I think a lot of what we’re seeing, frankly, follows a pattern that Shoshana Zuboff, the
Harvard professor who wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — she talks about how before
the September 11th attacks, there had been an aggressive move to protect consumer privacy
against increased surveillance by tech companies, and that immediately after those attacks,
there was, rather, a very aggressive push by government to collaborate with tech companies
to get at the access — to get access to the same data that they were worried about
the tech companies mining before the attacks.
And so, now we’re in a moment where there was a huge amount of concern about what Zuboff
calls surveillance capitalism, and now many people who had been raising those alarms are
going, “Well, maybe it’s OK if we let our governments collaborate with tech companies
to store this very, very sensitive data about us.”
Now, I want to be clear.
I think there is absolutely a role, an important role, for technology in figuring out how we
are going to live under these extraordinary circumstances.
But the question is whether tech companies and government get the kind of carte blanche
that they got in 2001 to massively invade our privacy.
What is going to — where is this data going to be stored?
Who is going to have access to it?
Australia has rolled out one of these apps very quickly, and it turns out that Amazon
is controlling the data.
So, you know, that clip, I think, is a very worrying one.
The other thing that I think we need to be really acutely aware of is, a lot of the narratives
that we’ve heard early on about countries that successfully controlled the virus, or
at least much more successfully than the United States, a lot of it was attributed to these
kinds of apps, to this kind of surveillance.
And that narrative is a very convenient one for these tech companies.
And in many cases, it erases the role of a functioning public healthcare system, of the
fact that it was not merely an app that was placed voluntarily on people’s phones, but,
much more importantly, a well-staffed public health system that allowed human tracing and
tracking of the virus, which means a human being.
Not an alert on your phone, but a human being calls you — best of all, a human being in
your community, somebody who you might trust, who speaks your language — and says, “OK,
you may have come in contact with this virus.
What would you need to be able to self-quarantine?
Can we get you a hotel room?
Can we help you to make sure that your kids are cared for?”
This is the kind of human work and job creation that it actually takes.
And what we’re being sold now, whether with the idea that everything is going to be solved
with more surveillance and an app or remote learning and telehealth, is really taking
the humans out of the equation.
It is humans who are setting up these systems.
It is humans, like whether it is the teachers in their homes or the parents in their homes,
who are helping students learn right now.
It isn’t just Google Classroom that is doing it.
But humans are being erased from this story.
And we aren’t hearing the kinds of human solutions that, with proper control over good
technology, we could actually come up with some viable models here.
And, Naomi, I wanted to ask you — in your article in The Intercept, you talk about this
new form of yellow peril that Eric Schmidt is peddling, that now it’s China that is
the threat when it comes to artificial intelligence.
The United States is falling behind.
It dovetails with Trump’s blaming China for the trade gap of the United States.
What about this issue of artificial intelligence
and whether we are in a new space race with China over it?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, in my article, I quote some documents that were FOIA’d by EPIC, which is Electronic
Privacy Information Center.
They got a trove of documents out of the National Security Commission on AI, NSCAI, which is
the commission that — one of the two commissions that Schmidt chairs.
And it advises Congress on ways that it can increase its uses of technology, particularly
AI, but not exclusively AI.
And it’s all framed in this yellow peril language of China is on the verge of beating
Silicon Valley in the technology race that began in Silicon Valley.
So, basically, the narrative is, you know, American innovation is responsible for these
technologies — of course, Silicon Valley takes much of the credit, but, as we know,
a lot of it comes from public research, and a lot of it comes from military research — but
because China does not have the same privacy concerns — indeed, you have a government
that is erecting a high-tech surveillance state — and because China has leapfrogged
over a lot of what this report calls sort of legacy structures — so, they go directly
to cashless, digital payments; they are going directly to telehealth because there’s a
big shortage of doctors.
Naomi, we have 20 seconds.
Yeah.
So, basically, the idea is China is leaping ahead of the United States, and the only way
to fight back is to have a China-style surveillance state here in the United States.
And that’s the message that Schmidt has been peddling for a long time now.