Silicon States

by Lucie Greene

  Fears about the impact of artificial intelligence are interestingly coming from Silicon Valley, too. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have entered a public spat about the impact of artificial intelligence. Musk called it the “biggest risk we face as a civilization.” Speaking at a National Governors Association meeting in July 2017, he said: “Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal. AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.” Meanwhile, Zuckerberg dubbed his comments “irresponsible.” AI has been a key focus of investment at Facebook. But it also famously had to shut down an artificial-intelligence engine in summer 2017 after developers realized that two chatbots had created their own unique language that humans couldn’t understand. Zuckerberg now believes AI will be the silver bullet to eradicate fake news and ghost profiles.

  The response among Silicon Valley venture capitalists to concern about future employment is that work is “boring.” And that driving should not be done by humans—we aren’t safe—just as planes are now, for the most part, flown by machines. They also talk about the notion of universal basic income being a solution. (A basic income is a form of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional set sum of money from the government. They are not required to seek work. And this is separate to any income they might generate. This has already been tested in Finland.) In some more fantastical situations, they have charged Hollywood with imagining a nicer-looking, less-scary future, with no work, so it looks more inspiring. If everyone gets on board with the idea, presumably, the apocalyptic baying mob constructing military bunkers for when society collapses will not form.

  “There are so many other values and psychological benefits that come from having a job. [For] someone that’s not in economics, that’s like, ‘Duh.’ It’s obvious. We should have realized this fifty years ago, but I think economists have never really thought about the sort of more societal effects of unemployment or displacement,” says Berger.

  Amid reports of jobless miners, truck drivers, and retail workers, many pundits, including Trump, have talked about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and prioritizing U.S. citizens (over immigrants) for jobs in successful companies based here, not least at Big Tech companies who rely on H-1B visas to employ high-skilled workers from India and China. But it’s not that simple, says Stewart, who recently published a paper called “Who Benefits from Apple?”

  “Apple has kept high-value functions from product design to marketing and software development in the U.S. Despite the fact that its products and components are manufactured offshore, Apple pays more wages in America than it does overseas,” writes Stewart. “The labor for assembling Apple products comes mainly from China. Yet the assembly takes place in factories owned by a Taiwanese firm, Foxconn. China benefits in terms of wages but not profits. China’s share of the iPhone’s price, at 2 percent, is less than one-fifth the share of Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese companies.

  “The main beneficiaries of Apple’s success are Apple itself and its predominantly American shareholders and employees. Apple demonstrates that the real value in electronics lies in design, development, and marketing, not in assembly,” he continues. “In the wake of the global financial crisis, manufacturing is once again in vogue with policymakers. They would do well to heed the conclusions of the PCIC report on Apple: ‘The best . . . companies will continue to create tremendous value and high-wage jobs by mobilizing the best resources, wherever in the world they may be.’”

  Even coding itself looks set to be automated, becoming the equivalent of sewing in a textile factory. Governments will have to come up with some kind of solution, training, or new industry, quick, to create new work.

  The pace of innovation—the emergence of everything from our phone to our home being a portal to the internet, and the continuing crossover between digital behemoths and governments—means that the future poses a plethora of issues in many directions, not least privacy. It’s one that Sherif Elsayed-Ali, head of technology and human rights at Amnesty International, has had to come to grips with quickly, especially in the wake of extensive government surveillance of citizens across the world. The challenge with Silicon Valley companies is that they are developing technology that’s essentially taking governments and policymakers by surprise, he says: “That means you can drive whatever agenda you have in the absence of public understanding, in the absence of regulation, in the absence of frameworks. There is this vacuum, and the companies are taking over some of this vacuum just by the fact that there’s no one else there.”

  Part of the problem, Elsayed-Ali agrees, is government’s cyclical nature, which distracts from long-term thinking: “If you’re in the democratic system, you’re always looking at the next four or five years. That’s your planning timeframe, because you’re looking at the next election. There are things that could not be anticipated, things like Uber coming up and disrupting the taxi market, or Airbnb, all of these examples. But there are other things that you could potentially anticipate.” He cites a study by the chief economist of the Bank of England on jobs being disrupted by automation. “It doesn’t seem to me that it’s being followed up by anything concrete in the government. We know there are ongoing trends, but going from there to actually affecting policy and affecting practice, that’s not happening.”

  In the expanded digital landscape, Amnesty International’s focus is largely on privacy and censorship. “We very quickly started looking at the human rights impact [of technological change]. It is difficult to protect privacy because of the way business models have developed over time. Everything that’s coming up, from better artificial intelligence to automation to genetic engineering, even things like disruptions in the energy market, may have a big effect on geopolitics. We need to be ahead of the game, we need to be much better at understanding the possible risks.” On the horizon, among other issues, says Elsayed-Ali, are online violence against women and predictive policing. “The debates on the ethics of artificial intelligence that are happening now are integrated with human rights principles.”

  AI is a big one, says Elsayed-Ali, especially in this new public/private era. “One of the issues with AI which can be quite worrying, especially if it is used in policing, as has already started happening in the UK and the U.S. at least [in the form of image recognition algorithms used to search bodycam footage], is the opaqueness of the processes by which decisions are taken, the lack of scrutiny, the lack of transparency. At the same time, it’s the issue of who has the responsibility to make sure that something is operating via principles that respect human rights.” In the policing example, does responsibility lie with the police force, the AI operator, or the company providing the software?

  It’s a dangerous path, says Elsayed-Ali. “It’s not going to be long before you start having autonomous weapons used by private security companies. But generally with AI, whether it’s deciding on whether you’re getting a loan or who is going to get bombed, the thread that runs through is who has responsibility for the decisions that are taken, and the transparency of those decisions.”

  Silicon Valley companies have varying approaches to data privacy, with Apple being pro-privacy and others such as Yahoo willing to share with governments. According to Elsayed-Ali, not sharing with the American government is in part a protective policy, setting a precedent not to share with international governments: “It means you don’t have to give data to Russia, or China, or wherever else you’re operating.” How are Silicon Valley platforms already affecting governance? “In sub-Saharan Africa, governments are copying each other. Whenever you have an election, social media gets shut down, it gets blocked.”

  Unfortunately, consumer apathy is a universal issue in not driving discourse and further scrutiny, both among themselves and in prompting it by the
ir governments. “People know that data is being used in different ways, for marketing purposes, for selling ads, being spied on by governments, but they don’t know necessarily what to do about it or they feel powerless. There’s a fundamentally problematic issue there. We have no real control over our data whatsoever.” Yes, we all sometimes consent to conditions, but, as Elsayed-Ali points out, few people attempt to read them and they aren’t very comprehensible to anyone who is not a legal expert.

  Dominic Campbell, founder of FutureGov, a UK- and Australia-based consultancy aimed at helping governments navigate the digital age, agrees there is little public understanding of data or technology issues as they relate to privacy, which has potentially worrying implications as Silicon Valley expands into health care, finance, and every segment in between.

  The problem is also that governments are more often reactive than proactive, says Campbell. Changes tend to come out of “failure, rather than, ‘How do we think about technology on the policy basis?’ or ‘What does that mean for us as an organization in government? What levels of control do we have? What do we have no control over? How do we influence?’ There are very few decent technologists helping governments in any country that can enable that kind of conversation,” he says.

  “I see things that worry me both inside government and outside government. People in power are often totally unaware of technology and have no literacy around it at all, and things are getting passed under the radar. There’s an awful lot of surveillance data and sharing data sets.” Already, continues Campbell, the sharing of personal financial data and personal data with governments poses conflicts, and these are not isolated to the UK.

  But to hand it all over to private corporations is not the answer. For all that government systems are slow, the accelerated pace of innovation also causes problems. “Every time I defend government, I find myself in meetings with people that make me want to jump out the window,” says Campbell. “Politicians and senior leaders in government have no clue about technology. But at the same time, there is a reason why that is the way it is. You can read it in different ways, and I tend to read it positively. There are meant to be checks and balances. There is something about the way government culture works, the way that it governs, that plays a stabilizing role in our society.

  “Our motto is ‘you’ve got to disrupt yourself,’” Campbell explains. “You’ve got to make your services attractive so that you’re competitive in the modern world. This safeguards a good side of government, which is democratic diplomacy, contestability, the ability to actually challenge and hold to account the services you receive.” By self-disruption, he means total disruption rather than incremental change. He means employing the tactics of Silicon Valley to reimagine sectors and industry. Break it, pretend you are a competitor, scenario-plan for the future, but be quick. Government, he says, cannot assume immunity to external disruption just because it is government—not any longer at least. But by working with governments, Campbell is witnessing firsthand the privatization of more digital aspects of governance. Large segments, and data pools, are being shared with and run by private entities.

  Debra Cleaver has a similar take. Governments and democracy need to adapt with the times to remain accessible and relevant for people to engage with them. They need to understand and use technology. And they need to market themselves to new generations who have become disengaged. “We used to teach this in high school, the importance of civics, and now we don’t . . . You need to be taught why government matters,” she says. “Everyone knows why money matters. With Elon Musk, it’s never ‘Oh, he’s so smart.’ It’s ‘He’s so rich.’ In the U.S. we definitely equate being rich with being smart. If you have money, your opinions matter more. Elon Musk actually is very intelligent, but there’s plenty of people we’re paying attention to that we shouldn’t.”

  One of Cleaver’s missions at Vote.org is to market democracy. “It’s so funny. To me it’s common sense, but no one’s out there marketing voting. They’re all marketing an individual candidate. When you try to use candidates to increase turnout, you’re counting on candidate charisma. That’s not going to work. Especially for local elections.” So Vote.org’s campaigns are focused purely on the act of voting itself, not policies or individuals. “We’re marketing voting like a product. How does Apple get you to buy a phone? They don’t go door to door to get you to buy the phone. They run these massive marketing campaigns. That’s the sort of stuff we were using last year. The way that technology was involved was we use one startup to buy billboards, we use another startup to send mail. We used technology to scale cheaply.”

  Cleaver pours scorn on the trope that young people don’t vote. The systems are outmoded, she thinks. “Young voters aren’t apathetic . . . It’s just so hard for them to actually cast ballots because everything about our voting system was set up decades ago. It’s this really antiquated paper-based system. Take something like voter registration. If you don’t have a driver’s license, you need to register on paper. You need to print and mail a form. But we don’t have as many post offices as we used to have. We don’t even have the boxes on the street. And no one knows where to buy stamps. And no one owns a printer. Legitimately home printer ownership is down to something like 4 percent. It’s not that young people don’t want to register, it just doesn’t fit life anymore.”

  She adds: “I have no doubt that if voting was more convenient, more people would vote.”

  Cleaver believes millennials will transform the political landscape in the next decade. “We’re already at the point that if millennials voted at the same rate as baby boomers, they would have more votes. I think things are going to get really interesting because these negative policies are going to affect the millennials for decades. The boomers are going to die. They made some bad decisions years past and they screwed us all over and the younger people are going to start taking action. It’s interesting though, about millennials. They have access to this information and yet I think it takes them a little longer [to get engaged]. It takes them till after college when they start paying off student loans or when they have to think about health insurance to become politically aware. But I think they are a lot more progressive than older voters and they’re really not tolerant. A young voter is like, ‘Of course climate change is real. What is the government doing about climate change?’”

  For now, government, conceptually, stands at a crossroads.

  Digital Revolutionaries

  A garage-rock band opens the scene in the music video, as three teenage girls get ready to leave their house, clad in vintage T-shirts emblazoned in feminist slogans, tattoos, and messy hair, in bedrooms surrounded by books, records, and magazines. Over the thumping music, spoken-word poetry begins—read so dramatically all that’s missing is clicking fingers and a coffee house (the dynamic drums take their place).

  Today, the movement of my body is simply one body in a movement. A movement where pink blush kisses skyline.

  Charcoal pencil sculpts future. And notebooks breathe, themselves living organisms . . .

  So reads the poem, a call to arms of creativity for personal politics.

  These aren’t your normal teens.

  The poem, entitled “Do Your Part”—or, in teen speak, #DoYourPart—is a promotional video for creative platform School of Platform, itself exemplary of the attitudinal uniqueness of Generation Z, a digital hub with multiple contributors, covering subjects including politics, feminism, craft and entrepreneurialism, and the environment.

  Born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, Generation Z members are the first true digital natives. They grew up with social media fully in place and have used cellphones and digital platforms from a young age. On this front, they’re beyond millennial. But to pass them off as millennials is to do them a discredit. They are the most politically engaged and conscientious generation to emerge in decades, already taking an active role in demonstrations, elections (where they can), and activism. The
most potent example in 2018 is the protest and outspoken criticism of the government led by teens in the wake of the Florida school shooting that saw seventeen young students killed. Unafraid and enraged, students took to social media to criticize the negligent government for not protecting them and for the close connection between Washington, DC and NRA donations. A protest March for Our Lives was promptly organized mostly by young people, and backed by George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, and other celebrities. The uproar saw the rise of a budding political figure in Emma Gonzalez, whose impassioned speech at a rally the weekend after the shooting hit the headlines for its eloquence and its pointedness, calling “B.S.” to all the previous excuses for not enforcing greater gun control.

  Digital platforms for these digital natives are key to making change as well as building businesses, charities, and of course their personal brands. They count themselves to be feminists, creators, and entrepreneurs. They are progressive. Having grown up when it was normal to have a black president and when gay marriage was taken for granted, they accept these as cultural norms that we cannot climb back from. They care deeply about the environment (to them, climate change is also a given, not a myth). They are also, as evidenced by the poetry, perhaps the most precocious teens to date.

  Within the next two election cycles, they will nearly all become first-time voters.

  This, along with millennials reaching professional maturity (and age of candidacy), means there’s some hope governments will get a shake-up, rescuing them from irrelevance. It also means there’s hope for the intersection of humility, diversity, social conscience, and digital platforms and technology. Futuristic tech with a soul.