Jennifer: He says having employees work as beta testers is problematic… because they might not feel like they have a choice.
Albert Fox Cahn: The reality is that when you’re an employee, oftentimes you don’t have the ability to meaningfully consent. You oftentimes can’t say no. And so instead of volunteering, you’re being voluntold to bring this product into your home, to collect your data. And so you’ll have this coercive dynamic where I just don’t think, you know, at, at, from a philosophical perspective, from an ethics perspective, that you can have meaningful consent for this sort of an invasive testing program by someone who is in an employment arrangement with the person who’s, you know, making the product.
Jennifer: Our devices already monitor our data… from smartphones to washing machines.
And that’s only going to get more common as AI gets integrated into more and more products and services.
Albert Fox Cahn: We see evermore money being spent on evermore invasive tools that are capturing data from parts of our lives that we once thought were sacrosanct. I do think that there is just a growing political backlash against this sort of technological power, this surveillance capitalism, this sort of, you know, corporate consolidation.
Jennifer: And he thinks that pressure is going to lead to new data privacy laws in the US. Partly because this problem is going to get worse.
Albert Fox Cahn: And when we think about the sort of data labeling that goes on the sorts of, you know, armies of human beings that have to pour over these recordings in order to transform them into the sorts of material that we need to train machine learning systems. There then is an army of people who can potentially take that information, record it, screenshot it, and turn it into something that goes public. And, and so, you know, I, I just don’t ever believe companies when they claim that they have this magic way of keeping safe all of the data we hand them, there’s this constant potential harm when we’re, especially when we’re dealing with any product that’s in its early training and design phase.
[CREDITS]
Jennifer: This episode was reported by Eileen Guo, produced by Emma Cillekens and Anthony Green, edited by Amanda Silverman and Mat Honan. And it’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from Garret Lang and Jacob Gorski.
Thanks for listening, I’m Jennifer Strong.