Artificial
Intelligence is a frighteningly powerful new tool — and weapon. Who
and what will it serve? In the U.S., tech giants Facebook, Google,
and Amazon and their corporate agendas; in China, the needs of the
public and the economy. These two models should be thought through
now.
by
Jim Carey
Part
3 - Tech Giants’ symbiotic relationship with the U.S. Deep State
These
three tech giants sometimes complain that they don’t work in a
healthy business climate in nations like China, where Facebook has
been banned for not complying with government regulations, but these
factors don’t seem to bother them when it comes to operating in the
United States.
Facebook,
for example, has become a focal point of the hysteria in the U.S.
media surrounding “Russian interference” in the 2016 election.
Following congressional hearings, Mark Zuckerberg apparently decided
that changes were needed at Facebook, saying in a post on his social
media platform that “the world feels anxious and divided, and
Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our
community from abuse and hate [or] defending against interference by
nation states.”
As
anyone reading this article probably knows, that portion of
Zuckerberg’s comment on “interference by nation states” doesn’t
only mean protection against the ever-obscuring concept of “Russian
meddling,” but also the rewriting of Facebook’s algorithms (a
form of AI) and policies to further censor Russian perspectives —
which in turn usually means more censorship on all media critical of
U.S. imperialism by labelling it “Russian propaganda”. If that
isn’t bad enough, Facebook has also recently been alleged to be
deleting accounts selected by U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Facebook
has also lobbied the government to stop attempts at writing stronger
internet privacy rules, which Google has also pushed against.
Google
is a unique case with strange beginnings as a simple search engine
turned tech behemoth, with a lot of the seed money coming from
research groups connected to the intelligence community. The
intelligence community’s aim in financing the projects that make up
the base of Google’s technology related to their value as data
collection tools that would serve both private industry and spy
agencies. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page both received
what was essentially seed money for their company through a
government-funded program at Stanford University.
This
connection between the U.S. government and Google hasn’t dissipated
since that initial creation. Indeed, Google has since filled its
ranks with ex-intelligence personnel. This includes many people who
come from the top ranks of agencies — such as Jared Cohen, who
moved from the Obama State Department to Google Ideas, the company’s
in-house think tank. Cohen and current Google CEO Eric Schmidt are
also among the members of the company who visited Julian Assange in
the Ecuadorian Embassy in the U.K. last year in what Assange believes
was an attempt to glean information from him.
Then
there is Amazon, perhaps the most notorious collaborator with U.S.
intelligence. In fact, Amazon’s CEO — and owner of the
pro-intelligence/anti-Trump Washington Post — Jeff Bezos garnered
quite a bit of attention at the end of last year when he inked a $600
million contract with the CIA.
The CIA
approached Amazon, having recognized the tech company’s proficiency
in creating the aforementioned databases the company likes so much,
and asked them to build the CIA its own. The new cloud server, built
by Amazon Web Services (AWS), will reportedly store a range of CIA
data. It has been confirmed that some of this data will be
classified, which basically means the CIA will be storing classified
data on Amazon servers. These are likely to be the most high-security
cloud services online, but it is important to remember that even
large clients such as Uber have had their Amazon cloud storage
breached. The U.S. intelligence agencies are also often accused of
being on the other side of the hacker-hacked relationship, and are
suspected to have stolen data from the very tech companies they do
business with.
At this
point, some people will ask: “What do the tech companies get out
of this relationship?”
The
answer is fairly simple. Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon
are allowed to act with impunity. This means that the
hyper-exploitative, crony-capitalist, neoliberal views of these tech
giants are applied wherever they do business.
This
manipulation of the government by companies like Facebook and Amazon
can best be observed at the local level, such as in the area around
Silicon Valley. In San Francisco, for example, the employees of these
tech companies have managed to drive up property values and make the
city so exclusive that even the blue-collar employees who work for
the tech companies have to sleep on buses or live in cars. These
employees are often contractors which, thanks to lobbying by tech
companies for the age of the “gig economy,” means they are
legally denied the same health, safety, and financial protections as
staff members.
The tech
companies, for their part, seem to acknowledge this as a problem but
often, instead of addressing it, instead build ways to ignore it,
such as private bus services that keep money from public
transportation. There have been proposals to curb some of these
problems, such as affordable housing projects, but they are typically
lobbied against either by the white collar residents in the city or
by realtors making a killing in the local market. On top of all this,
even if the local government did want to do more, San Francisco still
manages to accrue massive budget deficits despite having measures in
place such as high state and local taxes and having the seventh
highest GDP and highest property values among cities in the US.
Another
recent display of the incredible amount of power these companies hold
over local governments is the wave of videos by city and state
politicians across the country practically begging Amazon to build
its second headquarters in one of their cities. And if watching
spectacles such as the mayor of Kansas City reviewing Amazon products
in a video to ‘charm’ Bezos, or the mayor of Gary, Indiana
pleading with Bezos to move his HQ there, isn’t enough for you,
it’s important to remember there have also been billions of dollars
in tax breaks offered to Amazon by cities competing for its business.
These
crony-capitalist practices don’t just apply to these tech
companies’ physical locations. Google, Facebook, and Amazon have
all taken their privileged philosophy global by hiding money in
multiple tax havens to avoid paying the special (i.e., discounted)
tax rates they already receive. To be fair though, it seems that
these companies are planning on bringing some of this money back to
the U.S., now that it will be taxed at a lower rate as a part of the
new Republican tax scheme that Silicon Valley lobbied for. Some
members of Silicon Valley, such as Google engineer Patri Friedman and
Facebook board member Peter Thiel, have even crafted plans to go a
step further — such as the ‘Seasteading Institute,’ which would
allow elite technocrats to escape to floating cities free of any
nation’s laws.
These
tech companies also export to other countries their philosophy on how
low-skill workers should be treated. One way this ties into both the
economic practices of these companies and their development of AI is
how they outsource their need for human interactions with AI networks
to ‘teach’ those networks how to better mimic organic
intelligence and human learning habits. This is best exemplified by
Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ service, which outsources these
“micro-tasks” to vulnerable populations in places like Gaza,
sometimes for as little as $0.01 per contract. This is referred to as
‘Microwork,’ which consists of a variety of tedious tasks from
tagging photographs to translating or transcribing short texts.
These
are the standard practices of Silicon Valley, and just a snapshot of
the many ways they’re using AI while also maintaining substantial
control over any state body that could rein them in. This is what
happens when capital manages to precede and overwhelm the public’s
voice as politically expressed through the state in dictating how a
nation’s technology should be run.
There
is, however, an alternative model to this, which is now being
implemented by Beijing and may just show the world how a responsible
state grapples with machine intelligence.
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