Your Chatbot Knows Too Much

There are now more non-democratic countries in the world than democratic ones. Only a third of Americans under 35 say it's vital to live in a democracy. The share who would welcome military government rose from 7 percent in 1995 to 18 percent in 2017. On this episode of Thinking on Paper, we talk with Carissa Véliz, associate professor at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and author of Privacy Is Power, the Economist Book of the Year, about why privacy is not just a personal preference but the load-bearing wall under liberal democracy. Véliz walks us through what privacy actually is (a right, a duty, and a piece of social infrastructure all at once), why your music taste reveals your politics and your location reveals your religion, and how the East India Company is the historical model for what big tech could become if we keep mistaking convenience for a fair trade. Along the way: why corporate and government surveillance have quietly merged into a single system, how the Nazis' use of personal data shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, why Signal beats WhatsApp on every metric that matters, the difference between behaving like a user and behaving like a citizen, and the line that lands hardest near the end, that democracy is a conversation, and if we leave it to the chatbots we lose our place at the table.Please enjoy the show. --Follow Carissa on XBuy Privacy is Power----⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [email protected](00:00) Trailer(02:26) What Is Privacy(05:31) Is Democracy At Risk?(08:34) Government & Big Tech(10:39) How To Decouple Big Tech & Government(12:33) Privacy & The Common Human Experience(16:02) Tools To Protect Your Privacy(17:18) Cookie Clutter(19:30) ChatGPT Writes Policy(20:05) Radical Open Mindedness(21:52) AI Alignment(22:56) AI Ethics(28:09) How To Erase Your Data(29:27) What Should Humanity Be?