Other speaker (context): Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for attending this exciting discussion between me and Dr. James. I think it's important for us to lay the frameworks and foundations and define a few terms so that way that us in the audience are on the same page throughout the discussion. So with that, I think it'd be important for you to define democracy and the themes of a democratic society.
James Brusseau: Sure. In this field, I have to say that I am not a specialist in political science, So I think my definition will be a non-specialist's definition, but I think the reference would be the one that most of us intrinsically lean towards. Democracy is a kind of governance rule, whether it's a government in the sense of your political organization or governance just in the sense of the way you organize your existence in a group, in a family or elsewhere, in which the stakeholders, all of them are involved in making the decision. All of them have a direct route to determining, to some extent, the direction that the group will take. So democracy for me means collective participation in decision-making. I think that's a common definition, but I think it works pretty well.
Other speaker (context): Absolutely. It's almost that power is wielded by the many, not the few. We all have a say in a voice I think so that's right that's right all right could you define ethics
James Brusseau: As well okay so there I have this is my field I have a little bit more elaborate definition so ethics is the activity of rendering our experiences in terms of human values so, for example, I have a little iPhone. If you think of the way a physicist would look at this phone, what a physicist would say is, well, how much does it weigh? How many centimeters wide is it? How many centimeters long? What is it composed of? What materials exist there? So the kind of language that a physicist would develop or a scientist would be about the materials in the phone.
By contrast, an economist, if you ask the same question about well what is an iPhone, the economist would start talking about things like how much does it cost? Or if you discount the price 100, do you get enough sales subsequently, a greater increase in sales so that your profits increase above what you would have had had you kept the phone at a higher price, right? So economists, they tend to convert experiences into money incentives, that kind of thing. So as opposed to that, as opposed to the scientist and the economist, what ethics is and what an ethicist does is when he or she looks at something simple, just any phone, they convert that experience into the language of human values. So the kinds of things that I think about are in what ways does this phone help my autonomy, help my self-determination? It allows me to do things like find the quickest route driving from Boston to New York, for example, or it allows me to find my way to a good pizza restaurant if I'm hungry. These are little things, but the phone helps me determine my own existence and make the kinds of decisions that I want to make. It does that very effectively for me. By contrast, in the area of privacy, it's also true that the phone does things like it grabs my location and sends it to people I don't know, who perhaps will hit me with advertising, which will scramble my thinking and lead me to purchase things that I would not have thought of otherwise. Or perhaps not, right? And perhaps it will lead me to purchase things that I am glad that I was informed existed. Those kinds of discussions. In what way does the phone encourage or help privacy? In what way does it encourage my decision making? In what way does it help me to make the kinds of decisions that I want to make? In what way does it manipulate me to make decisions that I might not have made otherwise? Framing, or rather putting the objects of our experience into that language, that's what ethics is. Ethics is seeing the world in terms of human values, right? So that's what my definition is of ethics.
Other speaker (context): I love that yeah it's interesting in the information age that we have gone through, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. You know, there's two sides to every coin. We have decentralized the access to information. Anybody with an internet connection with reliable data and sources in that sense can educate themselves on the way that the world works that used to be safeguarded by, you know, large institutions, et cetera. But in exchange for that public utility, we've given up a lot of our own personal information And that's created one of the largest revenue generating things, data, you know, surpassing oil as the number one traded commodity, I think, in 2017.
Other speaker (context): Which I think is a great segue into our next question here. Other speaker (context): Dr. James, what keeps you up at night? What keeps that brain tinkering?
James Brusseau: I will get to that. But just to come back a little bit to the good point you make about the data. There's also a second point about this, the double-edged sword, that we have access to things we did not have access to previously, but we're also giving up things that we previously did not have to worry about, information about what our interests are, where we are at a certain time, what our proclivities and habits are, all those kinds of things.
Another aspect of ethics which is curious is trying to measure those things. For example, one thing that scientists have very easily, it's very easy for them. Their measurements are very clear, like centimeters, ounces, kilograms, that kind of thing. Their units of measurement are very clear. But how do you measure the fact that someone, let's say that Apple, that they know where I am 24 hours a day? What units do you use to measure that? What is the equivalent of ounces or for an economist, they talk about dollars. They also have good units of measure. One problem we have with ethics and with human values is that it's hard to even know how we measure these things. How do you measure increased autonomy or freedom? What is that worth? Is it worth... The iPhone allows me to get from New York to Boston faster. Is that worth two cups of coffee? And is that worth $35 and it's very hard to know so another just a quick point about ethics is that we don't even have units that were certain to make our measurements so it's an extremely hazy field of investigation which does not mean it's undisciplined but it does mean that it's a field where investigations must be very cautious so any case but then we can move on to your other question.
What keeps me up at night? Nothing keeps me up at night in terms of worry or concern. There's kind of a debate going on now about artificial intelligence, which is connected, of course, with the crypto industry and whether or not artificial intelligence could destroy the world and so on. And there are certainly older debates about what kinds of negative effects might exist in our lives because so much data about us is circulating in the world and is available to companies. And so, of course, these are, well, the first one, AI destroying the world, I'm not so sure that's real. But the privacy concerns are real and meaningful. But the truth is those kinds of things don't keep me up at night. If anything keeps me up at night, it is the opportunities that the data economy or the digital economy is presenting. And it keeps me up with excitement, optimism, hope, not fear, not dread, not concern, not worry.
So for example, I'm working on a project now with someone at one of the universities where I work at in Trento in Italy. He is a computer scientist who is interested in music and he's interested in finding ways to incorporate the well two things he's interested first in finding ways different ways to experience music so for example he has developed or he's constructed these vests that people can wear and they have little motors all around your body and these motors are sort of create vibrations and they're timed to go off or correspond with the music that's being played. So it has this curious experience where your body is kind of being moved physically by the music that presumably is moving you emotionally. He's interested in that, and then he's also interested in how the motions of the audience's bodies in response to the music as they're dancing or some such could in turn affect the musician and the actual music that he or she or the collective of musicians is making. So these kinds of interactive experiences that are possible now between musicians and audiences or between musicians in different places simultaneously as long as you've got an internet connection without a lot of lag, because that's really important for music—it's these kinds of opportunities for new ways to experience art, new ways to experience human interaction and human community. Things like these opportunities and hopes and aspirations, these are the things that keep me up at night. I think that most worries that people have about artificial intelligence and the data economy in my opinion are overblown. I think that the opportunities are far greater than the risks in most cases for most people.
Other speaker (context): I appreciate that. I think we average everyday consumer and oftentimes I feel myself engaging in this vicious feedback loop of pessimism, whatever the news cycle is, right? It's sometimes hard to focus on optimistic things that these opportunities of technology do present itself. So I appreciate your insight to that and your perspective on that because I think that the world generally needs more optimistic people because it is an exciting time to be alive as well.
Other speaker (context): As you know today, a lot of the world's data and IT systems and things are controlled by just a few companies. A lot of those same companies are also in an AI arm race with recent news about OpenAI and things of that nature. How do you personally feel about that?
James Brusseau: Right. Well, I think here is if I suppose if I could go back to your other question, something keeps me up at night it would be the loss of opportunities that exist when the data and possibilities for using contemporary technology are limited to small groups of people right this runs against our notion of democracy that we as we stated it at the beginning and it also runs against the possibilities for innovation when only a very few people have access to the tools of innovation, it probably will follow. That we will have less innovation and less interesting kinds of inventions like the musical things I was just referencing. So I think that the best things that the digital technology have to offer depend upon decentralizing these kinds of data and allowing as many people as possible access to the tools that are being developed.
I think, by the way, that ChatGPT, I don't think I know, that ChatGPT just announced an effort, which I think we should laud, to allow people, individuals to experiment a little bit more directly with their ChatGPT model by allowing individuals to train or add a training layer on top of the basic ChatGPT tool. So, for example, you need to have a subscription. I have the subscription. If you do, what you can do is you can go into ChatGPT, and on the left side there's an explore key, and you can explore ways of fine-tuning that model to suit your particular experience. So something I did—I'm a philosophy professor and I teach classes. One of the classes I teach is an ethics class, and I've written a textbook for that class.
So what I did with the ChatGPT is I took my textbook, well, I'm in the process. I will tell you more about how it's going later. I'm in the process of, I divided the textbook. First, I tried to just upload the whole textbook to ChatGPT, didn't take it. So I had to divide it up into chapters and clean up the data, clean up the pages a little bit. But little by little, I am uploading my textbook to ChatGPT. And what I'm trying to do is create an avatar, which will be like a ChatGPT James, which will answer questions about business ethics in the same way that I personally answer questions. So when you think right now about Chet GPT, if you ask it a question in ethics, it will give you an answer which tries to encompass all the thought of all ethicists in the world, which is great. You get kind of a master idea.
But what I want is something different. I want an idea which is in some sense suboptimal. I want an answer about ethics, which sounds like the answer Brusseau would give, which probably in some ways is very powerful and strong, but probably in other ways, it's not as good as the answers other people would give. But nonetheless, what I want for the students who are reading my textbook is for them to have access to a kind of avatar that can answer questions about ethics in the same way with the same strengths, the same weaknesses, and maybe the same tone of voice and same vocabulary and so on that will answer questions in the same way that I do.
And then, so that's a technological idea. Let me just say why I think this could be really valuable. I think it could be really valuable because what happens sometimes is students get embarrassed to ask professors questions. Like for example, it might happen that a student asked me a question, what is utilitarianism and I answer and the student understands it at that moment but then later on they kind of don't understand it but they're embarrassed to come back and ask me again so if you can have a ChatGPT which talks just like me and the student can come back and ask the same question whenever they want as frequently as they want I think that could be really helpful for a student also they could ask at 3am while I'm sleeping and they can get an answer which is just like the one I would give
So I think this is kind of a—I'm a philosopher, so I talk a lot in answer to a question, but I think that this is an example of the kind of power that decentralization holds, right? OpenAI in this one little way has opened up their ChatGPT platform and said people like me can take it and use it in the ways that I want. Now, later on we talk about how well it's actually working, we'll see. But at least theoretically it's a perfect example, I think. On the one side, the danger of the problem with this centralized data and centralized power is that no one in OpenAI is going to have the idea that I had of making a Brusseau avatar to answer questions for my students in my class with my textbook. That's the danger. But there's an opportunity to decentralize and when OpenAI does that and they did it a little bit when they do that then you can see how innovation can flow so rapidly and how so many improvements can be constructed for in just our everyday lives Of course, I mean, what difference does it make, just one professor, one class? I mean, that doesn't matter. But if you have that mentality of an open community, if you have that mentality of open infrastructure, open data, then that kind of innovation multiplied across thousands of professors in thousands of universities and other domains, that makes a big difference. So the initial question was about sort of decentralization and centralization of power and these companies. I think that my experience is a clear argument in favor of decentralization, and also is a testament to the fact that there might be some hope that these big companies might be willing to wedge open the door just a little bit for us. But we should try and ask them to wedge it open more, I think.
Other speaker (context): Yeah, transparency, I think, is incredibly important. I think the main goal, I mean, obviously yourself as a teacher, is to try to instill into students, everyday people, not what to think but how to think. If many, many companies control the data, they control the narrative. And with some of these AI models, if we get into a scenario where we are replicating the past of a lot of systems that are teaching people what to think, not how to think, not to do complex critical thinking exercises, etc., do you think that in today's age, especially with the influence of artificial intelligence, we are going to be at risk of these models telling people what to think, not showing them how to think? Right, well, I mean, I think just two words...
James Brusseau: Will answer that question for you tick tock it's pretty clear that well first of all there are two things right and there's telling people what to think in the sense that you try to drag someone in a different direction from the sort of direction of thought that they're intrinsically lean toward but there's also the other kind of manipulation which is you push people deeper This is what TikTok does. It pushes people so deeply in their own direction and into their own thought that they become almost kind of caricatures of themselves, right? So that's why you see in TikTok so much extremism on whether it's the kind of music you like or the political direction you lean or the economic theory you have about how the world should be organized, all that stuff doesn't matter.
You see a lot of extremism because it the platform manipulates people by making them so much like they are it's very curious the way that tick tock manipulates you is by making you more you than you are right it exaggerates your thought about politics or about economics it exaggerates it so much as you get caught in this kind of caricature of your an extreme version of yourself. So on the question of manipulation, I think that it's quite clear that we should be, that any thoughtful person should be concerned about the power that the big companies have to manipulate news feeds and that kind of thing. People have talked about this quite a bit, right? To try to change people's political orientation and so on. And I think there's a lot of discussion about that, but there's this other direction too which perhaps deserves more discussion, which is that there's the kind of manipulation in which you become even more yourself than what you want to be. So both those two kinds of manipulations are possible and I think that decentralization again is not a guaranteed response, But it's a pretty good response, maybe the best response we have at the moment to these kinds of forces. So decentralization means you have options more than TikTok. Decentralization means you have options for your newsfeed, which go beyond Google and so on. Yeah
Other speaker (context): Yeah, it seems that a lot of these algorithms cause polarization. And as you mentioned, just push people further into their own echo chamber where a lot of their ideas, thoughts are not healthily challenged. And this radical pursuit to what is truth is sometimes limited and inhibited by that. I think, you know, maybe good to segue into our question here, how decentralization does benefit society. Aside from increased transparency and having no single point of failure, what ways do you see or what systems do you see in our society that would benefit the most from decentralization?
James Brusseau: I think that just kind of linking back a little bit to what we were saying a minute ago, I think that there is a field of study in predictive analytics. So predictive analytics, all of us know, is the prediction of the kinds of movies you are going to watch or the kind of job LinkedIn predicting, the kind of job that should be recommended to you and so on. There is a field here sometimes called serendipity where AI engineers or information scientists are trying to learn how to make recommendations to you, whether it's the food you get or the kind of career you pursue or the music you listen to or anything. Try to make recommendations for you which are on the one side unfamiliar, new, different, unexpected. They are things that you're not naturally going to lean toward, but that on the other side are also attractive, that draw you in, that engage you and make you want to follow a new interest. So, for example, if you're listening, Spotify would be a great example of this, right? I mean, if I say that I like the Rolling Stones music and the Who, well, they're going to keep recommending maybe the Beatles or other English bands and that kind of thing. But they might also develop the talent of finding some kind of jazz musicians that somehow, for some reason, fit together well with the Who and the Rolling Stones. Who knows how? Who knows why? But if I am alerted to this kind of music and I listen to a song, I become interested and follow and learn about a new kind of music, a new kind of way of enjoying music. Jazz is really different than the Rolling Stones. So I think that there's, it's kind of a strange example of decentralization, but I think that is an example of decentralization. That is the search for interests and engagements which are unfamiliar, which are foreign to those that right now form the core of ourselves.
So I think the decentralization as a human experience, you know, I'm becoming a philosopher, I'm going far into the human experience, but I think it makes sense at least to me that the idea of interests that are unexpected and then artificial intelligence can alert you to, the idea of experiences that you would not have had, that might be produced by artificial intelligence if it has this serendipity power. I think that this is the experience of decentralization of just your own life. Again, new interests, new engagements, meeting new people, different kinds of experiences. I think that all of us know that as part of human being, this is fulfilling, this creates contentment, happiness and so on. And it seems to me that to a degree, to a significant degree, if data and infrastructure are centralized by OpenAI, by Google and those companies, that kind of centralization is going to echo down and get caught up in the, or get imposed upon to a certain extent to the users. People like me who are using their services. But decentralization allowing smaller innovators to find their own way, create serendipity, create ways of connecting new experiences with older experiences. I think that that is good technologically, and it's good humanly too. I'm not sure if that's the kind of answer you were looking for, but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to join the human experience of decentralization with the technological experience. And I think that the justification for technological decentralization is not only the technical claims that it creates more democracy or that creates more innovation that can be measured. It's also the human claim that decentralization of our own existences, the discovery of new interests, of new engagements, new experiences, new places, new things, new people. That's intrinsically good on a humanist level.
Other speaker (context): Yeah, I agree. Absolutely.
Other speaker (context): Like you mentioned earlier, it is often really hard to objectively measure the subjective human experience, especially when you relate that to how humans and technology interact. One thing that I'm curious on your thoughts on the rate of innovation at least maybe because I'm living through this what feels to be a revolution seems to be at a pace that's unprecedented. The way that I grew up though is much different than the way that the next generation very contrasting different than my parents, grandparents, etc. Other speaker (context): Do you think if you historically look at the Industrial Revolution, the printing press or these things that have kind of shaken up the world and the systems that do operate. Do you think that in contrast to today with the rate of innovation, especially with AI is going to pose a problem for the ethics of how the human experience is in today's world? So I guess in short question would be is technology moving at such fast of a pace that the ethics on how we engage with this technology unable for us to be able to establish a good framework or principles or values on how we should interact with TikTok, interact with OpenAI, et cetera?
James Brusseau: No, I don't think so. I don't think so for two reasons. The one is just very quickly a historical reason. When I was a younger person, I studied some science, technology and society kinds of things. And if you go back and look at some of the ways that inventions like even a typewriter are written about out in the newspapers it's startling how similar the something like the typewriter was feared and loathed by people at the time they thought it could destroy the human species even a simple typewriter would stop our ability to think and so on so the kinds of concerns that we have surrounding artificial intelligence and innovation and the fears of this advance I think that if you go back and look in the past you'll find that we've had the same reaction before and the outcomes have not been the outcomes have been positive not negative so that's the first thing I think historically the period we're living in is not as different from the past as it might seem to us who are caught up in the hurricane developments I think that if you look back at the past they mentioned the steam engine the typewriter and things like that the port of the personal computer very similar kinds of discussion surrounded it. But then, but that's just a quick historical point. But I think the more important question you're asking is one, well, I mean, how do we deal with this question of innovation?
And then as I'm sure you know, there's a very vigorous debate at the moment about this and they're sort of, as I understand it and this is an area I've been working on and trying to organize a little bit is developing very rapidly. It's hard to keep track of, but as I see it, there are sort of three different ways of reacting ethically to this let's say a splurge of innovation one way of reacting is this notion in the United States of what's called slow AI in europe people who gather around this way of thinking I gather underneath frequently underneath the idea of precaution and their idea fundamentally is that the best way it's a sensible idea. It's not an idea I agree with, but it's a good idea. It's a reasonable idea. Their idea fundamentally is that if we want to ensure innovation over the long term, then what we should do is take innovation very slowly now so that we don't let things get out of control and ruin the whole thing. In other words, they're part of this group of people, sometimes they're called the doomers who think that or who feel that it is possible for artificial intelligence and related kinds of information to get out of the boundaries of our control and maybe cause unfortunate consequences that are so great that we will stop using the technology. I don't agree with that, but it's a reasonable position.
On the other side there's the acceleration side. I'm on that side. And what we believe is that even though, let's say, our conviction is, even though it's certainly true that artificial intelligence will cause problems in society—for example, it causes new ways of discriminating against people, we've seen this in hiring algorithms. I just saw about a week ago there was a story about a hiring algorithm that was being used. I was sensitive to this because it was excluding men over 55 from considerations for a job. They got caught and so they had to change the algorithm. So there are these little ways in which the algorithms that we are using do create maybe unfairness in society or they create the possibility of great privacy violations because all my data is in a database somewhere. If that's violated, then the whole world might know everything about me. So there are risks, safety problems and concerns associated with the advancing data economy. But on the acceleration side what we tend to think is that the best way to resolve those problems, or to answer those risks and compensate for them, is with still more innovation. So, for example, in the case of privacy... Instead of saying that we are going to limit the gathering of data, instead of saying that we are going to limit the amount of AI healthcare that we develop, because that's a very data-intensive area, instead of limiting the technology, what the acceleration group says is, no, we should let the technology innovate and advance as quickly as possible, that we should move in parallel with the actual healthcare applications. We should also set up technology to preserve individual privacy using things like technical tools like differential privacy or machine unlearning, or using just more common sense tools like data minimization, that is collecting only the minimal amount of personal information required for any specific task.
So that's sort of how the field looks right now. There's the deceleration side, they say, look, perfectly reasonably, if you want innovation in the long term, then slow down now so you have more safety. And then there's the acceleration side, my side, which is where you say, well, if you want safety, what we say, what I say, is if you want safety in the long term, then the best thing to do is go forward with innovation as rapidly as possible, Because we will invent ways to create security for ourselves with respect to privacy, with respect to fairness in the way these machines operate in the world.
So I think that's kind of broadly what the horizon looks like now. It's either if we want to maximize innovation, some people say go slow. Other people say if you want to maximize safety and I say this, then go fast. Then, just very quickly, within the innovation group, there's two wings. There's one group called the effective acceleration or techno-optimism. I'm not in that wing. That's also the post-human wing. What characterizes them is they tend to think that human excellence should be defined in mechanical terms, or at the extreme case, they think that we should just get rid of our bodies and upload our minds to silicon. That's not me. That's the anti-humanist or the post-human side of acceleration, whereas by contrast, the humanist side of acceleration believes that machines should serve traditional human existence and traditional human embodied, like my body, my mind, the way I live now. It should in some sense serve the way we live now, not change who we are and change who we live. But that's a different debate. But largely, that's the spectrum. It's either slow down or speed up and if you want to speed up then you either go all the way to post-humanism that's not me but it could be you or you do speed up it speed up in the name of contemporary humanism and that's called acceleration ethics that's the camp I mean that's what it looks like to me now ask me tomorrow it might be different
Other speaker (context): Things are changing rapidly yeah you know like these technological innovations they're tools and just like any tool you can hit yourself in the head with it or you can build a house right like a hammer for example. But as long as these tools and these systems are transparent, and the users of these systems are able to choose when to participate or when to leave and understand all of the parameters set forth in the different guidelines and policies of the systems that they are participating in, I think we'll have a better future for society, that humans can participate in ways that they are fully aware of everything that is working for them, against them, et cetera.
James Brusseau: That's a perfect example of a human value, right? So when I was saying earlier that the machine should serve humanity, that's a perfect example of how that is. Transparency means that I as a human being can decide when and how to use the machine. So I think that's a perfect example of what certainly the two of us agree on that and that specific question at least, yes.
Other speaker (context): It's great. Well, it's been incredible chatting with you today of day and learning some valuable insights on your thoughts and from a philosophical perspective on this deep technical world that we do live in. Coming up on the end here, is there anything else you feel would be valuable to share with the audience? Only that I think that the idea of
James Brusseau: Cryptocurrency and the idea of decentralization that operates there, I think it's terrific because not only in and of itself, but maybe more importantly, it's a terrific area of study Because the tools of decentralization that are being worked out and applied there, I think that those will be able to be applied much more broadly in society. So that the field you're working on, the kind of decentralization involved with the blockchain and cryptocurrency, I think it's not only is it good in and of itself, but it's a great contribution to what will happen more broadly in society further down the line.
Other speaker (context): I couldn't agree more. I think especially in this world that we live in, an immutable ledger is very much needed. Other speaker (context): Thank you so much for your time today, Dr. James. It's been so great to chat with you.
James Brusseau: Okay. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Other speaker (context): Take care, everybody.