This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to human rights barrister Dr Susie Alegre. Susie is a legal pioneer in digital human rights, in particular the impact of artificial intelligence on the human rights of freedom of thought and opinion. Without a moment’s pause, many of us will share our most intimate thoughts with the largest tech companies and in doing so make it possible for them to categorise us and potentially jump to troubling conclusions about who we are. In her new book Susie argues that only by recasting our human rights for the digital age can we safeguard our futures.

‘Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate our Minds” (Susie Alegre, 2022)

0.00 Introduction

3.18 Can you tell us about your career and what’s led you to your current focus?

5.20 You argue that the online environment undermines our independence of opinion and in your book you illustrate this by starting with a brief history of legal freedoms to both holding beliefs and their expressions.

9.44 I’d like to focus on this manipulation. It’s hard to keep up with what’s happening in terms of the speed and number of platforms that are spreading ideas. How do we balance the fact that this is happening with the rights to form our own thoughts?

14.18 This whole area must be incredibly challenging. Can you give us a sense of what you face in trying to move legislation around like this?

18.10 How do you feel about your own experience of being manipulated on-line?

19.47 Can we turn to AI and how technology is now thinking that it can infer what our inner thoughts and feelings are?

24.01 What are thoughts on big tech company’s approach to ethics?

26.06 How do you think organisations in the tech space are going to give the application of human rights more teeth?

30.05 What are your thoughts on how the Chinese and Russian governments are wielding influence over their populations?

33.55 If we take the GDPR digital services act as an example, we can see that it’s a tricky balancing act to introduce legislation to achieve those goals and engage the public and commercial sectors. Can we do a better job in capturing the public’s imagination in these things?

37.34 What are the implications for leaders and organisations as they increasingly become dependent on digital and social technologies to prosper?

40.10 What reaction have you had across the political spectrum to your ideas?

42.14 You talk about how nobody wants to be manipulated and nobody thinks that are being manipulated. How do people get more honest and take more inventory in the ways that perhaps they are being manipulated?

45.41 So thinking about the freedom to think for younger people, what advice might you give them?

47.34 What are the next set of challenges for you? What are you working on at the moment?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Freedom to Think with Susie Alegre