when I inspire business people it makes me happy when I inspire high school students it makes me delighted so raise your hands or clap how many of you are citizens of Google how many of you belong to the Federation of Facebook how many of you pledge allegiance to the Republic of Apple I'm a citizen of Google I'm a citizen of Facebook I'm a citizen of Apple I know what some of you are thinking the professor needs a geography lesson we've heard that like schooling is bad in America but they're mixing up digital platforms with countries
I mean this is just too much the reason why I'm making this analogy is that citizenship is the way to be thinking about our relationship with these platforms they're not just bigger than the largest nation-states the world has ever seen they are the governments of the future so let me explain how platforms are starting to take on some of the rules that governments historically played let's start with censorship who filters out fake news from real news suppressors hate speech filters out porn it's not the censor Bureau that's doing the work anymore it's the algorithms of
YouTube and Facebook surveillance Apple and air tell Google and Vodafone they see at all where we are where we say we are sometimes a different thing who we talk to what we say your Amazon echo that Digital foot soldier in your living room here's a tall currency money used to be exclusively backed by a nation-state today you have Bitcoin aetherium and ripple backed by code and a crowd so censorship surveillance currency the list actually goes on you know Apple and Amazon licenses are becoming more important than copyright law your Facebook ID is used more frequently
than your government ID when a hurricane wiped out cell phone service in a Caribbean island Google restored service not the US Army platforms are even becoming gatekeepers to essential real world services accommodation education transportation a lot of you took an Ola cab to get here right even the way that we perceive physical reality is starting to be shaped by platforms I mean today we have our smart phones with us in ten years it'll be the iPhone 20 and Google glass 10 what we see in physical space will be digitally augmented have you seen those kids
running into traffic because of Pokemon go folks that's just the beginning but the government still has a monopoly over violence right Google and Facebook aren't actually going to assemble physical armies or private police forces the way the British East India Company did no you have to think differently about this think Russia and the u.s. election think North Korea and those wanna cry hacker ads cyber warfare is the future of armed conflict you don't need smart bombs anymore you need smart hackers you don't need military intelligence anymore you need artificial intelligence and who has the best
AI it's Facebook it's Google it's Apple it's Amazon it's Tencent guess who's gonna be in charge I want to step back a moment now and start to think about what kind of institutions these platforms are going to involve into so I'm going to take you from geography class now the civics class where we learned about all those different government forms and how to recognize what a democracy is so how many of you have voted in an election about apples privacy policy we ever been to a Google Court of Appeals do you even know what YouTube
censorship laws are do they apply equally to everybody do you own your Facebook data listen I'm not selling a conspiracy theory here or The Matrix is everywhere I mean platforms of course have really good intentions it's just that they're not democracies they're more like benevolent and so at Davos last month George Soros called on us to regulate the platforms but one government can't regulate another government perhaps we have to think about treaties then this is probably what Denmark is thinking they've actually appointed an ambassador to Silicon Valley but while he is working out the trade
agreements what I want us to work out and think about is democratic reform this is the goal of a project I'm leading for my World Economic Forum global Future Council creating a blueprint for platform governance a digital Bill of Rights the first right is transparency platforms must be open about how they filter our content how they censor us and how they target us I mean we wouldn't have actually clicked on those fake news stories if they were coming from a tiny town if we knew that they were coming from a tiny town in Macedonia right
and so openness could have helped prevent some of the world events that were shaped by fake news recently because echo chambers aren't new we have always lived in them with friends family grandparents villagers neighborhoods reinforcing our beliefs but Digital echo chambers are opaque this makes them susceptible to insidious infiltration those are my Shashi Tharoor words for today so what I mean is that strangers can enter these echo chambers sort of manipulate our opinions and outcomes we don't even realize it transparency is part of the solution so I want you guys to insist on it okay
the second right algorithmic fairness if an algorithm decides what content we see what transportation we get what college we get admission into what education we receive what job we get whether we get a bank loan what medical treatment we receive what prison sentence is meted out this algorithm must not be prejudiced democracies work really hard to make sure that their laws and institutions are free from discrimination and bias platforms need to do the same it is a fundamental part of any reasonable social contract and you have to insist on it the third right data property
rights mean we don't really think about this too much but someone can't just sort of grab your stuff run away and say this is mine in all of you bought your own TEDx gateway ticket right you didn't just snatch it from someone put on a fake mustache and then show up at the door if you did now is the time to stand up and we have a place for you in the corner on the left but we take these individual property rights for granted the ability to buy own and self in contrast whatever you create
on a platform is owned by the platform so here's a first step forward allow platform users to own their data and create a system for licensing this data I know that this sounds complicated but you know what else is complicated music has property after I buy a song do I own it or is it the person who's singing it or the person who wrote it we have solved these problems through innovations like copyright law we can do the same for data property rights insist on it for use they're inclusive decisions today platform decisions are made
by the CEO by the board by the shareholders you know by the government regulators by revenue goals by what the engineers pretend is feasible or not feasible platforms also need to create ways in which users can participate directly in decision-making about what effects especially the sociology of the platform now don't get me wrong I'm not suggesting that every decision made by every platform is voted on by every user like they did back in sort of democratic Athens you know though if you think about it that might be a better use of our time than participating
in another which Game of Thrones character are you quiz you know we could in this world make BuzzFeed the official election authority so you know seriously platforms you know democracy has evolved a lot since Athens we have all kinds of forms about parliamentary we got presidential we got representative we've got blockchain technology now that can easily implement distributed governance surely we can make user inclusive decisions a reality if you insist on it finally due process if your credit score is compromised if in the future your online work history is manipulated somehow there has to be
a way for you to seek recourse with advanced notice a fair hearing the attributes of a good justice system we need this insist on it so remember how the British government disbanded the East India Company following the war of 1857 so I'm now taking you from civics class to history class so I've covered the social science the social studies triumvirate now we heard from all these scientists in the morning I've always felt the social studies is sort of the stepchild of middle school so I wanted to give it some prominence of the event but the
reason why I'm talking about history is that I'm a big believer in learning from history and much like the crown disbanded the British East India Company I think government's in the future are going to try and reclaim the power that they have ceded to the platform's and I don't want to wait and we shouldn't wait until war breaks out between a major platform and a major government so what we have to remember is that without our attention without our participation without our engagement without our cooperation these platforms don't have a business we have more leverage
than we think so favor the platforms that adopt this bill of rights withdraw from the ones that don't inspire those around you to do the same because we are at a moment in history where we have a real opportunity to design the digital worlds that are forming to be places that we actually want to live we have to do this because if we don't someone else will design them for us and we may not like the design that we end up with so insist on it design your own reality take control democratize your platforms thank
you [Applause] [Applause]
