The Law & Tech Group of the School of Law and the interdisciplinary network Human Rights in the Digital Age (HRDA) of the UoN are delighted to invite you to the first in person HRDA talk for 2023:
Kieron O’Hara, Four Internets: Geopolitics, Ideologies of Technology, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract: The Internet is a collection of hardware, software, protocols, standards, public and private organisations, databases, security, telecommunications and more. It’s not only technical, but social. It has two major technical requirements: decentralisation, and identification (via a unique IP address), but there are several ways to realise and police the basic structure which encode or assume different values, protecting some rights and neglecting others. When these value systems are aligned with major geopolitical actors, they become influential in the Internet’s own development. This talk discerns four particularly important views: an Open Internet, a Commercial Internet, a Bourgeois Internet, and a Paternal Internet. They are in competition, but co-exist in uneasy peace, alongside a fifth, nihilistic programme of hacking and disinformation. Each of these makes different demands of Internet governance and engineering, and rests them on different assumptions about the ethics and social value of the Internet. These geopolitically-supported ideologies of technology form a lens through which we can consider technological developments, as argued in Kieron O’Hara & Wendy Hall, Four Internets. The framework will then be applied to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence.
Bio: Kieron O’Hara is emeritus fellow in electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton. His research interests include the philosophy and politics of technology, particularly the World Wide Web, and he was instrumental in developing the Anonymisation Decision-Making Framework for anonymising data. He is the author of several books, including The Enlightenment: A Beginner’s Guide (2010), The Devil’s Long Tail: Religious and Other Radicals in the Internet Marketplace (2015, with David Stevens), The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (2019, with Nigel Shadbolt, David De Roure and Wendy Hall), and Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace (2021, with Wendy Hall). His latest book, The Seven Veils of Privacy: How Our Debates About Privacy Conceal Its Nature, will appear in Summer 2023.