I have great hope about the potential for AI to save the world - inclusive of my own work to rebuild a more inclusive financial services sector - and heal the planet from it’s current climate crisis. I think a more data literate population will understand political polling and vote more. And I think the economy becomes much more inclusive, as we see new faces participate and become successful.
But I think we first need to focus on the very important task at hand — how to regulate AI — as this will dictate this future, which is not guaranteed.
The Tech Barrons being consulted (Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Thiel) do not have egalitarian interests (believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities). They bring aging politicians with flip phones celebrity cache and bankroll a large percentage of jobs. They’re all white men and the technologies they’ve created has brought about unchecked inequality, oppression, and violence.
What you won’t hear them say this week is — break up the big companies and give people the right to own their own data — even though these are the most important places to start a conversation on what regulation is appropriate and needed.
As I advocated in my open letter on AI, the three focus areas should be: 1. antitrust - data companies, like every other company, can not get too big and become monopolies. 2. consumers need to gain a new ability to supervise how data are being used and provide or remove consent. 3. how to prioritize peace and prolong the American Democratic experiment.
I want to expand on these topics because they’re nuanced. I’ll take on the first two in this blog and #3 separately…
1.
Antitrust law is simply the most important place to start / to pay attention to. Without competition, consumer choice becomes a construct, not a reality. Without competition, consumer prices increase, as companies extract and consolidate profits into monopolistic organizations. Without competition, the monopolist grows tired of innovation and doesn’t invest in it. Progress and productivity slow and the cool stuff gets a lot more boring and mundane. Without competition, nationalistic and fascists who govern without the will of the people, enrich themselves or impose (often more extremist or religious) world views.
Big data companies are already too big. It’s tempting because more data generates better results, but only to an extent. We must fight this temptation and justification to preserve choice, free will, and ownership. I’ll remind you that the same Tech Barrons that are speaking before Congress are also fighting in court to gain free access to copywritten material, so we must legislate anti-trust laws because monopolies are not interested in self-regulating.
2.
Consumers need to gain the ability to consent and opt out. The word “gain” is accentuated purposefully to acknowledge, we do not currently have an enumerated right to our data. We should. We should also know when we are interacting with a machine and have the opportunity to speak with a human for important decisions. The technology and infrastructure to do this is minimally disruptive to businesses. But again, the Tech Barrons have elected to harvest data, sell it, profit from it, and do so without your knowledge or consent aren’t policing themselves, so regulation is necessary.
We can not prevent China from creating a surveillance-based economy, but with regulation, we can chose not to become one. We’re at that turning point that people buy thousands of dollars worth of home surveillance equipment to allow a private company to view your front door, and your coming and goings; our vacuum cleaners know the interior floor plans of our homes, and we give our biological DNA — our personal, custom code to our lives itself — to private companies. Consumers do not appreciate that there are no limits imposed on these companies — how they obtain, use, resell your data without your knowledge or consent, necessarily.
FICO credit, for example, is a private company that compiles financial transaction histories. Maybe it makes sense to use their algorithm to qualify people for a loan, but do you know they also sell these data to car insurance companies, who turn around and discriminate low-credit drivers because they are unlikely to have additional assets to insure? That’s not how I want my data to be used! In China, a similar social caste algorithm is making a multitude of life-changing decisions, limiting free-enterprise and imposing a computational value to an individuals worth and potential.