Harmonising the Net

Amid all the hyperlinks and hyperbole, it can be easy to grow despondent. Is privacy dead? Is AI ungovernable? Is the hot mess of streaming services just a more expensive, frustrating version of the bleak mediascape depicted in Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 song 57 Channels (and nothin’ on)?

Last week, Richard Whitt came to visit UTS Law and the CMT. Whitt is a Californian lawyer and techie who has collaborated with internet pioneer Vint Cerf, worked at the Mozilla Foundation and been a senior fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy. Now at Twilio, he has also spent more than a decade at Google. Over the years, however, he’s become disillusioned with the internet.

As Whitt explained, the internet originally comprised a peer-to-peer network, which was democratic by design. Unfortunately, this original design has given way to a commerce-based architecture that’s extractive and exploitative. Whitt categorises this as the ‘SEAMs’ paradigm: Surveillance, Extraction, Analysis and Manipulation, all carried out in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. ‘This is not the way it has to be,’ he says. Whitt wants to see this paradigm replaced with the ‘HAACS’ paradigm, which stands for Human Autonomy and Agency via Computational Systems.

More than just catchy acronyms, Whitt proposes regulatory and technological solutions, including making companies digital fiduciaries that bear significant responsibilities on behalf of their users, and developing ‘personal AIs’ that can represent and protect individuals in their online engagements. Whitt spells out these proposals in a 2021 Colorado Technology Law Journal paper called 'Hacking the SEAMs'. To spread these ideas, and more broadly to create a digital media space characterised by trust rather than exploitation, Whitt started the GLIA Foundation.

Globally, positive steps have been taken recently, including the Bletchley Park Accords struck by 28 countries on the use of AI, the G7 agreeing to a code of conduct for companies developing AI, the Executive Order issued by the White House on ‘Safe, Secure and Trustworthy AI’, and the EU’s AI Act. All in all, says Whitt, there are good reasons for optimism, and reason to hope human-centric tech will prevail.

Sacha Molitorisz - Senior Lecturer, UTS Law