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Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data (Patreon)

Published:
2019-05-30 22:27:23
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Hello good humans!

I've been in heads-down work mode for the past two months writing this piece: https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/

It's about AI and the value of data, and why the pairing of AI and Universal Basic Income is attractive on the surface but has some deep problems (particularly regarding general respect for humanity). I also wanted to explain the motivation behind some of the work I've been doing with M Eifler and Jaron Lanier. 

The piece seems to have kept growing and growing, needing just a little more research on this or that (60 footnotes!), and I'll admit I've been working more hours than I should have recently. I've also been ignoring anything else involving typing (emails, posting here) partly because I kept allocating all my time to the piece (in constant "just one more push and it'll be done" mode) and partly because all the typing means no hands left for other typing tasks. I gotta give them a break now.

I'm curious what you think. With such a long piece covering such big topics there's sure to be things I missed or got wrong, but hopefully it's at least useful and interesting.

I'll be back with more updates before long! Thanks for sticking around.

Vi

Files

Comments

Lee-kai Wang

Very thoughtful post – thank you for sharing. P.S. I believe parts 3 and 4 got switched somehow.

Chris Silvia

Wow, that 45 minutes to read!!! I hope you can get this article into The Atlantic or some similar "traditional media" they'd be lucly to have it. It's especially clarifying to hear the argument: "AI does not exist, what exists is a way to crystalize and instantly apply all of human knowledge."

vihart

Oh whoops, thanks for catching that! I don't know how I managed to mislabel them.

vihart

Thank you! I hadn't thought of trying to go through a traditional publication, I've actually never published anything except academic papers. I might look into this. Although apparently, at 45 minutes, I'm also partway to writing a book... :D

Abhayakara

This was great. I really appreciate the insight that AI is really just repackaged human work. I do think there's some value in repackaging human work—if you think about it, a lot of the stuff we take for granted now is actually the result of real inventiveness by people who are long since dead. AI could be a place where that inventiveness survives, if only it were shared the way that ancient inventions are. But the problem is that we now have an intellectual property regime that rewards the hoarding of this legacy, rather than the free sharing of it, and that leads to the dystopian outcomes you were pointing to. One of the things that concerns me about your ideas about data collectives is simply that great ideas don't just get adopted. A lot of people have to do a lot of hard work (perhaps there's a theme here) to create the cultural basis for that idea becoming a reality. So to me the problem we have is not really about AI and UBI. These are just examples of how we are failing right now. The problem we have is that the human species doesn't seem to be capable of sustaining the sort of cultural meta-cognition that is required to consistently come up with new ideas, evaluate their effectiveness, start perpetuating the ones that are useful, and meanwhile garbage collect the ones that are no longer working.

David Morrison

Thank you for writing this. You give voice to a lot of my vague unsettled discomfort around "AI culture" and "UBI culture".

vihart

Good points! One of the fundamental things we think about when considering systems and alternatives is the cognitive load expected of participants and that is necessary for success. Current systems blame people for not having the time and energy to read through the legalese of every user agreement and privacy policy every time it updates on every piece of software they use, for example. If we have more cooperative structures that allow people to rely on each other, rather than expecting everyone to make independent individual well-researched decisions on a hundred important choices a day, perhaps humanity will have the time and energy to spend on new ideas and positive change.

vihart

our hundred important choices a day include what to eat, what brands to buy, what news to read and what to believe or act on, what problems to prioritize, how to spend our time and balance our immediate needs with long term goals, decisions regarding finances and taxes, who we interact with and what behavior we tolerate, what things in life we let slide and what we follow up on, etc etc etc. It seems like everyone's overextended with these choices already, who has room for more?

Abhayakara

Yes! Exactly. And we also tend to spend so much time beating ourselves up that even though in principle the load that we bear could be born, we wind up not being able to bear it. I realized after I posted my reply that I left it on a rather negative note, but actually I think this is a _really_ interesting problem, and that perhaps we can solve it, instead of just bemoaning it. :)

Abhayakara

Also, in principle if we stop spending time doing useless work, which we now do in spades because there is no alternative, we might have more time collectively to solve these problems: we don't know how to get paid to solve them, but I think that most people want to see them solved, and would work on them if they were free to do so.

Lee-kai Wang

Wow, the "automation's last mile" concept is really interesting and feels deep on many levels. I think that one's definitely going to stay with me.

magic science

This piece was excellent, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful work you put into it. I'd like to raise two concerns. When you talk about people being compensated for "data," is this not basically a euphemism for ubiquitous surveillance? And if basic income is contingent on that surveillance, what does it imply for privacy and civil liberties? What becomes of those who would prefer to opt out? Second, a broader issue: most AI/tech futurism, whether or not it considers a UBI, completely elides environmental externalities. The U.S. is a consumer economy. If the energy-intensive resource extraction, manufacturing, shipping, disposal, and infrastructure demands of that consumption are unsustainable, then even an optimistic UBI scenario is "whistling past the graveyard." How do climate change and environmental sustainability fit into this discussion?

vihart

Both great questions! For surveillance, the hope is that if data is considered work or is considered something of value intrinsically owned by its creator, it will become easier to protect because laws related to ownership and theft will apply. If it's valued correctly I believe people should be able to make decent money without opting in to selling their most personal data, though any implementation would certaintly take a lot of care to make sure we're not creating two classes of people, one that can't afford privacy and one that can. I certainly think that giving all personal data away in exchange for basic income would be a bad deal... all personal data is worth much more than that. But some data is unavoidably shared to participate in public systems, like anything you'd put on a driver's license. If this data had to be compensated at market prices, that would incentivize the gov't collecting the minimum amount that is useful to their systems instead of demanding it be handed over. You're right about most AI futurism avoiding sustainability issues. This is where automation's last mile and setting continually more ambitious goals is essential, rather than settling for some stagnant idea that AI will automate all existing jobs and we'll stop there. In my vision of AI as soon as we automate most of something, we set our sights higher for what we can accomplish with AI/automation and human work combined, and environmental sustainability is one of those areas where we won't run out of room for improvement for a very long time. It's a great reason to embrace improvements in what AI and humanity can accomplish together, instead of fetishizing "pure" AI.

Yile Ying

Thank you for writing this piece. I feel 4 hours spent reading it (as a slow reader & not a native English speaker) actually saved me tons of time if I were researching it by myself. Though I'm pessimistic about whether we can acheive what is described in the article before another "Great Depression", I totally agree that we need to find and fight for a way to let people know that we are not obosolete if just simply live our life - there will be a lot of data unavoidably collected as long as one participates in mordem society, and merely providing this most basic data is already helping others or even the whole humanity.

Gaëtan Perrault

This is a wonderful read. As someone in the tech industry who needs to engage both humans and AIs to get our work done, I spent the first half of the article just nodding my head 😶 "...however I am worried about the AI-pocalypse leading to people’s real, meaningful, contributions going unacknowledged and uncompensated." Frankly, I think we're already here. "I still like the idea of UBI for other reasons, though I worry if it were implemented in the current cultural and technological climate it would do more harm than good...I am worried about such apps being framed as free service..." Ultimately, the real blocker here is understanding. You and I now understand this stuff, but regulators, law-makers and general voter simply don't. Even smart people wonder "how do we break up Facebook or Google?" because they simply don't understand the building blocks of these orgs. They're not being handled with anti-competitive laws because "users of the product" are also seen as "customers paying a really low usage fee". Even when we know that the actual "customers" are advertisers. Anyways, thanks for the piece, I will be sharing it around :)

vihart

Yes! Great point about the misunderstanding of who is the customer vs the product. I think a lot of people who hear "you're not the customer of facebook, you're the product being sold to advertisers" the first time think it's a metaphor or exaggeration made for effect, since it sounds a bit dystopian... but it really is! I'm glad you like the piece :D

vihart

Thank you for taking the time to read it! I am hopeful that as more people become aware of the problem humanity will find a way forward together. There are possible futures that are really bright, if we work for them!

Patrik Svensson

Really a great piece giving hope in somewhat bleak times. You are a great inspiration as always.

Jim Snavely

Great article! Do you know if anyone is working to create a data collective and or the technical infrastructure to support one? I can imagine a custom build of Firefox that does some combination of recording, encrypting and anonymizing your browser traffic and an external data store that would manage aggregation and linkage.

John Hyde

Super interesting article, full of new-to-me ideas that seem like they’ll be very important! Also, I’ve been hearing about Jaron Lanier for a while and I feel like this was a great introduction. The one thing that was a bit frustrating to me when reading this article was the assumption that we’ll never created artificial general intelligence. I think it’s a perfectly fine assumption to make, but I would have liked to have seen it briefly addressed, instead of just stating that AI will never be able to, for example, read human language, perceive subtleties in meaning, infer or look up slang usage, and judge whether the content is appropriate. These tasks are only possible with AGI, which is probably far away, and maybe impossible, but I think it’s a big enough unknown that it’s worth at least saying, “I’m assuming for the sake of this article that we don’t develop AGI anytime soon.” Anyway, sorry for nitpicking, and thanks for writing this.

Patrik Svensson

Hi, wanted to revisit this piece but it seems like the art of research page is down. Can you maybe repost it on your website?