I think a lot of what we’re seeing, frankly,
follows a pattern that Shoshana Zuboff, the
Harvard professor who wrote The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism — she talks about how before
the September 11th attacks, there had been
an aggressive move to protect consumer privacy
against increased surveillance by tech companies,
and that immediately after those attacks,
there was, rather, a very aggressive push
by government to collaborate with tech companies
to get at the access — to get access to
the same data that they were worried about
the tech companies mining before the attacks.
And so, now we’re in a moment where there
was a huge amount of concern about what Zuboff
calls surveillance capitalism, and now many
people who had been raising those alarms are
going, “Well, maybe it’s OK if we let
our governments collaborate with tech companies
to store this very, very sensitive data about
us.”
Now, I want to be clear.
I think there is absolutely a role, an important
role, for technology in figuring out how we
are going to live under these extraordinary
circumstances.
But the question is whether tech companies
and government get the kind of carte blanche
that they got in 2001 to massively invade
our privacy.
What is going to — where is this data going
to be stored?
Who is going to have access to it?
Australia has rolled out one of these apps
very quickly, and it turns out that Amazon
is controlling the data.
So, you know, that clip, I think, is a very
worrying one.
The other thing that I think we need to be
really acutely aware of is, a lot of the narratives
that we’ve heard early on about countries
that successfully controlled the virus, or
at least much more successfully than the United
States, a lot of it was attributed to these
kinds of apps, to this kind of surveillance.
And that narrative is a very convenient one
for these tech companies.
And in many cases, it erases the role of a
functioning public healthcare system, of the
fact that it was not merely an app that was
placed voluntarily on people’s phones, but,
much more importantly, a well-staffed public
health system that allowed human tracing and
tracking of the virus, which means a human
being.
Not an alert on your phone, but a human being
calls you — best of all, a human being in
your community, somebody who you might trust,
who speaks your language — and says, “OK,
you may have come in contact with this virus.
What would you need to be able to self-quarantine?
Can we get you a hotel room?
Can we help you to make sure that your kids
are cared for?”
This is the kind of human work and job creation
that it actually takes.
And what we’re being sold now, whether with
the idea that everything is going to be solved
with more surveillance and an app or remote
learning and telehealth, is really taking
the humans out of the equation.
It is humans who are setting up these systems.
It is humans, like whether it is the teachers
in their homes or the parents in their homes,
who are helping students learn right now.
It isn’t just Google Classroom that is doing
it.
But humans are being erased from this story.
And we aren’t hearing the kinds of human
solutions that, with proper control over good
technology, we could actually come up with
some viable models here.
And, Naomi, I wanted to ask you — in your
article in The Intercept, you talk about this
new form of yellow peril that Eric Schmidt
is peddling, that now it’s China that is
the threat when it comes to artificial intelligence.
The United States is falling behind.
It dovetails with Trump’s blaming China
for the trade gap of the United States.
What about this issue of artificial intelligence
and whether we are in a new space race 
with China over it?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, in my article, I quote some documents
that were FOIA’d by EPIC, which is Electronic
Privacy Information Center.
They got a trove of documents out of the National
Security Commission on AI, NSCAI, which is
the commission that — one of the two commissions
that Schmidt chairs.
And it advises Congress on ways that it can
increase its uses of technology, particularly
AI, but not exclusively AI.
And it’s all framed in this yellow peril
language of China is on the verge of beating
Silicon Valley in the technology race that
began in Silicon Valley.
So, basically, the narrative is, you know,
American innovation is responsible for these
technologies — of course, Silicon Valley
takes much of the credit, but, as we know,
a lot of it comes from public research, and
a lot of it comes from military research — but
because China does not have the same privacy
concerns — indeed, you have a government
that is erecting a high-tech surveillance
state — and because China has leapfrogged
over a lot of what this report calls sort
of legacy structures — so, they go directly
to cashless, digital payments; they are going
directly to telehealth because there’s a
big shortage of doctors.
Naomi, we have 20 seconds.
Yeah.
So, basically, the idea is China is leaping
ahead of the United States, and the only way
to fight back is to have a China-style surveillance
state here in the United States.
And that’s the message that Schmidt has
been peddling for a long time now.
