Future Politics Quotes

“how we gather, store, analyse, and communicate our information—in essence how we organize it—is closely related to how we organize our politics. So when a society develops strange and different technologies for information and communication, we should expect political changes as well.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“In tech firms themselves, few engineers are tasked with thinking hard about the systemic consequences of their work. Most are given discrete technical problems to solve. Innovation in the tech sector is ultimately driven by profit, even if investors are prepared to take a ‘good idea first, profits later’ approach. This is not a criticism: it’s just that there’s no reason why making money and improving the world will always be the same thing. In fact, as many of the examples in this book show, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that digital technology is too often designed from the perspective of the powerful and privileged. As time goes on, we will need more philosophical engineers worthy of the name.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the educational system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What’s written on your form is far more important.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Onlife Initiative, ‘Background Document: Rethinking Public Spaces in the Digital Transition’, in Onlife Manifesto,”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Ebay’s online dispute resolution system, without courts or lawyers, already resolves some 60 million commercial disagreements a year—more than three times the total number of lawsuits filed in the entire US court system.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Microsoft launched its AI chatbot Tay on Twitter on 23 March 2016. Tay was intended to mimic the speech of a nineteen-year-old girl and to learn from interactions with other Twitter users. Sixteen hours after its launch, Tay was removed from active duty after posting a series of racist and sexually inflammatory tweets, including one which captioned a photo of Adolf Hitler with the tag ‘swag alert’, and another saying ‘Fuck my robot pussy daddy I’m such a naughty robot’. Tay had ‘learned’ to communicate this way from other users on Twitter. This example says as much about humans on social media as it does about machine learning.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Stepping back, it’s now possible to advance a tentative hypothesis that can guide us throughout this book: that how we gather, store, analyse, and communicate our information—in essence how we organize it—is closely related to how we organize our politics. So when a society develops strange and different technologies for information and communication, we should expect political changes as well.”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

“Confronted with the rousing battle-cry, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’ only the dorkiest pedant would reply, ‘Yes, but, pausing there, what kind of liberty are you referring to?”
― Jamie Susskind, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech