Dilemas Éticos y Políticos de la Computación en la Nube - Dr. Javier Bustamante Donas

Conferencia dentro del ciclo de la asignatura de Ética, Legislación y Profesión.

Thank you very much. I’m pleased to be here with you.

We have until 2:15, approximately.

Later at 3, I’m giving a Chinese Thinking class at the Faculty of Philosophy.

A “ni hao” thing.

At the Faculty of Philosophy, I have the pleasure of teaching a class of Science, Technology and Society,

which is very close to Philosophy-Technology.

Also another of Political Philosophy, where I introduce to plenty of elements of participatory democracy,

of how the Internet transforms the boundaries of the political and ethical ambit.

And a wonderful class of Chinese Thinking where I have the luck of discussing the fundamental paradigms

of the ancient Chinese thinking in the times of the battling states, Chun, Zhou, and it’s a time

in which the Lao-Tse thinking emerges. Confucius’ as well and other thinkers

like Mozi, Gong Sunlong, Han Feizi, etc.

All the basics of the Chinese thinking comes
from that time and it’s quite interesting

because, normally, the nexus between politics
and technology are forgotten.

And, nowadays, we’re seeing how technology is totally extending

the range of possibilities of the political ambit.

In fact, it’s usually said that
it’s the ideas that shape the world.

Well, today we can see that it’s
the artifacts, the devices and

the non-official use that people give them
what really makes

a very powerful engine of social change.

Note that even the very political ambit
is built through technology.

Do we have any Italians here or not?

Anyone from Italy with an Erasmus
scholarship or so?

No one in here?

Who can, please, tell me
when, before the Italian construction

of the 19th century…? People travelled
on horses between sites.

The Italians felt Venetian, Milanesi,
Torinese, Bolognesi, Roman, Sicilian…

But there was no conscience of Italy.

What is it that, suddenly,
makes the thought of being Italian appear,

the conscience of the Italian identity?
Who’d like to tell me?

Silence in the crowd.

Anyone?

The invention of the train.

When the first iron tracks appear in Italy
and when the distances

that had to be covered in a matter of days before
can be covered in hours,

people realize the transformation
of the physical space.

How directly the political identity,

the identity that one feels on himself,

is transformed through technology.

Aristotle said so.

Aristotle, who’s one of the founders
of our democratic thinking,

although people who speak of this don’t usually
know that the Athenian democracy

only reached out to ten
or fifteen thousands of people.

Just men, who did not rely on their salary

but their income and were free to
practice the “dolce far niente”,

bios theoretikos, the theoretic life,
the poiesis, poetry,

philosophy, general thinking, etc.

So, Aristotle said that democracy
can’t go beyond

the walls of the polis,
because it can’t reach further

than the orators voices.
When there’s no dialogue,

there’s no possible democracy,
and he was right, so

the walls of the polis were
physical until now and

no more than one city could be
democratic in those terms.

I mean, there couldn’t be
a participatory democracy

if there was no possibility of dialogue.

What do the Internet and the Information and
Communication Technology allow in general?

That everyone speaks and listens.

Those walls are directly brought down.
When there’s a students protest

in Iran or when there’s a strike and
a later protest by Buddhist monks

in Myanmar, there’s always someone recording
with a phone which is streaming live

those events to a global audience.

So, what about it? People who listen,
see, observe, take part

in that information become protagonists.

Things start happening live.

And it almost sounds like a joke that there’s
a Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

What are foreign affairs?
Every single thing out there

directly affects us, we’re now
living in a time

of fundamental elections for
Spain, which is the election

for president in the United States.
I think that we should all vote,

because, deep down, it’s going to be someone
ruling over our heads,

to put it like that, right?
Last night, a very interesting debate took place

between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump,
if the latter can be called a mister,

and it was viewed live,
especially for those who wanted to get up

at 2:30 AM to follow it, right?

Anyway, inside this matter
I would like to talk to you about

the ethical and political dilemmas brought
by one of the most interesting models

of computing that exists today,
which is the model of cloud computing.

I forgot to say that I had
the luck of doing

a Philosophy PhD, at Education Sciences,
from the Complutense.

I’m also a Computer Science master
from Universidad Pontificia of Salamanca.

I did a Science, Technology and Society PhD
at the University of Rensselaer,

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York,

where they have the best department
of science, technology and society in the world,

headed by a tremendously interesting
person called Langdon Winner,

who was my thesis director and has
become my best friend.

And, apart from being an exceptional
person in many fields, he’s a person

who the Senate and the Congress, in
a group hearing, invited to define

the American law of social
control of nanotechnology.

Therefore, I come from a field
where differences between science and arts

don’t exist at all, where you can’t say
one is on technical side

or on a humanistic side,
and where those two sides necessarily

have to have a meeting point,
or else we’ll hardly get to do anything interesting.

But well, since the subject of this conference
is very concrete and peculiar,

I’d like to stick to it, and as I said,
I’d like to talk about the ethical and political

dilemmas in the cloud computing,

along with the big data, one of the most
powerful paradigms of today.

And let’s do something else too:
if anyone at any time

would like to raise a hand, I won’t
be bothered at all, all the contrary.

The more interactive this is, the better.

I’ll try to go fast to have
some time later for you

to show me your concerns, or your protests,
or your divergent opinions,

for there’s nothing more
interesting than that, alright?

Then let’s begin.

What I’m about to discuss comes from
a research project by MINECO,

titled “Science, Technology and Society.

Ethical and Political Dilemmas in the Model of
Cloud Computing as a New Sociotechnical Paradigm“.

And the reference to this
innovation project is here.

This is important to mention,

since at the end of the three years
and a half, I’m asked, as director

of this research project,
for a report of everything I do,

so if I don’t mention this,
it’s all for nothing, isn’t it?

But the important thing is that, at least,
there was funding to have

an interdisciplinary team that
can handle these matters.

If we part from a definition of cloud computing,

there’s one created by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology from the United States government

which is really simple:
“Cloud computing is a model

that enables a whole set of computing
resources such as networks, servers,

applications, storage, service, etc...
to be available in a direct way

on demand for users and to be
acquired and released

with a minimal effort and without
an important interaction between

the provider and the own user”.

It has five specific features.

The first one is that the services will
be provided in a clear way

for the user, it doesn’t have
any kind of direct interaction.

Then, it’s very important that
the computers or devices

from which these applications can be launched,
these are called “thin clients",

I mean, computers with very little power
because the processing ability is not

on the user’s side, but on the cloud’s.

So tablets, smartphones, netbooks,
etc., can be used.

After that, there will be a set of resources
which will always be available

dynamically for the users,
in terms of memory, storage,

bandwidth, virtual machines, etc.

Also, there will be a very notable
elasticity since every single user

will experience the resources in use
as if they were only available

for him or her, that gives a feeling
of unlimited resources

and a system scalability:
the more users that are in,

if the system is well designed,
each one will probably have

a unique experience as to being the only
user using those resources.

And then, there’s the possibility of a clear
monitoring of the resources,

which is particularly important,
for both users and providers.

There are three types of models of service,
one of them is the applications service,

another one is the platforms, in the applications
one is what we usually know,

services such as Gmail. By the way, here’s
a small review, and it’s the fact that,

as we’ll later see, there’s a series of
issues with privacy and with

the integrity of emails
through a service like Gmail.

And it’s stunning to me
that the Complutense University

has outsourced all
of his email network.

Which means that all the information that goes
among researchers in our university,

including matters of potential
patents, is being monitored

by a private enterprise with strong
ties to the American government.

It’s not an opinion,
it’s a matter of fact.

And then, services like platforms
offer tools and

a programming environment that allow
a customization of the applications.

Microsoft Windows Azure and Google App
are two examples where the control

is leveled with the application but not
with the physical infrastructures.

Then, we have a last version
of the models of cloud computing

which is infrastructure as service.

Here the final users do have
access to the processing,

the network resources, etc... and
they can configure said resources

inside their operating systems
and use them as they please.

Here you have examples such as Rackspace,
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, etc.

When we talk about cloud computing,
I’d like to emphasize that it’s not just

a technical development, but it involves
a whole huge change of mentality

in the way of living and understanding
how we process our information.

Of course, this has many advantages,
such as that one can focus more

on the creative aspects, not on
the capture infrastructure,

or process, or use of information,
the spreading of it, etc.

But it also presents serious ethical and political
dilemmas which must be taken into account.

A lot of them, in my opinion,
don’t have so much to do with the contexts of use,

with the way they are used, but with
details belonging to the design

of the cloud computing. And the key
question here would be if

cloud computing can be understood as
an inherently political technology.

That's a very, very interesting
matter we can see now,

because the history of computing
shows how technical decisions

always or often have some
important social consequences.

I mean, the ambit of technology
is not opaque at all,

in general it's not opaque to the daily life,

but innovation is much more than
a resource that optimizes efficiency itself.

We have so many examples of it..
Believing in the neutrality of the technical decisions

or thinking that nowadays there are aspects
of the human life that remain isolated

from the technical development is quite hard.

Could anyone in here tell me any aspect of
our reality, of this activity,

in which technology, as an instrument or as a metaphor,
hasn't altered it substantially

or isn't affecting it? Can anyone
think of any ambit?

There are, but not many, though.
I can't think of any right now,

but, can you come up with any aspect where
technology doesn't play an important role?

Yes, please.

(PUPIL) The ambit of the countryside,
agriculture, livestock...

Look, the most trolled enterprises in
the whole world of technology,

enterprises like Monsanto, are
precisely related to agricultural production,

to the creation of fertilizers, etc...
which have automatically transformed

the whole agricultural world.

Nowadays there’s even a huge controversy
with those enterprises that are producing

what they call ‘killing seeds’, I mean,
seeds that can be sown by the farmer

but are no longer fertile a year later,
therefore they’re no use for a new harvest,

so the farmer depends all the time
on the enterprise

to keep sowing his fields.

In fact, there’s a tag that serves as
a mantra in the agricultural ambit

which is the Green Revolution.
It involves the use

and general advertising of transgenic
organisms to enhance productivity

on behalf of erasing starvation in the world.
The only problem is that, giving use to

a basic precaution principle, we still don’t
have much experience on what the consequences

of the technological transformation
of agriculture will be.

I can only think of one that affects
a huge part of the people here

and it’s about, at the end of the 20th century,
occidental men having 90% less

of sperm than occidental men from
the beginning of the 20th century.

I mean, the ones from the end of the 20th century 90% less
than those from the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th

because of the diet,
among other things.

If you can tell me something natural
that you can buy at a supermarket

I would encourage your teachers to add
one more point to all of your subjects.

Go buy at a supermarket and
tell me what’s natural there.

(PUPIL) Unless it’s an ecological supermarket...

Okay… I can say something about wheat.

The wheat we eat nowadays is already
completely different to the wheat

that ceased existing in the 40s and 50s,

because taller ears of the wheat were made
for the combine harvesters

to reap them properly and from that point,
96 or 97% of all the wheat in the world

is already transgenic, it’s already transformed
from the original varieties.

Yes, anything else, please?

(PUPIL) Philosophy.

Wow, well, philosophy…

You’ve actually said something quite beautiful,
and philosophy in many cases

is still unaware of the technology subject.

When they say “Man,
the essence of man, man”.

Can anyone tell me what is
man out of science?

If you know what a human being is...

What’s a human being when at the Beijing
Olympics they started to

introduce a committee for
genetic doping to detect

the inclusion of monkey genes
so the high-jumpers had

more explosiveness in the jump?

Or dolphin genes so the skin of the
swimmers was more hydrodynamic?

When the result of an athletic
test is totally transformed

or also the resistance ability through
stuff like erythropoietin

or tetrahydrogestrinone. I mean,
there’s such a huge developed doping,

the human being can be transformed
in such an incredible way

and also when we see the difference

between a “pan troglodytes” chimpanzee
and a human being...

Who’d like to tell me what is it?
Minimal, 46 chromosomes for us,

48 chromosomes for them.

Take two acrocentric chromosomes,
turn them into a metacentric one,

and we already have patterns for
possible transformation, artificial evolution,

from chimpanzee to human
being or vice versa.

I mean, the essence of human being
is completely touched

and defined by science,
and philosophy is totally unaware of it.

Just like some philosophy
that doesn’t talk with science

is just as blind as any computer science
that’s not in touch with the outer world.

Therefore, every concept of free
software, free knowledge, etc...

has so much strength, because, until this moment,
we’ve conceived science

as a centralized knowledge and not peripheral,
thinking that specialists are

in the center of the system.
However, nowadays,

we begin to see that the called
“hidden innovation”, I mean,

the innovation that is not
brought up in universities,

research institutes, etc.,
has a key role today.

How the called "power users", or
"early adopters" too, people who adopts

some technology in an early way
and give new uses to it

often give new development patterns
that seemed totally unthinkable until now.

And the problem with free
software and knowledge,

the problem to the system lies in the metaphor

they entail because, somehow,
if one gets used to sharing

we’re already talking about
a whole new mind model

where synergy opposes competence.
Where everything not given is a loss,

and where wealth doesn’t have anything to do
anymore with gold, with something you

keep under your bed, but it has more
to do with lettuces

and tomatoes, I mean,
perishable products

which at some point no longer have value
if not watered or kept

or taken care of, etc... So,
there’s also another interesting paradigm.

Our economy was based on
the law of supply and demand

through which the most scarce
has more value because few people

has access to it. So, if anyone owns
a Silver Ghost’s Rolls Royce

from the 30s, it’s very valuable, not because
it’s a great car, but because it’s a very rare car,

there are very few models in the world.
The fewer there are, the more valuable they are.

There’s a movie, “The Collector“, where
a philatelic who collects rare stamps

finds out he has a very limited
one and finds another person

who has another copy of the same stamp.

What does he do when he has both stamps in his hand,
when he gets to buy the second stamp?

He tears one of them apart, because one unique stamp is
more valuable than the sum of two rare stamps.

I mean, the fewer people has access
to something, the more valuable that is.

However, if we talk about emails
or operating systems...

If someone has an operating
system that nobody uses

or just one uses,
is it very or not very valuable?

If someone has an email and just him/her
has access to the Internet,

is it very or not very valuable?
Not valuable at all.

When does it start being valuable?
The moment the more it has.

When is it very valuable?
When everyone has it.

So, when we talk about
an economy of the information,

of the cloud computing, when we
work on the cloud and when

we work in a network, the total value of the network
will rise with the squared number of users,

in other words, the total value of the network
will increase in a quadratic function.

While in the real world, the fewer
people that has access to something,

the more valuable that is.
Alright?

Technology can embody models of life,
ideological forms

and also forms to dissolve power or to resolve
controversies regarding power.

My teacher, Langdon Winner,
has a beautiful article

titled
“Do artifacts have politics?”

in which he presents many cases,
and one of them is Robert Moses’.

Robert Moses was the great architect
of New York who in the 30s and 40s

worked on public constructions
that gave this city the role

of business metropolis that has until now.

And among his most acclaimed works
are over 200 overpasses

which lead to Jones Beach Park,
in Long Island,

which is like a green lung for the
city, like Casa de Campo

in that time. He built them in the 30s,
they’re overpasses that cross

the big highways such as Palisades Parkway

that lead to Long Island.
So under those overpasses

there’s a height of 2.5 meters that
contrasts with the huge width

of the multiple lane highways
in the United States.

Then, when they tried to understand why

this man had built overpasses of
just 2.5 meters, they started

with the esthetic and architectural guidelines.

The evolution of European art nouveau,
of matter qualities,

the volumetric dialogue…
And Langdon Winner says in this article:

“None of that is true, it needs
to be seen in a social environment”.

In that time, Robert Moses was
quite racist and snob,

but, in any case, he couldn’t hang
a sign in the parks of New York

that said “Black and Hispanic people
are not welcomed in these parks".

However, when overpasses with a height
of 2.5 meters are built,

what can pass below them?
Automobiles, right?

But, what cannot pass?

(PUPIL) Buses.

Then if you technically prevent buses from
crossing under those overpasses,

the access to those parks
is radically limited.

So technology was acting as
a way of social discrimination

to make only black and Hispanics
with their own cars

able to access those parks.
Everyone knows that black people

who had their own car in the 30s
and have a lot of money

and are very famous, they whiten before
our eyes in a metaphysical way.

Just like the transformation that Michael Jackson
went through but in a natural way.

If we continue, we’ll see that until now
we’ve gone from centralized models,

from the famous mainframes,
the IBM S/360 and S/370 from the 70s,

to distributed computing, citizen web
2.0, web 3.0, the Internet of things, etc...

We’ve come from models where
intelligence laid in the center

to a distributed intelligence.
From time to time,

a new sociotechnical paradigm arises.
There are tablets, smartphones,

phablets now, virtual reality,
and I hope that by the end of this year

we already have the first models of
Oculus Rift and PlayStation 4 goggles

out on sale.
The big question is whether all of this

has anything to do with
a wider cultural context.

There are official uses, but under that,
non-official uses given by

the very users, and this is what I was
previously calling “hidden innovation”.

If we talk about the dilemmas
that cloud computing brings along,

there are three fundamental risks that
should be noted, and a fourth one showed there.

First off, we have the privacy issues,

with the loss of control over access
to the information that we

store on the cloud.
Think about the messages that go through Gmail,

about the photos on
Picasa or Instagram, etc.

Intellectual property issues, due to

delocalization of servers
and multiple legislations.

Cloud computing is ubiquitous,
however, servers are

in certain countries and it’s their
law the one they must follow.

Therefore, if a server is in China,
in the United States, in an informational paradise

or in the European Union, it will obey
very different legislations about protection

of personal data.
And then there are problems

related to the inherently nature
of cloud computing.

Technical and political decisions
on CC implementation

are, as we’ll see, interdependent.

There’s a very interesting concept by
Bruin Floridi, which is the concept of

interlucency, of transparency in some way.
Floridi deffends that the fundamental

to ethically use cloud computing
is that it exists

an epistemic virtue that creates
a shared knowdledge

necessary for the user’s knowledge
to know what to conform to.

I mean, there’s a duty from
the provider’s side to inform

of the conditions of use of CC

and of the pros and cons for
the users, in a way that

the user may decide what
he/she really wants to do.

Truth is I don’t really
share this point of view for a reason,

because we’re often seeing that the terms
of agreement from the computer programs

are like the pamphlets of medication.

Is there anyone in here who reads
the full contract of a program, of Windows

or of an operating system, of Apple,
when you click “I agree”?

Yes? You do read it?
You are the first one in the world I’ve met.

(LAUGHTER)

They had an experiment at a bar, in
the United States, some time ago,

not long ago, in which they allowed
the use of WiFi after giving

a contract and answering “I agree“,
and that contract involved the sale

of your children, your home
and something else.

And people fell directly for it,
no one reads those contracts.

Deep down, I think that before having
a proper information about

what we win or what we lose,
we need to have a deeper education

to know what society we want
and what values are those

we want to serve with our own work.

When we talk about these ethical dilemmas,
I’ll mention ten in particular,

and I’ll go fast so we have
time later to talk about it.

First, there’s already a new
factor of digital divide.

If society was in the past divided
between the rich and the poor,

and now between inforich and infopoor,
we should also take into account that

in cloud computing any
infraestructural weakness

will affect a lot its implantation.

I mean, the world can be
divided into two categories:

first-class places where
we have fast Internet access

and second-class places where
there’s no service.

In the second, there will never
be informational equality

because one won’t be able
to have the processing ability,

somehow, we not only become
slaves to our devices

but slave to what we would
call "imperfect places”,

those places where one cannot
use all of the cloud computing services.

Reliability becomes an absolutely
critical element, given that our data

is on the cloud, like
what happened to Yahoo.

Not long ago 50 million passwords were stolen.

I think that’s the number, right?
In a single strike.

If they steal something from your
computer, it is limited.

However, any theft,
any fragility of vital subsystems

becomes a big problem. If you’ve noticed,
we’re going back to a centralized model,

where intelligence once again is part of the
core, of the central almond of the system.

All of this of course creates a collective perception
of vulnerability, and it’s very interesting.

This happens, for example,
to the energy models.

It’s not the same to choose a centralized
energy model like nuclear plants,

big dams, etc., or another
distributed with green energies.

It’s not just a technical decision,
it’s a political decision.

Whether our energy is based on uranium
or on plutonium,

it’ll be justified that a government states
“We are forced to bug your

telephone lines and your electronic communications
for the sake of the security of society.”,

“We have to torture terrorists in prisons
before the menace of a possible attack

by crashing an airplane into a nuclear plant", etc...

But well, look: if the energy model
was distributed and not centralized,

I can’t picture Osama bin Laden with
a baseball bat breaking solar panels

on the roofs, I can’t.
So, if there wasn’t that

centralized energy model, there wouldn’t be
a collective perception of vulnerability either.

And the perception of vulnerability is
what leads us to accept the undesirable as inevitable,

it’s a kind of policy which Naomi Klein,
the great American intellectual,

reports on the called “The Shock Doctrine".
That on many occasions we are presented with

the measures we do not wish to adopt
as inevitable measures.

Earlier, we were talking about
the Faculty of Philosophy and I’ll give

you one small and fun example.
The Faculty of Philosophy had never had

closed doors in its classrooms for many years,

however, there comes a time when
the deans are interested in having

control over the classrooms,
so for the people to be locked out

they thought of adding locks to the doors.

But the students, their representatives,
would have complained at any moment

if that had happened.
What are the solutions?

Put cannons inside.
They put cannons inside the classrooms,

without a cage and lowered

so many of them could be stolen.

The moment they’re stolen, locks are added

to the doors, but not to lock people out,

but to protect the patrimony.

So look how the best way

to get a problem out of the
way is to redefine it.

A political problem is redefined
as a technical problem.

Same thing happens with a government.
If a government has a strong police,

a harsh system for social control,
the best thing to do is to create

a very sensitive technology, very likely to be
attacked and very centralized, very gathered.

In that moment, we’ll have to choose
whether to protect society and its liberties

or to protect our own infrastructures.

Therefore, uninterrupted functioning
is an absolute must.

Nothing can be done offline and,
obviously, the risk of

a cyberterrorist attack is bigger
in a society whose services

are centralized and sensitive.
In the end, we’ll have to decide

what to protect:
society or the very cloud.

Internet will be needing a more
democratic architecture to prevent

cloud computing from turning
into a new form for social control.

I don’t wanna take long on this,
about BGP,

but as you know, the Border
Gateway Protocol is the way

of Internet to determine the flux
of data packages between domains.

And it is not very flexible
and not very smart

when it comes to choosing a path that goes
through the least possible number of independent systems.

A more intelligent and decentralized
multi-path intelligent routing will be necessary

for the cloud computing not to turn
into a new form for social control.

This has examples like the viral
networks of Walter Lippmann or like

the whole Open Spectrum matter.
I mean, the non-assignment of

radio or microwave frequencies,
but a smart sharing

of the whole spectrum.
But that would be another matter.

What we said before, too,
the delocalization of information

and the extraterritoriality of laws.
CC services are

by definition, ubiquitous.
However, communication

infrastructures and servers
belong to countries

and are submitted to the national regulations.
The legal framework is very confusing nowadays.

And there are risks for privacy
and integrity of personal information.

CC implies massive data traffic,

that data flows out
of our firewalls,

so by having systems of shared
storage, shared channels,

shared resources,
virtualization of the same data

in different operating systems
at the same time,

there’s always a major
vulnerability factor.

And we shan’t forget that the user
is the ultimate responsible

for any violation of the law.

Also talking about the
challenges to social empowerment

and hidden innovation,

we must think that having local
tools and, above all, free software

allows us to be the
owners of what we’re doing.

However, inside all this
set of services in CC,

the user does not need any
specific skills to work on it

and intelligence is on the side
of the cloud and not on the users’.

What about its technical autonomy?

If there’s a shutdown, if a service
like FileFactory closes,

what about the people?
If we forget to use

our local tools and let
the image storage services

the ones that process and exchange them, etc.,
there comes a point in which we lose

an important part of autonomy which
Richard Stallman reports in this quote:

He says: “One reason you should
not use Web applications

to do your computing is that you lose control.
It’s just as bad as

using a proprietary program".

He encourages us to do our
own computing with copies of

a freedom-respecting program.

Otherwise, one is putty in the hands
of whoever developed that software.

Menaces to network neutrality
are also important

since the thin clients, I mean,
the not-so-powerful computers

that launch these services,
are enough to be able to

enjoy them.
The key matter is

the quality of network access,
so the access quality

becomes a critical requirement and also
there’ll be more and more enterprises

interested in being able to give
people who are willing to pay more

a privileged access to the network,
hence that much pressure

for that neutrality to be broken.

And there’s the need for a
higher decentralization of Internet.

When the Internet is used to further
centralize computing power,

the pendulum seems to be swinging away
from individual autonomy,

and towards more concentrated power

in fewer hands.
We should ask ourselves

if this is within
the Internet’s philosophy.

CC will be, from this point of view,

an inherently political technology.
Once fundamental decisions are taken,

changing the sign of its social
impact will be extremely difficult.

Just like with Robert Moses’ overpasses.

Once those were built,
there was no way for the buses

to cross them to get to the parks.

So putting rails and flowers

won’t do much change to the system.
Then the important thing is to be able

to do a social futurology previous

to the own uses of CC.

From this point of view, since
it will be affecting even more areas

of our own activity,
be it jobs, be it

our leisure time for example, Pokémon GO is
a good example of a on-cloud game,

but as we’ll see as well, autonomous cars,
driverless, by Apple

and Google are becoming elements
that use factors

of CC such as geolocation and also

ethical norms, as we’ll see,
to know how a car should react

during a risk factor such
as the possibility of having

many people in the road
ahead and we have to divert.

What will the car do? Run them over or
throw the driver and the family down a cliff?

We’ll see more about it later.

Corporate agents, the enterprises,
become much vulnerable

to the influence of central states

because of national security matters,
law enforcement, war on terrorism,

defense of national values,
protection of free trade, etc.,

for the enterprises to be

some kind of cultural and political
battering rams in this war.

Google, Microsoft and Apple
admitted that they accepted

subsidies from the US Government
in exchange for

user and content identification
and for general access without

explicit judicial order to files downloaded

by users to their systems.

I’ll quote two sentences
which are very curious

where a Google attorney says that:
“Users from any

email system who exchange information

and mails with a Gmail user

should have no legitimate
expectation of privacy ever",

I mean, they shouldn’t be surprised
that their emails are being monitored.

And because of this he states:
“Just as a sender

of a letter to a business colleague
cannot be surprised

that the recipient’s assistant opens
the letter, people who use

Web-based email today,

cannot be surprised of their
emails are processed by

the recipient’s email provider.

And, of course, a person should
not have legitimate expectation of

privacy for their information that they
voluntarily turn over to third parties.

It’s quite curious, because when
I give a letter to the mail service

I’m not expecting the postman
to open it, just to deliver it.

I mean, I’m not giving him a
blank check, the question is:

why am I giving it to Gmail?
And of course when I check my mail

from my Complutense teacher account,

I suddenly notice it says
“Featured messages”,

“Important people who sent you information".

I say: why do you people have to check
if those people are important to me?

Of course, that entails
information scanning.

Okay, what I said before.
Sending an email

is like giving a letter to the mail service.
The expectations are that the service delivers

that letter, but not that
it opens it and reads it.

Similarly, when I send an email I expect it
to be delivered to the intended

recipient with a Gmail account.
But, why would I expect

its content to be intercepted
or read by the provider?

And, lastly, we have
the called "function creep",

I mean, the unauthorized spreading of
information for different purposes,

and personal data collected collected
for a particular and well defined purpose

can be added to other data,
mixed, combined and

get a result from it that
is unrelated to the original purposes.

The case of Instagram,
in 2012 it announced

that its advertisers can freely make use
of any uploaded personal picture

without economic compensation
and notification to the users

A big scandal was on the table

and they backed out, but anyway this
is an example of how with just

an ownership change of a company
or with an American company

being sold to another country outside
the US or the European Union

and with other type of legislation,
the laws that the information conforms to

inside the servers

totally changes.
There are other dilemmas as well

that have to do with such fun
things as cloud robotics,

autonomous cars,
drones programming,

who’s responsible for
the accidental shots by a drone

that is, by definition, automatic?
Automated weapons are also

subject to the dilemma and of course
they take the dilemma of morality of ethics

of robots to another more complex
than we had until now.

Car makers are facing the
problem of which algorithm

they should have to protect the passengers
in case a possible running over.

Let’s say you’re driving
on a mountain road

and there are five people on the road.
Your autonomous car notices there are

five people and so to prevent the greater harm
it throws itself down the cliff.

The question is:
who would buy that car?

But if you ask people how an autonomous
car should be programmed,

the answer will be:
“aiming for the greater possible good".

It’s the utilitarian concept.
This takes us to the famous dilemma

of the trolley problem which
Philippa Foot introduced in 1967,

it’s a very fun matter.
Let’s say you’re on a trolley

with no brakes and all of a sudden
you see ahead of you a certain number

of workers, let’s say five,
and you’re going to run them over.

However, if you change of track,
there’s a split of tracks,

you can just kill one person,
what would you do in such case?

Divert to kill one person
or run those five over?

And the answers are
obviously very complicated.

You can say: “Well, five is okay, but

what if there are five on one side
and a little kid on the other?"

How do we react in this case?
There’s also another version where

there’s a very, very fat person
who we know if we can push

it’ll make the trolley derail
and not kill anybody.

We must throw down the fatty, this looks
like something by Mike Myers, right?

So, here we have a very
important problem to know how

to react. Also, when we talk
about on-cloud robotics

look at the extraordinary
ability given by the fact that

the programming of the robots
or automatic devices,

be it weapons, robots,
autonomous cars, etc.,

can be done live from
the cloud itself, therefore

the changes are much
more effective and efficient.

Good, we’re ending here
with the CC matter

as a way of life.
According to Langdon Winner,

technologies are forms of life
because they reflect our interests,

desires and embody the goals of people,

the goals we promote and develop..

In a world of global consciousness is also needed
that the global technical infrastructure

has a certain ethical element and of course

CC is very compatible with
that definition of privacy,

for example, from the young people now
where privacy is not something to defend

in an absolute way, but relatively.
And it’s also important and must be counterbalanced

with the right that every youngster
of being able to live-stream his/her life.

So it’s not just about the right
for privacy of data

but the right of being able
to share with my friends

all the important data which
may be important to me.

We also need a critical approach
to problems like these,

since a more advanced technology
doesn’t just mean a better society.

“Technological determinism" would mean that,
given the advance of the Internet,

everything is getting democratized.
Given the advance of the

Information Technologies and
the drop of prices by Moore’s law,

everyone will be able to enjoy
by the trickle-down effect

what was very expensive at a certain time,
now becomes cheaper and everyone

has access to it.
Well, it’s proven that

this is not so simple.
Technology opens some democratizer doors

but not necessarily achieves
this without any other element

if a new form of construction
is not created, a new social order.

When technologies take over
society, the form

a new sociotechnical system which sometimes
even replace the very constitutions

because they tell us how to
distribute power, authority,

freedom and justice. We should ask
ourselves if that’s somehow the case

of cloud computing.
CC will allow

companies and agencies to function

at a much larger scale,
providing global solutions.

The questions is whether we will eventually
eliminate cultural differences

and local solutions on behalf of a
unified standardized market-society

The rationality of CC

also will impose new forms
of hierarchical reorganization,

new actors will rule
and information as big data

will be power more than ever.
Maybe the perfect paradigm

lies in the combination
of the flexibility given by CC

with the ability of data processing
given by data mining and big data in general.

In this digital ecosystem,
we’ll have to see if CC

will predate other models
of non-global business, right?

Since we can work on a much
larger scale with the same flexibility

of the local models, for example,
who buys at their local store

instead of doing it in Amazon?

And there will also be a bigger
concentration of political power on

CC companies, which will have a
powerful voice in regulation

or deregulation of the market,
controlling the political institutions

that should control them, then
there could be a shift

of political power leading to
a more vulnerable society to corporative

and enterprise interests.

Alright, it’s 2:00, only a
minute to uh... to finish.

Thanks for your patience.

As I said before, those who call
themselves "generation X" or "millennials",

I mean, people who were born
after the year 2000,

do not care very much about who owns

a personal picture of them
stored on a cloud service

but care more about the freedom
to share it and show it at will.

Then, any process of
identity construction emerges

from the “mediascape".

When one used to build
his/her identity in a traditional way,

he/she didn’t carry it around,
but it was what was shared.

I mean, the neighborhood one lived in,
the language spoken, the nation

one lived in, etc. But today,
the soundtrack of our life is

made of what we listen, read,

put in our MP3 player.
So, look at the same walkman metaphor.

When Sony invented the walkman,
which was the first

portable cassette working with batteries,
and one could carry it with earphones

on the street, they invented
much more than a device.

The concept of walkman is also
“the man that walks” and

it’s the person that builds his/her
own identity through this walk,

so what one carries inside their ears,
their brain,

what one listens to through
a walkman , initially, and now

an MP3 or MP4 player or whatever,
is built in their true landscape.

In other words, one life’s landscape is
the "soundscape" or the "mediascape".

If we want to know what’s with a person,
what are his/her habits, values...

it’s much more important to know
what’s on the MP3 player rather

than knowing where he/she lives,
walks and goes around.

So it’s a mobile construction
of the identity.

And in the end, I’d just like to highlight
a funny side that is the discussion that

Weaver makes about "god terms
and evil terms".

I mean, terms that are
the best and lame terms.

So a "god term", I mean,
a super positive term,

a god term, are those that from
the moment they’re spoken, everyone

is astonished, so
they play a huge role

in the settlement of the science
schedule, in countries like

the US. The concept of the last
frontier has been, for example,

a constant reference in American politics,
when they talked about

“the conquest of the west, the last frontier”.
Even in Star Trek: Space, the last frontier.

And it’s always an appeal
to an achievable dream.

When talking about CC,
if the data is on the cloud

it'll be so close to God
and if it's really in the sky,

who's going to worry about it, right?
There's a certain funny rhetoric

in that, but Weaver and
Langdon Winner say that language

reflects of a society,
so we have to be

very careful so, from an enterprise context,
some terms are not redefined

such as freedom, rights,
privacy, information ownership, etc.

We're closing with five short conclusions.
First, cloud computing

is a revolutionary development in I.T.
and it is

a sociotechnical paradigm,
a whole rationality set,

social and territorial organization, etc.

There is a strong financial
pressure to invest

in critical infrastructures.
It doesn't work in any case

if the territory is not wired.
Third, it can be interpreted

as an inherently political
technology in the strong sense.

I mean, certain technologies require
a set of certain requirements

to properly function.
Look at this.

There's an article about technology...
computing, well, kidding,

very rad written by Engels in
1872 and it's titled "On Authority".

A tremendously interesting article
in which Engels, the famous socialist author,

argues against anarchists.
So, Engels says in this article:

"Anarchists say that if deep down
the workers take control of

a mass production factory,
the worker will be freed

and people will live better".
However, what Engels argues

is that it's not the entrepreneur
who bothers the workers,

but it's what he calls
"the authority of the steam".

He says then: "When we mass produce,
when we produce through

technology, we dominate nature through
it but, at the same time,

we become slaves to ourselves because,
if one doesn't follow the pace set

by the chain of production, things
won't be properly made, they don't pass

the quality test,
it's like nothing was made".

Then, Engels says: "Honestly, it's not
always the will of some people

that oppresses others, but every
technological model, at a certain moment,

brings certain game rules
that one can hardly subtract".

Because of this, even Marx, notice that there's
a deterministic version of him in the first volume

of the book "Capital", where he states:
"The plough is to the farming society

the same as the steam machine is
to industrial society".

In other version he says: "The plough is
to the farming society the same

as the mechanical loom is
to industrial society".

I mean, when there are ploughs
the organization is feudal.

When there's Internet, the organization
can't be feudal,

it can't be centralized,
it can't be as simple as before.

Finally, we don't have to wait
to the implementation of technology

to forecast its impact on society.
These impacts above all

are due to its nature.
The last point is, to me,

the most interesting, but is subject
to discussion, obviously.

CC is in fact a political constitution.

When people get used to having
their data not in their phones,

but on the cloud, the mentality
will have changed. And just like

the way that a person's mentality
changes when having

their own energy at home, when they have
their photovoltaic panel or

their production of bituminous
schists or biomass or compost...

When they have their wind
turbines in windy lands,

for example the Canary Islands are great
for having a wind turbine at home,

it makes you practically self-sufficient.
When people have

informational autonomy, energy
autonomy, they often ask too

for a certain political autonomy.
However, when our

energy and information systems, etc...
are centralized

they also promote a more
centralized mentality, more competitive

and more selfish. Then, the discussion
on cloud computing,

and this is the final sentence, doesn't
have to do just with technical design,

but with which values
we are willing to support

and with the kind of
society we want to be.

Thank you so much, it's been
a pleasure being with you.