Epilogue: What We Can Do Together—A Call to Action

The people, united, will never be defeated!

—Traditional protest chant

We do not have to live in the world the new technocrats are designing for us. We do not have to acquiesce to their growing project of dehumanization and data mining. Each of us has agency.

—Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor at The Atlantic

The 1 percent have a vast armory of material resources and political special forces, but the 99 percent have an army.

—Jane McAlevey, organizer and author

You won’t get a revolution if you don’t ask for one.

—Becky Bond and Zak Exley, Rules for Revolutionaries

Social media has in many ways polarized society and broken the spirit of many children and teenagers; as of this writing, Congress has done almost nothing to protect our privacy, and passed zero legislation to rein in AI. State attorneys general are having to step in where the national legislature has fallen short. AI is poised to make many things (from employment to the information ecosphere) worse, though of course some better, faster, and cheaper. And far too often, when push comes to shove, the lobbyists have won.

Yet I still think there is hope. I would not have raced to get this book out if I didn’t think otherwise. Our biggest hope comes if we work together. And I honestly think we can do it. Sometimes, citizens are able to make themselves heard, even when up against big tech.

Consider, for example, what happened with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs abortive Quayside “smart city” project in Toronto, when citizens organized and fought back. Alphabet sold the project as “the most innovative district in the entire world,” but never really made a convincing argument why the citizens should want it. Even so, the project, which was first begun in 2015, initially seemed like shoo-in. It was announced publicly, with great fanfare, in October 2017; the idea was that big data in massively instrumented cities was somehow going to make cities work better and more efficiently—less traffic, less waste, faster ambulances, and other benefits. Google’s then Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Toronto’s Mayor at the time, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were all on hand. Trudeau declared that a stretch of downtown, lakefront Toronto would become a “testbed for new technologies that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities,” adding that “the future, just like this community, will be interconnected.”1

But was the smart city project really in the net interest of the citizens? What exactly would the citizens get out of it? How would all the data Google was going to collect help them? That was never entirely clear.

A darker view, pithily captured by the eminent venture capitalist Roger McNamee, was that “it was a real estate deal w/ massive surveillance, where data taken from residents would be owned and exploited by Google.”2 In late 2017, a group of citizens, led initially by the activist Bianca Wylie, started to fight back, raising concerns about privacy and democracy. As journalist Brian Barth describes the scene,

Wylie’s biggest fear about Quayside . . . was that Sidewalk Labs’ profiteering would come at the expense of democracy. Sidewalk Labs’ proposal encompassed many of the functions of municipal government, but without the accountability we expect from elected officials. Just as Google monopolizes search, critics feared a similar scenario in the smart city market. They argued that data collected in public space, where opting out isn’t an option, would herald a new age of surveillance. And the agreement between Toronto and Sidewalk Labs was proceeding without a single vote from a local resident.3

Eventually, in October 2018, Jim Balsillie, cofounder of Research in Motion (Blackberry), at one time one of Canada’s largest companies, joined in, writing in an op-ed in a national newspaper that Quayside “is not a smart city” but rather “a pseudo-tech dystopia.” The project soldiered on, but over time, protests to it steadily increased. More and more community leaders joined in; polls showed that a majority of the citizens had become concerned about the invasion of privacy. Alphabet tried to hang on, but by May 2020 they gave up, withdrawing from the project; the citizens succeed in turning them away. As the journalist Brian Barth put it, “Alphabet bet big in Toronto. Toronto didn’t play along.”4

We don’t have to play along with what’s going on in tech, and with AI. We can do what the citizens of Toronto did: organize and fight back. Sometimes that might mean blocking projects (as with Toronto); other times it might mean fighting inequality or insisting on high standards (like the Underwriter Laboratory [UL] Standards for electricity, widely adopted into building codes). Either way, it means banding together to make sure that AI works for us, and not the other way around.

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And as daunting as AI may seem, it’s actually easier to address than many other challenges, if we have the collective will. As NYU computer science professor Ernest Davis recently put it:

Unlike with climate change or pandemics, society as a whole has complete collective agency over computer technology. Given the will, nothing would stop us from eliminating [objectionable forms of AI] from our lives; doing so would not even cost much. We are in charge, not the AIs.5

The following are eight suggestions for how we, as citizens, can make a difference:

1. 1. Organize, now. A few days after I started writing this book, the UK was holding their big AI Summit, and what could have been a turning point was already starting to look like a shambles. One of the biggest problems was the guest list. Among those who were rightfully furious were groups who represent civil society; almost everyone on the guest list were leaders of either government or big tech. Who represents the people? Three small but impressive organizations, Connected by Data, TUC (a British trade union organization that represents six million workers), and Open Rights Group (the UK’s largest grassroots digital rights campaigning organization) cowrite a letter of protest. More than that, they enlisted Amnesty International, the AFL-CIO, Mozilla, the Alan Turing Institute, and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC, representing 45 million members from 93 trade union organizations in 41 countries, and many others (including me) to co-sign.6 Collectively, voices representing many tens of millions of citizens stood up. If we can harness that many people, we can literally change the world.
2. 2. Demand that members of civil society be at every table. The simple request in the abovementioned petition? The people must have a voice. No more closed-door meetings in which tech executives meet with prime ministers, grinning for photos afterward, with nobody (or hardly anybody) from civil society invited. We must ensure that government leaders who suck up to tech lords, while excluding civil society, be named, shamed, and ousted.
3. 3. Actions speak louder than words. Don’t use digital tools from companies that won’t play ball. No data transparency, no artist compensation? No genuinely empowered public oversight board? Just say no. Work only with companies that use AI in responsible ways. We can organize a worldwide movement that hits the biggest offenders right in the wallet. None of this would be easy, given our almost universal addiction to digital tools. But there could be immense value to humanity if we could work collectively to fight back.
4. 4. Insist on real oversight. It’s fine for governments to negotiate “voluntary guidelines” with tech companies as a first step, and even fine for companies to build their own internal “oversight” boards. But independent oversight is an essential part of what keeps our world safe. We already have the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) so we won’t get fleeced in the stock market, the FDA to make sure drug companies don’t poison us, and the FAA (and others) to make airplanes safe. Tech companies should not be exempt; an agency of experts needs to regularly review what they are doing, and needs the power to intercede when necessary.
5. 5. Bring ballot initiatives, if your state (or province or nation) allows. In the United States, about half of all states allow some form of ballot initiative, and in many other states citizens can craft legislation that state legislators can then consider. Ambitious/energetic citizens in states such as California, Oregon, and Texas could push their states to pass bills around privacy, data rights, and other issues, without waiting on their state legislators, and without waiting on the federal government, simply by gathering enough signatures, and winning a two-thirds’ majority. (At the website for this book, provided below, you can find some suggestions to get you started.)
6. 6. Demand representatives and legal changes that allow citizens—and not just well-endowed political parties—to have a stronger voice. In places like the United States, that means supporting initiatives for techniques like ranked-choice voting (in which voters rank multiple candidates, rather than just selecting their favorite) that give independent candidates a fairer shot.7 It might also mean reviving an idea from the Ancient Greeks: assemblies of randomly selected citizens that deliberate, which is to say collaboratively propose, swap, evaluate, and refine arguments around the key issues that shape humanity. Of course, this time it should be global, not local, and one shouldn’t need to be male, as required in ancient Athens. And having twenty or thirty people sorting something out in a room, as the Athenians may have tried, is not the same as 300 million. But there is actually at least a tiny bit of room for optimism. The French government actually tried hosting, with some success, a larger-scale deliberation in a “Great National Debate,” convened in 2019, a two-month-long effort at bringing in the whole population, following the massive “Yellow Vests” protests over living conditions,8 focusing on topics such as taxation, ecology, and the structure of the state. Over 10,000 town halls were held, thousands of emails written, and roughly a million people participated directly, leading, among other things, to the first national Citizens’ Assembly ever held in France, the Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which ultimately shaped a 2021 Climate and Resilience law. And, as Yale professor Hélène Landemore has argued, AI could (once it is more reliable) eventually facilitate even larger group conversations, by summarizing and cross-correlating people’s views.9 Andrew Konya and others have argued for a similar idea, a kind of a regular, worldwide census on the will of the people. We should urge our governments to support such efforts, and eventually incorporate them, giving genuine voice to a society that too often has too little chance to participate.
7. 7. Speak up, with your voice, with your words, and, if you have the resources, with your money. Reach out to your representatives, even when it’s not election time, to tell them how you feel, and consider donating to those worthy of your support, and/or to nonprofits that advocate for sound AI and tech policy. Post well-reasoned arguments on social media and in other forums. Make sure your own arguments get heard. And engage in constructive dialogue with others. (Tips for all of this, from worthy nonprofits, on how to reach your representatives and how to engage in constructive dialogue and elevate the debate can be found at the website provided below.) Fifteen-year old Francesca Mani, one of thirty girls targeted in the New Jersey nonconsensual deepfake porn incident I mentioned earlier, approached her state senators and eventually spoke with members of the US Congress as well, and has already gotten many members to listen.10 Her advocacy should be a model for us all.
8. 8. Use your vote wisely. Vote for people who won’t roll over to big tech. Demand disclosure of conflicts of interest, demand to know how much lobbying money your representatives accepted from big tech, and how many of their family members work for big tech. If they won’t play ball, don’t vote for them. There are, of course, many issues—but few will matter in the years ahead more than how your elected leaders handle AI; it will matter for your privacy, for your safety, and for democracy.

If you want to rein in big tech, so that we can have a world steeped in AI that is positive for all, not merely profitable for the few, sign up and make use of the many resources at tamingsiliconvalley.org and encourage your friends to do the same.

I suggest we start with one simple act: let’s stand up for all the artists, musicians, and writers we love, and boycott Generative AI companies that use their work without compensation or consent. Take generative art, where you type in a prompt and get an image back. For a while Adobe licensed most of the work they use to train their systems, as of this writing OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion do not. (Rumor has it that Google used to, until others stopped, lowering the ethical bar.) If you want to use Generative AI to create images, great. Ed Newton-Rex and others have created an organization called Fairly Trained that certifies who is fairly sourcing art and who is not.11 Let’s support their efforts, and thereby artists, and send a message to the companies that feel entitled to steal. Don’t mess with artists; their work is not yours to steal. Same for authors: OpenAI licenses some of their sources, but they are not open about which, and many are not licensed. (Which is why they have so often been sued.) Virtually all of the other AI developers are training on copyrighted writing, without either compensation or consent from the authors, too. Why should we let that stand? If they can’t fairly source their models, don’t use them. And don’t just do this for artists and writers; musicians will be next. And after that, who knows? If we put a moral norm in place that anybody’s work is free for the taking, at any time, yours might be next. Not compensating artists and writers is a first step toward a dark world in which a few giant companies own almost everything, and the rest of us subsist on whatever handouts they deign to pass along.

If we succeed, together, in sending big tech a message that intellectual property is not free for the taking, and get our lawmakers to back us up, we will redraft the lines of power. Further down the line we can take other actions, using companies that can build reliable, safe technology, and shunning those that cut corners. We do that for airplanes; it’s time we demand the same of AI.

Likewise, we can push on privacy. If OpenAI insists on training on all our private data, presumably eventually selling to advertisers, scammers, and political operatives, we can go elsewhere.

Companies that don’t respect your data rights don’t deserve your business.

The bottom line is this: if we can push the big tech companies toward safe and responsible AI that respects our privacy, and that is transparent, we can avoid the mistakes of social media, and make AI a net benefit to society, rather than a parasite that slowly sucks away our humanity. If the big tech companies can’t yet build AI that is safe and responsible, because they haven’t figured out how, let us tell them to take their premature technologies back to the lab, and come back when they can build AI that serves humanity.

The good news is that collectively we still have a real chance to shape some of the most important choices of our time. It is no exaggeration to say that choices in the next few years will shape the next century.

Let’s work together to tame the excesses and recklessness of Silicon Valley and ensure a positive, thriving AI world.