How AI Could Hack Democracy | Lawrence Lessig | TED

8,992 views ・ 2024-11-05

TED


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00:03
So on January 6, 2021
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my nation suffered a little bit of a democracy heart attack.
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Thousands of Americans had been told that the election had been stolen,
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and tens of thousands of them showed up
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because they believed the election had been stolen.
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And indeed, in polling immediately after January 6,
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“The Washington Post” found 70 percent of Republicans believed
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the election had been stolen,
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and a majority of college-educated Republicans believed
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the election had been stolen.
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That was their perception.
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And I don't know what the right way to act on that perception is.
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They thought the right way was to defend
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what they thought was a democracy stolen.
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Now, these numbers were astonishing:
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30 percent or two thirds of Republicans believing the election was stolen.
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But even more extraordinary are these numbers.
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The fact that in the three years since that astonishing event,
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the numbers have not changed.
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The same number believe today that the election was stolen
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as believed it was stolen three years ago,
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despite the fact that we've had investigations
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and overwhelming evidence that there was no fraud
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sufficient to ever change even a single state.
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This is something new.
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When Richard Nixon went through the Watergate scandal,
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as the news was being reported,
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Nixon's popularity collapsed not just among Democrats,
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but among independents and Republicans.
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But we're at a stage where it doesn't matter what happens.
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This is Donald Trump's popularity over the course of his administration.
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Nothing changes.
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The facts don't matter.
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Now I think this truth should bother us a lot.
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I think we need to develop a kind of paranoia
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about what produces this reality.
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A particular paranoia, the paranoia of the hunted.
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Think of the kids in "The Birds"
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first realizing that those crows were attacking them,
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or "Black Mirror's" Metalheads,
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when you see these creatures chasing and surrounding you.
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The point is, we need to recognize
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that there is an intelligence out there to get us.
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Because our perceptions,
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our collective perceptions,
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our collective misimpressions
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are not accidental.
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They are expected, they are intended,
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they are the product of the thing.
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(Laughter)
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OK, I want to be careful introducing the thing.
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I'm going to talk a little bit about AI, but I'm not going to slag on AI.
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I think AI is the most extraordinary technology
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humanity has ever even conceived of.
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But I also think it has the potential to end humanity.
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But I'm not going to slag on AI,
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because I'm pretty sure that our robot overlord
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is going to be listening to these TED talks someday,
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and I don't want to be on the wrong side of the overlord.
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So AI is just fine.
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I'm not going to talk about this AI first.
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I want to instead put AI in a little bit of a perspective,
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because I think that we're too obsessed with the new,
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and we fail to recognize the significance of AI in the old.
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We think about intelligence,
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and we're distinguishing between artificial and natural intelligence.
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And we, of course, as humans,
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claim pride of kingdom in the world of natural intelligence.
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And then we build artificial intelligence.
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It's intelligence that we make.
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But here's the critical point.
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We have already, for a long time,
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lived with systems of artificial intelligence.
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I don't mean digital AI,
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I mean analog AI.
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Any entity or institution that we build with a purpose
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that acts instrumentally in the world is in this sense an AI.
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It is an instrumentally rational entity that's mapping how it should behave,
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given the way the world evolves and responds to it.
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So think about democracy as an AI.
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It has institutions, elections, parliaments, constitutions
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for the purpose of some collective ends.
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Our Constitution says it's for the common good.
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So the democracy in our Constitution is an analog artificial intelligence
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devoted to the common good.
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Or think about corporations as an AI.
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They have institutions, boards, management, finance,
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for the purpose of making money, or at least conceived of narrowly,
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today, that’s the way it is.
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There corporation is an analog intelligence devoted to maximizing
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shareholder value.
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These are AIs.
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They have purposes and objectives sometimes complementing each other.
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So the purpose of a school bus company
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complements the purpose of a school board
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to produce school bus transportation in a district.
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That's just beautiful.
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But sometimes they're competing.
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The purpose of a government and having a clean environment
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conflicts with the purpose of a coal company
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designing to produce electricity
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by spewing carbon and soot into the environment.
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And when they conflict, we tell ourselves this happy story.
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We tell ourselves the story that democracy is going to stand up
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and discipline that evil corporation.
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To get the corporation to do the right thing,
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to do the thing that's in the interest of all of us.
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That's our happy story.
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It's also a fantasy.
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Because at least in my country,
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corporations are more effective AIs than democracy.
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Think about it a little bit like this.
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If we think about instrumental rationality along one axis of this graph
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and time across the other,
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humans, of course, are the first instrumentally rational entity
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we care about, we're better than cows.
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Maybe not as good as ants, but the point is,
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we're pretty good as individuals
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figuring out how to do things strategically.
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And then we built democracy to do that a little bit better,
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to act collectively for all of us.
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And that's a more instrumentally rational entity
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than we, individual humans, can be.
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Then we created corporations.
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And it turns out, they have become, at least in corrupted political regimes —
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which, I’ll just submit, my political regime is —
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better than democracy
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in bringing about their objective ends.
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Now, of course, in this system,
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each of these layers has an aspiration to control the higher layer.
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So humans try to control democracy through elections.
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Democracy tries to control corporations through regulation.
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But the reality of control is, of course, a little bit different.
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In the United States, corporations control democracy
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through the extraordinary amount of money they pour into elections,
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making our representatives dependent not on us, but on them.
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And democracy then controls the humans
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by making representation,
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not actually representation, corrupting representation.
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Now, this structure, this layer of higher order intelligence
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or instrumental rationality might evoke,
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for those of you who think about AI,
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a statement by the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton.
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Hinton warns us,
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"There are a few examples of a more intelligent thing
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being controlled by a less intelligent thing."
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Or we could say,
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a more instrumentally rational thing
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being controlled by a less instrumentally rational thing.
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And that is consistent with this picture of AIs.
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And then we add digital AI into this mix.
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And here too, once again,
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we have corporations attempting to control their digital AI.
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But the reality of that control is not quite perfect.
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Facebook, in September of 2017,
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was revealed to have a term in their ad system
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called "Jew Haters."
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You could buy ads targeting Jew haters.
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Now, nobody in Facebook created that category.
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There was not a human in Facebook who decided
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"We're going to start targeting Jew haters."
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Its AI created that category
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because its AI figured Jew haters would be a profitable category
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for them to begin to sell ads to,
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and the company was, of course, embarrassed
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that it turned out they didn't actually have control
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over the machine that ran their machines that run our lives.
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The real difference in this story, though,
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is the extraordinary potential
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of this instrumentally rational entity
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versus us.
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This massively better instrumentally rational entity
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versus even corporations and certainly democracies,
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because it's going to be more efficient at achieving its objective than we are.
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And here's where we cue the paranoia I began to seed
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because our collective perceptions, our collective misperceptions
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are not accidental.
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They are expected, intended, the product of this AI.
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We could think of it as the AI perception machine.
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We are its targets.
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Now, the first contact we had with this AI,
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as Tristan Harris described it,
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came from social media.
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Tristan Harris, who started the Center for Humane Technology,
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cofounded it, famous in this extraordinary documentary,
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"The Social Dilemma,"
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before he was famous, he was just an engineer at Google.
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And at Google, he was focused on the science of attention
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using AI to engineer attention,
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to overcome resistance,
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to increase human engagement with the platform
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because engagement is the business model.
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Compare this to, think of it as brain hacking.
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We could compare it to what we could call body hacking.
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This is the exploiting of food science.
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Scientists engineer food to exploit our evolution,
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our mix of salt, fat and sugar,
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to overcome the natural resistance
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so you can't stop eating food.
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So that they can sell food or sell, "food" more profitably.
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Brain hacking is the same, but focused on attention.
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It's exploiting evolution.
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The fact that we have an irrational response to random rewards,
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or can't stop consuming bottomless pits of content
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with the aim to increase engagement,
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to sell more ads.
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And it just so happens, too bad for us,
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that we engage more
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the more extreme, the more polarizing,
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the more hate-filled this content is.
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So that is what we're fed by these AIs.
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With the consequence
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that we produce a people more polarized and ignorant and angry
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than at any time in democracy's history in America
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since the Civil War
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and democracy is thereby weakened.
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They give us what we want.
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What we want makes us into this.
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OK, but recognize something really critically important.
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This is not because AI is so strong.
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It's because we are so weak.
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Here's Tristan Harris describing this.
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(Video) "We're all looking out for the moment
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when technology would overwhelm human strengths and intelligence.
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When is it going to cross the singularity,
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replace our jobs,
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be smarter than humans?
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But there's this much earlier moment
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when technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses.
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This point being crossed is at the root of addiction, polarization,
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radicalization, outrage-ification, vanity-ification, the entire thing.
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This is overpowering human nature.
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And this is checkmate on humanity."
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Lawrence Lessig: So Tristan’s point is we’re always focused
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on this corner, when AGI comes,
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when it's super intelligent,
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when it's more intelligent than any of us.
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And that's what we now fear.
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Whether we will get there in three years or 20 years,
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what will happen then?
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But his point is, it's actually this place
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that we must begin to worry,
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because at this place, it can overcome our weaknesses.
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"The Social Dilemma"
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was about the individual weaknesses we have,
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not to be able to turn away from our phones,
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or to convince our children to turn away from their phones.
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But I want you to see that there's also a collective human weakness.
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That this technology drives us to disable our capacity to act collectively
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in ways that any of us would want.
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So we are surrounded individually by these metalheads,
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and we are also surrounded as a people
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by these metalheads
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long before AGI is anywhere on the horizon.
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It overwhelms us.
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AI gets us to do what it seeks,
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which is engagement,
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and we get democracy hacked in return.
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Now, if the first contact that we had gave us that,
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if social media circa 2020 gave us that,
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what's this second contact with AI going to produce?
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When AI is capable, not just in figuring out how to target you
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with the content it knows will elicit the most reaction
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and engagement from you,
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but can create content
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that it knows will react or get you to engage more directly,
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whether true or false,
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whether slanderous or not.
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What does that contact do?
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I so hate the writers of "Game of Thrones"
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because their last season,
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they so completely ruined the whole series.
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(Laughter and applause)
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We can't use memes from "Game of Thrones" anymore.
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But if we could, I would say winter is coming, friends,
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I'm just going to say it anyway.
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Winter is coming, friends.
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And these AIs are the source that we have to worry about.
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So then, what is to be done?
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Well, you know, if there's a flood, what you do is you turn around and run.
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You move.
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You move to higher ground or protected ground.
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You find a way to insulate democracy
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or to shelter democracy from AI's force
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or from AI's harmful force.
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And, you know, the law does this in America with juries.
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We have juries.
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They deliberate,
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but they are protected in the types of information
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that they're allowed to hear or talk about or deliberate upon,
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because we know we need to protect them
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if they're to reach a judgment that is just.
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And democracy reformers, especially across Europe,
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are trying to do this right now.
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Reformers building citizen assemblies,
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across Europe mainly, in Japan as well.
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And the citizen assemblies are these random, representative,
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informed and deliberative bodies
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that take on particular democratic questions
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and address them in a way that could be protected
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from this corruption of the AI.
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So Iceland was able to craft a constitution out of a process like this.
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Ireland was able to approve gay marriage and deregulation of abortion
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through a process like this.
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France has addressed climate change
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and also end-of-life decisions.
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And across Germany there are many of these entities
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that are boiling up to find ways for a different democratic voice,
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to find voice.
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But here's the point.
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These are extraordinarily hopeful and exciting, no doubt.
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But they are not just a good idea.
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They are existential for democracy.
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They are security for democracy.
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They are a way to protect us from this AI hacking
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that steers against a public will.
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This is change not just to make democracy better,
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a tweak to just make it a little bit more democratic.
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It's a change to let democracy survive,
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given what we know technology will become.
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This is a terrifying moment.
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It's an exhilarating moment.
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Long before superintelligence, long before AGI threatens us,
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a different AI threatens us.
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But there is something to do while we still can do something.
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We should know enough now
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to know we can't trust democracy just now.
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We should see that we still have time to build something different.
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We should act with the love that makes anything possible,
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not because we know we will succeed.
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I'm pretty sure we won't.
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But because this is what love means.
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You do whatever you can,
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whatever the odds, for your children,
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for your family, for your country, for humanity
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while there is still time,
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while our robot overlord is still just a sci-fi fantasy.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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