Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week I interviewed Andrew Sullivan, a veteran technologist and director of the Internet Society, the nonprofit founded by internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn that advocates for and develops the basic open internet on top of which pretty much everything else in the digital world sits. We discussed what he sees as the misguided nature of most internet regulations, why people forgot how to build a Roman arch, and what the automobile can teach us about the digital age. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? That the internet can put the power of communication in the hands of the people who want to communicate. Traditionally, communication networks and tools were a channel for the people who owned them. One of the most interesting things about the internet is that it's a total disintermediation mechanism. [Regulators and private firms] are now busy attempting to put the mediators back in. We see a lot of attempts at regulation right now that ultimately amount to that. And yet, the big idea of the internet was supposed to be that you didn't have that problem anymore. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? Just like everybody else, I would say probably anything to do with AI. But maybe in particular, the idea that you're going to have this kind of magic oracle in the cloud somewhere that is going to deliver pure and true answers under the eye of eternity as opposed to very contingent things that emerge from our wider society. I look at how people use ChatGPT and what I see is the loss of the Roman arch. As the Roman Empire fell in the West, Western civilization forgot how to build the arch and by sometime in the early Middle Ages nobody knew how to build it anymore. They knew that they existed, they could see them all around, they knew that they were important, but they just didn't know how to build them anymore. I worry that the way we are treating ChatGPT is leading us to this fundamental inability to look at things critically. Our current cultural drift seems to be that way, there seems to be this deep anti-intellectualism that is going on right now that tends to militate against asking picky questions, because you sound like some kind of weird nerd, like, what's wrong with you? And you know, we'll just get an expert system to answer this question. That's really what bothers me about the way they talk about these tools, as if we just ask the expert system and then we'll have the truth. No. That's just picking up a summary of all of the things that we already wrote down before. That’s not new access to anything. Failure to recognize that is putting our culture at risk. What book most shaped your conception of the future? One that has been very influential on me for the last several years is “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City” by Peter D. Norton. This is a book about how culture remade itself, and remade the physical world, in response to the arrival of the automobile. The automobile is this massive transformational technology, it radically alters the relationship between people and speed. It introduces these very fast moving and very heavy metal objects into places that were completely unused to them. Culture had to remake itself, and the power that was wielded by various interest groups in order to change things is entirely instructive when we’re looking around right now, and we're trying to work out what we’re going to do about this internet thing. You can look back at how these arguments were deployed when another transformative technology remade our culture. There are a whole bunch of things that humans gave up. Ordinary citizens used to control the street, walk in the street, it was a normal place to be. And now if you walk in the street and you're hit by a car, it's your fault. That is a massive change. It used to be that you would expect things running through the street that were going faster than you not to run you down, and if they did, that was a problem for them. Now it's a problem for you. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Particularly in the United States, but more generally we're not dealing with the concentration of economic power in the marketplace. We’re treating this as a technical problem and attempting to regulate the technology in various ways. But in fact it’s a corporate behavior issue. Europe is trying a little bit, but we don't really seem to be coping with it because the United States is singularly set up not to cope with it. And yet, it's where these companies have been incorporated. We have an antitrust problem and we don’t know what to do about it. What surprised you most in the past year? The willingness of subnational jurisdictions to try to regulate the internet. It's weird enough to get nation states trying to write regulations about how the internet is going to work when the internet is not aligned around their borders. But it's even weirder when a state is trying to do it. California has tried quite a few things along these lines. Texas and Florida have done some things. We've got the TikTok stuff in Colorado, similar things in India, with various state-level attempts to regulate. You see people attempting to regulate things within these very narrow geographic boundaries, and it's totally the wrong tool. It doesn't work at all. And yet they keep reaching for it, mostly because that's where they feel they've got some political influence. But it’s such a mismatched tool.
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