Last night at the Hot Docs Cinema on Bloor (in Toronto for those of you in Mumbai), the director Fred Peabody showed his new feature documentary — Digital Tsunami: Big Tech, Big AI, Big Brother. I was glad to be part of it. Fred always drives important arguments.
After the film, I was part of a panel on stage with Fred and Phillip Martin (from GBH News Boston), chaired by Susan Ormiston.
And there was a great — involved! —crowd.
How are we to handle AI? Implications for democracy? I have some simple views — a few clips follow. I also wrote a lot about this in The Unconcious Civilization.
Of course, Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan lie at the foundation of the great information technology arc which has led to AI.
People seem surprised by where we are today — I constantly hear sounds of fear, of worry that technology could take over.
They have seen too many bad films.
What would Innis and McLuhan say today? Well, they already said it 60 years ago. We have only now caught up with them.
OK. What would they add? Perhaps that we can pull the plug on any technology, whenever we want, whatever the plug looks like.
And whatever the technology, it belongs to corporations, which belong to individuals. If the corporations are threatening democracy, there are laws to deal with them, their owners and their managers.
We are not living in a sci-fi movie. We have enormous power to make corporate leaders act responsibly, or we have the power to remove them — and easiest of all — we have the power to control corporations and to control those who own and/or run them.
Our laws almost certainly need to be updated, clarified and strengthened.
Those who are obsessed by the power of technology are like those who were obsessed by the power of slavery or machinery or cheap labour or cheap nationalism.
All of those forces had to be dealt with one way or another. True, it was a lot of work. Sometimes it involved wars. Certainly political movements had to clarify their aims.
Only passivity can make us the victims of new technology.
