Fixing AI & Social Media. Globally.
Congressional hearings in the United States, House of Commons hearings in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and being hauled before a myriad other governments, Tech Giant CEO’s are under a constant barrage of political artillery fire of late. These appearances are good. And bad. They help, they hurt. We see that politicians barely understand not just how these technologies work, but they barely understand the implications, let alone how a digital society works.
While for some it may appear that the CEOs of these Tech Giants, from Zuckerberg to Shou are glib, evil and uncaring and are forging on regardless, that’s not quite true at all. Zuckerberg himself recently said that running a social media company is like getting out of bed in the morning and getting a punch to the gut. It is. Increasingly, these companies and their CEOs are asking for regulators to step in. They want guardrails, they need them. They’ve long ago realised that they can’t solve these problems with technology alone. AI hasn’t worked, no other tools have.
The majority of dis/misinformation and nefarious content remains barely managed by thousands of humans spread across the planet that are underpaid and overworked with little to no rights. They spend hours a day looking at child pornography, abusive content, murders and attempted murders, vitriolic content, terrorist propaganda, racism, well everything that is the dark side of humanity. They end up with PTSD, depression and a raft of psychological disorders. When they burn out, they are tossed aside. The raging torrent of dark content is a never ending flash flood.
Then of course, there’s Artificial Intelligence. We all know it needs regulation. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, they all know this. Google and Microsoft have decimated their AI ethics teams, with no plans to revitalise them. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has even acknowledged the risks. When will they fire their ethics teams? The Tech Giants all feel ethics slows them down, inhibits growth. Shareholders come first, not society. They have answered the question of why they can’t, won’t, regulate themselves.
The CEOs of these tech giants, especially the social media and AI companies know all this. But they’re stuck in a Catch 22, damned if they do, damned if they don’t. If they stop those human reviewers, their sites will be flooded with the vulgar vomit of the trolls. Governments will shut them down and the good people, the majority of users of these platforms, will be disconnected and have no options. It is a cruel calculation of cost/benefit for the CEOs of social media giants.
It is an abject failure of governments too, around the world, to take any action or accept any responsibility. To place the entire burden on the CEOs and executive of these companies, to fail to take the time to truly learn what the situation is. They howl like giant raging bears, spittle shooting from their mouths to “just fix it.” And offer no tools to help the CEOs, no policies and regulations, no laws that would help. Yet we cannot blame it all on the politicians either.
They may rage, howl and demand. That is political theatre, to show to the angry citizens bombarding them with emails, tweets and calls to “just fix it.” But they don’t understand what they’re trying to fix either. They’re already overwhelmed with the current climate of bitter political divisions and all the other problems they have to solve. Wars, massive migrations, climate change, inflation, weird economics, bank collapses.
So they get a two page briefing from aides who have to take a 300 page document and distill it down into simple language and the right questions to ask, but the politician doesn’t understand the technology, the business model, the economics and the social issues, so they cannot truly understand the answers, the nuance. What is not black and white is shoved into a box like forcing a round peg into a square hole.
And so the problems grow in complexity, fingers are stuck in a mile wide gap in a digital dam, while society is flooded and a torrent of digital rain pours down at the same time.
So how do we fix this?
It’s simple, which means it is complex. Of course. This is a whole-of-society issue. It means moving away from the favourite mental model of technologists, solving for a problem, to the mental models needed when addressing complexity; critical thinking and systems thinking.
It is the problem solving approach that ended up getting the Tech Giants of social media and Artificial Intelligence into this problem. It is the same approach being used by politicians and lawmakers. It is the same demand being made by civil action groups and citizens. It has not worked. It is not going to work. Remember that definition of insanity quote?
To get anywhere near solving this, we have to understand this is not one single problem and they cannot collectively be boiled down to one single problem. We are dealing with sociocultural systems, humans, and first we must shift the way we frame the issues. This means that technology comes second, human society comes first.
We need to bring together human-centric thinking combined with complex systems design and theory and a holistic, whole-of-society approach.
To add to all of this, the issues aren’t just for any single country to solve. This is also a whole-of-humanity challenge. It means countries working together because our world is made up of a plethora of wonderful and different cultures that all deserve the right to be respected.
Rather than frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs, barking furiously at one another, we should be forming ways to work together. Not some group hug event where everyone starts off holding hands and singing kumbaya, that’s delusional and ridiculous. Any idea that we’ll end up with some lovely utopian ideal needs to be shoved into a garbage can and tossed to the curb.
Humans , can and have for a long time, done rather well when they figure out how to come together and solve thorny issues. The last time we did this was the formation of the United Nations, although today that August body is failing us in many ways. But we figured out the SWIFT banking system to move money quite effectively. We mostly worked together to deliver a vaccine for COVID within a year. There is proof we can do it. Will we?
