Technology has amplified disinformation, polarization and zero-sum politics, Bruce Schneier told RSA conference goers. Addressing this will require new thinking on the nature of democracy.
By John E. Dunn
The technologies of the 21st Century are being used to “hack” democracy and the system needs to change rapidly if it is to survive this onslaught, Bruce Schneier
has told delegates at San Francisco’s RSA Conference.
Schneier painted a dystopian picture of the current relationship between technology and democracy in countries such as the U.S. Disinformation was often as or more powerful than information. Knowingly or not, powerful tech platforms exploit polarization for profit. The idea of zero-sum politics – for someone to win someone else must lose – had become ingrained.
None of this was new, he said, but the advent of technology was amplifying these problems in ways that today’s politicians and legislators had failed to keep up with.
This was because the system in the U.S. – and arguably in most other developed economies – was conceived centuries ago to meet the needs of a smaller world in which people, ideas and information moved at the speed of horsepower.
“The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited to the 21st century,” argued Schneier.
Expecting this to scale efficiently to a world where new technologies might appear over weeks or months was wildly optimistic. Inevitably, today’s regulation was too slow to adapt to new risks created by technology of all kinds.
Incentives had become misaligned in ways that favored people who knew how to hack, bypass, or subvert the system from the inside. Although it had often tried to project itself as politically neutral, this included the tech industry.
AI: Fact, Fiction and Separating the Two
The rise of misinformation wasn’t an accident; it had flourished because it is an effective strategy, he said. He contrasted the tendency to give technology a free pass to the incredible scrutiny placed on other industries such as aviation or pharmaceuticals which posed widely understood life and death risks for their customers.
A problem was that some technological risk could look perfectly innocent at first glance. He used the example of how Twitter had become a de-facto arbiter of free speech in the U.S. That had given a single company a position of power unimaginable even 20 years ago.
Schneier suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) has finally woken people up to the threat and that the era of light-touch or no-touch regulation was on its way out.
“When do we move into a world in tech where we can’t just do anything, where everything new is automatically allowed unless it’s forbidden. That’s been fun, we’ve done that for decades. That works only if the mistakes don’t have catastrophic consequences,” said Schneier.
“You can’t do that in aircraft design or pharmaceuticals. There will be a time when you can’t do that in software. It might not happen for 20 or 30 years, but that time will come…because this stuff is so powerful and is getting physical agency.”
AI would be used to both defend but also hack democracy and the economy, he believed.
“Finding new tax loopholes, new ways to evade financial regulations, creating micro-legislation that surreptitiously benefits one group.” The risk that this would lead to catastrophe in the physical world meant that this was no longer tenable.
Speed of policy
Schneier’s solution: democracy needed to be rebuilt to resist the ways in which technology was supercharging forces manipulating it to be less representative or serve narrow interests.
Ironically for a presentation to a tech audience, he implied that the era when Silicon Valley and its entrepreneurs were left alone to do what they liked without interference should come to an end.
“Maybe we can invent an AI that calculates policy based on everyone’s preferences. We need systems resilient against hacking and catastrophic risks. Systems that leverage cooperation more and conflict less and are now zero sum.”
Democracy needed to create a game where everybody wins that is unlike anything in existence today, including democracies, autocracies, socialism, and Communism.
What form this might take Schneier was unable to say although he expressed interest in the idea of open-source AI and in his framing of some questions hinted that cybersecurity professionals – experts in how systems are subverted – could play a role.