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Marietje Schaake
Says More…
This week in Say More, PS talks with Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament, International Policy Director of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, International Policy Fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and a member of the Executive Committee of the UN High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.
Project Syndicate: Powerful new technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence, could “undermine democratic governance,” you warned earlier this year. In your book, The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, you argue that tech companies are compounding this risk by increasingly taking on functions “normally assumed by states.” Why is this outsourcing to the private sector more worrisome than in the past, and how should legal frameworks be rethought in response to the new dangers?
Marietje Schaake: There is an “ecosystem” of companies, large and small, that wield enormous power because they produce or control technologies that affect people’s rights or the role of the state. The amount of data, computational power, capital, and talent that they have amassed, and the variety of critical roles they play in our world, is unprecedented. Add to that products that are often non-transparent, highly personalized, ever-changing, and unpredictable – as is the case with artificial intelligence – and regulating these firms can be extremely difficult.
The resulting “tech coup” poses a threat to democracy, as it leaves the public unable to exercise real agency or hold companies accountable. Given the stakes, powerful countervailing measures are in order.