Carissa Véliz: privacy is power, surveillance capitalism, and why AI alignment is a myth
Thinking On Paper
Intro
Hosts introduce the episode topic, guest Carissa Véliz, and the stakes of privacy for democracy.
Carissa Véliz wrote Privacy is Power because she wanted people to understand what is actually being taken from them when they hand over their data. Not their browsing history. Not their location. Their autonomy. Their ability to be unknown. Their right to make mistakes without those mistakes being permanent, profitable, and portable.
Somewhere, right now, algorithms are making decisions about your life. A loan. A job. An insurance premium. A news feed curated to make you feel a particular way about politics. You didn't apply. You weren't consulted. You cannot see the criteria. You cannot appeal the outcome. You just live with it.
Carissa calls this Kafkaesque. She's an associate professor of AI ethics at Oxford, and she has sharper things to say about AI than most people building it.
This episode covers:
- Why privacy is not just your problem but everyone's, and why failing to protect it exposes others to harm
- How the Nazis used personal data to find and kill people, and why that lesson is written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Why the line between government and corporate surveillance has disappeared, and the East India Company as proof that companies can be as dangerous as dictatorships
- Why AI alignment is incompatible with machine learning: "We are ruled by rules we don't know, we don't understand, and we can't appeal. That is the definition of Kafkaesque."
- Why only 5 to 10 percent of people changing their habits is enough to make companies notice
- Signal over WhatsApp. DuckDuckGo over Google. Proton over Gmail. The specific switches worth making today
- Chatbots making people crazy: sycophancy, isolation, and a murder attempt on the CEO of OpenAI
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TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Trailer
(02:26) What Is Privacy
(05:31) Is Democracy At Risk?
(08:34) Government & Big Tech
(10:39) How To Decouple Big Tech & Government
(12:33) Privacy & The Common Human Experience
(16:02) Tools To Protect Your Privacy
(17:18) Cookie Clutter
(19:30) ChatGPT Writes Policy
(20:05) Radical Open Mindedness
(21:52) AI Alignment
(22:56) AI Ethics
(28:09) How To Erase Your Data
(29:27) What Should Humanity Be?
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