[00:00] Baroness Beeban Kidron:And this argument about that tech is somehow, you know, it's so good that it's allowed to do a bit of harm is actually just tech exceptionalism, you know, on steroids.
[00:15] Ravi Gurumurthy:Hello, I'm Ravi Gurumurthy and welcome to this miniseries of Policy Fix on what Andy Burnham should do. We're at the beginning of Andy Burnham's tenure as PM, and today we're going to be talking about what he can do about Big Tech and how he can bring it under greater public control—a word he's used repeatedly in his first days in office.
[00:34]Joining me now is Baroness Kidron, who is a filmmaker. For 20 years she was in Hollywood, made films like Bridget Jones. She's now a crossbencher in the Lords and has become a campaigner and global authority on digital regulation and how we bring Big Tech to heel. Welcome.
[00:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Lovely to be here.
[00:52] Ravi Gurumurthy:You've written a fabulous book. I'm going to put it on here. And one of the things that it talks about in its title is how Big Tech took control. And I was thinking about this in the context of Andy Burnham talking about taking back control and giving the public control. And often we tend to talk about this in terms of energy and water and the utilities of the past. I think we still don't understand quite how far tech has captured our attention and shaped our whole preferences, and with a huge set of harms underpinning it.
[01:26]And I think it's an incredibly important book in trying to sort of make that more central to what a government should do. Do you want to just say, how did you—I mean, you spent 20 years making films and then you changed. How did you spot this well before others did? Just say a bit about how you got into it.
[01:47] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, first of all, really glad to be here. And I do think that there is an interesting thing about what does it mean to take back control, and who is taking back control from what for whom is probably the first thing that the new government really need to think about.
[02:06]And I think, and I hope that's what we're going to discuss, is there's personal control—you know, one's own agency and whether one's being bullied into certain sorts of behavior. There's the second bit of control, where actually we've seen Big Tech take control over the previous Labour government, very catastrophically in my opinion. So it's like actually shutting them out and bringing a few more people in to think about that. And then there is this big global question about both frontier technologies in the form of AI, but also some of how concentrated the power is in a few Big Tech companies, and perhaps the VC world—you know, the venture capital world. So I think there's lots of areas where we have to look at how you take back control. But I really do hope that Andy Burnham's really thinking about it in that level of sophistication.
[03:00]I mean, my own journey is rather more simple than that in the sense that, you know, 2012, phone becomes price point that an adult would give it to a child. And I walk into my kitchen and there are four 15-year-old girls not talking, staring at something. And, you know, I had never seen four 15-year-old girls not talking in any circumstance, but the fact that they were not talking and looking at a screen, and it went on for quite a considerable time, and no one went, "Oh, hi!" to me as the mother walking in.
[03:40]And the whole thing just sort of played in my brain in slow motion. I thought, "Oh, I wonder what it's like growing up here in my kitchen and there." And then of course, I thought, "Well, where is there? What's at the other end of the phone?"
[03:54]Well, at the time I was a movie director. I worked between Hollywood and here, and I always used to make documentary films in between my feature films. Before you knew it, I picked up my camera, I was on my way, and I spent hundreds of hours in the bedrooms of teenagers sort of looking at their relationship to the internet. Once I'd got ahold of that, I started looking at the infrastructure of the internet. And once I got ahold of that, I went to America and talked to a lot of the founders and so on.
[04:31]And somewhere in the middle of that process—it was about a year—I suddenly thought, "Oh my goodness, we are literally—this is a generational injustice. We are pushing kids into a highly engineered world which assumes everybody is an adult, and we are asking them to make decisions, and at the same time, bullying them into likely outcomes, all of which are predicated on all users being equal, i.e., all users being adults." And I thought it was wrong.
[05:04]I've never made another film since. I became a campaigner on Child Safety First, but that actually then led me on my whole journey, the journey of the book, which is really to say, actually, don't think that information integrity, don't think job displacement, don't think discrimination, don't think AI and creative copyright, don't think kids' safety are all different things. This is really possible to map as a single issue, and boy, we better take control! Otherwise, we have no political control, no control over the future. And that was why I sat down and wrote a book.
[05:49] Ravi Gurumurthy:So Big Tech captured your attention and distracted you from your previous life, so brilliant.
[05:52]So I mean, obviously, one of the ways in which this debate has changed in very recent years is the social media ban that's been proposed for under-16s, and it's a good example of the debate changing just in two years. I think it's gone from Starmer basically looking like he was totally against it to being essentially forced into trying to do something. What's your view about how to make a ban effective? What do you think that we can learn from Australia, or all the things we've got to learn not to—to avoid?
[06:26] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I think the first thing to say is, absolutely, it was done reluctantly, and I think it is a testament to the failure of previous incarnations allowing the Online Safety Act to work properly, and also, you know, the success of tech lobbying to prevent the Online Safety Act being a really great tool and effective tool.
[06:49]So I think that the reason we got here—and I do remember having a conversation with someone from Google who went, "Hang on a minute. I went away, you know, 6 months ago, and it was all about, you know, online safety. I've come back, it's all about banning." And I remember turning around and going, "Hey, you know, you were too good at the lobbying. You know, didn't move fast enough, and people have lost patience."
[07:15] Ravi Gurumurthy:So they overreached in a way, and it created a backlash.
[07:19] Baroness Beeban Kidron:And we're seeing the same thing around AI in America and here. And I saw some really interesting polling this week on AI, and I'm going to say again: Andy Burnham will not be able to govern unless he actually takes a look at what's happening in tech, unless he takes a look at what's happening in AI. And I think the idea that there is international and there's domestic misses the point that actually in this area of life, we are being controlled from companies across the sea.
[07:51]So on the ban, I think the way to think about it first and foremost is to think about banning tech that is not treating children safely, privately, and with respect.
[08:05] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah.
[08:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:And actually it's the banning of the company rather than the banning of the child. And I say that for two reasons: One is sort of probably political/ideological, which is I don't want to ban children from the technological world; I think it should be fit for purpose if it's going to trade with children. So that's the political piece. But there is actually just a really pragmatic thing, which is, you know, when we have—brakes have to stop within a certain amount at a certain speed. We don't go, "Porsche and Mini have to have good brakes, but Ford and Honda can do what they like."
[08:46] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah, that's nonsense.
[08:47] Baroness Beeban Kidron:So I think that the Starmer government was about to ban brands, and I think that that is not going to work, and it's not going to work because:

1. Kids will gravitate to other things.
   
2. Everybody's in a race to be an "everything app," so they're actually going to be indistinguishable.
   
3. And possibly most importantly, no one saw the way that TikTok would be central to everyone's life the way it was, particularly if you were young. And if you look even more recently, ChatGPT—I can't remember exactly, but I think it was sort of 8 to 10 weeks, it went from zero to hundreds of millions across the world, right? Loads of those were kids and loads of them were here in the UK.
   

So if you start banning brands, you know, you get into that nonsense where, you know, you can't get a Grok because it's an offshoot of X because it's a, you know, and they've already fallen foul of that. So don't ban the brand. Look at the behavior of the company. See what features it has. Look at the features that are dangerous, both individually and in concert. And just in case anybody's listening from Number 10, I have a whole long list and I'd be happy to share it.
[10:13] Ravi Gurumurthy:So yeah, because the risk is you end up in a sort of whack-a-mole situation where regulator moves way too slowly and before you know it, new things have popped up, and it's quite hard to sort of fix. So if you take a more outcome-based approach and say, "Here are the outcomes that we're going to hold you responsible to and the behaviors," how would that work legally?
[10:39] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I think there's two things to look at: One is to say that actually the biggest problem around tech is its addictivity. Everyone gets a bit sort of distracted on the content and contact bit, but actually, if it wasn't so addictive, if it didn't take up so much of your time, if it wasn't sort of going all the way through the night, actually kids would make better decisions. And I know that the research says that. I know that I have a lot of experience—do a lot of workshops with kids right across the world, and it's really clear.
[11:12]I think the way perhaps to look at it is to look at product liability. I mean, why is an app not a product? It's sold, it's advertised, it's managed, it has profits like other things, you know, and it's a product in a different scheme of products. It may be owned by Meta, but it has its own place, its own brand. And I think as soon as you start thinking about it and you say, "Oh, product liability, consumer rights, product safety, you know, even individual harms," and the way that you can actually use civil law, all of that is how we treat everything else.
[11:55] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. So if my car starts having a problem, there's a recall on it because they're liable, even years after, for the potential harm.
[12:01] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Exactly. Anybody just has to think, what would happen to an air fryer that blew up in your face, that hurt a few kids, that made people so anxious that it was going to—you know, it'd be recalled. All we have to think about is VW and what happened there. I mean, we've seen it again and again and again. And this argument about that tech is somehow, you know, it's so good that it's allowed to do a bit of harm is actually just tech exceptionalism, you know, on steroids.
[12:37] Ravi Gurumurthy:And if you think about children, to what extent is your vision a childhood where people aren't on social media or AI, or is it to try to construct good tech, both from sort of content side so they're not exposed to harmful or damaging content, but most importantly, the addictiveness of it so that you're constantly on it? Is that the model? Are you sort of anti-tech, or wanting children to use tech in a good way?
[13:08] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I mean, that's a very—it's actually slightly complicated and sophisticated question you've asked, because you asked a few different things in one question. But I mean, first of all, not anti-tech; I'm actually for tech. I think that the political and economic arrangements we've made about technology, rather than technology itself, that is the heart of the problem.
[13:31]On to your point: I think very young children suffer disproportionately the opportunity cost of being online. So, you know, and I can't tell you how sort of tragic it is, you know, that everybody's worried about very extreme, particular, and difficult circumstances. But actually, in the meantime, whether you're on a bus, a train, a cafe, you know, whatever, you see kids slammed up against a phone. Friend of mine sent me a picture of a woman feeding her baby on her phone, you know, like this.
[14:14]And what I think people don't realize is that the way children develop is from hearing you talk, from the way you look, the smiles you give, what they react to. Even looking out and having a baby, you know, tied up like this—if on the tube everybody's on the—no one's looking at them and going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." These things seem remarkably unimportant beat by beat, but actually that's how people are socialized. That's how they learn. That's how their intelligence grows.
[14:50]So I think from a developmental point of view, I am probably pretty anti-screens for young children. I am also pretty anti-screens in schools. And I think the whole edtech thing is really, really a monstrous affront, because actually it's not about individual whether you can do maths; it's about how to negotiate, how to learn, learning from other people, teaching other people, being in a group, and all the socializing things, you know.
[15:18]So in those circumstances, I'm probably, you know, a little bit hardcore. But more generally, no. I mean, if tech is a tool and tech is a tool to do something you want to do, if tech is used creatively, if tech is used to communicate—if, I mean, you know, how miraculous is it that I can speak to kids from Pakistan, Kenya, Germany, Ireland, UK, all at the same time? They love it, I love it. That's tech too.
[15:51]So I think it's a question of how it's used. And I would say on the whole, we have allowed a very kind of greedy version of highly commercialized tech to, you know, to advertise to kids, to send them stuff that is unsuitable, to deliberately addict them to specific products, to compete between the different companies for their time. And kids are a mess.
[16:22] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. I would also say that's true of all of us.
[16:28] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yes. Yeah, so I've always said, if we get it right for kids, we know what good looks like. So you said that in your question, and that is the "yes" answer, but it comes in pieces: No tech, good tech, let me—let's put it within political and social control, and then tech not "for good" in a whole-food sense—tech that works.
[16:54] Ravi Gurumurthy:I guess one thing I wonder about is whether the business model of social media is at all compatible with it ever being good. So as long as you are basically using our data to manipulate our preferences and keep us online, and then selling that to advertisers, you've just got a whole set of pretty perverse incentives.
[17:16]And even if you regulate for that, you're regulating very much against the grain of what they're trying to do every day, which is keep you addicted. So to what extent do you need to actually change the whole—change the whole business model? And that sort of relates in a way to my question on AI, which is AI has started off not with that kind of business model—it's more subscription-based. So does that give us a bit of hope? So I'm going to ask you two questions, but the first thing is: Do we first have to sort of change the business model, or can you regulate with that?
[17:48] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Okay, I'm going to say something a little bit sort of obvious, but do you know what? We got to work out what world we want, and they got to work out their business model. And the reason that I say this is it is so perverse that in this area only, we are supposed to work out the business model for the people who are selling to us! Whereas in any other thing, you know, if I was coming at you, you know, as you say, with the lemonade with the poison in it or the car without the brakes and say, "Hey, what's my business model?" you'd go, "Go away and make a product that I want, and you know, that'll be the business model." I mean, I'm being a bit simplistic here, but it's actually true that this is what we're being asked to do.
[18:32]And I remember asking someone at Ofcom who shall remain nameless, you know, why they didn't deal on the risk assessment. Streaming—live streaming was one of the biggest risks, but in the Children's Code there was nothing about live streaming. And I go, "I don't get it. Biggest risk, nothing?" And they go, "Well, if we'd made that, then Twitch wouldn't have a business model." And I go, "So what?" So what! Because if things are intrinsically dangerous or difficult, whatever, then they shouldn't be in the market! There is no market!
[19:17]So I think the business model is their problem. I think I would also make a very important intervention and say: It was advertising, until it was then a bit freemium, and then it was a bit subscription. And actually, I think you'll find you're paying for everything two or three times in different ways. And that makes me answer your last question, which is: That's the way AI will go. They're going to advertise; they're going to do links to products that pay them. So they'll be paid by us on subscription, they'll be paid by us on our data, paid by rivals, and then they'll be paid for click-throughs—four ways of making...
[20:03] Ravi Gurumurthy:So I agree, but in a way, because they're not quite doing that yet, is this a moment? Is this a moment to say, "Look, let's not let them evolve their business model in that direction, because then we're always going to be slightly fighting a losing battle"? So could we not regulate essentially to avoid them doing exactly what you just said?
[20:22] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, I mean, listen, I definitely think what we should do is regulate for the way we want it to develop. But I think that I would take it away from the business model and say it's an outcome. If people want, you know, to—if it's basically safe, fair, an exchange that you understand, an exchange that you can get out of, you know, easy exit and all of that, then some people might pay subscriptions, some people might pay data, some people might pay advertising.
[20:53]But at the moment, let's not pretend we do not have a proper choice. And I, as a privacy campaigner, endlessly ticking the, "Don't take my data," and basically all the products don't work, you know. So that where it's a proper choice, I'm fine with different ways of going about it. But actually, it's not a proper choice. And again, I point you at things like, you know, you get a Nest to do your heating in your house, and actually, if you don't take "yes" to another 100 companies—in fact, I think we worked it out once, it was more than a thousand companies: the first 100 companies, then the next ones, the next one, waterfall of permissions. But if you didn't do "yes," your heating didn't work, you know. And that is actually—I go back to product liability, product safety, consumer rights, you know, and access to the courts. That's a good way of doing business.
[21:51] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. And are you seeing with AI—are you starting to see the kind of harms play out there, and are they very similar in nature to what we've seen in social media, or is it different and distinct? For instance, AI companions, for instance?
[22:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think AI companions is very similar, but more powerful and more private and even more worrying. And I'm absolutely furious with the Starmer government for not acting when we could have acted. They took a power to do something later, still not determined, but I had real amendments in the Crime and Policing Bill that would have made it immediately illegal to put either illegal content or harmful content for children into a chatbot in the UK. It could have been with us now, and they didn't do it because they were soft on tech. So, absolutely in certain areas.
[22:45] Ravi Gurumurthy:And you would define that harmful content—how would you define that?
[22:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, we actually have definitions in law already, which is the good news, you know, because we've been doing this a while. I think our enforcement is not there yet, and our processes are too processy and not enough outcome-based. But actually, a lot of the definitions are done and dusted. And if we need to revisit them, fine, but actually we don't need to wait for a whole set of new definitions.
[23:16]I think on AI, the thing that I'm more worried about—I mean, I think that's very straightforward; chatbots, you know, should not be allowed to be harmful and so on—but I think that we're watching two or three things happen around AI that I think people are not completely cognizant of. I think the first thing is the vast sums that are going into this. Vast sums cannot properly, you know, make the kind of margin that the investors expect, so everybody thinks there's going to be a crash.
[23:54]So we had a lot of media headlines when Elon Musk became a trillionaire, but we didn't see in the media what was actually happening: He was privatizing the benefit and socializing the risk. It was basically like subprime mortgages, yeah, 'cause once it collapses, he's not going to—he's fine! He's got his cash, right? He'd be a little bit poorer, but he's got his big wad of cash right now. All the pension funds all over the world who've picked up a bit of that are carrying the risk. And we know that there's going to be a whole series of IPOs, and everybody in the business knows there's going to be a crash. And I just say, who jumped out of windows? Who lost their homes? Who lost their jobs? It wasn't the people at the top of the banks; it won't be the people at the top of tech. So I think, first of all, we are not really taking that seriously and looking at that properly.
[24:53]I think the second thing about AI—and let me make clear, AI can do lots of very interesting things really, really well, and possibly far better than humans—but many people, many, many, many people think that actually narrow applications, specialist applications of AI is where the breakthrough is going to come from. And this whole thing for, you know, AGI, and sort of sentience, and the robots taking over is quite a Silicon Valley dream. And we are all being asked to put all our money and all our thought on that, including, you know, not really taking seriously that in those specialist areas, we in the UK are in pole position to build an economy of narrow AI because we have the best data sets in the world.
[25:58]So instead of actually piling in to data centers that benefit, you know, some of those guys, we could be actually making sovereign data assets of our own data. So there's another area where I would like to see the government kind of be much quicker and much more sort of sovereign-building, if you like, in its attitude.
[26:22] Ravi Gurumurthy:So you think we've got actually more power to shape that than people realize, and we're not taking it?
[26:26] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Absolutely, absolutely!
[26:27] Ravi Gurumurthy:So what would we actually—how would we...
[26:28] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think—I mean, there's a number of things on the table and we've discussed them in various places, but I mean, first of all, we would actually put some sort of wraparound around our data so that we can actually trade data rather than leak data. Um, I think we would change our procurement. The way identity—at the moment, we just give it to Silicon Valley companies, even when we can do it better themselves. And in fact, you know, for example, there's been a lot of rows about Palantir, about its sort of ideological position. But actually, if you ask Leeds Hospital Trust or Manchester Trust, they go, "Hang on a minute! If we move to this, we're downgrading our system, because what we've built for ourselves is already better, has more functionality." So you kind of go, "Hm, why are we paying an American company to siphon off our data for a great deal of money when we can already do it better here?"
[27:25]And the good thing is about doing it here is that is skills for the future, that's UK companies, that's money in our own communities. And that's my final piece about AI: They have got to stop talking about growth and start talking about household prosperity and national prosperity, because everyone who you displace here with an AI that's owned in Silicon Valley is one more person who needs welfare or a job, yeah, and a whole lot of money that is not going into your local community.
[28:04]And you know, I can't believe I'm saying this—you know, I am a first-generation British, both my parents were immigrants, you know, I'm an internationalist by nature—but we have literally lost the plot! And I think unless we, in a post-Brexit Britain, unless we build British, buy British, and actually really sort of have some expertise, we're not using what we can negotiate with.
[28:31]And I can't tell you on a podcast, but honestly, I have had conversations right in the heart of various of the beasts. They want our data so bad that actually, instead of making our energy cheaper, instead of bending over and saying, "Whatever you like, boys," instead of paying them to take it away, we should actually be going, "Well, if you'd like it, then this is how we're coming to the table," and it should be as a sovereign asset.
[28:59]And that really goes right the way from NHS geospatial, some of our security data, the naval data of the seabed—you know, I mean, the BBC, some of our big institutions—we are so rich in data. And that's why we had that terrible argument last year, as you know, about creative copyright: It was like the government were blinded by the snake-oil salesmen, you know, thinking, "Uh, we have to be nice to these guys, and then we'll be close to power." But being close to power ain't being powerful, and I think all of history shows that.
[29:40] Ravi Gurumurthy:In the book you talk about where we need to be more sovereign, and where the BBC could play a bigger role, or other institutions. Could you just say a little bit more about expand more on that point?
[29:55] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I think the BBC is a really interesting sort of example of where we just don't think long-term, where we don't think big. So the BBC has an enormous depth of creative material, yeah, that has been checked, and so on and so forth, and it has a very valuable set of material in that the World Service in particular, I happen to know, is of great interest to both security community and also the AI community, because it is the only detailed analysis of all these countries that are not central to everybody's concern, but are in everybody's remit.
[30:44]So there you've got sort of a value thing, but think about it at a bigger, bigger level, which is: We have a worldwide, a global issue about information integrity, yeah. So for—and we've got this sort of problem that we, as I think I said in the debate last week about sovereignty in the law, I quoted a senior civil servant who said, "No one ever got fired for giving Microsoft another contract." And so I'm going, okay, so you've got public services around the world that need a safe haven, not an advertising platform. Yeah. You've got an absolute crisis about information integrity, and you've got this thing that has got all the pieces, but none of the infrastructure.
[31:35]And then you look back at the BBC history and say, before it became a political football, actually, it was started as an infrastructure project. It was actually to connect people in the days of radio and TV and so on—that was the idea of the BBC. The content came later. Yeah, so why are we not creating the BBC as an infrastructure on which governments, people who actually don't want to be in the algorithmically driven attention model on, you know, for information of all varieties, and also for the free press to give them a platform—ironically, you know, given that they've been fighting the BBC for so many years, but prominence and so on.
[32:27]And you kind of think about all the different uses that a platform that was actually modeled on different values... And all the BBC has to do is say, "You have to meet these values in order to share on our platform." Now, that is actually not a huge investment, because so much of it is already there, you know. And in fact, I've got colleagues at both Oxford—you know, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, who works with Tim Berners-Lee, and Professor Tarassenko, who's big in the whole area of health data and so on—and they go, "Yeah, we could build this for very, very little money."
[33:04]Yeah, and so you kind of go, "Why isn't that a thing?" But what we do instead is we go, "Oh, let the guy from Google and let the guy from YouTube go and take over the BBC, because they know where everyone is," and then we watch them put BBC product onto YouTube without any prominence, and now they've announced, "We're going to do less news because we got to cut things." And I say to you, I'm not blaming any individual person; I'm saying the imagination that they have is that winner takes all, and those guys have already won, instead of saying, "Here is a public service opportunity that actually might—in fact, I would—I'm prepared to say would create incoming revenue."
[33:55]Because once Sweden, Australia, etc., etc. see that we've got a platform to host things that is not toxic, will keep your data for sovereign, will let you store it wherever you want to store it, doesn't actually have the CLOUD Act that will say we can nick any data you like for our own purposes, they might actually like to have that outside of China and the US! And guess what? We have seen some people moving towards France because they're offering something similar. So—but we have the English language and we have a lot of history.
[34:29] Ravi Gurumurthy:So it's Charter Renewal next year, I think, yes. And we published something by Tony Curzon Price about the idea of the BBC role-modeling what a good, effective social media platform would look like, with an algorithm that promoted accurate content, that didn't necessarily always keep you always engaged, maybe promoting viewpoint diversity. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind, or is it something quite different?
[34:50] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think—I mean, I'm a big fan of Tony, so that might be part of the vision, but my vision is actually more to do with actually an alternative platform rather than alternative communication model, if you see what I mean. It may well be that the different social media offer could sit on top of platform, you know, that would be fine. Or maybe a more sort of trustworthy version of WhatsApp for families or, you know, etc., etc., etc. There are any number of things, but I think I'm saying, look, where are our strengths? Our strengths are in the data. Our strength is actually, bizarrely, in our history of, you know, of sort of rule of law and regulation.
[35:47]And instead of all of those things being downgraded as they have been over the last two years—and I say that very straightforwardly: child safety, copyright and IP, data privacy, competition, all of it was actively downgraded over the last two years to satisfy the tech companies—instead of doing that, you go, "Hang on a minute! There are more people on the planet who live outside of America and China than there are inside those two behemoths. And actually, there is a middle. As a middle power, we have the most extraordinary amount of value and values that are recognized, and we speak English—how lucky is that?"
[36:40] Ravi Gurumurthy:When you interact with policymakers in government departments and Ofcom, what is it that they don't get? Is it your view that they are just being affected by the tech lobby and particular concern about annoying the US president, or do you think the policymakers themselves are in a different place to you?
[37:02] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think that's a really interesting question. I would say there's a lot—a lot of politicians, both Houses, all sides of the political spectrum, who absolutely agree with me, and in fact, I absolutely agree with, who would make, you know, very sophisticated arguments of their own on this issue. So I think this is a place where government is way behind the people, the citizenship, way behind their own backbench, and way behind the backbench opposition.
[37:37]What has happened is, I would say there are two things, and you've alluded to both: One is I think that Starmer took a close-Trump policy, and that led him absolutely nowhere, as we've seen, because, you know, he's not a man you can do a deal with. But also, as he abandons the rule of law, it becomes more and more egregious to do a deal. So you've got a double whammy of, you know, he's up and down and he'll make it up in the middle of the night, and at the same time, you're further and further and further away from anything you could possibly agree with. So that was a negative, and yes, we have literally heard in Parliament, "Shh, don't upset the Americans!" That has been a policy.
[38:21]I think there has been another thing, and I do write about it in my book: this whole lobbying thing. I want to say this: There is lobbying that is cynical, but there's a lot of believers in there. And it's not just—I mean, people have been persuaded that only tech can do tech, yeah.
[38:43]And it was funny, I was speaking to someone earlier from one of the Big Five AI companies who came voluntarily to see me, asked to see me. And one of the things they said is, "It is terrible, 'cause I can get into any ministerial room because I work for X, and they should be listening to you, and how can I help you?"
[39:07] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah.
[39:08] Baroness Beeban Kidron:So even within the company, there are people who are really anxious, yeah. And what they're saying is, "We're not having a proper conversation."
[39:17]And in fact, we had a meeting—some parliamentarians and myself—we invited—we were asked, again, asked by one of the other Big Five, and they went on to say how their CEO had met all seven G7, plus the five extras, all at the same meeting. I mean, the political access! And then they have all brought in the next layer, and so you find in Ofcom and CMA and the BBC, within Number 10 and so on, how many people who used to work for tech, yeah.
[39:56]And it's not that any one of those individual people is good or bad—some might be, and I wouldn't necessarily know which is which. The problem is they come in with a viewpoint of the world that starts with, you know, "Tech behaves like this, and because they behave like this, this is all we can imagine."
[40:19]And so there's a sort of a failure of two things: One is, you know, basic, "What do we want, and who do we want it from?" which is the groundswell of being a political party leader, government. And the other thing is of imagination, because all they see... And again, I cannot tell you how many regulators—regulators have turned around to me and said, "Yeah, but, you know, they are for-profit companies, so we can't ask them to do X." And I go, "That's not where we start!"
[40:58] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. I mean, one of your arguments in your book, obviously, is that you can't then just play a pure insider game and persuade the politicians to act. You've got to actually exert lots of pressure externally and campaign, which is why you've been doing what you've been doing.
[41:12]I think the other interesting thing, though, is that the backlash is not always just from the obvious places. So MAGA is quite divided, very divided between some people who fear technology is destroying traditional ways of life and really want to push back against it. And I would say, do you feel like in the next 5 years, there is going to be a backlash on tech in multiple countries? I think that's relevant for politicians, because they then need to think: Who's going to co-opt that? Is that going to fall to the right or to the left, and how do they actually grab hold of that sort of energy?
[41:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:So I have my hands on some very interesting polling, which I'm actually going to send to you, because I think that Nesta should be aware of it, actually. But it's precisely to this point: I am grasping at numbers, but they're roughly right—I won't say that exactly right—but mid-80s in the UK. It was done in UK, Australia, and America, and it was largely the same, yeah.
[42:23]So in the UK, mid-80s people all think something should be done about tech, all think something should be done about AI, and even higher think something should be done about social media. However, mid-80s think that the person who should do it is not tech, but government, because they don't trust tech. Mid-80s think that government can't be trusted to do it right! So they want it done, they don't trust government to do it, they know the tech companies—so they are way ahead of the game.
[42:55]Then it goes—and this is to the question—which is that actually it sort of fragments a bit between those who are really, really angry and very possibly going to be replaced in their jobs, and those who are sort of, "Well, we really want tech, but we want it to be better," and then a small bit in the middle, which is sort of, "This is what we want." So I'm in that bit.
[43:22]But what the polling shows is that actually, if you don't do it for the people who are angry, those—you know, they will disappear to Reform or Green, yeah. They don't go Labour; Reform or Green, and it's more or less equal. And on the other side, if you don't do it for the sort of the "embrace tech" people, they will go Liberal or maybe even Conservative. So Labour doesn't inherit the world, yeah. And I think that that's a problem of their own making, and I would also say that it's something they can solve.
[44:09]But interestingly, as part of the book I did, right at the beginning, first gig I did was at the London version of South by Southwest—techie, techie audience. Someone asked me a question, couldn't remember—I don't remember what the question was, but I turned around to the room and I said, "Well, who voted according to tech policy? Any election, anywhere in the world, last election, who voted?" Zero! I have asked everyone since, because I was so stunned, and actually I must have spoken to 3 or 4 thousand people in the last few weeks—not one person voted on tech policy!
[44:53]Now, that is my—I'm going to put my life in my hands—my prediction is it's going to be on the doorstep. It's going to be on the ballot next time.
[45:00] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah, that's it. And so it's something for someone to catch.
[45:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Exactly, and unless you catch it early, you'll lose it.
[45:08] Ravi Gurumurthy:The obvious kind of pushback you could make to some of the arguments you've made is that, yes, we need to take control of tech, but this can't be done at the nation-state level, and that, you know, how do we avoid American companies stealing our data and copyrighted material? What's your—what's your pushback to that?
[45:28] Baroness Beeban Kidron:My pushback to that is look at Australia: It started a fire, you know, with banning social media. And look at Indonesia today that has just done copyright for AI: It's pushed back and said no.
[45:45] Ravi Gurumurthy:And how will that play out, though? Will it actually change the behavior of the companies in any way?
[45:52] Baroness Beeban Kidron:It's more of a political thing. It's more of a—actually, no. I mean, I think—at a practical level, all these companies, you know, they are global companies, they want one set of rules. So what they actually often do, although they don't advertise this, is they go to the highest group of rules, yeah, and it just goes like that.
[46:10]And so any one person—and you will have known because you've read my book—I started off this whole thing with the Age Appropriate Design Code. It is now in many countries, many American states. It sort of gradually becomes the new norm. They try and push it down, we try and push it up.
[46:27]And I actually also think that there is going to be a huge amount of legal uncertainty for these companies. And I go back to my point earlier that a narrow company here that says, "Yeah, don't worry, we have checked all our stuff. You will not be done for using our model, our outcomes. Yeah, we might be a bit more expensive to use, but actually we're not going to have years and years in the courts."
[46:58]I mean, I actually think between one's own attention—it's an attention economy, so we should spend our attention better, that's our individual piece—our vote, our democratic will for things to be different and how they might be different, and creating a lot of legal uncertainty, I think that there is a big move. Because once they start crashing and burning, yeah, the survivors are going to really, you know, be in the spotlight for what they do and don't do.
[47:33]So I think there's an awful lot of things. I mean, you know, people always say empire is—you know, the empire's there until it's not. And I don't think—and maybe I can say this a bit more clearly—we don't have a choice, because it's not a choice between carving a path and no path; it's carving a path and being the 51st state of America, you know? We are regulated by the terms and conditions, we are subject to the laws of the US, yeah, and that's not a place I want to be.
[48:12] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. My final question is: What should Andy Burnham actually do in the first 100 days, apart from—I think in a day, he could read your book, because it's such a good page-turner. It's a very serious book, but incredibly compelling. So day one...
[48:24] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, he's already gone past his first day, but you know what I mean.
[48:27] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah, so, but all summer, nothing to do, kicking his feet up, what—what would you do initially, 'cause you are at the high point of your political capital early on. You need to send some signals or establish certain institutions or precedents.
[48:43] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, I think I think there are probably three things he could do straight away that would just send the right signal:

1. Make a commitment on copyright to UK Creative Industries. We're a huge, huge part of the economy. It is a huge number of people and employment that could be undone by not having any copyright. And actually, it's an emblematic fight. And I think it was interesting that in the polling, that was the single highest issue for the British public: They do not want their culture stolen or put elsewhere. So I think he could make a really big statement on that and not do all the compromises that the DCMS and DC were thinking of doing, but actually just say, "We'll have transparency, we'll protect copyright," and then see how the thing shuffles.
   

[49:45] Ravi Gurumurthy:And that would be symbolic, but hard to enforce, obviously, because it's other people's...
[49:48] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Hard to enforce, but symbolic, and also it would give clarity to some of the court cases that are ongoing. So I think it'd be huge to say, "Actually, we have a line, and do not cross it." So I think there's that.

1. Get the child protection piece right. He has to think about how children flourish, about protecting childhood, not children online. And I honestly do have a very, very worked-up version of that that is very widely supported by both the "banners" and "not the banners," because it actually comes in the middle and says, "This is what we want." And I would urge him to do that. We've got a new chair at Ofcom, we've got a new Prime Minister, we've got DSIT, which was a very, very captured organization, and this is their opportunity to put, actually, you know, kids first. And I think that is, again, millions of people who would be very happy to hear that and see that, and that is another very popular thing.
   
2. Have a proper conversation about AI for Britain. What is it? What do we want? What do we understand by it? What jobs do we want to keep? What jobs are worth having? What jobs are not worth having? Because I think there is this sort of whole idea of efficiency and growth that have not asked, "Efficiency for whom? Growth for whom, for where?" And I think what we want to see is both our values, but we also have to see the financial value land, you know, in our economy, rather than just simply be extracted.
   

And I think that is a conversation with the public. I did a proposal that would be absolutely fantastic—be like town halls, you know? Start in Newcastle—they know a bit about industrial disruption, you know—go all the way down to Cornwall—they know a bit, too, you know—and actually involve a lot of the people who need to be in this conversation, but not put tech in the middle of it, but have them as a constituency rather than as the driving force.
And I think that's something he could do. Those three things would help people understand that he gets that he cannot actually govern without good tech, and he cannot govern if every time he tries to do something, President Trump or Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman go, "Hey babe, no!" Yeah, yeah, because you literally can't govern if you can't actually use your laws, have your regulator, you know, make laws to your values. And I think that needs to be honestly understood. And at the moment, all the evidence is the public understand it and the politicians don't.
[53:13] Ravi Gurumurthy:And on your last point, what was interesting is the idea of actually bringing the public into this debate. Andy Burnham has talked a lot about new politics and pushing power down, but I think it's also about actually having a proper conversation about tech.
[53:27] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, and Andy, if you're listening, I'd love to do that piece of work!
[53:30] Ravi Gurumurthy:Final, final question, which is: You actually, as well as telling government what to do in this, you also tell us what to do. And I found one or two of the things that we in our daily lives should be doing—and there are loads of—there's like a ton of examples. What are two or three that you find—you think are most valuable for the self-help section?
[53:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, yeah. No, no, I hasten to say, it's just because people always ask, "But what can I do?" And I do make clear: Here are the 12 things that we have to do legally and so on, but here are some things that other people say work. So, you know, they are from the obvious:

• Come into the house and say hello to everybody in the house; don't just walk in with your phone and go up to your bedroom. Don't laugh! It seems very small, but I know a few people who've done it since the book came out, said transformative. They've worked out how to talk to their kids about what their day at school was like because they had to say hello.
  
• Doing some gaming and dancing and so on, you know, having "Battle of the Spotify List," you know, so that everybody gets their music out there and their moves out there, and, you know, parents are ritually humiliated by their dancing, etc. (Ah, can't believe you do that!) Again, it makes something that is atomizing, collective.
  
• And I think probably the thing that worked for me the best was when I was making the film in 2012, all those years ago, someone who is a great expert in tech said, "I'll only let you interview me if you let me have your phone for 5 minutes." And he took off every single factory setting. My phone doesn't ring, it doesn't buzz, it doesn't notify, it doesn't think. And I have kept it through all the different variations over the last 15 years of phone. I have kept that situation. And so every now and again I do miss, you know, a call I would rather have had, but for the most part, my phone is my opportunity to talk to the world, rather than this oppressive, you know, force.
  

And I do notice, in relation to other people, that I have a much better relationship with my phone, and thank him, not me. He said, "Must do that. Factory settings are set to addict you. Don't be addicted, baby."
[56:03] Ravi Gurumurthy:Thank you so much for joining us.
[56:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Absolute pleasure.
[56:08] Ravi Gurumurthy:If you enjoyed this episode, please do like, share, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We've got more coming. For those of you who don't know us, Nesta is a research and innovation foundation based in the UK. We design, test, and scale solutions to the big challenges of our time. We're funded by a charity endowment and are politically neutral. For more, do visit www.nesta.org.uk.

[00:00] Baroness Beeban Kidron:And this argument about that tech is somehow, you know, it's so good that it's allowed to do a bit of harm is actually just tech exceptionalism, you know, on steroids.
[00:15] Ravi Gurumurthy:Hello, I'm Ravi Gurumurthy and welcome to this miniseries of Policy Fix on what Andy Burnham should do. We're at the beginning of Andy Burnham's tenure as PM, and today we're going to be talking about what he can do about Big Tech and how he can bring it under greater public control—a word he's used repeatedly in his first days in office.
[00:34]Joining me now is Baroness Kidron, who is a filmmaker. For 20 years she was in Hollywood, made films like Bridget Jones. She's now a crossbencher in the Lords and has become a campaigner and global authority on digital regulation and how we bring Big Tech to heel. Welcome.
[00:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Lovely to be here.
[00:52] Ravi Gurumurthy:You've written a fabulous book. I'm going to put it on here. And one of the things that it talks about in its title is how Big Tech took control. And I was thinking about this in the context of Andy Burnham talking about taking back control and giving the public control. And often we tend to talk about this in terms of energy and water and the utilities of the past. I think we still don't understand quite how far tech has captured our attention and shaped our whole preferences, and with a huge set of harms underpinning it.
[01:26]And I think it's an incredibly important book in trying to sort of make that more central to what a government should do. Do you want to just say, how did you—I mean, you spent 20 years making films and then you changed. How did you spot this well before others did? Just say a bit about how you got into it.
[01:47] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, first of all, really glad to be here. And I do think that there is an interesting thing about what does it mean to take back control, and who is taking back control from what for whom is probably the first thing that the new government really need to think about.
[02:06]And I think, and I hope that's what we're going to discuss, is there's personal control—you know, one's own agency and whether one's being bullied into certain sorts of behavior. There's the second bit of control, where actually we've seen Big Tech take control over the previous Labour government, very catastrophically in my opinion. So it's like actually shutting them out and bringing a few more people in to think about that. And then there is this big global question about both frontier technologies in the form of AI, but also some of how concentrated the power is in a few Big Tech companies, and perhaps the VC world—you know, the venture capital world. So I think there's lots of areas where we have to look at how you take back control. But I really do hope that Andy Burnham's really thinking about it in that level of sophistication.
[03:00]I mean, my own journey is rather more simple than that in the sense that, you know, 2012, phone becomes price point that an adult would give it to a child. And I walk into my kitchen and there are four 15-year-old girls not talking, staring at something. And, you know, I had never seen four 15-year-old girls not talking in any circumstance, but the fact that they were not talking and looking at a screen, and it went on for quite a considerable time, and no one went, "Oh, hi!" to me as the mother walking in.
[03:40]And the whole thing just sort of played in my brain in slow motion. I thought, "Oh, I wonder what it's like growing up here in my kitchen and there." And then of course, I thought, "Well, where is there? What's at the other end of the phone?"
[03:54]Well, at the time I was a movie director. I worked between Hollywood and here, and I always used to make documentary films in between my feature films. Before you knew it, I picked up my camera, I was on my way, and I spent hundreds of hours in the bedrooms of teenagers sort of looking at their relationship to the internet. Once I'd got ahold of that, I started looking at the infrastructure of the internet. And once I got ahold of that, I went to America and talked to a lot of the founders and so on.
[04:31]And somewhere in the middle of that process—it was about a year—I suddenly thought, "Oh my goodness, we are literally—this is a generational injustice. We are pushing kids into a highly engineered world which assumes everybody is an adult, and we are asking them to make decisions, and at the same time, bullying them into likely outcomes, all of which are predicated on all users being equal, i.e., all users being adults." And I thought it was wrong.
[05:04]I've never made another film since. I became a campaigner on Child Safety First, but that actually then led me on my whole journey, the journey of the book, which is really to say, actually, don't think that information integrity, don't think job displacement, don't think discrimination, don't think AI and creative copyright, don't think kids' safety are all different things. This is really possible to map as a single issue, and boy, we better take control! Otherwise, we have no political control, no control over the future. And that was why I sat down and wrote a book.
[05:49] Ravi Gurumurthy:So Big Tech captured your attention and distracted you from your previous life, so brilliant.
[05:52]So I mean, obviously, one of the ways in which this debate has changed in very recent years is the social media ban that's been proposed for under-16s, and it's a good example of the debate changing just in two years. I think it's gone from Starmer basically looking like he was totally against it to being essentially forced into trying to do something. What's your view about how to make a ban effective? What do you think that we can learn from Australia, or all the things we've got to learn not to—to avoid?
[06:26] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I think the first thing to say is, absolutely, it was done reluctantly, and I think it is a testament to the failure of previous incarnations allowing the Online Safety Act to work properly, and also, you know, the success of tech lobbying to prevent the Online Safety Act being a really great tool and effective tool.
[06:49]So I think that the reason we got here—and I do remember having a conversation with someone from Google who went, "Hang on a minute. I went away, you know, 6 months ago, and it was all about, you know, online safety. I've come back, it's all about banning." And I remember turning around and going, "Hey, you know, you were too good at the lobbying. You know, didn't move fast enough, and people have lost patience."
[07:15] Ravi Gurumurthy:So they overreached in a way, and it created a backlash.
[07:19] Baroness Beeban Kidron:And we're seeing the same thing around AI in America and here. And I saw some really interesting polling this week on AI, and I'm going to say again: Andy Burnham will not be able to govern unless he actually takes a look at what's happening in tech, unless he takes a look at what's happening in AI. And I think the idea that there is international and there's domestic misses the point that actually in this area of life, we are being controlled from companies across the sea.
[07:51]So on the ban, I think the way to think about it first and foremost is to think about banning tech that is not treating children safely, privately, and with respect.
[08:05] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah.
[08:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:And actually it's the banning of the company rather than the banning of the child. And I say that for two reasons: One is sort of probably political/ideological, which is I don't want to ban children from the technological world; I think it should be fit for purpose if it's going to trade with children. So that's the political piece. But there is actually just a really pragmatic thing, which is, you know, when we have—brakes have to stop within a certain amount at a certain speed. We don't go, "Porsche and Mini have to have good brakes, but Ford and Honda can do what they like."
[08:46] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah, that's nonsense.
[08:47] Baroness Beeban Kidron:So I think that the Starmer government was about to ban brands, and I think that that is not going to work, and it's not going to work because:

1. Kids will gravitate to other things.
   
2. Everybody's in a race to be an "everything app," so they're actually going to be indistinguishable.
   
3. And possibly most importantly, no one saw the way that TikTok would be central to everyone's life the way it was, particularly if you were young. And if you look even more recently, ChatGPT—I can't remember exactly, but I think it was sort of 8 to 10 weeks, it went from zero to hundreds of millions across the world, right? Loads of those were kids and loads of them were here in the UK.
   

So if you start banning brands, you know, you get into that nonsense where, you know, you can't get a Grok because it's an offshoot of X because it's a, you know, and they've already fallen foul of that. So don't ban the brand. Look at the behavior of the company. See what features it has. Look at the features that are dangerous, both individually and in concert. And just in case anybody's listening from Number 10, I have a whole long list and I'd be happy to share it.
[10:13] Ravi Gurumurthy:So yeah, because the risk is you end up in a sort of whack-a-mole situation where regulator moves way too slowly and before you know it, new things have popped up, and it's quite hard to sort of fix. So if you take a more outcome-based approach and say, "Here are the outcomes that we're going to hold you responsible to and the behaviors," how would that work legally?
[10:39] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I think there's two things to look at: One is to say that actually the biggest problem around tech is its addictivity. Everyone gets a bit sort of distracted on the content and contact bit, but actually, if it wasn't so addictive, if it didn't take up so much of your time, if it wasn't sort of going all the way through the night, actually kids would make better decisions. And I know that the research says that. I know that I have a lot of experience—do a lot of workshops with kids right across the world, and it's really clear.
[11:12]I think the way perhaps to look at it is to look at product liability. I mean, why is an app not a product? It's sold, it's advertised, it's managed, it has profits like other things, you know, and it's a product in a different scheme of products. It may be owned by Meta, but it has its own place, its own brand. And I think as soon as you start thinking about it and you say, "Oh, product liability, consumer rights, product safety, you know, even individual harms," and the way that you can actually use civil law, all of that is how we treat everything else.
[11:55] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. So if my car starts having a problem, there's a recall on it because they're liable, even years after, for the potential harm.
[12:01] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Exactly. Anybody just has to think, what would happen to an air fryer that blew up in your face, that hurt a few kids, that made people so anxious that it was going to—you know, it'd be recalled. All we have to think about is VW and what happened there. I mean, we've seen it again and again and again. And this argument about that tech is somehow, you know, it's so good that it's allowed to do a bit of harm is actually just tech exceptionalism, you know, on steroids.
[12:37] Ravi Gurumurthy:And if you think about children, to what extent is your vision a childhood where people aren't on social media or AI, or is it to try to construct good tech, both from sort of content side so they're not exposed to harmful or damaging content, but most importantly, the addictiveness of it so that you're constantly on it? Is that the model? Are you sort of anti-tech, or wanting children to use tech in a good way?
[13:08] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I mean, that's a very—it's actually slightly complicated and sophisticated question you've asked, because you asked a few different things in one question. But I mean, first of all, not anti-tech; I'm actually for tech. I think that the political and economic arrangements we've made about technology, rather than technology itself, that is the heart of the problem.
[13:31]On to your point: I think very young children suffer disproportionately the opportunity cost of being online. So, you know, and I can't tell you how sort of tragic it is, you know, that everybody's worried about very extreme, particular, and difficult circumstances. But actually, in the meantime, whether you're on a bus, a train, a cafe, you know, whatever, you see kids slammed up against a phone. Friend of mine sent me a picture of a woman feeding her baby on her phone, you know, like this.
[14:14]And what I think people don't realize is that the way children develop is from hearing you talk, from the way you look, the smiles you give, what they react to. Even looking out and having a baby, you know, tied up like this—if on the tube everybody's on the—no one's looking at them and going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." These things seem remarkably unimportant beat by beat, but actually that's how people are socialized. That's how they learn. That's how their intelligence grows.
[14:50]So I think from a developmental point of view, I am probably pretty anti-screens for young children. I am also pretty anti-screens in schools. And I think the whole edtech thing is really, really a monstrous affront, because actually it's not about individual whether you can do maths; it's about how to negotiate, how to learn, learning from other people, teaching other people, being in a group, and all the socializing things, you know.
[15:18]So in those circumstances, I'm probably, you know, a little bit hardcore. But more generally, no. I mean, if tech is a tool and tech is a tool to do something you want to do, if tech is used creatively, if tech is used to communicate—if, I mean, you know, how miraculous is it that I can speak to kids from Pakistan, Kenya, Germany, Ireland, UK, all at the same time? They love it, I love it. That's tech too.
[15:51]So I think it's a question of how it's used. And I would say on the whole, we have allowed a very kind of greedy version of highly commercialized tech to, you know, to advertise to kids, to send them stuff that is unsuitable, to deliberately addict them to specific products, to compete between the different companies for their time. And kids are a mess.
[16:22] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. I would also say that's true of all of us.
[16:28] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yes. Yeah, so I've always said, if we get it right for kids, we know what good looks like. So you said that in your question, and that is the "yes" answer, but it comes in pieces: No tech, good tech, let me—let's put it within political and social control, and then tech not "for good" in a whole-food sense—tech that works.
[16:54] Ravi Gurumurthy:I guess one thing I wonder about is whether the business model of social media is at all compatible with it ever being good. So as long as you are basically using our data to manipulate our preferences and keep us online, and then selling that to advertisers, you've just got a whole set of pretty perverse incentives.
[17:16]And even if you regulate for that, you're regulating very much against the grain of what they're trying to do every day, which is keep you addicted. So to what extent do you need to actually change the whole—change the whole business model? And that sort of relates in a way to my question on AI, which is AI has started off not with that kind of business model—it's more subscription-based. So does that give us a bit of hope? So I'm going to ask you two questions, but the first thing is: Do we first have to sort of change the business model, or can you regulate with that?
[17:48] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Okay, I'm going to say something a little bit sort of obvious, but do you know what? We got to work out what world we want, and they got to work out their business model. And the reason that I say this is it is so perverse that in this area only, we are supposed to work out the business model for the people who are selling to us! Whereas in any other thing, you know, if I was coming at you, you know, as you say, with the lemonade with the poison in it or the car without the brakes and say, "Hey, what's my business model?" you'd go, "Go away and make a product that I want, and you know, that'll be the business model." I mean, I'm being a bit simplistic here, but it's actually true that this is what we're being asked to do.
[18:32]And I remember asking someone at Ofcom who shall remain nameless, you know, why they didn't deal on the risk assessment. Streaming—live streaming was one of the biggest risks, but in the Children's Code there was nothing about live streaming. And I go, "I don't get it. Biggest risk, nothing?" And they go, "Well, if we'd made that, then Twitch wouldn't have a business model." And I go, "So what?" So what! Because if things are intrinsically dangerous or difficult, whatever, then they shouldn't be in the market! There is no market!
[19:17]So I think the business model is their problem. I think I would also make a very important intervention and say: It was advertising, until it was then a bit freemium, and then it was a bit subscription. And actually, I think you'll find you're paying for everything two or three times in different ways. And that makes me answer your last question, which is: That's the way AI will go. They're going to advertise; they're going to do links to products that pay them. So they'll be paid by us on subscription, they'll be paid by us on our data, paid by rivals, and then they'll be paid for click-throughs—four ways of making...
[20:03] Ravi Gurumurthy:So I agree, but in a way, because they're not quite doing that yet, is this a moment? Is this a moment to say, "Look, let's not let them evolve their business model in that direction, because then we're always going to be slightly fighting a losing battle"? So could we not regulate essentially to avoid them doing exactly what you just said?
[20:22] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, I mean, listen, I definitely think what we should do is regulate for the way we want it to develop. But I think that I would take it away from the business model and say it's an outcome. If people want, you know, to—if it's basically safe, fair, an exchange that you understand, an exchange that you can get out of, you know, easy exit and all of that, then some people might pay subscriptions, some people might pay data, some people might pay advertising.
[20:53]But at the moment, let's not pretend we do not have a proper choice. And I, as a privacy campaigner, endlessly ticking the, "Don't take my data," and basically all the products don't work, you know. So that where it's a proper choice, I'm fine with different ways of going about it. But actually, it's not a proper choice. And again, I point you at things like, you know, you get a Nest to do your heating in your house, and actually, if you don't take "yes" to another 100 companies—in fact, I think we worked it out once, it was more than a thousand companies: the first 100 companies, then the next ones, the next one, waterfall of permissions. But if you didn't do "yes," your heating didn't work, you know. And that is actually—I go back to product liability, product safety, consumer rights, you know, and access to the courts. That's a good way of doing business.
[21:51] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. And are you seeing with AI—are you starting to see the kind of harms play out there, and are they very similar in nature to what we've seen in social media, or is it different and distinct? For instance, AI companions, for instance?
[22:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think AI companions is very similar, but more powerful and more private and even more worrying. And I'm absolutely furious with the Starmer government for not acting when we could have acted. They took a power to do something later, still not determined, but I had real amendments in the Crime and Policing Bill that would have made it immediately illegal to put either illegal content or harmful content for children into a chatbot in the UK. It could have been with us now, and they didn't do it because they were soft on tech. So, absolutely in certain areas.
[22:45] Ravi Gurumurthy:And you would define that harmful content—how would you define that?
[22:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, we actually have definitions in law already, which is the good news, you know, because we've been doing this a while. I think our enforcement is not there yet, and our processes are too processy and not enough outcome-based. But actually, a lot of the definitions are done and dusted. And if we need to revisit them, fine, but actually we don't need to wait for a whole set of new definitions.
[23:16]I think on AI, the thing that I'm more worried about—I mean, I think that's very straightforward; chatbots, you know, should not be allowed to be harmful and so on—but I think that we're watching two or three things happen around AI that I think people are not completely cognizant of. I think the first thing is the vast sums that are going into this. Vast sums cannot properly, you know, make the kind of margin that the investors expect, so everybody thinks there's going to be a crash.
[23:54]So we had a lot of media headlines when Elon Musk became a trillionaire, but we didn't see in the media what was actually happening: He was privatizing the benefit and socializing the risk. It was basically like subprime mortgages, yeah, 'cause once it collapses, he's not going to—he's fine! He's got his cash, right? He'd be a little bit poorer, but he's got his big wad of cash right now. All the pension funds all over the world who've picked up a bit of that are carrying the risk. And we know that there's going to be a whole series of IPOs, and everybody in the business knows there's going to be a crash. And I just say, who jumped out of windows? Who lost their homes? Who lost their jobs? It wasn't the people at the top of the banks; it won't be the people at the top of tech. So I think, first of all, we are not really taking that seriously and looking at that properly.
[24:53]I think the second thing about AI—and let me make clear, AI can do lots of very interesting things really, really well, and possibly far better than humans—but many people, many, many, many people think that actually narrow applications, specialist applications of AI is where the breakthrough is going to come from. And this whole thing for, you know, AGI, and sort of sentience, and the robots taking over is quite a Silicon Valley dream. And we are all being asked to put all our money and all our thought on that, including, you know, not really taking seriously that in those specialist areas, we in the UK are in pole position to build an economy of narrow AI because we have the best data sets in the world.
[25:58]So instead of actually piling in to data centers that benefit, you know, some of those guys, we could be actually making sovereign data assets of our own data. So there's another area where I would like to see the government kind of be much quicker and much more sort of sovereign-building, if you like, in its attitude.
[26:22] Ravi Gurumurthy:So you think we've got actually more power to shape that than people realize, and we're not taking it?
[26:26] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Absolutely, absolutely!
[26:27] Ravi Gurumurthy:So what would we actually—how would we...
[26:28] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think—I mean, there's a number of things on the table and we've discussed them in various places, but I mean, first of all, we would actually put some sort of wraparound around our data so that we can actually trade data rather than leak data. Um, I think we would change our procurement. The way identity—at the moment, we just give it to Silicon Valley companies, even when we can do it better themselves. And in fact, you know, for example, there's been a lot of rows about Palantir, about its sort of ideological position. But actually, if you ask Leeds Hospital Trust or Manchester Trust, they go, "Hang on a minute! If we move to this, we're downgrading our system, because what we've built for ourselves is already better, has more functionality." So you kind of go, "Hm, why are we paying an American company to siphon off our data for a great deal of money when we can already do it better here?"
[27:25]And the good thing is about doing it here is that is skills for the future, that's UK companies, that's money in our own communities. And that's my final piece about AI: They have got to stop talking about growth and start talking about household prosperity and national prosperity, because everyone who you displace here with an AI that's owned in Silicon Valley is one more person who needs welfare or a job, yeah, and a whole lot of money that is not going into your local community.
[28:04]And you know, I can't believe I'm saying this—you know, I am a first-generation British, both my parents were immigrants, you know, I'm an internationalist by nature—but we have literally lost the plot! And I think unless we, in a post-Brexit Britain, unless we build British, buy British, and actually really sort of have some expertise, we're not using what we can negotiate with.
[28:31]And I can't tell you on a podcast, but honestly, I have had conversations right in the heart of various of the beasts. They want our data so bad that actually, instead of making our energy cheaper, instead of bending over and saying, "Whatever you like, boys," instead of paying them to take it away, we should actually be going, "Well, if you'd like it, then this is how we're coming to the table," and it should be as a sovereign asset.
[28:59]And that really goes right the way from NHS geospatial, some of our security data, the naval data of the seabed—you know, I mean, the BBC, some of our big institutions—we are so rich in data. And that's why we had that terrible argument last year, as you know, about creative copyright: It was like the government were blinded by the snake-oil salesmen, you know, thinking, "Uh, we have to be nice to these guys, and then we'll be close to power." But being close to power ain't being powerful, and I think all of history shows that.
[29:40] Ravi Gurumurthy:In the book you talk about where we need to be more sovereign, and where the BBC could play a bigger role, or other institutions. Could you just say a little bit more about expand more on that point?
[29:55] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, I think the BBC is a really interesting sort of example of where we just don't think long-term, where we don't think big. So the BBC has an enormous depth of creative material, yeah, that has been checked, and so on and so forth, and it has a very valuable set of material in that the World Service in particular, I happen to know, is of great interest to both security community and also the AI community, because it is the only detailed analysis of all these countries that are not central to everybody's concern, but are in everybody's remit.
[30:44]So there you've got sort of a value thing, but think about it at a bigger, bigger level, which is: We have a worldwide, a global issue about information integrity, yeah. So for—and we've got this sort of problem that we, as I think I said in the debate last week about sovereignty in the law, I quoted a senior civil servant who said, "No one ever got fired for giving Microsoft another contract." And so I'm going, okay, so you've got public services around the world that need a safe haven, not an advertising platform. Yeah. You've got an absolute crisis about information integrity, and you've got this thing that has got all the pieces, but none of the infrastructure.
[31:35]And then you look back at the BBC history and say, before it became a political football, actually, it was started as an infrastructure project. It was actually to connect people in the days of radio and TV and so on—that was the idea of the BBC. The content came later. Yeah, so why are we not creating the BBC as an infrastructure on which governments, people who actually don't want to be in the algorithmically driven attention model on, you know, for information of all varieties, and also for the free press to give them a platform—ironically, you know, given that they've been fighting the BBC for so many years, but prominence and so on.
[32:27]And you kind of think about all the different uses that a platform that was actually modeled on different values... And all the BBC has to do is say, "You have to meet these values in order to share on our platform." Now, that is actually not a huge investment, because so much of it is already there, you know. And in fact, I've got colleagues at both Oxford—you know, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, who works with Tim Berners-Lee, and Professor Tarassenko, who's big in the whole area of health data and so on—and they go, "Yeah, we could build this for very, very little money."
[33:04]Yeah, and so you kind of go, "Why isn't that a thing?" But what we do instead is we go, "Oh, let the guy from Google and let the guy from YouTube go and take over the BBC, because they know where everyone is," and then we watch them put BBC product onto YouTube without any prominence, and now they've announced, "We're going to do less news because we got to cut things." And I say to you, I'm not blaming any individual person; I'm saying the imagination that they have is that winner takes all, and those guys have already won, instead of saying, "Here is a public service opportunity that actually might—in fact, I would—I'm prepared to say would create incoming revenue."
[33:55]Because once Sweden, Australia, etc., etc. see that we've got a platform to host things that is not toxic, will keep your data for sovereign, will let you store it wherever you want to store it, doesn't actually have the CLOUD Act that will say we can nick any data you like for our own purposes, they might actually like to have that outside of China and the US! And guess what? We have seen some people moving towards France because they're offering something similar. So—but we have the English language and we have a lot of history.
[34:29] Ravi Gurumurthy:So it's Charter Renewal next year, I think, yes. And we published something by Tony Curzon Price about the idea of the BBC role-modeling what a good, effective social media platform would look like, with an algorithm that promoted accurate content, that didn't necessarily always keep you always engaged, maybe promoting viewpoint diversity. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind, or is it something quite different?
[34:50] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think—I mean, I'm a big fan of Tony, so that might be part of the vision, but my vision is actually more to do with actually an alternative platform rather than alternative communication model, if you see what I mean. It may well be that the different social media offer could sit on top of platform, you know, that would be fine. Or maybe a more sort of trustworthy version of WhatsApp for families or, you know, etc., etc., etc. There are any number of things, but I think I'm saying, look, where are our strengths? Our strengths are in the data. Our strength is actually, bizarrely, in our history of, you know, of sort of rule of law and regulation.
[35:47]And instead of all of those things being downgraded as they have been over the last two years—and I say that very straightforwardly: child safety, copyright and IP, data privacy, competition, all of it was actively downgraded over the last two years to satisfy the tech companies—instead of doing that, you go, "Hang on a minute! There are more people on the planet who live outside of America and China than there are inside those two behemoths. And actually, there is a middle. As a middle power, we have the most extraordinary amount of value and values that are recognized, and we speak English—how lucky is that?"
[36:40] Ravi Gurumurthy:When you interact with policymakers in government departments and Ofcom, what is it that they don't get? Is it your view that they are just being affected by the tech lobby and particular concern about annoying the US president, or do you think the policymakers themselves are in a different place to you?
[37:02] Baroness Beeban Kidron:I think that's a really interesting question. I would say there's a lot—a lot of politicians, both Houses, all sides of the political spectrum, who absolutely agree with me, and in fact, I absolutely agree with, who would make, you know, very sophisticated arguments of their own on this issue. So I think this is a place where government is way behind the people, the citizenship, way behind their own backbench, and way behind the backbench opposition.
[37:37]What has happened is, I would say there are two things, and you've alluded to both: One is I think that Starmer took a close-Trump policy, and that led him absolutely nowhere, as we've seen, because, you know, he's not a man you can do a deal with. But also, as he abandons the rule of law, it becomes more and more egregious to do a deal. So you've got a double whammy of, you know, he's up and down and he'll make it up in the middle of the night, and at the same time, you're further and further and further away from anything you could possibly agree with. So that was a negative, and yes, we have literally heard in Parliament, "Shh, don't upset the Americans!" That has been a policy.
[38:21]I think there has been another thing, and I do write about it in my book: this whole lobbying thing. I want to say this: There is lobbying that is cynical, but there's a lot of believers in there. And it's not just—I mean, people have been persuaded that only tech can do tech, yeah.
[38:43]And it was funny, I was speaking to someone earlier from one of the Big Five AI companies who came voluntarily to see me, asked to see me. And one of the things they said is, "It is terrible, 'cause I can get into any ministerial room because I work for X, and they should be listening to you, and how can I help you?"
[39:07] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah.
[39:08] Baroness Beeban Kidron:So even within the company, there are people who are really anxious, yeah. And what they're saying is, "We're not having a proper conversation."
[39:17]And in fact, we had a meeting—some parliamentarians and myself—we invited—we were asked, again, asked by one of the other Big Five, and they went on to say how their CEO had met all seven G7, plus the five extras, all at the same meeting. I mean, the political access! And then they have all brought in the next layer, and so you find in Ofcom and CMA and the BBC, within Number 10 and so on, how many people who used to work for tech, yeah.
[39:56]And it's not that any one of those individual people is good or bad—some might be, and I wouldn't necessarily know which is which. The problem is they come in with a viewpoint of the world that starts with, you know, "Tech behaves like this, and because they behave like this, this is all we can imagine."
[40:19]And so there's a sort of a failure of two things: One is, you know, basic, "What do we want, and who do we want it from?" which is the groundswell of being a political party leader, government. And the other thing is of imagination, because all they see... And again, I cannot tell you how many regulators—regulators have turned around to me and said, "Yeah, but, you know, they are for-profit companies, so we can't ask them to do X." And I go, "That's not where we start!"
[40:58] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. I mean, one of your arguments in your book, obviously, is that you can't then just play a pure insider game and persuade the politicians to act. You've got to actually exert lots of pressure externally and campaign, which is why you've been doing what you've been doing.
[41:12]I think the other interesting thing, though, is that the backlash is not always just from the obvious places. So MAGA is quite divided, very divided between some people who fear technology is destroying traditional ways of life and really want to push back against it. And I would say, do you feel like in the next 5 years, there is going to be a backlash on tech in multiple countries? I think that's relevant for politicians, because they then need to think: Who's going to co-opt that? Is that going to fall to the right or to the left, and how do they actually grab hold of that sort of energy?
[41:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:So I have my hands on some very interesting polling, which I'm actually going to send to you, because I think that Nesta should be aware of it, actually. But it's precisely to this point: I am grasping at numbers, but they're roughly right—I won't say that exactly right—but mid-80s in the UK. It was done in UK, Australia, and America, and it was largely the same, yeah.
[42:23]So in the UK, mid-80s people all think something should be done about tech, all think something should be done about AI, and even higher think something should be done about social media. However, mid-80s think that the person who should do it is not tech, but government, because they don't trust tech. Mid-80s think that government can't be trusted to do it right! So they want it done, they don't trust government to do it, they know the tech companies—so they are way ahead of the game.
[42:55]Then it goes—and this is to the question—which is that actually it sort of fragments a bit between those who are really, really angry and very possibly going to be replaced in their jobs, and those who are sort of, "Well, we really want tech, but we want it to be better," and then a small bit in the middle, which is sort of, "This is what we want." So I'm in that bit.
[43:22]But what the polling shows is that actually, if you don't do it for the people who are angry, those—you know, they will disappear to Reform or Green, yeah. They don't go Labour; Reform or Green, and it's more or less equal. And on the other side, if you don't do it for the sort of the "embrace tech" people, they will go Liberal or maybe even Conservative. So Labour doesn't inherit the world, yeah. And I think that that's a problem of their own making, and I would also say that it's something they can solve.
[44:09]But interestingly, as part of the book I did, right at the beginning, first gig I did was at the London version of South by Southwest—techie, techie audience. Someone asked me a question, couldn't remember—I don't remember what the question was, but I turned around to the room and I said, "Well, who voted according to tech policy? Any election, anywhere in the world, last election, who voted?" Zero! I have asked everyone since, because I was so stunned, and actually I must have spoken to 3 or 4 thousand people in the last few weeks—not one person voted on tech policy!
[44:53]Now, that is my—I'm going to put my life in my hands—my prediction is it's going to be on the doorstep. It's going to be on the ballot next time.
[45:00] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah, that's it. And so it's something for someone to catch.
[45:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Exactly, and unless you catch it early, you'll lose it.
[45:08] Ravi Gurumurthy:The obvious kind of pushback you could make to some of the arguments you've made is that, yes, we need to take control of tech, but this can't be done at the nation-state level, and that, you know, how do we avoid American companies stealing our data and copyrighted material? What's your—what's your pushback to that?
[45:28] Baroness Beeban Kidron:My pushback to that is look at Australia: It started a fire, you know, with banning social media. And look at Indonesia today that has just done copyright for AI: It's pushed back and said no.
[45:45] Ravi Gurumurthy:And how will that play out, though? Will it actually change the behavior of the companies in any way?
[45:52] Baroness Beeban Kidron:It's more of a political thing. It's more of a—actually, no. I mean, I think—at a practical level, all these companies, you know, they are global companies, they want one set of rules. So what they actually often do, although they don't advertise this, is they go to the highest group of rules, yeah, and it just goes like that.
[46:10]And so any one person—and you will have known because you've read my book—I started off this whole thing with the Age Appropriate Design Code. It is now in many countries, many American states. It sort of gradually becomes the new norm. They try and push it down, we try and push it up.
[46:27]And I actually also think that there is going to be a huge amount of legal uncertainty for these companies. And I go back to my point earlier that a narrow company here that says, "Yeah, don't worry, we have checked all our stuff. You will not be done for using our model, our outcomes. Yeah, we might be a bit more expensive to use, but actually we're not going to have years and years in the courts."
[46:58]I mean, I actually think between one's own attention—it's an attention economy, so we should spend our attention better, that's our individual piece—our vote, our democratic will for things to be different and how they might be different, and creating a lot of legal uncertainty, I think that there is a big move. Because once they start crashing and burning, yeah, the survivors are going to really, you know, be in the spotlight for what they do and don't do.
[47:33]So I think there's an awful lot of things. I mean, you know, people always say empire is—you know, the empire's there until it's not. And I don't think—and maybe I can say this a bit more clearly—we don't have a choice, because it's not a choice between carving a path and no path; it's carving a path and being the 51st state of America, you know? We are regulated by the terms and conditions, we are subject to the laws of the US, yeah, and that's not a place I want to be.
[48:12] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah. My final question is: What should Andy Burnham actually do in the first 100 days, apart from—I think in a day, he could read your book, because it's such a good page-turner. It's a very serious book, but incredibly compelling. So day one...
[48:24] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Well, he's already gone past his first day, but you know what I mean.
[48:27] Ravi Gurumurthy:Yeah, so, but all summer, nothing to do, kicking his feet up, what—what would you do initially, 'cause you are at the high point of your political capital early on. You need to send some signals or establish certain institutions or precedents.
[48:43] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, I think I think there are probably three things he could do straight away that would just send the right signal:

1. Make a commitment on copyright to UK Creative Industries. We're a huge, huge part of the economy. It is a huge number of people and employment that could be undone by not having any copyright. And actually, it's an emblematic fight. And I think it was interesting that in the polling, that was the single highest issue for the British public: They do not want their culture stolen or put elsewhere. So I think he could make a really big statement on that and not do all the compromises that the DCMS and DC were thinking of doing, but actually just say, "We'll have transparency, we'll protect copyright," and then see how the thing shuffles.
   

[49:45] Ravi Gurumurthy:And that would be symbolic, but hard to enforce, obviously, because it's other people's...
[49:48] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Hard to enforce, but symbolic, and also it would give clarity to some of the court cases that are ongoing. So I think it'd be huge to say, "Actually, we have a line, and do not cross it." So I think there's that.

1. Get the child protection piece right. He has to think about how children flourish, about protecting childhood, not children online. And I honestly do have a very, very worked-up version of that that is very widely supported by both the "banners" and "not the banners," because it actually comes in the middle and says, "This is what we want." And I would urge him to do that. We've got a new chair at Ofcom, we've got a new Prime Minister, we've got DSIT, which was a very, very captured organization, and this is their opportunity to put, actually, you know, kids first. And I think that is, again, millions of people who would be very happy to hear that and see that, and that is another very popular thing.
   
2. Have a proper conversation about AI for Britain. What is it? What do we want? What do we understand by it? What jobs do we want to keep? What jobs are worth having? What jobs are not worth having? Because I think there is this sort of whole idea of efficiency and growth that have not asked, "Efficiency for whom? Growth for whom, for where?" And I think what we want to see is both our values, but we also have to see the financial value land, you know, in our economy, rather than just simply be extracted.
   

And I think that is a conversation with the public. I did a proposal that would be absolutely fantastic—be like town halls, you know? Start in Newcastle—they know a bit about industrial disruption, you know—go all the way down to Cornwall—they know a bit, too, you know—and actually involve a lot of the people who need to be in this conversation, but not put tech in the middle of it, but have them as a constituency rather than as the driving force.
And I think that's something he could do. Those three things would help people understand that he gets that he cannot actually govern without good tech, and he cannot govern if every time he tries to do something, President Trump or Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman go, "Hey babe, no!" Yeah, yeah, because you literally can't govern if you can't actually use your laws, have your regulator, you know, make laws to your values. And I think that needs to be honestly understood. And at the moment, all the evidence is the public understand it and the politicians don't.
[53:13] Ravi Gurumurthy:And on your last point, what was interesting is the idea of actually bringing the public into this debate. Andy Burnham has talked a lot about new politics and pushing power down, but I think it's also about actually having a proper conversation about tech.
[53:27] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, and Andy, if you're listening, I'd love to do that piece of work!
[53:30] Ravi Gurumurthy:Final, final question, which is: You actually, as well as telling government what to do in this, you also tell us what to do. And I found one or two of the things that we in our daily lives should be doing—and there are loads of—there's like a ton of examples. What are two or three that you find—you think are most valuable for the self-help section?
[53:51] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Yeah, yeah. No, no, I hasten to say, it's just because people always ask, "But what can I do?" And I do make clear: Here are the 12 things that we have to do legally and so on, but here are some things that other people say work. So, you know, they are from the obvious:

• Come into the house and say hello to everybody in the house; don't just walk in with your phone and go up to your bedroom. Don't laugh! It seems very small, but I know a few people who've done it since the book came out, said transformative. They've worked out how to talk to their kids about what their day at school was like because they had to say hello.
  
• Doing some gaming and dancing and so on, you know, having "Battle of the Spotify List," you know, so that everybody gets their music out there and their moves out there, and, you know, parents are ritually humiliated by their dancing, etc. (Ah, can't believe you do that!) Again, it makes something that is atomizing, collective.
  
• And I think probably the thing that worked for me the best was when I was making the film in 2012, all those years ago, someone who is a great expert in tech said, "I'll only let you interview me if you let me have your phone for 5 minutes." And he took off every single factory setting. My phone doesn't ring, it doesn't buzz, it doesn't notify, it doesn't think. And I have kept it through all the different variations over the last 15 years of phone. I have kept that situation. And so every now and again I do miss, you know, a call I would rather have had, but for the most part, my phone is my opportunity to talk to the world, rather than this oppressive, you know, force.
  

And I do notice, in relation to other people, that I have a much better relationship with my phone, and thank him, not me. He said, "Must do that. Factory settings are set to addict you. Don't be addicted, baby."
[56:03] Ravi Gurumurthy:Thank you so much for joining us.
[56:05] Baroness Beeban Kidron:Absolute pleasure.
[56:08] Ravi Gurumurthy:If you enjoyed this episode, please do like, share, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We've got more coming. For those of you who don't know us, Nesta is a research and innovation foundation based in the UK. We design, test, and scale solutions to the big challenges of our time. We're funded by a charity endowment and are politically neutral. For more, do visit www.nesta.org.uk.