Thank you so much for sharing your attention with me today.
The technology is not really working, but I'll explain what's on the slides, and you can download them if they don't get up here.
So I'm a law professor at Copenhagen Business School and Aalborg University, and I'm here to talk about hacking human behavior.
I will talk about big tech arrogance, human ignorance, what human dignity can be used for, what to do about it.
And so that's what I'm going to talk about.
Everything is based on the book you can see on the screen there.
It's an orange book.
I'll leave a copy at the Policy Village for you to see.
So the good thing is it's available online, and you can find the link on the slides whenever you get there.
Okay, so here they are.
So you have the link here, everything is working.
And so first of all, what we're talking about here is also artificial intelligence.
And if you look at the history of technology law, that in the mid-90s, there was a lot of focus on copyright, because what was being digitalized back in the 90s was music, films, and so on.
What happens next was that we got social media.
And what happened with social media was that it was the human experience that got digitalized.
And then the interest revolved around privacy, personal data.
And now with the latest hype of artificial intelligence, we see that the focus in law is on copyright and privacy once again.
So these two areas.
So that's curious.
So the conclusions, to start with them, Norbert Wiener said it very nice more than 75 years ago, that what we have with artificial intelligence or thinking machines, as he talked about, was akin to the atomic bomb.
He compared to the atomic bomb back then.
What he also said was that when we have technology, it's going to be used.
So it's not going to go away.
So that is also something we can rely on.
And the last thing, which is the most important thing, is that the solution is to think about something else than just buying and selling.
Market economy.
But think about humanity instead of that.
And what is also interesting is that this book that came out for Norbert Wiener came out in 1948, which was also the year that we got the UN Declaration of Human Rights that speaks about human dignity.
So this is an old story being told again.
So the first thing we should recognize is that when we are talking about data and AI, they don't have any intrinsic value.
I can have full data sets of all of you on a USB stick, and it doesn't have any value before I start using it.
So what we should be curious about is, what is the technology being used for?
That is why my focus has been on data-driven business models rather than the technology.
And I would argue that what we see with artificial intelligence is just the same as what we've seen with data-driven business models.
So it's been a dress rehearsal for more than a decade that we have used technology for manipulation, and it's just been exacerbated by new technology in AI.
So what we should be curious about is, what incentives are there?
And when it comes to personalized marketing, there are basically three incentives that businesses have.
They want to earn money.
But what correlates with earning money, making profits?
That is getting as many users as possible.
That's why you want to have the network effect.
So you're going to be the winner that takes it all.
You also want to have more attention.
So the more addictive you can make your platform, the more attention you will get, and the more advertising dollars you can get.
And the last thing what you want to have is as much data as possible of each individual, because the more you know of each individual, the higher price you can charge for the advertising.
And what is new with generative AI is basically that the businesses also have an interest in getting as much content as possible.
That is why we see social media platforms trying to use our content to train their AI models on.
That is part of what we can talk about when we say big tech arrogance.
But I come back to that.
Yes.
So in liberal democracies and in markets, we have the idea of empowerment.
So as citizens, we should be empowered to be part of society.
In markets, we should be able to make rational choices following our goals, values, and preferences that may be different from each of us, but we should be free individuals.
We should be empowered.
And that is what I will challenge in this talk to begin with.
So what I came up to in my research is that there are three things that need to be in place in order to talk meaningfully about empowerment.
First, we need agency.
Some capability to understand and act in the world that we are living in.
We need to have some sort of transparency.
And then we, of course, need the absence of manipulation because manipulation is the opposite of freedom.
And if we start with agency, we can say we know from psychology that we are bounded rationally.
That means that we are not completely rational in whatever we do.
And there's been a lot of research in how we are irrational that can be used against us.
When it comes to transparency, the only thing I will say now is that information and transparency is not the same.
I'll come back to transparency soon because that is key to what we are talking about.
The last thing, when we talk about absence of manipulation, I've borrowed a definition from Cass Sunstein speaking about whether you're sufficiently engaging or appealing to the user's capacity for reflection and deliberation.
Just think about you get a cookie consent pop up and you get the choice between managed preferences and accept all.
You would, of course, accept all because there's less friction.
So you could do a lot with design and there's a lot of focus on design in both in law and in technology.
How do we design the reality we enter online?
So this slide I've taken here just to signal or give you some insights into the toolbox of advertisers.
These levels of influence are compiled by Sheldini who is a professor in marketing.
And this is just to illustrate how easy it is to manipulate us.
So if you take reciprocation, for instance, if we get something from a company or from a person, we feel obliged toward that person.
So if you get a free Google Maps, that's great.
You feel you're obliged to do something for Google.
If you take scarcity, three other people are looking at this limited offer right now.
Oh, we better buy it right now.
So scarcity works.
This is written down in books.
So it's easy, accessible, but nobody reads it.
So when we talk about markets, we want to make the distinction between persuasion and manipulation because in a market economy, we need to have marketing and we need to be able to persuade consumers, but we should not manipulate them.
And that is what I've spent almost 30 years of my life finding out where is the fine line between persuasion and manipulation.
When it comes to technology, I should just add for behavior modification for marketing, the first book I've come across on scientific advertising is more than 100 years old.
So this is an old discipline in manipulating people.
It's definitely not new.
A newer discipline is how can you use technology to persuade people?
Some of you might be familiar with B.J.
Fogg, who wrote a book on persuasive technology or captology.
How can you use computers to persuade people to buy stuff and do stuff?
And what I'll just conclude here is that design is extraordinarily powerful in how we can manipulate people.
One of the things he mentioned is that computers can go where humans cannot go.
So I would assume that most of you will have Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
with you everywhere you go, in your bedroom, in your bathroom, and so on.
So that is definitely a testament to the fact that you can go where nobody else can go.
Also, another important thing, if you look into psychology, if you want to conclude on bounded rationality, the fact that we're not completely rational, the reason why we're not completely rational is because we are more emotional.
A lot of the choices we make are emotional, and then we rationalize them afterwards.
And the interesting thing about computers is that it can actually evoke feelings.
So when you open your computer and you get a smiley, you feel better with yourself.
That's how easy we are to persuade and manipulate.
And if you fuse BJ Fogg with Sheldini, we get online influence.
We get Sheldini on steroids, because you can actually use the technology to apply the levers of influence.
The good thing about being in academia is that you decide yourselves which books to read.
And I thought it would be interesting to read books on magic.
And it actually turns out that the two foundations of magic is misdirection and the impression of having a choice.
And that's what's going on here.
That's why we could say it's kind of magic.
So where does that all lead?
It leads to information asymmetries.
This is not new.
What I've done in my book is I have developed the model of information asymmetry.
So Agerlof wrote in 1970 a book, sorry, an article about information asymmetry.
That is what I call tier one information asymmetry.
The fact that the seller knows much more him or herself than the buyer and also about the product.
So if I'm going to sell my used car to you, I know everything about it.
You know nothing.
In law, we solve that with information.
I have a duty to inform you about the condition of the car.
And if I fail to do that, you can come after me.
So that is the tier one information asymmetry.
The tier two information asymmetry is what the business knows about how to persuade us, how to persuade people in general.
That is Sheldini's technology.
That is PJ Fox technology on how are the techniques about how to influence people and using computers to do that.
So that is tier two.
Tier three is where we get information of each individual.
That is where personal data come in.
So if I don't see you as a whole crowd, but see you as individuals, and I have in my records thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of users, you can go into my shop and you can click a little bit around and I can easily find a group of people that match you.
Meaning I can start creating an artificial intelligence model of you.
So just a few clicks, I have a model of you and I can use that model to test how to better persuade you.
So that is tier three information asymmetry.
And that is why we should care about personal data, of course.
One of the things we do with that is we create personalized realities.
That means that my reality may be different from each of yours reality.
That means that it is difficult to compare how we are being persuaded or manipulated.
So how do we level that information asymmetry?
Well, the first thing we should recognize, as I said earlier, information and transparency are two different things.
So you use information, you communicate information to create transparency.
And regulators have preferred to use information as the regime to regulate markets because it is almost free to do.
The problem is that if I'm obliged as a seller to give you information, your obligation will be to decode the information I've given to you.
That means I put an extra burden on you.
And we already have cognitive overload when we are on the internet.
So more information is not going to help us.
So that is one thing we should realize about that.
We should also realize that there's a lot of theory about frames and storytelling.
Storytelling is how we understand the world.
We understand the world in stories.
So we tell each other stories and we are being told stories by businesses.
And they are much better at making up stories than we are ourselves.
One of the things or more misleading stories that are there is that we are paying with personal data.
I would argue that that is a misleading story.
It's a misleading framing of the situation which I will come back to.
So what we need to as consumers, as regulators and so on is we need to understand the deal.
So article 22 of the GDPR speaks about automated decision making.
So that is the closest we get to regulation of applied artificial intelligence.
And there the requirement is that you should explain the data subject about the logic, the significance and envisage consequences.
In my book, that is a gold standard for how you should inform people.
Neil Postman, one of my heroes, wrote in the 80s and the 90s about technology and media.
And what he said about technology is that everything we should know about technology is everything we should know about cars.
It is not how we use the cars of the technology.
It is how the technology or the cars are using us.
That is what we should be curious about, because that is where we can understand the price that we are paying when we get something for free.
So what we need to understand is externalities.
So externalities, if you imagine you have a factory making shoes and you have some waste from the shoe production and you just throw it in the river, that's an externality.
The business will sell the shoes and get the money from them, but the rest of us will have to clean up of the disaster they made in the river.
That's an externality.
Think about big tech companies, how much damage, how much harm they are making to society that we have to clean up after them.
So I think it makes sense to talk about externalities.
So what are the harms?
Well, first of all, you can say that the whole idea is of hacking or hijacking the human experience.
And a lot of people talk about personalized marketing.
What's the problem that I'm going to buy something I don't need?
We do that all the time.
Well, it might not be such a big harm, you know, departing with your money, depending on how rich or how poor you are, of course, it makes a difference.
But what we should also care about is that it's not only commercial marketing we're talking about.
We're talking about political marketing.
We are talking about religious marketing.
And that is where it gets a bit sketchy.
We should also understand that we are being affected by technology, including artificial intelligence, as citizens, as workers, and as consumers.
So every aspect of our life is being influenced by how technology around us is being designed and sold to us.
So in the book, I divide the harms into three categories.
I talk about personal harms, including people getting more lonely, which correlates with having bad health.
We don't want people to be lonely.
We are social animals.
We also get worse at reading and understanding our attention span due to the overload.
And I can see that with my students.
We are less able to communicate with other people because we have an escape route for social interaction.
Social interaction is hard.
There's a lot of friction.
But if you can go and look at cat videos, on TikTok or YouTube, that is easy.
That is frictionless.
And that is why we will often go there.
But that means also that we will not train our capabilities of engaging with other people.
And that, of course, has consequences for democracy.
Because if we are not active in markets and democracy, you know, it's going to hurt ourselves eventually.
So data-driven business models, including those that use artificial intelligence, whatever that means, that affects markets.
Our ability to choose between different products, new natural monopoly due to network effects and so on.
It also affects democracy, as I mentioned.
And more important nowadays, geopolitics.
We have a huge debate about TikTok.
Can we use TikTok because they're based in China?
And in my view, the problem with TikTok or similar providers are not so much that they are looking into our data, but the fact that they are actually making all our children look at cat videos instead of training their social engagement with each other.
I think that is the big overlooked danger in all this.
And then, of course, climate.
I mean, first of all, we need to understand and realize the consequences of what we've been doing for the last 100, 150 years.
What's going on there?
That means that we can think critically.
And if you can't think critically, we can just accept things.
Oh, you know, everything is fine.
But we also should realize, especially when it comes to generative AI, that the fact that we are talking about a bubble when it comes to generative AI is because they are running out of content to train their models on.
But also the power grid is not...
doesn't have the proportions to feed all the energy that is used for it.
And it's not going to happen in the next few years.
So should we have a discussion about what our energy should be used for?
Or should we just have a market saying those that pay the most?
And I could imagine that is maybe on the West Coast somewhere, that they will have the most money to buy all the energy.
But how will that affect the rest of us?
Again, think about externality.
Who's going to clean up this thing?
And there we should also be aware when we talk about climate, it is...
there is...
people in other places that will feel the harms more than we will, maybe.
But it's also our children that will have to pay the price and their children.
We should also be aware of that.
That is part of rational choice that is thinking about future generations, which is very complicated.
And that is why it's much easier to just buy what we think we need or feel what we need and just rationalize it afterwards.
The whole idea of data-driven business models is that you basically, as such a company, you're looking at humans as programmable objects.
So that is how we are seen.
You know, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and so on don't care about their users.
They care about money, which is completely legitimate in a market economy, profit maximization.
They don't care about you.
So they will do whatever they can as long as it's profitable.
Including manipulate you to buy stuff, to stay longer on their platform so they can sell more advertising and so on.
So you could make the argument that by using technology the way we do, we have been domesticated by technology.
We talk about augmented reality and we talk about virtual realities.
But I think we should talk about abated realities.
So our real reality is being abated.
By using technology.
And just to quote Postman once again, to be against technology is like being against food.
It doesn't make sense.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't use technology.
I'm just arguing that we should be more conscious about how we use it, recognizing how it's being used against us.
So when I say we are not paying with personal data, which we are, we are paying with personal data, but we are also paying with attention.
We are paying with our agency, our ability to make rational choices.
And attention and agency are scarce resources.
So when we talk about personal data, you can take the same personal data and get a lot of stuff for free.
I'm the clever guy, right?
I get all these things for free and I use the same data.
But again, you should be curious about what the data is being used for.
And if it's being used to make us addicted to technologies, we are paying with attention.
When we are being manipulated, we are paying with agency, the scarce resources that we need to lead good lives.
So the solution I come up with is that we should focus more on human dignity.
So we should design policy, business and so on based on human dignity.
Because human dignity is basically the idea of not reducing the individual to an object.
That's exactly what's going on here.
So what is human dignity?
Well, human dignity has a history in philosophy and religion and so on.
But with the declaration of the fundamental rights from the United Nations, it was actually put into a law.
It's a legal value now.
And I suggest in my book that we see in a liberal democracy, we see our constitutions on our fundamental human rights.
We see that as the operating system of our society.
And the reason why I use the metaphor of an operating system is because it's not a given.
You know better than I do how you can change the operating system of a computer, just like we can change the operating system of a society, which some people would like.
When we have, when we see fundamental rights constitutions as the operating system, we can see secondary law legislation as the application layer.
That means that we should understand everything on the application layer in light of the operating system of human dignity.
So we should design everything for human dignity and have that in the back of our mind.
So what is human dignity?
So in the book of work with freedom, so the idea that we should be free individuals having agency, we should have not only the right, but also the ability to think critically.
We should make sure that those people providing the software or tools, apps to us, that to some extent that they align their products with our goals.
We should also make sure that if you're using, for instance, AI, that should be voluntary.
Just think about when we got My AI in Snapchat.
Well, that was to children.
Here, dear children, here is a chatbot.
That means that you can spend more time and give us more data by using that.
Think about the incentives.
We should think about privacy, personal data and security.
And I would say one of the most successful pieces of legislation from the EU must be the GDPR.
And I hope you will get something akin to that here in the US as well.
But just remember that we have the UN principles on human rights as well that protects privacy.
One thing I would emphasize here when we talk about privacy and personal data, because that's basically two different things.
So personal data is information about each individual.
That's about individuals.
And what we see when we are looking at artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, you're building large language models based on personal data.
But when you create a large language model, suddenly you're not dealing with personal data.
But does that mean that you can just do that?
And I don't think we can do that.
Because if I have a big model of how consumers, how citizens are reacting to certain things, how you have correlations between certain things, you can actually use that to invade people's privacy.
And that is why I think in the future, in the near future, we will talk less about personal data and much more about privacy in general.
And just to illustrate this, we have five or six court cases from the Court of Justice of the European Union dealing with data retention.
So in essence, they were about police for fighting serious crime wanting to get access to metadata from the telecom operators.
And what the Court of Justice said, that is too far-reaching.
That is too much of an interference with people's privacy that the police would get access to metadata, to have indiscriminate access to all the metadata.
And the question that is obvious to raise here is, do we think that social media services, big tech, do they have more or less personal data or data in general about us than telecom operators?
Probably with some magnitude more data.
The next question we should ask ourselves.
So fighting serious crime, is that more important than serving personalized marketing?
And again, the answer should be obvious.
And that is also one of the reasons why it should be obvious that the current models, under EU law at least, are not viable.
They are not legal.
That will be my argument.
But just the fact here that I think we should still be curious about personal data, but I think the general concept of privacy will be much more important.
Then, of course, there is equality, non-discrimination, which is also part of human rights.
And we know that digital vulnerabilities will come out of artificial intelligence.
Some people will lose their jobs and some won't.
And the whole idea of getting AI is try to be more efficient so we can get rid of people working for us, meaning also that we will lose potential whistleblowers.
Wouldn't it be great if we could just automate everything so we wouldn't have anybody to blow the whistle and say there's something going on here?
We will never see an Edward Snowden or Francis Haugen again, because everything is being automated.
And the last thing that comes with generative AI, as I said, that is their hunger for getting more data to train their models on.
And that is why they are looking into whatever content you posted on Facebook 10 or 20 years ago, and suddenly they consider it to be their property and can just use it to train data, just like Apple can train their algorithms on all the photos you put up there.
So intellectual property rights are extraordinarily important.
So what I will talk about here is big tech arrogance.
So big tech arrogance, in my view, would constitute the fact that you have companies, they can be small or large, but mainly big tech.
They will have an interest and they will design their technology not in our interest, on the contrary, against our best interests.
So they will make products that are not aligned with our interests.
Then they will use storytelling to convince us that they're doing it for us.
And in addition, they're buying and gaslighting our politicians.
This is too complicated.
Don't regulate.
You don't want to be in the EU, right?
It's too complicated.
You're protecting all the users.
Don't go down that route.
We're going to lose a lot of money.
And they do that to not be regulated and not to be taxed.
That is what I would consider to be big tech arrogance.
So what do we do about this?
So of course, we need to have legislation, laws, but we have realized how difficult it is to enforce law when we are up against actors that are so big and don't care about complying with the law.
That is very difficult.
We've seen that over and over again.
So META in the European Union got a fine of half a billion euros, roughly half a billion US dollars.
That's a parking fine.
That's a license fee for them.
They have profits of 40 billion each year.
And this was a fine for what they had done for six years or maybe seven.
It's a license fee.
It's not going to change anything.
So what I will propose here is that we focus on businesses.
So I come from a consumer law background, but can we learn something in businesses from consumer law?
And here I will argue that businesses, they are just as vulnerable as consumers, especially when it comes to AI and generative AI.
It's been hyped so much that many companies will feel obliged to buy these licenses, for instance, for Copilot, because their competitors are doing it.
The press are not critical about how much they can be used for.
What are the gains?
I mean, as a business, you should think about what are the benefits and what are the downsides?
So businesses are vulnerable.
It's just like outsourcing stuff.
So when you use generative AI in your business, it's like outsourcing.
And we've seen that there was a time when it was good to outsource all your production.
We could get cheap stuff we didn't need made somewhere else.
And now we realize there are some geopolitical issues about outsourcing.
So think about buying into the generative AI hype as using the fear of missing out.
As we've used for social media, for human beings, it's now being used as FOMO for businesses.
It is also being said that if you don't buy these licenses, all your employees will go and use the unsafe version that is freely available on the Internet.
Right?
Try and ask your boss whether they want to, you know, pay for World of Warcraft or some other game.
Because if you don't pay it, you don't buy it to us, we will use it.
So that is the pressure that is being put on businesses.
And we should just realize that there are risks and associated costs with outsourcing.
It creates new dependencies.
Would we like to be as dependent in our core business strategy as most companies are in using Microsoft Office?
When is the last time your company considered which word processor to use for their employees?
Would you be in the same situation when it comes to artificial intelligence, when you have fired people in the hope that the AI would make you more efficient?
And it turns out that it's not more efficient, it's actually more expensive.
Because who is going to pay the $1 trillion that is supposed to be invested in a generative AI?
You and I.
And who has the money?
The businesses.
So I think we should think about what businesses can do.
And we see that with the action taken by certain business withdrawing advertising from the Social Media X.
That is what businesses can do because businesses are big spenders.
They buy stuff in massive amounts so businesses can do something.
So one thing you could ask yourself is, is cloud as cheap as social media free?
Especially if you're in a situation where the cloud content is being used to train AI.
And also don't believe everything you read on the internet.
Think about the incentives of all the consultants telling you that you will become so much more efficient if you adopt generative AI in your business.
Goldman Sachs had a very critical report out recently.
Saying that is probably overstated how much benefit there will be to businesses from adopting generative AI.
So what we should do is we should sense the environment we live in and act upon it.
That's a definition of agency.
As we talked about in the beginning, which is a part of empowerment.
We should understand what's going on and I've tried to present that to you.
How does it work?
How are we being used by technology?
And again, I'm not saying technology is good or bad, but the current data-driven business models, including those based on AI, are not necessarily in our best interest.
And we should be curious about that.
We should also use the human superpower.
What we can do as human beings is that we can imagine things that don't exist.
That is our superpower.
We can imagine a building that is not built yet.
We can imagine value out of nothing.
We can create NFTs and suddenly they have value and suddenly they don't.
But we can imagine stuff that doesn't exist.
So how can we as individuals imagine a better future?
How can we imagine the companies we're working for or with?
How can we talk to the people making decisions there?
Maybe it's not necessarily a good idea to have generative AI licenses for all our employees, especially not if data is being used to train these models.
We should recognize that democracy is the people ruling.
It's not big tech ruling.
So I would encourage and argue that human dignity can be used for us as individuals as a guiding policy for how we should see these things.
It can be used for businesses.
Would we accept to buy into generative AI that has been built on other people's content, infringing their copyrights?
And I also think that we should be more careful about recognizing that we are actually still living in a liberal democracy and we have human rights and take them serious and have that into tech policy.
So I will emphasize the policy is also what you think, say and do.
And the best thing we can do for big tech at this moment is to ensure that our children will not be able to do anything without big tech.
Wouldn't it be great if people can't read, they can't think, they can't talk, they can't write without being dependent on generative AI?
Wouldn't that be great?
Then at least we will have the dystopian fantasy that we see from California.
So what I will end this talk on is basically just saying don't out-solve humanity.
We have to do something about this.
And if we don't do it as employees, as business owners, as government officials, whatever, as hackers, if we don't take these things serious, it's going to be even worse than it is already now.
In the book, I ask the question, do we really have 10 years?
And that was three years ago.
Do we have seven years to get the balance right?
You make the decision, you can go and do a lot of stuff, talk to people, talk to your friends, talk to your family, just have discussions about these things, revealing what's really going on.
Thank you so much for your attention.