Why Big Tech is incompatible with democracy | Bruno Giussani

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
How much of your day is shaped by technology you don't really control, and from a country you don't live in? The apps you open, the feeds you scroll, the cloud services you rely on, the AI tools that now seem to show up everywhere.

**Bruno Giussani** (0:26)
Almost all important software and digital services, they all now run on the cloud, as we say. Which means that both the data and the processing are not in our machines, controlled by us locally, but they are on distant machines, on remote servers to which we buy access and which are controlled by the providers.

**Elise Hu** (0:56)
That's author and journalist Bruno Giussani. In this talk, he shares why these technologies aren't just products anymore. They've become the invisible architecture of daily life, for governments, hospitals, businesses, the public forums, and our individual day-to-day work. And that gives the companies behind them enormous power.
Bruno shares why he is especially concerned about what this means for Europe, where so much digital infrastructure depends on American platforms, American companies, and American law.

**Bruno Giussani** (1:26)
Their utility is real, and that's why we have adopted them, and that's why it's so difficult to imagine doing without them. But all that comes at a price. You cannot build a healthy economy and a strong society on somebody else's digital infrastructure.

**Elise Hu** (1:45)
He makes the case for what he calls Europe's digital difference, technology that doesn't spy on you, and infrastructure that gives people more choice, more control, and more accountability. It raises questions that reach far beyond any continent or country. How much autonomy do we really have right now, and what would it take to build a digital world we actually have a say in? That's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Bruno Giussani** (2:21)
How many algorithms are part of your daily life? How many sensors? How many screens? In fact, interacting with screens and other digital interfaces has become the main daily activity of almost all of us.
But how many of those interactions are actually really of our choosing? Our lives and our societies are increasingly structured around and by algorithms and digital networks. And this algorithmization of life, I think, is a problem. For different reasons, and I want to touch upon two of them tonight.
The first one is the nature of these technologies. We think they are products, and we buy them, and once we own them, we can do with them as we please. But in the last couple of decades, digital technologies have actually become platforms. Invisible digital architectures within which we live. And that changes absolutely everything. Almost all important software and digital services think of office and industrial applications, information and entertainment feeds, payments, artificial intelligence, chatbots. They all now run on the cloud, as we say. Which means that both the data and the processing are not in our machines controlled by us locally, but they are on distant machines, on remote servers, to which we buy access and which are controlled by the providers. And that gives them an immense power over our lives. It allows them to decide what we can and cannot do, what ideas get visibility and what don't, what information we can access, and also to influence our public debates. Of course, these technologies are efficient, useful, practical, well-integrated, easy to use, often even free. Their utility is real, and that's why we have adopted them, and that's why it's so difficult to imagine doing without them. But all that comes at a price. And finally, we are starting to understand it. Data extraction, privacy loss, fragmentation of attention, dependency, mental health, we can do a very long list. And now for the past three years, a little bit more, generative artificial intelligence is infiltrating itself everywhere, it's popping up on all sorts of applications and programs, talking to us like friends, giving us sometimes the impression that we have superpowers. And indeed, AI chatbots can seem magical because they offer something almost irresistible, the opportunity to delegate to a machine the effort of thinking, learning, writing, even deciding. They are like cognitive baby bottles, and every day, tens of millions of people rush to the nipple. But the more we delegate thinking and deciding, the less we will be able to think and decide by ourselves. And indeed, we are increasingly surrounded by machines that, under the cover of optimization and practicality, diminish our ability to understand reality and to act upon it. And they algorithmically reprogram, change our societies. We think we control them, but actually it's they who hypnotize us and domesticate us. And I know, that's not a happy profile of our current situation that I just described. And for us Europeans, and that's the second point, for us Europeans, this problem is compounded by the fact that almost all these digital technologies are American. For a long time, for a mix of economic opportunism and strategic naivete, and comfort, and lack of imagination, we have accumulated a substantial technological lag. We have given up on our digital autonomy. And it didn't seem such a huge deal, because these technologies were coming from a country that was a friend and an ally.