Discussion on Trusting AI in Data Management (Part 2)

Well, how would we guard against them? Okay, there's technologies like encryption, there are security technologies we could use. Okay, well, let me invest my time and my care into trying to build those. And I was part of a community at that point that was sort of a hacker, open source folks, people that were referred to as sort of tinfoil hat before Snowden, who were trying to build independent technology that would help remedy or prevent some of those harms. Now, I think my theory of change and my understanding of it was a little naive at that point. My sense was if the technology exists, then it will be adopted. I didn't understand the political economic foundation that actually these large companies who are based on this data gathering, this surveillance business model, where they need all this data, they need this scale in order to fuel this particular peculiar economic form, are never going to apply those technologies, whether they exist or not. It's just not in the. To protect our data. No, I mean Facebook with none of our data have a business model. Right. Signal is a non profit because there is no business model for collecting no data. Yeah, that's the economic engine of the particular tech industry we have right now. Neil, throughout the debate you were in the difficult position of actually having some nuance in the sense that you were saying. Yeah, a lot of what Meredith is saying is concerning, but we can find ways to deal with it. You seem confident that we'll find ways to deal with it. Same question that I put to Meredith, going back to your time in this field, what gives you that? I guess I would say relative optimism. So I was the first kid in my family to go to college and I was very interested in computers. And so I went and I studied computers. But what got me interested in computers was complexity theory, actually. And so this is the idea. I mean, people have heard about the butterfly effect and lots of other like versions of it, but one thing that comes out of complexity theory, complex systems, is that you can't control them, but they can do very powerful things and you can influence them. You can poke your finger in here and there, you can influence them, but you can't control them. And so this idea of control has like sort of control versus dynamism has been the major way that has driven in sort of how I think about the world. What do you mean by that? The idea.