The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Okay, thank you everybody for coming. It's a pleasure to see you all.
This is the IGF workshop on ethical networking, sustainability and accountability. Rather than introduce everyone I will turn over to my colleague Sara over here to ask our first question.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Thanks, Keith, first of all, oh, my name's Sara, I'm the vice care of the European party, we have a booth here if you're onsite. So, if you like what we're talking about please feel free to stop by.
I'd like to start by letting our speakers introduce themselves first before we start with question one. So, I'd like to hand over to Daphne. We have Daphne with us? Welcome, Daphne, please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do. Tell me something about yourself, your project and how it relates to ethical networking we're having a bit of ‑‑ now we can hear you?
>> DAPHNE TUNCER: Sorry I couldn't turn on my mic. Sorry about that.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: That's okay, happens, sometimes, go for it.
>> DAPHNE TUNCER: I'm so sorry, let me turn on my video now. Hi, everyone, thank you so much for join thing session so my name is Daphne Tuncer, I'm an academic. My research is on science, networks. I'm affiliated with in Paris, France. So, over the years I've been trying to work on putting together kind of actionable resources both for research and education on what I call responsible, responsibility and our digital development. So, thank you.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay. Wow. That's a big responsibility. All right. Thank you, Daphne. Next, let's see here. Next, we have Marc Bruyere, Marc, are you with us?
>> MARC BRUYERE: Yes, can you hear me in okay, quickly. I did a Ph.D. when I was 40, like ten years ago coming from a long path of industry. When you are actually starting to do research and you know what implication it is in research, it always questioned me how to do this without hurting society with an ethical way. That's what we, with Daphne had our very first conversation about it and I'm actually working for a large company back for ten years in research where everything does count in the choice you do. It is very valuable that we are all thinking of the impact of the choices we do. And I really appreciate we have this time together.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Oh, wow. So you've had a lot of insight to share there. Looking forward to it. Next we have Keith. Sorry, next we have Maurice. Maurice, are you with us?
>> MAURICE CHIODO: Yes can you hear me? It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm a research associate at the center for the study of existential risk at the University of Cambridge and also the cofounder of the ethics and mathematics project. I specialized in computer theory and algebra. I look at the risks posed by mathematics, mathematicians and technologies. I have insights and industry experience as an ethics safety consultant.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: You've done a bit of everything. Next we have Dennis. Dennis are you with us?
>> DENNIS MUELLER: I'm here. Thank you very much.
It's not an honor to be here I'm also a cofounder of the ethics and mathematics project. I'm currently a research associate at the University of Cologne and I work with Maurice at the center of the study of existential risk where I study extreme technological risks related to AI and the internet. My work connects to ethics, education, mathematics and I'm particularly interested in studying how mathematics and how this technology is shaping our world.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Wow. All right. Very good. Great to have you with us. Next, we have Alexander, are you with us?
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: Yeah, for sure, hello, I'm Alexander, I'm a member of the Russian party where we believe in very difficult. Now I have, and citizens of our country have constantly need to face sustainability challenges. I am also mathematician by education but have no relation to mathematic projects.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay. Welcome. Next, we have Keith.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: And I will just Bruce introduce myself I am Keith Goldstein; I've also been involved with Daphne and Marc here on drafting a research project on ethics and looking at how humans are able to learn new systems.
Thanks, so why don't we move onto the next question.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Let's start with the first question there we're sharing a little bit. So how can we ensure that mathematics and computer networking practices align with ethical principles including privacy, transparency, and accountability?
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Daphne, would you like to start?
>> DAPHNE TUNCER: Sure, I am a scientist but in the recent year I worked with people from social science. And through this collaboration I got to learn a lot about the role of narratives in how this contributes to how we approach and develop new technologies. And if you take computer network research as an example, so a lot of the narratives that we have today have to do with hyper performance, optimization, measurements, so of course there's nothing wrong with that. But my point is that there are things we take for granted. We never really question this narrative and so it does subconsciously as a research in computer networks, influence the way we speak so for me spending time to talk about this narrative with the inner space to confront them is an essential part and also ingredient to get an alignment between our practices in competent networks and ethical principles. So I think what is really important is to reserve time for that so today and I think this has been driven a lot by all the development in the computing technologies, we tend to value high speed as something good. It's fast, it's good. But to some extent this does not align with the ethical principle where we require time to think so I think time is very key here.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Thank you, next, Maurice. What are your thoughts on this?
>> MAURICE CHIODO: Sorry, let me pull that up. Yeah. Right. So ensuring that practices align with ethical principles it requires to have three interconnected channels of the alignment problem. From the perspective of mathematics, we must first define what we want to achieve.
Second, we must determine how to achieve these outcomes by developing the right mathematical tools, technologies and practices. This involves examination of the methods we use for instance a commitment to privacy requires not just policy but the implementation of privacy preserving mathematics from the ground up. The third and most crucial (screen froze) we must scrutinize three areas simultaneously, the outcomes, the integrity of our tools and the robustness of our processes. Any one of these can undermine the others. For example, an ethical process can lead to a harmful outcome if flawed. Therefore, we must analyze intent and design, we have to rigorously investigate the ability to do good or cause harm. We must understand not only what they want to do but also (screen froze).
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Oh, we have a bit of a lag there. We missed the last thing you said, Maurice.
>> MAURICE CHIODO: Sorry. So I was saying we must move beyond analyzing intent and we have to rigorously investigate the technologists' ability to do good or do harm and we must understand what they want to do and what they can do.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay. Yeah. That's a big point. Let's see. We have Alexander. You have a slightly different cultural environment. What's your perspective?
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: Let me give perspective not just from my cultural environment but from my experience. We all know that technology and instrumentation and tools are being developed much faster than regulations or even norms of what's going on. At the beginning of the internet there was no privacy considerations or security considerations because scientists have created internet for their own needs. They told that only good guys with scientific approaches will exist on internet. But actually, a lot happened since that. A lot of people came here, evil people, bad people, government, corporations, and so on. So, I think that our idea of sustainability and ethical networking should go towards understanding of what people needs first of all and only then such formulated needs need to shape technology developments. Back to my cultural background in Russia it's happening always the state controls corporations at developing technologies. They announcing that technologists are for the good of the people but lately it appears that's even network applications are developed for surveillance or control of people's activities. Thanks.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: All right, very good. We'll actually get into that topic in a moment. In the meantime, we have sorry, Dennis. What's your perspective?
>> DENNIS MUELLER: I think to truly align our practices with ethical principles we must understand that ethics is not an optional extra but something we embed with everything we do and so principles like safety and sustainability cannot be brought on at the end of a project especially with technologies such as the internet where fixes can be difficult or even impossible and I think that achieving this requires a fundamental systemic shift in how we work. We need to communicate, hire and train with ethics as a core competency.
Technical success must sort of be balanced with success from ethical and sustainability perspective and this can be quite challenging from my experience and from working with other engineers and it requires sort of like an adjustment because engineers can be accustomed to viewing their work as a technological optimization problems and this perspective demands that technical and nontechnical experts and the communities must find a common language and build a shared understanding of the goals and risks involved. And so ultimately, technical expertise and ethical expertise are sort of like two sides of the same coin and only by fostering a community that is sort of like equally values forward‑thinking responsibility and backward looking accountability we can ensure that this happens.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay, very good. Thank you, Dennis and finally we have Marc.
>> MARC VAN TREUREN: I think multidisciplinary groups and thinking is always a benefit. That is something in engineering design and so on with those implied choices as well.
With the thought have actually placed some time in industry. In research and so on. That's very important we also feed back in time to give proper response and IDs review from other people with other field of research or activities and so on. So, a simple story to illustrate this, we actually and using IPv4 to communicate through Zoom. Think of the teeny details as very profound impact today and the design that actually placed the source address before the destination at rest. What do you do when you actually are checking where the packet need to go? You are expecting the destination. Not the sounds to be first and these teeny details is using a lot of power and electricity every time for a long-time big impact on this. They have to wait on the field before having the resource. Kind of teeny mistakes but big impact and obviously reviewing and so on. Everyone and all disciplinary things is so difficult we didn't know that design would remain for that long. And in 1986 destination come first.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: All right, thank you very much. That's a wonderful segue into our next question. So, we've already, Marc, sorry, Marc has mentioned the technology that we've had for quite a while now. And how we've learned from that and made things more efficient but we're also seeing emerging technologies. How can these emerging technologies such as automated language models and artificial intelligence, the internet of things and so on, be ethically developed and deployed to ensure they have positive social cultural, political, academic and environmental impacts? Ten minutes for that one. So, let's go back to Marc for that one. Everyone will have a chance to answer but just going it in a kind of opposite order this time. Go ahead, Marc.
>> MARC BRUYERE: It's practice to have the view and impact of what we do but what I actually, when we started to open up ideas and thoughts with Daphne, we did find people are working hard on those questions. From the root practice of what we call computer science today with mathematicians with Dennis and Maurice, they put together a lot of questions, a lot of way of asking yourself is this a good project and so on. That practice needs to be every time for everything mostly. It is very hard to have the time for this but is necessary giving time for this kind of practice is essential. And it does, it has to cover a minimum of different pillars that's been influenced by their works and I think we rely on actually kind of future project on their approaches and it is very valuable and that's why like all the people already spend a lot of time thinking of it.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay. Very good. Thank you, Marc. Do you want, Alexander, you have something specific, go ahead.
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: Yeah, you asked a really broad question.
About impact of very, very difficult fields of human society. But I would like to point two issues. Just for technologists developing of technology is something funny. So that more than young people who are each rushing into technology, into education, into testing something, they don't think about impact of their activities at all so that's why we have this and so on. That I think is the lack of education, general education, not technology education. That's an issue. And I remember myself when I was young internet was at university and so on. I definitely can confess I did some unethical things which I would not do now having an understanding of all this impact. So, first of all, we need to educate, yeah. The second approach and this is actually kind of experience from local, from Russia because officials, corrupted officials, corporations, say, which have tied to the government state nearly the same things that technology need to be ethical. Technology needs to provide sustainability and be available for everyone. But in contrary, technology does not develop, for example, in Russia, we do not have 5G cellular networks because all the frequencies are stockpiled by fuel companies or militaries under the name of protecting common resource and so on so the development of 5G network is not possible. Not because of sanctions or some retrospective things but just because somebody tries to keep us sustainable. So that's, I think that's two points I would like to bring to the table and maybe discuss later, thanks.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: All right. Thank you very much, Alex.
That's an interesting point and also we invite questions from our online participants.
Next we have Maurice, go ahead, Maurice.
>> MAURICE CHIODO: I will try to give this from an engineer's viewpoint. There are three key aspects to ethical development here. Perspective, perspective, and perspective. Even the most conscientious engineer can ensure positive impacts on their own. We work deep within technical systems but technology is like AI and they connect people and the object people use. Therefore, human insights and a range of perspectives must be central throughout the entire development and deployment process. Not just as an afterthought this requires a shift in resources. This is not free, it takes time and effort to consult with experts, and engage with communities. This work must be budgeted for, not an optional extra but as a requirement. This must be scrutinized. We should solve recognized problems rather than a new tool. With every step forward we have to ask a critical question, who wins and who loses, this requires us to see and account for everyone.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Absolutely. So very good. Thank you, Maurice and Daphne. What are your thoughts?
>> DAPHNE TUNCER: I think kind of the keyword here in this question is positive impacts because positive for who and reactive to what? Everything is subjective and that is what you said, Alexander with the situation in Russia. What might be conceived as positive can be negative. It can be a community, a group of interests, can be a government, et cetera, et cetera. So as a question shows impact is not a dimensional. So we have to explain that it is one group of people that decide what positive impacts here so here I will answer as a researcher because that's my community but I think as a research, the important thing for us now is the right to engage a practice that goes beyond this kind of mode of organisation and silos that we see.
So you're scientists, but at the end what matters is we agree and we get some shared value and what positive impacts we are aiming at but also how we assess this impact.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay, thank you, Daphne. And Dennis of course. Go ahead.
>> DENNIS MUELLER: The development of technologies like large language models or the internet of things hinges critically on understanding the interconnected. We cannot compartmentalize because things will get overlooked nor can we sort of overlook the social, cultural or environmental aspects that are deeply intertwined we cannot address one without affecting the other and that means for developers there's sort of a dual responsibility here. Building safety into the technical architecture or into the technical system and also earning the public's trust. One does not necessarily imply the other in an interconnected world. And we cannot assume that engineers or mathematicians or computer scientists by default understand how to navigate this complexity or how to raise the right questions. They need to be taught this and given the space to think beyond immediate localized, often monetary incentives and they need to be taught how to do this in a way that earns trust from society. And once again this sort of requires balancing technical expertise and technical incentives with nontechnical knowledge and nontechnical incentives. In this sense, I can only reiterate what Maurice said, perspective is what really matters here from my perspective.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay. Thank you very much. I think we have quite a few overlaps there. I think a common thread is education and integration with our interdisciplinary teams and interdisciplinary work environments. And in that sense, we kind of have this big interdisciplinary environment with the IGF and that leads us to the next question. What role can the IGF play in promoting responsible internet governance? So, let's start with Daphne this time, go ahead, Daphne.
>> DAPHNE TUNCER: Thanks. Well I think that this is a platform to connect with the visibility of what's going on. As I said earlier I really think that understanding for who and related to what technology and development demonstrates that equality is not simple. So to me the IGF really is the ability to reach out to a very worldwide audience. So it must get look at that to provide medium to which we can confront our perspective especially coming from different part of the world. Because this raises perspectives that we need to embed into sustainable and responsible internet governance I don't think we should get a top down approach with a small group of people who decide on the definition of the equalities of governance so I really believe that the IGF has a key role to play in supporting the background and point of views that are necessary to design and build this governance framework.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay, thank you, Daphne. Maurice? What's your perspective? What do you think?
>> MAURICE CHIODO: Thank you. So my view, the IGF's most important role is the convener supplies the room and supplies the tables for the sustainable governance requires. This is a space where the dialogue is not just possible but the primary purpose but the idea of assemble is needed to generate perspective from governments to corporations to activists. As we discussed perspective is the single most critical agreement for the development. And engineering in a lab cannot understand their work just as a policymaker cannot grasp all the nuances. This is a place where the worlds connect. Breaks down the silos where the technical experts that often exist in industry and governance which is crucial in finding and nurturing a common language. The IGF acts as the first step, gathers the perspective, creating the foundation upon which the responsible governance like the internets can be built.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Okay. Thank you, Maurice. Next Alexander. Go ahead.
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: Yes, for sure. But first I would like to point out that ethics and sustainability might be really different in different part of the world. So I think that the locations where the last IGF was. And events like Internet Governance Forum is for us to all understand each other. Not to synchronize but to understand each other's approaches. So that's two, Internet Governance Forum not just connects different stakeholders from the same group but understanding of what is going on in different regions, different countries, different regions. And overall, it connects all IGF alone connects all positively thinking people looking forward for development of the internet for good. I think not just IGF. Maybe some other platforms like for information society is actually spinned off IGF 20 years ago. It still has forum which is are more populated by governmental people.
Though I think we should continue not just in IGF in our local IGF, in our local communities but also have broader interaction within United Nations and intergovernmental organisations.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Thank you, Alexander, Dennis, how about you?
>> DENNIS MUELLER: This is a follow up from Maurice's response. I think assembling the right people is only half of the process. The IGF's next crucial role is to ensure that the insights radiate outwards and they are already highly effective at correctly identifying emerging issues. I think what can be done next is sort of like how do we translate that awareness into action because our research on ethics and mathematics has demonstrated that many technical practitioners such as mathematics view their jobs as different. So as we understand that technology and sustainability are inseparable the understanding is not very widespread from our experience.
And so, the primary role that we see here is sort of like for IGF stakeholders to act as ambassadors championing this integrative experience and bringing it where people who are not yet convinced that this is important.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Very important point.
Thank you. Thank you, Dennis and finally Marc. Go ahead.
>> MARC BRUYERE: Well when we look into the story of IGF and why it is and so when we talk about internet that's not something we initially come up from the ITU. ITU has been, I mean the very beginning of ITU was the one before United Nations. But in '47 that was the very first chapter out of the second war. To be United Nations. Before UNESCO and so on. ITU is still there for standardizations, for telecommunication. But come up in the meantime that we all know, internet, very different way of, to be governed and becoming origin and so the way to design the standards are very, very different and then it is actually winning compared to ITU standards. What we call RFS, and the different things coming up from this community. Very different. Then United Nations created IGF because they realized that something is missing. It went out of ITU.
Then IGF is the good place actually to get many, many people. People in a very different aspect to take over what we call internet today but it is not only in the way the protocol has been designed and also the content and all the aspect and is very, very open and we have this occasion today that is very important. It could be, the missing part of it is how we can influence a little bit more. Participating a little bit more from the IGF community interacting with EATF, the design and the department of technology standardizations as it is.
There is gateway, people coming more from ITF and vice versa. I think it is very important as well and what we see and all the different aspects and so then I haven't been participating much on understanding the relationship between standing organisation like this but that's very important. That could be our future.
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: So, having those platforms in place gives us more leverage. Okay. Thank you very much. Everyone. Thank you, Marc, and everyone. For the last, we're doing okay time‑wise so we have time for one more question.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: We have time for one more question. I will take that over it's sort of a question as well and then we'll try and get some questions from the audience. We have just about nine minutes left and the last question is how can we evaluate the human component of networks. We talked about how these aren't just systems, there's people behind them. What can we do more on how to learn new networks. What tools can we use. Go back in reverse order with Marc first?
>> MARC BRUYERE: The human part of it. It's a good question and we have done well trying to understand this. But it is social works and so on. The only things I learned recently, trying and it is a fact. The quantitative space of nothing to see is the qualitative space. And trying to understand this through different spaces for deciding what quality we want to give to some evaluation we do as an engineer together with better optimization process or whatever system and so. Finding the right gap to be able to get the quantitative design we want as a good quality. As a beginning. It's, we need people to guide us for pushing to the questions and finding the right way of making finite choices.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Really quick so maybe go off to Daphne next.
>> DAPHNE TUNCER: Yeah, I don't know if I have much to add to this question. I think that's really kind of a typical question that we need collaboration across disciplines and yeah for people working on networks that's important. We understand the human perspective but we don't necessarily know the tool that we can use to actually access to human perception, human feedback on this, so I think that's where we need to collaborate, for example, with social scientists, I mean, we started working with you on that purpose. To learn how we can run survey, how we can run consultation and how to analyze the feedback on this method.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Okay. Since we're short on time, Maurice, Dennis, Alexander, would any of you like to chime in?
>> MAURICE CHIODO: I'd be happy to at this stage. So I think the more pertinent question really to consider here is how to evaluate the network as a sociotechnical system so humans' technical components cannot be assessed in isolation. Their value emerges from interactions. This looks at the systems and the potential points of failure. The failure for the component or the failure of the human component or the failure of the workflow they're meant to follow. And also the human machine to fail itself and finally we must account for failures caused by exogenous circumstances. And this is by the sociotechnical evaluation and these are neither purely human nor purely technical instead stemming from interaction.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Dennis or Alex?
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: I would like to add shortly that our main task is just not to lose our focus. And continue observing developments. So in case we shortly stopping attentions to raise to the latest developments to technological advances, they could and I think will go the wrong way. So just keep an eye and follow, and communicate with each other. That's important.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Dennis?
>> DENNIS MUELLER: I think the really big first step is to not view human components of a network similar to technical or mathematical components. Our experience of working with mathematicians, engineers but also with users is that their actions, their awareness and their motivation almost equally important when it comes to eventual outcomes and the failure modes that was outlined are deeply connected to who a human is. From that perspective we really need to think about this question, how do we understand who the humans are involved in these networks?
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: And just to chime in myself that this workshop itself really began as a questionnaire that Marc, Daphne and myself developed to try and learn about how humans are learning difficult new methods for operating computer networks and just for our last four or five minutes, I ask Bailey who is with us online to collect some questions from the audience and maybe she can read them out to us?
>> BAILEY: Hello, everybody, we do have a couple of questions in the chat here. I'll start with the first question. I apologize if I mispronounce anybody's name but her question is how can ethical networking be democratized to ensure oversight over data‑driven public systems?
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Would any of you like to quickly, three minutes and thirty seconds half that time answer it?
>> SARA HJALMARSSON: Alex? Would you want to... go ahead, Dennis.
>> DENNIS MUELLER: It goes back to what Alex says, we need to sort of like respect the different cultures and different regions of this world. Have different perspectives on this very question. The IGF should probably to be even more international. And to really sort of, like, bring in these different cultures and perspectives. But it's a hard question.
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: And I would like to reply to this question by noting that technology could not ensure you in something.
You are your own insurance you have to communicate; you have to oversight, you have to think about what is going on with your data and how it's being driven so IGF is a good starting venue for discussions like this. But your participation is also really important.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: And Bailey one more question.
>> BAILEY: There's one more here from Anna Gretel and she's asking, I would like to know how do you think of global north and global south dynamics, cross the issues you are arising?
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: Yeah, let me answer this question because I'm from a country that for a long time pretending to be global north and now pretending to be global south. Internet could shorten the gap between what we call west world and the others, of north and south.
But you also have to emphasize really clearly because in not very democratic developed countries, especially in countries of so‑called global south, technology can easily be abused by the government which will make gap to the north economical gap, well not civilization, societal gaps, democratic gaps much bigger.
I will repeat my answer. Technology could not close gaps. You have to oversight really, really accurately and constantly and not realizing it. Thanks.
>> KEITH GOLDSTEIN: Last 40 seconds, any other ideas? I will close out this session and thank everybody for coming. It was really interesting. I hope we can make a routine of this and produce some studies that also look into these very difficult questions and hopefully we'll have a publication or some other outputs for you all to read soon. Thank you, all, for coming.
>> AUDIENCE: (Applause).
>> ALEXANDER ISAVNIN: Thank you, all. Thank you, all, in the audience.
>> DENNIS MUELLER: Thank you.
>> (Music).
