Science and Technology

It is now well-known that some of the world’s biggest technology companies have built their strategies around monetizing the attention of consumers while simultaneously eroding the revenue models of news media. Maria Ressa, a Filipino American journalist and media leader who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, argues that Big Tech is destroying democracy. But what can ordinary citizens do in response? This is a question that Ressa attempts to answer in her forthcoming book, The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators. Ressa is also a co-chair of the United Nations’ Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which gives her a unique vantage point to assess discussions on guardrails for AI. I caught up with her at FP’s Tech and AI Forum, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week. The full conversation is now available on FP Live—on this website and on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You say that Big Tech is bad for democracy. I want most of this conversation to be about solutions, but before we go there, can you give us a quick sketch of the problem?

It is now well-known that some of the world’s biggest technology companies have built their strategies around monetizing the attention of consumers while simultaneously eroding the revenue models of news media. Maria Ressa, a Filipino American journalist and media leader who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, argues that Big Tech is destroying democracy. But what can ordinary citizens do in response? This is a question that Ressa attempts to answer in her forthcoming book, The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators. Ressa is also a co-chair of the United Nations’ Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which gives her a unique vantage point to assess discussions on guardrails for AI. I caught up with her at FP’s Tech and AI Forum, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week. The full conversation is now available on FP Live—on this website and on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You say that Big Tech is bad for democracy. I want most of this conversation to be about solutions, but before we go there, can you give us a quick sketch of the problem?

Maria Ressa: First, let’s define it. Artificial intelligence has been around in some form for 70 years, and it has gone out to the world in three phases. The first phase was about a decade ago with social media, where machine learning came in and cloned you, and then artificial intelligence came in and took all of our clones. That was micro-targeting. The next phase came around 2022 and 2023, when large language models (LLMs) came out. LLMs have never been factual—they’re probabilistic machines. The first rollout of that was chatbots, and those chatbots then changed what you see. Now, it’s not just having no facts, truth, or trust; it’s literally just AI slop. The third phase, which is what we’re grappling with at the United Nations’ Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, is the agents and multi-agents, agentic and multi-agentic.

These three stages hacked our biology. Social media changed the attention economy. Our attention spans diminished. We gave up our attention. We gave up our intimacy. Now what’s being hacked is agency itself. You literally give these agents permission to act for you.

In July, when we released the preliminary report from the Scientific Panel on AI,........

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