Soc(AI)ety Seminars, Part 3: Technology and Democracy

U.S. society is in the throes of deep societal polarization that not only leads to political paralysis, but also threatens the very foundations of democracy. The phrase “The Disunited States of America” is often mentioned. Other countries are displaying similar polarization. How did we get here? What went wrong?

In this talk, distinguished Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, Moshe Vardi, will argue that the current state of affairs is the result of the confluence of two tsunamis that have unfolded over the past 40 years. On one hand, there was the tsunami of technology — from the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 to the current domination of public discourse by social media. On the other hand, there was a tsunami of neoliberal economic policies. Vardi will suggest that the combination of these two tsunamis led to both economic polarization and cognitive polarization.

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Transcript

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Good afternoon, everyone. It's my distinct honor to introduce Professor Marsha Birdy from the Rice University, where he's a university professor And George, Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. And to know about being a university professor at Rice University means that he can teach in any department. He's basically qualified to say, I'm going to teach at department A, B, C, or D, and that's what he can do. And not surprisingly, as a computer scientist, I don't know many other computer scientists, who is a member of National Academy of Engineering, member of National Academy of Sciences. Member, American Academy of Austin Sciences, member of the Royal Society of pa, member of the European Academy of Science Academia, nine Honorable PhD, doctorates from different universities, globally, and of course he a fellow of every distinguished society. I don't know if anything is left now. That's why we better find another line because there's more on us at this time. needs, but more importantly, I would like to share with you is the generosity and the kindness that he brings to his work as well. there's this thing that held at Rice University two years ago called Quality Invest. Students wonder if we can do We had to celebrate him and, from all over the place, and apparently they didn't know if they can, for two days, to talk about incidents of Moche body of scholarship and research, etc. They had developed the proposals to cover the two days program. And I would quote some of the things, as I said, you can read them of these things. Moshe is a wonderful mentor, collaborator, and I come back to him in every sense of the world. He's constantly thinking about how science can benefit the community. wider and nearer dissemination of prisoners of war, as he was known as CSCM. Moshe's influence is so far reaching that we received more than twice the number of proposals we could fill in three days. Moshe has a strong moral compass, coupled with his logical mind and his ability to empathize. And he's now going to talk to us about technology and democracy. And he's going to challenge all the computer scientists in the room to say, we got to get it right. Otherwise, democracy is a solution. Thank you. This introduction reminds me of an old story about three students from MIT who published a paper. The first one had a footnote next to his name, AT& T fellow, because he had a fellowship fund there. AT& T Foundation. The second one had a footnote, Hertz Fellow, but they had a fellowship from the Hertz Foundation. The third one had a footnote and it says, a jolly good fellow. So let's talk about technology and democracy. Why do we need to talk about democracy? The most recent issue of Time magazine had the top 10 global risk for 2024. And what is number one? The United States versus itself. While America's military and economy remain exceptionally strong, the U. S. political system is more dysfunctional than any other advanced industrial democracy. In 2025, the problem will get much worse. So let's dig deeper into that. But I first want to go back to an important book. It was written in 1899. 1981, by Francis Fukuyama, is called The End of History and The Last Man. The triumph, the summary, the triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in total exhaustion of viable systematic alternative to Western liberalism. The joke is that history received a copy of the book and she was not amused at all. And she said, at the end of me, I'm going to show you. And he has been showing us since then. I'm a member, I've been very involved in ACM, Association of Computing Machinery, which is the foremost, the premier society in computing. In 2012, We celebrated the Turing centenary. Alan Turing was born in 19, in 1912. I was part of the organizing committee. And you can go and find it on the web. You see what is the program? Celebration of Computing. Five years later, the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize in Computing, hit 50 years. Another celebration. You can go and look how we talk about computing as an ascendant technology. We influence everything. Then on June 10, 2022, I want you to pay attention to the date. You look at the program and now it's more sober and more somber. The panel will imagine what might be next for technology and society. In the years to come. Suddenly we're talking about society. If you look at the program, much of it is about adverse societal impact of computing. So much that a fairly well known participant, I don't want to embarrass him by putting his name, put on social media, I found the whole thing a little depressing. Why can't we just celebrate computing as an ascendant technology? Why do we need to worry about societal adverse effects? But if you want to know why we have to think about society, you need to think of the social context. One day before that ACM event, on June 9th of 2022, the House of Representatives started its hearing about January 6th, 2021 insurrection, where ultimately we learn of a plot to subvert the lawful transfer of power in the United States. And two weeks before that, in Texas, in New Valley, Texas, a young gunman killed 19 children. And two students. Very tragic event. It was in Texas. I took it personally, but it may have to do something with the name Uvaldi. Every time I heard Uvaldi, I think of somebody pointed me and you say Uvardi. So I felt very affected by this. Very, to me, still very tragic event. In fact, we just, the Attorney General just issued a report about the total incompetence of police force in, around, around that event. Very tragic. The reason I'm mentioning these two. events, because the boss show us how polarized American society is. Let's look at president, ex president Trump. This was a New York Times poll just after the hearing started. A month later, 92 percent of Democrats think he threatened U. S. democracy, but 76 percent of Republicans think he was just exercising his right to contest the elections. Completely legitimate, they think, they say. Or let's look, there was a proposal after Uvaldi to, ban the sale of assault type weapons, like the AR 15, among gun owners. 84 percent of a democratic gun owner says yes, ban, but 75 percent of Republican gun owners object to banning such assault weapons. These are two sample points of very deep polarization, and polarization is the enemy of democracy, because democracy is, needs to have a sense, sometimes you win, sometimes I win, but we are in it together. George Shultz used to be Secretary of State of the United States about a month before he died at age 100. Wrote a, a, an article, an op ed in New York Times about trust. When trust was in the room, good thing happened. When trust was not in the room, good thing did not happen. Everything else is details. This is also true for society in general. Without trust, democracy cannot survive. And the breakdown is so much and people are seriously speculating about what they call the dis United States. An article in New York Review of Books talk about the possibility of the United States breaking into a blue and red confederacies. And if you think this is crazy, come with me to Texas, where there is promotion of what you call texting. In June 22, again, a year and a half ago, the Republican Party put a plank on its platform Calling for a voter referendum, whether or not the state of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation. Just a little bit of American history. Texas used to be part of the United States of Mexico. There was a rebellion, they left Mexico, they were in Texas for nine years. And then they joined the United States. And now some people are seriously saying we should leave the United States. And I want to read you a paragraph from an article in Time magazine of about a year ago, because I think it's very poignant. How is it that politicians are banning books in a country whose founding First Amendment protects the right to free speech? How is it the United States, in spite of wealth and technology, leads the world in more than one million deaths from COVID 19, more than any other nations on Earth? How is it that insurrectionists could storm the citadel of American democracy in a crusade to overturn a presidential election? How is it that we actually saw a confederate flag inside the U. S. Capitol that the rioters in our era could deliver the confederate flag farther than General Robert E. Lee himself? And I think there's a very important question that we must ask. What went wrong? What happened to the United States of America? And I have no doubt that historians will write about it for the next 50 years. But I think we need some kind of an answer now, and I will try to offer an answer. It's, I don't claim it's a definitive answer, but I would like to start a conversation. And I think, especially for us competing professionals, to find out the role that we play in there should be a wake up call. So for this, I'm going to go 40 years ago, but first, there are things that I cannot talk here. Political scientists here may resonate with them. what's called the Nixon Southern strategy. I don't have time to talk about it here. Election primaries, we don't have time. The decline of social capital, a la Robert Putnam, we don't have time to talk about it either. But let's go back about 40 years ago, 1981. Because three pivotal events happened in 1981. Number one, a young postdoc arrives at Stanford University. it was at least pivotal for me. More significantly, just less than a month before that, IBM introduced the so called personal computer model 5150. Or more colloquially known as the IBM PC. And earlier in that year, Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. So let's talk about the impact of the last two bullets. The IBM PC was a resounding business success. It was so successful that just about a year later, in January of 1983, Time magazine put the IBM PC on its cover magazine. Usually they have the person of the year. Now it's became the machine of the year. The computer move on. You see the IBM PC on a desk and a man looking rather glumly at this machine. So machines suddenly became such important presence in our life. They move away from what used to be called the glass house into our desks. And the IBM PC started a tsunami of technology. By the mid 80s, every knowledge worker has a computer on their desk. By the late 80s, every knowledge worker took a computer home. The web, the world of the web was introduced in 1989. Internet became commercial in 1995, Google launched in 1998, Facebook in 2004, iPhone in 2007. And these events describe the world we live in today. Okay, I could have added Amazon to the picture also late, late, 90s, around 2000. This is the world in which we live today. It's a tsunami of technology. Equally important, and we are not paying enough attention to it, is what happened economically. Ronald Reagan introduced a tsunami of neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism? It's extreme free market capitalism. Some people call it market fundamentalism. Just believe in free market. It has to do with economic liberalization, austerity, privatization, deregulation, monitoring, tax reduction, globalization, free trade. We can go, of course, and spend a lot of time, just an hour, talking about all these different things. Here is the important thing to understand how successful Reagan has been. There is a famous sentence, the era of big government is over. And I asked people, there are some knowledgeable people, I asked a typical person who said it. They think it's Ronald Reagan. But this was said by Bill Clinton. By Bill Clinton. Reagan moved the country so much to the right, the Democrats also had to move to the right. And Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over. State of Union address. 1996. So what did neoliberalism, has done? I think it was put very well by a book, Wendy Brown. I'm doing the demos where she said, no, neoliberalism is not just an ideology that fills the market. Rather, it disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities, even where money is not the issue, and configure human being exhaustively as economic market actors, always and everywhere as homo economic, economicus. In fact, I would say, look at us elite universities. We used to be institution for the common good. Now, you look at elite universities, what do they care about? Money and prestige. They're also affected by neoliberalism. Now, where does the belief in the market go back to for this? The famous thing is the invisible hand. Adam Smit, it actually, the phrase Invisible Hand is not from his famous book on the Wealth of Nation, but from an earlier book. This The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he marvels about the, the mar, the Marvel. The Marvel, the magic of markets. I wake up in the morning, I'm hungry, I want a loaf of bread, I go to the market, I don't know the baker doesn't know me, I give the baker a shilling, I get a loaf of bread, the baker is happy, I'm happy, we're all happy. So he wrote, they're led by an invisible hand. And so without intending it, without knowing it, the interest of society as a whole, And provide means for the survival of the species. what people have taken from this is, it was put the most crassly, I think, in a movie, 1987 movie, called Wall Street, with the character Gordon Gekko, and he gives this rousing speech where he says, in other, the point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Why? The invisible hand. Each one of us can be greedy, and we will all be better off. Now, this idea actually was not due to Adam Smith. It preceded him. It goes back to earlier to a Dutch philosopher, Bernard Mandeville, who described a big community that thrives. But then they decide to live by honesty and virtue. They decide, abandon desire for personal grade, and he claimed that because of this, the hive will collapse. So again, private vice. Give right to social good. This is an amazing thing. It gives you permission to be selfish because out of this will come social good. That's the claim. So how well did it work? how well did the Ronald Reagan Revolution work? So let's look at the important thing. So for example, did it work for blue collar people? So this look at manufacturing jobs and you can see versus manufacturing output. Real dollars. That is real dollar means a dashing for inflation. And what you see here is that from 1950 till 1980, employment goes up and output goes up. But then something happened around 1980 and we see that output continues to grow, but employment has shrunk by millions of jobs. So we've want to understand what happened to the Midwest. The Midwest lost tons of manufacturing jobs, and the income and the outcome has been not pretty, not good for democracy. Here's another way of looking at it. Take four economic indicators, productivity, GDP, jobs, and income. You can look from 1953 to 1983, and they go together. And they were so well coupled that the economy thought that it's about the economic law. And it means that all you have to do is care about productivity, and then All good stuff will happen. The GDP will grow, jobs will be created, income will increase, except you see, it was not an economic law, and this would be called the Great Decoupling. So you can see that roughly from 1983, GDP, productivity continued to increase, GDP continued to increase, but we're creating fewer jobs. And income has flattened. So you have a rising tide, but it doesn't lift all boats. In particular, we see in this country growing inequality. This chart, to me, put it in a very stark way. It looks at the top 1 percent of income earners and the bottom 50%. You could see 1962, the top, but the bottom 50 percent earn about 20 percent of the income, and the top 1 percent earn about 12 percent of the income. Now you go forward about 50 years, and as a reversal, the 1 percent are taking 20 percent of the income home and the 50 percent are taking 12 percent of the income home. We have a growing economic gap and what happened to labor, we saw that the jobs have disappeared. But of course also technology creates jobs and the phenomenon that we see is called labor polarization. So if you look, economies divided the labor market into low skill, middle skill, and high skills. You can see that in 1983, we have almost 60 percent middle skill jobs. 50 percent low skill and 26 percent high skill. Now what happens if you zoom forward about 40 years? The low skill has not changed much. There are more high skilled jobs. So for people like us, this has been good. But the middle skilled jobs, we see they have declined. there are fewer middle skilled jobs. And you see it also by the impact of, you look at the same period, what does it have to do with, let's look at wages and education. If you're an educated professional, if you have a post baccalaureate degree, if you have a graduate degree, you've done very well. Men and women. If you have a college degree, you've done okay. Women have done better than men. If you have less in college degree, you have not done well. You have lost in real dollars. Your income has actually shrunk. Your income has actually shrunk. So we look at working class people, they've actually lost ground because of neoliberalism. And this was put very nicely in the parable of the Simpsons. So of course the Simpsons is a it's a story of a U. S. family. Homer Simpson is a nuclear safety inspector. It's a working class job. It's a union job. Important. It's a union job. So this is from NPR. And it says in 1930, 30 years ago, when Homer Simpson show started, you have someone without a college degree. One, one person in the family is working. Okay. Marge is not working till they have a nice quality of life. He can have beer. they have two cars. all, everything is very nice. Then you ask yourself, can you imagine today a working class family with only one working age, one wage earner in the family being able to afford the same quality of life as Homer Simpson? The answer is no way. So just a metaphor, how much working class people have lost ground. And in an article, in 2022, in The Guardian, Luke Mogelson asked, why did the big lie about the election stuck? Why do people believe Trump when he said the election was, he was cheated out of his, out of the presidency? And the answer is, he looks at, he compared Democratic districts to Republican districts. And Democratic districts, income has risen in real dollars. Republican districts. Income has income was declined in real dollars. So you have people whose overall, the quality of life has declined, and they feel they have someone, they want to blame someone, you can talk to them about globalization and automation. These are all very abstract things. But if you tell them it's because of the Chinese, because of the Mexican, this sticks, okay? Blame people who are not abstract, especially people that look different than you. in 2022, David, the New York Times asked all of its columnists to write a column what I was wrong about. Each one of them, they have an opinion every week. these are people who can opine every week. Please tell us what you're wrong about. David Brooks is a conservative columnist of the New York Times, and he wrote, I was wrong about capitalism. The most educated Americans were amassing more and more wealth, dominating the best living areas, throwing advantages into their kids. A highly unequal caste system was forming. So the invisible hand did not work very well for everyone. So what went wrong? So let's dig a little deeper. So what economists tell us that free market will give us is economic efficiency. That's the thing. The free market is the best, it's the most efficient way of allocating resources. What is economic efficiency? Here's the definition from Investopedia. Goods and factors of production are distributed or allocated to their most valuable use, and waste is minimized. And then, again from Investopedia, free market advocates argue that through individual self interest and freedom of production as well as consumption, economic efficiency is achieved and the best interests of society as a whole are fulfilled. So this is, we get the best of all possible words. Efficiency and optimality. But is it clear that efficiency guarantees optimality? So let's revisit this. So you go and, after in 2008 with a financial crisis, and, I, then I went to sabbatical Hebrew university and they have some very distinguished economists. I went to one of them and says, please tell me what does economic, what is the theory that tells the free market is so great? And he said, go read about the First Welfare Theory. So I went and read the First Welfare Theory. And it says that under certain technical assumptions, the free market will tend towards a competitive Pareto optimal equilibrium. That's a theorem. You can prove it. And Pareto optimal equilibrium is the definition for them is efficiency. That's what they mean by being efficient. That means no one can gain unless someone else has lose. That's what Pareto optimal means. But the question is, how does it serve the best interest of society? Remember, the investor Peter promised us. It will serve the best interest of society. it turns out that this question was visited by computer scientists. Here we look at Nash Equilibria, but later on people showed the same thing for Pareto Equilibrium, Pareto Optimal Equilibrium. And that's the same question. There are many possible equilibria. How do we know that? What is that? That what the system converges it, it in is the best one. So say let's compare the best one in terms of social utility to the worst one. And what can be the ratio and answer is the ratio it's called The price of anarchy can be very high. Exponential. Exponential in the size of the system. And that means that. That the free market guarantee efficiency, it does not guarantee societal optimality. Does not mean that you serve the best interest of society. This is mythology. It's, the theorem does not guarantee that. So when we talk to economists, they say, yeah, it guarantees Pareto optimality. So we have redefined it. To me, Pareto optimality is one consideration. But I would like to say, society as a whole gets richer. It doesn't give us that. and in fact, this is something even fundamentally worse. The free market was offered as a way to resolve our differences. Each one of us here have a different opinion about things. This is called the plurality of opinion problem. How do we all agree on value of things? They say, you price everything, and the value that the free market converges in, this must be the true value. The answer is no, it's an arbitrary value. It doesn't, there's nothing fundamentally true, but other than it's an equilibrium value. But it doesn't mean that this is true. It could be another equilibrium, but it will have a different value. ThinkND. com So there's no way to escape the plurality of opinion. We're stuck with each other, guys. We have to figure it out. Now, this economic polarization was aggravated by cognitive polarization. So you go back, even to the 80s, and the news, to watch the news, you watch it on the broadcast channel, and the broadcast, broadcaster have to, lease spectrum from the government. And one condition was they had to be balanced. This was called a fairness doctrine. They have to present all points of view in a balanced way. So it doesn't matter what you watch, ABC, CBS, NBC. You essentially saw the same news in a balanced way. But then we had in the 80s web proliferation of cable channels. So the FCC said, you know what? We don't need fairness anymore. Because all points of view are created by some channel, but the difference is when you watch, let's say ABC, you got balanced coverage of the news. Now it is true that if you want to get balanced coverage of the news today, you can watch Fox News and then MSNBC and maybe try to interpolate somewhere in the middle there. But as we know, people don't do that. They gravitate to one channel, that's what they watch. So today, depending on what news channel you watch, you live in a different cognitive bubble. Now let's go back to, we can say, oh, cable channel, it's not computer science, it's electrical engineering, it's not our fault. let's go to the internet. So when I came to the U. S. in 1981, we already had social media. Social media existed way before Facebook. What is social media? There were dial up bulletin boards. In the Bay Area, there was something called Famous the Well. People had furious debates about topics. If you're old enough, you may remember Usenet, Unis to Unix network, which anybody who was in a research lab, academia or industry, had access to. And this was social media. And the mantra at the time, so in 1981, I was surprised to discover in 1981, that the barrier was still in the 60s. The culture of the 60s really solidified in the 70s. It was much shaped by the resistance to the Vietnam War. So it was very anti government, anti establishment. And from this came the mantra, information wants to be free. Now, of course, you understand this mantra, information doesn't want anything. It means we want information to be free. But it affected people. People still complain, I post something on social media and people say, Oh, a paywall. I I don't see anybody going to the supermarket and says, Oh, I can get ice cream. There is a paywall. But somehow we think the information should be free. So when Tim Berners Lee introduced the web in 1989, it was all about federal public sharing of information. And the first few years were exhilarating. But then we quickly discovered there is a problem. Too much information. If you know the URL, good, you can go there. But otherwise, how do you find information? How do you find information? So there was a solution. Yahoo offered the solution. They said, libraries have catalogs. Let's do a catalog for the internet, for the web. Okay, they call it a directory. And that's what you did. In the early years, in the early 90s. Yahoo discovered it doesn't scale. Internet was growing so furiously that there was no way they could keep up with the catalog. the idea, another idea came, search engines. And the first one were pretty lousy. Didn't give you the right, the good information. Google came up with a brilliant search engine, the page algorithm, and, They became a huge success. But remember, information wants to be free. And Google is a company. How do they make money? So they had a great business idea. And the idea was, how does broadcast TV make money? Advertising. So they said, we'll give you free searches. We all now are so used to free, everything on the internet should be free. But, You have to watch, you have, you don't have to watch. We will try to tempt you to, to show you advertising, to click on advertisements. So this was a great idea, except it was not a very good idea. Turns out that when you have, if you have a newspaper, unless you're doing the classified is different. The classified, you look, you're looking for particular information. I need to buy a house, I want to buy a house. I want to buy a car. Go to the classified. But otherwise, you need big banners to catch up, to catch your information. Otherwise. You're not going to skip it. People tried Big Banner. I remember when there was Big Banner on the internet, and users hated Big Banners on the internet. Google came up with another brilliant business idea. Micro targeted advertising. We're going to show you the advertisement that you may want to see, and you're going to see the one you're interested in. How do we know what you want and what you want? We'll gather data on you, and that's how we're going to decide. Out of this, When people talk about impact of AI and they think of it as some futuristic thing, I said, guys, for the last 20 plus years, everything you consume on the internet is mediated by AI, where machine learning decides what you're going to see based on personal data, both online but offline. Google goes and buys lots of data about you offline. They want to know much about you, as much as possible. So what is the outcome? If each one of us Google wants to think that we want to see. We're back to the filter bubbles, so you can go. This was experiment done by some magazine. They put a query, what is Exxon, and want to see what kind of advertisement they get. So if Google thought that you are a liberal, then they will show you about carbon capture. Advertisement about carbon capture. But if Google thought that you are a conservative, you will see something against regulation, depending on what, on their profile of you. So very different worlds. Call it filter bubbles. This was named by Shoshana Zuboff as surveillance capitalism in a thick book, 700 pages that she published in, 2019. If you don't have the stamina for 700 pages, I urge you to read an article, an op ed she wrote in the New York Times just after January 6th. It was titled, The Coup We're Not Talking About, where she wrote, we can have democracy or we can have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. In Silicon Valley, the way this describe is they say if you are not paying for it, you are the product. But what does it mean? What exactly is the product? You are the product Jar Lan technology said in 2018. The product isn't so much you, is the ability to change the behavior of millions of people like you. James Plunkett, an economist, wrote in 2021, The search engine or social media platform is little more than a bait. Dare to hold our attention long enough to capture likeness in data. We are all being just tempted by these things. And Paul Romer is an economist at Stanford, and he wrote much about the economy of innovation and entrepreneurship. He was Silicon Valley's favorite economist. But then in 2021, he realized what's going on, and he wrote, People are realizing that this advertising model, pioneered by Google and Facebook, poses a growing threat to democracy. This firm knows more about the citizens of the world's democracies than Stasi knew about East Germans. They can exploit what they know without relying on the coercive power of the police state. They can adjust what people see and exercise control by a thousand nudges. And now we just have to think, we are heading into an election, and suppose that Facebook decides that one candidate over the other is better for their business. Do we have a guarantee that they're not going to use that power to influence us? Now, Facebook, in fact, took Google's idea of target advertising, took it to the next level. Because Facebook, even more than Google, have a very clear, they stated what is their business model. Maximize user engagement. The more time you spend on the platform, the better. The more likely you are to click advertisement. So we need to hook you. So they went to nano targeted advertising. And people have compared their design to, they call it addiction by design. An article from the, from the, from Atlantic a decade ago talks about an anthropology combination of vaga slot machines. Real, but I always spend on social network. if you went to a slot machine and you spend hours losing money, you're going to quit. So what do they have to do? They have to give you a few quarters once in a while, okay? You're still losing money, but they throw you some bones along the time. That's what happened on, on, on Facebook. What do they give you? They give you the likes. likes. We all crave social approval. People go there, oh, how many likes did I get? How many likes did I get? A paper from NYU from 2021. Social media use driven by search for reward, akin to animal seeking food, new study show. Addiction by design. And the hypocrisy coming from Silicon Valley is just staggering. Here is a quote. If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. To me, this is very sinister, but it was said by Eric Schmidt, who used to be then the CEO of Google. Now, Eric Schmidt wanted to forget what happened in 2005. CNET, a tech magazine, decided to see how much personal information can you discover using just Google. So they said, how about we use Eric Schmidt? ThinkND. as a Guinea pig for this. And they did Google searches, find lots of information about it and published it. They said this what Discover used in Google, Eric Schmidt threw Ahi ofit and, for years cnet, Google would not talk to cnet'cause Eric Schmidt was so upset. They revealed his, that the book, his privacy then privacy is over. Mark Zuckerberg in 2010, which he doesn't want you to, he wants you to forget. When he bought a house in Palo Alto, he bought all the houses around him. Because he wants some, guess what, privacy. And I think this way, one of the best descriptions of what social media has done to us was written by Jonathan Haidt in 2022. The story of Babel, remember the biblical story of Babel, humanity wants to build a tower to go to heaven, God wants to cancel the project, and he's, everybody's speaking different language. Now they cannot talk to each other, they cannot coordinate the project. The story of Babel is the best metaphor I've found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the future country. Something went terribly wrong very suddenly. We're disoriented, unable to speak the same language, or if not the same truth. We're cut off from one another and from the past. Story of bubble. We've lost our common language. Polarization. And, where do we stand now as computer scientists? So to me, the best metaphor, to describe at least how I feel about it, is come from a book that was 90s, Ender's Game, by Scott, also Scott Card. This is a spoiler alert. What happened in the book is that, Ender thinks he and his teenage friend, he's a teenager, think they're playing video games. They don't know. They're actually fighting intergalactic war. When they think they won the game, they actually won the war and they destroyed the civilization. Then of the book, they realize, oops, we've destroyed the civilization. We thought, to use the star war metaphor, we thought we are the rebels. Turns out, we are the empire now. We are the empire. there is a lot of talk today about responsibility. Responsible AI, you hear this phrase a lot, and responsible corporate social responsibility. But, at the end of the day, who develops AI? We develop AI. Who runs corporations? People run corporations. at the end of the day, I think people have to be responsible. ACM Code of Ethics does talk about professional responsibility. The first sentence is, Conveying professional accents changes the world. To act responsibly, they should reflect Upon the wider impact of the work, consistently supporting the public good. So if you want to be a responsible computer scientist, that's what you have to do. Support the public good. We have to start thinking about the public good. And I like the way I student once, with the conversation in class and you try to explain, I ask them, I ask students if they'll take a face, a job at face. And there was a distribution, but the survey student said no. When I asked, can someone explain why not? The student says, I'll have a degree, a bachelor degree in computer science from Rice University. I'll have many job offers. Why do I have to take those that are ethically questionable? There are many unquestioned, there are many companies I can't take a job with that will not be ethically questionable. You say it's going to be easy for me to be ethical. Now, when I start talking about the public good a couple of years ago, some of the response I got on social media is pretty much accusing me of being Marxist Leninist. Okay, social, so talk about public good, that's socialism. We don't do that in America. so I wanted to figure out what are we doing in America? This is the first paragraph of the Constitution of the United States of America. We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do, or then, and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. What is this about? It's about the public good. The Constitution says the purpose of this country is to promote the public good. Now, how do we agree collectively what is the public good? For this we need a mechanism. The rest of the Constitution is the mechanism by which we reach agreement on what is the public good. Because, as we said, we have plurality of opinions. Benjamin Franklin, at the closing speech of the Constitutional Convention, he had some quibbles about the Constitution, and he said, thus I consensual to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I'm not sure that it's not the best. The opinions I have of its error, I sacrifice for the public good. so public good is an American as it can be. People who think that this is socialism just don't know enough about United States of America. Now, as we say, it's not always easy to say what is a public good. your definition, that might be different. And it's not black and white. Take something that seems very simple. Thou shall not kill. we still have execution in America. We debate it, but we still have execution. Self defense. So we make exceptions, okay? It's not always black and white. But sometimes it is almost black and white. Take a company like Uber that I use, but I hate to use it. In 2019, there was no, that was the only way to get here. So I had to use it. In 2019, Jacobin magazine wrote, from the start, Uber's business model has been based on habitual criminality and a shocking indifference to human life. Now, Jacobin magazine is very left wing magazine, so you may tend to dismiss it, these are the leftists. Guardian, wrote in 2022, a whistleblower leaked over 100, 000, over 120, 000 confidential documents. Guardian analyzed them, and what did they wrote? Uber broke laws, do police, and secondly, law governments leak reveals. So yes, habitual criminality. is a good description for Uber. There's a, the management has changed, so you have to give them a little benefit of doubt. The new CEO may be less prone to habitual criminality than the old one. So let's come back to computer science education here. There are many people here, I think, are computer science educators. And I said, if we want to be, we need to make sure that our students, when they graduate, they know about social responsibility. We cannot make them act responsibly, that has to be their ethical decision. But we have to make sure that they are aware of their responsibility. That means that we have to include this in our curriculum. If we don't do it, then we are not being socially responsible. And at Rice, it's been a success story. We started this course on ethics in, computing ethics in society in 2018, and it took some years to build it up. By last spring, the faculty in my department voted to make it a required course. Before it was an elective, now it's a required course. And, and such just a bit, promote self promotion. I wrote a paper about this with a colleague of mine called Deep Tech Ethics. if you, it was in 60 in 2021. And if you're interested, I think you'll find it, you'll find it very relevant. And in some sense, I said, this is one of the most, I teach different courses, database theory, logic and computer science. This is the most gratifying course to teach. There's no exam at the end. The student have to write essays. And here is a quote from one of the essays. I believe that there was no problem that could not be solved with all powerful technology. It was only a matter of time before scientists devised the correct algorithm to solve all the problems of the world. Looking back, I realize how naive I was. So these kind of statements make it really, that you're changing the heart and the mind of students. It's incredibly gratifying. I think, I want to quote Edward O. Wilson. He wrote, the true problem of humanity is the following, we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and the technology of gods. And I will paraphrase him right now. I think our technology today is taking advantage of Paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions. the fact that we like, with the fact that we like, like so much, that's a Paleolithic emotion. It's built into us. It's still there. The fact that it's so hard to regulate technology from medieval institutions. BMW used to have the quote, the ultimate driving machine. But now they are being threatened by autonomous vehicles. So they changed the slogan to don't be driven by technology, drive it. I think this is a fantastic, motto for what we should ask for as a society. We should not be driven by technology, we should drive it. And if in Vienna in 2019, a bunch of us wrote a manifesto on digital humanism, we must shape our technology in accordance with human values and needs instead of following, allowing technology to shape humans. Our task is not only to rein in the downside of information communication technology, but to encourage human centered innovation. And today I was talking to people asking, how can we use technology to strengthen democracy instead of weaken democracy? And I think that's a fantastic. And if you're interested, just search for Digital Humanism Initiative. There are lots of interesting stuff there. And perhaps one way in which we can, again, motivate our students to take it more seriously is to do something which is in analogy with the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic Oath is You know, first do know how, so I proposed a love Atlassian Oath. Why? Why love Atlassian? ed Loveless was a 19th century mathematician. He was, she corresponded with Charles Babbage. Some people call her the first programmer, and she was the first one that I thought, especially talking about the public good. Babbage wanted to, Baab was entrepreneur. the analytic engine he wanted to build and never built was he wanted, he was a business person. He wanted to make money. He wrote back to him, it's okay with me that you make money. But short, I wish to add my mind towards expanding and interpreting the Almighty and His laws and works for the most effective use of mankind. And what is the effective use of mankind? The public good. So the oath that I propose is a solemnly pledged, always to reflect upon the wider impact of my work, consistently supporting the public good. Just basically taking the ACM Code of Ethics Statement, turning it into a pledge. Remember, we saw the cover of Time Magazine in 1983, showed the IBM PC. Every Time magazine puts technology on the cover, you better take it seriously. And this is just from an issue last year. And what do you see here? High chart GPT. A conversation with chart GPT. So this is the new kid on the block. And all of the people are worrying about how chart GPT is going to hijack democracy. and this cartoon, I think, captures it very well. There is a box, labelled AI, you see a monster coming out of it, and the man is asking, who the heck is Pandora? Who the heck is Pandora? And, I want to go back to the invisible hand, and the business aspect of it. So Nick Bostrom is a British philosopher, In 2012, you wrote a book Super INT Intelligence, where you start worrying about what will happen if we have not just a GI, but super intelligent A GI. And he described a sort experiment, he call it the paperclip maximizer. So you build a super intelligent agent and you tell it make paperclips. So because it is so smart, he will try to maximize it. We'll figure out how to turn the whole solar system into a paperclips factory life. On Earth's not important. The important thing is paperclips and. People are debating this. Guys, the people in Maxima is already here. It's the profit maximizing corporation. And, just recently a book was written about, guess what, about Boeing. The chief executive and his closest lieutenants have chosen to prioritize growth and engagement over any other objective. No, sorry, about Facebook. About, and something probably happened and you can say, you say about Boeing. But the book about Facebook, the chief executive and his closest lieutenants chose to prioritize growth and engagement over any other objective. We have large corporations. And they're in the business of one thing, maximizing profits. So what should we do? So one proposal there is a Antitrust and some books came up in the last few years, the Curse of Bigness, antitrust in the New Gilded Age, by Tim Wu, who served for a while in, in the Biden administration. He left not clear exactly why, another book in 2020 by er, teach Out antitrust, break them Up, recovering Freedom from Big Ag, big Tech, and Big Money. And Zephyr made the point that the problem with monopolies. It's not just that they distort the market because we can say, look, people said, Google is free. Facebook is free. The problem is she says is power. If we get age, we get a participant in our democracy, they're too powerful. It distorts democracy. She says that the real motivation of antitrust is not just about, About price, the issue of price fixing has to do about power. And Kate Codford said it in, in 2021. Stop talking about AI ethic. It's time to talk about power. So this is one thing. Entitle something will be taken more seriously. The other thing is something that I've been trying to promote, which is something very invisible. We're living in a world where there are two legal regime. There's a normal legal regime where, how, where do we get laws? We get it from legislatures. Is it pretty how laws are made? No. It's like making sausage. Everybody knows it. This is democracy in action. How do we deal with plurality of, opinions or strating practically. But when it comes to technology, it's a different regime altogether. Soon as you use any technology, you use your phone, you clicked on a contract, you have signed a contract, you haven't read the contract. You don't know what's in the contract. It was written by corporate lawyers. You think it was in your interest. I can guarantee you it was not in your interest. It's the interest of whoever is makes the phone. in particular, they have no liability. My worry about AI is that AI will be unleashed on us on corporations who are not liable. Because if you use TGPT, for example, you already sign a contract with them and you waived your liability. They have no liability. This is to me a powerful. Power and no liability is a dangerous combination. So my remedy is a very simple law. All clicks through contracts, past, present, and future are hereby nullified. Do we need laws to govern? Cyberspace, of course, but we should do it the old fashioned way. Democratically. To paraphrase Kate Crawford, stop talking about AI technology. It's time to talk about corporate power. Thank you very much.