Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

[...]

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

(http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm)

That basic argument makes sense to me but the leap to say that AlphaGo proves automation is accelerating doesn't.

Go is one of many task-specific AI's. It's not clear that it implies anything about generalized AI (which most experts agree is still very far off) or the rate at which task-specific AI's are developed.

I work in deep learning and I think the article is more fear than food for thought.

People all over the world are adding an incredible amount of economic value to the knowledge economy, it's just being captured completely by Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.

Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.

Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.

The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized.

There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies are failing.

We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.

For this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that this is the outcome of their engineering success. - http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php

Silicon Valley has seemingly abandoned the notion of treating intellectual property as a capital good. Facebook is a marketing platform, not a marketplace. The solution is to add actual market value to intellectual property instead of covering operations costs with advertising.

If I write a song I can sell it on an open marketplace to competing publishers. It will be treated as a capital good. It can be recorded by numerous recording artists and packaged and resold in myriad other ways. All of that is measurable productivity. All of that lets songwriters, publishers, recording artists and music marketers make real profits and pay their rent.

If I write a song and publish it to a private social media platform like Facebook it goes nowhere. It's not a capital good, there is no notion of intellectual property, and I am not financially rewarded for the benefits that it gives to the other users of Facebook. There's no market value for a Facebook post. The only measurable value is from the indirect commerce that it stimulates. Facebook captures all of the profits from selling advertising. Facebook is not a public platform. It is a private, closed platform that we're all stuck with it due to network effects.

Capital, like energy, is a dormant value. Bringing it to life requires us to go beyond looking at our assets as they are to actively thinking about them as they could be. It requires a process for fixing an asset's economic potential into a form that can be used to initiate additional production.

[...]

Any asset whose economic and social aspects are not fixed in a formal property system is extremely hard to move in the market. How can the huge amounts of assets changing hands in a modern market economy be controlled, if not through a formal property process? Without such a system, any trade of an asset, say a piece of real estate, requires an enormous effort just to determine the basics of the transaction: Does the seller own the real estate and have the right to transfer it? Can he pledge it? Will the new owner be accepted as such by those who enforce property rights? What are the effective means to exclude other claimants? This is why the exchange of most assets outside the West is restricted to local circles of trading partners. - http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03/desoto.htm

There's a lot of potential economic energy contained in the non-repetitive cognitive tasks that billions of people are performing on social media every day, it's just not being treated like capital, rather being captured by the private intellectual property industries.

Can we please explore some tried-and-true methods of establishing and maintaining marketplaces of intellectual property before we give up and start preaching about silly experiments like basic income?

Blindly paying people basic income in order to create intellectual property that is completely captured by Google is literally the dumbest way to distribute wealth through society.

dumb

verb

2.

literary

make dumb or unheard; silence.

"a splendor that dazed the mind and dumbed the tongue"

We need to speak and we need to speak through the free and public exchange of information with measurable value.