AI is a tool and a weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further.
So far, computers have been economic complements to high cognitive ability. Harari extrapolates that trend. He thinks that it leads to a loss of autonomy for the great mass of people who lack the highest cognitive ability.
George Gilder, in Life After Google, takes the opposite point of view.
George Gilder’s Microcosm. The copyright date is 1989. I checked it out of the library shortly after it was published, and I have been meaning to buy a copy for a while.
When I first read it, I was struck by his emphasis on human ingenuity as more important than physical resources. That has stuck with me ever since. It influenced my decision in April of 1994 to quit my job to start an Internet-based business. It influenced my economic views, where I emphasize intangible assets.
I was also struck by his echoing Carver Mead that in the future analog computing would experience growth. It seems to me that this did did not happen, although one can argue that computing devices are increasingly linked to analog sensors.
He also did not mention the Internet. But he did stress the potential of computers as communication tools, and he understood that the cost of switches was falling relative to the cost of wires, which is the technological reason that the Internet took over the communication process. And of course, by 1994 he was writing long articles for Wired extolling the Internet.
He prophesied a decline of centralized power. On p. 361, he wrote,
The military threats of the future come not from mass mobilizations for territorial expansion but from nihilist forces of terrorism and reaction. . .all democracies will face the challenge of using new methods of electronic surveillance, security, and control, together with new non-lethal weapons, without seriously infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens.
It all seems obvious now. It didn’t in 1989.
I finished reading Wendy M. Grossman’s Net Wars, which came out in 1997. The specific examples are no longer interesting, but the larger issues seem rather current. A couple of interesting excerpts:
p. 7:
I’d argue instead that what makes a community is a mark of difference between the community members and the rest of the world and, more importantly, an external threat, real or imagined.
…The Net started like that, as a loose group of people who all used computers but knew that other people were desperately bored by them.
p. 160:
an interesting battle lies ahead between two net.obsessions: freedom of information and privacy. Commercial interests don’t want to give their information away; if advertising is going to pay all those costs, then Net users must be prepared to give up their demographic secrets. If users want privacy and anonymity, they may have to pay extra for it.
Tobias Berg and others have an abstract that says,
We analyze the information content of the digital footprint – information that people leave online simply by accessing or registering on a website – for predicting consumer default. Using more than 250,000 observations, we show that even simple, easily accessible variables from the digital footprint equal or exceed the information content of credit bureau (FICO) scores. Furthermore, the discriminatory power for unscorable customers is very similar to that of scorable customers. Our results have potentially wide implications for financial intermediaries’ business models, for access to credit for the unbanked, and for the behavior of consumers, firms, and regulators in the digital sphere.
This is interesting for many reasons.
They are not all good, as I point out in an essay about the bad old days of un-targeted advertising.
Twenty-two years ago, there weren’t large Internet companies tracking your every move and serving targeted advertising. But that does not mean that life was perfect for Internet users. Those were also the days when we were deluged with emails with the subject line Enhance Your Penis!. The emails were sent indiscriminately. There was no interest in penis-enhancement products on the part of the vast majority of recipients, quite a number of whom did not even have penises.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how you’d launch rival social networks. My sense is that unless you can find something that lets you stay in touch with your friends that are already on Twitter and Facebook, you sort of have no prayer of launching anything new. And so my analogy for this is to say, imagine that you had a web browser that could only look at Facebook. It couldn’t look at any other website. Well, that’s what we had more or less in the days of AOL and CompuServe. They finally had to open up, otherwise they would die. But that was that walled-garden model.
In many ways, that’s now what we’re all dealing with on our phones, you know? My Facebook app won’t let me look at Twitter, and it won’t let me look at Mastodon, and it won’t let me look at anything else. I would really like to get back to the moment where I could have a single application that could let me look at existing social networks and new social networks. And that seems like the sort of direction we’d need to go in if we actually wanted more competition and more creativity than we’re getting right now.
Thanks to commenter Handle for the pointer to a whole set of articles on the theme of “what went wrong on the Internet.” The entire interview has a lot of thoughts that are similar to mine. But not the last two paragraphs.
He suggests giving users information about why they are being fed certain content and certain ads. I would say that most users would do nothing with that information. By the way, that is also a valid argument against my idea for a competitor to Facebook where users give more indications of what they would like to see, rather than having it fed to them by algorithm. That is, users are too lazy to create metadata.
Which leads me to think that we need to pay attention to the problems that emerge when a service caters to users who aren’t very savvy and aren’t very pro-active. The folks who need to be regulated are not the service providers–it’s the users.
As a thought-experiment, perhaps we should imagine requiring a license to use the Internet, or some parts of it. The analogy would be with a driver’s license. There are different licenses with different restrictions. I cannot drive a bus, for example. So maybe certain apps on our phone would not be available until you got the necessary license, which might require you to pass a test of some sort.
The question is not whether you would want this implemented–I am pretty sure that I would not. But come up with ideas as if you were going to implement this, just to see how the problem looks from that perspective.
Erik Brynjolfsson, Avi Gannamaneni, and Felix Eggers have a paper on the topic. From the abstract:
We explore the potential of massive online choice experiments to measure consumers’ willingness to accept compensation for losing access to various digital goods and thereby estimate the consumer surplus generated from these goods. We test the robustness of the approach and benchmark it against established methods, including incentive compatible choice experiments that require participants to give up Facebook for a certain period in exchange for compensation. The proposed choice experiments show convergent validity and are massively scalable. Our results indicate that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are missed by conventional measures of GDP and productivity.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Based on their powerpoint, I gather that the method is something like this.
1. Ask a user of, say, Facebook how much they would need to be paid to give it up for a month.
2. If they say they would give it up for $25, tell them to do it.
3. If after a month they have not used it, give them $25.
The methods that they use are really interesting, but I have doubts about the approach. I think dollars are too abstract. I would like to see a lot of “give up X or give up Y” choices offered. The authors do some of this and apparently it confirms their findings.
The values that the authors get are really high. If the median Facebook user gets over $40 a month in value from it, then Facebook is leaving a fortune on the table by not having a subscription service. Yes, they have to be careful that charging a subscription price could drive some customers away, lowering the value of the service to other customers, but the “freemium” model could be used to address that. That is, let anyone join for free, but give more privileges to subscribers.
Finally, note that if I pay less for Google Maps and other digital services than I would be willing to pay, I also pay more for my smart phone, home Internet connection, and wireless service provider than I would if all I were getting were just plain phone service. In other words, some of the “consumer’s surplus” from digital goods goes to Verizon and Apple as revenue, not to consumers.
My latest essay is on the decline of the Internet.
In 1993, I did not picture people having their online experience being “fed” to them by large corporations using mysterious algorithms. Instead, I envisioned individuals in control, creating and exploring on their own.
My theories of its decline include a snobbish view that the masses made it worse. Feel free to give me pushback after you read the whole thing.
peer-to-peer interaction with no regulations, norms, middlemen, or trusted parties is actually a bad way to empower people.
…A lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is the only source of safety is a not a paradise but a crypto-medieval hellhole.
Read the whole thing. Suppose that the population that is eager to adopt blockchain consists mostly of people who are really annoyed by existing laws and business practices. Dealing with such a population on a regular basis is probably not a good way to enjoy low-risk, trouble-free interactions.
On the other side, the blockchain Kool-Aid includes stories like this:
The trend toward blockchain agriculture promises to make each step of growing and distributing food simpler. It will offer all parties involved a single source of truth for the agriculture supply chain. In this article, we’ll cover four key ways that blockchain is changing agriculture.
I take Stinchcombe’s side on this one. Note that I scheduled this post a week ago, before Tyler linked to the same piece.
The [Wall Street] Journal has found that these non-subscribed visitors fall into groups that can be roughly defined as hot, warm, or cold, according to Wells. Those with high scores above a certain threshold — indicating a high likelihood of subscribing — will hit a hard paywall. Those who score lower might get to browse stories for free in one session — and then hit the paywall. Or they may be offered guest passes to the site, in various time increments, in exchange for providing an email address (thus giving the Journal more signals to analyze). The passes are also offered based on a visitor’s score, aimed at people whose scores indicate they could be nudged into subscribing if tantalized with just a little bit more Journal content.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I think that the future of paywalls is aggregation, not artificial intelligence. Spotify is an aggregator. It works better than having individual recording companies set up and manage their own paywalls. Maybe Amazon Prime will become a news aggregator. It already has access to the WaPo (gee, I wonder how it got that?). Facebook is a news aggregator.
The WSJ should get together with the NYT and other major publications to create a news aggregator. I have been saying that for twenty years, but the legacy media won’t do it. Pretty soon they won’t have much choice. Aggregate or be aggregated.