The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue - Professor Rob Reich - Do We Need To Reboot Our Relationship With Technology?

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Episode summary Technology has quietly taken over our everyday lives and the idea of living with less, not more, technology is almost unimaginable. As a result, its growth and impacts are being felt well beyond the realms of work and play and it reshapes our politics, culture and ethics. The rapid and pervasive influence of technology over human society today raises important questions: are we still in control of technology, or are we letting it control us? How has Big Tech’s focus on the “optimization of everything” impacted our own sense of ourselves as agents of our future? Is there any merit in the fear of robots replacing workers, the erosion of privacy and disinformation? Just how worried should we be?  And maybe most important of all, what could, or should, be done to reform technology in society today? QUOTES: Technology in my view, in its worst aspects, flattens the radical diversity and pluralism of humans to our great detriment. Inefficient solutions to problems sometimes are better because they reflect the grand diversity of ends that human beings have long had. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Marissa Ramnanan Editor: Adam Karch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Low Monk podcast listeners, well, we're back. at it here with another monk dialogue. These are our long-form conversations on the big issues and ideas transforming our world. We're searching out some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers to reflect on those issues and ideas, hopefully giving you some new insights and analysis. On today's edition of the monk dialogues, we return to a topic that we focused on a lot here at the monk debates and debates, podcasts, and dialogues.

over the last couple of years, and that's the effects of big tech, how technology is impacting our lives, our culture, our society. This is an important issue one that we think requires reflection and sustained analysis. We're really fortunate to welcome on the program, Rob Reish. He is the author of the new bestselling book, System Error, where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot. acclaimed professor of political science and philosophy at Stanford University. He's director of Stanford Center for Ethics in Society and co-director of the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. He's the author of a number of internationally best-selling books. He's an award recipient of Stanford's highest honor for teaching, the Walter Gorman.

Wars Award. In short, this is a person you want to listen to about the big ideas, in this case, big tech and how it's changing our world. The next voice you'll hear is me in conversation with our guest, Rob, Rish. Rob, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. Likewise. Looking forward to this conversation. We, you know, we've been talking about big tech a lot here at the Monctabates during the pandemic. focusing on all kinds of different dimensions from its impacts on the economy to society to our politics to so the opportunity today to have a kind of considered in-depth conversation with you about your new book system error where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot is a privilege indeed i i want to

begin by helping our listeners kind of tap into your kind of key insights in fact your your pointed criticisms that you elucidate in your writings about big tech by having you speak about the optimization mindset. This is a kind of a term, a vision, a projection on big tech that you're asserting here. And I think it's important for us to start our conversation by getting a better understanding of it. I should begin by saying that I'm a philosopher by training, not a technologists, but I've been collaborating on this book and in a class that I teach here on campus at Stanford with a computer scientist and a policymaker. And of course, having lived in Silicon Valley for 25 years, I've been steeping in a kind of technologist's orientation to the

world. And over the course of the past decade, basically, I came to feel that the defining characteristic of a technologist's way of understanding the world as a whole is to think about everything through this optimization lens. How can we optimize a solution to any problem? And as I learned more about what this meant within, say, a computer science curriculum or how it is that an engineer would speak about their work, there's a narrow approach to thinking about optimization. You try to find the optimal solution to a problem. Say, you know, if you're using, a Maps app on your phone, the app is optimized to get you from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time. And the problem from an engineering standpoint is to provide the optimal route

for you to take, given the traffic conditions. But what I discovered, or I guess what I diagnosed along the way, is that optimization, when applied in a narrow technical sense, when it becomes a worldview, becomes a real threat. And I think that there are four problems with optimization, and I'll just tick them off really quickly here for you. So number one, optimization is just a means to an end. If you optimize for something, the key thing you first have to do is decide what the goal is or what the problem is or what you're trying to optimize for.

And when you become obsessed with optimization as such, you have a really powerful means to accomplish an end. But if you don't choose a good end, optimizing for something that's bad makes the world worse, not better. So optimizing for bad outcomes or bad goals is not a good thing. So the conclusion I reach here is that optimization, number one, is at best a secondary or derivative kind of approach to the world. It's not a first best thing. The first best thing is to get the good end. All right.

Number two is that when you're optimizing as an engineer, technologist for some type of very large mission, you know, say Facebook's mission is to connect the world. Google's mission is to organize the world's information. Those are very large and lofty goals, and you can't just say I'm going to optimize for connecting people. You have to get what we, you know, engineers often describe as proxies or, you know, adequate substitutes that are computationally tractable. That's the key approach for the technologist is getting something that a machine, can, you know, mathematically or statistically make sense of. So you have to reduce these large goals to proxies.

And when you choose proxies, the proxies are often quite distant from the end that you're trying to optimize for. And the technologist who's obsessed with optimization, then you get the proxy, you don't get the end. And just to give you a, you know, a quick example of that, you can think again about that Facebook mission of connecting the world. So the way that an engineer is evaluated often at Facebook is on how much their contribution to, say, the product in Facebook's newsfeed or Instagram is keeping you on the platform or how many users are added to the platform, the growth metric

or the attention metric. And growth and attention are proxies for connecting the world, but time on platform as such isn't a metric of human connection because the time on platform could be negative could give you a bad feeling, can give you misinformation, hate speech, et cetera, et cetera. So obsessing with proxies is a bad idea. Third problem with optimization is this idea that optimizing for one thing and doing it successfully can upset a broader balance of values that matter to us. And the best example I can think of is this obsession that many engineers have with meal replacement powders. There's a story we tell in the book about this product called soylent.

Soilent is basically a white powder that you add some water to or it comes in a kind of granola bar-like form. And the claim in the packaging is that food is an inefficient way of delivering the body's nutritional needs. You have to shop, you have to cook, you have to clean, you have to spend time at a dinner table talking with people. And if you want just optimal nutrition, then here's this powder in which you can buy it quickly, make it quickly, ingest it quickly, and you're done. Now, of course, food has many different meanings. It brings social connection. It's a form of cultural identity. It tastes good.

It's not just something that we do to provide for the body's optimal nutritional needs. And engineers obsess about one particular thing optimizing for nutrition, and they lose sight of other things that matter. And I'll give you very quickly here the last idea, which is in certain respects the most worrisome. This optimization mindset when it gets applied far outside the realm of a technical solution to a problem, and you start talking about optimizing your sleep, optimizing your exercise, optimizing how you parent, optimizing democracy, that's when you really find the kind of failure of an optimization orientation to the world. Many engineers complain about, say, you know, the government's performance because they look at any governance performance and see it as suboptimal.

It's failing to deliver on so many different fronts. But in my view, that reflects just a deep misunderstanding of what democracy is for. Democracy is not an optimal solution to a problem. is a fair way to organize disagreements amongst citizens who are treated as equals. And the fact that we don't get optimal solutions to problems is not a fault of democracy. It's the design process put in place to deal withstanding disagreement. So that optimization mindset leads engineers often to be disappointed in the government because they expect optimal solutions to problems when they're looking for something that shouldn't be there in the first place.

You're listening to Rob Reisch, Stanford Philosophy, Professor and author of the Big New Bestseller System Error, where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot. Rob, this is fascinating stuff, and I love the way that you've kind of broken this down. I guess before we get into some of those individual components, the dilemmas of optimization, I explain to me. I guess what is different this time? Capitalism, corporations have been optimizing, you know, for a while, whether it was, you know, Fordism, Taylorism, you can go through all the different kind of ideologies and fads. So what's different this time? Is it a matter of the scale of it that is what concerns you?

Or is it a combination of scale and tactics? Give us some context here. That's right. Well, yeah, in the book, we say that there are three core problems that constitute the system error. So the first we've just discussed, which is this technologist's optimization mindset, this idea that they're going to try to optimize for everything. So you begin with that.

The second piece of the puzzle is the venture capitalists' obsession with scale at all costs, the idea that get as many people to use your product as quickly as possible. You're aiming for the so-called unicorn, the company that's worth a billion dollars. And it's just a race to get people to use your product, occupy the market space. And if there happen to be, you know, socially undesirable consequences, hate speech, misinformation, privacy abuses, et cetera, et cetera, well, you just deal with that downstream. Don't build in any breaks on progress while you're trying to occupy the market. Don't build in any sense of responsibility for a wider array of social goals. Just figure that out after you've dominated the marketplace.

So that obsession with scale at all costs is the second problem. And the third problem is that, at least in the United States, but also in most other countries, there was a deliberate choice amongst policymakers to sort of leave a regulatory oasis around big tech and a deliberate indifference to trying to figure out ways to cultivate the benefits of technology and mitigate the harms. and instead just leave it to technologists and companies to do what they want. In the United States, back in the era of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, they talked about a race to pave the information superhighway

and wanting American companies to win that economic space. And so they deliberately created policies that left a moat around Silicon Valley. There was regulation on lots of other industries, but not on tech companies. And that turns out to have been, in my view, a big mistake. The chickens are coming home to roost now as leaving everything up to the technologists has shown that when they acquire large social power, when the companies come to dominate the global scene, the personal, professional, civic and political consequences of big tech are not all upsides, to say the obvious. And it's the traditional role of government to try to

contain the negative consequences of any marketplace actor. One other big picture question before we get to some specifics in the book. You know, many people will equate optimization with efficiency. You know, you've mentioned Google Maps. We love how Google Maps saves us time. It allows us to move efficiently from one place to another as a result of the algorithm and the technology and the tracking that provide us with kind of spatial optimization. Some people have extrapolated that there is all kinds of efficiencies now that we're realizing

that are lowering the costs of both private and public goods that are making society more productive, increasing society's stores of wealth. How do you balance off the negative externalities that many listening to you now would agree with, with the positive externalities of optimization? Optimization has a place. Efficiency has a place, but it's not a primary goal or a primary value. I mean, let me put it in a kind of typical philosopher's example here,

illustration. Back in Nazi era, Germany, there was an attempt to hire engineers to make far more efficient the process, of killing people in the gas chambers and the death camps. How can we find a way to optimize for mass killing? That illustration to me shows the problem with obsessions with efficiency as such. Efficiency and optimization are not good in and of themselves. They are only good when they're applied to a worthy end. Apply optimization to a bad end killing people. And you make the world

a much worse place, not a better place. So when you have to place efficiency in its place, always make it secondary to the goals we care about, then the relevant questions become, what do we want the technologists to optimize for and let the technologists do her job in just optimizing for our traffic route? I mean, the Google Map example is a good one. Sometimes when we go out for a drive, we actually want to take the scenic route off the main highway in order to have a pleasant afternoon Sunday drive. The maps are not designed for you to get that route unless you somehow program around it with your own inputs.

Optimization is not the be-all and end-all of the world. So putting it in its place and containing it, ensuring that we as users or we as citizens, install the guardrails and are always able to choose the ends that we want, doing those ends efficiently can be a good. thing, but we shouldn't always listen to what the technologists want to optimize for us. That's the problem. Good stuff.

So to return, because I want to have time here to also talk about solutions because your book and you've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can reconceptualize technology in more positive ways. But before we go there, I want to talk a little bit more about some of those four examples that you raised off the top in terms of the pitfalls of optimization. I guess what I want to try to get out, Rob, is because you're a philosopher, I want to try to get out this idea of that, you know, historically, we've had conceptions of the good.

And we've, often in democratic societies, feel that we've come up with, as you say, at times a chaotic, it can seem anything but optimal system, to try to figure out and negotiate a shared conception of the good, or at least a society in which people are allowed to pursue, different ends to realize them themselves. What I sense from you, Rob, is that you feel that technology is somehow deeply disjointed in terms of these longer and more important conversations that we've had about ourselves, about the kinds of societies we want to live in. I guess I want to ask you, why do you think that is? Why do you think technology has failed in some way to

do a very human thing, which is to try to figure out what are the goods? What do we care about? Why do we choose to live certain ways? Yeah, all right. Well, now we're really getting to, as you said, the kind of deeper philosophical terrain that I think is the appropriate large vantage point by which to assess how it is that technology has transformed social life and personal. life and political life. And this idea that one of the great accomplishments of the modern world, especially in our political arrangements when we can get them to work, is to allow people who are radically pluralistic and diverse in every possible dimension, nevertheless, to share space together as equal citizens. And you have a set of beliefs or ends or worldviews that you get to pursue

and projects that are your own, and I have radically different ones. And in our personal lives, I might think that yours are trivial, pathetic, damnable, and you reciprocally think the same of me, and yet we share space as citizens and respect each other. That's an extraordinary accomplishment for a political arrangement, and it's what democracies, when they work well, are designed to allow. And the technologist sort of, in my view, reduces this. And technologies reduce our relations to a set of questions of efficient solutions to problems, rather than allowing for pluralistic and diverse ways of orienting ourselves to the world. So let me put, let me give you a really concrete example of this. Many people express anxieties these days about job killing robots or, you know, the automation revolution.

that's displacing workers from jobs. Or algorithmic decision making in which we outsource to a machine, you know, some way to make a decision for us. You work in a company and you get thousands of applications for people who want to join your company and you give it to a hiring algorithm to highlight the best applicants. So in these cases, we're sort of allowing either a machine to do a job that a human can do or an algorithm to make a decision that a human previously did, thinking that it could improve in terms of certain metrics of efficiency, how the world works. But as we aggregate more and

more of these examples, we give more and more jobs over to machines, we give more and more decisions over to algorithms. It's the accumulation of those things that diminish our fundamental agency or sense of ourselves as actors in the world. We outsource to machines narrowly efficient solutions to particular problems, but on the whole, we reduce the complexity and diversity and great pluralism. That is one of the great accomplishments of any well-functioning modern society. Technology, in my view, in its worst aspects, flattens the radical diversity in pluralism of humans.

to our great detriment. Inefficient solutions to problems sometimes are better because they reflect the grand diversity of ends that human beings have long had. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world, and you get a specially curated Friday weekly Monk members-only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.com.

I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Quick segue here. Just play along with me for a moment because listening to you speak about this and we, you know, have an increasingly hot debate in our society about AI and artificial intelligence. I would think then to extrapolate from what you just said, a real concern here about greater levels of machine learning, of greater sophistication of optimization of optimization leading us to steadily bleed off our agency to these platforms. I mean, what are we really seeing here? What's really at stake, I guess?

Because with AI, we're often, you know, obsessed with doomsday scenarios or robots taking over the world, but you're really talking about something here that's much more of an existential human crisis. That's right. It's much more mundane and insidious, the threat from AI. in that respect. It's the slow corrosion of our human agency and our place in the world. And, you know, in maybe kind of typical philosophical fashion, what I'd say is that for the past 50 years, the root problem here is that computer scientists or technologists have asked themselves a bad question. And that bad question has oriented so much of the work that they've done.

That bad question is, is it possible for machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, to outperform human intelligence? And so you get things like the touring test. Can a human being detect whether some particular thing has been generated by a machine or by another human? The whole background goal of computer scientists' education and then job performance often is a question about how can the machine outperform a human. in my view, that's a bad question to ask. A far better question would be, how can we get machines to augment human capabilities and to support human interests? Questions about facilitation of human flourishing and the pursuit of human projects, rather than machines that outperform humans, would be a far better world for us as agents. And, you know, it's not always the case that this is

what technology does. But in the background, that kind of loose orientation, let's get machines to outperform humans, I think, has ultimately served us very badly as a species. And we're seeing that now with the machine age in which artificial intelligence has indeed accomplished some superhuman feats. I'm not talking about replicators and robots that are going to destroy people, but just the ordinary experience of using machines in ways that outperform humans, that displace humans from their place in the world as agents, that's the existential threat that the machine age poses us. Well, let's bring this down from the discussion of these kind of big concepts and ideas, really to you, to your classroom, to the students that you're interacting with at Stanford.

I mean, what are you seeing with this new generation? because it's kind of interesting. You are truly an elite institution, so you're getting a kind of a cross-section of young people who have grown up in this much more optimized world than, let's say, their parents' generation. What are you seeing in terms of people's behavior, their attitudes? And what do you think this tells us about the future? Oh, boy. Well, I mean, let me give you just some concrete examples. I'm right now preparing for the beginning of the school. year here on campus that begins in a couple of weeks. And for the first time ever in putting together a syllabus, my colleagues and I have to create some type of policy on the syllabus that guide students about how they use, you know, large language models that produce text. So just in the past year, there have become available, you know, commercially available options where you type in a prompt to a website, you know, write an essay about the main themes of Hamlet, and it will give you a three-paragraph,

five-paragraph essay in response, a complete unique one, not one just drawn from the web. And so we have to create a policy about the permissible or impermissible uses of machine-generated text. That's just a small example of the kinds of challenges that we face these days. You think another small example that just illustrates the grand theme, one of my own children is just now a junior in college and another one is about to start. And compared to when I went to college 25, 30 years ago, the way you approach college these days is so different because you've sorted yourselves into social media groups. You often have an application, not in the form of like a written thing that you send to the university, but rather an app on your phone to help you identify an optimal roommate. You're creating social connections with your future classmates before you've even shown up on campus and met them in person. Some of these things probably are good and other things I think are a concern about the ways in which digitally mediated friendships are forming before.

you've actually met anybody in person. Campus has become a kind of, you know, a technologist's saturated with various ways in which things are tracked and stored and optimized. Card swipes to get into a dorm room, video surveillance cameras outside of classrooms and in parking lots, the various ways in which every email is tracked, Every web search is recorded. Anytime you check a book out from the library, that's noticed. There are just so many ways in which technology has pervaded the most macro and most micro forms of our life.

And I find that there are enormous benefits, but this is the key message of the book at some level. We have given technologists the permission to create these products that have so radicals, transformed the world in the past 30 years. And it's time for all of us as citizens, all of us as users of the products to help shape the technological future instead of just giving the keys to the kingdom over to the engineers who work in these tech companies. We want to get the great benefits that indeed technology can provide while avoiding some of the great harms. And that just requires many, many more voices, many, many more countervailing forms of power and influence in the commercial world of big tech than we've had to date.

Just coping with this idea that I can write a Hamlet essay by punching the words in, and you as a professor have no idea who, in fact, is the author. I mean, what an amazing example in a sense of the leaking away of agency when we, when we turn to, you know, algorithms to write our hamlet papers for us. Wow, that is revealing. Well, let's in our remaining time, because it's a lot of what you spend your time on, is thinking about solutions, because there is a feeling, Rob here, of, of, I don't know, a combination of kind of hopelessness and fatalism, that these companies are so big. this technology is so pervasive that our role is really to adapt.

And yes, there will be winners and losers, but there's an inevitability to the cycle that we are in. Technology will now be done to us. It's not something that we will do for ourselves. How do you, how do we, let's just start there. How do you, how do we overcome in a way the, the reality that we've already lost our agency or we've lost a sense of our agency when it comes to technology? Right. And here's where I think having some historical perspective is really important because there are many things that are genuinely novel about this particular technological age. But of course, if you think historically, you can look back in the past.

and see ways in which technological change has created massive ruptures in personal life, economic life, political life. And then we've managed to adapt ourselves to the circumstances. One of the, you know, examples often used, especially about automation, is that the, you know, the industrial evolution massively transformed agriculture in addition to many other things. And in 1900, the percentage of people in the United States who were employed in some agricultural role was nearly 50% of the labor force. And by 1950, it was down to 2% because of the replacement of so much manual labor by machines in fields. And yet that huge transition probably has had all kinds of benefits for the ability to create food more efficiently and in various ways, some downsides as well,

of course, but we found ways to cope with it, partly because the history of democratic societies or policy when it works well is to give ample space to private commercial initiative to pioneer new things on the frontier of innovation or technology, to bring those things to market. The market then traditionally consolidates in various ways, which is what we've seen with big tech now. And when the consolidation happens, the negative externalities of this commercial enterprise become more apparent. And so government steps in. We think in what we teach here on campus and what we say in the book is that we're at the opening moments of this new window for other people coming into the arena to have a countervailing form of power and influence to reign in big tech. It's simply a historical pattern repeating itself where the policy window is just now opening for 10, 20 years in which we're going to have various ways of trying to contain the socially undesirable consequences of this big tech age.

And the question is whether our policy makers are up to the task. The EU has been leading the way in certain respects here with the GDPR, the general data protection regime. That's why you get those pop-ups on your, you know, whenever you navigate to a website about cookie settings. But the U.S. and other countries are getting into the mix now as well with antitrust investigations and various ways of passing privacy laws about our data. And we think that it's just the opening salvo in what's going to be a decade-plus-long reaction, which is the historical norm.

So at the end of the day, we're, you know, actually quite optimistic that, over the course of the next decade plus, we'll find ways in which we can get some of the great benefits of technology and mitigate some of the harms. It just requires us to take an orientation, as you so aptly put it, to think that technology is not a force that acts upon us, like a law of gravity, but rather that we collectively can shape technology to serve the ends that we wanted to. And we're just in the beginning moments of giving that entire orientation a full, a full go. You're listening to Rob Reisch. He's the author, co-author of the new bestseller system error where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot as long as, as well as being

a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. So Rob, let's hypothesize that you are Texar for however long you need to be and you have the wherewithal, the means to introduce, you know, sweeping reforms. What would be the one or two or three key kind of policies or ideas that we could implement that would have an immediate and hopefully far-reaching impact on the negative externalities we've talked about, but also hopefully reclaiming for ourselves some of the sense of agency of our humanity in an era of big tech. Yeah, it's always, it gives me a smile whenever someone asks a philosopher, like, you know, allow yourself for a moment to be policies are. Philosopher King, what would you do in order to make the world a better place?

And, you know, part of where philosophy over the course of centuries has gotten to is that you shouldn't hand the keys of the kingdom over to the philosopher. That was a really bad idea in the first place. But I'm going to go with your question and put myself in the role of, say, you know, digital minister of the U.S. or something, a position that doesn't exist, but I think it would be wise to create. All right. So number one, take the conventional tools of antitrust and apply those to big tech. Find ways in which you make mergers and acquisitions much more difficult find ways in order to break up the various functions of a few different pieces of companies that have been stitched together, YouTube and Google search and ways, you know,

aren't necessarily all a package of one place, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, you know, separate sort of things that are all unified in one company meta. So I think there are various antitrust approaches that could be pursued that even if they fell short of breaking companies up, If they just made much less likely the mergers and acquisitions that happen where big tech gobbles up, its competitors very early, that would be a really good first step. Number two, I would put in place various forms of algorithmic auditing. So think, you know, back a generation ago where many countries put in place rules about environmental impact assessments.

I mean, you wouldn't give, you know, developers a chance to develop a new piece of land or, you know, affect a particular environment in one way without first doing an environmental assessment of what the consequences might be. I think we need algorithmic audits, algorithmic impact assessments now, especially when algorithms are being applied to the work of the government in public agencies, in schools, in hospitals, in various forms of hiring and decision making. And having algorithmic audits is a kind of an ordinary part of the policymakers' toolbox that we could easily apply in certain respects to algorithmic decision-making. And third, I would put in place federal laws about privacy, data privacy, that don't currently exist. The EU made an initial start at this,

and in the United States, we're seeing different states get into the action. Illinois has a Biometric Data Privacy Act. California just created a data privacy agency. And I think the trends are moving in the direction where industry itself will prefer there to be a common set of rules across the entire country rather than complying with, you know, 40 or 50 different rules of different states around data. So those are a beginning point of view. And I'll add, if you'll let me, just one other bigger picture, because each of the things I've just described, the antitrust approach, the idea of algorithmic audits and this idea of data privacy legislation, our policy reactions to what big tech has brought upon us collectively.

But what I think is even more important is the ability to kind of reposition and reinvigorate our policymaking apparatus to anticipate the problems of the future rather than just react to the problems of the past. And so in the book, in the last chapter, we talk about the various ways in which the policymaking apparatus of government can be made far more nimble, including the infusion of technology talent into the government for the government's own purposes to adapt to the future. So just to give you an example of this, imagine a way in which various forms of technological platforms, digital platforms, could coordinate and shepherd citizen voice across a wide array of topics. We could have various ways of organizing, you know, citizens to express their views about

city budgets or about federal budgets or about ways in which we inform people in different ways and get them into what are often called citizen assemblies. We can use technology to amplify the place of ordinary voices in government, and we can use technology in ways in which we can anticipate the problems of technology in the future far more than we've done in the past. So reinvigorating democratic institutions themselves is, in my view, the best possible solution to the problems of a technological age. Final question, Rob, we would like to hear the monk debates and monk dialogues talk a lot about geopolitics. And you'll know this argument that there is a case that we are entering into an age of

increasing great power competition between primarily the United States, but you could say the democracies of the West and the autocracies of the East led by possibly by China or recalcitrant China. Many people have said that this conflict will have a technological component to it. And some people have said that this is a reason not to restrain tech at this moment, because it is, in a sense, an asset of soft power that the U.S. and democracies can project kind of around the world. Others saying, no, look, this is the very moment that we need to reform our democracies

to strengthen our civic institutions and civic culture and finding a solution to, you know, the tragedy of the commons that unfortunately often big tech creates in our civic places and spaces is got to be job number one when it comes to facing off against these great power competitors. Where do you come down on that debate and what's your take in terms of what is at stake? Yeah, that's right. I mean, you've hit the nail on the head. This is a more and more common response, especially amongst, you know, technologists, the technology companies in Silicon Valley. You point out the various problems that this age of big tech has brought us. People have a short debate about what to do. And then someone says,

but what about China? Are we going to let China win the AI arms race and, you know, seed the technological frontier to do an autocratic society? And I just think that is a false choice. that is a misguided way of framing the geopolitical question. The question isn't whether we have an unregulated tech sector in order to win the technology race else China does. The question is whether or not we can find various ways of getting technology to serve and support the aspirations of democracy so that it's positioned as an alternative to a digital authoritarian model in a geopolitical sense.

So here's a really concrete way of framing it. Sometimes in Silicon Valley in the United States, you hear the following phrase. Right now what happens is that Europe regulates and America innovates. And that's a good default setting. Let Europe be the regulator and let America be the innovator. That's fine and let China do what it wants. That effectively puts democratic societies into competition with one another rather than into some loose form of coalition. What we need geopolitically, in my view, is a model.

on the global scene of how a robust, aggressive, technological frontier can be designed to support democratic ideals, which will make on the geopolitical scene the opportunity to live and work and flourish in a democratic society far more appealing than the kind of autocratic surveillance that is so often the aspiration of a digital authoritarian regime. Don't have to be democracies compete between each other, have democracies coordinate with each other on the geopolitical scene to provide a worthy alternative to digital authoritarianism. Excellent. Well, Rob, congratulations on your book.

It's an important one. I recommend our listeners grab a copy now, System Error, where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot. Really appreciated this conversation. We covered so much of the ground that I hoped we would. I just applaud you for your public spiritedness and your willingness to engage with these important debates and ideas. Thanks again, Rob, for coming on the program. Thank you very much for having me. Well, thank you for listening to this edition of the Monk Dialogues.

We have lots of new Monk debates plan for this podcast. We'll get back to them shortly. We hope in the meantime that you're enjoying these longer form conversations that we're posting on the monk dialogues. If you have some reflections, some input for us about what you've just heard from Rob Rish and our conversation about big tech, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithan S.com. While you're online, check out our website, triple w monkdebates.com. You'll find all kinds of great debates dialog. and podcasts, literally 500 total recordings, audio, visual, you name it, we've got a debate for you,

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