It really does feel good to see so many people from so many places around the world convening in good faith to figure out how we can all work together to help the future go well.
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. So, it’s my first time at any sort of function of the United Nations. Not gonna lie—I’m pretty excited about it, and I want to thank you all for inviting me.
This is the 20th annual meeting of the UN Internet Governance Forum. And it’s no surprise that this year, we’re mostly here talking about artificial intelligence. It’s easy to see that AI is very quickly changing the Internet. And arguably, it’s poised to change the whole world. Of course, nobody knows yet exactly how. Personally, I believe in this new technology’s potential to help make life better in so many ways, solving big problems, expanding knowledge, and creating beauty. But I also see the potential for great harm, a concentration of power, and a denigration of humanity itself.
So, how do we get the good stuff and avoid the bad stuff, right? Well, I think that one key is in the very name of this gathering, the Internet Governance Forum. We have to have some governance. We have to establish some values, and make some rules, and set up systems to enforce those rules. And that might sound obvious, but I’m sure you’re all aware, where I’m from, in the United States, a lot of powerful people are taking the position that AI companies shouldn’t be subject to much governance. Right now, our Congress is getting close to passing a bill that would prohibit any of our fifty states from making new laws to govern this technology for the next ten years.
Their idea is that instead of developing AI according to laws, we should develop it according to the Free Market. We should be letting business incentives, and business incentives alone, guide how this revolutionary technology unfolds. We should be putting our trust in a small handful of private companies who ultimately aren’t accountable to anybody but their shareholders. But we know from history that this doesn’t work. Look at the last twenty years of social media. Governments largely stayed hands-off, we put our trust in Silicon Valley, and yeah social media has been beneficial in a lot of ways, but it’s also been deeply damaging in a lot of other ways that we might have been able to mitigate if we’d been more proactive with our governance.
I imagine a lot of you here have a number of good ideas for how to govern AI. I’ll just briefly mention the specific idea I’m here to talk about, and I’ll be diving more deeply into it later today. It’s the basic principle that your digital self should belong to you: that the data produced by human beings—our writings, our voices, our connections, our experiences, our ideas—should belong to us; and that any economic value generated from this data should be shared with the humans who produce it.
But now, here’s my point—this basic principle will not be honored by the Free Market. And in fact, a lot of the biggest AI businesses in the industry are lobbying hard against it right now. It’s just one example of why we can’t put all our eggs in the business incentive basket, and why profit-driven companies need guardrails in place to help drive them towards serving the public good.
“I know governing technology looks like an uphill battle from here,” said the American standing on a stage in Scandinavia. But I take heart in gatherings like this. And I thank you all for being here, especially those of you working in the public sector, when you could probably be getting a bigger salary somewhere else—thank you for fighting the good fight. I look forward to meeting and talking with you all here. Thanks again.
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