The age of surveillance capitalism pdf download

America would take out major Soviet cities with nukes and send anticommunist commandos who had been recruited from local populations to take charge and set up provisional governments. The Central Intelligence Agency, along with clandestine military services, trained Eastern Europeans, many of whom had been Nazi collaborators, for the fateful day when they would be parachuted into their homelands to take charge.

Though the more hawkish US generals seemed eager for nuclear conflict, many believed that open war with the Soviet Union was too dangerous and cooler heads prevailed. They counseled instead for a more measured approach. The plan was to use sabotage, assassinations, propaganda, and covert financing of political parties and movements to halt the spread of communism in postwar Europe, and then to use these same covert tools to defeat the Soviet Union itself.

Kennan believed that closed authoritarian societies were inherently unstable in comparison with open democratic ones like the United States.

To him, traditional war with the Soviet Union was not necessary. The directive gave the CIA carte blanche to do whatever was required to fight communism wherever it reared its head.

In some cases, the stations, especially those targeting Ukraine, Germany, and the Baltic States, were staffed by known Nazi collaborators and broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda. They became highly effective at communicating American ideals and influencing cultural and intellectual trends. These projects were not restricted to Europe. Broadcasts targeting Vietnam and North Korea came online as well. Over the next several decades, these radio stations were shuffled, reorganized, and steadily expanded.

By the early s, they had grown into the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency apparatus that functioned like a holding company for rehabilitated CIA propaganda properties. Internet Freedom. Over the decades, the agency shut down and relaunched Radio Free Asia under different guises and, ultimately, handed it off to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. For years, China had been jamming Voice of America and Radio Free Asia programs by playing loud noises or looping Chinese opera music over the same frequencies with a more powerful radio signal, which bumped American broadcasts off the air.

Chinese officials saw the Internet as just another communication medium being used by America to undermine their government. Jamming this kind of activity was standard practice in China long before the Internet arrived. Expected or not, the US government did not let the matter drop. Under President George W. They saw foreign control of the Internet, first in China but also in Iran and later Vietnam, Russia, and Myanmar, as an illegitimate check on their ability to expand into new global markets, and ultimately as a threat to their businesses.

It also funded several small outfits run by practitioners of Falun Gong, a controversial Chinese anticommunist cult banned in China whose leader believes that humans are being corrupted by aliens from other dimensions and that people of mixed blood are subhumans and unfit for salvation.

The Chinese government saw these anti-censorship tools as weapons in an upgraded version of an old war. It was the start of a censorship arms race.

They had few users and were easily blocked. If Internet Freedom was going to triumph, America needed bigger and stronger weapons. Russia Deployment Plan. One of those lessons came in Vlad was glad to hear from Dingledine. He knew about Tor and was a fan of the technology, but he had doubts about the plan. He explained that censorship was not currently an issue in Russia. In other words: Why fix a problem that did not exist? Given the deteriorating political relations between Russia and the United States, the subtext of the question was obvious: How close was Tor to the US government?

And, in this strained geopolitical climate, will these ties cause problems for Russian activists like him back home? These were honest questions, and relevant ones. The emails I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act do not show whether Dingledine ever replied.

How could he? What would he say? The correspondence left little room for doubt. The Tor Project was not a radical indie organization fighting The Man. For all intents and purposes, it was The Man. The funding record tells the story even more precisely. What would someone like Vlad think of all this? Obviously, nothing good. And that was an issue. The Tor Project needed users to trust its technology and show enthusiasm. Credibility was key. Clearly, Tor needed to do something to change public perception, something that could help distance Tor from its government sponsors once and for all.

As luck would have it, Dingledine found the perfect man for the job: a young, ambitious Tor developer who could help rebrand the Tor Project as a group of rebels that made Uncle Sam tremble in his jackboots. A Hero Is Born. He grew up in Santa Rosa, a city just north of San Francisco, in a bohemian family. He liked to talk up his rough upbringing: a schizophrenic mother, a musician-turned-junkie dad, and a domestic situation that got so bad he had to fish used needles out of the couch as a kid.

But he was also a smart middle-class Jewish kid with a knack for programming and hacking. He attended Santa Rosa Junior College and took classes in computer science. Politically, he identified as a libertarian. Most of my super left wing friends really dislike Ayn Rand for some reason or another.

The characters were simple. The story was simple. What I found compelling was the moral behind the story. I suppose it may be summed up in one line… Those that seek to gather you together for selfless actions, wish to enslave you for their own gain.

He moved to San Francisco and worked low-level computer jobs with an emphasis in network management, but he chafed at regular tech jobs and pined for something meaningful. He returned to the Bay Area more determined than ever to live an exciting life. I work helping groups that I feel really need my help. It has to be both an interesting job and for an interesting result.

Appelbaum also began to develop a bad reputation in the Bay Area hacker scene for his aggressive, unwanted sexual advances. San Francisco journalist Violet Blue recounted how he spent months trying to coerce and bully women into having sex with him, attempted to forcefully isolate his victims in rooms or stairwells at parties, and resorted to public shaming if his advances were rebuffed.

But for now, his star was ascendant. And in , Appelbaum finally got his dream job—a position that could expand with his giant ego and ambition. In April of that year, Dingledine hired him as a full-time Tor contractor. As Dingledine discovered, Appelbaum proved better and much more useful at something else: branding and public relations. Tor employees were computer engineers, mathematicians, and encryption junkies.

Most of them were introverts, and socially awkward. Even worse: some, like Roger Dingledine, had spent time at US intelligence agencies and proudly displayed this fact on their online CVs—a not-so-subtle sign of a lack of radicalness. He had flair, a taste for drama and hyperbole. He was full of tall tales and vanity, and he had a burning desire for the spotlight. Within months of getting the job, he assumed the role of official Tor Project spokesman and began promoting Tor as a powerful weapon against government oppression.

While Dingledine focused on running the business, Jacob Appelbaum jet-setted to exotic locations around the world to evangelize and spread the word. He also met with Swedish law enforcement agencies, but that was done out of the public eye.

Lots of people were interested in Tor and many many people installed Tor on both laptops and servers. This advocacy resulted in at least two new high bandwidth nodes that he helped the administrators configure. Appelbaum was energetic and did his best to promote Tor among privacy activists, cryptographers, and, most important of all, the radical cypherpunk movement that dreamed of using encryption to take on the power of governments and liberate the world from centralized control.

In , he snagged the support of Julian Assange, a silver-haired hacker who wanted to free the world of secrets. Tor Gets Radical. Appelbaum watched as Assange slowly erected WikiLeaks from nothing, building up a dedicated following by trawling hacker conferences for would-be leakers. Soon after that supposedly wild night, Appelbaum decided to attach himself to the WikiLeaks cause. First came the war logs from Afghanistan, showing how the United States had systematically underreported civilian casualties and operated an elite assassination unit.

Assange was suddenly one of the most famous people in the world—a fearless radical taking on the awesome power of the United States. Appelbaum leveraged his new rebel status for all it was worth. He regaled reporters with wild stories of how his association with WikiLeaks made him a wanted man. He talked about being pursued, interrogated, and threatened by shadowy government forces. He described in chilling detail how he and everyone he knew were thrown into a nightmare world of Big Brother harassment and surveillance.

He claimed his mother was targeted. His girlfriend received nightly visits by men clad in black. And she saw two men outside of her house on the ground floor in her backyard, meaning that they were on her property inside of a fence. And presumably, this is because there was a third person in the house placing a bug or doing something else, and they were keeping watch on her to make sure that if she were to hear something or to get up, they would be able to alert this other person.

He was a great performer and had a knack for giving journalists what they wanted. He spun fantastic stories, and Tor was at the center of them all. Reporters lapped it up. The more exaggerated and heroic his performance, the more attention flowed his way.

News articles, radio shows, television appearances, and magazine spreads. Support and accolades poured in from journalists, privacy organizations, and government watchdogs. Well, what of them? To any doubters, Jacob Appelbaum was held up as living, breathing proof of the radical independence of the Tor Project.

With Julian Assange endorsing Tor, reporters assumed that the US government saw the anonymity nonprofit as a threat. They reveal that Appelbaum and Dingledine worked with Assange on securing WikiLeaks with Tor since late and that they kept their handlers at the BBG informed about their relationship and even provided information about the inner workings of WikiLeaks secure submissions system.

No one at the BBG raised any objections. To the contrary, they appeared to be supportive. Perhaps most telling was that support from the BBG continued even after WikiLeaks began publishing classified government information and Appelbaum became the target of a larger Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks. It was incredible. I guess it makes sense, in a way. It was an opportunity. Social Media as a Weapon. In , less than a year after WikiLeaks broke onto the world stage, the Middle East and North Africa exploded like a powder keg.

Seemingly out of nowhere, huge demonstrations and protests swept through the region. It started in Tunisia, where a poor fruit seller lit himself on fire to protest humiliating harassment and extortion at the hands of the local police. The Arab Spring had arrived. In Tunisia and Egypt, these protest movements toppled longstanding dictatorships from within. In Libya, opposition forces deposed and savagely killed Muammar Gaddafi, knifing him in the anus, after an extensive bombing campaign from NATO forces.

Arab Spring turned into a long, bloody winter. The underlying causes of these opposition movements were deep, complex, and varied from country to country. Youth unemployment, corruption, drought and related high food prices, political repression, economic stagnation, and longstanding geopolitical aspirations were just a few of the factors. To a young and digitally savvy crop of State Department officials and foreign policy planners, these political movements had one thing in common: they arose because of the democratizing power of the Internet.

They saw social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as democratic multipliers that allowed people to get around official state-controlled information sources and organize political movements quickly and efficiently. For years the State Department, in partnership with the Broadcasting Board of Governors and companies like Facebook and Google, had worked to train activists from around the world on how to use Internet tools and social media to organize opposition political movements.

Indeed, the New York Times reported that many of the activists who played leading roles in the Arab Spring—from Egypt to Syria to Yemen—had taken part in these training sessions. This certainly helped during the revolution. Staff from the Tor Project played a role in some of these trainings, taking part in a series of Arab Blogger sessions in Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Bahrain, where Jacob Appelbaum taught opposition activists how to use Tor to get around government censorship.

I really have to recommend visiting Beirut. Lebanon is an amazing place. Activists later put the skills taught at these training sessions to use during the Arab Spring, routing around Internet blocks that their governments threw up to prevent them from using social media to organize protests. From a higher vantage point, the Tor Project was a wild success. It had matured into a powerful foreign policy tool—a soft-power cyber weapon with multiple uses and benefits.

It hid spies and military agents on the Internet, enabling them to carry out their missions without leaving a trace. It was used by the US government as a persuasive regime-change weapon, a digital crowbar that prevented countries from exercising sovereign control over their own Internet infrastructure.

Counterintuitively, Tor also emerged as a focal point for anti-government privacy activists and organizations, a huge cultural success that made Tor that much more effective for its government backers by drawing fans and helping shield the project from scrutiny.

And Tor was just the beginning. The Arab Spring provided the US government with the confirmation it was looking for. Social media, combined with technologies like Tor, could be tapped to bring huge masses of people onto the streets and could even trigger revolutions.

The US government saw that it could leverage the Internet to sow discord and inflame political instability in countries it considered hostile to US interests. Good or bad, it could weaponize social media and use it for insurgency. And it wanted more. The plan was to go beyond the Tor Project and launch all sorts of crypto tools to leverage the power of social media to help foreign activists build political movements and organize protests: encrypted chat apps and ultra secure operating systems designed to prevent governments from spying on activists, anonymous whistle-blowing platforms that could help expose government corruption, and wireless networks that could be deployed instantaneously anywhere in the world to keep activists connected even if their government turned off the Internet.

Strangely enough, these efforts were about to get a major credibility boost from an unlikely source: an NSA contractor by the name of Edward Snowden. Strange Alliances. The post-WikiLeaks years were good for the Tor Project. With the government contracts flowing, Roger Dingledine expanded the payroll, adding a dedicated crew of developers and managers who saw their job in messianic terms: to free the Internet of government surveillance.

Jacob Appelbaum, too, was doing well. Claiming that harassment from the US government was too much to bear, he spent most of his time in Berlin in a sort of self-imposed exile. There, he continued to do the job Dingledine had hired him to do. He traveled the world training political activists and persuading techies and hackers to join up as Tor volunteers. He also did various side projects, some of which blurred the line between activism and intelligence gathering.

In , he made a trip to Burma, a longtime target of US government regime-change efforts. Appelbaum continued to draw a high five-figure salary from Tor, a government contractor funded almost exclusively by military and intelligence grants.

But, to the public, he was a real-life superhero on the run from the US surveillance state—now hiding out in Berlin, the nerve center of the global hacker scene known for its nerdy mix of machismo, all-night hackathons, drug use, and partner swapping. In Berlin, Appelbaum caught another lucky break for the Tor Project.

This source turned out to be Edward Snowden. In Russia, where the BBG and Dingledine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deployment plan, use of the software increased from twenty thousand daily connections to somewhere around two hundred thousand. During a promotional campaign for the Tor Project, Snowden said:.

Without Tor, the streets of the Internet become like the streets of a very heavily surveilled city. With Tor, we have private spaces and private lives, where we can choose who we want to associate with and how, without the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. To some, Edward Snowden was a hero. To others, he was a traitor who deserved to be executed. Some called for bringing him back in a black-ops kidnapping; others, like Donald Trump, called for him to be assassinated.

The funds were to be split evenly between the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Although Congress had been providing funds for various anti censorship programs for years, this was the first time that it budgeted money specifically for Internet Freedom.

The motivation for this expansion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US government would maintain its technological advantage in the censorship arms race that began in the early s, but the funds were also going into developing a new generation of tools aimed at leveraging the power of the Internet to help foreign opposition activists organize into cohesive political movements.

Initially launched by the Central Intelligence Agency in to target China with anticommunist radio broadcasts, Radio Free Asia had been shuttered and relaunched several times over the course of its history.

Radio Free Asia had trouble shedding its covert Cold War tactics. Radio Free Asia executives hoped that, bit by bit, the stream of anticommunist propaganda directed at the country would bring about the collapse of the government. He was fluent in cypherpunk-hacktivist lingo and was very much a part of the grassroots privacy community he sought to woo.

With him at the helm, OTF put a lot of effort on branding. Outwardly, it looked like a grassroots privacy activist organization, not a government agency. But if OTF appeared scrappy, it was also extremely well connected. The organization was supported by a star-studded team—from best-selling science fiction authors to Silicon Valley executives and celebrated cryptography experts.

From behind this hip and connected exterior, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a vertically integrated incubator for Internet Freedom technologies, pouring millions into projects big and small, including everything from evading censorship to helping political organizing, protests, and movement building. In many ways, it was the privacy movement.

It expanded the reach and speed of the Tor Project network and directed several million dollars to setting up high-bandwidth Tor exit nodes in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, both high-priority regions for US foreign policy. The Tor Project remained the best-known privacy app funded by the Open Technology Fund, but it was quickly joined by another: Signal, an encrypted mobile phone messaging app for the iPhone and Android.

Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation run by Moxie Marlinspike, a tall, lanky cryptographer with a head full of dreadlocks. Marlinspike was an old friend of Jacob Appelbaum, and he played a similar radical game.

He remained cryptic about his real name and identity, told stories of being targeted by the FBI, and spent his free time sailing and surfing in Hawaii. He had made a good chunk of money selling his encryption start-up to Twitter and had worked with the State Department on Internet Freedom projects since , but he posed as a feisty anarchist fighting the system.

His personal website was called thoughtcrime. Signal was a huge success. Journalists, privacy activists, and cryptographers hailed Signal as an indispensable Internet privacy tool.

It was a complement to Tor in the age of mobile phones. While Tor anonymized browsing, Signal encrypted voice calls and text, making it impossible for governments to monitor communication. With endorsements like these, Signal quickly became the go-to app for political activists around the world.

Egypt, Russia, Syria, and even the United States—millions downloaded Signal, and it became the communication app of choice for those who hoped to avoid police surveillance. Feminist collectives, anti—President Donald Trump protesters, communists, anarchists, radical animal rights organizations, Black Lives Matter activists—all flocked to Signal.

Compartmentalize to limit compromise. Encrypt everything, from calls to texts use Signal as a first step. Google followed suit, building Signal encryption into its Allo and Duo text and video messaging apps. If you stepped back to survey the scene, the entire landscape of this new Internet Freedom privacy movement looked absurd. Cold War—era organizations spun off from the CIA now funding the global movement against government surveillance?

Google and Facebook, companies that ran private surveillance networks and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploying government-funded privacy tech to protect their users from government surveillance? Privacy activists working with Silicon Valley and the US government to fight government surveillance—and with the support of Edward Snowden himself?

It is very hard to imagine that back in the s student radicals at Harvard and MIT would have ever thought to partner with IBM and the State Department to protest against Pentagon surveillance.

If they did, they probably would have been mocked and chased off campus, branded fools or—worse—as some kind of feds. Back then, the lines were clear, but today all these connections are obscured. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to makes sense of it all. So, talk of government involvement in the privacy space sounds like something cooked up by a paranoiac. In any event, with support from someone as celebrated as Edward Snowden, few had any reason to question why apps like Signal and Tor existed, or what larger purpose they served.

It was easier and simpler to put your trust in app, and to believe in the idea that America still had a healthy civil society, where people could come together to fund tools that countervailed the surveillance power of the state. That suited the sponsors of Internet Freedom just fine.

It boasted that its partnership with both Silicon Valley and respected privacy activists meant that hundreds of millions of people could use the privacy tools the US government had brought to market.

False Sense of Security. While accolades for the Tor Project, Signal, and other crypto apps funded by the US government rolled in, a deeper look showed that they were not as secure or as impervious to government penetration as their proponents claimed. Perhaps no story better exemplifies the flaws in impenetrable crypto security than that of Ross Ulbricht, otherwise known as Dread Pirate Roberts, the architect of Silk Road.

In October , four months after Edward Snowden came out of hiding and endorsed Tor, a twenty-nine-year-old native Texan by the name of Ross Ulbricht was arrested in a public library in San Francisco. He was accused of being Dread Pirate Roberts and was charged with multiple counts of money laundering, narcotics trafficking, hacking, and, on top of it all, murder.

When his case went to trial a year later, the story of the Tor Project took on a different shade, demonstrating the power of marketing and ideology over reality. He believed that everything he did in the murkiness of the dark web would have no bearing on him in the real world—he believed it so much that he not only built a massively illegal drug business on top of it but also ordered hits on anyone who threatened his business.

His belief in the power of the Tor Project to create a cybernetic island completely impervious to the law persisted even in the face of strong countervailing evidence. Starting in March , Silk Road was hit with multiple attacks that crashed the Tor hidden server software that enabled it to be on the dark web.

It seemed the party was over. Tor had failed. But Ulbricht still believed. It was a friendly sort of outreach. Yet, amazingly, he continued to run his site, confident that it would turn out fine in the end. A day later, he was in federal custody. After being found guilty of seven felonies, including money laundering, drug trafficking, running a criminal enterprise, and identity fraud, he went from calling for revolution to begging the judge for leniency.

The judge had no pity. She hit him with a double life sentence without the possibility of parole. And more years may be added to the clock if he is convicted for any of his murders for hire.

Even as Edward Snowden and organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation promoted Tor as a powerful tool against the US surveillance state, that very surveillance state was poking Tor full of holes. In , the FBI along with the DHS and European law enforcement agencies went on the hunt for Silk Road copycat stores, taking down fifty marketplaces hawking everything from drugs to weapons to credit cards to child abuse pornography in an international sweep codenamed Operation Omynous.

In , international law enforcement in conjunction with the FBI arrested more than five hundred people linked with Playpen, a notorious child pornography network that ran on the Tor cloud.

Seventy-six people were prosecuted in the United States, and nearly three hundred child victims from around the world were rescued from their abusers. It seemed that cops knew exactly where to hit and how to do it. How did law enforcement penetrate what was supposed to be ironclad anonymity strong enough to withstand an onslaught by the NSA? It was strange to see Dingledine getting angry about researchers taking money from law enforcement when his own salary was paid almost entirely by military and intelligence-linked contracts.

But Dingledine did something that was even stranger. He accused Carnegie Mellon researchers of violating academic standards for ethical research by working with law enforcement. Although demands like this make sense in a research context, they were baffling when applied to Tor. After all, Tor and its backers, including Edward Snowden, presented the project as a real-world anonymity tool that could resist the most powerful attackers. Self-learning and self-programming algorithms are now emerging, so it is possible that in the future algorithms will write many if not most algorithms.

Algorithms are often elegant and incredibly useful tools used to accomplish tasks. They are mostly invisible aids, augmenting human lives in increasingly incredible ways. However, sometimes the application of algorithms created with good intentions leads to unintended consequences. Recent news items tie to these concerns:. The use of algorithms is spreading as massive amounts of data are being created, captured and analyzed by businesses and governments.

Some are calling this the Age of Algorithms and predicting that the future of algorithms is tied to machine learning and deep learning that will get better and better at an ever-faster pace. While many of the U. Some 1, responded to this question about what will happen in the next decade:. Will the net overall effect of algorithms be positive for individuals and society or negative for individuals and society? Respondents were allowed to respond anonymously; these constitute a slight majority of the written elaborations.

These findings do not represent all the points of view that are possible to a question like this, but they do reveal a wide range of valuable observations based on current trends. In the next section we offer a brief outline of seven key themes found among the written elaborations.

All responses are lightly edited for style. There is fairly uniform agreement among these respondents that algorithms are generally invisible to the public and there will be an exponential rise in their influence in the next decade. He replied:. Fact: We have already turned our world over to machine learning and algorithms. The question now is, how to better understand and manage what we have done? Namely, how can we see them at work?

Consider and assess their assumptions? Like fish in a tank, we can see them swimming around and keep an eye on them. Barry Chudakov. After all, algorithms are generated by trial and error, by testing, by observing, and coming to certain mathematical formulae regarding choices that have been made again and again — and this can be used for difficult choices and problems, especially when intuitively we cannot readily see an answer or a way to resolve the problem.

In a technological recapitulation of what spiritual teachers have been saying for centuries, our things are demonstrating that everything is — or can be — connected to everything else.

Algorithms with the persistence and ubiquity of insects will automate processes that used to require human manipulation and thinking. These can now manage basic processes of monitoring, measuring, counting or even seeing. Our car can tell us to slow down. Our televisions can suggest movies to watch. A grocery can suggest a healthy combination of meats and vegetables for dinner. The rub is this: Whose intelligence is it, anyway?

So prediction possibilities follow us around like a pet. The result: As information tools and predictive dynamics are more widely adopted, our lives will be increasingly affected by their inherent conclusions and the narratives they spawn.

All of our extended thinking systems algorithms fuel the software and connectivity that create extended thinking systems demand more thinking — not less — and a more global perspective than we have previously managed.

The expanding collection and analysis of data and the resulting application of this information can cure diseases, decrease poverty, bring timely solutions to people and places where need is greatest, and dispel millennia of prejudice, ill-founded conclusions, inhumane practice and ignorance of all kinds. Our algorithms are now redefining what we think, how we think and what we know. We need to ask them to think about their thinking — to look out for pitfalls and inherent biases before those are baked in and harder to remove.

That, by itself, is a tall order that requires impartial experts backtracking through the technology development process to find the models and formulae that originated the algorithms.

Then, keeping all that learning at hand, the experts need to soberly assess the benefits and deficits or risks the algorithms create. Who is prepared to do this? Who has the time, the budget and resources to investigate and recommend useful courses of action?

This is a 21st-century job description — and market niche — in search of real people and companies. In order to make algorithms more transparent, products and product information circulars might include an outline of algorithmic assumptions, akin to the nutritional sidebar now found on many packaged food products, that would inform users of how algorithms drive intelligence in a given product and a reasonable outline of the implications inherent in those assumptions.

A number of respondents noted the many ways in which algorithms will help make sense of massive amounts of data, noting that this will spark breakthroughs in science, new conveniences and human capacities in everyday life, and an ever-better capacity to link people to the information that will help them. They perform seemingly miraculous tasks humans cannot and they will continue to greatly augment human intelligence and assist in accomplishing great things.

A representative proponent of this view is Stephen Downes , a researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, who listed the following as positive changes:. Today banks provide loans based on very incomplete data. It is true that many people who today qualify for loans would not get them in the future.

However, many people — and arguably many more people — will be able to obtain loans in the future, as banks turn away from using such factors as race, socio-economic background, postal code and the like to assess fit. Health care is a significant and growing expense not because people are becoming less healthy in fact, society-wide, the opposite is true but because of the significant overhead required to support increasingly complex systems, including prescriptions, insurance, facilities and more.

New technologies will enable health providers to shift a significant percentage of that load to the individual, who will with the aid of personal support systems manage their health better, coordinate and manage their own care, and create less of a burden on the system. As the overall cost of health care declines, it becomes increasingly feasible to provide single-payer health insurance for the entire population, which has known beneficial health outcomes and efficiencies.

A significant proportion of government is based on regulation and monitoring, which will no longer be required with the deployment of automated production and transportation systems, along with sensor networks. This includes many of the daily and often unpleasant interactions we have with government today, from traffic offenses, manifestation of civil discontent, unfair treatment in commercial and legal processes, and the like. A simple example: One of the most persistent political problems in the United States is the gerrymandering of political boundaries to benefit incumbents.

Electoral divisions created by an algorithm to a large degree eliminate gerrymandering and when open and debatable, can be modified to improve on that result. Participants in this study were in substantial agreement that the abundant positives of accelerating code-dependency will continue to drive the spread of algorithms; however, as with all great technological revolutions, this trend has a dark side.

Most respondents pointed out concerns, chief among them the final five overarching themes of this report; all have subthemes. Advances in algorithms are allowing technology corporations and governments to gather, store, sort and analyze massive data sets. Experts in this canvassing noted that these algorithms are primarily written to optimize efficiency and profitability without much thought about the possible societal impacts of the data modeling and analysis.

The goal of algorithms is to fit some of our preferences, but not necessarily all of them: They essentially present a caricature of our tastes and preferences. My biggest fear is that, unless we tune our algorithms for self-actualization , it will be simply too convenient for people to follow the advice of an algorithm or, too difficult to go beyond such advice , turning these algorithms into self-fulfilling prophecies, and users into zombies who exclusively consume easy-to-consume items.

Every time you design a human system optimized for efficiency or profitability you dehumanize the workforce. That dehumanization has now spread to our health care and social services. When you remove the humanity from a system where people are included, they become victims. Who is collecting what data points? Do the human beings the data points reflect even know or did they just agree to the terms of service because they had no real choice? Who is making money from the data? There is no transparency, and oversight is a farce.

A sampling of excerpts tied to this theme from other respondents for details, read the fuller versions in the full report :. Two strands of thinking tie together here. One is that the algorithm creators code writers , even if they strive for inclusiveness, objectivity and neutrality, build into their creations their own perspectives and values.

The other is that the datasets to which algorithms are applied have their own limits and deficiencies. Moreover, the datasets themselves are imperfect because they do not contain inputs from everyone or a representative sample of everyone.

The two themes are advanced in these answers:. Most people in positions of privilege will find these new tools convenient, safe and useful. The harms of new technology will be most experienced by those already disadvantaged in society, where advertising algorithms offer bail bondsman ads that assume readers are criminals, loan applications that penalize people for proxies so correlated with race that they effectively penalize people based on race, and similar issues.

Much of it either racial- or class-related, with a fair sprinkling of simply punishing people for not using a standard dialect of English. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, out of the crooked timber of these datasets no straight thing was ever made.

A sampling of quote excerpts tied to this theme from other respondents for details, read the fuller versions in the full report :. One of the greatest challenges of the next era will be balancing protection of intellectual property in algorithms with protecting the subjects of those algorithms from unfair discrimination and social engineering.

First, they predicted that an algorithm-assisted future will widen the gap between the digitally savvy predominantly the most well-off, who are the most desired demographic in the new information ecosystem and those who are not nearly as connected or able to participate. Second, they said social and political divisions will be abetted by algorithms, as algorithm-driven categorizations and classifications steer people into echo chambers of repeated and reinforced media and political content.

Two illustrative answers:. And that divide will be self-perpetuating, where those with fewer capabilities will be more vulnerable in many ways to those with more.

Brushing up against contrasting viewpoints challenges us, and if we are able to actively or passively avoid others with different perspectives, it will negatively impact our society. It will be telling to see what features our major social media companies add in coming years, as they will have tremendous power over the structure of information flow. The overall effect will be positive for some individuals. It will be negative for the poor and the uneducated. As a result, the digital divide and wealth disparity will grow.

It will be a net negative for society. The spread of artificial intelligence AI has the potential to create major unemployment and all the fallout from that. What will then be the fate of Man?

The respondents to this canvassing offered a variety of ideas about how individuals and the broader culture might respond to the algorithm-ization of life. They argued for public education to instill literacy about how algorithms function in the general public. They also noted that those who create and evolve algorithms are not held accountable to society and argued there should be some method by which they are.

Representative comments:. What is the supply chain for that information? Is there clear stewardship and an audit trail? Were the assumptions based on partial information, flawed sources or irrelevant benchmarks? Did we train our data sufficiently? Were the right stakeholders involved, and did we learn from our mistakes? The upshot of all of this is that our entire way of managing organizations will be upended in the next decade. The power to create and change reality will reside in technology that only a few truly understand.

So to ensure that we use algorithms successfully, whether for financial or human benefit or both, we need to have governance and accountability structures in place. Easier said than done, but if there were ever a time to bring the smartest minds in industry together with the smartest minds in academia to solve this problem, this is the time. That coping strategy has always been co-evolving with humanity, and with the complexity of our social systems and data environments.

Becoming explicitly aware of our simplifying assumptions and heuristics is an important site at which our intellects and influence mature. What is different now is the increasing power to program these heuristics explicitly, to perform the simplification outside of the human mind and within the machines and platforms that deliver data to billions of individual lives.

It will take us some time to develop the wisdom and the ethics to understand and direct this power. The first and most important step is to develop better social awareness of who, how, and where it is being applied.

We need some kind of rainbow coalition to come up with rules to avoid allowing inbuilt bias and groupthink to effect the outcomes. Finally, this prediction from an anonymous participant who sees the likely endpoint to be one of two extremes:. I suspect utopia given that we have survived at least one existential crisis nuclear in the past and that our track record toward peace, although slow, is solid.

Following is a brief collection of comments by several of the many top analysts who participated in this canvassing:. When they make a change, they make a prediction about its likely outcome on sales, then they use sales data from that prediction to refine the model. Their model also makes predictions about likely outcomes on reoffending , but there is no tracking of whether their model makes good predictions, and no refinement.

This frees them to make terrible predictions without consequence. The algorithms are not in control; people create and adjust them.

However, positive effects for one person can be negative for another, and tracing causes and effects can be difficult, so we will have to continually work to understand and adjust the balance. The methods behind the decisions it makes are completely opaque, not only to those whose credit is judged, but to most of the people running the algorithm as well. In some cases there is no way to tell exactly why or how a decision by an algorithm is reached.

And even if the responsible parties do know exactly how the algorithm works, they will call it a trade secret and keep it hidden. There is already pushback against the opacity of algorithms, and the sometimes vast systems behind them. These things have the size, scale, and in some ways the importance of nuclear power plants and oil refineries, yet enjoy almost no regulatory oversight. This will change. At the same time, so will the size of the entities using algorithms.

They will get smaller and more numerous, as more responsibility over individual lives moves away from faceless systems more interested in surveillance and advertising than actual service. Machines have literally become black boxes — even the developers and operators do not fully understand how outputs are produced. There is a larger problem with the increase of algorithm-based outcomes beyond the risk of error or discrimination — the increasing opacity of decision-making and the growing lack of human accountability.

We need to confront the reality that power and authority are moving from people to machines. That is why AlgorithmicTransparency is one of the great challenges of our era. I have heard that people who refuse to be used by Facebook are discriminated against in some ways.