Balaji Srinivasan says that a centralized AI is inherently unethical. Because all the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the Big Tech and large corporations cannot make up for the lack of voices from non-Western countries.
Only decentralization can fix this and bring true equality of voices and viewpoints. The study of AI bias is a study of how to put (old WASP establishment) bias into AI. But we are not in 1950s and the world got used to free and disintermediated expression online.
Balaji sees inequality as dynamic and refuses to use terms like developed countries and developing countries. He uses the ascending world and declining world instead. There are billions of people whose lives were improved with technology, and they perceive it quite differently than the old Black Mirror elites, who were disrupted by the rise of Internet, and therefore dislike proles short-circuiting them.
Kenyans leapfrogged the West and launched the mobile banking revolution of M-Pesa. India developed Aadhaar digital identity and payments stack in record time, provided fast mobile internet to hundreds of millions through Reliance Jio, and started a national telemedicine app Aarogya Setu during Covid-19 pandemics. Since 2008, China has built 38,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. It costs around 100 billion dollars to build a mile of high-speed rail in the US, so it won’t be built anytime soon.
In what now seems like a different era, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talked about the danger of a single story. The danger of seeing Africa only as a poor place of frequent catastrophes and Africans as passive victims. She talked about American and English books she read as a kid and how she couldn’t identify with experiences of their characters.
This is the year of Stable Diffusion, and such decentralized and open-source versions of AI will eventually disrupt Hollywood and traditional media, which Balaji calls downstream media. Because it will disintermediate big studios, newsrooms and professional creators. People will become narrators of their own stories and myths, and create them symbiotically with AI.
Peter Thiel jokes that the opposite of diversity is university. We have seen prestigious institutions and scientists engaging in activities like gain-of-function research with the goal of preventing future pandemics. But this risky research in dual-use tech, might have instead caused the Covid-19 pandemics, as the lab leak hypothesis is quite probable.
Decentralization of exponential technology increases catastrophic and existential risks. But centralization of such technologies can result not just in a lack of diversity of approaches and fragility, but in attempts to slow down tech progress further, and install totalitarian measures for the supposed protection of the vulnerable world.
Balaji sees a way forward in what he calls optimalism, a pragmatic approach of increasing choice in smart regulators and de-harmonization, opposed to maximalism in various ideological viewpoints that lean towards max decentralization or centralization. We need protopias, instead of utopias or dystopias.
Peter Thiel says crypto is libertarian, AI is communist. But CBDCs and Stable Diffusion show that the opposite is also true. The real division is between centralized and decentralized (AI, social, web3) tech.