 Good afternoon. I don't think there's any other person who has a chaired Professorship at the Harvard Law School who would be doing his own AV, but of course It is thrilling to welcome you all to this splendid occasion We will soon hear the lecture love the processor hate the process the temptations of clever algorithms And when to resist them by Jonathan Zittrain, but first you have to hear from me We are here to mark the splendid occasion of the appointment of Jonathan Zittrain as the George Bemis professor of International law Everyone here knows Jonathan some know him as Jay-Z more on that later but that won't stop me from telling you about him and indeed raving about him and Some may be surprised by the association with international law. So I thought I'd create a little mystery stay tuned First I'm really delighted to welcome some special guests several members of Jay-Z's families sister professor Laurie Zittrain Eisenberg Brother-in-law dr. Michael Eisenberg and niece Hannah Eisenberg and fiance Laura knee house Now the mystery of the international law chair and why a chair named for George Bemis is not only appropriate but elegant for our remarkable Jonathan Zittrain Bemis attended Harvard College and studied law at Harvard Law School and earned his degree not that long ago 1839 he was born nearly 100 years ago in 1816 just up the road in Watertown, Massachusetts His ancestors actually helped to found the town of Watertown in the 1640s while in law school Bemis taught Classes at the Charlestown State Prison and this experience stoked his passion for reform for prison reform initially and his initial focus was the system of cumulative punishment and His work produced an overhaul of the scale of criminal penalties actually something we might well use again now Bemis made news in 1844 when he defended a convict on trial for murdering a prison warden by using Bemis that is an extenuating plea of insanity and uncontrollable impulse this led to his Invitation to assist Attorney General John Clifford in the prosecution of what became the most famous or infamous trial of its time The Dr. George Parkman trial one of the first trials in the United States to use forensic evidence British historian Simon Shama published a book about it PBS did a documentary about it if you're interested you can even see The books on the iPhone application. That's about it. Okay So you see this is all connected in one way or another Bemis retired to Europe and Live the rest of his life abroad and turned his attention to international law and serve the United States Government in connection with the claims for compensation lodged against the British government for permitting the Confederate cruiser Alabama to take on arms and escaped from British ports during the Civil War He also Rope pamphlets relating to the problems and issues of neutrals and belligerence in wartime. This is all gonna connect. I promise When he died he in his will he provided for the founding of a professor and he said in his will and I quote He wanted to pay tribute to and I quote the instruction Which I derive from the legal department through the lips of the late judge story whose memory I cherish as one of the best guides to study whom I ever shall have the good fortune to meet and whose friendly stimulus to exertion Exertion I shall always gratefully remember the terms of the gift call for establishing and maintaining a professorship of public or International law and I will give you the choice you could have it be called public law But I'm gonna make the case right here for international law Because be miss wrote that he wants the recipient to be a practical Cooperator and I'm quoting him in the work of advancing knowledge and goodwill among nations and governments for that object I should prefer if practicable the incumbent should have had some official connection with public or diplomatic life Or at least have had an opportunity by foreign travel or residents to look at the United States from a foreign point of view and so to estimate it Only one of the family of nations Okay, here it comes Who better than Jonathan Zittrain can bring a practical sense of cooperation in advancing knowledge and goodwill and Look at the United States from a foreign point of view Then the person who understands the internet better than anybody then the person who? Actually has served in the government and served the government in addressing Issues of our new day who's lived in these very foreign parts Silicon Valley Oxford NYU Stanford and who actually most importantly Has the incredible commitment and ability to come up with ideas like what if When there's a service attack you had the different service providers behave as if they were on the sea during wartime Finding a way to cooperate and help each other. That's Jonathan Zittrain So a little bit more about him because I can't resist I don't know any other professor in the history of Harvard University who has Been as heralded that he is under such demand that he is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at the Engineering school as well as at the law school and here at the law school He is faculty director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society itself a university Center and he is the co-founder of it, but that's not all He's also vice dean for library and information resources and as the director of the Harvard Law School library He has brought an extraordinary vision about how information should be accessible and open to all and How to innovate constantly to innovate to come up with practical solutions to problems like Stack life so that when you zoom in and you find the right thing through your digital searching You also have the serendipity experience of seeing what's next to it on the shelf and Library cloud another project both of them recognized by the Stanford Prize for Innovation and Research Libraries and H2o how many of you have encountered h2o anybody here? so the possibility of using the digital resources to bust open the monopoly of Publishers on the case publishing business something that hits me in the heart because I'm an editor of two casebooks and Free the law free the law a fascinating and exciting project to open up the resources and riches of the Harvard Law Library to the world a Man of capacious intellect. There's a reason why he's known by just his initials He's a rock star Jay Z and underlying all of these talents is just an extraordinary level of generosity and friendliness and good humor Good humor. You'll see some in evidence making him such an extraordinary teacher and collaborator Child of two lawyers one of his early books was a look at the tort law through the work of his father who had been attorney for football player mean Joe Green and In his introduction to that book Jonathan Wright said he and his co-author who was also the child of a lawyer Were grounded in and taught to love the law at early ages by our parents When he was undergraduate he studied Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence A magna cum laude graduate of this school. His name is engraved on a plaque in Langdell for winning the Williston negotiation Competition this explains how you've no He also has a master's degree From the JFK school of government and he has as I've already alluded to been a professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and was a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute He's been a visiting professor at NYU University School of Law and at Stanford Law School and his research interests range from battles for control of digital property and content to Cryptography electronic privacy the role of intermediaries within internet architecture and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education His many books include the future of the internet and how to stop it And he crowdsourced the cover So in every aspect of his work he exemplifies the cutting-edge innovative approach that informs his ideas his students and he collaborated on a website called chilling effects which tracks and archives legal threats that are made to internet content providers and He performed the first large-scale tests of internet filtering in China and in Saudi Arabia as part of the open-net Initiative get it international International law, but the end and he created the website herdict which is a user driven platform for identifying web Lockages as they happen including denial of service attacks censorship and other kinds of filtering a leader in the global Conversation about access to information I can't tell you after the Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum each year I get this wave of e-mails saying Any Jonathan's it train is incredible which I know and some of these messages are in another language So that's really something he wrote an open letter earlier this year to British Prime Minister David Cameron warning against Upending the long-established balance of security and privacy and his four-point message to the British Prime Minister shows What a great teacher Jay-Z is and that may be one of the many reasons why Harvard University featured him in his 375th anniversary as one of the great teachers and then there's foreign policy magazine Recognizing him as one of the 100 foreign policy global thinkers get it international law He serves on the board of trustees of the internet society and electronic freedom foundation He has taught me as a colleague and as a co-teacher more than I could possibly tell you He's on the board of advisors for the scientific American He's a member of the council on foreign relations He's been a forum fellow at the World Economic Forum which named him a young global leader and he still counts as young for sure And he was appointed chair of the open internet advisory committee Which was called for by the federal communications commission to track and evaluate the effects of the FCC's open internet rules and To provide recommendations to to that Commission regarding policies and practices related to preserving the open internet He was appointed also to serve as the first distinguished scholar of the FCC and in making that announcement The chair of the Commission who is also an alum of Harvard Law School Julie Sheneckowski described Jonathan and I quote as one of the world's leading strategic thinkers on communications policy in the 21st century as I turned to Jonathan. I will briefly Tell him I couldn't resist crowdsourcing a little bit So I did ask a couple people what I should say about you and I'll just share too. They're just too many to share one Is from Dan Meltzer the story professor of law who says as a student Jonathan was much as he is today brilliant poised exuberant and hilarious one day in response to a question in class he answered Yes Only was so talented and justifiably self-confident a student what I have dared to respond Mr. Zitrin says yes, can anyone think of a shorter and possibly more accurate answer And Dan Meltzer goes on to say Jonathan appreciated the retort even more than anyone else And now he's gone on to become a renowned scholar internationally recognized figure and indeed a celebrity of sorts his good humor his enthusiasm and His decency towards others have remained undiminished Finally Larry Lessig the Roy L. Furman professor of law says One source of JZ's brilliance is his ability to keep constantly in view the views of everyone in his audience Whether writing speaking or teaching and engaging in a way that responds to even a radically mixed audience of views Never did I see that skill tested more severely than when we were teaching an eye law class in Brazil At a celebratory dinner our host honored the leaders of the course and Jay-Z in particular By inviting an incredibly scantily clad actually almost not clad Brazilian dancer to dance with Jay-Z in front of the assembled students and teachers This created an obvious conflict as the audience ranged between people from our perspective who thought there's the display quite Inappropriate to people who thought it expressed traditional and engaged Brazilian culture Jay-Z met the challenge through a mix of hiding under the table and Then when finally fleshed out graciously Acknowledging the invitation to dance with a generous and warm smile and a bow and then a retreat to the applause and laughs of Almost all I introduced to you Jonathan Zittrain the George Bemis professor Thank you very much Martha. I Can't think of the occasion for which hiding under the table is not an appropriate response And I confess I'm somewhat tempted to try it right now, but you've outmaneuvered me There's not room under the lectern and it does seem like Only yesterday even though it was a bit ago now that I was coming from Dan Meltzer's criminal law class having been slightly put in my place and in fact in that era, I remember Right before Thanksgiving break my parents both lawyers were coming to visit me at Harvard Law for the first time and I was very excited to show them the place and They arrived on the Wednesday of Thanksgiving weekend and the one thing my dad wanted to do while he was here that he'd been talking about Was he really wanted to see the library? He loved libraries. He loved history. He was so excited to see Langdell library Which as law libraries go was a pretty good one I must say and I Was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll see the library But first I got to show you the hark and I was just the folly of youth I don't know what I was thinking or you know why a thall which used to be here And I think they performed an exorcism after they knocked it down, but I Just showed him everything and it was finally getting late in the day and he's like, you know We really need please can we see the library? I'm like, all right We'll go right now and so we're walking over towards Langdell with big windows You can see in and as we're walking we see in sequence the lights going off in Langdell and I'm like run for it and we go up the stairs and Basically get to the entrance of Langdell. It's pitch black inside and there's the guy walking up And I'm just like, you know, please my parents are here You're about to close for all the Thanksgiving weekend My dad just really wants to see it. Can you and he looked at me and he said these are Natural gas fired lighting fixtures. It takes 25 minutes to turn them back on which was true before the Langdell Hall renovation and He then managed to meet us halfway He pulled out a flashlight and we got a tour of Langdell Hall reading room by flashlight and You haven't really experienced law school until you So you've done that sadly insurance precludes it now and I Must say though metaphorically speaking. I feel like in the intervening years since I returned here in a new role I feel like metaphorically. I'm still exploring Langdell Hall with a flashlight and to have The help that I have the colleagues the friends the fellows the students who are together in that search Not counting on just the overhead light to do the trick Is part of what makes this place such a wonderful crucible such a great place? to try to explore the world and it's been a particularly special thing in the past year not only to be connecting more with the Berkman Center, but to have a role at the library and both Across the board and with the Innovation Lab staff and I saw its Immediate former co-director David Weinberger was here and it was actually David who Did the some of the programs that Martha mentioned including stack life and library cloud and amazing to see the energy that's here and Really my role these days and just helping to catalyze it and accelerate it And so I just feel so blessed and privileged to be a part of that Beyond the circles of faculty and fellows and friends within the Harvard orbit There are communities of scholars out there and cyber law is one of those fields that has Had relatively recent beginnings and from its beginning its existence questioned the famous article by Larry Lessig on The law of a horse catalogs judge Easterbrook wondering why there's a cyber law at all It makes no more sense than it does to have a law of a horse and in the early days a lot of cyber law was focused around intellectual property issues and what the online world was doing with the copying of information and That then receded and it was sort of quiet for a while. There wasn't a unifying thing We each went off into our own corners and worked on different things And I think I feel another Centripetal moment coming on and what I thought I would talk about today would be some of the Joy and excitement. I'm feeling in the face of a new set of really puzzling challenges that have Feels like overnight, but probably more accurately just in the span of six to 18 months have come into the view of multiple people Simultaneously not just within law, but across multiple disciplines as we're all trying to figure this thing out And that's really what I wanted to talk about Today, so how to talk about that? Well One that kind of anxiety of our time that will definitely I think date this talk as circa 2015 are the worries around what artificial intelligence is going to do to us Bill Gates No less like funny that he would be worrying about it. But yes, Bill Gates is really worried about the threat posed by artificial intelligence Here's Stephen Hawking famed theoretical physicist worrying about it Elon Musk said that AI is nothing short of a threat to humanity with artificial intelligence We are summoning the demon and Nick Bostrom philosopher at Oxford where I spent several years Has this wonderfully newsweek kind of view on it like the end of every newsweek article is The future is unclear, but one thing is certain if things don't get better. They could certainly get a lot worse He says Superintelligence could emerge and while it could be great It could also decide it doesn't humans around or do any number of things that destroy the world So, you know anyone's guess. Let's just wait and watch. Let's just see what happens and I Without spending the rest of the talk on it want to ally myself with those who don't see AI as a big threat I'm actually more optimistic than I am pessimistic about it But this kind of existential angst second only to zombies these days is Capturing a set of anxieties within us that have to do with technology autonomy power and control and those are feelings that aren't coming from nowhere Those are feelings that really are coming from the development of technology wholly apart from whether there's going to be the Terminator as a documentary and so I want to situate these anxieties in a much more present and concrete Context so here's present in concrete or slightly past This is it the page rank algorithm This is what Google originally used and it's not to figure out when crawling a ton of web pages all over the place What to rank what so that when you put in a search term something would come back and It's parallel these days the Facebook newsfeed algorithm so secret I don't have anything to put up on the screen except its result rather than the recipe and For those of you who have been really Working on that book for a while and not doing anything else the Facebook newsfeed will Populate your screen with all sorts of stuff one thing after another that might interest you if you like it You click like if you don't like it you click like and You don't know among of the many hundreds or thousands of things that could appear how Facebook decides What's to show you and I want to now run through? basically five and a half Hypothetical or not so hypothetical situations and capture the zeitgeist of this room Of 2015 as to how we feel about each of these so for each of these at the end I'm going to call for a hum on your view And if you agree in one way at the right moment, you'll hum And if you think the other way at the right moment, you'll hum in the other direction and we'll see where we stand So here's the first hypothetical This is Facebook newsfeed oriented and of course the feed doesn't just show you stuff on the basis of it being off In a corner it's learning about you as you act on or near Facebook And in this case for instance Facebook can predict when two Facebook members are about to enter into a relationship Possibly before even they know it which gives them an opportunity to decide to move things along a little bit by Populating the others feeds with positive things about the first or if it decides it's not a good idea or a Would-be-in-law who's not pleased writes them a check could decide to Pull them apart kind of thing That's a little far-fetched So far, but with this kind of knowledge you can imagine a more concrete hypothetical that I broached last summer Based on this very real experiment done off the congressional elections of 2010 in that November of 2010 Facebook in conjunction with some researchers did an incredible thing They salted the news feeds of tens of millions of visitors to Facebook on election day from North America With this message that says today is election day You can find your polling place and here are some of your friends in particular who have voted Facebook is in a privileged position to know that and They waited to see for those whose feeds they put the message in did they vote out of proportion To those who didn't have their feeds have anything in it and the answer was yes statistically significantly so and Enough that for an election as close as the US presidential election of the year 2000 in Florida It could have tipped the election in one way or another with a number of extra votes depending on what Facebook Had done. Sorry. Here's a hypothetical suppose that it's the 2016 presidential election and Facebook has a firm view as a company is represented say through Mark Zuckerberg about who should win the election and Mark decides to put reminders in the feeds of take your pick Republicans or Democrats whoever you don't like most and It alerts them to go to the polls and it says nothing To those who you like and who Facebook doesn't and let us suppose as a result We can document that the election outcome was changed. So here's what I'm going to call for a hum At the count of three if you think that that would be an awful thing to do Facebook absolutely should not do that and if it did do it They should possibly be in line for some form of punishment. Let me know with a hum on the count of three one two three Alright, so a somewhat uncertain hum, but consistent if you think that's perfectly fine Electioneering is the name of the game. Let the good times roll Facebook is entitled to do it. It pleases Let me know with a hum one two three Okay, like three people in the front row have a view couldn't see if it was Charles Freed. I Will withdraw that Calum knee right now but All right, it sounds like pretty lopsided not happy with that. Let's move on Here's the next hypothetical and this was highlighted by Berkman fellow Zane up to Fiki thinking about the two events that consumed us last summer as a nation first the riots in Ferguson and the after-effects and Second the ice bucket challenge. These were the two things that were really big from the summer of 2014 and Here's what Zane up assembled noticing about this fact first that as Ferguson was getting more and more Unrestful you could see in this chart of Twitter mentions Ferguson going off the charts Twitter everybody's mentioning it retweeting stuff about Ferguson going off the charts And then others were starting to notice. It's so weird My tweet stream is wall-to-wall Ferguson only two mentions of it in my Facebook news feed What's going on? And in fact it does turn out that Facebook news feeds had many more ice bucket challenges than they did Talk of Ferguson. So here's now the hypothetical Suppose it's the summer of 2015 and it's not Ferguson. It's some other town and we don't even know why but there is unrest in that town and you are at Facebook and A law enforcement official perhaps the new US Attorney General Calls and says I'm not going to order you to do anything But I want you to know that unrest is looking like it might spread to other cities And we have reason to think that when people are uploading videos well short of incitement But still that are showing unrest in this town. It might spread to other towns We are asking as a civic duty in the interests of protecting safety physical safety We are asking you to do a few fewer shares in news feeds of Video of violence taking place in this town and a little bit more of The ice bucket challenge of the day Okay, that's the question. How many people? Say Absolutely, not I will not do that Whatever this roulette wheel of an algorithm that even I don't understand spits out is what they're gonna get by gum I won't hand tweak it. How many say that one two three? All right, very confident humming now. How many people are like I am open to that Discussion because I believe in saving lives one two three That was if you're laughing while humming it's hard to hear but Less enthusiasm about that Okay, let's mark that less enthusiasm than the first at this kind of maneuver Should say by the way one inference about why there was less Ferguson on Facebook much was ascribed to Facebook Somehow in cahoots with the government trying to tamp down news out of Ferguson I think it was actually that Facebook was really excited about hosting native video and the ice bucket challenge happened at Just the moment that they were pushing native video up if you recorded a video and put it on Facebook They really wanted to share it because they wanted to promote it and in fact, that's what made the ice bucket challenge take off I can think of no other explanation for why pouring ice on your head in order to avoid giving to charity Would be something that would be extremely exciting to do All right third example For the longest time if you perform to search in Google not on the word Jewish But on the word Jew One of the top hits in this case the second hit would be the site Jew watch calm The most comprehensive and easiest to use because sometimes websites are hard to use Website dedicated to both current historical Jewish news organizations, etc. It has a famous Jews list Jewish entertainment Zionist occupied governments But wait a minute Okay This is an anti-semitic site and Some people noticed that and complained to Google or like WTF So Google took firm action They bought themselves in ad at their own prices on their own service and said we're disturbed about these results as well Please read our note about it, and if you click through you get a message from Google. That's like we don't Feel terrible This is not what this is not the Google we strive to be and yet we couldn't possibly do Anything about it because that would be messing with the secret algorithm that none of us understands anymore We won't change the outcome Okay, let me again ask each time I'm asking the first question It's in favor of non-intervention and the second is in favor of intervention So how many people would say Google did the right thing here by Refusing to adjust the position of the anti-semitic site after the complaint one two three How many people say Google should have taken action on the rankings one two three Okay, very clear Consensus in the room not unanimity but consensus that Google did the right thing here. All right Example number four. I think we are on I Googled on Sunday vaccinate my child and these are the results I got the first of which is anti vaccination The second of which is pro The second and third of which is anti the fourth of which is pro for which you might get a sense that It is completely up in the air as best humanity knows whether vaccinations are a good idea Should we ask Google should Google think about Whether to change the ordering of these results. I'm gonna take off the table the idea of buying an ad being like horrified by these results You might be depending on either side that you're on but we support you either way so How many people think this represents a problem that Google should fix and I'll just put it on the table in favor of Pushing down the anti-vaccination whoo W. Oh, oh, how many people would like to see that happen one two three? All right, not very much enthusiasm. How many people say let it ride one two three All right, we are status quoists in the room We like that roulette wheel even though we don't know the odds and all right Yes, here is the fifth example This is mugshots.com a Website with a fairly clear business model. It gathers public domain mugshots that exist from police departments around the nation it gathers them and information about the people who have been arrested and Then it makes clear that search engines should try to find it and if you type in this guy's name Odds are good Additionally that this would appear pretty high up because it's a quote-unquote relevant search result on his name now I realize he looks pretty happy. He was booked for marijuana possession You could imagine that later he regretted it and might not want this as a first hit on his name so again, I ask are you open to Fixing the roulette wheel a little bit so that this kind of site doesn't go down and before you answer Let me remind you that there's a little button here to unpublish the mugshot and it costs only $400 to have your mugshot removed from mugshots.com Of course, that does not cover mugshots with a z.com or any of the other 50 sites potentially run by the same person that do exactly this All right, so What do you say? How many people think Google should finally violate what you appear to think is its prime directive and Change the formula to push down the med mugshots.com sites one two three All right, I got some votes here and how many people say let it ride one two three All right, we are even on the mugshots It may surprise and amaze you to know that Google finally decided enough with the mugshots And not because they were doing somehow undue search engine optimization But because it basically did seem an extortion racket and the New York Times had written a story about it and they just decided enough and This greatly affected the business model of mugshots.com and similar sites and made life better Perhaps for people who had been arrested and had public mugshots about it All right, so there are our five examples Let me do the half real quick and the half is grounded in the observation That around to the corner Life is less and less going to be I search for something and I get results and then I click on stuff That's very 2005 More and more it's going to be concierge like Services where you just ask a question of your AI and it gives you some form of answer back And it's kind of the answer and that's how you go. That's the model behind Siri It's the model behind something like the Nest thermostat where You could set it to a temperature. Good luck getting it to stay at that temperature. The nest is too smart for that It's gonna change the temperature of your house depending on what it infers you probably want at the time According very little weight to what temperature you set the thermostat at so Here's the half example now suppose that nest Take some money from N-star whatever they're called these days energy source green ever source They take money from ever source the local utility to lower every person's thermostat in the jurisdiction by half a degree Saving a lot of money for the utility saving as maybe some burden on the grid and That's just one of multiple factors that go in How many people think that's not fair don't touch the thermostat in that circumstance one two three oh Anger and saving energy how many people say bless you. That's a great idea one two three All right a few less than that. All right. We've done a bunch of votes and case studies Let's now try to sort them out along a spectrum. So here we go I've made a spectrum from leave the algorithm alone Over to no no what just happened is not good We should adjust or penalize The algorithm as a result and here's where I think we ended up in our voting for the Search on Jew within Google which just led an accusation That's where people were most supportive of Google's action and in fact doing nothing leave the algorithm alone For vaccinate my child which have results that include inaccurate stuff There was a little more enthusiasm for it, but not much for the mugshots being Deemphasized I think I heard more support for Google's ultimate decision there probably more after you found out that they made that decision and For Ferguson or another city having its updates about Violence being de-emphasized. Whoa do not want to see Facebook even in the name of public safety making changes and finally for Facebook putting a thumb on the scale in election That was the third rail. That was where people were like that's beyond the pale So how do we make sense of our range? Disclosed as a group of feelings about this Other than to say I don't know We just seem to feel different things about different ways about different things Well, here's a couple ways of thinking about it one is offered up by Randall Monroe Randall Monroe is the creator of the xkcd comic and Randall has Lots of time and lots of his comics are about tax optimization and categorization and stuff So for example, he likes to do comics to draw out how things work And he's also very sensitive to the role the technology can play in things So he shows how the actual nuclear chain of command may work and in that instance And this is now going beyond the comic But Randall has suggested that maybe the technologies that we're talking about and across these examples Some we think of as tools and some we think of as friends and the things we think of as tools We may expect to work a certain way and if they don't we react in a way Different from how we react if our friends don't act a certain way and these technologies are evolving under our noses Sometimes pushing the line between tool and friend. So maybe this distinction between tool and friend Or tool and guide Is something worth exploring? So here's one hypothesis that We start and say If you've got tool Maybe that's where we're least interested in changing the way the tool works For instance in the US nuclear command and control The job of the engineer is to build a tool that does one thing and then be out of the picture and that's it That's the tool. What's deterministic and so we are least interested maybe in changing when we see it as a Mere tool and it operates according to certain principles We don't want to fuzz it in specific circumstances But as something moves more and more to a friend and maybe the Facebook feed is more and more like your home It's like a place you visit online That's your place and it's getting filled by Facebook Acting in a capacity of trying to give you stuff you really want for which there's no baseline Feed a generic feed against which yours is compared your feed is Personalized to you Facebook perhaps is acting as a friend in that instance and that's why we would be least interested Even when there's a clear public safety mandate hypothesized not in having Anything going on underneath that's different from somehow a general rule Which I'm calling the roulette wheel what can algorithm so complicated that even the operator designer the algorithm doesn't know what's going on So that's one hypothesis now, of course there was disagreement in the hums as we went along I don't want to assume unanimity If you find yourself disagreeing with where I placed a given example along the spectrum One account for that might be what I'm calling toxicity There's a sense that some information or result is sufficiently toxic however, you wanted to find that wrong evil that this is not about a User getting something from a friend that is relevant to what the user searches all the time It's about no there's some stuff that shouldn't exist So for example if the Google algorithm were turning up child abuse images in response to searches that you might infer We're looking for exactly that We would probably I would assume not have Much objection to Google adjusting the algorithm to lose those images and in fact possibly to make reports for those Who provide the images online? That's an example to me if that's how you're feeling of toxicity Trumping and for those who think that maybe this should be a website. That's a hate site in Europe It might be quite trivial to say that should be pushed down and results or omitted entirely Website stormfront.org is a neo-nazi site. It does not appear in Google dot DE It has not appeared in Google dot DE for at least a decade under German law As Google understands it because it's just deem toxic in Germany and there's not a first amendment to stop it I guess my point here is that that reaction is one not specific to the technology that is a classic under the law reaction Here's some stuff in society that we're not going to allow our government decides what it is It gets tested against some freedom of speech test perhaps in the courts and if it survives That's how it goes and then those who are trafficking in the speech have to abide by the ruling That's the toxicity Trump Now Other ways of thinking through besides tool and friend What can we think of and for this? I want to just show some other thinking going on by others as I said from other fields from other quarters One such person is Frank Pasquale here with Orin Braka in I think 2008 writing this article federal search commission and Accountability in the law of search now this article Hues to better ridges law of headlines which is to say If there's a question in the headline the answer is always no So he does not call for a federal search commission in this 63 page article In fact spends most of the article just trying to lay down track to say Houston. We have a problem here You readers are used to saying leave search engines alone. They're just doing their thing don't interfere But there's a bunch of stuff on the horizon predicting some of the case studies and hypotheticals that I've already mentioned Unfortunately for solutions. They don't have a whole lot They're just wanting to put the problem on the map and this is the penultimate paragraph of the article and it basically says Just don't shoot me for saying maybe there should be a form of regulation what it should be I don't know TBD and in fact Frank has since come out with this book just coming out this month on the black box society And we'll be presenting on it at the Berkman Center next Tuesday. This is your sponsored moment of the lecture For which you're welcome to attend in which he's talking more about Really a much more kind of capacious view of the problems here Frank is thinking a lot about power dynamics about a Colonialism about capitalism and such but a very interesting view not as much driven in the technology as what we're talking about today Christian Sandvig is another scholar who's been thinking a lot about this coming from a Sociology and communications background. He also has wonderful titles for his talks But the thing I wanted to draw out of Christians work is he's come up with another axis not tool or friend But he says here are two questions to ask About a technology with what we would call algorithmic consequences. First is what it's doing predictable by the designers Did they know what it's going to do and second can users discover? What the designers can predict and the choices that he's most interested in are when it is predictable But not discoverable by the users and what would an example of that be not in the technology realm probably the Harvard Yale game of 2004 where at halftime members of the Harvard Pepsquad went up and down the aisles and soldiers field on the Harvard side Distributing colored cards so that at the right moment they could be given a signal or like a North Korean rally Hold up their colored cards and spell out a message to the other side of the field which at the signal Turned out to be different than expected because it was not the Harvard Pepsquad It was the Yale Pepsquad in disguise and this was the resulting message at the game so This is a great example of an algorithm that is entirely predictable by the designer But not discoverable by the users until it's too late. So What would that mean? Technologically well, so I think for almost all of the examples five at least I won't go into the half yet all of them are pretty much in these Category of predictable if you're intervening by the designer, but not so readily Discoverable by the user you won't know what you don't know and that means Solution-wise if you think any of these would be a problem if you're not in favor of this kind of action You might say well, let's just make things discoverable. This naturally gravitates towards a transparency Rule of some kind and sure enough we've had people including Nicholas Diacopolis who is coined the phrase algorithmic accountability. It has a literation going for it Nicholas has written a wonderful paper with advice to journalists who are trying to deal with issues like this as they write stories and Talks about how important it is to try to encourage Transparency among the likes of Facebook or Google and when you don't get it how to try to game the process so that you might be able to reverse engineer What's going on and find out what those cards are gonna say before you actually hold them up? But now transparency has its limits and these are limits well known to legal scholars or policy folks They're all sorts of times when disclosure isn't enough I will often ask a torts class if there's rancid meat in the supermarket and the supermarket knows it But the shopper doesn't seems to meet these kinds of criteria. It's transparency the way to go like stick a sign And it's like rancid meat half off or is it like maybe it shouldn't be on the shelf at all This is a test for your free market libertarian kind of thing but we tend to like to live in a world where we don't always have to read the fine print not to fall ill and Similarly, there might be challenges to transparency Particularly when on every search telling you what you don't know if it's exactly the thing hidden There's so many things you don't know when there are ten hits on a million possibilities Very hard to figure out what a transparency rule would look like there and that's why I would shift to other approaches complimentary approaches and one of them is Inspired by Jack Balkan a conversation with him actually at a symposium thrown by the Harvard Law Review here last spring is the idea of information fiduciaries Information fiduciaries is a concept not yet finding itself in law anywhere. This is just an idea so far that says, you know We have relationships in the real world that are Dr. Patient lawyer client maybe financial advisor and Mark I guess that's what you'd call it when I say maybe of course by the way with financial advisors you know there are two types fiduciary and non fiduciary and fiduciary just means they have a duty to put your interests first. That's all it means and There are some financial advisors who have that legal duty and others who don't and if you have one that does the idea Is that advisor would not recommend a jackalope ranch to you as an investment just because the person is getting a commission on shares of the stock and the one without the fiduciary Dewey would be allowed to do that and it's just transparent in the sense of by the way, I'm not your fiduciary now by the ranch and It's just weird to go online and be like which kind of advisor is right for you It's like in what planet is the second kind of advisor right for you So if we have these kinds of relationships backed up by a legal duty Differing from one field to another couldn't we have something similar for information fiduciaries? For Google and Facebook that have to kind of put your interests first or at least not theirs Ahead of yours and what would that mean on our spectrum? And maybe we should think less about any specific case study and just more about what it would mean as we would distribute it Between tool and friend and here's my thought Have some kind of lighter duty, but more than no duty if you're thinking You're just a tool and if you're a friend there's going to be a heavier duty because friendship carries certain Responsibilities with it if you're following Dumbledore down a dark alley you want to believe that he's kind of on your side Which most of the time he is so okay, what would an example be of a lighter duty? How about don't be evil that's not a bad way of thinking about a duty And it's fact one that Google itself of course embraced It's exactly why Google was reluctant to change the output of a search on the word Jew. They have a certain Pride about the engine itself and what it means and about its neutrality and they're gonna stick to it so Here's another example of don't be evil if we had a lightweight information fiduciary on this tool the connect Microsoft recently filed for a patent on the connect 2011 and It's a here's the figure There are two things worth noting here the consumer detectors in these examples the connect is a consumer Detector it detects consumers and what that means is that if you order up a pay-per-view movie And there are ten consumers in the room It should charge more than if there's only one consumer in the room That is an example if not outright evil this gets to a discussion of price discrimination That is beyond the scope of this lecture But is something for which at this point? It's not clear the connect is working for you anymore It is a tool that is not Not only not being your friend It's got someone else's interests in mind and that's the kind of thing that maybe could be Procluded now when we go over to the heavier duty What might that mean and I guess I find myself turning back to tort a little bit and thinking of something that resembles a recklessness standard of some kind and For that I would say it's when it's more a friend So this isn't just for organic search or something It's when you've got something more than just regular old search results So this is the Google knowledge graph project you have been exposed to the knowledge graph sometimes This is a search for avashai Margoli a Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy and here is just the regular results for which Google basically takes no Responsibility why should they this is just a tool the only thing I would say here is don't be evil Okay, this is knowledge graph at work This is Google filling in what it knows through automated means still about him Maybe drawing from Wikipedia now. Here's something notable. It says that he died in 1962 Which would mean there was a really low bar for serving as a George F. Kennan professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton but in fact avashai is very much alive and He's a puzzled man He's like, where do I go to get my life back and we don't have much of an answer for that There's nowhere to go on go you can get updates about him if he should come back to life You'll be the first to know and what happened was they drew it from Wikipedia to begin with and Wikipedia had it wrong and then Wikipedia got fixed and got it right But Google never bothered to visit and draw in the new information What responsibility if any would Google have over here not over here friend not tool to do something here I think that's a fair question worth asking and a question that doesn't lead to madness The way that trying to impose some kind of bizarre standard of being responsible for everything in the world This division helps us say look if you're venturing into this if you're gonna play Dumbledore You got to learn how to work a wand a little better than you do right now Would basically be the idea and you can see the same thing about appendicitis right new Google What is appendicitis? You're just getting like whatever comes in on the sedimentary wave system below But if you're looking here through knowledge graph like this had better represent appendicitis I doesn't have to be an actual sufferer It could be a Corbis image But like if this has nothing to do with it or if down here It was like this is known to result from an imbalance of the four bodily humors I would object to this and say come on Google like you know go big or go home This is not the way to be but now fiduciaries can't be the solution to everything and for that It's worth noting that Uber presents a really good example of the problem now Uber is easy to think of is actually a great example for a fiduciary at first because you know you order up a car service and it should come and you see the drivers get rated that helps You out you can make a choice although you only know the drivers rating after the drivers assigned to you whatever but there was a moment where it became known that in soviet russia the car Rates you and in fact through a bug on the uber site you could find out how uber drivers were rating you as a passenger because they did and This spread on Twitter in the summer of 2014, so I guess three things happened in the summer of 2014 this became known and Here's somebody saying my uber passenger rating is just a 3.9 So my life is a c-plus person continues and my uber rating is 4.8 I'm racking my brain to figure out how I've been a less than perfect passenger mind you this is out of five But whatever we aspire to nothing short of perfection in our lives as car passengers And this is my favorite 2.6 guess it's not cool to always yell hold and steady and roll out of a moving vehicle We should say by the way There are now services that can buy that information from uber and use it in job Selection and other sorts of things, but that's a different talk having to do with scaring you about personal privacy Which can always do it anytime so? This is an example though of kind of a two-sided market Uber is not just in the business of having passengers get cars. It's in the business of helping drivers get fares So to whom do they owe the duty? Is it to the driver to get a good ride or is it to the passenger to get a good driver both? Well, what happens if they conflict thinking this through with fiduciaries alone? I think doesn't Exactly solve the problem and you can start to see insidiousness creeping in in either direction Suppose on the basis of the color of your skin you get a lower rating either as a driver or as a passenger Is that fair? How would you know? How would uber know? Is there anything that could be done about that and you can generalize it away from uber even to job sites? Which more and more are taking on non-sierge like friend like non-tool like rolls Insane, you know what we're gonna take in 2000 or 20,000 applications for a barista at the Starbucks down the street But Starbucks you don't have to go through them We're gonna offer you three and they'll be on the basis of a complex algorithm that even we're not sure how it will Turn out but it will be trying to figure out how to serve you and get you the baristas You want through your ratings of them after we fill earlier positions that could allow Latent racism or other discrimination to creep in how do we think about that? Well in this case the law has had a lot to say about that over the years This is a 1936 map of the city of Philadelphia the original redlining done without the aid of computational Services these are just the bankers carving up the city as to where they would and wouldn't be making Loans and it's this kind of behavior through the decades that led to things like the community Reinvestment Act of 1977 which said if you're a bank You can't do that and in fact you have to look to see we're gonna audit you every so often and see Where are you and aren't you making loans and how is it matching to the kinds of applications? You're getting and as a society those behind this law have found it an acceptable intrusion I think it's almost a version of the toxicity point This is a form of toxicity discrimination and that's gonna be a trump Maybe you're a tool maybe you're a friend but toxicity trumps and that kind of discrimination is not acceptable the only thing kind of to worry about here is Discrimination can be so widespread and across so many services This really works best as a stovepipe solution You pick a narrow domain one where you can compare apples to apples discern a disparate impact Remove factors that might account for it that don't have to do with discrimination and that means housing employment very specific fields in which that might happen either through mechanisms like this or There's some really interesting technical work going on in the computer science side of things where researchers like Cynthia Dwork and others are looking for formulas that could prepare data before it goes in to an algorithm Like that of monster.com to see to it that the data has been situated so that like people will be treated in like ways And I won't attempt to summarize how it works in this paper except to say that it's extremely complicated But that's the kind of work that Cynthia and others are doing to say could we have algorithms that would try to get the stage Set so you don't have to go in and try to audit things Later and be really intrusive, but still try to have some assurance that you won't have the kind of discrimination that we don't like So, okay, that's a tour of predictable by designers and discoverable by users But really the last riff that we were just on gives a hint of the harder problem What happens when stuff isn't even predictable by the designer the discrimination is not intentional It's just an emergent characteristic of the system and for that we have a real challenge And there are lots of systems that are emergent in their properties It is said it might be apocryphal But not so much so that it stops salon from writing this article about it that House of cards was not like they sat around the writers room are like, you know what we need is a house of cards But instead they went through all the data of people who like this like that and the machine turned the crank And it was like Kevin Spacey now Like you're the machine and like Kevin. Are you free? We need you to sit in the Lincoln Memorial. We don't have a plot yet That's the kind of thing that is not predictable by the designer Certainly not discoverable by the user and we're just like, I don't know. I am addicted to it's just the way it is And it's the stuff that gives you ads like these from lower my bills calm. We were just like Why is that the ad? How is that possibly an appealing ad to click on to get yourself some car insurance and the answer from lower my bills It's like wait, I don't know We just took some stuff and kept putting it on and you know what people click on this stuff He was like, well, okay now if you feel that your life isn't data enough This is probably a good trend but for the rest of us you start to worry And I don't know if the problem is more that it works or that it doesn't work as in this instance where If you were shopping for the official Lego creator activity book Here's the perfect partner American jihad the terrorists living among us today It's like I'm going to back slowly away from that book That's the kind of thing that just you know I don't know and there's so many correlations with big data that are entirely spurious and yet They're very tight and how are you going to know when it's right and when it's not? I should say by the way this correlation point nine nine three seven six and many others like it are offered up on Tyler Viggins website HLS class of sixteen. So go Tyler. I don't know if you're here today You're probably correlating things as we speak so very good and This is a great example of not just an algorithm going to ride But what happens when algorithms start to encounter other algorithms out in the wild This is a wonderful example from Amazon where the normal market price of this book the making of a fly is 2895 But there was a strange period of time when it turned out it was $1.7 million at its cheapest. It's like why is this book so expensive? Here's the next seller up two-point wild This is looking like a better price So what's going on with this? Well, so we did some reverse engineering of the algorithm as a community This is great from Michael Eisen's blog and he noticed that the two sellers were actually using each other's price point to determine their next So whatever Prof Nath charged Bordy book would charge 1.27 and the next day prop now to be whatever Bordy books charging point 99 of that and I'll undercut them Now why is Bordy book like I'm going to charge more that'll differentiate me because he doesn't have the book He's waiting for somebody stupid enough to click on him anyway at which point he will buy the book from Prof Nath and make point 27 in profit So it's actually so crazy it just might work, but it's also just entirely crazy and we end up with two million dollar books I can't resist but share one more Example of this and that is a real shirt available on Amazon.com from the aptly named store solid gold bomb And it says keep calm and rape a lot and so somebody like noticed this on Amazon It was like what now and wrote to Amazon. How dare you Amazon's like we're just Google for stuff We don't know what we're selling and they wrote to solid gold bomb and here's the explanation that rings true That solid gold bomb offers they said well We actually have an inventory of 1.4 million shirts with different things on them and when we say inventory We mean nothing we mean that we only Generate by algorithm words on a shirt that start with keep calm and then wait to see if anybody buys any of them And if they do we'll go to cafe press and have the shirt made and send it to them This is an example again of an algorithm that just operates on sheer volume and lets the search engines sort it out Undiscoverable really even by the makers as to what they are in fact doing or offering up to the public And don't think academia is immune either this recent scandal is quite notable when a hundred and twenty Gibberish papers appeared not just like randomly online, but in Springer and I triple E these are journals I guarantee you over at the library we pay your tuition money to subscribe to these journals And it does make me kind of think we should get our money back because we have enough of our own gibberish we do not need to import it and When I say gibberish, let me be clear These are words that have no meaning whatsoever. This is not like a poorly written paper This is a paper never that a human mind never experienced or wrote in fact They were written by this MIT gem Called side gen the automatic computer science paper generator for which I gave it a whirl and Here's violet a methodology for the improvement of rasterization and it's like a full paper I could submit to a journal and I it felt so wrong to even generate this on the screen It felt like thought crime. I intentionally misspelled the names so that there couldn't be some scandal six months from now about like That's not or they would become my most famous and well-cited paper. So This is a problem with an academia that somehow it would make sense for people to do that and for journals to just publish it Hello, and how did Springer and IEEE react while rest assured they have now after an intensive Collaboration come up with a side gen paper detector So you can rest assured that another machine has tried to detect the first machine to put the nonsense paper into the annals of human knowledge okay, so one last point on the academic Kind of oddity front which is in 1996 now quite a long time ago Julie Cohen a wonderful scholar of privacy law and personhood at Georgetown law wrote this paper about a right to read anonymously She was worried that a right that we just took for granted you could open a book read it close the book and get Rid of it and nobody would know you had read the book or how far you had read in or what you thought about it would be eroded by Ebooks and that suddenly in Soviet Russia the book reads you and now years later It's like well of course it does in fact It's a helpful way for the teacher to check in on the student and see how the student is doing But here I'm not as concerned about the students right to read anonymously I am concerned about that but I'm thinking more about what this kind of iterative a B testing will do to us as scholars We're gonna write stuff and I cannot tell you that I could resist the temptation if I find out that it's the fourth paragraph of chapter Three of the future of the internet where I lose them That's where they all stop reading I'm gonna put a picture of a cat right under that paragraph and be like there's more where this came from and These are ways of adapting to a market demand For which scholarship isn't always that there are hard truths that maybe 90% of the people aren't ready to hear yet And they're gonna throw that book away But the 10% that that that tough it out and keep reading those are the people you're actually trying to reach and These are the kinds of algorithms affected by humans that we're gonna face as academics asking us about our own identities now Here's just a snapshot from earlier today of Google searches 2.7 billion searches so far of Google today adding up to about 1.2 trillion searches a year this is Remember double X not really predictable by Google not discovered by the user what goes in or out of it How can you impose any standard to Google on what searches say when we're talking about this volume of stuff? I don't think that you can so here's a last Kind of crack at another approach that maybe could help and the idea is maybe there should be more than one search engine You know, I think we like to sort of chore to a little at Bing because you know Microsoft had it coming after all 20 years ago, they did some bad stuff, but There's a thought that says you know There should be more than just one place for your searches and there should be more than just one social network This is not what should happen when Facebook goes down. It should not be national news It's like Facebook is down But there's no way for you to know because you don't watch the news anymore. You're just hitting reload on Facebook like we need Competition and there were days early on when there was competition to people remember dog pile Yeah, some alright those were the days dog pile was the search engine of search engines and it searched multiple search engines at once And you know if one is putting a thumb on the scale or forget the thumb on the scale. We're talking about x and x so it's not even Predictable to the engine where it's screwing up have multiple engines with competing engineers that That end up in different cul-de-sacs with their AB testing and the users can then see from those different engines Differences and what they're doing and there was a time when there was more than one auction site There was Yahoo auctions for example and this site bitters edge Would let you search all of them simultaneously and thereby get the best deal on the thing you're looking for what stopped bitters edge a lawsuit a lawsuit under the idea of Trespass to the chattel of ebay that the hamsters on the ebay server reels were running too fast Serving up pages for bitters edge to scrape and therefore bitters edge had to shut down and that Accelerated the primacy of just one natural monopoly through network effects for your auctions If there were multiple sites searchable through a dashboard that could be much more helpful or just think about this right now If I tell Siri I need to ride home. All right, Siri hasn't gotten around to that yet series. Just like I feel you but Should this just be fine Uber is what you're getting or should it be like all right here are five services You can compare the prices if you're a driver for uber and you don't feel you're getting good shake Should you have to leave uber should you be able to be a driver on your phone for multiple services and be like I'm ready to take a call from any of the five pipelines that come in I know I can do only one at a time, but I'll just do the one that comes next that kind of competition is What we stand for it's why we trust the market It's why we feel comfortable being cherry of regulation But the reality is shaping up not to have that competition and to imagine the law Assisting as it did in the bidder's edge case in not having that kind of competition Strikes me is very wrong-headed and something that would be an easy easy fix to make now. There's one More thing I want to say on that front which goes more fundamentally to the nature of competition because it's not just one company against another it's the idea of collective hallucination Open facilities versus the more traditional proprietary and perfectly acceptable so-called closed ones And here's an example to think about that open table is something probably many or all of us have used at one time or another many restaurants advertise their tables through open table and It turns out the restaurants hate open table Because now that they're signed up and they need the stream of reservations coming in because it's pretty much the ebay of restaurant reservations They're finding the prices to be so high. They're making almost nothing off the tables from open table Did there need to be an open table and the only hope being that well, let's have three of them and hope that they compete I think it could have been different and for that it's worth looking at an idea that has been percolating for years really since the advent of the web and That's the idea of the semantic web And I'm now at the point in the talk where I worry about an Annie Hall moment Where like Marshall McLuhan comes on is like, you know nothing of my work because I see that the Tim Berners-Lee The inventor of the web is here so Going to tread carefully But Tim didn't just invent the web. It's like in this season talk about Diana. It's like no he did more He actually went so far as to conceive of something called the semantic web Which as I can best understand it treading carefully the semantic web says What if people putting stuff online on web pages setting stuff out for the world to see We're a little bit more structured about their data They made it easier for a crawler a machine crawler Not a human so much to crawl that data and get a sense. I see this is a train timetable Oh, I see this is a list of tables available at a restaurant and the times at which they're available If you could do that as a restaurant rather than the traditional approach of a flash site that nobody can use You could see anybody writing an easy crawler to offer to users that would say here The tables available at restaurants if you'd like to reserve one will shoot a note through to the respective website of the restaurant No intermediary of any particular kind just a web of open Structured data That's the kind of promise. I think that the semantic web Could and still does offer for problems of the sort That otherwise we're looking at almost to narrow a conception of competition to solve And that's an idea that quite naturally is coming out of academia That's coming from a different quarter academia comes up with solutions to problems for which there is not an obvious market solution because if there is Then the market can take care of it. You don't need academia unless you see a problem So big the market can't raise the money to figure it out or Where you're creating or ideating a common good that if people can Connect with and say yes, I'll be a part of that and get some momentum Possibly without only the Vabarian animal spirits urging them on you then get something that the commercial sector picks up on That's the story of the internet over copy servant prodigy It's the story of the web Over the stove piped alternatives and this is not something that has an ending It's a constant kind of thing. It's what open table could be It's the story that Yochai tells in his wealth of networks. So It's academia that I think has that role and that's been recognized here are two authors Saying that you know search engines use advertising and that's a problem That's a source of bias and there's not an easy way for the market to strip that bias out all the time And that's why they conclude we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives It's crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm Who wrote these words? Lawrence Page and Sergei Brin in 1998 and their paper introducing Google to the world That's the spirit. I got to say I completely agree with Larry and Sergei That's what we're looking for and it's up to us to step out now Google has still some of these feelings. This is again why they have a pride about just changing search And there's no intimation yet that they're changing organic search on the basis of somebody writing them a check But Google is hedging its bets. You might say a little bit not that long ago Eugene Volek law professor at UCLA Announced that he had written a white paper first amendment protection for search engine results You can see where this is going You cannot reach in and ask any change to search end results because it would violate the first amendment By the way, I wrote the papers an advocate and not as a disinterested academic But you might find it interesting nonetheless ie I may not agree with the paper. I just wrote For which I so much want to ask Eugene as an academic. What do you think of the paper? You just wrote He's like, I can't answer that Cannot tell you and it's funny because if you actually go to the paper, here's the first page of the paper, right? This white paper was commissioned by Google, but the views of it should not be ascribed to Google Which I'm like now. I'm really puzzled Who wrote this paper? Whose view does this paper represent and the answer is no one's it's not Eugene Volek's view It's not Google's view. This is just a view that arrived from Mars That the first amendment should protect search engine results Which of course the papers and credulous reported as Professor Volek says that first amendment protects search engine results So there's an intertwining between academia and comm that's a line We need to navigate and that's there's a final set of remarks. I want to give which is Of course, I couldn't give this talk without talking about this study This is a study in the proceedings of the National Academies of Science one of the most distinguished journals and it's people from the core data science team of Facebook and some people from the Communication Information Science Departments at Cornell and They just blew through Brederidge's law of headlines. They're like experimental. It's a massive scale emotional Contagion through social networks. This is like the AI threat is upon. No. No. No Here's what they mean they meant that they found through in cooperation with Facebook manipulating people's news feeds from what they were otherwise destined to be that they could take some feeds and Check out things that were about to go into them and evaluate them automatically for are they happy or sad and for some people? They only gave them happy things and for other people They just gave them more sad things and they found that people that had happy things in their feeds Tended to share happy stuff in turn and people with sad stuff shared sad stuff this just in okay That was what they found this led to an uproar There was something about this that had people feeling like Gandalf had just turned and strangled Frodo It was just like this is not cool but the the firestorm I want to talk about here was the reaction of many academics was this should have gone through an institutional review board this should have gone through an IRB and If it wasn't going to go to IRB academia should have had nothing to do with it It just should have been Published by the Facebook people but keep academia pure We don't want to be a party to this kind of I know they thought it was like the Stanford prison experiment or something and That's why we can't have nice things like if we could just undo Milgram and Stanford anyway. Don't get me started so Looking at this My reaction is the opposite It's like be careful what you ask for because who were the critical parties to this experiment Facebook they didn't need the academics. They were just getting some extra credit in academia by publishing for the world their Findings if they don't publish for the world in the words of the common rule if they don't contribute to generalized knowledge No IRB would apply so Facebook is perfectly entitled to do all the experimentation that they want Subject only the restrictions hypothetical that we brainstormed about today as long as they're not publishing them They're good to go that strikes me as a terrible set of incentives and the fact is What ended up having with penis is they did what Google did with explanation They published an editorial expression of concern like disturbed by this paper We are too as the publishers, but we're not going to retract it We're just going to tell you that we feel very uncomfortable about what we did last summer and like that's all there is to it, but It's like this world of data and algorithms is not a world for which there is a natural Place for academia. It's one we have to fight for This is the particle accelerator at CERN also the Original physical home of the worldwide web This particle accelerator is the kind of public good that it had to be a collaboration between dot gov and dot edu Metaphorically speaking to generate it and once that was done the results go public because it's a public good paid by taxpayers and other Foundations it's in the realm of public knowledge If it's somehow with sensible for comms to build these things It's like Google just smashed some atoms and we just want to tell you the results are very interesting trade secret But might be a Higgs boson For us to know you to find out like that's the kind of thing that we wouldn't accept in physics I don't think we would at least we would want to think about it And this is what our information landscape is doing it shifting and when it shifts You run into trouble because the values of academia cannot be guaranteed to come along with it That's what Sergei and Larry were worried about in 1998 and sure enough this book is not just a product This book is war and peace This is an expression of Humanism this is humanities one of its greatest works to hear some tell it I started reading war and peace on the nook Not that long ago and came upon this bizarre phrase in it that a vivid glow had looked in her face And the flame of the songs nook by what's going on here as I search for the word nook in the book and it's all over I mean war and peace is long to be sure, but what's going on and turns out every place the word Kindle appeared And war and peace has been replaced by nook in an accidental case of the worst product placement ever Now if your barn's a noble you're like whoops Or bad Would you like your 99 cent nah forget it if you are the Harvard Law School library and you've done this I don't know. I would like to think librarians in the room would be like a little bit more than like our bad Like that would be a problem, right? These are the rea director was like on it Yeah So that's where academia comes in and the only thing I think is academics for us to realize Whether we're thinking about our role in the production of knowledge or in whether or not it should be Provax or Anti-vax going in a knowledge base, maybe not organic search in Google The only thing we should be thinking of is to be careful not to assume that we are Oracular because one of the best gifts of the past 20 years has been the realization that No one needs to be the oracle anymore and only on the basis of asserted authority Able to say this is true and this isn't we use proxies all the time We desperately need them because we can't personally research everything But those proxies can have fights with other proxies What they do can be made public so that Ralph Nader has the time to look at and tell us what he thinks We can come up with ways to do that and in fact I think it is to academia's enduring shame that we've remained at such a distance from Wikipedia for so many years In fact that we didn't create it to begin with that it took somebody else off of the proceeds of a search engine To create it because he thought it would be a good thing for the world rather than just another comm idea And he didn't do it from academic quarters It's time to look at something like Wikipedia and see that the process that happens in the public eye as truth Is tangled about and asserted and rethought about every day That's really what is supposed to be happening in academia as well And if we can worry a little bit less about volume and the number of papers we're cranking out and the citations that they're Racking up as robots are writing the papers We can focus more on the actual kinds of conversations the dialogues that I feel personally so amazingly blessed to have had as a part of my education over the past Wow, like 10 15 years on and off at this amazing institution and I just again want to reiterate How privileged and blessed I feel and How grateful I am for the many people in this room with whom I've had conversations over the years and who've supported me And to say I see Harvard as a great columned place Not identical with other great columned places, but in complementarity with them driving forward a society in which we can enjoy the kind of Fruits of the technology that we are sewing In a way that is quite safe and that gets us just back to the beginning thinking about AI Nick Bostrom in his book on super intelligence Likens the development of AI into a bag of marbles for which if you pull out a white marble It's a good thing if you pull out a different color marble. It's a bad thing and He's just like it one day. We might pull out a bad marble, and that's it and my book is over and it may be the case but like I like the fact that we can see inside the bag and that we're gonna be trying to do it through so many methodologies and Have people whose full-time Occupation is peering inside the bag and doing it for the intrinsic joy of it a joy that I again Feel so lucky to have experienced on many occasions. Thank you very much The dean says there's time for questions, and of course if there isn't time for questions, you're free to leave The hostage crisis is over but Questions I assume there's a microphone or something. Ah, yes Patricia has a mic Malavika Will you be taking your dad back to the library today? I wish I could it will have to be My sister and her husband and my niece who get the tour and maybe Suzanne or others from the library can Join us in the lights or electrics. So even if it shut down we can do it quickly. Thank you Feel free Patricia just to row with the mic This is just a quick comment But when you had the example about Google and the you know the Jews I think the answer might have been very different if it had been Google does nothing as opposed to Google throws that page up And and and puts it at the top Say that again. It's if oh I see yes that Google chose to buy its own ad is utterly Uncontroversial surely it can buy if they had not done that if they had not done that answers in the room might have been different Surely yes, I think you're right. I think people might have said At least Google you did that much and it also might have been at a time When people I mean a lot of people use Google and a lot of people don't exactly know Whether Google is supposed to be their tool or their friend, you know If I'm searching Google for something like vaccination It might not be for a medical dictionary answer to a question But to see what's going on out there on the web How much activity is there around anti-vax stuff for which unadulterated results would be most helpful And you're right that an explanation that just says look this is this is what Google is don't shoot us Might represent something helpful there. I don't know. I think we're agreeing right? Yeah. Yeah, very good So I have a question. Oh, yes You know that I'm curious about the cartoon on your poster. Oh, yes So I wonder as you were giving the talk it seemed to me that it was both about We don't know what our future is But it also was a little bit about the difference between The kind of algorithm where the designers don't know what they're giving versus the ones where they know But the user doesn't know so if you could talk about your cartoon Yeah, so this cartoon is by John O'Brien of the New Yorker Who kindly told me to consult the New Yorker about licensing it which We did in the dean's office front of the two hundred fifty dollars needed to put it on the poster and on the web but What really struck me about it was a couple things first you're right that this is a great example of predictable by the designer and intentionally of course not known discoverable by the user until it's too late in that sort of way and What I love is of course the juxtaposition of a new car a Maui vacation and death and like the idea that like oh, yes, that's number three Reflects to me the ways in which we're using technologies of general purpose Google Twitter Facebook of 2015 For such in a ridiculous range of stuff if I were having heart palpitations right now The first thing I might do is call 911 But other than that be googling like heart palpitations should I be worried at the same time? I might be googling Maui vacation or something like the sublime to the ridiculous to the Utterly grave the ways in which we're asking so much at once is To me evocative here and also the way that it's treated as all fun and games until someone loses an eye and The reaction among many of us I think I might even put myself in that category at the time that Frank Pascal wrote his first federal search commission paper was like Come on like it's just it's Google we can do and it's kind of that idea of the festive atmosphere That surrounds our joy when we use new technologies and I wouldn't want that to cloud the very real Pedestals on which it is sitting now that Walter Cronkite used to sit on and I'm the last person to say Walter Cronkite was like The be all and end all but he had a different conception of what he was doing and Google did Yes, Lucian Bebchuk. Oh, sorry. Thank you You've shown us a lot of examples of people trying to think of these issues and surely you dedicate your life to do that as well How worried are you if at all? About not enough people worrying about those issues What's the right level of people worrying about the issues I think we want enough healthy skepticism and non complacency That if there are a small number of people thinking through issues vetting them through with representative groups and such We live in a specialized society and one of expertise That there could be enough pressure To improve things that where you need a political movement where you need a court ready to say something and not fear that It's one decision is gonna bring the house down or you need a legislature willing to do something that they feel like the public Is tuned in enough to have their back? so That's why I'm putting together this talk. I wanted to give a lot of attention to solutions Rather than what I think of some of the talks I've given in the past And it's really easy to get people worried and to just be like anxiety anxiety Look at this and if you look at a lot of talks out there about privacy and such That's what they are and it's like well, okay. I'm worried now. Are you happy like no, I'm worried too so I don't know any people need to be worried but Skeptical healthily critical and of course one of the things left out among the solutions was sort of the user education thing To the extent that in our schools day by day where we're warehousing kids for years at a time Just trying to keep them from like getting hit by cars or tour cases about this to have them in the schools doing things like editing Wikipedia and Justifying their edits and pushing back when somebody pushes on them. That's the kind of thing that would lead to a Population of enough general literacy That it's not just scare them and then tell them to place a call to a representative because that gets automated too but rather to be a little bit more thoughtful and in their margins than Collectively demanding about what the market produces Yeah, I see why you are drawn to competition and I think that competition can help with some of the problems you discussed Yes, but with some of the problems. I think competition would make things worse not better and if you think about the examples you had about Hoping that Google might Downplay or eliminate say anti-semitic sites or anti-vaccination Or muck shots the reason why you can hope that Google will do that Is that Google can do it without being threatened of losing? Substantial market share because it's the defect of monopoly. Yes in a world in which there was substantial competition If Google were to try to do it Yes, then there would be another service that would say we just give you The sites as they come with yes and all the people who don't want paternalism Yes, they do want to get anti-semitic sites and they do want to get the act They do want to get the muck shots. Yes would be going there. Yes And that would be a perverse effect of competition So that's a great point and the way I would try to Refraise it without doing injustice to it in the terms of the talk would be to say if to the extent you are concerned about toxicity an Absence of competition provides a one-stop shop To administer your anti-toxin if you think that cars can have certain dangers AI driven cars for example, but there's only one maker of them All right, you go sit down with that one maker and you work it through and that's the story of if you want to stop Criminals and do it through lawful intercept of telephonic communications when it's just AT&T It's much easier to affect when it's VOIP and all these other things that we would normally think of as the fruits of competition So that then just is either a to be sure that If you're worried about toxicity the way I've defined it Having only one place to go to do it Makes your job easier, but of course that has to get weighed against all of the other Benefits that come and the anti toxicity thing. I would be careful not to generalize about I Think many here might be skeptical of most of the things we would decide is toxic and others of course I can find we can find something that everybody thinks is and the fact that we have a distributed web and Bit torrent and all of these other things that roughly fall under the rubric of distributed if not competition makes effective regulation more difficult and Yes, that does provide a regular ability problem Yep Okay Get your chair Thank you