Hey, this is Paris. I hope you enjoyed the Data Vampire series that we did back in October. It's had a fantastic response. And for that series, I spoke to a bunch of experts. And now we're releasing the full-length versions of those interviews for our supporters over on Patreon.com. And I wanted to give you a preview of what those interviews sound like. So you can consider whether to go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us, become a supporter yourself so you can tune in to the full-length interviews. So you can learn even more about the important topics that we dug into in that special series. So enjoy this clip from my interview with Ali Al-Khatib. There's been a lot of talk in the past year and a half about what effective regulation of AI is going to look like or should look like. But you recently wrote an essay about destroying AI, you know, taking one step further than that, than just kind of passing some regulations to try to, you know, uh reduce the worst aspects of what these AI systems can do. What brought you to the point to write something like that and to take that further step?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sorry. So I've been studying human-computer interaction for about 10 years, started a PhD program 10 years ago today, actually, uh, or close to today. I mean, I had been spending a long time thinking about how to develop human-centered systems and particularly uh writing papers that were trying to bring ideas from the social sciences about power, about oppression, about violence, um, into understanding how algorithmic systems can manifest these kinds of harms and trying to encourage people to think along those kinds of lines to understand and then to design uh consequential algorithmic systems in various different ways. Um and part of my frustration was coming from the feeling that HCI was sort of not picking up some of that. Although I suppose I should be grateful that I like a lot of my work has been very well received, um uh like especially sort of like in the quantitative and like sort of awards sense and everything like that. But it really just feels like uh a lot of the work that I had done sort of didn't sufficiently or didn't adequately address what was sort of a core problem with these systems in the first place, which is that if if people are designing these systems to cause harm fundamentally, then there kind of is no way to make a human-centered version of that sort of system. In the same way, legislation that makes it slightly more costly to do something harmful doesn't necessarily fix or even really discourage uh tech companies that find ways to uh amordize those costs or kind of absorb those costs into their business model. One example that I I think I've given recently in like conversation was that there are all sorts of reasons or all sorts of like kind of powers that cause us to behave differently when we're driving on the streets, because as individual people, the costs of crashing into another car or of hitting a pedestrian or something like that are quite substantial for us as individuals. But if a tech company that's developing autonomous cars is going to put 100,000 or a million cars out onto the streets, it really behooves them to find a way to legislatively make it not their fault to hit a pedestrian, for instance. And so they find ways to sort of defer the responsibility for who ultimately like caused that harm or who takes the responsibility for whatever kind of incident or whatever. And so that creates like these really wild perverse incentives to find ways to sort of consolidate and then offload responsibilities and consequences for violence. And I just don't see a good way with design out of that, or even with a lot of legislative solutions and everything else like that. And so I kind of wanted to explore uh what I thought was a somewhat uh like a not ho a not overly provocative suggestion, which was that uh sometimes a person will encounter an algorithmic system and it is not going to stop hurting them and they will not be able to escape the system. And given those two facts, I think it's pretty kind of obvious that it is reasonable to start dismantling the system to destroy it. And I'm not saying like we should necessarily destroy everything that has silicone in it or something like that, although I'm sure there are probably people that would argue that and I'd be happy to hear them out. But it doesn't seem radical to me to say if you can't leave a system, if the system is harming you, if you can't get it to stop hurting you, there really aren't that many other options. And like I think it's reasonable to say you don't have to take it. You don't have to continue to be to be harmed. And if it forecloses on all of the other possible avenues that you have, then one of the avenues that we sometimes don't like to talk about is to start destroying the system.
SPEAKER_00If you found that clip intriguing, go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter, support the work that goes into making the show, and get the full length version of that interview. Thanks so much.