George Orwell
It’s all about tech.
15 February 2019 (Munich, Germany) – If there is one theme at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) this year, it is this: when looking at the current state of international affairs, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the world is not just witnessing a series of smaller and bigger crises, but that there is a more fundamental problem. Indeed, we seem to be experiencing a reshuffling of core pieces of the international order. A new era of great power competition is unfolding between the United States, China, and Russia, accompanied by a certain leadership vacuum in what has become known as the liberal international order. And the role of technology in all of this has seemed to astound everybody.
I will return to this bigger theme after MSC concludes. Herein some brief notes on a wall, tech’s new power play, and malicious AI.
That Wall
Trump liked the idea of declaring a national emergency because it’s the maximalist, most dramatic option. Trump never gravitates towards complexity. And the reprogramming of funds to allow more wall spending, without declaring an emergency, would have been complicated to explain to voters.
When he declared a national emergency just a few hours ago, most of the people in the room with me were watching on their phones. It was his trademark maximalist impulse. As one of my fellow attendees noted “it is so typical of him. Building a ‘Great Wall’ versus the mix of security solutions recommended by border experts, or his repeated threats to ‘kill all of NAFTA’. Or his calls for a ‘full’, rather than gradual, withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan. Twitter has created a monster. God, technology sucks!”
Yes, Twitter has created a monster but I was not in the mood to discuss the nuances of “technology sucks”. And it was vintage Trump who makes big decisions substantially through the lens of: “What can I sell to my people?” Trump consistently thinks in terms of public relations: when people ask him what he achieved during the shutdown, look at his quotes: “I got the nation to focus on the border, and I got the media to talk about nothing but the border for a month”. Government by Twitter.
Trump’s use of social media is overturning decades of conventional wisdom from scholars of communications and management (and some anthropologists) about the use and misuse of political power. Trump has triumphed over the space-time continuum.
Big Tech’s new power playbook
Amazon’s retreat from New York City reveals the dynamics of a new power game: giant tech companies play as equals with governments, with massive influence over economies and communities. Amazon gave us a glimpse into the new playbook of how a tech company, functioning like a quasi-state, can flex its power:
- Close the doors: dicker with cities and states in secret
- Hide your cards: tell the other side what you want without letting on how flexible you’re actually going to be
- Change the game: Amazon may prefer to rewrite its expansion plan rather than horse-trade with demanding and unpredictable local elected officials.
But there is also the other way to play the game. Google and Apple have been undertaking major expansions outside Silicon Valley, with a lot less tax money and a lot less drama. Apple said a year ago it was looking at a spot outside of California and Texas in which to expand. It decided instead to expand in Austin, pledging to invest $1 billion there. It also is setting up new offices in Seattle, San Diego and the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City, and expanding operations in Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Portland, Oregon and Boulder, Colo. Impact: no public search, minor tax breaks.
And lost in the flurry of stories about Amazon’s play in New York was this: Google announced last year a major expansion in New York, spending $2.4 billion to acquire Chelsea Market and then, in December, announcing a further $1 billion investment. Impact: lots of jobs in New York, no tax breaks.
The new AI fake text generator
And the world is aghast because the creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed “deepfakes for text” – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse. This has echoes of the moratorium on genetic engineering of bacteria in the 1970s. That eventually escaped into the wild. This neural network development will also escape into the wild. It deserves a longer analysis but just a few points:
- Yet another troubling example of just how good AI is getting at fooling us. (Another one you might have missed this week: the website that automatically generates new human faces. None of them are real. They are generated through AI. Refresh the site for a new face. For the story click here).
- Last night I read the brief on how this new AI was developed. Originally, the researchers aimed to create a general-purpose language algorithm to help translate text or answer questions. It could have beneficial uses, like summarizing text or improving chatbots’ conversational skills. But the potential for abuse was quickly realised and that outweighed everything – for now.
- And the killer lines? It will not be long before AI can “reliably produce fake stories, bogus Tweets, duplicitous comments and change documents that are even more convincing than what AI can produce now. It’s very clear that as this technology matures – and we give it one or two years – it will be used for disinformation or propaganda that even Orwell would find amazing”. Notice “as it matures” and not “if it matures”.
- And while the impressive results are a remarkable leap beyond existing language models, the technique used to achieve them isn’t exactly new. Instead, the breakthrough is primarily driven by feeding the algorithm ever more training data – a trick that has also been responsible for most of the other recent advancements in teaching AI to process and compose text.
- More to come.
To conclude …
The breathtaking advance of scientific discovery and technology has the unknown on the run. Not so long ago, the Creation was 8,000 years old and Heaven hovered a few thousand miles above our heads. Now Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the observable Universe spans 92 billion light years.
But I think as we are hurled headlong into this frenetic pace we suffer from illusions of understanding, a false sense of comprehension, failing to see the looming chasm between what our brain knows and what our mind is capable of accessing. It’s a problem, of course. Science has spawned a proliferation of technology that has dramatically infiltrated all aspects of modern life. In many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies.
So we owe it to ourselves to step back at some point and do some “big thinks”. This is partly because we live via pieces: shards, ostraca, palimpsests, sometimes crumbling codices with missing pages. But mostly we live on a barrage of news clips from CNN, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and [“name-your-social-media-blaster”]. We have created an environment which rewards simplicity and shortness, which punishes complexity and depth. Yes, we may never know more than part, as “through a glass darkly”, and all knowledge comes to us in pieces, but we do owe ourselves “big think” time.
That is my goal this year. Enjoy your weekend. I leave you with Mary Oliver, an American poet and my next-door neighbor when I lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. More about her here.
