Is AI Better Regulated After the White House Meeting?

 

The easy answer is, it's too soon to tell.  But for a number of reasons, the July 21 meeting between President Biden and leaders of seven Big Tech firms, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, may prove to be more show than substance.

 

Admittedly, there is widespread agreement that some sort of regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) should be considered.  Even industry leaders such as Elon Musk have been warning that things are moving too fast, and there are small but real risks of huge catastrophes lurking out there that could be averted by agreed-upon restrictions or regulations of the burgeoning AI industry.

 

Last Friday's White House meeting of representatives from seven leading AI firms—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, and OpenAI—produced a "fact sheet" that listed eight bullet-point commitments made by the participants.  The actual meeting was not open to the public, but one presumes the White House would not publish such things without at least the passive approval of the participants. 

 

Browsing through the items, I don't see many things that a prudent giant AI corporation wouldn't be doing already.  For example, take "The companies commit to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before their release."  Not to do any security testing would be foolish.  External testing, meaning testing by third-party security firms, is probably pretty common in the industry already, although not universal. 

 

The same thing goes for the commitment to "facilitating third-party discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities in their AI systems."  No tech firm worth its salt is going to ignore an outsider's legitimate report of finding a weak spot in their products, and so this is again something that the firms are probably doing already. 

 

The most technical commitment, but again one that the companies are probably doing already, is to "protect proprietary and unreleased model weights."  Unversed as I am at AI technicalities, I'm not sure exactly what this means, but the model weights appear to be something like the keys to how a given AI system runs once it's been trained, and so it only stands to reason that the companies would protect assets that cost them a lot of computing time to obtain, even before the White House told them to do that.

 

Four bullet points address "Earning the Public's Trust," which, incidentally, implies that the firms have a considerable way to go to earn it.  But we'll let that pass. 

 

The firms commit to developing some way of watermarking or otherwise indicating when "content is AI generated."  That's all very well, but the answer to such a question is rarely just yes or no.  What if some private citizen takes a watermarked AI product and incorporates it manually into something else that is no longer watermarked?  The intention is good, but the path to execution is foggy, to say the least.

 

Perhaps the commitment with the most bite is this one:  "The companies commit to publicly reporting their AI systems’ capabilities, limitations, and areas of appropriate and inappropriate use."  The wording is broad enough to drive a truck through, although again, the intention is good.  How often, how detailed, and how extensive such reports may be is left up to the company.

 

The last two public-trust items commit the firms to "prioritizing" research into the societal risks of AI, and to use AI to address "society's greatest challenges."  If I decide not to wash my car today, I have prioritized washing my car—negatively, it is true, but hey, I said I'd prioritize it!

 

So what is different about the way these firms will carry out their AI activities after the White House meeting?  A lot of good intentions were aired, and if the firms happened to enjoy a lot of public trust in the first place, these good intentions might have found an audience who believes that they will be carried out.

 

But the atmosphere of cynicism which has gradually encroached on almost all areas of public life make such an eventuality unlikely, to say the least.  And this cynicism has arisen due in no small part to the previous doings of the aforementioned Big Tech firms—specifically, their activities in social media.

 

When you compare the health of what you might call the body politic of the United States today with what it was say, fifty years ago, the comparison is breathtaking.  In 1973, 42% of those U. S. residents surveyed said they had either a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress.  Only 16% said they had "very little" confidence.  In 2023, the number of people with either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence is only 8%, and fully 48% say they have "very little" confidence in Congress.  While this trend has been happening for years, much of it has occurred only since 2018, after the social-media phenomenon overtook legacy media as the main conduit of political information exchange—if one can call it that.

 

Never mind what AI may do in the future.  We are standing in the wreckage of something it has done already:  it has caused great and perhaps permanent damage to the primary means by which a nation has of governing itself.  Not AI alone, to be sure, but AI has played an essential role in the way companies have profited from encouraging the worst in people. 

 

It would be nice if last Friday's White House meeting triggered a revolution in the way Big Tech uses AI and its other boxes of tricks to encourage genuine human flourishing without the horrific side effects in both personal lives and in public institutions that we have seen already.  But getting some CEOs in a private room with the President and issuing a nice-sounding press release afterwards isn't likely to do that.  It's a step in the right direction, but a step so tiny that it's almost not worth talking about. 

 

Historically, needed technical regulations have come about only when vivid, graphic, and (usually) sudden harm has been caused.  The kinds of damage AI can do are rarely that striking, so we may have to wait quite a while before meaningful AI regulations are even considered.  But in my view, it was already high time years ago.

 

Sources:  The White House press release on the July 21 meeting of AI firms with President Biden can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/07/21/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-secures-voluntary-commitments-from-leading-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-manage-the-risks-posed-by-ai/.  I also referred to a PBS report on the meeting at

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-biden-announces-ai-safeguards-after-meeting-with-tech-leaders.  The Gallup poll historical data on confidence in Congress can be found at

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.

High-Tech Surveillance and Control: Citizens or Sheep?

 

In recent testimony before the U. S. Senate's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, philosopher and author Matthew B. Crawford reminded his audience that the Revolutionary War was fought for principles that are now once again in jeopardy.  In a summary of his remarks posted on the website of the technology and society journal The New Atlantis, Crawford pointed out that the coming era of smart-home technology comes with a price that people may not fully understand.  He used the example of the Sleep Number bed product, which includes a phone app that must be installed to gain the full benefits of the bed.  To use the app, the user must agree to a sixteen-page "privacy policy" which is in reality anything but. 

 

The policy, which a vanishingly small number of users probably read in its entirety, talks about all the things that you allow the Sleep Number people to do with information about what is probably the most intimate and private sector of your life—the time you spend in bed, alone or with someone else.  Although this part of the policy has been deleted, one section used to state that the app was also allowed to transmit "audio in your room."  And the tracking can go on even after you cancel your Sleep Number account.

 

Crawford pointed out that this is only one prominent example of the multifarious ways that big tech is invading all aspects of our lives to mine data that is then used to "determine the world that is presented to us" and to "determine our standing in the reputational economy" with regard to credit ratings, for example.  One need only look to China to see how a malevolent government can employ high-tech means to rank its citizens by standards that it alone determines.  But the difference between what the Chinese Communist Party does and what Experian or Sleep Number does is only a matter of degree, not of kind.

 

The ability to take private information from us and to use it in ways that ultimately benefit corporations rather than individuals, without the individuals involved having any effective say over the process, is a good definition of tyranny.  Substitute "the state" for "corporations" and you have a good description of the way life was in the old Soviet Union.  And at least the USSR was honest enough to admit that the state took priority over the individual. 

 

But in the picture painted by our supposedly free-market big-tech firms, it's all positives and no negatives:  everything is "free" and all they're trying to do is give you a personalized world that will make you happier—or at least more profitable to them.

 

Politics is simply the conduct of public affairs, as a seventh-grade civics teacher once told me.  Facebook, Google, Apple, and their ilk are private only in the sense that they are not recognized as sovereign states (yet).  But if you measure the degree to which an organization is public by number of people affected, money that flows through it, or its power to influence lives, Google is a lot more of a public entity than the United States or even the United Nations. 

 

As Crawford reminded the senators, the Revolutionary War of 1776 was fought, among other things, over the way the government of Britain allowed corporations to control trade with the colonies.  Simply to go about one's ordinary life, one was forced to deal with certain British companies and had no choice in the matter, even if the prices or quality of service or goods was way out of line with reasonable expectations.

 

Surely there is a parallel between that situation and the fact that getting up in the morning, driving to work, and doing one's job, to say nothing of communicating with one's family and friends, is virtually impossible these days without submitting oneself to the powers of big-tech firms that are doing opaque things to one's data and one's online world.

 

Crawford drew an apt parallel between the way big-tech firms operate and the governmental trend of power flowing away from Congress—the only branch of government designed to represent the people in a direct way—and the administrative state of experts who are not beholden to anyone but their own kind.  Both are signs that whatever control the populace used to exert over either government or private business is waning, while power is concentrating in the hands of an elite group of overlords and their technological minions. 

 

He left the senators with a probing question:  "Who rules?"  Is it the people?  Congress?  The executive branch?  Or is it a group of mostly faceless high-tech employees and their billionaire controllers who, while sometimes intending to do the right thing, will not let anything get in the way of continuing to make money in the most successful way possible.  And one can't really blame them for that.  But one can take steps to safeguard what used to be the most cherished aspect of living in the United States:  freedom from tyranny. 

 

Crawford made no suggestions as to how this might be accomplished.  In the space I have remaining, I will throw something out that I'm sure is full of holes, but might get the ball rolling.

 

It used to be the case that banks could not operate outside of the state in which they were chartered.  In 1927, the federal McFadden Act restricted banks from opening branches across state lines.  That law did nothing to stop the Great Depression, but it did preserve the regional nature of the banking industry until the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 rescinded most of those restrictions. 

 

One thing we could try would be to pass a kind of McFadden Act for online companies.  As legal corporations, they could not operate as a single entity, but only as state-chartered organizations.  You wouldn't have one Google:  you'd have fifty Googles, each with a physical presence in each state. Obviously, for Google to be Google, you'd have to allow them to exchange data somehow, but not money.  If something like this were proposed, I'm sure Google's corporate heads would scream bloody murder and say it would destroy the company, but that's just what we heard when the Bell System breakup came along.  And look what happened:  not only did phone service not vanish, it got a great deal better.  And something similar might happen with Google.  We'll never know until we try.

 

Sources:  Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, is the author of "Defying the Data Priests" posted at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/defying-the-data-priests.  I also referred to an article on interstate banking at https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/riegle-neal-act-of-1994.

Getting Used to Liquid Modernity

 

I do not own a conventional smart phone.  Instead, I intentionally use a style of flip phone whose rugged case and physical numeric keypad buttons won't be injured by a drop of three or four feet to a concrete surface.  It can receive some texts on its small screen, and I can even send texts after a fashion with the twelve numeric keys, tapping them rapidly one to four times to select the correct letter or punctuation mark.  It won't do capitals, but you can read texts from me without capitals and still get the message.  It took me a while to get used to that method of texting, but in the five or six years I've had a phone like this, I've gotten to where I can do it as fast as I need to. 

 

Until a couple of weeks ago, that is.  One day I went to send a text and the keypad didn't respond as usual.  If I wanted to start a sentence with "C," for example, I tapped the "2-ABC" key four times.  It used to be that I'd get a C that way.  But no longer.  Now, if I tap the "C" key four times, I don't get "C"—I get "BBC." 

 

Much as I admire the British Broadcasting Corporation, it was not my intention to discuss it when all I wanted was a C.  Further investigation revealed that some little menu showed up every time I touched a key longer than really short, and the thing expected me to navigate the menu to the letter I wanted, using a separate up-and-down button that I never had to fool with before when I was texting.  It's two weeks later and I still haven't figured out how this new system is supposed to work.  I've been too busy to call my phone provider and chew them out about this, because I don't send texts that much and the ones I do send are things like, "OK" and "LVG NOW" ("leaving now," not "living now," although that's not a bad interpretation either), and I've been able after much struggle to send those messages after taking out extraneous spaces and idiotic guesses of the software as to what I was really trying to say.

 

I shouldn't complain, though, because this is a tiny example of what the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called "liquid modernity."  Living in liquid modernity requires that you take an approach to life that is more like a tourist on a vacation than a conventional citizen of an organized, institutionalized society. 

 

The only constant of liquid modernity is change, chiefly of the self, but also of the self's surroundings.  Jobs, relationships, commitments, political or sexual orientation—all are subject to the whims of the sovereign self.  And firms that fail to adapt to liquid modernity will of course be left in the dustbin of history.  The onslaught of liquid modernity has accelerated in recent decades, and the contrast can be seen by another thing that happened to a piece of personal electronics of mine recently.

 

Somewhere around 1984, I bought a Hewlett-Packard HP15C pocket calculator.  It was a state-of-the-art machine when I got it, capable of all the standard scientific math operations plus programming and even numerical integration.  To use it, you had to learn something called "reverse Polish notation" involving stacking numbers in an imaginary stack, but I was younger and eager then and didn't have much problem learning it.  The beauty of it was that it avoided having to use parentheses in complicated math expressions, which was good because the small one-line display wouldn't have accommodated parentheses very well anyway. 

 

That calculator served me well for over thirty years until a couple of weeks ago, when it fell from a height of two feet underneath a book that also fell on it, and the glass display screen cracked.  I was able to find a used one on eBay, so I can still calculate with reverse Polish, but the point here is that a product that didn't change fulfilled its purpose in my life—hardly a week passed when I didn't use it for something—for over thirty years.  I kept doing the same sort of thing, and it kept right up with me.

 

You might call that "solid life"—an approximation to the eternity of bliss promised to the faithful by the religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

 

In marked contrast to that is liquid life, in which a cell phone you buy isn't really yours in the full sense.  In order for it to remain useful, the phone company continually messes with it and reserves the right to change important fundamental aspects of its operation. 

 

What happened to my phone was minor compared to some of the things that New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert describes in a recent piece about the fluid nature of ownership in a high-tech world.  Her emphasis is on the way that legal concepts of ownership have lagged far behind what firms like Apple and Google actually do, shielded by incomprehensible legal boilerplate that it is practically impossible to opt out of.  Besides providing all sorts of details about our private lives that we don't even know our phones and other electronics are sending to their makers, the software we try to use is subject to change at any time, and usually does.  If you don't like it, well, your liquid self can just flow over to the next opportunity and change phones, or service companies, or even start using carrier pigeons if it strikes your fancy. (But you'll have to get everybody you know to switch to carrier pigeons too. Good luck with that.)

 

The freedom that high-tech life presents is largely illusory, because it has to remain within the bounds of what the dominant high-tech firms allow us to do.  I could pitch my flip phone and buy a smart phone, but I suspect that would just be leaving the frying pan for the fire.  So as long as I don't move by myself to a cabin in the woods, I suppose I'll just have to deal with whatever arcane system for sending texts that the phone company imposes on me.  But I wonder what this sort of thing multiplied by millions does to our collective psyches.

 

Sources:  Elizabeth Kolbert's "What's Mine is Mine" appeared in the Mar. 15, 2021 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 78-80.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Zygmunt Bauman and Late Modernity. 

 

Can Democracy in America Survive Big Tech?

 

Two articles I came across recently raise the question in the headline of today's column.  One is by a journalist named Allum Bokhari, who gave a speech last November at Hillsdale College, one of the very small number of U. S. colleges that does not accept Federal grants, loans, or other funding.  The other is by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitics specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  Both gentlemen are deeply concerned that social media, as it now works, constitute an existential threat to American small-d democratic government.

 

Kaplan is concerned that social media may create conditions in which the "fragile, perhaps even ephemeral" experiment called American democracy cannot survive.  His studies of nation-states range widely over time and geography.  The old USSR, he points out, was not defeated from without by nuclear or conventional warfare.  Rather, it was destroyed by internal weaknesses and a crisis of purpose that led to its disintegration.  Regarding the present rivalry between the U. S. and China, he sees social media playing radically different roles in the two countries.

 

In China, the authoritarian government ensures that everything on social media reinforces the "blood-and-soil nationalism" of the dominant Han cultural matrix.  Traces of dissent are ruthlessly stamped out, and ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs are suppressed and even locked up in concentration camps.  There is basically one political story available in China, and social media reinforce it.

 

In the U. S., on the other hand, Big Tech effectively control social media, and recent events emphasize the subtle but increasingly effective control they exert.  The dominant vision embraced by those who inhabit the upper reaches of corporate and cultural America is a transnational one which, when it looks at American history at all, sees a story of exploitation and shame, exemplified by the New York Times's "1619 Project" that attempted to show that the founders based America on slavery, not on anything noble.  Even worse, the economics of social media have come to embrace the divide-and-conquer principle that feeding different kinds of people what they most want to hear means cutting up the citizenry into "racial, gender, political, or sexual" identity groups that are often pitted against each other, to the great loss of the basic unity that any nation needs to survive.

 

Allum Bokhari brings his experience with Breitbart News to the table.  While I am no fan of Breitbart News, the old principle of free speech (much abused lately) says that every voice deserves to be heard, if not believed.  And he brings some indisputable facts to the table that are worth considering.

 

Unlike the early days of the Internet when no single social-media platform was dominant and everybody had more or less equal access to everybody else's website, today's Internet is a creature of the Google-Facebook-Amazon complex of corporate control.  And control is the right word.  The velvet glove of free apps and fun-looking websites conceals an iron hand of manipulation that is so subtle and complex, powered by advanced AI software, that the vast majority of users have little or no idea that they are being manipulated.  But they are.  

 

Cadres of software engineers spend countless hours devising complex algorithms to change behavior, not only to the benefit of advertisers on Big Tech's media, but for other reasons as well.  One quote that Bokhari reports from a source he interviewed at Facebook says it all:  “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.”  If this isn't manipulation, I don't know what is.

 

In recent months, the manipulation and control has come above ground for everyone to see.  Bokhari cites the actions of Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech firms in de-platforming President Trump, and of Amazon and Apple in kicking the upstart social-media platform Parler off their equipment (or in the case of Apple, off the privately owned phones of millions of users).  One can argue about the motivations for such actions.  But the bare fact of the actions remain:  privately owned companies, largely unhindered and in fact protected by government regulation from lawsuits that private individuals can be subject to (that is what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does), unilaterally censored an entire social-media network regardless of who or what was on it, and also censored the sitting President of the United States. 

 

For those who can remember the old days of only three television networks, the only analogous action I can imagine would be if the President decided to make a speech one day, and in the middle of his words spoken to the "pool" camera that all three networks were taking their video feed from, executives decided to pull the switch and return to their regular programming of the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever.  Nothing like that ever happened, but if it had, the roars of outrage from common citizens of every political viewpoint would have been deafening. 

 

Today, roars—or anything else—can't be heard unless Big Tech approves of the roar.  The dominant progressive political views of the transnational cultural elite who are in charge are squeezing out the wide spectrum of views that, no matter how annoying some of the extremes are, turn out to be vital to the survival of democracy.  To those who deplore disagreement and debate, I would say this:  disagreement and debate are features of democracy, not bugs.  Cut them off and you are left with a softer form of what China has:  a homogenized, uniform, expert-driven technocracy that maintains the form of democracy, perhaps, but denies its power.  If this nation, which has endured for 245 years, is to preserve government "of the people, by the people, for the people," the malignant effects of social media and corporate control must be dealt with.  And soon, before it is too late.

 

Sources:  Allum Bokhari's post, based on a modified version of his Nov. 8, 2020 speech at Hillsdale College, is available at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/control-need-rein-big-tech/.  Robert D. Kaplan's article "How We Lose Against China" appeared in the Feb. 8, 2021 issue of National Review on pp. 27-29.