What A Big Tech Whistleblower Learned About Power

Jon Favreau (0:00)

Offline is brought to you by NetSuite. Across global markets, AI is changing the way businesses conduct themselves from the top down. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of the business management suite trusted by over 44,000 companies with AI woven into every tool you already rely on. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into a single source of truth. It automatically surfaces custom insights throughout your day. NetSuite is customized for a wide range of industries, but supports the way your business truly works. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI.

Our finance team uses NetSuite. Here's what Jessica has to say. Our finance team has used NetSuite for years now, and they love it because it is scalable and equipped to handle all of our operational needs. From generating invoices to producing key reports that support short-term or long-term business decisions, NetSuite serves as a reliable all-in-one platform that helps our team work efficiently and stay organized. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.com/offline. Get your free guide at netsuite.com/offline.

netsuite.com/offline, netsuite.com/offline.

Frances Haugen (1:14)

We decided to have maybe like a public whistleblower, like maybe five weeks before the first Wall Street Journal story came out. I was like in this pit of despair, being like I cannot escape the circumstances that I am in. I never ever thought in my wildest dreams that my story might inspire an AI whistleblower one day.

Jon Favreau (1:34)

How much of what went wrong at Facebook do you blame on Mark Zuckerberg personally, and how much was baked into the structure and incentives of the company?

Frances Haugen (1:46)

How much are those two intertwined?

We ran an experiment where we stopped sending kids notifications during the school day, we stopped sending them late at night. Kids have said they're less stressed. There's no point in us launching this though because they spend one percent fewer minutes a month. Mark has said that's all he cares about. One thing I wish we were seeing more from the current crop of AI whistleblowers, we get a lot of accounts. We are not getting a lot of what I would call data or evidence. The only place where you can really study these things, where the conversations are fully happening, is behind those closed doors. If you are going to leave, we need your help trying to bootstrap more of that public understanding. The thing that the government provides is the ref who says like, yeah, that car actually has fewer fatalities, or when we did crash tests, the dummies got less damaged.

We should be asking, what is the crash test dummy of AI?

Jon Favreau (2:49)

What do you do when being right isn't enough to change what's wrong? You speak up, you make your case, you show people the evidence. But what happens when they believe you and still don't act? What do you do then? Frances Haugen knows this dilemma better than most. Five years ago, she was a data scientist at Facebook who became convinced the company was dismissing serious dangers that its own researchers had discovered. So she copied thousands of pages of internal documents, gave them to journalists and regulators, and eventually revealed herself as the whistleblower behind what became known as the Facebook files. This week, her story is getting the full Aaron Sorkin treatment in The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to the social network based on Haugen's memoir, The Power of One. Sure enough, the movie is a classic Hollywood story about one brave person taking on a big, powerful corporation. But the more I've thought about Haugen's story, the more I've realized that the Hollywood version leaves out the most important part. Facebook's problem wasn't that no one inside the company knew anything was wrong. They knew a lot. Their own researchers knew that Instagram could harm teenage girls who struggle with body image issues. Their own employees warned that Facebook's algorithm was poisoning our political climate, fueling hate speech and violence in other countries. These people knew the risks. They knew the dangers. They had the evidence. But being right wasn't enough.

For Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior leaders, all those warnings and studies collided with other pressures to keep people on the platforms, to grow the company, to beat the competition, to generate more profit. They ultimately had to decide how much money and influence they were willing to sacrifice in order to prevent harms that were harder to measure and might not happen for years. And the answer turned out to be very little. Five years later, the Frances Haugans who work in artificial intelligence are wrestling with an even harder question. What if the people in charge of your company are also warning about the dangers and that's still not enough? Anthropic founder Dario Amadei has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the potentially catastrophic risks of developing AI that we may not be able to control. And a common response has been, why don't you just stop then? Why don't you just decide on your own to slow down? Well, what if Anthropic slows down but OpenAI doesn't? What if Google doesn't? What if China doesn't? The truth is, problems that affect all of us cannot be solved by any one of us. Not by one whistleblower who exposes the truth. Not by one CEO who wants to do the right thing. You don't ask the nicest factory owner to stop dumping poison into the river while all their competitors get to keep doing it. You make dumping poison into the river illegal. These kinds of problems, whether it's pollution or AI or future pandemics, require convincing a lot of people who may not agree on much else to come together and figure out what happens next. Pass the law, sign the agreement, join the strike, file the lawsuit, show up, vote. Because being right about something isn't the same as having the power to change it. For most of us, the place where we now experience politics every day is on the very social media platforms that Frances Haugen warned us about. We operate in an information environment that primarily rewards us for successfully expressing and proving what we believe. You post the take, you bring the receipts, you expose the hypocrisy, the likes start rolling in, and pretty soon, you're on the winning side of a viral exchange. Cool.