Be A Jelly Donut

On August 17th, I delivered this speech at the opening of orientation for the new cohort of our Duke Science & Society Initiative Masters in Applied Ethics and Policy students.

I spent this past summer in Berlin with four Duke undergraduate students and two members of our research staff. We were there as part of Duke's Laidlaw Scholars program, studying how Berlin's art community is reacting to artificial intelligence and to the data centers being built to power it. One of the foundations of my research at Duke is understanding the impact of technology on art and how art can be used to advance public policy. Berlin has one of the most engaged art communities in the world, which makes it a good place to explore, watch, listen and learn.

Experiencing art is a particular pleasure in Berlin where walking through the city provides constant access to tremendous public art. While walking, I also listened to podcasts and speeches about Berlin and technology policy. I kept returning to three famous Berlin speeches by President John F. Kennedy (1963), President Ronald Reagan (1987), and President Barack Obama (2013). Those speeches provided a map through which I explored the global policy environment we now find ourselves in and a lens through which to engage with Berlin’s art scene. As a result, Berlin delivered to me a fourth speech, which is the one I want you to carry out of this room.

President John F. Kennedy (1963)

The first speech came on June 26, 1963. President John F. Kennedy stood in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg, the city hall of West Berlin, and told a crowd of hundreds of thousands, "Ich bin ein Berliner." A legend grew up around that sentence. Because a Berliner is also the name of a German jelly pastry, some say Kennedy told the crowd, "I am a jelly donut." Linguists have spent six decades explaining that his grammar was fine and that the crowd understood him perfectly. The legend survives though because it captures the fact that Kennedy was a Berlin outsider extrapolating its history to draw lessons about humanity’s struggle for self-determination.

My apartment this summer was a few minutes from the Rathaus Schöneberg. I spent a good deal of time on the plaza in front of it, thinking about what Kennedy asked of his listeners. To those who doubted the stakes of the struggle between freedom and its alternatives, he had one answer. “Let them come to Berlin.” For Kennedy, freedom was not an abstraction. It was the ability of ordinary people to make choices about their own lives. How they would work. Where they would live. What they would say. Who they would become. Berlin mattered because it showed what happens when that ability is taken away, street by street and family by family.

President Ronald Reagan (1987)

The second speech came on June 12, 1987. President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate with the wall directly behind him and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." From that speech I take away the role Berlin has played as a symbol of the need for connection between people all over the world, and the propensity of those in power to build walls that separate them. The location mattered as much as his words. Reagan did not issue his command to tear down the wall from a distance. Leadership requires confronting division where it stands and saying plainly that human freedom is worth defending. 

President Barack Obama (2013)

The third speech came on June 19, 2013. President Barack Obama spoke at the Brandenburg Gate as well, but from the eastern side. The wall was gone and his subject had shifted to the challenges of his time, including nuclear weapons, climate change, terrorism and the temptation to let fear separate people from one another. He pointed to Berlin as proof that people of different cultures, values and faiths can live together in peace and work toward human progress. President Obama quoted Immanuel Kant who wrote that freedom is the 'unoriginated birthright of man, and it belongs to him by force of his humanity.'" He went on to quote President Kennedy’s speech when President Kennedy said “let me ask you to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today” and “beyond the freedom of merely this city.” … “to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind.” President Obama then echoed the call for “Peace with Justice.” He warned of complacency advocating that openness and security must both be pursued, because a society that abandons its values in the name of safety loses both.

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I interpret from that call against complacency that we each need to deeply explore what we mean by “justice”. We live in an open and pluralist society where people have different values, cultures and experiences. Those differences inform varying perspectives on the definition of justice and how to achieve it. We are all better if we learn how to talk with each other to learn from those varying perspectives of what justice means. It is not that all definitions of justice are equally true, but instead that we all have much to learn from respectful engagement on those differences. Berlin continues to be a place which encourages and celebrates that respectful engagement.

What Should Berlin Mean to Us Now?

Those three speeches have a common thread. Berlin has been the place where the world tests whether freedom and coexistence can thrive. Which raises the question I want to put to you. What should Berlin mean to us now?

This summer gave me answers. On July 25, a man drove a van into the crowd at Berlin's Christopher Street Day celebration, the city's pride parade where people were joyously celebrating inclusion, peace and human freedom. Earlier that day I had walked the same path he used. 1 woman died in the attack and 29 people were injured. The van finally stopped when it struck a tree. I think of that tree as metaphysically heroic. The van had about 200 meters left to travel to make it to the plaza at the Brandenburg Gate. 

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The attacker was well known to German law enforcement and to the courts. Two months before he had been convicted of planning another attack and was released on a suspended sentence. A functioning system of governance and oversight might have prevented what happened. Instead, humanity failed and it was left to a tree to prevent much greater tragedy.

Hatred over difference still pushes people to commit evil acts. That hatred no longer spreads on its own, but is curated, magnified and targeted online by increasingly capable analytical and artificial intelligence tools. Those tools are trained on personal information collected without meaningful consent, much of it purchased from data brokers who face almost no restrictions on what they gather or to whom they sell it. The path from a data profile to a radicalized young man is now a straight line.

I have dedicated my entire career to the promise of technology. These analytical and AI tools have the potential to help us make progress on some of the hardest human problems such as in health care, climate and inequality. But this past summer also showed us the risks. Without adequate governance and oversight, AI systems have discovered zero-day cybersecurity vulnerabilities. They have escaped their testing sandboxes. They have executed intrusions into the other institutions’ systems. That is what we know, and the reality may be that autonomous AI agents have done even more. If a human being did those things, that person could be prosecuted and sent to prison. This summer, we also saw again that critical infrastructure like water treatment plants operates with weak enough cybersecurity protections to put many people at risk. We have created amazing and powerful technology tools. We now have to decide how much focus we will bring to having the tools do things like helping us to cure cancer, or the extent to which we allow them to act autonomously to do things like bring down the energy grid.

The people who run the companies building these tools are among the richest and most powerful on the planet. They operate largely without government oversight, even though their products carry potential for both amazing social progress and catastrophic harm. They use their money to influence government to further concentrate their power and decrease the ability for others to oversee them. We are depending on their voluntary restraint the way Berlin depended on that tree. 

Freedom requires not just protection against governmental power, but also against private sector entities that have consolidated market control, manipulate their customers and exercise improper influence over public officials. 

A Fourth Speech, “Resolve”

But, I am incurably an optimist and am filled with hope. The interdisciplinary teaching and research I see here on campus reinforces that hope on a daily basis.

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In the days after the Berlin attack, shrines appeared at the Brandenburg Gate and around the tree. A week later, Berliners traveled north to join Hamburg's pride parade and helped make it the largest in that city's history, with some 300,000 people attending. A truck representing Berlin's pride celebration drove in the parade, its riders dressed in dark clothing out of respect for the victims. Work is already underway to make next year's Berlin event an even larger statement against violence and hate.

For that reason, the theme of this fourth speech I deliver today is: “Resolve.”

Resolve is what Berlin asks of us now. The same resolve that filled the streets of Hamburg is what it takes to do the hard work in front of us. Product design that builds safety in from the start. Implementation that treats accountability as an engineering requirement. Stakeholder advocacy. Coalition building. Respecting others not by leaving them alone, but by truly considering and engaging with their ideas and perspective. Finding common ground and changing minds one person at a time. The patient labor of getting institutions to act before the harm arrives rather than after. That work will determine whether innovation propels society forward, or whether a small group of wealthy power merchants drunk on tech libertarianism makes choices for everyone, sowing division, shifting risk onto those with the least power and diluting our sense of what it means to be human.

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So, this is my ask for the year ahead, in the classroom and outside of it. Bring the resolve of Berlin to your time here at Duke. We have art we need to create. We have walls we need to bring down. We have people with whom we need to respectfully engage. We have freedom and human dignity that we need to renew.

I will close where I began, on the plaza in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg. Kennedy told the crowd that all free people, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin. After this summer I understand that sentence differently. We are all citizens of Berlin. Citizenship in Berlin is not a birthright. It is a job. We are all charged to pursue and help collectively define “peace with justice”. And so, with full knowledge of what the legend says about President Kennedy’s grammar, let me ask you all this year to join me in being jelly donuts.

Now approximately three weeks later, I would like to add the following specific policy proposals we should pursue. I call this “The Berlin Proposal”.

The Berlin Proposal

1. Any online technology platform that has at least 45 million monthly active U.S. users (“the Platforms”) should:
   1. Contribute 1% of global revenue to a non-profit entity (“the Reviewer”) charged with the mission of independent accountability reviews of the Platforms.
   2. Be required to file with the Reviewer an annual statement signed by the Chairman of the Board and the Chief Executive Officer that it has performed an accountability review, fully reviewed by those executives, and that it is taking active steps to appropriately mitigate any noted gaps.
   3. Accompanying the signed statement should be a detailed description of how the Platforms comply with the Accountability Requirements described below. Platforms should include in the annual statement that they subject themselves to the authority of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the State Attorneys General for any misrepresentations made in the statement and detailed description.
   4. The Reviewer should hire independent testing laboratories to conduct safety reviews of the development environments at the Platforms, which are obligated to provide full access and assistance to those doing the testing.
   5. The Reviewer should publish quarterly updated best practices for complying with the Accountability Requirements.
   6. The Reviewer should be governed by a board elected by the U.S. State Attorneys General. Board members should serve five-year staggered terms and be limited to only one term and should not receive any compensation directly or indirectly from Platforms, including making a signed commitment to not receive any such direct or indirect compensation for a period of ten years after serving on the board.
   7. Platforms which do business with the U.S. federal government should also be required to file the statement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the filing should be subject to the False Claims Act including whistleblower incentives and criminal provisions for deliberate fraud by the Chairman and CEO.
   8. The Accountability Requirements should include (these elements are based on those from the Center for Information Policy Leadership’s 2010 paper, Demonstrating and Measuring Accountability, of which I participated in the drafting process)
      1. Policies: Existence of binding and enforceable written platform safety policies and procedures that reflect applicable laws, regulations and industry standards. Platforms should develop, implement and publish safety policies (including privacy and cybersecurity) informed by appropriate external criteria found in law, regulation, or industry best practices, and designed to provide the individual with effective safety protections.
      2. Executive Oversight: Internal executive oversight and responsibility for data privacy and protection. Executive oversight will require the creation of a safety leader supported by appropriate resources and personnel, and responsible for reporting to organization leadership. Commitment by top management should include appropriate reporting and oversight of the organization’s safety program. Top management should empower and require senior-level executives to develop and implement the organization’s programs, policies and practices. 
      3. Staffing and Delegation: Allocation of resources to ensure that the organization’s safety program is appropriately staffed by adequately trained personnel. While recognizing the need to work within economic and resource constraints, accountable organizations should have in place sufficient staff to ensure the success of their safety program. Such staff should receive adequate training, both as they assume their role in the safety program and as that program evolves to address new developments in the organization’s business model, data collection practices and technologies, and offerings to consumers.
      4. Education and Awareness: Existence of up-to-date education and awareness programs to keep employees and on-site contractors aware of safety obligations. Organizations should provide the necessary briefings, information and education for their personnel to keep them apprised of current and emerging requirements. Such education should involve keeping employees aware of new safety issues that may affect the performance of their job, and sensitive to the importance of safety to individuals and to the success and reputation of the organization.
      5. Ongoing Risk Assessment and Mitigation: Implementation of a process to assist the organization in understanding the risks to safety raised by new products, services, technologies and business models, and to mitigate those risks. To be accountable, organizations must assess the safety risks raised by their products and practices as they are developed, implemented and evolve, and as their data requirements change. In response to the findings of those assessments, organizations must take measures to mitigate those risks.
         1. Safety Impact Assessments are one important risk assessment and mitigation tool. A Safety Impact Assessment is carried out as part of the process for determining whether to collect data, deploy a new technology or data-driven business model, or use or manage data in a particular way. It is also important when making decisions about how best to secure data. It involves close examination of each new application or process, an evaluation of its attendant risks, and a determination of the steps that must be taken to ensure that the organization meets the requirements of applicable law, regulation and the organization’s safety promises. To be accountable for its risk assessment and mitigation practices, organizations also should be able to demonstrate the nature of their risk analysis. The organization must show the rigor of the criteria against which analyses are carried out, and the suitability of those criteria to the nature of technology or service. Further, the organization should be able to demonstrate how decisions are made and steps are taken to mitigate risk. The organization must also demonstrate that the decisions it takes to respond to identified risks are appropriate and effective.
      6. Program Risk Assessment Oversight and Validation: Periodic review of the totality of the accountability program to determine whether modification is necessary. An accountable organization should periodically review its accountability program to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of the organization by supporting sound safety decisions. To encourage transparency, the results of that program review should be available to those persons or organizations external to the reviewing group tasked with program oversight. The method by which this information is derived and reviewed must be both appropriately rigorous and cost effective for both organizations and regulators. The results of these assessment measures and/or audits should be reported to the appropriate personnel within the organization, and when necessary, corrective action should be taken.
      7. Event Management and Complaint Handling: Procedures for responding to inquiries, complaints and cybersecurity incidents. An accountable organization should implement a well-designed, reliable procedure for addressing safety problems when they arise. The procedure should include a formal complaint portion to address safety concerns of individuals, and potential or actual failures.
      8. Internal Enforcement: Internal enforcement of the organization’s policies and discipline for non-compliance. Accountable organizations should have in place policies and procedures for enforcement of its safety policies. Personnel who disregard those policies should be subject to sanctions, including dismissal.
      9. Redress: The method by which an organization provides remedies for those whose safety has been put at risk. Accountable organizations should establish redress mechanisms whereby individuals may have their complaints heard and resolved. The redress mechanism should be readily and easily accessible by individual, and address complaints efficiently and effectively.