<nettime> Joseph Stiglitz on artificial intelligence: 'We’re going towards a more divided society' (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/joseph-stiglitz-on-artificial-intelligence-were-going-towards-a-more-divided-society


The technology could vastly improve lives, the economist says – but only 
if the tech titans that control it are properly regulated. ‘What we have 
now is totally inadequate’
by Ian Sample, Science editor

Sat 8 Sep 2018


It must be hard for Joseph Stiglitz to remain an optimist in the face of 
the grim future he fears may be coming. The Nobel laureate and former 
chief economist at the World Bank has thought carefully about how 
artificial intelligence will affect our lives. On the back of the 
technology, we could build ourselves a richer society and perhaps enjoy 
a shorter working week, he says. But there are countless pitfalls to 
avoid on the way. The ones Stiglitz has in mind are hardly trivial. He 
worries about hamfisted moves that lead to routine exploitation in our 
daily lives, that leave society more divided than ever and threaten the 
fundamentals of democracy.
“Artificial intelligence and robotisation have the potential to increase 
the productivity of the economy and, in principle, that could make 
everybody better off,” he says. “But only if they are well managed.”
On 11 September, the Columbia University professor will be in London to 
deliver the latest lecture in the Royal Society’s You and AI series. 
Stiglitz will talk about the future of work, an area where predictions 
have been frequent, contradictory and unnerving. Last month, the Bank of 
England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, warned that “large swathes” of 
Britain’s workforce face unemployment as AI and other technologies 
automate more jobs. He had less to say about the new positions AI may 
create. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers in July argued that AI may 
create as many jobs as it destroys – perhaps even more. As with the 
Industrial Revolution, the misery would come not from a lack of work, 
but the difficulty in switching from one job to another.
A distinction Stiglitz makes is between AI that replaces workers and AI 
that helps people to do their jobs better. It already helps doctors to 
work more efficiently. At Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, for 
example, cancer consultants spend less time than they used to planning 
radiotherapy for men with prostate cancer, because an AI system called 
InnerEye automatically marks up the gland on the patients’ scans. The 
doctors process patients faster, the men start treatment sooner and the 
radiotherapy is delivered with more precision.
For other specialists, the technology is more of a threat. Well-trained 
AIs are now better at spotting breast tumours and other cancers than 
radiologists. Does that mean widespread unemployment for radiologists? 
It is not so straightforward, says Stiglitz. “Reading an MRI scan is 
only part of the job that person performs, but you can’t easily separate 
that task from the others.”
And yet some jobs may be fully replaced. Mostly these are low-skilled 
roles: truck drivers, cashiers, call centre workers and more. Again, 
though, Stiglitz sees reasons to be cautious about what that will mean 
for overall unemployment. There is a strong demand for unskilled workers 
in education, the health service and care for older people. “If we care 
about our children, if we care about our aged, if we care about the 
sick, we have ample room to spend more on those,” Stiglitz says. If AI 
takes over certain unskilled jobs, the blow could be softened by hiring 
more people into health, education and care work and paying them a 
decent wage, he says.
Stiglitz won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001 for his analyses of 
imperfect information in markets. A year later, he published 
Globalisation and Its Discontents, a book that laid bare his disillusion 
with the International Monetary Fund – the World Bank’s sister 
organisation – and, by extension, the US Treasury. Trade negotiations, 
he argued, were driven by multinationals at the expense of workers and 
ordinary citizens. “What I want to emphasise is that it is time to focus 
on the public-policy issues surrounding AI, because the concerns are a 
continuation of the concerns that globalisation and innovation have 
brought us. We were slow to grasp what they were doing and we shouldn’t 
make that mistake again.”
Beyond the impact of AI on work, Stiglitz sees more insidious forces at 
play. Armed with AI, tech firms can extract meaning from the data we 
hand over when we search, buy and message our friends. It is used 
ostensibly to deliver a more personalised service. That is one 
perspective. Another is that our data is used against us.
“These new tech giants are raising very deep issues about privacy and 
the ability to exploit ordinary people that were never present in 
earlier eras of monopoly power,” says Stiglitz. “Beforehand, you could 
raise the price. Now you can target particular individuals by exploiting 
their information.”
It is the potential for datasets to be combined that most worries 
Stiglitz. For example, retailers can now track customers via their 
smartphones as they move around stores and can gather data on what 
catches their eye and which displays they walk straight past.
“In your interactions with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, they 
gather an awful lot of data about you. If that data is combined with 
other data, then companies have a great deal of information about you as 
an individual – more information than you have on yourself,” he says.
“They know, for example, that people who search this way are willing to 
pay more. They know every store you’ve visited. That means that life is 
going to be increasingly unpleasant, because your decision to shop in a 
certain store may result in you paying more money. To the extent that 
people are aware of this game, it distorts their behaviour. What is 
clear is that it introduces a level of anxiety in everything we do and 
it increases inequality even more.”
Stiglitz poses a question that he suspects tech firms have faced 
internally. “Which is the easier way to make a buck: figuring out a 
better way to exploit somebody, or making a better product? With the new 
AI, it looks like the answer is finding a better way to exploit 
somebody.”
Grim revelations about how Russia turned to Facebook, Twitter and Google 
to interfere with the 2016 US election brought home how effectively 
people can be targeted with bespoke messages. Stiglitz is concerned that 
companies are using, or will use, similar tactics to exploit their 
customers, in particular those who are vulnerable, such as compulsive 
shoppers. “As opposed to a doctor who might help us manage our 
frailties, their objective is to take as much advantage of you as they 
can,” he says. “All the worst tendencies of the private sector in taking 
advantage of people are heightened by these new technologies.”
So far, Stiglitz argues, neither governments nor tech firms have done 
enough to prevent such abuses. “What we have now is totally inadequate,” 
he says. “There is nothing to circumscribe that kind of bad behaviour 
and we have enough evidence that there are people who are willing to do 
it, who have no moral compunction.”
In the US in particular, there has been a willingness to leave tech 
firms to thrash out decent rules of behaviour and adhere to them, 
Stiglitz believes. One of the many reasons is that the complexity of the 
technology can make it intimidating. “It overwhelms a lot of people and 
their response is: ‘We can’t do it, the government can’t do it, we have 
to leave it to the tech giants.’”
But Stiglitz thinks that view is changing. There is a growing awareness 
of how companies can use data to target customers, he believes. 
“Initially, a lot of young people took the view that I have nothing to 
hide: if you behave well, what are you afraid of? People thought: ‘What 
harm is there to it?’ And now they realise there can be a lot of harm. I 
think a large fraction of Americans no longer give the tech firms the 
benefit of the doubt.”
So, how do we get back on track? The measures Stiglitz proposes are 
broad and it is hard to see how they could be brought in swiftly. The 
regulatory structure has to be decided publicly, he says. This would 
include what data the tech firms can store; what data they can use; 
whether they can merge different datasets; the purposes for which they 
can use that data; and what degree of transparency they must provide 
about what they do with the data. “These are all issues that have to be 
decided,” he says. “You can’t allow the tech giants to do it. It has to 
be done publicly with an awareness of the danger that the tech firms 
represent.”
Fresh policies are needed to curb monopoly powers and redistribute the 
immense wealth that is concentrated in the leading AI firms, he adds. 
This month, Amazon became the second company, after Apple, to reach a 
market valuation of $1tn. The pair are now worth more than the top 10 
oil companies combined. “When you have so much wealth concentrated in 
the hands of relatively few, you have a more unequal society and that is 
bad for our democracy,” says Stiglitz.
Taxes are not enough. To Stiglitz, this is about labour bargaining 
power, intellectual property rights, redefining and enforcing 
competition laws, corporate governance laws and the way the financial 
system operates. “It’s a much broader agenda than just redistribution,” 
he says.
He is not a fan of universal basic income, a proposal under which 
everyone receives a no-strings handout to cover the costs of living. 
Advocates argue that, as tech firms gather ever more wealth, UBI could 
help to redistribute the proceeds and ensure that everyone benefits. 
But, to Stiglitz, UBI is a cop-out. He does not believe it is what most 
people want.
“If we don’t change our overall economic and policy framework, what 
we’re going towards is greater wage inequality, greater income and 
wealth inequality and probably more unemployment and a more divided 
society. But none of this is inevitable,” he says. “By changing the 
rules, we could wind up with a richer society, with the fruits more 
equally divided, and quite possibly where people have a shorter working 
week. We’ve gone from a 60-hour working week to a 45-hour week and we 
could go to 30 or 25.”
None of this will happen overnight, he warns. A more robust public 
debate around AI and work is needed to throw up new ideas, for a start. 
“Silicon Valley may hire a disproportionate fraction [of people who work 
in AI], but it may not take that many people to figure it out, including 
people from Silicon Valley who have become disgruntled with what has 
been going on,” he says. “People will, and have already begun to, think 
about new ideas. There will be people with skills who try to work out 
solutions.”
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