she was lumped into categories like goth subculture, middle class, and fan of harpers. I thought that's a really funny thing. I don't know if she was too embarrassed that she was listed as goth. I think that was kind of a point of pride in the office. It was kind of hilarious and awesome. Yeah. But it's interesting, right? I mean, like, your piece about Facebook's two years in the barrel, they know damn well how impressive and sophisticated and advertising company they've built, which I think is why people like me and others were sort of stunned and pissed off at when Mark Zuckerberg initially after the election said it was absurd to assume that somehow Facebook could influence votes.

I mean, it's one of the tensions that has continued to come up in the last two years where they say, well, no, we couldn't have swung the election. or no, it was just a small factor, but simultaneously when they sell their products to advertisers, oh, you know, we have this incredible power, we have this incredible influence. And it's clearly both, right? It's clearly that they did have a lot of influence. They were hugely beneficial to Trump.

Trump probably used the platform better. The underlying algorithm of Facebook, which rewards emotion and outrage, clearly benefited Trump much more than it benefited Hillary Clinton. So there are a hundred factors that go into the way they help Trump, but it's also not the only factor. And then later, of course, yes, it's not, they've been coping with, they've been dealing with the aftermath of Trump's victory for the last two years, which is really what my story was. And so they've been trying to walk the line between we're not totally responsible for

this or we're only partly responsible for this, but also we're going to make a lot of changes because of what's happened. Right. So I think if you and I right now were at a bar and we were having an off-the-record drink with someone at Facebook. Their response would basically be, look, we dealt with the Cambridge Analytica problem four years ago by limiting the way data can be collected by these third-party apps, which is how Cambridge Analytica got the data. They were supposed to delete that data. They lied to Facebook and retained it, but Facebook, the company had already made the fix.

And I think on the broader privacy issue, the Facebook staffer would say to us, you guys all agreed to these terms and conditions and you love the ease and functionality those conditions enable. We don't do anything differently than any other free site. You might hate us because our product is lame and we got wrapped up in a fight about 2016. But like Google has just as much, if not more data about you is that you just don't feel self-loathing when you Google something. Is that right and fair? Do you think? Yeah, I think that is the argument they would make. And it's not fallacious argument, right? I mean, what's so interesting about this is that what Cambridge Analytica did wasn't really entirely Facebook's fault because Facebook, Cambridge Analytica basically stole

the data or got the data in an inappropriate way. It's kind of like Facebook left the door unlocked and Cambridge Analytica came in and robbed them. So you can kind of blame Facebook a little bit for what happened, but really you should blame Cambridge Analytica more. So Facebook feels like they're getting hit too hard for this, right, that the punishment doesn't fit the crime. They realized that it was a mistake to have the sort of the open privacy policies in 2013, 2014, that they've now closed up. They realized they should have been more vigilant when they first learned about what Cambridge Analytica had done for Ted Cruz. They realized those things, but they also feel like the backlash is too much. But on the other hand, you know, people didn't give a damn

about privacy for 10 years when there were all kinds of prophecy problems. And I think kind of the frustration with the way privacy works on the Internet today has just exploded. It's like it's been bottled up for 10 years, and now this just happened to be the moment that uncorked it. So I think that's what's happening. So in a way, Facebook is right. Punishment doesn't fit the crime. Right. You know, the reason I wanted to talk about this stuff on my foreign policy show is because I feel like this is the follow-on conversation that we probably should have had immediately after the Snowden revelations, but just didn't.

I don't, we just didn't get there. Because for all the talk and outrage about Snowden and surveillance, we know that these companies can use your online activity to figure out your sexuality. your political views. They know who you texted. They know when you texted them. They know your location data down to the foot. Like forget about tapping phones. There's literally a fucking microphone in your pocket at all times.

Right. Is it too late to fix this? Like, have we given up the store already? Or are there things people can do to erase their online footprint or reduce the data we give up in the future without deleting Facebook and logging off forever? Yeah. So there are lots of things you can and should do, right? You can be vigilant about your privacy settings.

You can go in. You can delete your information from. Facebook. You can go and check and see all the websites that have gotten your email address. You can be vigilant and reduce the amount of information that's spread about you. And that's useful and that's smart and you should do that. The most important thing is going to be for these companies to change the way they operate. And you've seen big changes at Facebook in the last two weeks and you've created a privacy dashboard, making it much easier to adjust your settings. And so making it much clearer in the future how you can deal with these issues of privacy.

The onus is on us, but the onus is also on all of these companies. And my hope is that the big ones and small ones and the ones that will be big have a different approach to privacy in the future. Like, it seems to me like there are probably a lot of staffers that are not in senior senior management at Facebook, but rank and file that probably are pretty damn upset about not just 2016, but sort of the way the company is now viewed. But management, as they always are, has moved slowly. they've been recalcitrant. They've seemed to be unwilling to give up information quickly. Do you think that's going to change? Do you think, like, Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Stanberg will ultimately get before a committee

and start answering tough questions, or is that going to be something they resist until they are dragged there? Yeah, that's super interesting on a couple levels. The first part, you know, about the young engineers at Facebook, I really believe that the way the pressure point on Facebook, you know, there are a couple of pressure points on Facebook, right? There's media coverage. There's potential congressional regulation. but the real pressure point, the thing that Facebook really worries about is young engineers leaving and not wanting to be working at Facebook and not being proud of working at Facebook.

And so leaving to go to Snapchat, right? Because engineers are so hard to find even when you have all the money in the world like Facebook. And so one of the themes that Fred Vogelstein and I looked at in our piece was, you know, when Zuckerberg has in all hands, and this was true with the one he did this recently and then, you know, most poignantly probably right before Thanksgiving of the past year, he's been apologizing and saying to them, you know, I know it's hard now to go home to your families and say you work at Facebook. It used to be the coolest thing in the world.

And so they're really worried that working at Facebook will become kind of like what working at Goldman Sachs used to be, you know, nine years ago. And that's like, that is an existential deep fear for Zuckerberg, for Sandberg. I mean, I assume it is for all of them because that's what really hurts. So, yes, that's interesting. That's important. On the testimony stuff, you know, I interviewed Zuckerberg last week. I asked him whether he's going to testify. He gave kind of a careful answer about,

I will if I'm the most informed person at the company. And the proper answer is just yes. Like now is the moment. There's pressure to do it. Let's go do it. So I think that to your question, he will definitely go testify. He certainly should go testify.

Sandberg should go testify too. Her capacity to avoid the heat during this shows utter tactical brilliance. Like how she has somehow been able to get through this without any mud in her shoes is amazing. without too much mud on her shoes. So, yeah, I'll be very interested to see what happens there.

Yes, I agree. Yeah, she is brilliant in a lot of ways. So I want you to think back to a time before Donald Trump dominated every political debate and in an argument. Yeah. Talk for a minute about encryption. After the mass shooting in San Bernardino, the FBI tried to compel Apple to help it access

the shooter's encrypted phone. James Comey, remember? Yes, James Comey. He was the guy. I believe he circled back. Yeah, circle back. And like they wanted a way to access encrypted data when necessary via some sort of backdoor. Apple didn't just say no.

They took the case public and they said hell no. And this was to Obama. Can you explain the basics here? Like what is encryption? How does that protect our data? Right. So what Apple decided at that point was that they would make it virtually impossible for law enforcement to extract information off of that phone or off of any phone. right like Apple wouldn't be able to get it there's something called you know end-to-end encryption where

you can see a message that I send to Tommy or Tommy you can see a message on your phone that I send to you and I can see it on my phone but nobody in the middle can see it right and that's a really strong form of encryption because it means that in order to get that message law enforcement has to get my phone or your phone they can't talk to Apple which owns the phones they can't talk to Verizon or AT&T or Sprint he transfers a message they can't talk to any of the very very various different metalmen, you know, where the message passes. And that's been a big change in the tech industry. And that, you know, that becoming the default, you know, ties back to this big, this big encryption debate. But the general principle of encryption is that the data is hashed or

stored in a way that makes it very hard, if not impossible, to access. And that drives law enforcement crazy, right? And for reasons you can imagine, like it would be very helpful. And so it was so interesting about that San Bernardino case, it was like the FBI, maybe they didn't actually need what was on the shooter's phone. But they wanted to have a test case, right? They wanted to have a case where the public would be totally on board with them, and so they thought this was the one to go for.

And Apple, very interestingly, I remember I can put myself back into those debates, and I remember thinking it was crazy for Apple to fight this one. But they did, and they kind of won in the court of public opinion. And so Apple pressed back and kind of won that debate, and then Apple since then has used extremely strong encryption and made it very hard for law enforcement. And so the advantage of that is that, you know,

people can't take your information off your iPhone. The disadvantage is that the FBI can't take the information off, you know, potential bad guys' iPhone. So that's the complex trade-off. Yeah. I mean, I remember being struck by that debate, too, because it wasn't Apple going up against Donald Trump. It was Apple going against Barack Obama,

someone who was pretty popular at the time. You would imagine he would have a pretty strong case given what had just happened in San Bernardino. I mean, I personally was in, many, many meetings in the situation room where we were talking about intelligence and wanted more access to some Al-Qaeda group or individual but couldn't get it because they were using cryptic communications. Like, I've seen it firsthand.

I do think the ticking time bomb 24-driven scenarios that people like to draw to make these arguments are a little bit ridiculous. But ultimately, it felt like Apple not only said no way to the government, but they gave a whole bunch of other companies cover. to tell the government to pound sand when it comes to encryption, right? You had WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook now, telegram, signal. They all said they would have what you just mentioned end-to-end encryption, which means nobody, not the government, not the company itself,

can read your messages, even if they're intercepted by the NSA. Do you feel like that trajectory is just set, and that's how communications platforms are going to operate going forward? Or there's some rumblings that the FBI is revisiting this, and DOJ might revisit this case. Yeah, so, well, first of all, remember that even as some of the world goes towards end-to-end encryption, it's also the case that you own an Android phone, Facebook, has taken all your information and just stuck it in a file. So data does leak out.

My, you know, the other thing that I remember that goes back to your point was that Obama gave a talk at South by Southwest after this encryption fight. And he said there should be a solution, right? He said there should be a way that the government can have access to access, you know, if they have a legal warrant, if they have an actual right, Apple should be able to do this. And the tech community booed and he got attacked for that. And I don't know. I feel like this is a problem that should have a solution. Because what you want to do is you want to be able to give people security over their information,

not have it be stolen by hackers or misused by the government. But you also, in certain situations, want the government to be able to you know, exercise just law enforcement's rights. So I feel like what you said was exactly right in that Apple's strong stand, Apple success, the way that Silicon Valley stood up behind Apple, the way all developers stood up behind Apple, you know, kind of structured this debate in a way that made it impossible to figure out a solution, right? There's this absolute position that if you come up with any backdoor, if you come up with any way that you work with the government, you will put all our data at risk.

And maybe that absolute position is correct, but maybe it's not. But I feel like we didn't have that conversation enough afterwards. And it does seem like we are starting to maybe have it again. Do you think we didn't have that conversation because the 99.999% of people are not equipped to even understand the context to have a smart conversation about this? Or I guess maybe just all of our political fights are dumb. Do you have an opinion? I kind of think it's because the 1% of the people who really understand this issue

and the experts on it are 99% aligned in favor of strong encryption. Right, right, right. So it's like the politics of the Uber experts are, you know, monochromatic on this. I think that might be why it would happen. Also, it's, I guess another interesting factor is Apple has a real political power. They have really good spokesmen. They're beloved. They can mobilize the media.

I remember, you know, I remember Apple, like the way they, I worked at the New York dot com back then. I ran the New Yorker's website and the way that Apple was engaging with us to try to Apple doesn't always call you back but on this one Apple was calling you in advance right they really cared about public perception on this story that is fascinating well I have to say I was on the side of the companies then and part of it was because I do think you need to imagine the worst case scenario which is Donald Trump as president and his political hacks in national security apparatus of government and then imagine yourself in those shoes. So if you're listening right now and you think, oh, my God, this is scary,

I want to only use the most secure communications platforms out there. Do you have recommendations? Are there messaging apps, like Signal that some people say are the best? Are there email services? Are there types of phone calls people should use? Yeah, I use Signal. When I'm reporting and I need to have total confidence that the person I'm talking to, their information won't be exposed.

I use Signal and then I just delete the message afterward. It's the one I trust the most. When I was working on my Facebook story and I wanted to, you know, make sure that Facebook didn't know who I was talking to in the company. I did it all through Signal and I deleted Facebook WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram from my phone just to make sure that they couldn't track me. One thing that a Facebook source had told me is that it's possible using location services to know, you know, if I have location services turned on to any Facebook owned app,

they'll know where my phone is at a certain point, and then if the employee has location services turned on, you could conceivably match that. Now, Facebook says that's baloney. They would never do that. But better be, you know, safe and sorry in that case. So that's how I dealt with it. Yeah, hey, we'd never do this.

That's unethical. No one would ever do that. Oh, yeah, Uber did it at a party three days ago. So, you know, right? I mean, it's... God mode and showed everywhere we are. Yeah, Uber did that. Yeah, it's funny, right?

Because I have different positions depending on the case, right? I love strong encryption, end-to-end encryption when it involves me talking to my sources. I have a little more laxity when it involves government investigations of terrorists. And maybe those things are squared or maybe there's a little hypocrisy there. And there are a series of very, very complicated tradeoffs in all of us. My position ultimately on this was I think we should not force these companies to create a backdoor, but that the NSA should get to work, do its job. They created Enigma, who, you know, with our allies, like, next version, let's go.

That's what you guys do. But maybe that's sanguine. Well, but here's the issue about the NSA, right? I mean, the NSA created all of these incredible tools but didn't keep them secure. And now they've leaked out into the wild and are being used against us. So that, in fact, kind of makes the argument of the anti-NSA, which is also the sort of the hugely pro-encription crowd, which is that if you create tools that you use, think only the people you trust will use, actually that's not true because those tools will eventually seep out and be used by random hackers in the Ukraine shutting down banks and hospitals

in London to try to get ransom. Right. Yeah. I do not trust the NSA to keep some sort of backdoor safe. I just fundamentally don't because we're all human and we're fallible and that's why I landed there. Slightly shifting gear to something a little more frightening, I think. You guys did some Wired's website is fantastic but a lot of articles will send you down some dark places including one about advances in technology that allow you to realistically superimpose someone's face onto

or a body in a video. So like all things on the internet it started with porn. Some creeps figured out a way to put celebrity faces on existing pornography that is weird and disturbing but it creates an entirely new and frightening genre of fake news.

How does this work and how does this work And how big a deal do you think it is? In what sort of time frame do we need to start worrying about the proliferation of this stuff? Yeah. So it's a small deal right now, right? You can create porn, which realistically uses the face of somebody else. You can create a replica of Donald Trump that kind of pretty much sounds like Donald Trump, but people aren't really doing it yet.

But I don't think we're that far away from somebody being able to recreate me. saying whatever they want me to be saying in a way that sounds exactly like me and then using it in a way that's manipulative or even worse using it in virtual reality where we really don't have the filters right when we go into virtual reality we forget that we're in a simulated world when we're on a computer we at least have some notion that we're in a potentially simulated world when we're in virtual reality we don't so the possibility of you know political manipulation of the sort that we saw in 2016 times 100 is real. And you can imagine a political campaign,

and I don't let's say 24, 2028, where their virtual reality actors made by people who want to manipulate us, whether they're teenagers in Macedonia, or whether they're intelligence operatives in Russia, or whether they're highly skilled political campaigners for either side, you can see a real problem. And you think about the fake news problem we had, where we couldn't distinguish between,

York Times stories and stories, you know, by kids in Macedonia about the Pope and Donald Trump, think about what it's going to be like when it's a thousand times worse. So, you know, one of the things I think about with Facebook is like they're finally getting a handle on fake news, right? They're finally figuring out the signals that indicate that a story is fake as opposed to true. Finally getting the algorithms to work through that. And now we're going to move on to new problems. That, in fact, is more scary than what we just talked about. I wasn't sure how we were going to get more scary than terrorism and encryption and government hacking in and government, you know, losing all its tools to Ukrainian hackers, but you did it.

It's not my fault. You guys do great reporting. But you guys wrote a piece how you thought how blockchain might be the solution to this problem. So I've been asked a question that most people are asking, what the fuck is blockchain? And how could that help here? Well, so blockchain is basically a way of verifying transactions. And it's a way of, you know, a ledger of transactions that only moves forward. So you can't go back in a race and modify. You just, you are able to add new transactions onto it.

And every transaction that happens on that ledger is more or less. on the computers of everybody who's participating in that network. So what that does is it allows the possibility of real verification. So you can, it makes it harder or at least quite different to manipulate things. And so you can imagine a new creation using blockchain that make sure to verify and to confirm that sources of information are trusted. Whether that can really work, I don't know. We're not particularly close to that at all.

but it gets to the point that technology at every stage creates the ability to manipulate us further and it also creates the ability for us to prevent that manipulation, track that manipulation, and monitor that manipulation. So, you know, it's, you know, a knife. You can use it to stab somebody. You can use it to cut butter and it's just becoming an ever more powerful knife as we go forward. So that is like, that's what makes it ever more important for us to think about debate. study, watch, look, and try to push this industry so it builds good things. It builds in trust.

It builds in verification. It builds an accuracy as opposed to getting it, letting it get hijacked by all the bad actors who hijacked it. Right. I mean, that, again, not to circle back too much to 2016, but that is the story of 2016, right? This platform of Facebook, which can be a tool for amazing good and still is, right? Me Too movement. It's a large part. It's a hashtag, right? It's partly based on Facebook, right? There's all kinds of good that happens with Facebook, all kinds of wonderful connections. But this tool was manipulated and used to, you know, push, you know, false information in a way that changed the way our democracy works, which helped contribute to Donald Trump being elected. So every new tool that's getting created, we have to think, and we have to think about the ways

it can be misused, and we have to think about the ways it can be used well. That's so true, right? I mean, a theme in everything we've talked about today is, in my opinion, kind of a naive Silicon Valley belief that technology can fix everything, that it will always be a force for good, that everyone is changing the world. And obviously, some of this is like corporate Kool-A drinking to inspire a young workforce, but there is a strain of it that's a bit dangerous. I mean, how do these guys miss the reality that humans have been doing evil stuff to each other for thousands of years and are more likely to use some of the tools they created for ill than they are for a utopian world where everyone communicates and there's universal basic income and yada,

yada, yada. Yeah, that is the fundamental mistake that Silicon Valley made over the last, you know, 10, 20 years, right? So think about the Cambridge Analytica thing. So why did Facebook let app developers pull information about users and their friends? Like, that's crazy. Like, obviously someone is going to misuse that. Obviously someone's going to take all that data and sell it. Obviously someone's going to take all that data, sell it and use it against us. Well, the reason they did that is Because they thought, oh, if we allow them to do that, they'll build better apps, they'll be able to do better research, they'll be helpful. You know, if people have access to your social graph, they can figure out, I don't know, all kinds of academic or medical research or valuable things. They just didn't think through, you know, the negative stuff that would be done by, you know, a James Bond villain like Alexander Nix.

So it was a big mistake. And that was, you know, one of the main realizations of Mark Zuckerberg is how the technology he created, which he thought would bring the world together. could actually drive the world apart. And I think that what you're going to see is that after this reckoning for Silicon Valley and for the tech companies in the future, everybody who builds a product is going to start thinking about sort of the worst case scenarios, if you build a drone, right, you're not going to be thinking about, oh, well, let's see, let's see how it can, it'll just be used to, like, monitor crops and deliver burritos.

You've got to think about how it's going to be weaponized. Yeah, literally. And I think that the people who build these incredible technologies, like, I think their worldviews going to change. My final question for you is, I feel like it's easy in any given moment to feel like things are more out of control, more risky, more dangerous than before. But, you know, 2018 is not the first year we've created new technology. You know, the atomic bomb is a notable example of, you know, a major innovation that had horrific downsides. Do you think things are in any way worse now or more dangerous now? Like, is Moore's law catching up to us in a way that is putting people at real risk

with advances in technology, or is that just like the moment feeling frightening? I think the moment feels frightening. I mean, I think the thing that is most important for us will be thinking through the hard choices that come up as artificial intelligence starts to really rearrange the world. I mean, we're entering a moment where, you know, we are going to fairly soon create machines that are unambiguously more intelligent than humans in all kinds of ways, right? And so we will change the whole nature of the way society works. We're going to be inventing machines that are going to improve exponentially.

And so we won't be quite aware when the moment happens when they reach this level of intelligence, but they will only continue to become more intelligent, right, whereas our intelligence will stay static, right? Because we are born and then we die, whereas the machines just get more and more intelligent. So it's a super exciting moment because we'll bring all kinds of incredible advances in all kinds of ways and new things for us to do and like wonderful ways of communicating and all that. But it's also a dangerous, risky, complicated time for the societal disruption that will happen, for the possibilities of bias seeping in,

for the possible effect on warfare. Right, they're all kinds of really hard choices, and they're going to happen really fast. And so what's worrisome to me is we're at this moment where this wonderful, magical, you know, beautiful technology is coming very fast, and we have to make all these hard decisions, right, to think through all these complicated things.

And, A, we've got Donald Trump in the White House. We have no one staffed up on the Office of Technology Policy, right? So there's no government help thinking through this stuff. And, you know, Silicon Valley has been slow, though now they are starting to, you know, reckon with the big questions coming in artificial intelligence. So we're entering a really interesting moment for, I don't know, it sounds so overdramatic or melodramatic for our species,

but it's true. And so we have to think through. And there are choices that we will make now and their choices we'll make in the next few years that will have profound effects for, you know, long periods of time, but we don't totally know what those choices are. So that's where we are. So it's frightening,

but it's also super exciting. And it's definitely interesting. Yeah. It is very interesting. And I think sort of what I wanted folks to come away with today is knowing that these issues are you don't have to have a PhD. I mean, they are a little more accessible than you would expect if you just read Wired.

Or like the wait but why, it's a great website, Wait But Why. Their series on artificial intelligence is a great explainer with like literal stick figure drawings that can help you understand some of the issues you were just talking about. But like the more you engage on this stuff, the more you can actually lobby Congress or vote accordingly or refuse to elect people like Donald Trump who print out their emails in 2018. And we can, you know, maybe advance the ball a little bit here. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I don't, you know, and going back to the encryption debate, right, part of where I feel like that debate fell down was the sense that there's a small number of experts and they think about it a certain way and that's definitely the way to think about it. And that's where the debate ended. And that's kind of not what you want to have happen. You want to have lots of people weighing in and lots of different ways. And there are a hundred different complexities to what's coming in artificial intelligence. And yeah, we want to be discussing it, thinking it through and everybody should be thinking it through. Yeah, that's right. Nick Thompson is the editor.

editor-in-chief at Wired. He's written a hell of a lot of good stuff. You should check out their site. They're doing cutting-edge, smart, innovative stuff every day. So check it out. And thank you so much for doing the show. I learned a lot. And I imagine everybody listening to it too. Thank you. It's really, really fun to be on and to talk about all this stuff. Thank you, Tommy. Okay, Worldose. That's it for Pod Save the World this week. Thank you for tuning in. I can't really say that with a straight face. But, you know, we're working on it. I appreciate you guys listening. If you like this episode, please share it on. Facebook. I know I get the irony, but I would greatly appreciate it. We're trying to spread

the word about Pate de the World and everything you can do to protect yourself. Thanks, guys. See you next week.