Governing technology: Can the subaltern speak on social media platforms?

Recently the question of technological governance, in particular the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), has become a central issue in a certain kind of political circle. This is the circle that believes in using politics for the promotion of general welfare. Worryingly, in the fragmented and contentious political discourse now most often conducted through social media platforms, its voice does not always carry through to the people.

In September 2024, the United Nations adopted the Global Digital Compact, which was adopted by 193 member states as part of the UN’s Pact for the Future. One of the aims of the Global Digital Compact is to

• Promote and facilitate access to independent, fact-based and timely information to counter mis- and disinformation

This aim seems to have been in discussions, though mostly as a subtext, in this week’s contentious pronouncements regarding freedom of speech on social media platforms and the internet more generally.

This blog post argues that this aim of the Global Digital Compact needs to be made a regulatory priority because, coupled with the uses of AI by social media platforms, the recent pronouncements have the potential to harm freedom of speech while presenting certain individuals, parties and platforms as its defenders.

Free speech and the role of AI on social media platforms

The role of social media in fuelling divisive debates had already been an issue of concern, but the use of AI by social media platforms has heightened concerns from responsible actors across board that the capacity of AI to actively manipulate user behaviour can undermine free speech rather than provide a free space for its exercise.

AI is now deeply integrated into nearly all parts of the work and leisure lives of most people, at least in the global North, and increasingly in the global South too. However, its hidden nature and ‘behind-the-scenes’ uses are not always apparent to those interacting with it.

This is the context in which one must view the recent trend amongst certain right-leaning groups to justify, in the name of freedom of speech, types of speech and arguments which would normally be frowned upon in measured political debates. For example, in his recent comments, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has focussed on what he termed as the return of free speech (‘”free speech was back” on X’ ) on social media, especially X (formerly Twitter).

A similar concern for removing ‘bias’ was shown by Meta, the owner of Facebook, who has also decided to do away with ‘factcheckers’ for Facebook, Instagram and Threads (used by 3 billion people worldwide) apparently to remove ‘bias’ and a practice that had become a ‘tool to censor’. Both the owner of X, Elon Musk, and the owner of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, have recently moved key businesses to Texas from California, the latter considered a more ‘liberal’ state in the United States.

How can AI manipulate user behaviour, reaction or speech?

AI is a computer algorithm or programme that can read patterns if presented with very large amounts of data. Its special features are its speed and scale at which it can handle data, far surpassing the capacities of even the most able human individuals in this regard.

On large internet platforms, including social media platforms, AI models are routinely deployed. They are often programmed to give the owner business certain types of information about the users of the platform. For example, some can work out what makes the users angry (and now many of our devices even have the capacity to read our faces) and put that information together with ‘data’ about our ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ we indicate on the platform, the amount of time we linger on a movie ad, and a plethora of other such micro-data over a period of time to work out our personalities and preferences.

The AI not only collects user-generated data but also analyses it constantly. With its speed, and often using the psychological and other expertise that it has been programmed with, it can ‘read’ the minds and behaviours of users who feel they are acting freely in a safe space when acting on the internet. This information has been used successfully to control and manipulate the behaviour and emotions of users once the AI has worked out what makes the user happy, or upset, or angry. They are then shown more of the content which elicits big strong reactions.

These key players’ aim is not to be social with us and engage in conversation, as your neighbour or friend might do if they wanted to find out about you, but to exert control in a way that benefits the people and businesses who have the money, knowledge and resources to create and deploy bigger and more powerful AI algorithms all the time. This control mostly takes the form of ‘nudges’, using the user’s preferences to show them advertisements, news feeds or even friends’ posts that are likely to put them in a certain kind of mood to take a certain type of action, which is ultimately beneficial to the AI owner. This may be a ‘nudge’ or creating digital environment that makes you buy a car or a book or can potentially make you write a divisive and angry political post that you may not normally have written.

This control is not exerted simply by knowing how to develop an AI model. With all the expertise in the world, it would be very hard for a dreaming idealist to sit in their living room or access the local library to create an AI model to match the capacities of Google’s Kubernetes model with its over a trillion ‘parameters’, because that would require millions of dollars to do. In the current AI race, the big players are far ahead and difficult for start-ups, whom they routinely absorb to grow even bigger themselves, to catch up with.

The economic and the political in AI deployment

The justification for the pervasive AI analysis, or ‘surveillance’ of the users, is often given as improving the customer experience by making it easier for the customers to find information that they like or find useful. Importantly, the big technology companies, American and Chinese in the main, have been supported by their governments in developing these technologies in order to create more ‘growth’ or wealth.

However, the United States Senate’s hearings in the elections of 2016 about the Cambridge Analytica scandal heard evidence that suggested powerfully that both in the American elections and in the Brexit campaign on 2016 such technology was used to manipulate the voting behaviour of users.

The cries of ‘disinformation’ and manipulation have been raised from other quarters too implicating Russian, Iranian or other expertise in controlling the behaviour of users through AI, which works at a speed that is overwhelmingly fast compared to human cognition and understanding.

Under these circumstances, does freedom of speech exist in a meaningful way on social media platforms?

Resources and power in the digital space

Increasingly, we are being forced to go digital in all walks of life, including work, health, play, communication, studies or politics. More and more free apps and facilities are being made available that make actions easier and more ‘pleasurable’. A lot of them, however, come from a small group of corporate sources. Even smaller companies creating free content use ‘free’ software and platforms made available by the tech giants such as Google workspace or Amazon’s cloud facilities. Amazon, Google and Microsoft together control almost 60% of the cloud infrastructure.

Despite their ‘virtual’ nature, digital technologies run on hardware. The ‘cloud’ is not a free-floating soft, woolly amalgam of gases and light but a huge ‘black box’, or rather banks upon banks of them, controlled and guarded zealously by the big corporates that control them. Entering a facility housing databanks is probably equivalent to trying to enter Fort Knox in the lore of old.

There is good reason for this. Databanks control the arteries of global interactions in almost everything we do digitally, which is not only the internet use on mobiles or laptops but also Internet of Things (IoT), wearable, smart devices and home gadgets. Almost all users, from governments to ordinary individuals, depend on the space and expertise made available by these corporations. All the data generated through all such interactions, whether about satellites in space or my weekly groceries shop done online, or your school’s lessons made available through the internet, your chat with your mother in another country or the businesses hosted in the Amazon Marketplace, is stored here.

Accessing and utilising Big Data

‘Big Data’ or data on a topic in huge quantities, for example, 10 years of my WhatsApp chats, when used to train AI models, provide invaluable insights and patterns of thought and behaviour that can be used in many different ways, leading to more product ‘innovation’ on a scale for Big Tech that is difficult for newcomers to match.

Of course, data is not always free to use as it is the Intellectual Property (IP) of its owner. However, in many cases the user has little real choice in handing over their data to the app/platform they are interacting with.

Further, uses of ‘secondary data‘ are allowed for ‘research’ purposes, specially for scientific research, without permission by most countries’ IP laws. It has often been argued that very large tech companies have used their knowledge and financial resources to hoover up data,  use for their AI-training purposes, even in ways not allowed by the law, and then destroyed it. AI training needs such vast amounts of data that it is difficult for owners to know or to prove, particularly as the AI output often does not directly reflect the training input. Big Tech has also sometimes used the strategy of starting with ‘research’ purposes to develop their AI and then switching to commercial, proprietary uses since they have the deep pockets to fight lawsuits should such needs arise.

Power of agenda-setting

With such control that is invasive, often affecting humans at ‘subliminal’ (below the level that we are conscious of) level, and with little power in the hands of humans to resist, either because they have few or no other options to the digital, or because their personalities are being read with a view to manipulating them, exercising freedom of speech in any meaningful way can become problematic.

Moving large parts of human social, political and economic interactions to the digital space, without a transparent, accountable and binding global regulatory architecture in place first puts tremendous agenda-setting powers in the hands of platform owners. This power undermines the aim of the Global Digital Compact to ensure independent, fact-based and timely information for all.

In the context of the moves by Musk and Zuckerberg, it is clear that these parties have their own agendas, which are not purely economic. To take just one example, Elon Musk cut almost 80% of jobs on taking over Twitter, and promoted a culture of ‘long hours at high intensity, enforcing a demanding work environment‘, which was his view of what is worthwhile in a human being’s contribution to a work environment. The debate in philosophy on what is the purpose of technology is old and long: is it there to make work more humane and human-centred, so that the ordinary person may earn a living without breaking body and soul, or is it there simply to make more and more money for an abstract notion of ‘welfare’ where an increase in wealth of a country overall, even if it is only in the hands of the top 1%, is counted as progress or welfare?

To promote his agenda of a gruelling work ethic, Musk, a billionaire, absorbed reported losses in revenues of the platform X, formerly Twitter, and has increasingly politicised his approach to debate, now taking it to government-level in the most powerful country in the world. With an ability to control the users behind the scenes, and a definite agenda to promote, the questions to ask are:

1. how far is Musk’s platform a means for ensuring ‘free speech’?
2. Should the US authorities, who have clearly recognised the dangers of the technology in Chinese corporations (TikTok’s status and future in the US may depend on the divestment of Chinese interest in the business due to data security concerns), not also apply similar standards to American corporations?
3. Is control less harmful when exerted by homegrown didacts?

Margaret Atwood’s timely warning in The Handmaid’s Tale can be aptly applied to any group with the power to preach and manipulate and espousing an extremist philosophy and discourse, not only to a religious source.

Can the subaltern speak in the digital space?

In 1988, the scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote an article titled ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ that provides a pertinent lens for the current debate. When discussing arguments by postcolonial scholars to give a ‘voice’ to the Indian ‘subaltern’ (the economically dispossessed), Spivak asked whether the argument-makers did not end up ‘speaking for’ the subaltern?

In the effort to grant the subaltern – a heterogenous group – ‘collective speech’ did the scholars not end up subsuming diversity in unified classifications that represented their own views of the subaltern voice rather than give voice to the subaltern.

In the AI age, we may further ask whether simply allowing a person/group to post on an issue, when perhaps they may have been ‘nudged’ or ‘manipulated’ or been locked in a ‘filter bubble’ of their own preferences by AI applications, is giving them the right to free speech? The global reach of the internet extends to groups that may not have been allowed, or taught, to critically think on, or indeed, have the knowledge, time or other resources to fully access all the points at issue; does simply putting them in the fraught environment of the internet, often hijacked by the loud, and the loudness magnified by AI, still equate to giving them a ‘voice’ in a meaningful sense?

In any argument-making, the balance of power always tilts in favour of those with the knowledge and resources such as time, insider-knowledge, cultural expertise, technical leverage and financial muscle to shape the contours of the argument.

One may agree with Musk that freedom of speech is fundamental to societies, particularly to democracies, and the United Nations should put it high on its agenda to advocate for mechanisms that make it impossible for powerful individuals and corporations to manipulate the behaviour, actions and emotions of millions of people in the guise of safeguarding their rights. In the AI age, a new category of ‘subaltern’ is emerging: those who are dispossessed of the power to hold the Internet Powers to account.

The subaltern groups may be said to be all those who in their different ways are denied the power to access, or use, digital technologies free from the agendas of those who control the technology but are not accountable for its use. A strange alliance may exist amongst all those who cannot access digital technologies, or walk away from them without incurring almost unbearable costs in access to health, work or other fundamentals, if effect, anyone without choices with regard to digital technologies may be classed as a ‘subaltern’. Just as the economically dispossessed had ranks and hierarchies amongst them so do the digital subaltern and all cases of dispossession are not equal. However, it would be fatally complacent not to keep asking the questions in the global North and the global South:

What stands in the way of the tech billionaires in using AI technologies to promote their own agendas?

What safeguards will guarantee that the continuous interaction of the user with the AI technologies of social media platforms is not, vampire-like, sucking the free-speech rights of the ordinary folk to fatten the powers of the platforms themselves?

Who, in reality, speaks when the internet subaltern speaks?

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-white-toy-with-a-black-nose-6UDansS-rPI

 

Creating ‘fair’ reciprocities in the field of AI: A proposal for general consideration

 

Since attending Professor John Willinsky’s seminar last year on making the copyright system fairer, I have been emboldened to put forward a very early-stage suggestion on another complicated topic in the intellectual property world, i.e., on balancing the various rights involved in the creation and use of artificial intelligence systems.

Context

To provide context, some seminal quotes from the United States National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s (NSCAI) report of 2021, whose sentiments have been repeated by other governments, organisations and experts from different forums, may be useful:

1. ‘We worry that only a few big companies and powerful states will have the resources to make the biggest AI breakthroughs’ (p. 4, italics added)
2. AI ‘technologies will be a source of enormous power for the companies and countries that harness them’ (p.7, italics added)
3. AI ‘is deepening the threat posed by cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns’ (p. 7)
4. ‘…the United States must act now to field AI systems and invest substantially more resources in AI innovation … Today, the government is not organising or investing to win the technology competition’ (p. 8), and
5. ‘We found consensus among nearly all of our partners … that AI is an enormously powerful technology … [and there is] responsibility to develop and use AI guided by democratic principles’ (p. 5).

Putting these statements together, what emerges clearly is what Professor Bradford (2023) has called the ‘American market-driven regulatory model’ to AI policy (Bradford 2023). The approach is marked by commercial corporations developing and deploying AI technologies, and reaping the power and profit resulting from the policies of a government in a supportive role rather than one that stands in oversight over them. The power differential that this creates between the ordinary citizen and the combined might of the government and Big Tech (the large American technology corporations that include Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft) has concerned scholars and activists regarding the space left for meaningfully exercising the freedoms guaranteed to individual citizens by the political system where such freedoms are in conflict with the interests backing fast AI integration in all spheres.

Outside of the United States, too, Professor Bradford (2023) has identified two main political approaches to AI policies, which she calls ‘The Chinese state-driven regulatory model’ and ‘The European rights-driven regulatory model’. The European Union has since passed the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, ‘the first comprehensive regulation on AI by a major regulator anywhere’. However, the EU is the weakest in terms of having the large technology firms that are leading the field in the creation of AI technologies.

China, the other major AI player, has an even closer relationship between the government and technology firms made explicit in a ‘state-driven vision for the digital economy’ (Bradford 2023, p. 8). This state support has seen the emergence of tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu and Xiomi. Professor Bradford asserts that ‘the Chinese government has converted the internet from a tool for advancing democracy to an instrument in service of autocracy’ (Bradford 2023, p. 9).

The global nature of the digital technologies means that these approaches, and cultural visions underpinning them, are projected across national boundaries as each ‘digital empire’ (Bradford 2023) fights to shape the world’s digital future. The fact and method of the spread of AI technologies, which speed up the digital sphere while concentrating control in ever fewer human hands, will affect whose vision ultimately moulds the relationship between the ordinary individual, the political authority and those wielding economic and technological power in the new world being created by Industry 4.0 technologies.

As things currently stand, people and communities are being invited to choose from a vision of

• the political authorities as guardians of democratic rights and freedoms such as dignity, liberty and security, liberty of thought, conscience and religion, and others listed in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,
• or, the more libertarian democratic approach of the United States that prioritises the rights of ‘free market and free speech as cornerstones of digital economy’ (Bradford 2023, p. 21),
• or, China’s approach that seeks to employ technology for ‘economic growth and development while maintaining social harmony and control over its citizens’ communications’ (Bradford 2023, p. 69).

The invitation is not always clear though, nor are the stakes always apparent in the noise and confusion with which AI has suddenly appeared everywhere. The discourse around it, until recently, almost presented it as a divine act beyond human control whose progress could only be challenged at the risk of untenable material harms.

‘Absence of reciprocities’

However, what is emerging only slowly, but still through a considerable body of scholarship, is that the development, use and spread of AI technologies is a complex issue that cannot be reduced to merely a matter of economic growth. The power of the technology is such that it can completely squeeze the ordinary human person between AI-owning powers of authoritarian states and technology corporations controlling the individuals’ socio-economic, behavioural and environmental freedoms, creating novel forms of oppression that press down with all the might that incumbent technologies already tend to acquire.

Beginning from the beginning – the development of artificial intelligence systems itself involves serious conflicts of interest between the rights of the ordinary ‘users’ and the Big Tech providing and controlling major services on the internet. One of the most significant formulations of these conflicts is by-now famous article by Professor Shoshana Zuboff that popularised the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ for the current form of capitalist practices that operate through the digital medium, and of which AI is a formidable part.

According to Professor Zuboff, the new digital systems (which are set to be sped up even further with AI deployment) ‘take direct aim at individual autonomy, systematically replacing self-determined action with a range of hidden operations designed to shape behaviour at the source’ (Zuboff 2019). This behavioural control, which keeps the user locked into a digital dependency on the platforms, is then exploited for commercial gain in the form of data extraction to enrich the data coffers of the companies that mine information about our likes, dislikes, vulnerabilities, moods and desires. Imagine your best friend making money on the side out of your heartfelt confidences!

This is a game-changer, Professor Zuboff goes on to explain, because until now in the modern era of world history ‘reciprocities in economics produced and sustained reciprocities in politics’ (Zuboff 2019). The money power of the capitalists was balanced by their need for workers, whose collective bargaining ensured that it was ‘more difficult for elites to “crush the masses” rather than accede to their demands’ (Zuboff 2019).

In the digital world, however, apps and services even come free oftentimes because the currency of payment, the raw material that delivers profits, is ‘data’ from the users, and not necessarily their small-time dollars. Thus, being able to attract ‘users’, keep them engaged and shifting ever larger areas of their lives to the digital sphere is far more profitable to the platform providers. Their real clients are the the other companies – those wishing to sell TVs, trainers and toys, or even political influence – who pay handsomely for insights into user behaviour and ways to influence or even control it to sell their goods. There are algorithms that have predicted people’s behaviours with greater accuracy than the people themselves.

At the same time, the ‘hyperscale’ at which these companies operate frees them of the need to have large workforces from the societies they operate in. Their employees are fewer, more specialised and able to operate from anywhere in the world. This means that while the companies have the motive, the knowledge, the resources and the political leverage to wield control over the ordinary user’s behaviour, the users have suffered a loss in their reciprocal power to influence the companies’ behaviour in their own favour. Professor Zuboff warns that the ‘choice mechanisms that once adhered to the private realm—exit, voice, and loyalty’ (Zuboff 2019) have been eroded, leaving the users with a serious power deficit compared to the tech companies.

Discourse and hegemony

This worrying gap between the power of the AI developers and deployers and the ordinary citizens in the digital world is further widened by the power of discourse on the subject. The political elite in the United States and elsewhere have identified it as a matter of national security to ‘incentivize investments in and protect the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies’ (NSCAI 2021).  The discourse of national security ties AI to the firmly established ideological hegemony and venerated interests of nationalism that remain difficult to argue with.

Consequently, without much debate at the popular level, ‘AI is not just playing games and doing research; it is doing all sorts of basic activities which until recently could only be done by a person’ from taking restaurant orders, to driving cars, to advising on prisoner parole and sentencing, writing legal documents, plays and music, diagnosing certain medical conditions, and providing care, comfort and companionship to those who may have only their devices for company.

Veale and Borgius (2021) noted in connection with the public consultation on EU’s draft AI Act that ‘[I]t is unclear whether limited existing efforts to include stakeholder representation will enable the deep and meaningful engagement needed from affected communities’. This is because the ‘dual-use’ nature of AI, the possibilities of developing it for military and economic purposes both, has begun a power rivalry amongst the dominant nations that has left the public behind. Bareis and Katzenbach (2022) have expostulated that governments ‘are themselves powerful players in shaping our perception and expectation of AI’ in an article that was tellingly titled ‘Talking AI into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national AI strategies and their performative politics’. Veale further analysed the policy stance even in the most sympathetic of regulators, i.e., the EU, in 2020 and found that

considerations of whether ‘computing’ was useful in a given context were often felt to be less important than simply increasing the availability or intensity of digital use.

The desirability of digital is often taken as a given in the current state of discourse on the subject around the globe.

People on the global power periphery

What all this amounts to is that the loss of power experienced by the citizens in the Global North is in danger of being magnified manifold in the Global South, particularly with respect to those at the periphery. The promise of the internet, in its early era, was of promoting freedom and democratic rights for people around the world. The potential of the digital to enable connectivity and voice for millions of people who were without any means of creating solidarities of action with others still survives in popular imagination and in the policy initiatives of multinational organisations like the United Nations. Since 2003, the United Nations has been a staunch supporter of promoting digital solutions to developmental and climate problems, declaring them to be a ‘major catalyst[s] for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ in 2020.

Yet, as Png points out ‘[B]oth the Global South and Global North are heterogeneous’ (2023). It is therefore somewhat dangerous to continue with discussing ‘power asymmetries and unequal distribution of AI risks’ (Png 2023) as if they fall neatly into one of the two categories of those applying to the Global North and those applying to the Global South. The difficulties arising from putting the power of AI in the hands of governments that may not have the capacity or the will to resist economic incentives should not be minimised. Cutler (2021) further highlights that in the current climate of international capitalism,

transnational legal regimes prioritise ‘“the protection of the property and economic interests of transnational corporations over the right to regulate of states and the right to the self-determination of peoples”’.

Thus even democratically-minded governments in the Global South are in an unequal position against corporations that can often command more resources than a majority of governments.

This emasculation of the political and legal structures leaves the most vulnerable communities fighting ‘for resources, for rights, for territory, for survival and for profit’ in a grossly unjust and untenable manner. In the ‘Introduction’ to the 2020 report on ‘Technology, the environment and a sustainable world’ by Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch), Alan Finlay points out the importance of framing issues in making visible ‘what is governable, or can be governed’.

Once discussion begins from taking the digital as the best possible option under all circumstances, it becomes arduous to weigh up the benefits and losses of situations like the ones reported on by Nobrega and Varon in this report. With data, images and academic discussion, the authors clearly establish that while Google’s supply chain for its electronics business includes suppliers mining the Amazon rainforest for minerals, it also proposes to save the forest by putting sensors on the trees that will feed local sounds to its AI for recognising such information as the sound of chainsaws. They say,

‘On one hand, the company extracts minerals causing deforestation and threatening Indigenous lands and ways of living, on the other, it offers AI to connect with what some have awkwardly called the “Internet of Trees”‘.

‘Exercise of power through technical strategies’

Google’s approach, typical of all large digital technology firms whether from the US or China fits into Andrew Feenberg’s description of exercising power through such technical strategies. With multistakeholder organisations like the United Nations also providing the technology companies further platforms to showcase their visions, the entire global discourse is structured to enable the identification of ‘problems’ to be solved by technical means only. To use Martin Heidegger’s words, ‘the technological mood’ of our era has scarcely any space for non-technological solutions.

The collection of data from the forest, when subsumed in the virtuous categories of environmentalism, seems like a common-sense beneficial solution to help the local communities. However, what is hidden in plain sight is that the clear objective of commercial firms is to make profit. Hence, data extraction becomes a form of control exerted under a hegemony created by such discourses when the solutions demanded by the local people clash with ‘top-down solutions’ (Nobrega and Varon 2020).

Identifying with the indigenous people of the rainforest, Nobrega and Varon, (‘As [they]… are both originally from Brazil’), clarify instead that the people there want to decide for themselves, they ‘want to get to where the production chains connect; to identify the territories, relationships, common goods and imaginaries they affect. What dynamics are behind the production and use of technology? Which inequalities are reinforced?’ (Nobrega and Varon 2020).

Returning to Professor Zuboff, under the present surveillance capitalism, ‘“User” dependency is … a classic Faustian pact … which … produces a psychic numbing that inures users to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified’ (Zuboff 2019).

Technology has become a form of domination that imposes, though only little-by-little and couched in benevolence-speak, an alien vision of life upon lifeworlds that may choose to value objectives other than commercial profits.

If vocal support for democracy is to carry real weight, the multistakeholder global institutions need to ensure that the people on the global periphery are allowed the power and the space to articulate their alternative visions of the future with adequate force, even when their forests hold the minerals required for commercial and technological development identified by some of the most powerful state and non-state interests.

Png suggests that a truly democratic and equitable AI governance debate will allow 3 roles for the Global South voices: to challenge ‘exclusionary governance mechanisms’, to provide local expertise grounded in historic and whole-system approaches, and provide alternative governance mechanisms (Png 2023).

Proposal for creation of fairer reciprocities

In that same spirit of proposing simple but concrete ways to remove such glaring inequities from the prevailing environment for the use of AI, I propose a global remuneration system for the data providers that should go some way towards the creation of the missing reciprocities that Professor Zuboff has pointed out. Though I have little experience or knowledge of the banking and accounting systems but I am hoping that those with better knowledge will still see the germ of a usable idea in what I am proposing here.

Following Marx’s theory of surplus value in the 19th century, Morreale et al have proposed that what is being extracted in the data extraction process of AI development is ‘humanness’, which is the real source of value in the AI development process.

Agreeing with Morreale et al, I suggest that it is, therefore, reasonable to assert that even the free internet services and apps are not truly ‘free’ and a small remuneration for the raw material of data is in order. My proposal has the following steps:

1.  A monetary value should be attached to each datum, such as each ‘like’ or ‘share’ that is ‘harvested’ by a company.
2. The value can be a small, almost infinitesimal amount. However, it should be mandatory for all AI systems to have the built-in facility to monitor and calculate this value per piece of data for each time of its use.
3. As there are machine learning systems that are opaque in the way they reach a decision, all the training data ever entered in their systems shall be presumed to have been used each time they act.
4. The value against each piece of data, for each time of use, for each AI system used commercially, whether for a ‘free’ service or a paid one, throughout the world, will be deposited with a global agency under the aegis of the United Nations.
5. Each month, in a well-publicised event, a worldwide lottery draw will choose winners.
6. The names of the people in the draw will be entered from national censuses around the world and no actual lottery tickets will be sold.
7. Prizes will only go to individuals, with extra weightage awarded to those of the poorest means.
8. Those above a given threshold of income from each country will not be eligible. 
9. There will be a ceiling on the amount that any one individual can acquire through this process.
10. No one will be entered into the draw in the same year they have already been a winner.
11. The administration charges for the work will be deducted before the prize draws are made.

I visualise the benefits of this system as:

• to effect a fairer distribution of wealth being generated through the use of AI than is currently the case.
• to encourage debates and awareness of AI in affected communities.
• to allow alternative visions to form and crystallise about problems that are currently being solved with AI or other technologies only.
• the digital solutions can continue to be proposed by the companies, but their profit-making nature will be clearer.
• the data providers will become more aware of the value of their data, helping them to choose how they share their data in a more informed manner.
• the lottery draws can also become a monthly forum for debating non-digital solutions to given problems, balancing costs and benefits of digital solutions in a more holistic and not merely in a monetary context.

I am aware that this is a step that will need to be refined if it is to be implemented and I hope others will build on it. In the context of the US–China rivalry in the AI field, it may be fitting to end with the words of Mao Zedong, whose spirit was not observed at the time, but let’s hope can be captured now: ‘Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture’.

References

 

EU’s AI Act: Why do we need it?

Part 4: The digitalised environment and the threats to the existing social contract

Social contract is an important conceptual tool often used to delineate the basic features of a legitimate government, the justifications for it and the nature and scope of its role vis-à-vis the governed. It ‘is concerned with public justification, i.e., “of determining whether or not a given regime is legitimate and therefore worthy of loyalty” (D’Agostino 1996, 23)’ (D’Agostino et al. 2024). Hutan Ashrafian identifies the fact that the concept had been known in ancient times too (Ashrafian 2023, p. 1448), however, it was revived by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in England in the 17th century, and has since been utilised most prominently by John Locke (1632–1704), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and John Rawls (1921–2002).

AI use is spreading at a time of loss of trust in governments and institutions and deep polarisation in society. Digitalisation is in part both a cause and effect of this environment. We are faced with, what Anu Bradford has called a battle of ‘digital empires’ (Bradford 2023). This battle involves both ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ value clashes. The horizontal clashes are battles between governments that represent democratic vs authoritarian cultural values, while the ‘vertical’ battles are between governments and Big Tech, whose domain of influence stretches across territorial boundaries. Under the circumstances, a broad consensus on what constitutes legitimate power distribution in society must ground itself in certain principles drawn from across a wide range of philosophical and political ideas.

What follows is an exploration, first, of the threats to the existing social contract in the current environment, and, second, the next blog in the series explores some essential ideals to underpin a new and just global social contract that can make for a fair ‘division of advantages that arises through social cooperation’ (D’Agostino et al. 2024).

Digital technology and the threat to social contract

Deffains (2022) argues that our current ‘social contract’ – the implicit understanding we have of the legitimate role of government and of the rights and duties of individuals and entities forming society – was forged during a period when ‘work filled all the space’ (Deffains 2022, p. 234). People’s identities were often linked to their work, as was their level of safety and security against risks such as accidents, illnesses and unemployment. A progressive vision and implementation of this social contract envisaged a ‘mutualization of risks’ within national boundaries. It created a ‘solidarity’ amongst the people on principles akin to Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Since no one knew what risks they might face in future, they agreed to a sharing, or ‘redistribution’, of their advantages with those more afflicted, to ensure they had some level of security should they be so afflicted too.

Fig. 1: John Rawls’ idea of the ‘veil of ignorance’

Deffains sees this veil of ignorance being torn asunder by the latest technological developments. On the one hand, automation is forcing a larger number of people into ‘less routine tasks that are more autonomous but less protected’ (p. 234), on the other, ‘increasingly sophisticated processing’ (p. 243) of individual data seems to be bringing nearer the prediction of risk for each individual separately in terms of their health risks, employment risks and so on. Under these circumstances, solidarity in society is ‘confronted with the promise of increasingly individualized solutions’ to life’s risks (p. 245). Once people know their own level of risks, will they still stand in solidarity with those facing greater levels as is the case at the moment, or will each individual be expected to carry their own burden of risk?

This level of risk prediction, however, is not merely a threat to social solidarity, it also threatens the individual. The gain of knowledge about themselves is bought by individuals at a cost of their freedom. The lightening spread of ever more user-friendly devices like smartphones and even electronic toothbrushes means the ‘user–customer’ is under constant ‘surveillance’. Their data is being ‘constantly analyzed and dissected [and]… manipulated’ (p. 243) for the creation of more paid-for services and a ‘mental substitution system’ where our devices think for us, guiding, persuading and nudging us ‘to act progressively according to standardized and normalized patterns (eat well, sleep well, do sports, do not smoke)’ (p. 244). The surveillance here is of the finest Foucauldian variety so that we rarely feel our freedom slipping away with the drip-drip suction of our data.

Fig. 2: The ways in which AI affects individuals and social solidarity (based on Deffains 2022)

 

The role of Big Tech

Yet, taken together, the situation represents a serious threat to freedom, democracy and perhaps even the very existence of humanity. Michon and Hyppolite (2018) analysed the business practices of the American ‘Big Tech’, or the few technological giants who dominate the digital tech industry that include Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (owner of Google), Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, IBM and Qualcom (they focus on the American firms though more recently some Chinese firms have joined the group of huge international tech operators too) to conclude that ‘the American tech giants have acquired dominant positions, which they now use to hamper competition’. Following these practices and leveraging the respect for science and technology as the ‘foundation of humanity’s march toward progress’ (Deffains 2022, p. 248), these firms have added significant political and popular influence to their economic power without corresponding accountability.

Their services, often seemingly free to the user, e.g., Google searches and Facebook communication, provide them with the ‘data’ that is the bread and meat of their businesses, helping them devise new products that further increase their reach. While competition and anti-trust laws struggle to keep pace with the emerging business practices of digital operators, which are different enough from more traditional business practices to often evade the reach of the existing laws, the power of Big Tech grows and spreads in the lives of ordinary individuals who now increasingly work through digital media as well as conduct leisure and social activities through them.

Both Deffains, and Michon and Hippolyte warn that these firms have their own visions of the future that, if realised, can translate their economic power into an overlordship that can potentially stretch from political control to what Feenberg has called ‘psychic oppression’ (Feenberg 2024, 30:34) of the individual. Writing of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), Deffains says that ‘they also have a dominant and universal vision (identity, currency, power, etc.) which is dangerous if left unchecked’. Michon and Hippolyte point to the fact that the tech giants are careful to hoard a substantial amount of their ‘unparalleled’ profits, unlike other similar companies that tend to reinvest, while a much higher ratio of their R&D budget is spent on developing new products that are likely to extend their reach into ever newer areas, e.g., driverless cars, augmented reality and solar-powered drones.

 

 

Fig. 3: Comparison of R&D expenditure in percentage of revenues

© Fondation pour l’innovation politique, November 2018. Source: https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/big-tech-dominance-2-a-barrier-to-technological-innovation/

Other ethical issues

 

Other ethical problems about AI and Big Data include ‘platform and monopoly power [10-12], social media and its effects on human relations [13], and issues related to human cognition, polarization, filter bubbles, and pressure to conform [1,4,5,14] … privacy and surveillance [15,16], the manipulative power of tech [17,18], algorithmic bias resulting in racist and discriminatory AI systems [6,8,19,20] , and the carbon footprint of AI and Big Data [21-23]’ (Sætra et al 2021, p. 16).

The next blog in the series explores some fundamental principles that need to be incorporated into the new social contract to mitigate the effects of these threats and safeguard liberty and justice for people everywhere.

References

D’Agostino, F., Gaus, G. and Thrasher, J. (2024) ‘Contemporary approaches to the social contract’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), forthcoming [online]. Available at:  https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2024/entries/contractarianism-contemporary/ (accessed 9.3.24).

Deffains, B. (2022) ‘Rethinking the social contract in the digital age’ in Ytheir, J.M. (co-ordinator), Economic reason and political reason: deliberation and the construction of public space in the society of communication. London: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 227–258.

Feenberg, A. (2024) ‘Andrew Feenberg: Marcuse and the New Left – Book Launch’ [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5faYzlSTORE&ab_channel=SFU%27sVancityOfficeofCommunityEngagement (accessed 10.3.24).

Michon, A. and Hyppolite, P. A., ‘Big Tech dominance (2): A barrier to technological innovation?’, December 2018 [online]. Available at:   https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/big-tech-dominance-2-a-barrier-to-technological-innovation/   (accessed 10.3.24).

Sætra, H.S., Coeckelbergh, M. and Danaher, J. (2022) ‘The AI ethicist’s dilemma: fighting Big Tech by supporting Big Tech’, AI Ethics, 2, 15–27 [online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00123-7 (accessed 15.3.24).