AI & the Concentration of Power
Gerald Huff’s rebuttal of the most common arguments against a future of technological unemployment got me thinking about power, governance and democracy.
“Program or be programmed,” Douglas Ruskhoff wrote. Either direct technology, or let ourselves be directed by it.
“Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”
However, as Artificial Intelligence progresses, a lot of the technological direction and decision-making that needs to be done, will be performed by machines. The number of decision-makers thus decreases.
Given that we operate an economic system that is virtually oligopolistic in nature, particularly in tech, this is worrying. There are a handful of successful companies for each domain:
- Taxis & transportation: Uber & Lyft
- Ecommerce: eBay & Amazon (or Alibaba, or Yandex.Market, depending where you’re located)
- Social networks: Facebook, Twitter
- Search: Google
- Travel accommodation: Airbnb, Booking.com
Understanding how governments struggle to keep up with the rate of innovation and the new status quo set by these fast-growing startups, it makes it easy to understand that as we reach exponential growth of AI, in the hands of private companies, is real cause for concern.
What does exponential growth of AI look like?
Who are going to be making the decisions?
Democratic governments or technocratic oligarchs?
The cause of Basic Income is an important one, however we should be wary not to get trapped inside a virtual prison with an allowance.
We need a broad, global discussion between governments, businesses, NGOs and other important actors to set an agenda and start shaping our future technologies consciously.
We demand the preservation of our right to influence our communities and society through democratic decision-making.
