This was my second time participating in the UN’s Internet Governance Forum, and both times gave me an inspiring dose of hope for the future. I want to write more about it soon, but for now, here’s the transcript of the speech I gave:
🔴
Madam President of the General Assembly, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen — Thanks so much for having me here at the United Nations for the World Summit on the Information Society. I want to acknowledge the co-facilitators of this year’s summit, Kenya and Albania, as well as the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
This is a special milestone summit marking 20 years since the UN first adopted a set of shared principles for a human-centric digital world. And certainly, a lot has happened in the digital world these last 20 years.
We saw the rise of social media, which in a lot of ways really made good on the promise of what the Internet could be — a place where anybody’s voice could be heard, and anybody looking for connection and belonging could find their community.
But then, as market pressures set in, we saw social media gradually change. What had been about connection became more about addiction. Addiction to an algorithmic feed maximizing user engagement and ad revenue. And the side effects of these profit-driven algorithms have been hugely damaging: a global crisis of mental health and loneliness especially for young people, a rise in polarization, extremism, authoritarianism, with the impacts often worst for people in developing countries.
So, looking back on the last 20 years, here’s my question: are we going to learn from our past mistakes? Because today, we find ourselves at a crossroads, with a new revolutionary technology on the rise — AI.
Just like with social media, AI has the potential to do so much good. But let’s be clear, today’s biggest AI companies are running the same engagement maximizing algorithms, driven by the same advertising business model as the biggest social media companies.
So if we let the design and deployment of this incredible new technology be guided solely by business incentives, we can expect the same damaging side effects we’ve seen from social media — though probably worse this time, because there’s a lot more compute power in use and a lot more money at stake.
But this is not inevitable. The AI revolution can be guided by more than just market forces. Governments need to get in the game. For the past 20 years, governments have mostly stayed hands-off with digital technology. We’ve let these businesses deploy their products to billions of people with practically no guardrails. It has not worked out well. But I think things are changing.
I just met with a gentleman here from the Australian government, and as you all know, Australia has just enacted landmark legislation standing up to big social media companies to protect their youth from these predatory algorithms. And now more and more countries are moving in that direction. Change is possible.
And I believe it’s you all, here in this room and all over the world, you civil servants — who serve civilization, not just the bottom line, you serve the people, you serve everybody, especially the most vulnerable amongst us. This is your time to step up, and work together with business and industry, to build a brighter future.
And so I just want to say: thank you. As a father of three kids, as a citizen of a democracy, and just as a human being… Thank you for everything you’re doing. Keep going. Your work is deeply appreciated. Thanks again. 🔴
