Two years ago, a New York company enforced an “attorney exclusion list” at its venues, including Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, sparking a civil rights clash. Using artificial intelligence-enabled facial recognition technology, MSG Entertainment identified lawyers from firms involved in litigation against the company and barred them from entering concerts, shows and ice hockey and basketball games. Naturally, being lawyers, they sued, denouncing the ban as dystopian.
Not everyone sympathises with lawyers even when they are prevented from watching the Rockettes’ Christmas spectacular. When the tech entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman discussed this ban in a recent lecture in London, one veteran chief executive sitting next to me muttered: “Good.” But the incident neatly illustrates how our uses of technology can lead to messy wrangles over commercial interests, personal gripes, legal precedents and civil rights.
As Hoffman explained, such disputes are just the latest tech-enabled twists in age-old tussles over competing values. In democratic societies, at least, there are usually ways of reaching negotiated trade-offs in controversies over security and privacy, private profit and public good, individual freedom and the collective interest, often in the courts. Such clashes tend to revolve around what the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative and positive concepts of liberty. Berlin defined negative liberty as freedom from external barriers or constraints. Positive liberty he viewed as the possibility of exercising individual agency and taking control of one’s life.