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AI governance: Cultivating responsibility
Mustafa Suleyman, a prominent voice in the AI landscape and CEO & co-founder of Inflection AI, contends that effective regulation transcends legal frameworks—it encompasses a culture of self-regulation and informed regulatory comprehension. Today's AI leaders exhibit a unique blend of optimism and caution, recognizing both the transformative potential and potential pitfalls of AI technologies. Suleyman underscores the paradigm shift compared to the era of social media dominance.
This time, AI leaders have been proactive in raising concerns and questions about the technology's impact. Balancing innovation's pace with prudent safeguards is the goal, acknowledging that through collective efforts, the benefits of AI can far outweigh its drawbacks. Suleyman highlights that advanced AI models are increasingly controllable and capable of producing desired, safe outputs. He encourages external oversight and welcomes regulation as a proactive and thoughtful measure. The message is clear: the path to harnessing AI's power lies in fostering a culture of responsible development and collaborative regulatory action.
Watch the full conversation: Governing AI Before It’s Too Late
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- Podcast: Artificial intelligence new rules: Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman explain the AI power paradox ›
- How should artificial intelligence be governed? ›
- Making rules for AI … before it’s too late ›
- The AI power paradox: Rules for AI's power ›
- Is life better than ever for the human race? - GZERO Media ›
US President Joe Biden and an American flag
Should the US government be involved with content moderation?
In a decision that sets up a monumental legal battle over the limits of the US government’s power to influence online speech, Louisiana-based District Court Judge Terry Doughty on Tuesday ruled that the Biden administration cannot contact social media platforms for the purpose of moderating content that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment.
What’s the background? The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana last year, which alleged that the Biden administration had coerced platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube into suppressing certain views about public health measures during the pandemic, the 2020 election results, and the economy. The government says it merely made suggestions to blacklist content that it believed would cause public health harm or undermine trust in US elections, and that it didn’t force anyone to do anything.
The philosophical question: Who gets to decide? On the one hand, anyone with eyes can see that social media enables lies and disinformation to proliferate at unprecedented speeds. Enlightenment-era notions of free speech designed for a world of hand-printed pamphlets seem potentially out of date today -- especially when algorithms that tailor content to partisan tastes have turned the “marketplace of ideas” into a warren of self-contained online kiosks.
But the question is whether the government should be allowed to police content that might otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. Supporters of government intervention say that yes, it’s important to quickly stop lies that could, say, harm public health, or undermine the credibility of elections.
Skeptics – at least the good faith ones – see it differently. In a world where facts may be black and white (no, the 2020 election was not “stolen,”), but viewpoints are grayer (experts still disagree about the efficacy of masking and lockdowns during the pandemic), it’s a fatal mistake, they say, for a democracy to allow the government to police online speech like this. After all, one administration’s “fake news” might soon be another’s "fair question."
The partisan dimension: Philosophical matters aside, the case has a partisan coloring. It was brought by GOP states, and the presiding Judge — a Trump appointee — noted in his opinion that the viewpoints targeted for suppression were mostly ones shared by “conservatives.” What's more, it comes amid a broader campaign by the GOP-controlled House to show that various government institutions have been “weaponized” against them.
Still, ordinary Americans’ views on social media regulation don’t follow party lines as much as you might think. A huge study by the Knight Foundation in 2022 found that a majority of Americans think social media companies contribute to societal divisions, and 90% say these platforms spread disinformation. In other words, people don't feel they can trust social media -- a big problem when traditional media are also suffering a long-running crisis of credibility.
But when it comes to solving these problems, things get muddier. Nearly four in five Americans say social media companies can’t be trusted to solve that problem themselves, but 55% say they prefer to keep government out of those decisions entirely.
While there is a hard-core wing of Democrats who fully support government regulation of online content, and a similar, if smaller, wing of Republicans who oppose any controls whatsoever, the Knight study found that roughly half of Americans’ views on these questions don’t correlate neatly with party affiliation — younger and more politically active internet users of all party affiliations, for example, tended to think social media companies should regulate themselves.
What comes next? The Biden administration will appeal the ruling, and Eurasia Group US expert Jon Lieber says it will likely go all the way to the Supreme Court. If so, the case could land in the docket right as the country enters the homestretch of the 2024 election campaigns. In the meantime, the ruling will limit the administration’s ability to police what it sees as disinformation in the run-up to the vote. Depending on who you are, you either think that’s a bad thing or a good thing.
Speaking of which, let us know what you think.Should the government be allowed to pressure social media companies to suppress content? If not, is there another way to deal with the problem of lies or disinformation online? Email us here, and please include your name and location if you’d like us to consider publishing your response in an upcoming edition of the Daily. Thanks!
US President Joe Biden
Regulate AI, but how? The US isn’t sure
Calls to regulate AI are coming fast and furious now — including from industry pioneers themselves — but so far the world’s largest economy isn’t sure how to do it.
At a meeting this week with EU tech regulators, the Biden administration was reportedly “divided” over how strictly to police the emerging technology, as concerns swirl about AI’s potential to supercharge disinformation, learn and amplify human biases, make decisions that harm people in the real world, or use copyrighted materials to develop its own “thoughts.”
Europe, whose strict rules on digital privacy and competition already make it the baddest cop on the global tech beat, is moving toward strict new AI rules. These would force firms to disclose their underlying code and sources and clearly inform users when content has been generated by AI as opposed to human beings.
But Washington – more cautious on tech regulation overall – is still feeling things out. Unlike Europe, the US is home to leading AI firms whose competitiveness is important not only for the economy but, some say, for national security as well. After all, AI isn’t just a field of technology, it’s a battleground of geopolitics pitting Silicon Valley against (mainly) Chinese firms. Washington wants to find a balance that prevents harm without stifling innovation. And both sides will need to find common ground in order to avoid an even higher-stakes rerun of their ongoing spats over digital privacy.
How much should the US clamp down on AI firms? Please tell us what you think here.
Ian interviews Scott Galloway: the ChatGPT revolution & tech peril
Note: This interview appeared as part of an episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, "The AI arms race begins: Scott Galloway’s optimism & warnings" on February 20, 2023.
Hollywood has long predicted the blurring of lines between humans and machines, but now, with OpenAI's Dall-E-2 and ChatGPT pushing the boundaries of generative AI, the question becomes: Will the movie that is AI be a rom-com or horror? On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, tech expert and NYU Professor Scott Galloway warns of the dangers of AI-powered social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok, which are collecting vast amounts of data that could be used for espionage and propaganda.
Galloway believes that the younger generation may be manipulated by these platforms without even realizing it. He also addresses extreme political polarization in America, which he attributes to social media, and suggests mandatory national service to bring young people together and build relationships.
But AI is not all bad news. Galloway believes that generative AI-powered search and social media data sets could be used to predict trends and inform decision-making, potentially revolutionizing industries like healthcare and defense.
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television and on gzeromedia.com.
- AI's search revolution: How ChatGPT will be your new search engine ›
- Scott Galloway on population decline and the secret sauce of US success ›
- Podcast: Why Scott Galloway is “cautiously optimistic” about AI - but not TikTok or Meta ›
- The AI arms race begins: Scott Galloway’s optimism & warnings ›
- TikTok is the ultimate propaganda tool, says tech expert Scott Galloway ›
- Is AI's "intelligence" an illusion? - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Getting to know generative AI with Gary Marcus - GZERO Media ›
Toxic social media & American divisiveness
Are America's social and political divisions a greater threat to its future than any external force? On this episode of GZERO World, tech expert and NYU Professor Scott Galloway argues that despite its geopolitical and economic strength, America's social fabric is fraying due to “a lack of camaraderie, patriotism, and connective tissue.”
He blames social media for creating the sense that things are much worse than they are and worries that artificial intelligence may only make a growing problem much worse.
Galloway suggests antitrust measures, criminal charges, and mandatory national service as possible solutions to the problems America is facing. “I don’t think this will get better until someone a, key executive at a big tech company is criminally charged and walked off.”
Watch the full interview with Galloway on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: The AI arms race begins: Scott Galloway’s optimism & warnings
Ian Explains: The dark side of AI
Hollywood has long warned us about a future where humans and machines become indistinguishable, and we might be closer than we think. OpenAI's Dall-E-2 can create images from text prompts, like astronauts riding horses in space. And their ChatGPT language model generates human-like text, blurring the lines between sci-fi and reality. By 2023, AI might even pass the Turing test, which for decades has measured a machine's human intelligence.
While generative AI has the power to solve major global challenges, it also presents dangers, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.
Authoritarian governments can use it to increase surveillance and spread misinformation. In democracies, AI can create and spread large volumes of misinformation that make it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
We're at a critical juncture. How will generative AI change our lives? Will the ultimate movie be a rom-com or a horror film?
Watch the GZERO World episode: The AI arms race begins: Scott Galloway’s optimism & warnings
- Can we control AI before it controls us? ›
- Artificial intelligence from Ancient Greece to 2021 ›
- Be more worried about artificial intelligence ›
- The transformative potential of artificial intelligence ›
- Emotional AI: More harm than good? - GZERO Media ›
- GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Season 6 preview - GZERO Media ›
The AI arms race begins: Scott Galloway’s optimism & warnings
As the world embraces the power of AI, there are growing concerns about the potential consequences of this double-edged sword. On this episode of GZERO World, tech expert and NYU Professor Scott Galloway sheds light on the darker side of AI, with social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok being used as espionage and propaganda tools to manipulate younger generations. But don't lose hope yet. AI can speed up search and help predict the next big trend, says Galloway. He emphasizes the potential of AI and language structure-driven search to revolutionize traditional search methods, and the value of social media data sets for decision-making.
Galloway also expresses concern about the negative effects of extreme political polarization and a lack of camaraderie in the US, which he attributes to social media creating the sense that things are much worse than they are. He proposes one bold solution: mandatory national service. But he also recommends efforts to bring young people together and to hold social media companies accountable.
And let's not forget about population decline - it's a big problem. Galloway thinks we can fix it with better job security and an open immigration policy to get the best minds on board.
Watch "GZERO World with Ian Bremmer" every week on US public television and on gzeromedia.com.
- Can we control AI before it controls us? ›
- Artificial intelligence from Ancient Greece to 2021 ›
- Be more worried about artificial intelligence ›
- Artificial intelligence and the importance of civics ›
- TikTok is the ultimate propaganda tool, says tech expert Scott Galloway ›
- Emotional AI: More harm than good? - GZERO Media ›
- Ian interviews Scott Galloway: the ChatGPT revolution & tech peril - GZERO Media ›
- Larry Summers: Which jobs will AI replace? - GZERO Media ›
- US debt limit: default unlikely, dysfunction probable - GZERO Media ›
- GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Season 6 preview - GZERO Media ›
- The AI power paradox: Rules for AI's power - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Getting to know generative AI with Gary Marcus - GZERO Media ›
- How tech companies aim to make AI more ethical and responsible - GZERO Media ›
- How AI can be used in public policy: Anne Witkowsky - GZERO Media ›
Podcast: Why Scott Galloway is “cautiously optimistic” about AI - but not TikTok or Meta
Listen: AI is both exciting and scary these days. It could solve big challenges but also lead to political chaos and authoritarian surveillance. On the GZERO World podcast, tech expert and NYU Professor Scott Galloway warns that AI-powered social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok can be used for espionage and propaganda, potentially manipulating younger generations without them even realizing it. However, generative AI's potential to organize vast stores of data could revolutionize traditional search engines and provide huge value in unstructured data sets, particularly in healthcare and defense scenario planning.
Galloway, well-known as the co-host of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and host of The Prof G Pod, also expresses concern about the extreme political polarization in the US exacerbated by social media and suggests solutions like mandatory national service, more places for young people to gather, and greater accountability for social media companies. Additionally, Galloway warns about the negative economic consequences of population decline and calls for a more open immigration policy.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.TRANSCRIPT: Why Scott Galloway is “cautiously optimistic” about AI - but not TikTok or Meta
Scott Galloway:
It just shocks me, the lack of camaraderie, the lack of patriotism, the lack of connective tissue we're rotting from the inside out. Externally, I would argue we've never been this strong, but we're tearing each other apart from the inside.
Ian Bremmer:
Hello And welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and on today's episode, we're in the middle of an AI explosion. Like every emerging technology from nuclear fission to the internet, there's a lot to be excited by, but also a lot to fear. Tools like ChatGPT represent an exciting new era of generative AI, that is technology that can create human-like text, images, and video content, once thought to be uniquely a human skill. But even their most ardent evangelists admit that these tools can also be used for evil. And I'll talk about all that. Some of the biggest text stories of the year so far with Scott Galloway, tech expert and NYU business School professor. Let's get to it.
Announcer 3:
The GZERO World podcast 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. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Something's often missing in the way we talk about the climate crisis, and that's the issue of justice and equity. On season three of Heat of the Moment, a podcast from Foreign Policy in partnership with the Climate Investment Funds, host, John D. Sutter, explores the concept of a just transition away from fossil fuels and hopefully towards a net-zero future. Listen to season three of Heat of the Moment: A Just Transition wherever you get your podcasts.
Ian Bremmer:
Scott Galloway, Good to see you. Glad to have you here.
Scott Galloway:
Thanks, Ian. It's always good to be with you.
Ian Bremmer:
I want to start with an issue that has been increasingly both exciting me and worrying me, which is the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. Where are you on the panic versus elation scale?
Scott Galloway:
I'm more sort of somewhere around a six or a seven, and that is, I'm cautiously optimistic. If you look at any major breakthrough in technology, we kind of go through the same cycle, and that is we immediately go to job losses, or we go to a concern around job losses. And we're seeing that here. The majority of the articles are around how many thousands or millions of jobs are going to be lost in the services sector or in kind of the information, like this could do to manufacturing or this could do the information economy, what robotics did into manufacturing is kind of the general consensus of the media.
And what you see throughout history is every major technological innovation usually has a certain amount of pain and dislocation, but over time, creates a lot more jobs than it destroys. I mean, three out of five people in America used to get their living from agriculture, and we essentially destroyed all of those jobs with technology, but we created a ton of new ones. So I believe we're going through the cycle where we're more fearful than hopeful, but I actually think it's going to create a lot more jobs and I think it's exciting. I think it's going to have huge impacts specifically around healthcare.
Ian Bremmer:
So let's explain to the audience for a moment Chat GPT, OpenAI. What is it? Why is it such an extraordinary transformative technology?
Scott Galloway:
So it's sort of a language prediction engine that looks at language and analyzes it to the extent that it can predict the next word, if you will. It doesn't think or come up with answers. It comes up with words. So if you say, what is the color of the night sky? It looks at its dataset and figures out that the best answer is it'll say black. And it can also even start to figure out tone in the sense that it figures out what words the relationship between them, and recognizes words that are posed to inquiry. So it's sort of a prediction engine and ChatGPT is kind of the first public product from OpenAI, a group that was formed at least initially as an organization that would attempt to be mindful of the problems that AI would produce. But AI's been around a long time. AI is in customer call centers, it's in Netflix, it's in the tech stack and Meta, but this seems to have encapsulated a lot of the promise and energy and has created, if you will, an arms race all of a sudden.
Ian Bremmer:
So which are the companies that you think or the sectors that you think are so far most effectively able to grab onto these new opportunities?
Scott Galloway:
Well, it could take search to the new level. If you think about Google, search really hasn't innovated in about 20 years. The only thing that's changed about search is that there's more and more ads that are less and less obvious, or less and less transparent that they're ads. Remember when you initially did a Google search 20 years ago and there were two blue shaded first returns that said ad. Now they've taken those shades away and sometimes 60, 70% of the first page, the actual results in the right rail are not necessarily a place that takes you to the best answer, but it takes you to a place that Google can further monetize and their incentives have made them very disruptable because what ChatGPT and sort of AI driven or language structure driven search does, it says, okay, rather than offering you dozens and dozens of answers that might be somewhere between 30 and 70% accurate, we think we can give you one that's sort of 60 to 80% accurate.
And I mean Google, it's a classic innovator's dilemma, and Google had this technology, Google developed a lot of it but doesn't want to undermine or disrupt an unbelievable $150 billion toll booth business model and give people the best answer. They want to give them a lot of answers. So I think the first kind of industry to be disrupted, if you will, will be search. Now whether or not it holds the same promise, I think it holds huge promise around unstructured data sets to feed in all of your health records and then start making interesting predictions or things you should be at least cognizant of in your own health. But it would strike me that it has huge applications around technology and disrupting traditional players. And then we're probably going to see all sorts of applications in healthcare. I also wonder what it means for our defense department in terms of scenario planning, but that's more your bailiwick.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, I can see also, I mean if you want to make sure that you're making tools off of this, you don't just want to pivot towards giving someone the best answer. You'd also like to give them the best answer that also supports your sponsored ad buyer. So in other words, ChatGPT plus making sure that you're going to sites that would be reflected in favor of that company.
Scott Galloway:
Well, right away, if you want to talk sort of short term chess here, it appears that Google is probably going to shed somewhere between a hundred billion and a half a trillion dollars and leak it to Microsoft. Microsoft's $1 billion 2019 investment in OpenAI. And then their ability to incorporate it more quickly into the Bing search engine, although we haven't really seen what it can do. It's likely that Bing's share is going to go from whatever it is now, 5 or 6% to potentially 20%. I mean, I don't know about you, but when there's BingGPT or Bing powered by AI, I'm going to try it and I haven't been on Bing in years. And if Microsoft can be a formidable player in search, you're going to see it go well above $2 trillion, which it hit for the first time in a while. So it feels as if the biggest short-term tactical loser right now is Google and the biggest winner is Microsoft.
But this has inspired in arms race, the likes of which we haven't seen. The cycle time here is so fast. Think about Netflix. Netflix had the field to themselves for 10 years and then it got very crowded very fast. Take that entire competitive process and shrink it down to about 10 weeks and that's happened here. But you can expect Meta, Apple, Amazon, and thousands of companies to all of a sudden start spending a lot of time talking about how AI is improving the quality of their offering. It's an arms race right now. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, I saw Salesforce announcements earlier this week. Of course you saw Buzzfeed announce that they're going to be providing some level of support from GPT, it had boosted their stock. I mean, how much of this is we just want to make an announcement and get a bump? And how much of this do you think are structural changes to business models? Again, on search, it strikes me as if that really works, it's a structural change in the business model. But I mean there's got to be a lot of hype around this too. I mean, everybody now just saying I want to be in on it.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah. And I'm usually the one that feels like technology has a tendency, that a lot of times the performance doesn't catch up to the promise. I felt that way about wearables, VR, AR, the Metaverse, Web 3. I'm on record as saying that I thought these things were kind of head fakes, that there wasn't going to be a lot of there there. The last time I was this excited about a technology was Voice. I still think Voice is an unbelievable technology and it's going to transform the way we live our lives, if you will. This feels like there's some real beef there. I don't know about you, but I find myself spending a lot of time. We spoke off mic, I'm writing a book right now and I'm using ChatGPT for research. If I want to find the compound annual growth rate of the Dow versus the DAX or something, it does give you what feels like pretty solid information pretty quickly.
So I think this is going to seep in and have more ... I mean, it's the fastest 0 to 5 million users in history. It was something like 150 days for Spotify, a 100 from Instagram, it took ChatGPT 5 days. It does feel like there's going to be a ton of interesting apps. My guess is like most technologies that are successful, we won't anticipate, we'll overestimate where it'll be successful and underestimate and aren't even imagining where it might actually tap in. But this has got so much capital coming forward, and keep in mind the hype can turn into the reality because the hype creates cheap capital where you can pull the future forward, and actually find interesting innovations because you can throw so much human and financial capital at the problem.
Ian Bremmer:
Now Google is of course rolling out a similar GPT type technology inside their search. And I mean, they had a stumble at the outset because it responded badly to a demonstrating question, but that'll be forgotten quickly. What struck me as interesting is this is of course a more advanced version of the same technology that that Google engineer had some sort of a relationship with and said, "Google has developed sentient intelligence" just a matter of months ago. There are a lot of people that are going to have relationships with these bots. There are a lot of people that are going to have a hard time differentiating between what is a human being and what is the latest version of GPT. And I wonder what that makes you think.
Scott Galloway:
Well, we used a term before the best answer, and the problem is right now, and it doesn't take long. You see the potential pretty quickly if you use ChatGPT or DALL-E for very long and there's a lot of upside. But you can also imagine asking ChatGPT to come up with 20 myths or conspiracy theories around vaccines in the voice of a credible doctor. And then testing those conspiracy theories on social to see which gets the most traction, picking the two or three that spread the fastest, pouring some fuel behind them, weaponizing a bunch of bots. I mean, this does feel like it's an engine room for misinformation and the notion, and it gets a lot of stuff wrong. So you can see it could go very bad places very fast. And what's interesting about ...
I mean, a few interesting things about OpenAI. OpenAI was initially funded to try and serve as a guardian or a governor or a shepherd or a kind of safety council or guardrails for what a lot of people felt was a technology that could have a lot of negative externalities. And then quite frankly Ian, and I know this sounds cynical, they smelled money and they converted to a for-profit. I mean, I don't think any of the initial funding or formation of OpenAI anticipated that it would be a point of differentiation for Bing after a $10 billion investment. I don't think that's why it was initially formed.
The other thing is that was really interesting is Sam Altman, who's a very bright guy and is now the CEO of ChatGPT immediately partnered up with Microsoft. And I think that what he sees as the following, that AI is going to be very difficult to establish any sort of competitive differentiation or long-term advantage. That AI, if you will, will be used to create an equivalence across different AI chat bots. And so he immediately said we need to reverse integrate and find a partner with very deep processing power. Supposedly each question or query takes a few cents in processing power, which is about seven times what a Google query takes, and then also forward integrate into an application that already has a mature business model. And that is Bing and search.
So I think Sam looked around and said it's about to get very crowded, very competitive, very fast, and we need to sprint and partner with someone that has deep cloud processing and also has a front end on it right away. And that just gives you a sense for I think, how competitive this is going to get. I think there's going to be a lot of different chatbots and I wonder how differentiated they're going to be.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, well, I mean one is of course if your data set isn't great. I mean Google's saying that their chat bot is working off of current affairs as well, and Google has incredible amounts of data. Microsoft has massive cloud and processing power. I mean both of those things strike me as significant barriers to entry to small startups.
Scott Galloway:
Well, you're zeroing on the correct point and that is that the people who might end up having the rare earth material here are the people who have control and produce really robust data sets. I mean, as much as I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and Twitter, you wonder if Twitter, if someone were to say to me that Elon Musk got his $45 billion back, that somehow we recovered that $45 billion equity investment, which has been vaporized as of now. I would guess that a artificial intelligence engine found a way to take the unstructured dataset that we produce every day in terms of mood, emotion, what we're talking about, what news is trending, and that he licensed it and got huge dollars for that dataset that we produce every day on Twitter.
So whether it's health information, weather information, sports information, there are going to be a ton of companies that pop up that do nothing but collect structure and feed data sets into these beasts that will have insatiable appetites. I mean, it's kind of the difference between light crude and Texas West Intermediate. I think the real value here will be the people who control the most interesting and robust data sets.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, I mean, given the real time connectivity that so many people around the planet have on social media, I mean you could imagine that the fastest way to find out about an emerging new pandemic or even your latest flu wave would be much more effective through a dataset like that, which so far has been relatively unmined for that scientific purpose at least and monetizable.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah, it just reminded me, and it's a weird analogy, but Secretary Buttigieg talking about, they asked him what infrastructure investment he was most excited about and he said, smart sewers, you put sensors in sewers, and they can tell when COVID is spiking in an area. Could Twitter be a smart sewer? And that is, could it wade through all of the material and waste and find out interesting things around what's trending, where people are starting to get angry, where people are starting to become ... When there's violence across nations, will you be able to get to a point where you can predict that with greater accuracy based on the way people are behaving and the sentiment and the language they're using on Twitter?
Ian Bremmer:
So I have to go to on a slight angle here, as a political scientist. In your view, does that make it imperative that TikTok is banned in the United States?
Scott Galloway:
I think of just TikTok as the ultimate propaganda tool. I think Facebook and Meta are the ultimate espionage tool, and I think they've actually ... I would bet, my thesis is the reason there's been absolutely no regulation of Facebook is I would bet, and I'm curious if you believe this as well, that our security apparatus works pretty closely with Meta and there's sort of a behind the closed doors deal that we will continue to help you hunt down bad guys. I mean Meta is the ultimate espionage tool. It not only knows where you are, what you're doing, but who your relationships are and how you interact with them. The GRU, the Mossad, the NSA couldn't have thought of that in their wildest dreams. I think TikTok is the ultimate propaganda tool. Young people would now rather have TikTok than almost all other major media. They're on it. So I think the CCP would be stupid. If I take the body of your content and a lot of your stuff's on TikTok Ian, some of it's very pro-America, pro West.
Ian Bremmer:
I hope it's not.
Scott Galloway:
It's there. You're there boss. But some of what you say is very pro West and optimistic. Some of what you say highlights the many issues we have in the West. I think the CCP would be dumb not to put their thumbs on the scale of content slowly but surely that sheds the West in a poor light. And my fear is slowly but surely without even knowing it, the best sting, remember the movie, The Sting with Robert Redford, Paul Newman?
Ian Bremmer:
Sure.
Scott Galloway:
The best sting is the con or the mark that never knows they were conned. And I worry, we don't even know we're being conned right now because I think slowly but surely, we're raising a generation of civic, business, nonprofit and military leaders that every day just feel a little bit worse about America. And I think you see it in our surveys. People think the economy is really bad when it's not. People don't want to acknowledge the progress we've made around everything from systemic racism to eliminating infectious diseases. There just doesn't seem to be any appetite to acknowledge any of it. And I wonder if it's slowly but surely going to get worse at the hands of TikTok.
Ian Bremmer:
I agree with the problem. I will say that on the, people feel the economy's doing badly, that's been a structural problem in the United States for a long term. The data at least doesn't bear out that Americans are feeling much worse about it than they did 20 years ago, 40 years ago. But your broader point that this is a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes or certainly can be used for the purposes that would be beneficial to whoever happens to own the platform, whether those are commercial or non-commercial. I think that's a very real issue indeed.
And for decades, the biggest issue in terms of digital inequality was about the digital divide. Who are the people that are online and offline? And there are a lot of people that just don't have access to information. Increasingly what you and I are talking about today is it's less about the digital divide. It's the people that are online that believe things that aren't true, they're being fed disinformation, and just how much this can be accelerated and weaponized in this environment of generative AI by these social media platforms strikes me as an unsustainable trajectory.
Scott Galloway:
In my book, Adrift: America in 100 Charts, naked plug, people ask me, "What's the biggest threat to America?" And I say, I would argue that geopolitically, and I may even be just parroting your words here, that it's hard to imagine a time when we were stronger. We're food independent, relatively speaking, we're food independent. We're energy independent. No one's lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines. Smartest, brightest people in the world all still want to come here. We have an economy right now that is growing again, our inflation is bad, but it's less bad than anywhere else in the world. It's like if you want to talk about what's bad about America, I think you have to show up with, where would you rather be? In China where the equivalent of the Dow has been cut in half? In Europe, which has low growth? And I mean, who exactly is doing half as well as we are or who's doing less bad than we are right now.
But the problem is the horror movie, if America's a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. 54% of Democrats are worried that kid's going to marry a Republican. I was very discouraged watching the State of the Union just how angry we are at each other. These are people who are elected representatives, all Americans, many of them similar backgrounds, all doing the same job. They work together, they live close to each other, they go to cocktail parties with each other, and they scream at each other in the middle of the meeting. It just shocks me, the lack of camaraderie, the lack of patriotism, the lack of connective tissue. We're rotting from the inside out. Externally, I would argue we've never been this strong, but we're tearing each other apart from the inside. And I do think social media and media's cycle time that leads to catastrophizing everything gives us the sense that things are much worse than they are. And it's not another nation's fault. It's your neighbor's fault.
Ian Bremmer:
So what do you think the beginnings of any solution might be? Because the social media companies are clearly not self-regulating in a direction that would lead to resolving this problem?
Scott Galloway:
Well, I'm a fan of antitrust. I think if you had more competition, that eventually a social media company would raise their hand and say, "We're going to age gate at 16. There's no reason to have kids on social media." And that P&G and Unilever would like that, that we're going to be more stringent about misinformation and we're going to stop pretending and using the First Amendment as some sort of blanket coverage to not do anything. And we're going to fact check things just as traditional media companies do. And they claim it's too complex. It's not. This isn't an issue of possibility, it's an issue of profitability, it would take their profits down, it would make them legally liable, have exemptions or pull out some 230 around election misinformation or health misinformation, break them up, more competition. But also, I don't think this gets a lot better until someone, a key executive at a big tech company is criminally charged and walked off. We can't come up with fines that are big enough. So the algebra of deterrents here is just not in place.
And then on a broader level, from a national scale, I think we need mandatory national service. I think we need to get young people in the same uniform again, so they see each other's Americans not as people of different sexual orientations or different political parties. I think we need more third places so people can get together, young people can get together and establish mentorships, establish romantic relationships. The fundamental element of any society is relationships, and we aren't building enough of them because people are in their homes or on their devices, more vocational programming to level up men who are becoming economically and emotionally unviable at a young age. Germany, 50% of its populace has some sort of vocational certification .in the US, it's 5%. In the UK, 12% of all job titles on LinkedIn are apprentice. Here in the US, it's 3%. So a massive investment in young people that makes them more optimistic about the future, shared collective experiences and the service of our nation and holding our media complex, specifically social media, more accountable for the damage they're doing.
Ian Bremmer:
So is it fair to say, I mean that both the positive developments that we're seeing in the United States in terms of its geopolitical, its economic strength are being driven, will be driven very strongly by new changes in AI. But also all of the negative things that you just suggested that are deep problems inside the United States, especially when we talk about relationships between people, that's also one of the biggest challenges that will be exacerbated by the rollout of these new AI tools?
Scott Galloway:
Anytime you take one source or material or a piece of information and you convert it into something that is more valuable, whether it's petroleum, whether it's oil into petroleum, whether it's a attention into ads. My observation is anytime you have an arbitrage, there's emissions and externalities and we decided to regulate the emissions around carbon emissions. I mean, we might have been a little bit late, it might not go as far as we should, but we have emission standards. We have an act to try and reduce carbon. When we have translated or arbitraged attention to Nissan ads, it's created a very negative externality and that is keep people's attention. I mean, think about the cadence of news. If we could only have one headline news story, the last century, it probably, I would bet would be the West turns back tyranny. If we had to pick one headline for the last a 100 years, if we had to pick one headline for the last 50 years, I would argue it would be unprecedented historic prosperity led by China and the US.
I would think you would have to have positive headlines. But because we have a headline every three seconds to try and maintain our attention, we go to catastrophizing because that's what keeps our attention. But we don't seem to want to have the same type of regulation or standards to control or recognize these emissions. Now the next question is what emissions will emerge from the arbitrage from these data sets to money with artificial intelligence? And one thing we know that we're really bad at, we know or we can be fairly confident in the short term, there'll be a lot of job dislocation, but like every other technology, it will create more jobs than it replaces or that it destroys.
The question is what do we do with those people in the short term? That's what we're really bad at, right Ian? We're really bad at helping retrain and support through the transition the people that get left behind, but this will create a different flavor of noxious emissions. You just got to hope that we address it earlier. I don't know if you saw the hearings yesterday on Twitter, but it's just very discouraging and doesn't really buttress the notion that we have the skillset to regulate and control these emissions or even recognize them. Somewhere between 4 and 8% of our elected representatives have a background in engineering or technology. So I think it's a real concern. And to date, there has been absolutely no regulation around big tech. So we haven't even figured out what the emissions are.
Ian Bremmer:
And it's happening so much. It's becoming structural so much faster. I mean with the arbitrage of carbon emissions, we're late, but we've also had decades to get the joke. And you don't have decades to get the joke on the arbitrage from artificial intelligence. Frankly, you've got a couple of years. That's it. Yeah, exactly. I mean the people that you hope are going to be doing it, they're in power right now. It's a part of the problem.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah. And not only that. I'm an ageist. I don't know about you, I have a more difficult time wrapping my head around technology as I get older. And every year we continue to have the oldest elected representative body of almost any democracy. The average age of our elected representatives is 62. So I mean how many 62 year olds ... So that means for every 40 year old we have, we have an 84 year old. At one point, I think a third of all elected representatives had someone on their staff print out their emails. So are these the people to really be figuring out the legislation and the regulation for technology? We have a real dearth of domain expertise around the people who need to figure out the laws here.
Ian Bremmer:
One other thing I wanted to discuss, a topic that's on your mind a fair amount is the demographics more broadly, and I don't want to do it that way. How do I want to move to it. Let's see. Before we started the show, you mentioned as well, Scott, you want to talk about something completely different, which is that you've been fascinated recently. I mean, I've been fascinated by AI. You've been fascinated particularly by changes in demographics. Tell me what it is that you meant by that?
Scott Galloway:
We're about to go population negative. China's supposedly going to be 600 million people by the turn of the century. By the turn of the century in the US, get this, we're going to have 6 times as many people over the age of 80, and half as many kids under the age of 5, meaning the nursery schools will be like zoos with people sitting outside of them looking through fences, marveling at these creatures they don't see out in their natural habitat. And the reality our productivity peaks at about 44. The nations that have gone into population decline, Japan and Italy have seen very registered, really negative consequences on their economy. And the question is, how are we going to produce the productivity to take care of this increasingly aging workforce. In addition young people ...
Ian Bremmer:
Sounds like we need the AI faster.
Scott Galloway:
Something like that or you know what I think? At the end of the day, and I want to be clear, I got a lot of pushback on this because people equate population growth with climate change. And if you look at climate change, it's really not as much a function of population growth as it is the lifestyle and energy choices of the rich. But at the end of the day, we're going to have to create a context, more economic security, more possibilities for young people should they choose to have kids. Because essentially what's happening is people are deciding not to have kids, and my thesis is not that they don't want them, it's that they can't afford them. Kid can now cost about $350,000, and each year the wealth of youth has been cut in half, the wealth controlled by people under the age of 40 as a percentage of GDP has gone from 19% to 9%. The biggest tax deductions, mortgage, tax, interest or capital gains are taxes that old people enjoy. Who own stocks and owns their home old people. Who rents and makes their income from sweat? Young people.
So if we want to have a population that continues to be productive, and quite frankly creative, there weren't a lot of 70 plus year olds at the Grammys. The majority of Nobel Prize winners in science and economics is based on work that they did in their PhD during their doctorate. We need a country that has youth and feels good about the future and builds families. I want to be clear, the onus is not on any one group or any one gender to have babies. I don't think anyone should feel guilty. It's no one's fault, if you will. Or if it is someone's fault, it's that we haven't created the same economic opportunity that our generation had and the choices to have a family if they want. But if we go into population decline, I think we're really going to struggle as a society to maintain the productivity, the lifestyle, the money for climate change and the investments we need. I think it's a huge issue.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, one, you could still be having more because you're a robust male specimen.
Scott Galloway:
Go on.
Ian Bremmer:
So first of all, you should take some personal responsibility for this, Scott. But secondly, the demographic explosion that is still being seen around the world is mostly in the poor countries. I mean Africa is going to add another billion to 3 billion people by 2100. India is still a very positive demographic expansion. Those are poor countries, and to the extent that human capital can be harnessed, it's going to be a very positive thing for the world. It's also going to have resource stress attached to it. We're going to go from 8 billion certainly to post 10 billion over that period of time. But you're right, there's going to be shrinkage. And one big question is do the United States change? Because the US isn't just about demographics. Historically, it's also been about immigration, and yet the political drivers in the United States has been in, we don't want those people, even though a lot of those people have done some pretty extraordinary things in building the country.
Scott Galloway:
You're exactly right. It feels like immigration is the answer to a lot of this. A third of market cap in the NASDAQ is by first generation immigrants. 20% of the market cap in the NASDAQ is Indian immigrants, Microsoft, MasterCard, Adobe, all Indian immigrants. And the notion that we would take the secret sauce, we're a football team that gets the number one draft choice every year and says, no, we don't want them. I mean ...
Ian Bremmer:
MasterCard's a white guy now, by the way. The Indian guy retired. You're right. It was.
Scott Galloway:
Give it three years, give it three years, give it two bad earnings releases. Anyways. But if you think about the notion of just how crazy it is to turn away or not have much more open immigration policy, the biggest issue on people's minds is inflation. And the key component right now, the stubborn part of inflation is wage growth. And so immigration sort of would help abate that or assuage that issue.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, the biggest demographic disasters in the world right now, from a wealthy country perspective, Japan and South Korea. The Japanese absolutely refused to allow immigration to be a part of the solution, and so they've done nothing and it's getting worse. South Korea has a better trajectory in part because they've actually opened the borders.
Scott Galloway:
But hasn't that at the end of the day, and it sounds very passe, hasn't that been our secret weapon? Is that we're open to these incredibly bright, ambitious, hardworking people who are willing to quite frankly, work harder for less money than us.
Ian Bremmer:
That's Why you and I are here, obviously.
Scott Galloway:
I mean, it just feels like, again, okay, you can have every first round draft choice. No, we don't want them. We're going to demonize them. It makes absolutely no sense. And you see it in Brexit, what just a disaster that was. I'm living in London right now, amazing culture, fintech community on fire, amazing universities, and they figure out a way to manage to snatch defeat the jaws of victory with this ridiculous legislation that increases their costs and limits the markets they can sell into. I mean, it's just insane some of the decisions we and the West are making around this stuff.
Ian Bremmer:
Scott Galloway, great to have you here.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah, it's great to be with you Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Well, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter. It's called GZERO Day.
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