Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data

Natural pairing, massive automation means less need for work, but people still need money
UBI seems like probably a cool idea anyway?

Democracy is only as good as its education system, like AI is only as good as its data

"The AI isn’t just “looking at” tens of thousands of dog photos, the AI is dog photos. The data is the fabric, and the code is just the stitching."

Cultural evolution has no endpoint

We tend to ignore the magician's assistant in the box, the person running the Mechanical Turk
"Sometimes we willfully ignore the person hidden in the box, sometimes we don’t see the box because we’re the ones in the box."

Modern data work a la MTurk: "instead of valuing the need for this labor the industry performs the mental gymnastics of pre-retroactively depreciating the value of the task based on imagining it could have been done by an AI in the first place after we have the data"
"the majority of US workers on MTurk were making under $5 an hour"

95-99% accurate AI is easy, but not good enough
"Our commonalities can get an AI 99% of the way there, but our individuality remains, and so serving individuals requires constant labor along that last mile"

"Data labor is also done unknowingly and uncompensated by almost everyone with an internet connection, whether through explicit data tasks like re-captchas or by more subtle means such as the metadata on uploaded images"
"through the work of living in that world their data becomes more useful, more correlatable, more than a random number"
"we don’t pay the assistant. We pay the magician"
re e.g. Instagram, YouTube: "the platform gets all the benefit of a risk pool of content creators that could potentially bring value to the platform, while shifting the risk to the creators who are investing their lives"
"I wonder how we’ll look back at today’s dehumanizing and abusive online environment, the hypervigilance required to succeed on highly competitive platforms, and the apps designed to be addictive and free"

"data is already hugely valuable and will become more so, enough to allow individuals to sustain a living, so long as they are actually compensated" (Who Owns the Future?)
Hard to realize because there is no functioning market
Presently living in a data monopsony - few powerful buyers and many weak sellers

Collective bargaining for large datasets could produce more accurate valuations and better, more standardized data
"public health and security aspect to data privacy": Individuals giving away data drive down prices and make it easier to de-anonymize other people

"still relying on mechanisms that were developed for physical goods and physical labor"
"Perhaps we sell improvements to machine learning models, rather than the data that improves it."
"Maybe we track the sources of all data and collect royalties from the use value of a piece of data every time it is actually used by an AI"
"work toward a future where the average person will have access to the kind of computing power and knowledge that allows them to participate in the data market as buyers as well as sellers"

"Innovative or experimental content is disincentivized, as is developing unique unusual skills, as is thinking and expressing independent unusual thoughts"

"The more valuable AI becomes, the more value there is in the human labor that completes that last 1%"

"I am worried about the AI-pocalypse leading to people’s real, meaningful, contributions going unacknowledged and uncompensated"
"I believe UBI is not a departure from our current implementation of capitalism, but a validation of it."
"ultimately UBI would be used to strengthen the business models that made many of these people wealthy"