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119 Colum. L. Rev. Online 252 (2019)
Recovering Tech's Humanity

handle is hein.journals/sidbarc119 and id is 252 raw text is: COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW FORUM VOL. 119 NOVEMBER 20, 2019 PAGES 252-282 RECOVERING TECH'S HUMANITY Olivier Sylvain* INTRODUCTION Tim Wu's essay, Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law?, posits that automated decisionmaking systems may be taking the place of human adjudication in social media content moderation. Conventional adjudi- cative processes, he explains, are too slow or clumsy to keep up with the speed and scale of online information flows. Their eclipse is imminent, inevitable, and, he concludes, just as well.1 Wu's essay does not really indulge in the romantic tropes about cy- borg robot overlords, nor does he seem to hold a conceit about the superiority of networked technologies. He does not promise, for exam- ple, anything similar to Mark Zuckerberg's prophecy to Congress in spring 2018 that artificial intelligence would soon cure Facebook of its failings in content moderation.2 To the contrary, Wu here is sober about the private administration of consumer information markets. After all, he has been among the most articulate proponents of positive government regulation in this area for almost two decades. The best we can do, Wu argues, is create hybrid approaches that carefully integrate artificial intelligence into the content moderation process.3 But in at least two important ways, Wu's essay masks important chal- lenges. First, by presuming the inevitability of automated decisionmaking systems in online companies' distribution of user-generated content and data, Wu obscures the indispensable role that human managers at the Big Tech companies have in developing and selecting their business de- signs, algorithms, and operational techniques for managing content distribution.4 These companies deploy these resources to further their * Professor of Law, Fordham Law School. 1. Tim Wu, Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law? The Rise of Hybrid Social- Ordering Systems, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 2001, 2001-02 (2019) [hereinafter Wu, Al Eat the Law]. 2. Sarah Jeong, Al Is an Excuse for Facebook to Keep Messing Up, The Verge (Apr. 13, 2018), https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17235042/facebook-mark-zuckerberg- ai-artificial-intelligence-excuse-congress-hearings [https://perma.cc/6JB6-NJSG]. 3. Wu, Al Eat the Law, supra note 1, at 2001-05. 4. By Big Tech companies, I refer to the dozen or so internet companies that domi- nate the networked information economy, but especially the big five: Facebook, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. For the purposes of this Response, under this coinage, I also include Twitter, the social media company which, after Facebook-owned entities, has the second-largest U.S. user base. See J. Clement, Most 252

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