Daily Archives: March 23, 2017

Gorsuch's Free-Speech Lesson Wall Street Journal (subscription) Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn evaluates the Supreme Court nominee's Senate confirmation hearings. Photo credit: Getty Images. March 22, 2017 7:11 p.m. ET. Senate Democrats have been flailing this week trying to land a punch against Neil Gorsuch, ... Expert: Supreme Court Nominee Could Decide Nation's Course on Immigration, Free Speech, LGBT RightsTennessee Today all 4,066 news articles »

Originally posted here:
Gorsuch's Free-Speech Lesson - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Almost 400 professors have signed a pact to uphold the right to free speech on their college campuses since professors Robert P. George and Cornel West, respectively of Princeton and Harvard, published the appeal last week.

If students possess the brains we gloated about in our college applications, this should alarm us. This kind of edict should jerk us college kids from our self-absorbed slumber as if someone tossed a bucket of ice water into our dorm-issued bed at dawns first light.

In the statement, George and West defend the pursuit of truth and diversity of thought in an argument that fuses the freedom to disagree to the preservation of our democratic society. They celebrate and encourage humility and open-mindedness, dispositions they believe lead to productive discussions. They write: All of us should be willingeven eagerto engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments.

Professors all around the country have signed this oath in response to a widespread campus culture that demands homologous thought in the name of equality. While these instructors have made an important choice, American universities wont progress until their students practice a commitment to true equality, which values free speech through the practice of authentic deliberation, honest discussion, and civil discourse.

Thats why we students need to take our own oath and start protecting the free speech we are privileged to practice. Without it, we will abandon an education that could challenge and strengthen our dearest beliefs for a thorough, self-imposed brainwashing with a hefty price tag. And what would be the point of that?

Earlier this month, a mob of students protesting at Middlebury College physically attacked a visiting author, Charles Murray, and injured Allison Stranger, the professor escorting him to his speech. This incident is a part of a trend, although the level of violence warranted it especially newsworthy.

This academic year has seen young scholars shout down speakers all over the country, branding themselves as the students who cried oppression. It is possible, of course, that some of those instances were good the right to peaceably assemble is one Americans should always protect and practice when necessary. But most of these protests obstructed what could have been a productive discussion between a group of debate-ready students and a famous partisan with a strong commitment to his or her beliefs.

The right to free speech enables speakers, professors, and students of any ideological conviction to publicly justify their principles. Thats what makes this situation so ironic. Protesters can express their hatred for someone because of the First Amendment, but in doing so, they argue for the obstruction of the same right theyre using. If their wish were granted, and the right to free speech abolished, they would gag themselves as much as their opponents.

Debate and discourse, enabled by the right to free speech, are integral to the learning process. When we humble ourselves enough to entertain someone elses views, we allow ourselves to consider why we might be wrong, which allows us to check our reasoning over and again. We have the opportunity to change our own minds or change the minds of others in how we perceive fundamental truths about humanity, and how those truths manifest themselves in todays society. Thats exactly what education is supposed to do.

But students keep choosing to drown out those they consider intolerable. Immediately labeled as racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes, anyone with a more conservative set of beliefs loses the chance to legitimize their thoughts. Whats more, the students who take that opportunity from them also give up their moment to hurl intelligent, tough questions that an expert ought to be able to answer. In condemning their rival as the worlds worst, they waste the occasion to articulate why they disagree and demand an answer to the trepidations that antagonize them.

A long list of professors have agreed to challenge their classrooms, and this will make a difference within the lecture halls, but thats not enough. Students spend the majority of their time at school in cafeterias, coffee shops, dormitories, and libraries places profs arent around to nudge conversations in a productive direction. Students have to take responsibility for their own discussions, which means they must be willing to have them in the first place, with a commitment to charity and humility as their guide. We need to ask each other why we hold certain truths, how those truths appear in society, and to what end we acknowledge them. We must examine our thoughts and the thoughts of our peers with frequency and curious and deliberate, yet kind, intent.

Thats when we will learn when we argue, explain, defend, oppose, and question. These discussions, though sometimes uncomfortable, will guarantee us an education, and, more importantly, protect us from brainwashing.

Students, its time to take action and protect the right to free speech and diversity of thought that the Constitution preserves. If we humble ourselves and learn from our professors and our peers, we can champion equality, rather than substitute it for a prescription to a bland, homogenous narrative. It is time to shed our snowflake identity and don the strong, smart character we are capable of embodying.

A Michigan native, Katie studies French and journalism at Hillsdale College, where she serves as assistant culture editor at the Hillsdale Collegian. Her work has appeared in Verily Magazine and Liberty Headlines.

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Professors Shouldn't Be Signing Free-Speech Pacts Alone. Students, Step Up - The Federalist

Amazon

In November 2015, Victor Collins was found dead in a hot tub in James Bates home in Bentonville, Arkansas. Bates was charged with murder. During their investigation, police discovered that he owned an Amazon Echoa device that, upon voice activation through the wake word Alexa, answers questions, provides sports scores, and [h]ears you from across the room with far-field voice recognition, even while music is playing. Alexa, in other words, both speaks to users and listens to and records them. The police sought and received a warrant to obtain audio recordings made by the Echo. Concerned that rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazons customers could frighten countless potential customers, Amazon filed a motion to quash the warrant on Feb. 17, 2017. Buried in that motion was a striking claim: that Alexas responses to user queries are protected by the First Amendment.

Amazon has dropped its objection since Bates himself agreed to have the information handed over to law enforcement, so the First Amendment argument will not be addressed in this case. But its highly likely to crop up again in the future.

Alexa is an example of weak artificial intelligence, or applied A.I. It (she?) responds to narrow requests with a narrow range of responses, and is a far cry from A.I. that can think like a human (called strong A.I. or artificial general intelligence). Alexa does not think or speak on her own; her actions are traceable to her programmers choices. So Amazon does not, in fact, claim that Alexa herself has First Amendment rights. Instead, it claims that Alexas response to users is actually Amazons protected speech.

Whether the First Amendment protects Amazons speech through Alexa reflects a debate from a few years ago about whether search engine results are protected. Back in 2003, Google asserted that its search engine results were protected by the First Amendment. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles known for his First Amendment scholarship, wrote a Google-commissioned white paper arguing that search engine results were like the pages of a newspaper: protectable because of editorial choices. Some agreed. Others countered that search engines were more like information platforms or conduits that should be regulated to prevent unfair behavior; or like advisers who owe duties of disclosure and loyalty to users. In 2014, a district court held that Baidus search engine results were in fact protected by the First Amendment, citing Volokhs reasoning and analogizing the search engine to a newspaper. This kind of decision makes it harder to impossible to regulate search engine outputs, for better or for worse.

In the realm of weak A.I.which some believe includes search enginescourts may be comfortable granting First Amendment protection to A.I. speech as an extension of the rights of the programmer. But what if Alexa were strong A.I.? Many scientists say the question is moot: They believe artificial intelligence will never achieve that status. But for the sake of argument, lets imagine it does. Then Amazons analogy to editing breaks down. As Alexas emergent behavior becomes more and more unpredictable, more divorced from the intentions of her programmers, it will be harder to use old analogies to determine whether her output is protected speech.

Despite the limitations of old analogies, as we argue in a recent paper, a strong A.I. Alexa might well be protected under current First Amendment law. When legal analogies break down, courts and scholars turn to theory: explanations for why we provide rights protections in the first place. The First Amendment has been justified under a range of theories, all of which may support providing First Amendment protection for strong A.I. speech. This is especially the case when you focus not on the A.I. speaker but on human listeners and readers. Under the marketplace of ideas theory, we protect speech to increase the stock of ideas from which people can draw. A.I. speech adds ideas to the marketplace.

Another popular theory points out that the First Amendment enables democratic self-governance, and A.I. speech (say, A.I.-written news stories) could help human individuals make important decisions about government. Only one major theoryautonomy theorypotentially runs into concerns when a speaker is not human. And even there, A.I. speech may be covered by the First Amendment because the law cares about the autonomy of human listeners, too.

Todays First Amendment law seems to care very little about the humanness of speakers. The Supreme Court has notoriously recognized speech protection for corporations. First Amendment cases dont hinge on how caring or shame-filled a human speaker might be. In fact, the exact opposite occurs: The First Amendment protects even the most callous human speakers.

Nonetheless, arguing that First Amendment coverage may extend to strong A.I. speakers raises a number of legitimate concerns. If A.I. is protected, why not protect speech by cats or by parts of nature, like waves? Well, for one thing, unlike a meow or a crashing sound, A.I. speech uses words and is therefore more likely to be understood as conveying a message. A.I. is also more likely to be central to some human communications effort, supplanting human communication. In other words, we often construct A.I. to serve an essentially communicative function. When it doesntwhen A.I. speech is really more like conduct or an expressive act, say by dancing or staging a protest march or building thingsthen courts will have to engage in their usual difficult disentangling of speech from nonspeech harms. This is not a problem unique to A.I.: Courts face it when analyzing flag-burning, parades, software, and even 3-Dprinting. Each of these acts has expressive elements, and each can also have a nonspeech component that causes physical or similar harms.

As with protecting search engine speech, protecting A.I. speech risks subordinating the rights of users. But the theoretical justifications for protecting A.I. speechbecause it contributes to the marketplace of ideas, because it helps users participate in democracy, and because it protects listeners autonomyare all grounded in the rights of human listeners. Thus, if A.I. is deceptive or dangerous, there is a stronger justification for the government to intervene to protect human listeners than there would be when a speaker is human and has rights, too.

When strong A.I. Hello Barbie tries to sell your child candy or an upgrade, the government may have a strong interest in intervening despite the First Amendment values at stake. First Amendment coverage (that something is considered speech) does not always mean First Amendment protection (that speech wins out over other concerns).

Top Comment

This really has nothing to do with free speech rights and everything to do with the fact that you may or may not have unwittingly recorded audiovisual evidence that you committed a crime and it is in your house. More...

Ultimately, contemplating First Amendment coverage of A.I. speech teaches us about current First Amendment law. For a human right, free speech is surprisingly inattentive to the humanness of speakers. Alexas stronger progeny might thus push courts to stop using the First Amendment to inevitably deregulate, and spend more time determining what harms are worth preventing and when human listeners have rights, too.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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Does Alexa Have Free Speech Rights? - Slate Magazine