Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science hosted Latanya Sweeney as its Donoho Colloquium speaker on January 14th in Filene Auditorium to give a talk titled “How Technology Will Dictate Our Civil Future.” Sweeney is a highly accomplished Professor of Government and Technology at Harvard University, with career highlights including having served as Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, founding and directing the Public Interest Tech and Data Privacy Labs at Harvard, and publishing more than 100 academic papers.
Sweeney opened her talk with the bold claim that we find ourselves in the midst of a third industrial revolution. Unlike the agricultural revolution of roughly 10,000 BCE, in which Homo sapiens began to domesticate animals and cultivate crops, or the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, in which the assembly line came to dominate the production of goods worldwide, Sweeney points to the speed with which modern technology is adopted as this era’s distinguishing characteristic. Today, it is possible for the designers and developers of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies to, with the click of a button, release new software updates and design changes to billions of people instantly across the world.
Sweeney then urged the audience to consider the difference in perspective between those on the development side of technological advances and the average person who benefits. For the software designer, a new feature to be implemented may be the product of many months or even years of work, from the idea’s inception to the click of a button that releases it to the masses. If it is successful in the market, serving the needs of users and making some aspect of their lives better, the feature stays and those responsible reap the financial rewards. If, on the other hand, the feature is not so successful, it may be removed and tweaked, only to be re-released when thought sufficient to satisfy the demands of customers. This is the continual cycle of implementation and iteration that ultimately creates the extremely useful products we use on a daily basis.
Like the molten, malleable metal that is to become a piece of armor, technology is forged in the furnace of society by the hardened hammer of market pressures and public opinion. When the armor is completed and ready to be worn, the blacksmith’s work is done. Likewise, customer satisfaction and corporate profits mark the end of the cycle for tech companies, who will soon enough be back to the drawing board to repeat it all again.
Sweeney explained how this satisfactory ending from Silicon Valley’s point of view is just the starting point for her work studying and analyzing the oftentimes unanticipated consequences of technology in society. That is not to say that technology companies do not care about the effects of their products in society, but rather that it occupies too little of their consideration, making unintended consequences of design inevitable. The reality is that downstream consequences are a less powerful motivator for companies than the much faster and easier to quantify increase in shareholder value that comes from increased research and product development. The saying “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” is wisdom tech companies are more than happy to heed, as Sweeney makes the point that a proven business model with a successful track record is often incredibly difficult to disrupt.
This idea of technological inertia is explicated with Sweeney’s deep dive into the history of Sony’s revolutionary Camcorder first released in 1983. The camera’s lightweight and portable design brought video recording into the homes of millions for the very first time and brought Sony millions of dollars, but failed to provide customers with a mute button feature to turn off audio recording while filming. This odd design omission, or potential feature depending on your point of view, led to multiple arrests for illegal wiretapping, as well as the mandatory inclusion of cameras with audio capabilities inside all Pennsylvania school buses and body cameras of law enforcement officers. Not only did the Camcorder set in motion a series of new laws and legal precedents, but it also established crucial design precedents that continue through today.
It should be noted that the cameras we carry around in our mobile devices today still lack a mute button feature, which might come in handy for the exclusion of noisy construction in the background of a scenic panorama video of the White Mountains from your dorm room window.
The story of the Sony Camcorder’s absent mute button lends itself to one of Sweeney’s larger points that designers of technology today are the new policymakers of the past. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, technocracy’s usage has been on a steady incline since the turn of the 21st century, and particularly in recent years with the rise of large language models like ChatGPT. Sweeney then expressed particular apprehension about the proclivity of AI to isolate individuals in an “echo chamber” of curated information and its effects on the politics of today.
In a similar explosion in the usage of the term “technocracy,” the term echo chamber has been a staple in describing the modern political climate of polarization we find ourselves in. What is colloquially referred to as “the algorithm” is yet another example of the prevalence of neural networks and machine learning, and is similarly a black box to the average person in terms of its internal parameters. The algorithms of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, and other platforms clinically monitor and surveil user inputs like keystrokes and search histories to spoon-feed content they are likely to be hooked by.
Like ChatGPT’s sophisticated stochastic computations used to predict the next word in a paragraph response, the YouTube algorithm’s probability calculations recommend content with maximum likelihood of being clicked and viewed in full. Sweeney mentioned the particularly harmful effects on democracy by algorithms that entrap certain individuals in an echo chamber of overly sensationalized and potentially misinformed content. Not only does this type of content prey upon the primal psychological predisposition of humans toward novel content that is surprising and unexpected, but through such means, it radicalizes young people to commit atrocious acts of violence, particularly those that are politically motivated.
Therefore, with humanity’s continued offloading of cognitive demands and tasks to digital machines comes a concomitant reduction in transparency. These pieces of technology are never truly “off,” collecting and storing every single piece of user input data that has ever been entered, a fact that clearly raises important questions relating to surveillance and its potential for harm. Society will be forced to grapple with this tradeoff between privacy and increased technological presence in the coming years, a debate we can only hope is mediated by decent humans with expertise in the field, but more importantly, good conscience and a desire for human flourishing in an increasingly inhuman world.
Despite all of these harmful effects, Sweeney is apt to note that society’s only real option is to learn to navigate with technology at our side, harmful effects and all. Its significant daily utility and benefit to humanity is simply too great to abandon. So what are we to do?
The talk concluded with answers to this question, and Sweeney fielded the queries of professors and students alike in the audience regarding the best path forward. Her strategy revolves around a model she refers to as “helping the helpers,” in which attention is brought to a technology-society clash by interested and engaged citizens, with the end goal being a resolution or some form of societal improvement. Arguably, the most central portion of the cycle, as stressed by Sweeney, is the part in which attention is brought to an issue in the first place. Thankfully, this is something all of us can contribute to simply by being intellectually curious and actively civic-minded.
Sweeney left the audience with a hopeful and optimistic outlook on the future of technology and its relation to policy and government, positing the idea that good ideas spread rapidly, thereby returning to the very factor differentiating the modern industrial revolution from the previous two. The internet and social media platforms can be immensely powerful tools in catalyzing social, political, and technological change if harnessed properly, a far cry from the dismal outlook asserted above. In a world where “truth is up for grabs,” there is more opportunity than ever for teaching others and increasing humanity’s collective understanding of the world.
While it is true that Newton’s first law tells us objects in motion tend to stay in motion, we must not forget the second half, namely, that this unimpeded motion only holds unless the object is acted upon by an outside force. Such a counteracting force against the triumph of technology over human rights is the spirit of Latanya Sweeney’s mission, one we all have the power to support in hopes of creating a better future for all.
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