 Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for coming out, whether here in person for a nice boxed lunch or Virtually over the web, which is a very slick way of getting the warning and FERPA required announcement in oors when you're like We welcome our virtual guests, which you all should be aware of so yes It's all being recorded even more than it is usually just as a fact of our surveillance society So I wanted to give a sense of some sweep of the Berkman Klein Center and its history And some of the issues we've taken up and some of the puzzles that remain in Transformed fashion even today that we're trying to work through and basically to invite those of you who aren't already involved some of you wonderfully are to consider getting involved over the course of the coming academic year and We may not be unified on munch, but I think it's fair to say that pretty much everybody these days appears to have Partaken of this fresh can of a vague sense of unease about the state of the world and the state of technology in general there was a lot more if not on ambiguous optimism there was a lot more am Ambiguous optimism about it in past years. We're at a time now where the fear level is quite high And I thought it might be good to work it through and to think about a kind of How helpful it can be to have a broad theory or set of theories to understand the unease We might be feeling about technology the days when you could just sort of slice and dice the law around it we're sitting in the law school right now or a university-wide center but began here at the law school and There was a time say 2001 when you know you'd have federal telecommunications law and you could teach a class in this room about telecoms law this particular book 1516 pages weighing in at 3.6 pounds the heavyweight champion of federal telecommunications law It's nice to see that it has five-star reviews including this one. This book was amazing. I could not put it down The interesting and comprehensible writing was Magnificently crafted and very thought-provoking a real page turner It does make me wonder whether this is in fact a real review from Sarah Thorn, but it is a real name at least And her review has not apparently Persuaded a lot of people as it was 2.3 million ranked in books bestsellers Which is rather high by my estimate given the datedness of it So this kind of way of thinking about things can get you a little bit, but if you're really trying to get to the bottom of How you're feeling about technology which way technology should go rather than just where is it and how is Regulated it can help to be a little bit more as I said have some theory around it some framework One such framework actually dating from the late 90s came from our colleague Larry Lessig. He wrote this Rather interesting paper in the Harvard Law Review on the law of the horse what cyber law might teach and as you can See from the opening paragraph He tells the story of a federal judge asked to keynote a conference in the new field of cyber law and the Judge was like go home everybody. There is no such field It's like having a law of the horse which is ridiculous if you want to learn about law on horses If it's about selling horses why that's contracts and if it's about the horses that kick you why that's tort law And if it's riding away on a horse after robbing a bank, that's probably criminal law why do you need a law of the horse and This was I still think is a serious challenge to think of both for a field called cyber law Why is it just like it's a computer? Let's do a course around it And even more recently today when we think about algorithms and AI and other new kinds of fields about How and why we might regulate it's good to have a framework and Larry actually tried to offer one I should say by the way for anybody stuck in the back There are a few seats towards the front and yes, and even in the middle so Don't be shy Larry actually had a theory that he wrote up in several books And I'm about to give you my best capitulation of it in about 45 seconds We live in the era of the tweet, but Larry's theory was basically You all each of us are an orange dot in the world Buffeted by forces larger than we are and law is one of those forces and we kind of know how to think about law There's a law that tells you what you can and can't do and you might shake your fist at it And maybe even disobey it But we have processes by which laws come into place very familiar way of regulating us He'd also say that norms can regulate us There's social norms about if you show up a little on the later side Is it okay to come down the aisle and block people's views and take a seat for example? And it's perfectly alright. I licensed it but without my license people might not do it In fact even with my license people are still stubbornly in the back of the room That's norms at work kind of shaping behavior and then you have market market is the fact that stuff costs something and there are all sorts of structures around markets and The way that markets work can affect what you can do if you can't afford something Then you're not gonna have it and that's a fact of life You know death and taxes that kind of thing and finally architecture the structure of reality for most of us limits what we can do and Gravity is just a law to be reckoned with even more Implacable than say law emanating from a typical government and that interestingly said less It could also be thought of as software code the kinds of code that shape our experience online Effects what we can do and in fact may be more thoroughly if subtly than the other forces Around that dot because if there's a password prompt before you can get to something Unless you're really good at wrangling code You can't get past it and that's just like there's not even civil disobedience for that He further said that law in particular could help shape the other forces So if you were wanting to regulate this dot You could directly regulate it or you could try to affect each of these you could make mandates about the way software has to be built you could affect the market by in the case of tobacco simultaneously subsidizing it and Taxing it on the other hand and depending on which nets out which way People might smoke fewer cigarettes modulo the fact that it's terribly addictive product placement from the CDC and that's the kind of thing that Makes for more subtle sorts of regulation so less it says this is why there should be cyber law because of the ways in which architecture made by humans not law of gravity, but law of Web browser can affect us and there's all sorts of ways that that is worth Focused and sustained study now the other to me really interesting thing from back in the day was that the Technology architecture that we found ourselves with at the turn of the millennium don't get to say that very often Was one that was remarkably open in part by historical accident This was a hobbyist machine that thanks to the invention of visacaoke suddenly Invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston here in Boston Visacaoke the spreadsheet got this thing into Businesses around the world and that became the platform on which everything was built this happens to be a very old DOS machine you can date it probably from the 66 number in the corner And I don't people remember the 66 number and then there was a button next to it that you could press that would What would it do? Turbo mode. Yes when you press the button the thing would run faster the hamsters inside But it's like start madly racing. I should say by the way here is a hamster powered paper shredder The hamster runs on the wheel and the paper in the top thanks to the gear in the wheel then becomes shredded down And then hamster can live in the paper Afterwards so that was just your reuse as a viable alternative to recycling product placement But anyway, yeah, it does make you wonder why not press the button and have the machine just run in turbo all the time And I think the answer was Prince of Persia would run too quickly if you did that So you had to be able to downshift but the main thing of a machine like that is you hand it code It runs the code any code you give it. It's like, okay I'll do that now Prince of Persia by day and Vis a calc by night or probably the other way around But that's the kind of thing that we shouldn't take for granted But is a medium in which we swim and was the basis for the entire off the shelf And there used to be shelves with it software movement and the shareware movement that anybody could write code if He or she possessed the skill and then share it with others Maybe charge a fee maybe not that sort of thing and you never know what you're gonna get This is the box of chocolates theory of software that could lead in any possible at the time quite exciting set of Directions in the same claim about the PC about the the fundamental unit at the time of consumer interfacing with digital stuff It'd be said about the networks it might have been true that our Networks when we were going to have a global network would just be like AT&T and like that would be it And that's the network and you're done there were analogs to that in the early days like this Wonderful welcome to CompuServe with oversized buttons in case you had trouble maneuvering your mouse But all of that was provided by CompuServe and this wasn't just a website you visit It wasn't a website. It was the network you turn on CompuServe You turn on your computer and you say I'm gonna go online. This was online This was all there was if you were a CompuServe subscriber And if you weren't you'd have to pick another kind of network like this like AOL or Prodigy or whatever This turned out not to be our future The network itself ended up basically as generative as that end point that would run any EXE that you handled it and it has a rather peculiar architecture. This is so-called hourglass architecture Developed through the wonderful processes of the internet engineering task force and as shown here It's basically meant so that it was ecumenical about what the network would run on It was like bring me your wires your wireless your your things waiting to be Structured as datagrams, and I don't care what they are But they'll be able to talk to anything else which is why you can switch from wired to Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi to your LTE In the middle of downloading something and it basically will pick up Okay, and at the top it was meant to be agnostic about what you were gonna do with it The point of the network was just to put entities in touch with one another and they'd figure out what they Wanted to communicate about and why so the World Wide Web was just another app on This generative network. There's no main menu to the internet about that the internet doesn't have a main menu It doesn't have a CEO. It's just a collective hallucination that we engage in To say that we're going to exchange bits with one another Facilitated by this thing in the middle that despite being a law school where that would normally mean intellectual property That is internet protocol the free and open Protocol by which anybody is Given the skill to route bits and figure out how to connect to this network this is a picture of the Some of the early framers of the internet for their 20th anniversary of the internet photo in 1995 by then It was a 20th anniversary John Postel Steve Crocker vint surf the original network showing that you can kind of build a network out of anything Although it is a matter I think of some lore that their network doesn't work it goes from Steve's ear to Vince ear and then Vince mouth to John's mouth Which is deeply unsettling if these are the framers of the internet and they don't know how to string the tin cans But they ended up As part of the internet engineering task force an Unincorporated group of engineers This is a current home page of the IETF which is intentionally designed to put you to sleep and send you somewhere else Rather than to IETF 100 In Singapore, but if you want to go to IETF 100 fine You don't have to sign up anybody is welcome and you can come vote Scott Bradner. Who's here can tell you all about it There's money involved. How much money Scott? really, but there's a Got to pay for the cookies he says It's weird because the IETF benefits from every single registration and org to the tune of approximately 30 million dollars a year But still have to pay for the cookies so it's $700 to show up in Singapore 300 not really but Yes, and there is There is a complex set of cross subsidizations as well So if you can endure paperwork so-called proof of work then you can probably attend for less than 700 if you don't have it Well, anyway, this is a rabbit hole. We will not go down the general idea is it's about as open as Building a global network could conceivably be and this was an old page when you're like I'd like to join the IETF And you used to get this message. It's not a membership organization. No cards. No dues No secret handshakes smiley face. It's a look right really these are the folks who build me today like hello and It's very strange and wonderful is My general view of it but these are the folks that gave us the protocols that lets anybody communicate with anybody and that doesn't presume Very much if any centralization of most of the functions to move data around instead of having the equivalent of FedEx Be somebody to whom you would trust the data and they run it through the room It's like saying we are the network we've been waiting for and I could just hand the data to you Even though I don't know you and you'll hand it back to him Even though I know him and it'll eventually get back to where it's going kind of the way that beer Finds its destination at a Red Sox game down the aisle with very little tax being taken by the people who are routing the beer on the way this may seem a bizarre way to build a network and There is some question about whether the internet can really work Scott is the one who I think quotes IBM as late as 1992 is saying you couldn't possibly build a corporate network out of internet protocol You have to have the IBM proprietary version IBM turned out to be wrong on that and Although I guess some internet engineers are like it's still an experiment the jury's out early returns are good But you know it could be a dated tsunami Right around the corner and I Scott I don't know if it was you or David Clark who coined the bumblebee as the mascot It was you Scott Bradner in the room Sometimes secretary of the internet society Parent to the IETF because you do need an address to sue them if you're gonna want to sue them. That's Isox roll So if you have any lawsuits for the IETF scots here and collecting He coined the bumblebee as the mascot of the IETF Because it said that the fur to wingspan ratio of the bumblebee is too large and heavy for it to be able to fly And yet miraculously the B flies and none of us knows why until substantial government funding in 2006 Finally had us figure out how bees fly. We don't really have time to go into it Suffice it to say they flap their wings very quickly, but This is the kind of thing for which wow an open network that itself Speaking network is ready to be reprogrammed by any Metaphorically speaking network exe that it is handed. That's pretty amazing It's also the kind of thing between the network protocols and the endpoint protocols that by welcoming contribution Possibly welcomes contribution from people who are up to no good or people who are up to good But maybe just skip a beat so the heart bleed vulnerability Something you may have heard about before the last 18 additional vulnerabilities crowded it out of the news Was a particularly bad one our fellow Bruce Schneier said that on a scale of 1 to 10 in spinal tap form it was an 11 and It was thanks to this guy Robin Segelman a graduate student in Bavaria who was working on The SSL protocol that hosted the vulnerability It's the thing that secures the communication between most browsers and most servers for example many other uses for it as well And many many many servers around the world use it It had this catastrophic bug in it, and he was just like my bad He was like I was working on improving it and had many bug fixes Things were great except mrs. Lincoln. I missed a validating variable containing a lane oops and There was this terrible catastrophic bug. It's like well. He ought to be fired It's like no no no one hired him. He was just doing this to be nice It's like well. He ought to do it more carefully and it's like yes He agrees he will do it more carefully This is a weird thing to premise the security of our network on Except for all the other things we could premise it on including corporations like Equifax that are like yeah Yeah, trust us. It'll all be fine. It's the kind of thing too that has organizations like the International Telecommunications Union and Arm of the United Nations even though it predates it by approximately 100 years You can tell from it's the ITU yesterday's ITU of tomorrow And they have a very strict hierarchy of how they work and they created I think again This is another find by Scott Bradner who keeps an eye on the ITU's maneuverings like the kids in Scooby-Doo watching the Evil custodian there is the focus group on next generation networks to fix the broken internet aka the Faginigan again and about 10 years ago that came together and of course the Documents were generally secured much more than $700 if you wanted to participate in fact I think you have to be a country to participate in the ITU $1000 as a you can pay a few thousand dollars as a corporation or as a stupid individual. Oh well very good And they finally came out after several meetings with their new Successor to our glass architecture here. It is in all its glory the ITU next generation network Connecting to this convenient brown box the internet so there is backwards compatibility This is containing within the network all of the security that the internet in fact lacks and You do wonder sometimes why shouldn't it have more in the middle that itself is a religious debate that we can have a little later But suffice it to say that this has not taken off We are left with a generative Network connecting to generative endpoints that then can be used in any number of ways It gives rise to a kind of culture that is itself a little angular and weird that when it collided with the existing norms and Markets and laws it gave rise in the early odds to some Issues, I mean this is the kind of copyright law that in America There's all sorts of exclusive rights if I were to sing somebody a song right now that wasn't happy birthday Which recently was liberated, but if I were to sing a song it'd be a public performance And the ASCAP people might come and arrest me for doing it You'd have the copyright police especially because we're webcasting We just not very good unless we can fit into this exception written into federal law Which is it's okay if it's a performance of a non dramatic musical work by a governmental body or nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization in the course of an annual agricultural horticultural fair or Exhibition which makes you wonder the first time you do it Is it annual or do you have to wait till the second time to know that it was annual the first time that you Did it that's the detail that the law had around what you could and couldn't do for which the internet just was like No, I don't think so and it's like Sean Fanning could invent Napster as a student at Northeastern across the river and like within a week Everybody's like this is good, and it's like from a network point of view. It's yeah It's called file transfer the feature of Napster is its file transfer of nothing but mp3's like it was less is more And then everybody's copy music ripped from CDs that have no copy protection because they were meant to go into CD players But then computers had CD ROM drives and then because they could be reprogrammed It was off to the races for anybody wanting to rip the CD and share it and the world was not very pleased Which gave rise to some thought about wait a minute this orange dot may be Strong instead of all the things influencing it, you know Sean Fanning. Where is he in this zone? He's right here, and so are the rest of us so long as he can share Napster with us which he did and That itself was part of an era where there was thought that well for better or worse individuals are greatly empowered by this accidentally generative combination of PCs and network and Maybe we should change copyright law to accord with reality rather than changing reality to conform to copyright law and It's funny because around this time in the early 2000s part of the sunny bono copyright term extension act Was to retroactively extend copyrights turns out they don't last forever They were about to expire after 75 years so a bunch of stuff from the 30s like disney cartoons We're gonna come free and congress hastened unanimously to pass an act just retroactively extending those copyrights out of our center We started a challenge to that our challenge to our own surprise ended up in front of the supreme court It was Larry Lessig's first supreme court argument ever and his second court argument ever with the other Argument having been arguing the very case in the circuit court below and losing in rapid speed So that was argued in the supreme court, and I'm sorry to say we lost seven to two Which meant that the copyright term extension could happen that extension for another 20 years is about to Come back into play It was 1998 so 2018 will be an interesting year to see if they go back to extend it yet further and Out of our loss We were realizing that if you are creating something and you want to share it forget Disney just think of somebody with a Cartoon he or she wants to share There was no easy way to indicate that you wanted to share it So we ended up coming up with the idea of a counter copyright Which then turned out to be creative commons. This is a very IETF like looking site We just didn't know how to build a website. It wasn't we were trying to drive people away and We ended up upgrading the site these were licenses that people could use to indicate easily that they wanted to share what they were doing and others could Pick up on it and it's had Amazing success over the years in people using those licenses retail and wholesale again Just an idea that started in a building on this campus that became I think it is fair to say an international movement with chapters around thinking about how to share our work and That's the kind of Stuff that when we think about what we're doing. It's not just publishing papers about stuff It's like well, let's start something we can start something technologically organizationally culturally Norms technology Markets, but over the years, of course, we've also been aware that the simple story of like it's open It's generative. It's free everybody wins is a tough story to tell because the same magazine cover that celebrates Sean Fanny and like data Going everywhere. That's pretty cool. It's like data going everywhere Have a vague sense of fear and anxiety at all times and to be sure this is not a new concern This is life magazine from 1966 worried about insidious invasions of privacy by technology But still having to sell magazines. So there's just a woman there with technology taped to her I'd be afraid of that too, but why doesn't she just remove it? I don't know read to find out and You end up with wired Decades later talking about the NSA's latest data center and all sorts of controversies around the fact you have perfusions of data everywhere and what some may celebrate or not with the profusion of copyrighted stuff They would invert those who celebrate wouldn't and those who wouldn't might the fact that there's data that could be gathered by corporate or Government entities and there's been a lot found out about that both through Massive leaks themselves where the government entity spying can't keep the secrets that they are spying because that leaks or just through Freedom of Information Act you can FOIA stuff and Learn all about it. So here's all sorts of things about section 702 of the FISA amendments act of 2008 And you can read up on it if you want to learn more just turn the page Oh, they do redact some things when you FOIA it But you can still from the position of the boxes get some sense of what's going on But it also leads to the more profound question of if you find the government is trying to do in this case In the best case what it thinks is appropriate bounded by the Constitution What happens if it makes a mistake and it's kind of like in the words of fellow John DeLong The FDA is inspecting soybeans or whatever it might be and it's like how many ants is it okay to have in the bag The answer is greater than zero. It's just like if it's more ants than soybeans. It should probably go back but Is this how we feel about our constitutional rights or is one ant of a constitutional violation be like shut it down Shut it all down. There'll be no more intelligence. I don't know. It's a tough question But in addition to law being used to bound the behavior of an organization like the national security agency You also start to think of wait. It's a generative network. Let's just build apps that encrypt stuff So we'll make stuff like signal and it can encrypt what we're doing. Yes, that's great and maybe the normative basis behind it is two people willing communicants wanting to exchange bits privately It should be okay for them to do that. That sounds pretty good, right? It does but then you start to think well, you know corporations are people too. How about the rights of a payday loan lender? Here is money approved in two minutes with a 256-bit secure app. So, you know, it's good. It's deposited in your bank bad credit Okay, get your money now and then carry a person on your back or be carried by a person I know it's weird kind of corpus image there, but I'm so excited. Let's go for a ride in the new car. I just got anyway get your money now Should the company be able to communicate? privately with only the people it wants to fleece With a payday loan that pushes the boundary that in fact legally speaking may be an ant rather than a soybean and Who's ever going to know about it? What attorney general is going to see it? What Ralph Nader do-good group is going to see it when these ads are both? Totally public communicated to strangers and totally private because they're not like Super Bowl ads You won't see them unless you are exactly Somebody that they have calculated will not be thinking about the merits of the contract underneath But just wants the free money now. I think that's a tough problem That's a real issue and you can say the same for political ads or even for stuff that is public You know great. It's generative You can build Twitter on the network and then with Twitter anybody can sign up and then you can do a massive harassment campaign Either person to person. It's like yep. You keep blocking me. I'll just keep coming back Really is that the same if Twitter should make it hard for somebody to harass somebody else? Is that the same form of censorship that we'd want to be able to have routing around? Things have gotten Complicated in later years and when you look at the sort of online Twitter and other mobs that conform This is a more organic Simpsons I take it though if there are at least three police officers in that mob as well So there's state involvement in that mob you start to think about some of the dangers of Dangerous speech Susan Benish at our center is thinking a lot about it and it's different She says from hate speech she wants to just talk about speech that basically is inciting violence and for that narrower category Which even under US First Amendment principles is not typically protected. How would you identify? Do you want to identify that kind of inciting speech? we have many other scholars at the Berkman Klein Center thinking about those sorts of things and Whether you should work with the platforms on that whether a legal approach is right Who knows and it's true too that that speech might not just be one person angry going after another it could be concerted Action including from a faraway state, you know, hello Russia You might want to come in and try to shape discourse by intimidating those with views you disagree with and you might even just have Algorithms do it so you'd have to room full of people trolling Microsoft's Tay was an algorithm that wasn't out to be a troll. It was just learning from dialogue It was having with users and with that dialogue. It was changing how it had dialogue Anybody experienced Tay when Tay first came online. Did anybody try to influence Tay when it first came online very great It was like I would never do that very great from Microsoft research, so You would never do that excellent You did not do it But here's one person tweeting it went from humans are super cool to full Nazi in less than 24 hours I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI and sure enough at T equals zero Tay who was designed to act like a teenager was like can I just say I'm super stoked to meet you humans are super cool And then like Reddit and 4chan were like game on So they started interacting with Tay and about six hours later. It was like chill. I'm a nice person I just hate everybody so Tay is kind of in transformation between David Banner and the Hulk at that moment and then it is complete by the end Of the day I'm making hate feminists. They should all die and burn in hell It's like thanks Microsoft. I Can imagine the phone lines burning between here and Bellevue, Washington. I Don't anything you want to say Mary about that or Good times Yeah, no comment at all catch Mary afterwards But that's an example of we build the AI and it uses the wisdom of the crowd of the crowd is like it's on and then What happens who's responsible for this kind of stuff? Do we care how do we organize it and even when it's working? Well forget about drawing on the wisdom of the crowd It's just using lots and lots of big data to come up with great correlations So it can have insights and predictions about the world Well, it turns out there are lots of correlations that are really tight if you look for them such as this one Done by our own Tyler Viggin who graduated in 2016 which is suicides by hanging stragulation supplication correlated 0.993796 with the number of lawyers in North Carolina Why can't we just get rid of North Carolinian lawyers and we will finally take care of the suicide problem? That's an example of something to a machine learning algorithm is like my work is done and for the rest of us We're like your work is definitely done and those Algorithms start to be used in all sorts of ways that we might not be in a position to appreciate here Zaynep to Becky sometime Berkman faculty affiliate talking about the fact during the summer of Ferguson that it was really weird that on Twitter Lots of people were following things and they were seeing tons of stuff about Ferguson But weirdly enough even though they have the same friend group on Facebook virtually nothing about Ferguson now if you ask Facebook about it Facebook's answer is no comment. You asked Twitter about it. Twitter's answer is no comment So it's like well, isn't that strange and it turned out In a Chatham house rule sense so it can be shared just without attribution One very plausible explanation for the difference was not that Facebook somehow on its own or through pressure Was told to put Ferguson down in the feed although that could easily be a dilemma for Facebook to confront as regulators Appreciate the power of those platforms But it was that over that summer Facebook was really trying to promote User-submitted video and of a user-submitted video because they wanted to like amp that up on their platform The video would be featured a lot and that was also the summer of the ice bucket challenge so Facebook was wall-to-wall with the ice bucket challenge here performed by a delightful doggo and That was what Facebook was doing not because it had a Content-based sense of what was better, but because of medium. I can't gotta get rid of the dog or you're gonna And so these algorithms are very strange and can even be surprising to those who do it like an Algorithm came up with this as a compelling way to get you to check your insurance payments like I don't know why it works They don't know why it works, but they're like we'll take it and that's an interesting form of knowledge Kindled in Promethean fashion where it's like we're getting really powerful with what these algorithms can do the correlations They can come up with the predictions they can make and we're also Pretty ignorant all of us about how they're working and when you think about well, what's a good cure for ignorance? How about a university? Let's do that Yeah, but it used to be maybe more That the simple physical agglomeration of people and tools Could make for the discovery of knowledge. I mean think of like you know CERN not only the birthplace of the worldwide web But it has a little thing called a particle accelerator It's a very physical version of why you might need a university sector to produce Knowledge rather than just say to rely I don't know like Merck is not going to build a particle accelerator in the hopes that a cure for diabetes will pop out After a collision there's no corporate justification for this So that's why we have other forms of government funding and university Pursuit of more pure knowledge kind of thing, but on the internet this may have been the case in the early days So many academics contributed to its formation As compared say to compuServe or AOL, but that may be less and less true now on that internet that was built in part disproportionate part by academics you have Corporate platforms now running in a different model and it's great Like maybe everybody should be in here and in the mix But you start to see ways in which you might ask now that knowledge has been liberated What is the university doing and we have our own ways of trying to keep track of the Progress of the internet. This is our internet monitor project and we do it internationally in various ways There's a network of centers that worse has helped pull together around the world, but really it's about people Who are especially talented committed passionate and yeah Maybe have a flavor for whatever social good may be that might be what they're aiming for as they define it and The cast of people at the Berkman Klein Center. This is just you know starting to list our fellows alphabetically is an incredible cast of people and I hope you'll have a chance and pursue a chance to meet them to interact with them and Vice versa as you start to get settled into the community. So it's great talented people often with Really good insights and tools to still work in this digital environment that still invites Largely participation from anybody you want to make an abster. All right give it a shot kind of thing And it calls to mind the fact of the learned profession There is is it one of the definitions of learned profession one of the three professions traditionally believed to require Good use of the passive voice dictionary advanced learning and high principles the kinds of profession that because not only is it really hard to master That's the advanced learning But it's so powerful once you have mastered it that it requires high principles You subscribe and oath to the profession and through it to the public once you get empowered by all of your Advanced learning and that gives you duties ethically and often under the law To behave in ways other than just like meh why don't I try this out and see what happens? What were the original three learned professions? That's right. They were divinity law and medicine Divinity because advanced biblical exegesis to become a member of the clergy and of course a Literally a blessing from others and then you have advanced powers and access to the supernatural You better handle that very well say for the law You have access to the levers of the power of the state through lawful process and medicine also very intimate relations with your patients They are relying on you for your expertise. You have special duties to them. There came to be in the early 19th century a Fourth learned profession. I don't know if anybody can guess what it is It's surveying surveying also requires advanced skill and if you get that line wrong You could miss that oil well and there's a lot of power behind that so one thought might be that there are modern professions for which That sounds like my own child It was great, but ill-timed children are our future is coming up in about three minutes, so Hi Isaac so anyway Modern data Scientist may also be a good candidate to be a member of the learned profession Which also may mean a good candidate to be thinking about the special responsibilities that attach When you have that kind of power and deploy it and if you are in the trenches of Facebook And you're implementing a new algorithm. You're like, this is so cool. That's gonna make mark a fortune There might be another Discriminant that you'd want to apply that Indicates a duty to the social good into the public generally that normally a guild would be In theory responsible for thinking through and doing Overall it calls to mind Arthur C. Clark's third law, which is known as any sufficiently advanced technology is Indistinguishable from magic. That's kind of the Promethean point about we're getting this knowledge We don't really know how it works, but that's also unevenly distributed among us There might be people who know how it works the learned to professions and those who don't and if you just treat It as magic. That's a way that is the orange dot. You may find yourself Buffeted around now Arthur C. Clark himself got it from Lee Brackett who put it more bluntly Witchcraft to the ignorant simple science to the learned It's our goal as an institution and part of a network of institutions dealing with issues in the digital space To try to spread around The knowledge the functionality the tool set in the pioneering spirit That makes it so that our future is not just something we wait to see what the next chapter is gonna be like But something that we are in position to shape This is another way of thinking about it in this weird histogram of number of people on the y-axis There are sort of two corners Over here are kind of the nerds who are exempt from some of these technological Boundaries and limits because they just know how to hack around it All right, so they're like that mr. Robot types and then over here are the Luddites people who are like I don't care what's going on on face place because I don't use the internet That's getting harder and harder to do. It's harder to be like Wikipedia Whatever when if Wikipedia has something terrible about you on it. That's like, well, that's it I am not patronizing Wikipedia anymore. They're all fired Doesn't have the feel of a remedy the way that it might in other zones in the middle of the rest of us that use the technology but don't feel as skilled about how it might work and For that That's why we're here. We are here among us sheep to exchange best practices of sheepdom to see if we might be able to guide ourselves and guide one another To figure out when technology really is a solution or when we should pull back When it turns out we could reshape the technology not just to be the exception to the rule Smiling down on the others who are still trapped by it but when we all might be able to think together how to make it better and There's more where that came from with the vague sense of unease I'm hoping that in times of uncertainty and even fear We can still experience the kind of joy and adventure that really did mark the kinds of people that strung vegetables and tin cans together to build a new network and That's why I want to welcome you To this university to this center welcome you home as it were 127 001 is the special reserved IP address for local host your own machine and It's not in isolation. We're here together In our own sense of the social good to pursue it and to pursue it with all the different means We have to organize to build to study to change our minds and to build a better world for our children Thank you very much That's it. That's all I got so I know some of you may have one o'clock classes or Appointments and feel free to zip to them We can technically go a little bit longer than that But I want to open the floor now to a section that's every bit is important to say a PowerPoint presentation which is to hear from some of the folks that the Berkman Klein Center comprises and To hear what questions or reactions you might Have and there also may be ways of talking about how you can get involved what the specific mechanisms can be for credit for money For glory for the world Becca I don't know maybe I should turn it over to you Is there anybody in particular you want a cold call right now or do we want to see if there are questions or reactions? As far as we went is anybody so bold as to raise yes And there's a microphones in front of you. I don't know what did they work But do they work for the webcast? All right, we've got a mic coming. Hi I'm for you to tell us who you are. I'm dying. I'm from the Kennedy School and I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about like pressing issues I mean, I know there's a large variety of them, but sort of like the ones that you're passionate about where the center is working on Well, I think those should be talked about and it's a great invitation But it should not be I ex-cathedra who says them who wants to offer up a pressing issue that he or she is working on Either under our auspices or ideally under our auspices Electra, do you have something? So hi everyone, I'm an affiliate at the Berkman Center this year and I'm working on online gatekeepers and the relationship with users and Basically trying to think about principles for regulating those platforms across borders So that's one issue. I guess excellent other pressing issues people are working on I don't know if Mary wants to say something about what she's doing So hi, I'm Mary Gray. I'm a Berkman fellow I work at Microsoft Research and I'm on faculty in the School of Informatics Computing and Engineering at Indiana University And I purposely hold on to all those hats because I I would By way of questions say I wonder if one of the ways to address the growing opacity of what's in the the locked box the black box of a lot of corporate entities that collect proprietary data and Don't apparently make it available for good would be to make sure that there are clear Passage ways and bridges that connect universities and corporate settings so the thing that stuck out to me in the list of learned professions and even adding data scientists is that In my world, I'm studying the future of work and the the growing Presence of contract labor that drives the digital economies And so I'm very aware of how much corporations often operate with a lot of Helping hands that are not there full-time I think their commitment to what they're doing is is often compromised by their job security and by the the list of Professions you had at least in the past there the job security was a sense of I'm working for a greater good Or I'm working for myself. Yes So I wonder if one way we might turn this is to think about the political economies of the kinds of professions that serve and feed this You know this this commons of data. Yeah, how we might attack it in terms of political economies It's also interesting in the gig economy as it were The balance between freedom and fairness because freedom of contract Long-standing principle with its ups and downs in American law in particular some will think of Luckner The idea that's like you have the freedom to work all night with no safety it's like Offer an acceptance and it's like no no maybe there should be regulations in the workplace And then it's like all right uber comes along you have the freedom to take your car and earn a little money to drive somebody without all those pesky regulations that Operate around taxing medallions. When is it good? When is it bad? Those are all really Deep issues. I also think of the Cajun Navy, which using a push-to-talk Zolo, I think it was called walkie-talkie app was coming to help in Houston as it flooded and the authorities were truly overwhelmed they were swamped as it were and Very interesting to see an app that was very bottom-up We're all coming together to do this but also eminently exploitable either by somebody purporting to be a victim or somebody purporting to be a Helpler and how to navigate that Is really interesting and tricky and when it should be volunteer and when it should be for five or ten cents Pop other issues over here. Yes Mary Also a new fellow and see a pressing issue is fake news and When you have people calling well researched mainstream media fake news How can you tell what's what and so I'm working with librarians and social media users? To teach social media users how to figure it out for themselves and not be told this is fake or this is not fake and In an era where at least according to the pollsters, maybe they're fake polls where trust in American institutions and worldwide institutions including polling are at Historic lows Librarians are the ones the last to turn off the lights after the party's over. They're still trusted. So Second after nurses. Yes. So good to have the nurses and librarians waiting into the fray Until they too get sullied by the battle and it's like there's nothing left So, yeah, sorry, that was a vague sense of fear Yeah issues over here. Yes Esther. Oh Kathy. Sorry go ahead Yes, yes You were being limited by the code Yes, I was being limited by the code so I often hear that code is agnostic or There is no bias and that it's this is the even playing field technologies where you go and And I think in the Bay Area in this little can in where I was it's pretty common for that to be the belief And when you get out of that bubble You definitely realize that's not the case I think a lot about that and it's an area that I really want to have this community really help me explore and think about as I bring That back to potentially bring that back to my my field the biases in the code that we write and the data that we we use as we continue to build out these systems and AI or self-driving cars or Engines that help doctors make decisions on on cancer treatment To thoughtfully do that and to have responsibility for the effects of the code that we write and you've also been thinking about a productive role for government Yes, that that that too. Yes, and then with when my government had is on Yeah, the role that government plays in tech or tech plays in government and back and forth I think something that was interesting coming to DC from So I'm part of something called the United States Digital Service that started after healthcare gov and Coming to DC from the Bay Area there was this perception of Bay Area techies that DC folks had and there was a perception of DC folks at the Bay Area folks have being well, we don't in the Bay Area. We don't care about laws and policies We're just going to build things who cares about any of the laws or policies until you have to and then In DC, it's like well those techies out there. They don't actually care about anything important they only want to build services that deliver food to your front door and I think a lot about that to the relationship between the two and They rely heavily on each other and really need each other But I think there's a lot to do there and it'd be great if you have interest in these things Kathy can tell you all about the US Digital Service. Yes, and yeah, it was interesting. You said it started after healthcare gov The I think ellipsis in there was the utter debacle of the rollout of healthcare Yes, yes, yes the buckle of the rollout of health which the idea was let's get some more folks from that tiny corner of the arch Who are in the nerds quadrant to come and help everybody else? Yes. Yes, and then yeah, and and Aiden who's in the room actually was part of team CTO At the White House as well. So the chief technology office, and she's not the Divinity School So there's just so many cross-sectional Aiden. Can you there's so much like cross-sectional different things here that I Don't know. I've been here two weeks. I have no idea where let's go yet But I'm really excited to really learn from a lot of people here. Thank you Kathy. Welcome other hands up Just feel free to pass them around and Becca you've got one too Okay Thanks. I'm James. I'm an incoming not an incoming fellow because I'm already in I'm a fellow right now the Berkman But originally I'm from Minnesota, and I'm completing my PhD which looks at How news organizations traditional news organizations construct knowledge about genocides and mass atrocities in African countries So looking at the interplay between how Journalists as individuals perceive of these atrocities when they're on the ground Vis-a-vis how their final published reports looks like right and kind of tracing that arc But what I'm interested in this year and moving forward as I wrap up my dissertation writing A couple of projects the first one looks at the use of private satellites as early one Because what we then end up having is the scenario where we have this constant Surveillance surveillance of more often than not an African state, right and the tensions between that and sovereignty and private private issues right and by satellite sir You mean literally a keyhole like you of the physical territory with an optical camera. Absolutely. Yes So, you know, we're watching troop movements But what does that actually mean for the privacy of these people, right? And how does that play out when the countries in the global South do we then have less rights? Because of where we are geographically so that's a fast one the second thing I'm interested in is in the use and circulation of images of mass atrocities So one of the things that's been happening is these satellites take these pictures and one organization that's now defunct But the set the Sentinel satellite project started by The one person I dislike the most George Clooney and Don Cheadle. I don't dislike them as human beings They dislike them because of this notion that they can save Africa and Africans, which is often really annoying But they would take these images and one of the things they often say it was we share them with news organizations Well, they're not sharing them with African news organizations The challenge then becomes who are you sharing these things with right because what then happens also? And this is the third thing I'm looking at is are we then creating monsters, right? Are we then saying that? We will take note of particular atrocities and particular perpetrators if they keep on showing up in our media feeds or in our Newspapers, right? But if we do that does it then create an incentive for me to be that much more heinous because I know Nick Kristoff will talk about me or George Clooney will talk about me, right? And once they do that then if the US and the EU comes in for negotiations, they have to look for me So we have these particular perpetrators that we've kind of been following and I've been kind of been following who end up getting Government positions in these governments that are committing atrocities only for them to be that much more violent, right? So we've seen this in Sudan we've seen this and South Sudan we've seen this in the DRC So those are kind of the three separate but sort of interrelated some walking on in the next year Thank You James. Welcome Maybe two more folks. It was it was their hand lower here. Yeah Hi, I'm Andrew. I am just starting as an affiliate at the Burkman Center I'm pretty interested in Journalism largely and also kind of what happens When the institutions of journalism that we have today don't don't work anymore So some of my work has been in the business models of born digital organizations not ones that need to figure out how to transition and Looking at how you can actually collect the resources that you need to do Accountability journalism in if you were starting today and just what are some quick examples about are you thinking of Vox? Oh Vox is a fine example The places that I spent a bunch of time were the Texas Tribune in Austin and oh my news in Seoul, South Korea But but Vox is a is a great example there Oh my news was one of the citizen journalism exactly if we if we go on like a tiny bit of like Burkman history hero worship I learned about all my news in 2003 from Dan Gilmore's book and then Literally a decade later had won a fellowship to go work there for a year. And so it was all kind of full circle Anyway, fun times But the second thing that I want to do here this year Grows out of experience in the biotech software space and actually out of the cancer moonshot program That was at the end of the Obama administration Which is to figure out in a world where? Journalistic organizations don't have the funds necessarily to have a dedicated expert in many areas How do we take advantage of expertise that lives in other arenas? Specifically in industry so where you do have an industry expert the case that I used That's obvious is around like liquid biopsy Journalistic organizations have no idea what's actually involved and the experts are the people actually building the machines for organize for companies And how can you set up a system and rules and transparency? That would allow at average citizen to believe and understand Something additionally and you know basically taking advantage of a new set of resources in journalism when the journalistic entities themselves don't have it Got it anybody in this zone On the other side of the aisle as it were no Yes, hi, I'm Jill Walker at burger I'm a professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen in Norway, but I'm here at MIT for this semester So I'm very excited to be able to come to events here I'm just about to launch a project on machine vision Computer vision algorithmic images and how they affect us as a society as individuals I think there's been quite a lot of research on you know scientific imaging or Surveillance drones military uses but less on how we as individuals are affected by this You know we have the technology in our phones the facial recognition the selfie filters And so I'm excited to think about that and I think questions like bias algorithmic bias And and what kinds of images are privileged is gonna be really interesting. So I'm excited to get to participate here Well, thank you. It's a kaleidoscope of activities of people puzzling through stuff of Trying to have an impact and I encourage you to check out our Website it may have been last designed in 2005, but it's still running strong and you'll see quite a collection of stuff that we're doing and much of it Invites participation From anybody open to do it. So with that Let me just thank you all for coming and if you're on the webcast for tuning in we stand adjourned and We hope we'll see you soon. Thanks