Sam Altman is a talented, unreliable storyteller
Meta says the quiet part out loud, ICE is surveilling your license plate, and Substack isn't cool.
Almost three years ago exactly, I wrote an essay called “Tech for … what, exactly?” that started this way:
What if I told you that the key to unlocking universal basic income was your biometric information? Sam Altman, the founder of WorldCoin, has proposed that this is the only way.
Back then, Altman and WorldCoin CEO Alex Blania were sending orbs around the world loaded with cameras and sensors to scan your eyes, faces, and bodies, and turn that information into a unique identifier, or an ‘Irishash’. In exchange, you’d receive some WorldCoin cryptocurrency.
Now, you might reasonably ask: WHY!? For Altman and Blania, the answer was clear at the time: if we wanted to scale universal basic income, we would have to address fraud. I argued then that ‘fraud’ has never been critical to unlocking UBI and that Altman and Blania were simply using it to justify the scale of the Orb hardware, and in turn, launder their own interests. In 2022, they simply wanted to onboard more users into crypto and address the issue of Sybil attacks (i.e. when multiple pseudonymous accounts essentially take control of the network).
But the Orb is back, this time with a new story attached to it. In a great piece by Billy Perrigo in Time, Altman explains “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI. We wanted to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” In a world wherein AI agents are doing things online, the story goes, we’ll need to be able to distinguish between humans and agents. (Untangled Deep Dive — There’s no such thing as ‘fully autonomous agents’)
Put aside for a moment the irony that Altman’s Orb would be attempting to solve a problem that Altman’s other company is creating. Is the underlying reasoning sound? Nope! The system is designed so that a human can delegate any action to an agent. Which, uh, sort of undermines Altman’s central claim. Worse, the system only distinguishes between a human and an AI agent at the account level, not at the content level. So, sure, we might get to distinguish between humans and bots, but we will still drown in a sea of AI generated content.
While reading Perrigo’s story, I picked up Karen Hao’s great new book Empire of AI, to prep for our conversation later this month. Early on, I stumbled upon this quote about Sam Altman from Geoff Ralston, who took over running Y Combinator from Altman: “Sam can tell a tale that you want to be part of, that is compelling, and that seems real, that seems even likely.” Altman might be a talented storyteller, but the stories become less believable — as does he - the more they change. And they continue to shift as the technologies desperately look for a new problem to solve. One thing that hasn’t changed? The ultimate beneficiaries! Roughly 75% of all Worldcoins are distributed to those who participate in a scan but the remaining 25% are allocated to Altman, Blania, and their investors. As Blania tells Perrigo, “I’m really excited to make a lot of money.”
Artificial Intelligence’
There are diametrically opposed views on AI among researchers, which hinge on the question: are we dealing with rogue robots or normal technology we can control? In an essay for The New Yorker, Jonathan Rothman described the experience of interviewing experts from either camp this way: “I felt like I was having a conversation about spirituality with Richard Dawkins and the Pope.” (More)
ICE is working with local police to access data from an AI-powered automatic license plate reader to assist in its investigations. As 404 Media reports, this gives federal enforcement “side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.” (More)
Let’s decolonize the future and resist the empire of AI, shall we? A great conversation between two of my favorite thinkers on technology and democracy: Karen Hao & Justin Hendrix. (More)
A great new paper shows how algorithms reflect “the perspectives, priorities, and values of the people and institutions that design them.” The paper focuses on fintech companies and finds that gendered norms became encoded in the algorithmic system assessing creditworthiness. As a result, women were less likely to receive loans, despite being more likely to repay the loan. (More)
This Week: Free Workshop
There are only 5 spots left for this week’s workshop on the social construction of data.
Media, Crypto, etc.
Are social networks products that can be held liable when something goes wrong? That’s the legal theory being tested in the case of Payton Gendron, who in 2022, killed 10 people in a Tops supermarket in Buffalo New York. Gendron left a manifesto behind that said he had been radicalized in part by racist memes, and the plaintiffs are arguing that Meta, Amazon, Discord, Snap, 4chan, YouTube, and other platforms bear responsibility. The plaintiffs allege that these companies created an unsafe product that was “reasonably dangerous for its intended use,” pointing out the algorithm’s addictive nature and the platforms willingness to host white supremacist content. The lawyers for the companies argue that social networks aren’t products under the law because “they’re not standardized,” they are “used and experienced differently by every user.” Both arguments are true — watch this space. (More)
Meta’s Nick Clegg says the quiet part out loud: asking artists and creators consent to use their works would “basically kill” the AI industry. (More)
The ad-supported web is dying. What comes next? I’m still puzzling through the implications of Ben Thompson’s latest essay (More)
Substack isn’t cool. (More) Welp 🤷
“The Latin roots of complicated is to unfold, whereas the Greek origin of complex is entangled. So something which you can fold, you can unfold and fold, it stays the same thing. Something which is entangled is constantly shifting and constantly changing.” Dave Snowden, Cynefin.
Want to know if you’re dealing with a complex system? Check out my latest Guide!
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