Technology, Democracy & Power: Is Innovation Saving the World—or Killing the Planet?

Is technology saving the world or killing the planet? That's the question we're tackling today.

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of FMC Fast Chat. I'm Jaci Clement, and joining me today is Justin Hendricks, CEO and editor of techpolicy.press. We're going to talk about technology and democracy. Justin, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So my, my big question to you, and you can break this down however you like, is, is technology Saving the world or is it killing the planet? Which is it?

Oh goodness. Well, if presented with that binary, I'm not exactly sure which way I'd go. I guess my first instinct would be to sort of complicate it, you know, as a person who perhaps sits in a camp of folks who are always trying to kind of complicate and look at the details of questions about technology and its role in society, technology and its role in human civilization. Um, and I think when I think about that question, I think about concentrations of power. Um, so it's not so much as technology, uh, you know, you know, solving the world's problems or is it contributing to them? Uh, but is the current ecosystem that we have, uh, contributing to the problems that we face? Uh, or is it helping us to solve them? Are the, the current concentrations of power building a more just, equitable, sustainable world or challenging that potential alternative future. So that's kind of how I think about it.

And when you talk about concentration of power, are you talking about the handful of big tech companies that we have?

I am talking about that handful of big tech companies, their influence. I'm also talking about state power and the increasing kind of, you know, combination of corporate and state power and what that means for us as well.

Okay. Can you give people who aren't familiar with, you know, the inner workings of technology, where would you put state power right now? I mean, has it really jumped forward very quickly or what at least is the landscape right now?

Another complicated question. I would say, you know, when you think about the kind of triangle between the state corporations and the kind of technology, private technology ecosystem on one hand, and then maybe individual power, users, citizens in the third point on that triangle. You know, power sort of shifts around those different points. It's reflective. It's It interacts across those different points. Um, but right now I think we, I think we have an imbalance, um, towards corporate power. Um, we see that manifesting itself in a lot of different ways. Um, and in, in many places you also see the state attempting to try to reexert, uh, itself, uh, or to challenge corporate power or to contain corporate power in different ways. And, you know, you see that right now in, in competition and antitrust Uh, you see it in Europe in the Digital Markets Act. You see it in the US, still the Department of Justice pursuing various antitrust actions. Uh, you see it all across the globe in efforts to regulate technology firms, uh, which take, you know, there's all sorts of different phenomena, all kinds of flora and fauna within that. Um, that, those are the stuff we kind of COVID at Tech Policy Press or try to pay attention to. Um, but I do think it's fair to say that, uh, over the last few years we've seen, of course, an increase. in the amount of regulation, the amount of policy that's targeting tech firms and trying to, on some level, kind of control their power.

All right. I'm old enough to remember that when the internet was invented, it was supposed to be this great democratization of information for us. What would you say has been the biggest factor in making sure that didn't actually happen?

Well, I mean, I think, you know, the internet has delivered extraordinary benefits to society in terms of the free flow of information across the world. The question right now, and we actually have a post on our site at the moment from a fellow called Konstantinos Komaitis, who writes for us regularly on these issues. The question right now is sort of where is the internet headed? Where are we at at the moment? And some of those early ideas about democratization and interoperability and the free flow of information and the kind of liberatory nature of the internet, I think a lot of that is really under threat at the moment, in question. And that's from a variety of different forces, some of which are about the privatization of the internet, about You know, how networks are essentially, uh, kind of closing off, turning inward. Some of that is about the role of the state, um, the US government essentially turning its back on its internet freedom agenda, uh, the Chinese government, the Russian government, uh, attempting to exert more influence, uh, over the internet and to change the way that it's governed. Um, so a lot has changed and right now it feels like There is no major champion of that original vision of the internet who has a voice as salient perhaps as some of these other forces. And so I think that leaves us in a very difficult spot. In civil society, there are still people obviously who are working on digital rights, internet freedom, et cetera. But if you look at the measures of it from Freedom House and others, You know, every year things continue to, uh, essentially deteriorate. And it's not clear to me who will pick up the banner and who will pick up the fight for those original ideas.

Who should it be in your, from your perspective?

Well, I mean, I, you know, I do believe that, um, uh, the United States government in past has played a positive role. Now, many people would criticize its role. They would say that, you know, uh, it was just as much about it exercising its state power. and trying to exert its worldview on the internet and on internet governance as anything else. And yet on some level, I think a lot of folks in the digital rights and internet freedom world would argue on balance, that might've been a better scenario than what we seem to have today, where it's all about corporate power, blunt state power, and the division and kind of drawing of lines. The splintering of the internet, as it were, and the focus on security primarily. So I don't know. I mean, I'd like to believe that at some point we could imagine a group of states, perhaps led by the US under different politics, or perhaps maybe led by Europe or some other type of international Uh, organization. Um, the United Nations wants to play a big role in this. We, we know the United Nations is meeting even as we speak. A lot of folks are skeptical about the role of the UN, uh, and whether, you know, China and Russia, um, are maybe expressing their interests a little too much through United Nations channels. Uh, but it would, it would be good to see a like-minded set of democracies figure out how to champion some of those original ideas a little more forcefully.

Okay. Where does money play a role in all of this?

Oh, money is the animating force, uh, in technology. I mean, you know, look at right now the extraordinary sums of capital, um, that are going into AI infrastructure development. Look at the just massive capital expenditures by the big tech firms. To build data centers, to build AI infrastructure. Um, they've never spent more money and they've announced plans to go out and partner with countries to, uh, try to, you know, join up with sovereign wealth funds to attract big, uh, investments from, you know, across the world. Uh, Sam Altman famously, you know, um, wants to try to acquire trillions to put towards OpenAI's efforts. Um, it really is something right now. Um, it's just the amount of capital and, you know, it's all because it's, it's an enormous bet, right? We, we, we need enormous amounts of capital to build the infrastructure, to buy the chips, to, uh, power the data centers, to eventually convert all of that energy into artificial intelligence, uh, is how Sam Altman likes to put it. So, you know, that's the big bet at the moment. And the question is, you know, are these firms too big to fail, or is this a boom for which there will be consequences?

Well, one of the issues we don't see often covered is how AI impacts the planet in terms of its need for energy consumption. Can you talk a little bit about that? How is it a green energy? You know?

Yeah. I mean, I think this is a major issue. It's one we've been talking about, um, at Tech Policy Press quite a lot. Uh, on, on our podcast, we just had a, uh, episode that was focused on this particular question. Um, you know, it's also Climate Week here in New York. So there are various conversations going on around this. Uh, last night I was at a dinner that, uh, hosted a handful of activists from across the country, from places like Memphis and Tucson. Who have worked to kind of counter data center development in their communities, primarily over environmental concerns around water, electricity. And, you know, I mean, all the estimates suggest that the load demand that data centers will pose in many communities across the grid in the United States and beyond is extraordinary. And, you know, ratepayers, Regular people in many cases are being asked to essentially pay for that investment energy infrastructure and to pay higher prices for their electricity bills. So we're seeing huge implications just in the bottom line of people's monthly expenses, not to mention the environmental impacts on the world. And it's really not clear. The industry tells us, you know, we'll clean our act up and will be more sustainable and eventually all this artificial intelligence will solve the problems of climate change fundamentally. Um, but that seems to me to be a risky bet.

Well, it just sounds like if we talk about the environment and, and the cost associated with AI and its development with the data centers, wouldn't we be better off advocating for those data centers not to be in the US, put them somewhere else?

Well, perhaps, but I will say that the United States is the largest kind of population of data centers, if you want to put it that way. And if the current investment level continues, I mean, that will certainly remain the case. There are trillions anticipated to be invested in data centers across the globe, and a huge amount of that is right here in the United States. I think if you were to literally look down from the moon and ask yourself, like, what is that? What are those people down there doing? What's that species down there on that pale blue dot? What are they up to? I mean, data centers, building data centers, building concrete cubes to host chips and to power them, that would appear to be one of the most significant things we are doing. As a species at the moment. Huge, huge infrastructure investment. One of the most historic along the kind of scale of building interstates or building highways across the planet. So, you know, it's really something what we're up to. I don't know if I would necessarily encourage building them elsewhere. Unfortunately, they are being built elsewhere, often in places where environmental constraints Might be weaker than they might even be here, although the Trump administration and its AI action plan and subsequent executive orders have removed some obstacles, environmental obstacles, to the development of data centers to begin with. So in some ways, you know, we've reduced the constraints in the United States.

One of the major concerns surrounding AI, of course, is job loss. For the jobs that are tried and true and that people know and understand. What's your outlook there?

I think we'll have to wait and see. I mean, there's obviously already some impact on job circumstances in different industries and different areas. We're seeing some impact on things like customer service. We're seeing various other forms of knowledge work, graphic design, you know, any kind of content production. Obviously already being affected by artificial intelligence. A little unclear though, exactly what the scale of the impact will be in other kinds of professional jobs or even other types of manual jobs as we see different forms of automation and robotics kind of come along. It's hard to see, hard to say. We'll see. I mean, I think, you know, at least at present, I think some of the doomsday scenarios don't appear to be immediately coming true about job loss. But on the other hand, you know, sometimes these things take a couple of 3 years to cycle through as people budget, as people do hiring, as people, you know, change their operations. So I think we're, we'll just have to wait and see. This is one of those questions that economists are going to continue to study.

Okay. One of my issues and concerns with it really comes down to education. I mean, is the American education system able to start teaching what people need to know to understand this technology, or are we headed down a have-have-not kind of path?

Well, I think we're well down the have-have-not kind of path, unfortunately. You know, measures of inequality and of course educational inequality are, you know, quite high. And, you know, I think that part of the conversation that's happening around AI And kind of human flourishing generally. How do we avoid a world where, you know, AI doesn't mean more concentration of wealth, more concentration of power, even concentration of information or access to educational opportunities? You know, that's the type of world we're trying to avoid. Of course, we're being told that AI systems, again, like with the internet, will democratize information, will help solve these problems of inequality. And that may be true in some cases, uh, but just as we know that, you know, one laptop per child or, uh, access to the internet in every community did not solve educational inequality, uh, I don't suspect we should go for the idea that AI will necessarily do that either.

Yeah. So AI is really taking up a lot of space in the, in the news cycle these days. What is it distracting our attention away from? What do you think are the important aspects that are developing now that people should be more aware of?

I have multiple ways of kind of coming at this question. Uh, but the one that occurs to me, uh, to say at the moment is the world is in a pickle. It's a complicated moment. It's a lot of conflict, climate change bearing down on us, movement of people, uh, democracy is in a multi-decade decline. Extraordinary challenges that face us. And unfortunately, I think AI is seen by many as a kind of panacea, a cure-all, an answer to all of these problems. There'll be no more conflict because we'll have abundance. There'll be no more concern about climate because AI will create the science and the technologies necessary to You know, give us abundant energy or to even help us to resolve our carbon emissions problem. There'll be no more concern about public health issues because AI will solve the science needed there. So in many ways, I don't know, I ask myself, you know, what is AI really at the moment? It seems to me it's a kind of faith that, you know, perhaps we'll be able to get through what appear to be some difficult decades ahead of us and that we won't have to change the way we live. In fact, we'll just enjoy the fruits of technology. And that, I think, distracts us potentially from having to make hard political decisions about the way we live and the way we interact with one another, the way we think about resources we have and which resources we share. And I don't know, to me, that, that Is the kind of broader question here.

Okay. I did just see a news story where Sam Altman was speaking somewhere and they quoted him as saying that he was saying the internet is dead.

Yeah, I haven't seen those comments. I wonder what perhaps he meant by that. I would suspect he may, you know, believe that that mode of interacting through web pages and through kind of static Interfaces that are delivered over the web, that perhaps that is dead. That of course would be up his alley because he's selling a kind of more robust interaction through chatbots and other generative AI interfaces. I suspect the internet may be a little more resilient than that. We'll see. It's certainly the case that AI is changing the nature of the internet, changing the nature of the way people interact with the internet. Through AI, through AI overviews. I'll even say at Tech Policy Press, I mean, we see more folks visiting our website through AI or generative AI search tools and coming from presumably clicking on citations from things that are offered to them by chatbots. So it's certainly changing people's behaviors, it's changing dynamics on the internet. I'm not sure I'd say the internet is quite dead, but back to my previous comments about You know, it's in a precarious position, certainly. And the old idea of the internet certainly is ailing.

Where do you think social media plays in all of this? Do you see that as sort of losing steam and people's attention going elsewhere in the long run? Or do you think everyone's kind of settled in and focused and saying social media is where it's at, this is where I'm going to stay? I love to fight with everyone I know, that sort of thing.

I mean, it's interesting. I mean, again, this is one of those, it feels like one of those, um, ground shifting moments as tectonic plates are moving. People are interacting more with AI companions, AI chatbots, AI systems generally, AI search systems, what have you. Um, I heard an anecdote. I've repeated this a couple of times. Um, but I heard an anecdote recently about a man who, uh, you had a long commute and he liked to try to keep himself awake. And so he would listen to NPR on that long commute. But he apparently replaced his NPR habit with talking to ChatGPT.

Okay.

That's a tale, you know, an anecdote that I think kind of points to a broader shift in people's behaviors and habits. Media in many ways is habit. I think social media very much is habit. We look for those notifications, we look for those likes, we look for certain posters perhaps that we follow intently. Whether any of those habits will get shifted or changed, I think we'll see. Certainly seems like a huge potential for that in the next couple of years. This seems like a sea shift moment, shifting tectonic plates, as I say. So we'll see. But I suspect social media is a pretty durable habit and it will see artificial intelligence kind of infused into it, I think, before we see artificial intelligence somehow replace it.

I think one of the major concerns right now though is people losing a grasp on reality as they don't actually know sometimes when they're interacting with Something that was AI generated versus a real person. And you look at younger generations and some of them say they don't care, you know? So, so where does that take us?

Um, I think that we're in an interesting moment. There's this kind of, uh, headlines recently about this concept of AI psychosis. Um, and, you know, a lot of kind of concerns about AI sycophancy. Even some lawsuits which have emerged from scenarios where people appear to become emotionally attached to AI agents and to their history of interaction with those chatbots. And we're beginning to try to create language around that phenomenon and beginning to track that phenomenon. Researchers are beginning to look at it and look at it a great deal. Um, you know, one of the things that, uh, one of the people who writes for us, uh, uh, Mikhail Luria at the Center for Democracy and Technology points to in particular is this idea that right now AI chatbots, you know, they are designed to portray themselves as, as human. Um, you know, they, they try to create the illusion of, uh, being a responsive individual. Um, and in many ways they kind of reassert, uh, their humanity or their quote unquote humanity. Um, that may be a fatal design flaw for these systems and one that produces more harm than good. I have a lanternfly on my shoulder.

Do you see that? Yes, I see that.

So for any of your viewers, that'll be, uh, that'll be interesting. New York is infested with lanternflies. Uh, so, uh, just so you know what it is, it's not a more, more, uh, terrifying creepy crawly, just a lanternfly.

Yeah, it's not like a tarantula or something crawling up your back there. But now, can we talk about an idea that actually seems quaint, you know, by comparison, which is, do we enjoy any sort of privacy anymore? Is there such a thing as personal privacy?

I mean, I think this is one of the biggest areas of concern, you know, in this age of AI, particularly in the United States. We do not have a comprehensive privacy law. You know, different states have advanced various privacy legislation to differing degrees of, you know, forcefulness. And it's not clear exactly who's coming to save us on this front. It doesn't look like Congress is intent on passing federal privacy law anytime soon. There appears to be extraordinary division and disagreement about, you know, what that law should look like and the extent sense in which it should preempt those state laws. Um, so I don't know. Uh, is, is my answer to your question is if, if you wanted to protect people in the age of artificial intelligence from the worst possible, uh, you know, downstream effects of, of the misuse or inappropriate use of artificial intelligence systems, then you would have strong privacy protections. Uh, So many of the phenomena we're seeing right now, whether it's scams, deepfakes, trickery, the unfortunate massive explosion in the use of nudify apps and things of that nature, all the types of things that you can imagine that artificial intelligence is being used for, we would much be improved if there were more fundamental privacy protections. That's an extraordinary oversight on our part as a nation not to have done that yet.

What's the key factor in people saying we don't need privacy protections? What's their main argument?

Well, I mean, I don't know that there are terribly many regular people who don't want privacy protections. What I think there is, is an extraordinarily well-funded industry lobby, which is able to stamp out that legislative progress. And the amount of money, the amount of people that are being put towards those efforts, both across the states and in the Congress, are, it's extraordinary and it's to the scale that we've only seen from, you know, a handful of other industries over the course of time.

Okay. Now, at techpolicy.press, you guys do a great job of covering these issues. So I would direct people to check it out if they haven't already, you know, because you're very timely and topical, both in analysis and opinion on this kind of stuff. But I'm wondering, you know, If you were to tell mainstream media stuff that you'd like to see them start covering, what would those suggestions look like?

I think the main thing that I would encourage, you know, folks in this industry to consider is to really look hard at hype as a kind of quantity in the overall narrative about artificial intelligence. Um, there was just a conference, uh, in Europe over near Barcelona, uh, called the Hype Studies Conference, a group of academics who were getting together to look at hype as a kind of political quotient, a kind of political idea, um, and to think about the ways in which especially technology hype, uh, has political consequences. And, you know, right now I think we're seeing that very much with artificial intelligence that the extent of the faith, again, that we're putting in this technology and that technology leaders are demanding of us with regard to their desire for capital, with regard to their belief in the near-term potential of the technology, where we're headed with it, its impacts on society. All of that adds up to a form of political power. Um, or they are granted political power as a result of that hype. And I think journalists, we have to look into that. Our job is to kind of pierce that hype a little bit, to really think hard about how we might, uh, you know, look, look at that a bit differently and think hard about, you know, how we can kind of create a more critical perspective.

All right. And at that note, we're actually at time already. Is there anything you wanted to bring up that we didn't cover?

No, I would be grateful to you. I'm grateful to you for recommending techpolicy.press to people. We have a newsletter, we have a podcast, and certainly we're covering these issues, as you say, almost every day of the week. And I don't know, I mean, I would encourage people to imagine what their own agency in all of this is. I do think, going back to that triangle, which I'm, you know, borrowing a bit from a scholar called Jack Balkan, but the idea of state power, of corporate power, of citizen power, user power. Each of us do have decisions to make and we do have power. And collectively we have a lot of power. So I would just leave your listeners with that. The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating For quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org. Thank you.