In this revealing article for The Intercept, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein discusses the signing of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a commission to "reimagine post-Covid reality" in New York where, she says, a future dominated by states' association with technology giants: "But ambitions go far beyond the borders of any state or country."
Klein defines a Doctrine of Pandemic Shock, which he calls the new covenant or New Deal of the Screens (Screen New Deal). It poses the plain and simple risk that this corporate policy threatens to destroy the education and health system. Data tracking, cashless commerce, telehealth, virtual school, and even gyms and prisons, part of a proposal "contactless and highly profitable".
Quarantine as a live laboratory, a "Black Mirror", and the acceleration of this dystopia from the coronavirus: "Now, in a heartbreaking context of mass death, we are being sold the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to protect our lives against a pandemic. " What are the (always) doubts and how, under the pretext of artificial intelligence, corporations fight again for the power to control lives.
By Naomi Klein for The Intercept. Translation from Lavaca.org
During New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the grim grimace that filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something akin to a smile.
The inspiration for these unusually good vibes was a video contact from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor's briefing to announce that he will head a commission to reimagine the post-Covid reality of New York State, with emphasis to permanently integrate technology in all aspects of civic life.
"The first priorities of what we are trying to do," said Schmidt, "are focused on telehealth, remote learning and broadband ... We need to find solutions that can be presented now and accelerate the use of technology to improve things." Lest there be any doubt that the goals of the former Google CEO were purely benevolent, his video background featured a pair of framed golden angel wings.
Just a day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop "a smarter education system." Calling Gates a "visionary," Cuomo said the pandemic has created "a moment in history when we can incorporate and advance [Gates's] ideas ... All of these buildings, all of these physical classrooms, what for, with all the technology you have? » he asked, apparently rhetorically.
It has taken a while to build, but something like a doctrine of pandemic shock is beginning to emerge. Let's call it "Screen New Deal". With far more high-tech than anything we've seen in previous disasters, the future is forging as bodies still accumulate the last few weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory. for a permanent and highly profitable future without contact.
Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company that sells technology for self-parking, recently summed up the new speech that the virus generates. "There is a definite trend towards technology without human contact," he said. "Humans are biohazardous, machines are not."
It is a future in which our homes will never again be exclusively personal spaces, but also, through high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, doctors' offices, our gyms and, if the state determines, our prisons. Of course, for many of us, those same houses were already becoming our never-ending workplaces and our top entertainment venues before the pandemic, and 'community' surveillance incarceration was already on the rise. . But in the future, under hasty construction, all of these trends are poised for a warp speed acceleration (theoretical way of moving faster than the speed of light).
This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is delivered to the home, either virtually through transmission technology and in the cloud, or physically through a driverless vehicle or a drone, and then the "shared" screen on a mediated platform. It is a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. Does not accept cash or card
This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is delivered to the home, either virtually through transmission technology and in the cloud, or physically through a driverless vehicle or a drone, and then the "shared" screen on a mediated platform. It is a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It does not accept cash or credit cards (under the pretext of virus control) and has skeletal public transport and much less live art. It's a future that claims to be based on "artificial intelligence," but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers hiding in warehouses, data centers, content moderation factories, electronic workshops, lithium mines, factory farms , meat processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected against disease and over-exploitation. It is a future in which each of our movements, our words, our relationships can be traced and data extracted through unprecedented agreements between the government and the technology giants.
If this all sounds familiar, it's because, before Covid, this precise, app-driven, concert-packed future was sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and customization. But many of us had concerns. On the safety, quality and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars that shoot down pedestrians and drones that destroy packages (and people). About location tracking and cashless trading that erases our privacy and entrenches racial and gender discrimination. On unscrupulous social media platforms that poison our information ecology and our children's mental health. About "smart cities" full of sensors that supplant local government. About the good jobs these technologies eliminated. About the bad jobs they produced en masse.
And, above all, we were concerned about the wealth and power that threatened democracy accumulated by a handful of technology companies that are masters of abdication, avoiding all responsibility for the remains that remain in the fields that now dominate, be they media, retail or transportation.
That was the ancient past known as "February." Today, a huge wave of panic carries away many of those well-founded concerns, and this heated dystopia is undergoing an urgent job rebranding. Now, in a heartbreaking context of mass death, we are being sold the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to protect our lives against a pandemic, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.
Thanks to Cuomo and his various multi-million dollar partnerships (including one with Michael Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York State is positioning itself as the brilliant showroom for this bleak future, but ambitions go far beyond the borders of any state or country.
And at the center of it all is Eric Schmidt. Long before Americans understood the Covid-19 threat, Schmidt had been in an aggressive lobbying, lobbying, and public relations campaign precisely driving the Black Mirror's (or Black Speaking, by the English series) society's view that Cuomo just give it power to build. At the heart of this vision is the perfect integration of the government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants: with public schools, hospitals, doctors' offices, police and military, all major functions are outsourced (at a high cost) to private companies in technology.
It is a vision in which Schmidt has been advancing in his duties as chairman of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises the Department of Defense on the increased use of artificial intelligence in the military, and as chairman of the powerful Security Commission. National on Artificial Intelligence, or NSCAI, which advises Congress on "Advances in artificial intelligence, developments related to machine learning and associated technologies," with the goal of addressing "the national and economic security needs of the United States, including the economic risk ». Both boards are filled with powerful Silicon Valley CEOS and top executives from companies like Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and, of course, Schmidt's colleagues at Google.
As president, Schmidt still owns more than $ 5.3 billion in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company), as well as large investments in other tech companies, he has essentially been carrying out a Washington-based restructuring on behalf of Silicon. Valley. The main objective of the two business chambers is to request exponential increases in government spending on artificial intelligence research and infrastructure that enables technologies such as 5G, investments that would directly benefit the companies in which Schmidt and other members of these groups have broad participations.
First in closed-door presentations to lawmakers, and later in opinion pieces and public interviews, Schmidt's argument has been that since the Chinese government is willing to spend unlimited public money to build high-tech surveillance infrastructure, while Allows Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei to reap the benefits of commercial apps, the US dominant position in the global economy is on the verge of collapse.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center recently gained access through a Freedom of Information Act request to a presentation made by Schmidt's NSCAI a year ago, in May 2019. Its slides raise a series of alarmist claims about how China's relatively lax regulatory infrastructure and its bottomless appetite for surveillance is driving the US ahead. in various fields, including artificial intelligence for medical diagnostics, autonomous vehicles, digital infrastructure, smart cities, carpooling, and cashless commerce.
The reasons given for China's competitive advantage are innumerable, from the large volume of consumers shopping online; "The lack of legacy banking systems in China", which has enabled it to jump on cash and credit cards and unleash "a huge market for e-commerce and digital services" using "digital payments"; and a severe shortage of doctors, prompting the government to work closely with technology companies like Tencent to use AI (artificial intelligence) as "predictive" medicine. The slides point out that in China, tech companies "have the authority to quickly remove regulatory barriers, while US initiatives are embroiled in HIPPA compliance and FDA approval."
However, more than any other factor, the NSCAI signals China's willingness to adopt public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection as a reason for its competitive advantage. The presentation promotes the "explicit support and participation of the Chinese government, for example, in the deployment of facial recognition." He maintains that "surveillance is one of the 'first and best clients' for Al" and, furthermore, that "mass surveillance is a killer app for deep learning."
A slide titled "State Data Sets: Surveillance = Smart Cities" notes that China, along with Google's main Chinese competitor Alibaba, are running ahead.
This is notable because Google's parent company Alphabet has been driving precisely this vision through its Sidewalk Labs division, choosing a large part of the Toronto coastline as its "smart city" prototype. But the Toronto project closed after two years of relentless controversy related to the vast amounts of personal data Alphabet would collect, the lack of privacy protections, and questionable benefits for the city as a whole.
Five months after this presentation, in November, the NSCAI issued an interim report to Congress that raised alarm over the need for the US to act on China's adaptation of these controversial technologies. "We are in strategic competition," says the report, obtained through FOIA by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Artificial intelligence will be at the center. The future of our national security and economy is at stake. "
In late February, Schmidt was bringing his campaign to the public, perhaps understanding that the budget increase his board of directors was asking for could not be approved without wider acceptance. In a New York Times op-ed article entitled "Silicon Valley could lose to China," Schmidt called for "unprecedented partnerships between government and industry" and, once again, sounding the yellow danger alarm:
AI (artificial intelligence) will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it's also a priority for the Department of Defense. … If current trends continue, China's overall investments in research and development are expected to outpace those of the United States in 10 years, around the same time that its economy is projected to be larger than ours.
Unless these trends change, in the 2030s we will compete with a country that has a larger economy, more investment in research and development, better research, a greater deployment of new technologies, and a stronger computing infrastructure. … Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world's leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win.
The only solution, for Schmidt, was a stream of public money. Praising the White House for requesting a doubling of funding for research in artificial intelligence and quantum information science, he wrote: “We should plan to double funding in those fields again as we build institutional capacity in laboratories and research centers. … At the same time, Congress must comply with the President's request for the highest level of defense R&D funding in over 70 years, and the Department of Defense must capitalize on that increased resources to develop innovative capabilities in artificial, quantum, hypersonic intelligence and other priority technological areas «.
That was exactly two weeks before the coronavirus outbreak declared a pandemic, and it was not mentioned that the goal of this vast high-tech expansion was to protect the health of Americans. Only it was necessary to avoid being overtaken by China. But of course that would soon change.
In the two months since then, Schmidt has submitted these pre-existing demands, for massive public spending on research and high-tech infrastructure, for a series of "public-private partnerships" on artificial intelligence, and for loosening countless privacy protections and security, through an aggressive exercise of discursive repositioning. Now all of these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible hope of protecting ourselves from a new virus that will accompany us for years to come.
And the technology companies with which Schmidt has deep ties, and who populate the influential advisory boards he chairs, have repositioned themselves as benevolent protectors of public health and generous champions of the "everyday heroes" of essential jobs (many of whom They would lose their jobs if these companies got away with it.) Less than two weeks after the close of New York state, Schmidt wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that set the new tone and made it clear that Silicon Valley fully intends to take advantage of the crisis for permanent transformation.
Like other Americans, technologists are trying to do their part to support the frontline response to the pandemic. …
But every American should ask himself where we want the nation to be when the Covid-19 pandemic ends. How could the emerging technologies deployed in the current crisis propel us towards a better future? … Companies like Amazon know how to supply and distribute efficiently. They will have to provide services and advice to government officials who lack the computer systems and experience.
We should also accelerate the trend towards remote learning, which is being tested today like never before. On-line, there is no proximity requirement, allowing students to obtain instruction from the best teachers, regardless of which school district they reside in…
The need for rapid large-scale experimentation will also accelerate the biotech revolution. ... Finally, the country is long overdue in real digital infrastructure ... If we want to build a future economy and a tele-everything-based education system, we need a fully connected population and ultrafast infrastructure. The government must make a massive investment, perhaps as part of a stimulus package, to turn the nation's digital infrastructure into cloud-based platforms and link them to a 5G network.
In fact, Schmidt has been relentless in pursuit of this vision. Two weeks after that opinion piece appeared, he described the ad hoc home schooling schedule that teachers and families across the country were forced to improvise during this public health emergency as "a massive experiment in remote learning ». The goal of this experiment, he said, was "to try to discover: how do children learn remotely? And with that data we should be able to build better distance learning tools that, when combined with the teacher… will help children learn better ”During this same video call, organized by the New York Economic Club, Schmidt also asked for more telehealth, plus 5G, plus digital commerce and the rest of the pre-existing wish list. All in the name of fighting the virus.
However, their most revealing comment was as follows: “The benefit of these corporations, which we love to smear, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to obtain information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in the United States without Amazon «. He added that people should "be a little thankful that these companies raised the capital, made the investment, built the tools we are using now, and have really helped us."
It is a reminder that, until very recently, public rejection of these corporations was growing. The presidential candidates openly discussed the fall of high technology. Amazon was forced to abandon its plans for a New York headquarters due to fierce local opposition. Google's Sidewalk Labs project was in a perennial crisis, and Google's own workers refused to build surveillance technology with military applications.
In short, democracy was becoming the biggest stumbling block to the vision Schmidt was promoting, first from his position at the top of Google and Alphabet and then as chairman of two powerful boards advising Congress and the Department of Defense. As the NSCAI documents reveal, this inconvenient exercise of power by the public and tech workers within these mega-companies, from the perspective of men like Schmidt and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, maddeningly slowed down the AI arms race. , keeping life-threatening driverless car and truck fleets off the roads, preventing private health records from becoming a weapon used by employers against workers, preventing urban spaces from being covered with facial recognition software, and much more.
Now, amid the carnage of this ongoing pandemic, and the fear and uncertainty about the future it has brought, these corporations clearly see their time to sweep away all of that democratic commitment. So they have the same kind of power as their Chinese competitors, who have the luxury of operating without being hampered by intrusions of civil or labor rights.
This is all moving very fast. The Australian government has contracted with Amazon to store the data for its controversial coronavirus tracking application. The Canadian government has contracted with Amazon to deliver medical equipment, raising questions about why it skipped the public postal service. And in just a few days in early May, Alphabet has launched a new Sidewalk Labs initiative to remake urban infrastructure with $ 400 million in seed capital. Josh Marcuse, executive director of the Defense Innovation Board chaired by Schmidt, announced that he would leave that job to work full-time at Google as head of strategy and innovation for the global public sector, which means he will help Google capitalize. of some of the many opportunities he and Schmidt have been creating with their lobby.
To be clear, technology is certainly a key part of how we must protect public health in the months and years ahead. The question is: will technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight, or will it be implemented in a frenzy of a state of emergency, without asking critical questions, shaping our lives for decades to come? Questions like, for example: If we are really seeing how critical digital connectivity is in times of crisis, should these networks and our data really be in the hands of private players like Google, Amazon and Apple? If public funds are paying much of that, shouldn't the public also own and control it? If the Internet is essential to many things in our lives, as it clearly is, shouldn't it be treated as a non-profit public utility?
And while there is no doubt that teleconferencing capability has been a lifesaver in this period of lockdown, there is serious debate over whether our most durable protections are clearly more humane. Let's take education. Schmidt is right that overcrowded classrooms pose a health risk, at least until we have a vaccine. So couldn't you hire twice as many teachers and cut your course size in half? How about making sure every school has a nurse?
That would create much-needed jobs in a depression-level unemployment crisis and give everyone more leeway in the educational environment. If the buildings are too crowded, how about dividing the day into shifts and having more outdoor education, taking advantage of the abundant research that shows that time in nature improves children's ability to learn?
Introducing such changes would be difficult, to be sure. But they are not as risky as giving up the tried and true technology of trained humans that teach younger humans face-to-face, in groups where they learn to socialize with each other.
Upon learning of New York State's new partnership with the Gates Foundation, Andy Pallotta, President of United Teachers of New York State, reacted quickly: “If we want to reimagine education, let's start by addressing the need for social workers, counselors for mental health, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller classes in school districts across the state, "he said. A coalition of parent groups also noted that if they had actually been experiencing a "remote learning experiment" (as Schmidt put it), the results were deeply troubling: "Since schools closed in mid-March, our understanding of the Deep shortcomings of screen-based instruction has only grown. "
In addition to the obvious class and race biases against children who lack access to the Internet and computers at home (a problem that technology companies are eager to collect through large technology sales), there are big questions about whether remote teaching can help. many children with disabilities, as required by law. And there is no technological solution to the problem of learning in an overcrowded and / or abusive home environment.
The problem is not whether schools must change in the face of a highly contagious virus for which we have no cure or vaccine. Like all institutions where humans operate in groups, schools will change. The problem, as always in these moments of collective commotion, is the lack of public debate about what those changes should be like and who they should benefit from. Private tech companies or students?
The same questions should be asked about health. Avoiding doctors' offices and hospitals during a pandemic makes sense. But telehealth loses to a great extent from person to person attention. Therefore, we should have an evidence-based debate on the pros and cons of spending scarce public resources on telehealth, compared to more trained nurses, equipped with all the necessary protective equipment, who can make home visits to diagnose and treat patients in their homes. And perhaps most pressingly, we need to strike the right balance between virus-tracking apps, which with the right privacy protections have a role to play, and calls for a Community Health Corps that would put millions of Americans to work. not just following up on contacts but making sure everyone has the material resources and support they need to be quarantined safely.
In each case, we face real and difficult decisions between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as things stand, it is highly unlikely that we will do both. Refusal to transfer necessary resources to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus health crisis is now turning into a manufactured austerity crisis. Public schools, universities, hospitals, and transit face existential questions about their future. If tech companies win their fierce lobbying and lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G and self-driving vehicles, their Screen New Deal simply won't have any money left for urgent public priorities, regardless of the Green New Deal. ) that our planet urgently needs.
Rather: The price of all the shiny devices will be the mass layoffs of teachers and the closure of hospitals.
Technology provides us with powerful tools, but not all solutions are technological. And the problem with outsourcing key decisions about how to "reimagine" our states and cities to men like Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt is that they have spent their lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot solve.
For them, and for many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not only the gratitude, but also the deference and power that they feel has been unfairly denied. And Andrew Cuomo, putting the former Google president in charge of the body that will shape the reopening of the state, seems to have given him something close to free reign.
Translation from Lavaca.org
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