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Profit and power, by themselves, are insufficient coding for these immensely powerful systems. They must now work to sustain their full range of stakeholders, and not just their shareholders. We must also raise our aspirations and focus these technologies on solving our greatest societal and ecological challenges. These systems must also be inoculated from autocracy by baking democratic governance into the very feedback these systems use to learn from us.
Humanity is on a collision course with technology and the stakes of our role in this emerging synthetic intelligence could not be higher. We must learn how to navigate this new relationship while retaining not just our liberty, but also that which is most sacred to us.
Disrupting the Disruptors
The code within the code that optimizes today’s platforms for control and wealth has led to much disillusion with big tech—and left it vulnerable to being disrupted themselves.
The root of this vulnerability lies in the dependence of platforms on contributions of work and intelligence by unpaid end users. Millions of us serve ourselves with automated user interfaces, generating invaluable data for machine learning as we do. The tech platforms then use the resulting synthetic intelligence to disrupt market after market, particularly within the service economy. But cut that flow of data and change users’ willingness to serve themselves without a stake in the result, and you disrupt the platform.
Openness is a key element in disrupting the disruptors and opening corporate data silos is just a start. Open standards and open-source software guard against monopolistic lock-in, as does the decentralized public record keeping technology of the blockchain.