Podcast: Big Brother is Watching You (And You. And You. And You, Too.) with Amy Webb

Transcript

Listen: We're digging into the politics of data, artificial intelligence, automation, and how all three could make American tech companies look a lot like their Chinese counterparts. Ian speaks with Then Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, talks about how tech titans and their machines could warp humanity.

TRANSCRIPT: Big Brother is Watching You (And You. And You. And You, Too.) with Amy Webb

Amy Webb:

At the moment, we're shedding just reams of data that are increasingly being consolidated under the umbrellas of Google, Amazon, and Apple. I think that what we're probably looking at is a consolidated, unified record.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television, where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of small puppets. This week, I sit down with Amy Webb. She's a leading futurist and professor at NYU, who has written extensively about artificial intelligence and how companies are turning the human machine relationship on its head. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

This is Amy Webb and she is professor at NYU, and the founder of The Future Today Institute, and the author of a great new book called, The Big Nine. The Big Nine, I don't usually start with books, but in this case, the book is really interesting and it's actually what I want to talk about because it's related to AI and technology and the Americans and the Chinese, since those are the-

Amy Webb:

It's right up your alley.

Ian Bremmer:

... only players that really matter.

Amy Webb:

Yep.

Ian Bremmer:

Right?

Amy Webb:

Yep.

Ian Bremmer:

The Big Nine are the big nine companies.

Amy Webb:

Mm-hmm.

Ian Bremmer:

Six American, three Chinese, no other companies. Did you even think, maybe I'll throw in a Samsung, I'll throw in something European?

Amy Webb:

Yeah, so here's the thing. It doesn't mean that there aren't other players in the space. The three Chinese companies are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, the BAT, and a lot of people say, "Well, why wasn't Huawei on the list?" And the reason is because Huawei is certainly making components and pieces that fit into the ecosystem, but it is these three companies along with the six in the United States that have the lion's share of patents, they have most of the political capital. They are able to track the best talent, they have the best partnerships with universities. It's their frameworks. It's their custom silicon, it's their algorithms, it's their corpora. They are the ones that are building the future of AI, and as a result, the future of humanity.

Ian Bremmer:

What is the way in which you think AI has most changed society so far?

Amy Webb:

Well, and this is not a singular technology. There are millions of different decisions that are being made for us all day long, and as a result, we don't really recognize that that is AI. In fact-

Ian Bremmer:

We're being steered. We're being nudged.

Amy Webb:

We're being nudged. Yeah. Yeah. We're being nudged. Whether it's the auto complete in your text message or the auto complete in your inbox, if you're on your mobile device, that seems totally insignificant, but it's shifting how we communicate with each other and it's starting to shift our expectations for what that communication might look like. Can I give you a-

Ian Bremmer:

Yes, please.

Amy Webb:

... bizarre example of this?

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely. Yeah. Is this one that's happened to you or?

Amy Webb:

This is one that's happened to me just a couple days ago. I was in the process of texting my husband, and in the middle of all this, I got back a response that sounded canned, and it just irritated me, and so I made a phone call on my phone.

Ian Bremmer:

Which you never do.

Amy Webb:

No, who does that?

Ian Bremmer:

Nobody calls. Yeah.

Amy Webb:

And I was like, what the hell? You can't take five seconds to text me something back in a meaningful way.

Ian Bremmer:

What was the actual canned response, since we're going there?

Amy Webb:

It was, "That's great!" which he's like, I know that seems innocuous, but he's like, he's never written that ever, and it was just easier for him to click that button.

Ian Bremmer:

To click the button.

Amy Webb:

I guess in the long grand scheme of things, maybe it doesn't matter that much, but it shifts the human relationship that we have with technology as an intermediary and AI as the driving force that connects everybody together.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, before we get into what it means politically and economically and geopolitically, that the Americans and Chinese are the ones with the companies that are dominating the space, what does it mean socially and culturally for the kinds of nudging that you're talking about? How is it different that the Americans are the ones that are doing this, as opposed to if it were-

Amy Webb:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

... the Europeans or it were the Canadians, for example?

Amy Webb:

That's a really good question. We don't have a singular dominant American culture that I could describe in any meaningful way. We're an amalgam and we're made up of lots of different cultures and traditions and ideas, and so we have a relatively homogenous group of people who don't share the same worldviews and experiences as everybody else whose code and corpora databases are being used to make decisions on behalf of all of us. That has different modalities. If you type in CEO to Google image search, you get a homogenous list of white men back. Do you have any idea who the first woman is that showed up on that list as the first woman CEO? Do you want to hazard a guess?

Ian Bremmer:

First woman CEO. I'm going to say Meg Whitman.

Amy Webb:

A lot of people think that. It wasn't.

Ian Bremmer:

Indra Nooyi. Not even-

Amy Webb:

Right. She's not-

Ian Bremmer:

Not even CEO anymore, but people know her. She's iconic.

Amy Webb:

She's like, a number two. It was CEO Barbie.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh no.

Amy Webb:

Oh yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Really?

Amy Webb:

So, it's like funny.

Ian Bremmer:

Who is the CEO Barbie?

Amy Webb:

And then it's not funny.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, you mean the actual doll?

Amy Webb:

No, like the doll.

Ian Bremmer:

The doll CEO.

Amy Webb:

Right. Not like, the CEO of Mattel, like CEO Barbie, a blonde.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, yeah.

Amy Webb:

Yeah, doll.

Ian Bremmer:

She probably still pulls down more than a lot of the actual women CEOs in the space.

Amy Webb:

Actually, they recognized that this was a problem and went in to try to train it, but it's good to sort of figure out what's going on here and how do we get to this point. So, you wind up with this initial training set, this initial data, which populates the search results, and as we continue to click, and then select what it is that we're looking for, it becomes this sort of loop. We get stuck in this loop where again, we're selecting based on a very, very limited set of criteria, so if it takes a long time to get to a person of color or a woman, it becomes this closed loop where our values are reflected back to us in sort of weird ways.

Ian Bremmer:

This gets to a point that I think is frequently mentioned as a conventional wisdom and is really wrong, that technology is value neutral and it is a multiplier. So whatever you have, you get more. And yet, it seems that actually implicit in the code that is being written are all sorts of values-

Amy Webb:

Sure.

Ian Bremmer:

... that are actually determining nudging-

Amy Webb:

Sure.

Ian Bremmer:

... behaviors and outcomes, and what I see from your writings and what you're talking about is that AI is doing that so much more insidiously and holistically than any of us have experienced before.

Amy Webb:

That's right, and most of its invisible. In fact, Marvin Minsky, who's one of the modern pioneers of AI, often said, "By the time that agent or that AI is so firmly a part of our business processes or our daily living, whatever it is that we're doing, we no longer recognize it as artificial intelligence." On paper, a lot of this makes sense. The challenge is that in order for algorithmic decision making systems to work correctly, they have to be specific. In order to be specific, you can't have any flexibility, which means that when he's-

Ian Bremmer:

You can't consider every scenario.

Amy Webb:

That's right, so we've become acclimated to obeying.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, let me push you a little bit in terms of, I accept the fact that we don't want to single out individual CEOs or corporations to say they're evil. Google was all, "Don't be evil."

Amy Webb:

Don't be evil.

Ian Bremmer:

Which they don't have any anymore. But nonetheless, it was a nice idea. But when your business model, when intrinsic to your business model is the optimization of data aggregation that makes you turn consumers into products, isn't there something kind of dystopian about the business model?

Amy Webb:

A little bit. On the other hand, the consumers are all getting something for free. Well, it's 2019. If you are a consumer who, maybe this is a fallacy of our education system. There's a lot of reasons that we wound up at this particular moment in time, but if you're getting all of this stuff for free and there's not a single part of you that's saying, "Well, maybe on the back end I'm giving up something that I'm not aware of," and not just an email, but I don't know if you did this, Google had over the holidays a system where you could upload your photo, a selfie, and it would tell you which fine art-

Ian Bremmer:

[inaudible 00:09:04]

Amy Webb:

... which fine art photo you look like.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh, I remember that. I did not do that, but I did.

Amy Webb:

Yeah, so a bunch of people, celebrities were doing this. Everybody was excited to share. There was an enormous machine learning project-

Ian Bremmer:

For that.

Amy Webb:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

Of course, it's not being offered for free.

Amy Webb:

Again, there are ways in which this is being, I think, intentionally obscured. There are other cases where Flickr, for example, everybody uploaded their photos to Flickr, the photo sharing website and had the Creative Commons license set so that it was publicly, and people probably didn't realize how they were setting the licenses, but that enabled IBM to go in with altruistic purposes. It was trying to build a better machine learning database with much more diverse faces, but they scraped millions and millions of photos in order to train their systems, and some people got pretty upset about that, so I think what this comes down to is transparency.

Ian Bremmer:

What are we doing and-

Amy Webb:

What are we doing?

Ian Bremmer:

Why are we doing it?

Amy Webb:

What does the data governance look like?

Ian Bremmer:

I want to get into the impact of all this on where the world is heading, which you spend a lot of time on, but I guess first I want to ask you, because you know these companies, and you've been watching these companies and not all companies are created equal. If you had to pick one of these nine that you were going to work in, equivalent money, equivalent job, let's even say the location was the same. So in other words, your life is not being changed. It's just about the company and what they're doing and their culture. It would be which one?

Amy Webb:

Well, you're asking me two different questions because culture is a big question.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes.

Amy Webb:

Who's doing remarkable work?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Is the other question, and there's not necessarily a line, that's right.

Amy Webb:

Yeah, so there-

Ian Bremmer:

Let's talk about both of them. Let's talk about both of them. So first, who's doing the work that you think is most-

Amy Webb:

Amazon.

Ian Bremmer:

... right now?

Amy Webb:

Amazon.

Ian Bremmer:

Because?

Amy Webb:

I am fascinated by Jeff Bezos, who is, I think-

Ian Bremmer:

Well, he's available apparently, so-

Amy Webb:

I don't care about that. I don't know what his... Well, we know what his texting is like.

Ian Bremmer:

No, we do actually. Yes, we do.

Amy Webb:

Yes. I think he is one of our most capable and prolific long-term thinkers alive today, and I think also pretty good when it comes to strategy. With that being said, Amazon is fairly far ahead in its thinking on biometric data scraping and how that might be used to learn more about us and to connect us in new and different interesting ways.

Ian Bremmer:

What do you think they're going to be capable of doing with that, that we'll be surprised by?

Amy Webb:

Sure. Again, I think this is automating a lot of our daily functions. One of the theories that I've been modeling again with data is, as our homes become more and more automated, where do our data ultimately end up and in what circumstances? At the moment, we're shedding just reams of data all day long that are increasingly being consolidated under the umbrellas of Google, Amazon, and Apple throughout the world. I think that what we're probably looking at is a consolidated unified record. At the moment, many people-

Ian Bremmer:

Of individuals.

Amy Webb:

That's right. I call it a personal data record, where all of your digital data, but also increasingly your health data, which by the way, these three companies are all pretty far ahead and working on your education data. Salesforce is working on a new system to create portable education records, so if all of this winds up under a unified record, which I think it probably will-

Ian Bremmer:

And by the way, you're not saying this unified record is something that we will have. You're saying this is a unified record that they will have.

Amy Webb:

That's the question. Is it ownership versus stewardship? How does it move? Is it heritable? These are really important questions for us to be thinking about, but there are also economic consequences and opportunities. We know that automation is coming. Nobody will say this out loud because it's unpopular, but a whole bunch of people are going to lose their jobs and there is no way to upskill them. They're just going to lose their jobs and it's going to be really hard to fit them into our existing economic structures.

Ian Bremmer:

Over the next few decades, what's the scale of displacement are we actually talking about here?

Amy Webb:

Again-

Ian Bremmer:

Percentage of workforce, roughly.

Amy Webb:

I would never answer that question because we don't know yet. There's a lot of...

Ian Bremmer:

When you say people that can't be upskilled.

Amy Webb:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

I'm saying because I know all of the sorts of jobs in white collar, blue collar jobs that show that different components of them can be automated away, but that's different from saying, do we think people that can't be upskilled? That's a different question.

Amy Webb:

Sure.

Ian Bremmer:

Is that a 5%, a 10%, maybe a 50%? Do you have any remote sense over the coming decades of what kind of number we're talking about there?

Amy Webb:

Again, this is not a hedge or me trying to short the question. To me, it's not entirely relevant because, well for one thing, the BLS where the data in the United States is housed on labor... This is a fun project for anybody who wants to take it on. A lot of those job titles are completely irrelevant. They don't exist. Even tracking at the moment which jobs there are and how they're going to be automated, the numbers, it's a lot. It's more than our current social structures are set up to handle. Therefore, when we talk about these great big new deal policies, or we talk about new social welfare systems or social trampolines, enabling people to bounce in and out, I think we are again trying to use something that might have worked in a different era and apply it as though it still makes sense today. Here's where the personal data record I think could come in really handy. We're already being monetized by these companies.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes.

Amy Webb:

These companies who like it or not, are going to face regulation. One way to appease the hill and appease, I'm assuming the EU, provide some transparency and help us out with the automation issue, is to treat our data as it moves every single one of those transactions as a packet that can be monetized. It's a different approach to universal basic income. We each get paid every time at some point along the chain, tiny amounts of money.

Ian Bremmer:

Because we're creating value.

Amy Webb:

That's right. Our value is recognized and we're being monetized on the other end.

Ian Bremmer:

For example, if we were all on bicycles for a few hours a day and they were making energy, we should get a couple dollars for that.

Amy Webb:

Sure, or if you're searching the internet for an hour a day and you're being tracked and retargeted and served ads, ads are one thing, but there's a lot of data that you're shedding that's being used by other companies as part of that process. All I'm saying is, let's just be open about it and give everybody a couple of fractions of a penny every time that happens. I think that winds up, as strange as the sounds, becoming an economic incentive for the big companies because it appeases would be regulators, it doesn't ultimately bleed all that much cash and it allows them buy-in from us, and the ability to use our data in a much more profound way without restrictions.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, one of the scary things that comes from that kind of a model is that these companies are then creating ecosystems around very different types of consumption models.

Amy Webb:

That's right. I will tell you that at the moment, I don't use very many Apple products because I can't stand the way that those systems are locked down. One of the things that I've envisioned and modeled is that Amazon sort of becomes the defacto lower income product. Amazon has, I think 153 Amazon basics products that it's already selling. Some of those are now devices that you talk to that collect data. The opposite end of that spectrum is Apple-

Ian Bremmer:

Apple.

Amy Webb:

... where the products are increasingly cost prohibitive for people who are on the lower part of the economic strata.

Ian Bremmer:

That sounds good in the sense that people will get paid for their data, but it sounds bad in the sense that you're really solidifying levels of inequality-

Amy Webb:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

... that exist inside the west right now.

Amy Webb:

That's right. In ways that I think we may later come to regret because we're not just talking about who has access to what device. I think we're also talking about permissions and having the choice to be anonymous when you want to be and have the choice to not be listened in on or not be nudged. Here's another great example. Let's say that you're living in your Amazon home and all of these companies are also increasingly connected to and learning about the grid, power grid. It's a relatively nice day outside, your home could decide not to open up the garage door because you should be able to walk that mile to work. Somebody somewhere has decided that we should be thinking about the environment. You could stand to burn some calories, so you lose the ability to drive your car on that day.

Ian Bremmer:

Or your healthcare premiums go up.

Amy Webb:

Or your healthcare care premiums go up, or you can't wash your jeans. If you're living in Austin, Texas where there's been drought going on for a while, maybe your washing machine decides that you could probably get another day or two out of the jeans. I don't want to be living in a situation where people, lower income people, lose so much control over so many facets of their daily life. I'm not saying that, that's on anybody's product roadmap at the moment. I'm just saying that if you look at all of the data that we have access to and model that out, these are plausible outcomes.

Ian Bremmer:

It sounds a lot like where you think AI is heading for the underclass in the United States is increasingly where it already is in China.

Amy Webb:

Yeah. China's difficult and I think we hear a lot of stories about the social credit score system.

Ian Bremmer:

If you're monetizing people's data and you have a personal data record and everything is increasingly being determined by either one government, China or one company in the United States, how do we avoid a situation where the nudging that presently happening is actually going to become much more all-encompassing behavioral control for large segments of the population that doesn't have the ability to pay for privacy?

Amy Webb:

That's a really smart, I really love the way you phrased that question because it's an acknowledgement that while we point our finger at what's happening in China and their social credit scoring system-

Ian Bremmer:

What's happening here is very similar.

Amy Webb:

That's right. It's just not as codified.

Ian Bremmer:

That's Amy Webb. You got to pay attention to her or you're all going to be consigned to Amazon. Thank you very much.

Amy Webb:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

Be with you.

Amy Webb:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week. Same place, same time. Unless you're watching on social media, in which cases, wherever you happen to be, don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first, by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.