WEF 2017 - is the West's 'citizen mutiny' a precursor to the 'digital refugee'?
- Summary:
- The rise of AI has been staggering, but is it helping fuel the 'mutiny' among citizens across the Western democracies against the establishment? And is the end point the birth of the digital refugee?
People across Europe and the United States have risen up and said, ‘We don’t feel we belong and we don’t feel we’re being heard by leaders in the public sector and sometimes by leaders in the private sector’.
A stark assessment from Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, as she opened a debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the World Economic Forum yesterday.
But with the past 12 months having seen the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of the Far Right in France and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, it’s also a claim that stands up to scrutiny.
The events of the past year have been turbulent enough to turn what might have been a technology-centered debate into a more societally-focused one, in which the enabling role of tech - for better or worse - was almost a sub-text to some bigger questions.
Woods cited founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab’s argument that to be a good leader you need a radar and a compass:
Leaders need radar to know what citizens are thinking and wanting and are concerned about. You certainly need a compass for the values that are going to take you forward. But we need to add one thing - you need a crew… In Britain and the US and other countries in Europe, it feels like people are staging a mutiny. The crew is not with the established governments and established leaders.
She added that the lessons to be learned are clear:
Citizens are not just consumers. You can’t just deliver to them. Why? A huge part is a human need to belong, help them feel they have a voice.
Digital refugees
Of particular focus in the debate was the rise of Artificial Intelligence, a major theme at this year’s Davos gathering and one that has focused on the disruptive (and negative) impact of such technology. It was an idea picked up by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, an evangelical enthusiast for AI, but one who struck some cautionary notes:
We can see advancements in Artificial Intelligence that are beyond even what we expected. It’s happening at a rate and capability that we’re worrying about how this will impact the 'everyman' and the broad range of workers across the world. This year my heart has been with so many migrants and refugees, 65 million refugees across the world, their touching stories and thinking about how they’re going to get back to stability and homes.
I think now about how Artificial Intelligence will create digital refugees and how tens of millions of people will be displaced from jobs across the planet because technology is moving ahead so rapidly. We have to decide - are we going to be committed to supporting and improving this state of the world or are we just going to let it go as it is? We’re at a crucial point right now.
It was an idea supported by Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys, who highlighted the enormous gap between what he’d studied around AI for his PhD many years ago and the “staggering” progress in the field in recent times:
We face the prospect of leaving a larger swathe of humanity behind in the light of this technology than any other technology we have ever created. We need to be extra careful, extra conscious and put in extra effort to ensure that we don’t create a bigger divide and create an even bigger society of ‘have nots’. Technology that we build now should be in service of everyone. That means education, a deep commitment to education and helping people to bridge the displacement gap when technologies disrupt jobs and so forth.
Benioff concurred, arguing that there’s an urgent societal need to explore new models of education and citing his own focus on the need for improvement in the US public school system.
But while encouraging all CEOs to “adopt” a public school, he admitted that this focus on education may not in itself be enough. A more radical solution might be needed, he said:
We may also have to bifurcate to basic income as well. We see those basic income experiments happening, even where I am, in Oakland, in other parts of Europe, in Africa and India. That is something that is potentially going to have to be explored. We are entering new territories.
Articulating those new territories is something that will remain the onus of the human being, suggested Sikka:
John McCarthy, the father of Artificial Intelligence, once said that articulating a problem is half the solution. We are rapidy approaching a time when AI is going to be able to solve mechanically the problems that we articulate and [when] the human frontier is [doing the] articulating.
Divisive tech
But while new tech like AI can have positive transformative effects, it can also be turned to more negative uses, warned Benioff. In an unspecified, but clear, nod to the controversy around alleged hacking of the US Election by Russia, he noted:
The counter-narrative is that software is also dividing us. Certainly we can see in social media, especially in regard to recent events, that I don’t have to go into in detail, that software was used in many cases to divide society. Bots were created to take on anonymous positions on social media that look like humans, amplifying narratives that may not have been true.
That is an example of where technology is dividing us. This is a new frontier and also part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution when we look at what has social media done to us. Yes, we like to be on Twitter, we get real-time feedback, but the other side of it is that there’s all kinds of intelligence and network capability that’s out there, trying to push society in a certain direction. That is something that we have not seen happen before.
That’s a situation, said Woods, that has frightening social and political implications:
This is dangerous stuff, when technologies become magnifiers of fear and of hatred of others, of polarisation. We know that when people are afraid they don’t work together and that means that they turn to governments that don’t permit them to work together, that control them and coerce them.
For Benioff, a critical part of the solution to challenge this lies with individual responsibility and with multi-stakeholder dialog:
We are going to pivot to where each of us is going to have to take personal action to overcome the kind of levels of inequality that we’re seeing. Everyone has to focus on this and do one thing. It could be to adopt a school, it could be working more closely with an NGO, but there’s a commitment that each of us has to make to move this ball forward.
We see all the voices emerging in the world, some we might like, some we might not like. Only through multi-stakeholder dialog will we be able to elevate our consciousness and be able to get to the answers.
If the rise of the digital refugee is to be prevented, there has to be coming together of leaders in both the public and private sectors, he urged:
That is something that we really need to be mindful of and start having these serious conversations, multi-stakeholder dialogs where we can bring together corporate leaders, government leaders, social leaders, NGOs. Only through multi-stakeholder dialog are we going to get this answer.
There isn’t a clear path forward. All this [with AI] has just happened in a matter of months.
My take
Woods decision to lead this debate around the idea of ‘citizen mutiny against the establishment’ was well-timed, with the session running hours after UK Prime Minister Theresa May outlined the next steps following the Brexit vote in June and a few days before Trump takes over in the US.
For their part as technology leaders, Sikka and Benioff made powerful points. One audience member accused the ‘need for education’ message of being something that has been on a loop at successive Davos gatherings, with seemingly little evidence of it making a difference. It’s a fair point, but as Sikka countered, there’s a good reason for that:
The reason we keep hearing about this over and over is that we are just not doing enough about these. There is no other answer.
Meanwhile Benioff’s focus on building a stakeholder economy that doesn’t just focus on shareholders, but on stakeholders that include customers, partners, employees, as well as their local communities, schools, the environment, chimed well with Woods underlying premise:
You need to bring people along with you. Governments across the world need a narrative that helps people to believe that they do belong, that they are being heard. That’s one way that they can start to rebuild trust.