Panel 3: Privacy

Chair: Dr Daniel Wilson (CRASSH, Cambridge)

Dr Nóra Ní Loideain (Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London)

Dr Anil Madhavapeddy (Computer Lab, Cambridge)

In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are:

* The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War)

* The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments

* Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create

* The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society

* The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself

Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines.

The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world.

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Panel 2: Security

Chair: Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge)

Dr Chris Doran (Director of Research Collaborations, ARM)

Professor Jon Crowcroft (Computer Lab, Cambridge)

In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are:

* The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War)

* The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments

* Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create

* The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society

* The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself

Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines.

The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world.

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Panel 1: Geo(politics)

Chair: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, Cambridge)

Professor Ross Anderson (Computer Lab, Cambridge)

Dr Bill Janeway (Pembroke College and Warburg Pincus)

Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge)

In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are:

* The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War)

* The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments

* Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create

* The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society

* The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself

Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines.

The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world.

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

‘Pax Technica’ Keynote Address: Professor Philip Howard (Oxford)

In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are:

* The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War)

* The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments

* Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create

* The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society

* The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself

Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines.

The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world.

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

A workshop at CRASSH on the uses of number, in and against the public interest: past, present and future.

Session Two - Liz McFall, Jonathan Gray and Frank Pasquale

This event is organised by the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project and will bring historical and contemporary perspectives to bear on the question of how the public interest is to be determined in a world increasingly under the rule of number, data and quantification.

Speakers:

Will Davies (Goldsmiths)

Glen O'Hara (Oxford Brookes)

Liz McFall (OU)

Jonathan Gray (Bath)

Frank Pasquale (Maryland)

Collecting information about the public has often caused controversy, but it has usually been understood as a form of exchange. As this information takes increasingly numerical form, the nature of this quid pro quo – who gets what from the exchange – has become more and more opaque. Who has the right to collect and organise public information, to control access to it now and into the future?

As a greater number of private entities accumulate statistical information, this workshop aims to investigate the shifting boundary of the public and the private spheres. We will ask how the processes of counting and enumerating people have helped to produce specific political forms of government and economic forms of business. And specifically, we will examine the ways in which claims of a public interest have been used to justify the collection of such information, from censuses to digital data trails.

Panellists, speakers and respondents will approach the question using case studies from the history of insurance and medical surveillance, neoliberalism and official statistics, as well as electoral political strategies.

A workshop at CRASSH on the uses of number, in and against the public interest: past, present and future.

Session One - Will Davies and Glen O'Hara

This event is organised by the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project and will bring historical and contemporary perspectives to bear on the question of how the public interest is to be determined in a world increasingly under the rule of number, data and quantification.

Speakers:

Will Davies (Goldsmiths)

Glen O'Hara (Oxford Brookes)

Liz McFall (OU)

Jonathan Gray (Bath)

Frank Pasquale (Maryland)

Collecting information about the public has often caused controversy, but it has usually been understood as a form of exchange. As this information takes increasingly numerical form, the nature of this quid pro quo – who gets what from the exchange – has become more and more opaque. Who has the right to collect and organise public information, to control access to it now and into the future?

As a greater number of private entities accumulate statistical information, this workshop aims to investigate the shifting boundary of the public and the private spheres. We will ask how the processes of counting and enumerating people have helped to produce specific political forms of government and economic forms of business. And specifically, we will examine the ways in which claims of a public interest have been used to justify the collection of such information, from censuses to digital data trails.

Panellists, speakers and respondents will approach the question using case studies from the history of insurance and medical surveillance, neoliberalism and official statistics, as well as electoral political strategies.

What do self-driving cars, on-demand services, AI, and income inequality have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we’re in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy. We are heading pell-mell towards a world being shaped by technology in ways that we don’t understand and have many reasons to fear.

Just about everyone’s asking WTF? (“What the F*?”) but also, more charitably “What’s the future?”. Where is technology taking us? Is it going to fill us with astonishment or dismay? And most importantly, what is our role in deciding that future? How do we make choices today that will result in a world we want to live in?

What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional universities in keeping skills up to date?

We are at a very dangerous moment in history. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a global elite is eroding the power and sovereignty of nation-states at the same time as globe-spanning technology platforms are enabling algorithmic control of firms, institutions, and societies, shaping what billions of people see and understand and how the economic pie is divided. At the same time, income inequality and the pace of technology change are leading to a populist backlash featuring opposition to science, distrust of our governing institutions, and fear of the future, making it ever more difficult to solve the problems we have created.

The biggest changes are still ahead. Every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next decades, in multiple ways, or fade away. We need to ask ourselves whether the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world will survive the transition, and more importantly, what we will replace them with. We need a focused, high-level conversation about the deep ways in which global computer networks and platforms are transforming how we do business, how we work, and how we live. This talk frames that conversation.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm, and is on the boards of Code for America, Maker Media, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox.

Over the years, Tim has built a culture where sustainable innovation is a key tenet of business philosophy. His active engagement with technology communities both drives the company’s product development and informs its marketing.

He graduated from Harvard in 1975 with a degree in Classics. He began working as a technical writer, and soon began writing and publishing his own books on technology topics. Since 1978, O’Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, honing in on the most significant technology trends and galvanising their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from tech innovators. His company is publisher of the iconic “animal books” for software developers, creator of the first commercial website (GNN), organiser of the summit meeting that gave the open source software movement its name, and he was a key figure in the “Web 2.0” renaissance after the original dot-com bubble burst. In 2009, with his “Gov 2.0 Summit,” he framed a conversation about the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawned initiatives at the Federal, State, and local level, and around the world. He has now turned his attention to the implications of AI, the on-demand economy, and other technologies that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world.

We are being told a simple story about the future of work: if a machine can record and imitate what you do, you will be replaced by it. Christened a “fourth industrial revolution,” a narrative of mass unemployment is now gripping policymakers. It envisions human workers rendered superfluous by ever-more-powerful software, robots, and predictive analytics.

Substituting robots for workers may seem like an impossibly grandiose ambition. But its main problem is not impracticality—rather, it is not nearly grand enough. It is a vision of society built on a narrow consumerism. We don’t exist simply to be served. We want to serve others, to make a contribution, and to find some meaning in our daily activities.

Another approach is possible—indeed, plausible. It is a future of robots and software complementing work, to make it better. I call technology that improves workers’ skills and opportunities “humane automation,” to be distinguished from other forms of technical advance that are indifferent to—or undermine—workers’ skills and wages. Fortunately, forms of humane automation are already taking root in many fields. As consumers and citizens, we can encourage this more inclusive and sustainable path. Enlightened policymakers and professionals can also re-channel the flow of commerce to respect, rather than replace, human initiative.

Frank Pasquale, JD, MPhil is an expert on the law and policy of big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. He has advised government and business leaders on the health care, internet, and finance industries, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, the Council of Institutional Investors, the Capitol Forum, and the European Commission. He has spoken on his book, The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015) at academic and policy venues around the world, including law, computer science, humanities, and social science departments. His work has recently been translated into Chinese, French, German, Korean, Hungarian, and Serbian, and he is routinely quoted in global media outlets. He has been recognised as one of the ten most-cited health law scholars in the United States. His current book project is tentatively titled Laws of Robotics: Revitalizing the Professions in an Era of Automation (under contract to Harvard University Press).

He is a currently a Visiting Fellow on the Technology and Democracy Project in CRASSH , an affiliate fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and a fellow at the New Economy Law Center. He has served as a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Panel Three: State Power

Discussants: Ross Anderson (Cambridge), Lawrence Quill (San Jose) & Ron Deibert (Toronto)

Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert on the technology, economics and psychology of computer security. He was awarded the 2016 Lovelace Medal—given to “individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding or advancement of computer science”.

Lawrence Quill is Professor of Political Science at San Jose State University. His books include Secrets and Democracy: From Arcana Imperii to WikiLeaks and he is a Visiting Fellow on Technology and Democracy project.

Ronald Deibert is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Black Code and a leading scholar on the intersection of digital technologies, global security and human rights.

Chair: Nora Ni Loideain (Cambridge)

Panel Four: Algorithmic Power

Discussants: Malte Ziewitz (Cornell), Ariel Ezrachi (Oxford) & Seda Guerses (Ku Leuven)

Malte Ziewitz is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University with a graduate field appointment in Information Science. Recently he was guest editor of a Special Issue of the journal Science, Technology and Human Values (vol 41.1: 2016) entitled ‘Governing Algorithms’.

Ariel Ezrachi is Slaughter and May Professor of Competition Law, University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Competition Law and Policy. He is co-author (with Maurice Stucke) of ”Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy”:(http://amzn.to/2izYRNK) (2016).

Seda Guerses is a post-doctoral fellow at Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) in the Privacy Technologies Team at the Department of Electrical Engineering University of Leuven, and an associate fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at Princeton University.

Chair: Julia Powles (Cambridge)