Brave new world
Technology thrusts us into an uncharted future and our regulators lag too far behind.
Google promises to tell if you’re talking to a robot.
At first listen, however, you might think you’re hearing a West Coast Valley Girl who has a tic of saying “um” a lot.
It is called Google Duplex, and its (her?) first performance drew cheers even from hardcore software developers after the CEO Sundar Pichai’s presentation at Google’s recent annual conference.
But the developers’ cheers were soon shadowed by a wave of existential panic.
We’ve all been reading about the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” featuring that psychopathic computer. Is Hal 9000 coming? Is 1984’s Big Brother already here?
Nobody seems ready for this brave, new world. Neither our old-school senators nor the Federal Trade Commission, established back in 1914 to fight coercive monopolies, have stepped up to confront the new challenges presented by all-powerful tech companies.
The United States — and the world — need to ensure that products like Google Duplex don’t go rogue. What if a customer programs Duplex to imitate someone’s voice to break up with a girlfriend? Or to ask someone else’s mother for a loan by using her son’s voice? Or to call a politician’s office in support of a corporate-friendly bill?
So much of yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality. Facebook knows the names, photos and preferences of billions of users and their “friends.” And some of our deepest DNA relationships already sit on servers that can be tapped by strangers.
Government rules and regulations haven’t kept up with today, much less tomorrow.
We can’t wait to be surprised by where technology takes us. Policymakers must act — and strategize both with our brilliant U.S. entrepreneurs and with our global allies — to set up a framework that enables innovation and protects consumers and taxpayers from being victimized by companies that already seem to be morphing into monopolistic all-knowing superpowers.
This means empowering the FTC to target corporate bad actors, passing new anti-monopoly laws and reinstating the Office of Technology Assessment, which provided Congress with authoritative information on a science and technology before it was eliminated in 1995 budget cuts.
Unfortunately, U.S. government agencies seem stuck with rules crafted for past problems. Not enough scientists and visionaries serve in government. There’s only one Ph.D scientist in the Congress right now. And few members of Congress seem to have a basic understanding of contemporary technological challenges. Just listen to the questions Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg fielded in a recent U.S. Senate hearing for some fine examples.
So far, it’s unclear what our government can do even about the latest tech excesses, though the FTC is making an attempt. The agency is now investigating whether Facebook violated a 2011 settlement in which it promised to protect personal privacy in tracking and sharing user data. If that 20-year agreement was broken, Facebook could face penalties as high as $40,000 per user per day.
Given the company’s 2.19 billion monthly active users, the maximum fine, if FTC could actually collect it, might be enough to wipe out our $21 trillion national debt.
We already live in a world in which our inventors are far ahead of our regulators, yet our leaders have weakened both regulations and regulatory agencies. We risk a return to a world that has something in common with the pre-computer era when the FTC was founded — an America where millionaire robber barons made their own rules and monopolistic businesses controlled prices, markets and workers.
All of us — and our leaders and regulators — need better tools to navigate in our fast-changing planet. Otherwise, we could end up in a place where the voice of the people becomes replaced by some corporate-owned computerized drone.