Why Big Tech Is Incompatible with Democracy | Bruno Giussani | TED

00:04How many algorithms are part of your daily life? How many sensors? How many screens? In fact, interacting with screens and other digital interfaces has become the main daily activity of almost all of us. But how many of those interactions are actually really of our choosing?

00:31Our lives are uh and our societies are increasingly structured around and by algorithms and digital networks. And this algorithmization of life I think is a problem for different reasons. And I want to uh touch upon two of them tonight. The first one is the nature of these technologies.

01:00We think they are products and we buy them and once we own them, we can do with them as we please. But in the last couple of decades, digital technologies have actually become platforms, invisible digital architectures within which we live and that changes absolutely everything.

01:30Almost all important software and digital services. Think of office and uh industrial applications, information and entertainment feeds, payments, artificial intelligence, chatbots, they all now run on the cloud as we say, which means that the data and the processing are not in our machines controlled by us locally, but they are on distant machines on remote servers to which we buy access and which are controlled by the providers and that gives them an immense power over our lives.

02:18It allows them to decide what we can and cannot do. what ideas get visibility and what don't, what information we can access and also to influence our public debates. Of course, these technologies are efficient, useful, practical, well integrated, easy to use, often even free.

02:49Their utility is real and that's why we have adopted them and that's why it's so difficult to imagine doing without them. But all that comes at a price and finally we are starting to understand it. Data extraction, privacy loss, fragmentation of attention, dependency, mental health, we can do a very long list.

03:16And now for the past 3 years, a little bit more, generative artificial intelligence is infiltrating itself everywhere. It's popping up on all sorts of applications and programs, talking to us like friends, giving us sometimes the impression that we have superpowers.

03:39And indeed, AI chatbots can seem magical because they offer something almost irresistible. The opportunity to delegate to a machine the effort of thinking, learning, writing, even deciding. They are like cognitive baby bottles. And uh every day tens of millions of people rush to the nipple.

04:08But the more we delegate thinking and deciding, the less we will be able to think and decide by ourselves. And indeed, we are increasingly surrounded by machines that under the cover of optimization and practicality diminish our ability to understand reality and to act upon it.

04:36And they algorithmically reprogram change our societies. We think we control them, but actually is they who hypnotize us and domesticate us. And I know that's not a happy profile of our current situation that I just described. And for us Europeans, and that's the second point, for us Europeans, this problem is compounded by the fact that almost all these digital technologies are American.

05:12for a long time for a mix of uh economic opportunism and uh strategic naive and comfort and lack of imagination. We have accumulated a substantial technological lag. We have given up on our digital autonomy and it didn't seem such a huge deal because these technologies were coming from a country that was a friend and an ally.

05:41But now the United States are undergoing an internal revolution with fascist tendencies and they are engaging in a rogue and destabilizing external activism. Old established friendships are being replaced by openly hostile postures, by brazen interferences and force threats are becoming tools of foreign policy.

06:15And we must not fool ourselves. This is not just temporary. This is a profound systemic transformation. And the big tech tech companies, the big American tech companies, the one that we carry in our pockets, the one that are on our desk on whose digital services we depend, they are aligned with the priorities or of their government.

06:37We actually seeing a convergence of military and political power and of cloud power. When the CEOs are invited to accompany the president to a dinner, for example, with the king of England, that's not so that they can take a selfie with the king, right?

07:01That's a signal. It's a signal that digital technology is today central to American power projection. In fact, we should start looking at their data centers in the same way we look at the military bases that the US is maintaining around the world.

07:18And in this context, the fact that uh large parts of Europe run on American servers and software owned by American companies, encoding American values and worldviews and subject to American law of course creates a huge systemic vulnerability.

07:48You cannot build a healthy economy and a strong society on somebody else's digital infrastructure. And our dependence is actually substantial. We may not realize it uh in our daily daily use, but somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of all digital technologies we use are American.

08:15And tech dependence is both a political and an economic risk. Should our access to American digital infrastructure be cut off for technical reasons, for an accident, for economic reasons or for political reasons, it would cause a nearly immediate paralysis of nearly everything.

08:38administration, hospitals, energy systems, businesses, of course, the military, payments, social networks, all our messaging apps. And yet we continue to transfer segments of our companies, of our governments, and our social and private lives onto American clouds every day, deepening our dependence.

09:09And dependencies, every dependence can be turned into coercion and into submission. And so I think it's urgent, very urgent, to find another way to demericanize as much as possible our digital uses and infrastructures. Now, don't take me for an anti-American.

09:40I've spent the last 30 years building bridges between the two sides of the Atlantic. There is nothing anti-American in what I'm saying here tonight. But there is everything anti-technological submission. So how do we go about it? Obviously I'm not advocating for shifting to the other technological track of the world, the Chinese, nor for anarchic approach which in today's technological reality would be impossible.

10:16I'm talking about taking back control, about reestablishing, restoring a level of choice, of autonomy, of digital sovereignty. Some will say, "But we don't really have alternatives to the American tech giants." We hear that all the time. But it's only half true because yes, we don't have giants.

10:45We don't have a European Google or a European Microsoft, but we do have alternatives, not for everything, but for many things. They may be small, national, perhaps not perfect, but they are rather good. And there are really many. And what we need to do is to make them grow to make them scale in a deliberate way.

11:16And there are many ways of doing that. One for example is to prioritize them in public procurement. We cannot go to private companies and dictate what kind of technology they should use to run their business. Although companies should wake up and realize that uh every time they store data on an American cloud, every time they integrate an American AI, every time they make their business model contingent upon accessing American digital technology, they're putting themselves in a position of dependence and weakening their operational robustness and resilience.

12:03But public procurement, we can decide where we direct taxpayers money. And I'm talking about tens, many tens of billions of euros that every year European public administrations send to the other side of the Atlantic to buy digital technology.

12:25And so we should start to take into account not only economic criteria but uh also strategic considerations when we choose technology and at least partially favoring national and European providers which would help them grow and note that that's exactly what the Americans and the Chinese do with their companies.

12:47And note also that I'm not talking about subsidies. I'm talking about markets, about purchases, about bids, about offer and supply. And if we help them grow, then there are cascading effects. They will have resources to invest in assets and capabilities.

13:08They will have a capacity to build new technologies, to retain talent, to dynamize the market, to become themselves internationally competitive. Further, we also need to establish distinct European model, a new kind of industrial policy that can foster a different kind of technological innovation and relaunch the European tech industry.

13:34An approach, for example, that favors transparency, interoperability, respect for essential values. A business model that does not rely on the often abusive exploitation of personal data, but favors technology that does not spy on people. A regime of competition rather than monopoly, federated rather than centralized, diverse, and above all democratic because the big tech tech platforms we use today by nature are authoritarian based as they are on surveillance and control.

14:27It seems to me that technology that does not spy on you, that should be Europe's digital difference. And it also needs to be an approach that is not only defensive but is competitive that builds technology, not only integrates or regulates it.

14:49Of course, emancipating ourselves even just partially won't be easy. There is no quick fix. There is no one for one replacement. It will take time but many have already done it. The city of Leon in France, cities in Denmark, the state of Schlesstein in Germany, ministries in Austria, the French National Police, the Swiss Supreme Court of Justice, both of those run on open-source software.

15:18The German government just a couple of days ago uh put forward a policy framework for a German tech stack and there are many many others which shows that it is possible. And then there is us, each and every one of us here tonight, who hand over entire parts of our private and social lives to American platforms every day, including today, without asking enough questions.

15:55Sometimes we do have a moment of doubt. We feel uneasy when we realize that our messages are read and our images are viewed by AIS. That the information we receive is filtered and often invented by algorithms that the machines we used we use are programmed to manipulate us.

16:22But then the apps are so convenient, free, easy. Our friends are there, our followers are there, the chat bots present themselves as friends. And so we convince ourselves that it's okay and continue to use them. But it's not okay. In fact, I believe that the existence of big tech given their size, their concentration of capital, their growing technological grip into our lives, their almost direct access to our minds and to our emotions.

17:00The existence of big tech is no longer compatible with our freedoms and with democracy. The control they have over the development of artificial intelligence, one of the most astounding technologies ever created further entrenches that power, projects it into the future.

17:26However, that power, algorithmic power, cloud power rests at least in part on our consent, on our compliance, on our passive and silent acceptance. And there is where we have a choice. We can of course decide that autonomy and digital sovereignty are too expensive or too complicated or that it is too late and accept technological submission.

18:01And that seems to be the path we are on right now. Or we can resist. We can decide that we want to remain free and democratic and make and do everything we can gradually but aggressively and with urgency to regain control of our cloud and our data.

18:23It's possible. It will be difficult. It may hurt. It will require a surge of pride and of will. collaborative effort, pulled resources, courage, imagination. But to me, the path is absolutely clear. We need to deamemericanize our technological uses and infrastructure and we need to start now.

18:56Thank you.