YouTube: xVzXQLKQnAE  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: YouTube: xVzXQLKQnAE - Category: #articles - Summary: Title: Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently the non-fiction book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Amber spoke with Cory at the Attention: Govern or be Governed Forum in Montreal. Subscribe to The AmberMac Show wherever you get your podcasts // listen on SiriusXM Channel 167 on Tuesdays at 2pm and weekends. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVzXQLKQnAE Thank you so much for joining me today. >> My pleasure. >> I have followed you for many years. We've met a few times. You have written a number of books. This book feels a little bit different. It's a a really interesting moment in time. How would you describe it? >> Uh the time or the or the book? >> The time. Well, uh, we've had a quarter century of tinkering in the margins with tech policy because the big swings, the the the things that really stood in the way of people having the technology they deserved were off the table because the US trade representative had threatened the world's countries with tariffs if they made it possible to modify the technology America exported. And now we have tariffs. And look, it's not good, but it's good for this. There is a policy space that's just opened up that I've been waiting for all my life. And while I'm terrified on a daily basis about the ICE goons kidnapping people in my neighborhood, I am quite excited about what this means for the world. >> So, let's talk about the book. So, it's called initification, which is a phrase that you coined uh that uh many have borrowed over the the past uh many of us. It's with your blessing. and uh the subtitle is why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. So can you talk a little bit about what you think has actually gotten worse? >> Yeah, so we've lived through this period in which platforms have found ways to lock us in, right? They they've uh bought their competitors so we don't have anywhere else to go. They have um uh used software locks to stop us from modifying their products. They have captured their regulators so that even the worst things they do to us are somehow legal. And as a result, you see things like, say, the quantum of material that you asked for in your Facebook feed being dialed down to a kind of homeopathic residue, leaving behind a big void that's filled with things that people are paying to shove in it. And those people, the advertisers, the publishers who are paying to boost their content, they're not getting a good deal either. They're also getting ripped off to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It's not that we have like a class alliance between advertisers and platforms to screw users. It's platforms versus the world. And they're winning. It it's interesting. I'm thinking of a video I often show in my keynotes. It's of the founder of Patagonia who's sitting down with a journalist. Uh this is in 2013. And the business journalist says to the founder of Patagonia, you remind me a lot of Steve Jobs. And the founder of Patagonia says to him, you know, I I hate that comparison. You know, Steve Jobs won't even let you open up an iPhone and do anything to it. And and I always show this video and people kind of are taken back because I think people have really sort of uh misunderstood that you should be able to own your data to fix your own technology. >> Why do you think that is? >> Well, I mean I think that there's a kind of vulgar Thatcherism practiced by the tech companies. You know that used to say there is no alternative. She said it so often they sometimes called her Tina Thatcher. There is no alternative. And um what she meant was stop trying to think of an alternative. Right? She wanted to extinguish our imagination. And that's something that tech bosses do. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that asking to have a conversation with your friends that he isn't privy to is not just like unreasonable, but irrational. It's like asking for water that isn't wet. You know, Kim Cook wants you to think that having a phone that works reliably is impossible unless you let him take 30 cents out of every dollar you give to a performer or software publisher or a news organization through an app. and S uh Sundar Pinchai who who runs Google, he wants you to think that searching the web is impossible unless he gets to spy on you from to appetite. >> Yeah. I mean it's a really I think terrifying reality and you know Scott Galloway who I listen to pretty regularly um he tells it calls it the complexity illusion. You know the fact that we are made to think that technology is a lot more complex actually is I've seen this my entire career. One of the things I saw you just speak about um at the end of your presentation is some of the solutions, some of the things that individuals can do because we are not without power. >> Well, I actually I would quibble with that. I don't think there's much we can do as individuals. I think that uh billionaires would really like you to vote with your wallet because their wallets are thicker than yours and they're going to win that election. I I think that like agonizing over your consumption choices is a waste of time. Like sure, if you think that, you know, Masedon or Blue Sky will be better for your mental health than Twitter, then go ahead and use it. But don't kid yourself that that's going to change our social media landscape. The way you get involved is as a polity, not as an individual, as a citizen, not as a consumer. And so that means you get involved in party politics. You join the BC Civil Liberties Association or the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. You get involved with Open Media, Cypic, all of these organizations now that have popped up. There's Shield and there's the Canadian anti- monopoly project. There's uh all of these different projects that have popped up around Canada to make policy changes, not to like let you shop a little better, right? You can't fix monopoly by shopping hard any more than you can stop the wildfires by recycling really carefully. >> Yeah. No, I mean it's a really good point and I I think if people are more involved, unfortunately, I think we have citizens who sometimes are a little apathetic about uh certain >> because no one's offered them a way out, right? We've been again like this is vulgarism. We've forgotten that we can act as citizens. We think that the only way we can act is as consumers, right? And it's only when we get there. Look, I there's a joke from down east. If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here, right? Starting this 40 years after Moroni and Reagan and Thatcher lobotomized us and made us forget that we could be a part of a polity and that we could act politically rather than as consumers. It's not ideal, but it doesn't change the fact that the only way we're going to make uh changes to the policy environment, right? this in shitenic policy environment that makes sure that the worst people on earth are making the worst decisions running the most profitable companies um then we're just going to be stuck. So you got to do what has to be done. >> You are originally from Canada. I know you're familiar with what's going on here politically in this country. What would you say about uh what's happening right now in terms of uh artificial intelligence and digital sovereignty? I mean, these are issues that I think Canada is trying to uh make a priority in this country. What do you think of the general state of things? >> Well, I think the uh move to replace 10,000 civil servants with AI chatbots is is a catastrophic blunder. But even if you disagree with me and you're like, "No, those chat bots are going to be awesome." We still have a digital sovereignty problem because KUSMA, the trade agreement that we agreed to 5 years ago at Donald Trump's insistence as a successor to NAFTA, has something called the uh source code chapter. And in the source code chapter of KUSMA, there is a prohibition on governments requiring disclosure of algorithms, of training data, or of um uh the uh any other kind of weights or aspects that would allow you to render legible the decisions being made by automatic systems. And so even if you think we should be making uh 10,000 of our civil servants redundant and replacing them with AI, wouldn't it be nice if we were legally allowed to know how that AI was deciding whose kids were getting taken away, who was getting parole, which neighborhoods were being singled out for extra policing, who could get a loan or a mortgage, who could get hired. Wouldn't that be at least the minimum standard for prudent procurement to know how the tools that you're entrusting with decision-m works? Now, I think in some ways it's kind of moot. You have $700 billion in capital expenditures across the AI sector. By their own grossly inflated account, they are making $60 billion a year. They are depreciating those assets that they bought for $700 billion over a 5year schedule. But when you look at their own books, those uh GPUs are burning out in two to three years, which means they have two to three years to make $700 billion at $60 billion a year. The math doesn't add up. The only thing worse than firing workers and replacing them with chat bots that can't do their job is then having all those chat bots switched off because the foundation models operating expenses and capital expenditures cannot be recouped in any reasonable way. Uh if we scatter 10,000 civil servants to the wind, discourage them from being in the workforce or have them retrain or immigrate, we're not going to get that expertise back. We're not going to get that process knowledge back of how the system works. We are going to be lovizing our own government. So I think it's a a catastrophic blunder. that even if you like the idea of a chatbot deciding whether you get to keep your children or whether you know your family who you're trying to bring over from another country can get citizenship, uh you should really want to know how that chatbot works. >> Uh just to be clear, I don't like that idea at all. I think it's a terrible idea. Uh one last question for you. Uh I I think I heard a little um glimmer of hope around Canada's role and what maybe Canada can do in your presentation. Um we have been kind of a wait andsee country. That's something we've seen at this event. People have said we've sort of, you know, assessed the situation and then eventually we act. It takes us a little while, but we usually do the right thing. >> Uh what do you think about the role that Canada can play in terms of uh our technology that we have today? >> You know, when you think back on the history of technology before this moment of American hegemony, which is a pretty recent phenomenon, you had a lot of regional success stories, right? Nokia, Finland, you know what Finland was a resource economy before Nokia. Do you know what Nokia did before it made phones? >> Uh, I don't. I do. >> They made rubber boots. >> Okay. >> Right. And it turns out that retooling to make a product that the world wanted was a way to take a small low population country and make it a a a global powerhouse. There are a lot of products that are missing in our market right now. If you're a mechanic and you want to fix a car, you have to buy a diagnostic tool to convert the check engine light into something that you can use to fix the car. that diagnostic tool is $10,000 per year per manufacturer. Right? The only reason third parties can't make those tools is because we've all signed up to these laws called anti-ircumvention laws that the US trade representatives said if we didn't pass them, we would have to pay tariffs. Well, we're paying tariffs, right? If someone says to you, uh, do as I say or I'll burn your house down, and then they burn your house down, you don't have to keep doing what they say. We could be exporting a tool to every mechanic in the world that fixes every car in the world for 25 bucks a month. We could have the relationship to auto repair that Finland had to mobile phones for a decade or that Canada had to mobile phones during the research in motion Blackberry decade, right? We could get that back. We could get that back through third party app stores. We could get that back through uh diagnostic and repair tools for tractors and for uh ventilators and for uh iPhones. Um there are so many opportunities going begging, right? these billions of dollars that have been left on the table globally, trillions that are ours for the taking if we want them because we have skilled technologists, we have capital and Lord knows there's lots of skilled technologists, lots of capital that's leaving America and looking for a safe haven, looking for a a better opportunity, a a good offer. There's a lot of people who'd like to invest in a company whose success factor is not how many Trump coins did you buy? And so this could be us. And if it's not us, someone else is going to do it. So we could either just get the cheap repair tool or we could have an export market where we sell that cheap repair tool to every mechanic in the world. We can act now and that's our opportunity., YouTube: xVzXQLKQnAE, YouTube, 01k8rjq604mf2pxqt44npt2ekw.