Tim Cook Is Right--We Must Not Shrink From This Moment

H.G. Wells observed that “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.” Which do you think is winning?

In a recent informal survey I conducted on LinkedIn, many expressed hope that education would win but few thought it was actually winning.

Some of this pessimism is due, no doubt, to the negativity and availability biases that Steven Pinker calls out and works to dispel in his smart book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, and in his earlier The Better Angels of our Nature. Pinker and others such as Hans Rosling, Max Roser and Bill Gates have made compelling, evidence-based efforts to show that, as Pinker notes, “the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being.”

Yet, many that I spoke to could not shake the feeling that we are making even more “progress” in behaviors and technologies that could trigger catastrophe.

This is the fear that Apple CEO Tim Cook captured when he said to the European Union Parliament earlier this week:

We see vividly — painfully — how technology can harm rather than help. Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies. Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false.

This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or crazy. And those of us who believe in technology's potential for good must not shrink from this moment.

Cook’s speech is well worth watching. You can also read the full text of his speech here.

Cook’s specific recommendations dealt with data privacy and the ethical use of artificial intelligence. He is drawing headlines for supporting the tough privacy policies of the European Union and calling for comprehensive privacy laws in the United States and the rest of the world.

Cook argued that privacy should be rooted in four principles (all of which I consider to be good starting points):

1. The right to have personal data minimized. Companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data — or not to collect it in the first place.

2. The right to knowledge. Users should always know what data is being collected and what it is being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn't. Anything less is a sham.

3. The right to access. Companies should recognize that data belongs to users, and we should all make it easy for users to get a copy of, correct and delete their personal data.

4. The right to security. Security is foundational to trust and all other privacy rights.

It would be easy to be cynical and discount Cook’s position, as some already have. Apple’s business model does not depend on advertising—whereas advertising is what rings the cash registers at Google and Facebook. On the other hand, who doubts that Apple could squeeze more profits out of customer data by skirting Cook's principles, if it chose to do so?

Cook made a more general and significant point about technology:

Now, more than ever — as leaders of governments, as decision-makers in business and as citizens — we must ask ourselves a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in?

Cook's question is crucial because advances in many information technologies, not just data and artificial intelligence, offer the potential of being “weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

The larger principle that Cook is advocating—as the key decision-maker in the world’s most valuable and profitable business—is that his company and, by implication, all companies, should take responsibility for preventing this.

We are responsible for recognizing that the devices we make and the platforms we build have real, lasting, even permanent effects on the individuals and communities who use them. We must never stop asking ourselves, what kind of world do we want to live in? The answer to that question must not be an afterthought, it should be our primary concern.

As CEO of Apple, Tim Cook is in a unique position to live up to his lofty rhetoric and set the tone for all businesses.

We’ll see if he does. It is certainly a noble aspiration, and I am very glad that he has so forcefully and publicly set it.

It is certainly better to aim towards the future that we want to live in, based on technology's possibilities, and proactively avoid the catastrophe that we fear will otherwise emerge.