Sometimes when you think about AI outcomes, you’re really just addressing issues of fairness and equity, and how we run our societies.
I think there’s an undercurrent of that in the places where we meet to discuss these things. For example, I thought about this listening to a recent talk by John Wu, president of Ava Labs.
The AI transformation, he suggested, is still in its infancy.
“It is still very nascent,” he said. “The users of AI still have a vote and a say in terms of how this technology can be developed.”
He mentioned the Internet and single-click shopping as technologies that have taken hold already, but in a rather oligarchical way.
Asking why we see so many negatives about technology in the news, he suggested that some of the large platforms may not be made with common human interests in mind. He also pointed out that according to studies, two out of three social media users say they are more lonely than ever before, with 40% more depressed and anxious.
“The answer for why there are so many negative (items) today always lies in: ‘who’s in control of the Internet, and what are their incentives?’” he said.
In the early days, he mentioned, the Internet was more fragmented, but what he called a ‘winner-take-most’ system brought several large companies to dominate large parts of the web and its activity – Amazon, Apple and Meta were some of his named examples.
“They have so much data,” he said, detailing how all sorts of personal services, from Ring doorbells to Alexa devices and smartphone apps, gather data about users. “They’ve got your professional profile as well – to me, this is kind of creepy.”
GenAI, he suggested, can make things “1000x worse.”
“The same people (that already control things) are the same ones that are leading the charge with GenAI,” he said.
For example, he added, one problem is the promotion of addictive hyper-personalized content. How will we react to that?
As a solution, Wu pointed to open innovation and aligning incentives.
The blockchain, he said, can help to implement this, with tokens that align incentives, as programmable data structures.
“Anyone who has these tokens in the blockchain ecosystem will have a vote on which data models to use, and what data (to use) and how to fine-tune that,” he said. “This is how we align through open innovation – this is the path that we should all vote for.”
Looking for these sorts of utilities in practical research, I came across a paper on “liquid democracy blockchains.”
“In public blockchain, distributed ledger technology is widely used,” the authors write. “The blockchain technology can be used in an almost infinite number of ways to benefit from sharing economies.”
Can we implement this type of thing? Some of our students have asserted that it’s possible. Other think it’s unlikely, saying that crypto and the blockchain already had their day, and were defeated in the referendum of the open market.
But if we move the use cases from finance to smart contracts, maybe the blockchain will be able to help after all. Take that to your next startup meeting.
