‘The first iteration of digitalisation extracted data about us. In the first digital world, facts like our age, ethnicity, location and viewing habits could be extracted — or inferred with ever increasing granularity — and then used to tailor our attention: surveillance to sell. But the onus was on our information and opinions, not our ideas. There have been a host of downstream harms and unintended consequences that we are still discovering.
‘But now, even before that first clean-up is complete, Generative Artificial Intelligence is coming for our creativity. Everything, but everything we write, or say, or sing, or paint, or draw, or sculpt or … everything: all of it, is — or soon might be — hoovered up inside a ‘foundation model’, because our creativity is the coal that powers this new generative AI furnace.’
Bishop of Oxford, quoting Simon Cross, Templeton Foundation
Nearly half the public fear that their jobs are at risk from the rise of Artificial Intelligence, as reported by The Times last Saturday following their YouGov poll and the AI Safety Conference at Bletchley Park last week.
There was an impressive line-up at the conference. Government representatives from twenty-eight nations, including both the United States and China, and eight leading Artificial Intelligence companies (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Amazon, Inflexion AI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Open AI) signed a ‘landmark agreement’ to work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released. In May a coalition of these industry experts issued the warning, ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’.
A salutary warning — but it doesn't address those worries about redundancy, which were underpinned by Elon Musk’s claim that ‘AI means nobody will have to work’. There was no discussion at the conference, so far as I'm aware, of what will take the place of earned income in future: but no doubt many of those 28 nations have their beady eyes on introducing ‘Universal Basic Income’ (UBI). The prospect of mass subservience to government handouts is indeed an horrendous prospect.
There is an alternative, which regulators and AI companies need to consider seriously: to democr atise the ownership of the businesses which feed on the data and creativity of their users and customers, thereby sharing their wealth creation and their governance.
If you've been following these commentaries over the past few years, you will be well aware of the priority we attach to finding a more egalitarian form of capitalism. In recent months this has focused more on inter-generational rebalancing, but another key element is ‘Stock for Data’, about which we first wrote in our commentary ‘Dividends please, not space rockets’ on 10th August 2020. More recently, and following the launch of Chat GPT, our commentary on 6th February this year was entitled ‘Solving the AI challenge to wealth, control and intelligence’, again proposing the democratisation of Artificial Intelligence and Data Harvesting through mass ownership.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why the governments and companies represented at Bletchley Park might be inclined to turn a blind eye to Stock for Data. From the companies’ perspective, it implies dilution of ownership and therefore of their hugely concentrated wealth. For governments, any form of disintermediation implies less central control. But neither of these are reasons to ignore an alternative which could significantly empower and spread wealth participation in the tech-based economies of the future.
The first year of the SHARE research programme at Cambridge resulted in the need to refocus this key part of its programme, and this took effect last week with confirmation of a new agreement between King’s College and the Greeff Investment consultancy. Dr. Heloïse Greeff is an Oxford academic with extensive involvement in data science and machine learning, and she is also well experienced in the investment world. Her investment strategy on eToro has in the region of 175,000 followers, and she has developed and implemented bespoke AI algorithms to steer future market activity.
Dr Greeff will be taking the lead on Stock for Data research over the next year, with the clear objective of laying the ground for a pilot operation in order to enable this significant way forward to be tested in practice.
There will be many questions needing answers: the economic perspective will need careful study, but so also will the effectiveness of distributed governance, and the interplay between regulators and mass ownership structures.
‘Stock for Data’ has a long development path ahead in order to be viewed as a serious alternative to the intense wealth concentration and the prospect of heavy government regulation which currently embrace AI and data harvesting; however, its impact for human dignity and freedom could be very significant indeed. Meanwhile, there is the empowering prospect for people to share in wealth creation as owners, as opposed to submitting to UBI welfare handouts.
Finally, a footnote on the Bletchley Park venue itself. My great-great grandfather, Herbert Samuel Leon, lived at Bletchley Park from 1882 until his death in 1926, and it stayed with the family until it was bought by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair for the Secret Intelligence Service (now MI6) in 1938. Sir Hugh bought it himself for the nation, because the then Government said it didn't have the budget to do so itself (sound familiar?). The contribution of operations at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, which included Alan Turing's extraordinary work on the Enigma code, was a key part of enabling its successful outcome.
The research into ‘Stock for Data’ will likewise be offered to governments, regulators and giant tech companies as a better way forward for humanity, and I hope that once it has proved its credentials it will similarly be accepted as a better alternative than leaving the human race subservient to robotics.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio