In October 24, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an epochal speech to a conference of European data officials. Many outside the technology industry have warned that we are sleepwalking our way through a vast transformation of politics, economy and society. Our world is being remade around us by data and by algorithms. Tools and sensors that gather data on people’s behavior and dispositions are increasingly pervasive. Our cars secretly upload information about the music that we listen to, and where we listen to it. Our televisions, like the televisions in 1984, can listen as well as speak. Mountain of data is piled upon mountain. The obdurate heaps are sieved, winnowed and harvested by machine-learning algorithms, vast unthinking engines of calculation and classification, that allot us to categories that may redefine our lives while being incomprehensible to human beings, and ceaselessly strive to predict and even manipulate our actions. Together, these technologies are commonly known as “artificial intelligence” (AI)—and the implications for politics and economics are vast.1
Cook’s speech spoke eloquently to the problems of AI. What was remarkable was not what he said but that it was Cook, the leader of a major technology company, who was saying it. Cook told his audience that AI needed to be subordinated to human values and not allowed to displace human ingenuity and creativity. Of course, Cook was far better positioned to make such an argument than the CEO of Google or Facebook would have been. His company’s fortunes rely on selling physical products to consumers, instead of selling consumers to advertisers. Yet what he did was to bring battle over the relationship between technology and morality to the heart of Silicon Valley.
The speech was a bold and very consciously political move. The technology guru and intellectual entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly has observed, that if data is increasingly the central source of value within a corporation, then how that data is managed and monetized is likewise central to how value will be captured and distributed within and across national economic units. This is a vast transformation of our economy. To give some sense of its scale, 2014 was the first year in which the value of data exchanges internationally exceeded the value of traded goods.
Of course, how value is distributed across an economy has enormous political implications. The economic implications are portentous, to be sure, but the social consequences are equally far reaching. Data collection is reshaping individual privacy, while predictive and manipulative algorithms have profound implications for how we think about the autonomy, or agency, of the individual—both, again, quintessentially political questions.
To understand these politics, we need to think about the moral frameworks that they are embedded in. Google and Facebook’s model, in which individuals come to know themselves and be known through data, is not just driven by greed. It also exemplifies a deeply felt morality: both companies see themselves not just as businesses, but as evangelists bringing the true faith to the unredeemed. Cook’s speech represents a different and incompatible morality, in which technology is harnessed so that it enhances rather than transforms our capacity for moral judgments.