Defending Humanity Against The Techno-Optimists

I've been involved in tech since the mid-90s, have experienced the rise and burst of many 'bubbles', and have been writing about SiliCon Valley's war on the human race since 2014. But the latest battles involving crypto and AI are proving to be especially dangerous. A cult of 'techno-optimism' has arisen, with a 'manifesto' asserting the dominance of their own self-interest, backed by a well-funded 'political action committee' making targeted political donations. Laws and lawsuits are pending, but humanity has to play a lot harder on defence... To chart a safe route, we must prioritize the public interest, and align technology with widely shared human values rather than the self-interest of a few tech enthusiasts, no matter how wealthy they are.

As Michael Lewis illustrated in The New New Thing, SiliCon Valley has always had its share of people eager to get rich flogging a 'minimum viable product' that leaves awkward 'externalities' for others to deal with. Twenty five years on, we are still wrestling with disinformation and other harmful content that flows from social media platforms, for example, never mind the 'dark web'.

Regardless of the potential downsides, the 'Techno-optimist manifesto' seeks to elevate and enshrine the get-rich-quick-at-others'-expense approach in a set of beliefs or 'creed' with technology as a 'god':

"Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential." a16z

The techno-optimist creed commands followers to view the world only in terms of individual self-interest, to a point verging on malignant narcissism:

"We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” a16z

In other words, techno-optimists aren't interested in humanity, good intentions or benevolence. They are only self-interested and believe that you and everyone else is, too. It's you against them, and them against you. In this way, the techno-optimists absolve themselves of any responsibility to care about other humans, because other humans are merely self-interested and technology is the pinnacle of everyone's self-interest. 

The cult only needs to focus on building new tech. 

The only remaining question relating to other humans is whether your self-interest is aligned with the techno-optimist's chosen technology. If not, you lose - as we'll see when it comes to their use of your cryptoassets or your copyright work or personal data where it is gathered among the training data they need to develop AI systems...

You might well ask if there are any constraints at all on the techno-optimists' ambition, and I would suggest only money, tech resources and the competing demands of other techno-optimists.

They claim not to be against regulation, so long as it doesn't throttle their unrestrained ambition or 'kill' their pet technology. To safeguard their self-interest, the techno-optimists are actively funding politicians who are aligned with their self-interest and support their technology, and attacking those who are not... with a dose of nationalism for good measure:

“If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them,” wrote Ben Horowitz, one of [a16z's] founders, in a Dec. 14 post, adding: “Every penny we donate will go to support like-minded candidates and oppose candidates who aim to kill America’s advanced technological future.” Cointelegraph

"Fairshake, a political action committee [PAC] supported by Coinbase and a16z, has a $73 million war chest to oppose anti-crypto candidates and support those in favor of digital assets... Fairshake describes itself as supporting candidates “committed to securing the United States as the home to innovators building the next generation of the internet.” Cointelegraph

Nationalistic claims are typical of such libertarian causes (Trump's "Make America Great Again") and invite unfortunate comparisons with European politics of the 1930s, as George Orwell pointed out in his Notes on Nationalism in 1945:

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism... two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power... 

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. 

But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right..."

Yet in 2014, Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, 'warned' us that humans can only avoid the much vaunted Singularity - where computers out-compete humans to the point of extinction - by finding things that 'only humans can do and are really good at'. Ironically, by dedicating themselves utterly to the god of technology, the techno-optimist is actually asserting the 'self-interest' of machines! 

Of course, technology is not inherently good or bad. That depends on their human creators, deployers and users. There's a long list of problems in the techno-optimist manifesto which they claim technology itself has 'solved' but self-evidently has not, either because the technology was useless without human involvement or the problems persist.

And what of their latest creatures: crypto and AI?

While 'blockchain' or distributed ledger technology does have some decent use-cases, the one that gets the techno-optimists most excited is using crypto-tokens as either a crypto-currency or some other form of tradeable crypto-asset. They insist that the technology is so distinct that it must not be subject to existing securities laws. Yet they use the terminology of existing regulated markets to describe roles in the crypto markets that are really only corruptions of their 'real world' counterparts. Markets for cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets are riddled with examples of fraud and market manipulation that were long ago prohibited in the regulated markets. A supposedly distributed means of exchange without human intervention is actually heavily facilitated by human-directed intermediaries, some of which claim to operate like their real world equivalents that safeguard their customers' funds, while actually doing the opposite. The shining example of all these problems, and the numerous conflicts with the participating techno-optimists' self-interest, is the FTX scandal. And there are many others.

As for AI, again there are decent systems and use-cases, but the development of some AI systems relies on huge sets of 'training data' that would be prohibitively expensive to come by, were they not simply 'scraped' from the internet, regardless of copyright or privacy concerns: the technological equivalent of toxic waste. The creators of several of these 'open' AI systems defend their activity on techno-optimist grounds. Midjourney founder David Holz has admitted that his company did not receive consent for the hundreds of millions of images used to train its AI image generator, outraging photographers and artists; and OpenAI blithely explained in its submission to a UK House of Lords committee:

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

So, there we were in 2014 being warned to be creative, but it turns out that the techno-optimists believe that your self-interest and the rights that protect your work can simply be overridden by their 'divine' self-interest. 

Needless to say, many humans are not taking this lying down (even if some of their governments and institutions are).

In January 2023, illustrators sued Midjourney Inc, DeviantArt Inc (DreamUp), and Stability A.I. Ltd (Stable Diffusion), claiming these text-to-image AI systems are “21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists.”  A spreadsheet submitted as evidence allegedly lists thousands of artists whose images the startup's AI picture generator "can successfully mimic or imitate." 

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copying and using millions of its copyright works seeking to free-ride on its investment in its journalism by using it to build 'substitutive' products without permission or payment.  

Getty Images has also filed a claim that Stability AI ‘unlawfully’ scraped millions of images from its website. 

Numerous other lawsuits are pending; and legislative measures have either been passed (as in the EU and China) or regulators have been taking action under existing law (as the Federal Trade Commission has been doing in the US). 

Meanwhile, the right wing UK government has effectively sided with the techno-optimists by leaving it to 90 regulatory authorities to try to assess the impact of AI in their sectors, and even cancelled plans for guidance on AI copyright licensing that copyright owners had requested. 

As the Finance Innovation Lab (of which I’m a Senior Fellow) has pointed out, the AI governance debate is dominated by those most likely to profit from more AI - and the voices of those who may be most negatively impacted are being ignored. Government needs to bring industry, researchers and civil society together, and find ways to include the perspectives of the wider public. To chart a safe route forward, it is essential that we prioritize the public interest, and align technology with societal values rather than the self-interest of the techno-optimists. 

Commercially speaking, however, there's also the point that consumers tend to reward businesses that act as 'facilitators' (who solve our problems) rather than 'institutions' (who solve their own problems at our expense). Of course, businesses can start out in one category and end up in another... The techno-optimists' commitment to their own self-interest (if recognised by consumers) should place them immediately in the second category.

You'll See The Tories' Last Stand On The Far Right...

Britain's voters need to be on guard against extremists in this year's elections, starting tomorrow. The divisive nature of British politics since 2015 has led to the collapse of the country's public services and infrastructure across the board. And we know from bitter experience that this is fertile ground for those on both the far left and far right who prey on the most vulnerable and dissatisfied. So we need a new set of politicians who focus on providing adequate public services and infrastructure rather than stoking 'culture wars' and spouting idiotic nationalism dressed up as patriotism. 

Starmer seems to have won the Labour Party's ideological battles and occupies relatively centrist ground. The polls suggest we're about to find out whether he's any more effective in government than the Tories have been. But anything can happen, so it's important to be alert to the threat of a Conservative Party in its death throes...

Last week, for example, a group calling themselves the Popular Conservatives (PopCorns) held a launch event in which speakers appeared to mimic the rhetoric from Germany in the 1920s-30s in rants against the judiciary and the courts. Dangerous stuff.

Worryingly, our Defence Secretary (who generally but not always goes by the name 'Grant Shapps') also recently attacked the British military's recruitment policies on "ethnicity, diversity and inclusivity" as part of his party's so-called 'war on woke'. This was alarming enough for the respected Royal United Services Institute to warn that neo-Nazi groups are trying to insert their supporters into Britain's armed forces and police (Evening Standard 14.02.24).

Sunak would likely have you believe that he represents the 'sensible' wing of Britain's Conservative Party (among many wings), but his sole remaining policy involves demonising asylum seekers and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda (on which he publicly accepted a £1,000 bet) and he recently attended a far right rally in Italy. Bringing back David Cameron as Foreign Secretary was also perceived by some as a sign of centrism. But you'll recall that it was Cameron who moved the Conservatives from the centrist political bloc in the European Parliament to the far right bloc, and they've remained fans of Hungary's leader and Putin fanboy, Viktor Orban to this day. Sunak was also Cameron's go-to contact when lobbying for Greensill/Gupta, so you can see they're really a couple of peas in the same pod.

If you think I'm suggesting that Putin also occupies the far right of the political spectrum, you wouldn't be far wrong. In truth, that 'spectrum' is not so much a line running infinitely left and right as a circle that brings the far right and far left together, cheek by jowl. Make no mistake, both extremes share an authoritarian vision that results in a totalitarian regime controlled by a wealthy elite. German fascists chose the name 'National Socialists' as an appeal as much to the workers and those who leaned left as to those who preferred jackboots to sandals. Putin longs to reinstate the communist USSR or perhaps an earlier empire, but his Russia is effectively controlled by oligarchs with their own private security forces. 

Britain's politicians may have started out spouting idiotic nationalist slogans as a means of courting marginal voters, but we've seen how this ends in tears as well as outright collapse. It's time Britain's voters sobered up and elected people who want to get on with the job of governing fairly in the national interest.

Our Enemies Are Within. Choose To Deserve Better.

When the British Prime Minister attended a fascist rally in Rome on the weekend, he crossed a line. When he claimed in his speech at that fascist rally that "our enemies... will use migration as a weapon, deliberately driving people to our shores to try to destabilise our societies," he crossed a line. 

In the year to June 2023, the British government allowed 1,200,000 people to come to Britain, of whom 40,000 arrived on 'small boats' seeking asylum. In the previous year, the figures were 1,100,000 and 35,000 respectively. To pretend that the 3% of all immigrants who come to Britain as asylum seekers in small boats are 'deliberately driven by our enemies to destabilise British society' is a very convenient scapegoat for a Prime Minister eager to distract from the many failings in British society. It is the Prime Minister's claim that has the deliberately destabilising effect.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss or Sunak himself.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for the need to bail out our banks during the financial crisis or the crippling austerity budgets that followed. 

Asylum seekers were not responsible for Britain's disastrous decision to leave the EU Single Market and Customs Union.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for perpetrating the vast financial waste and fraud during the Covid19 pandemic.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for ministers and officials partying while everyone else obeyed their Covid restrictions.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for sexual assaults by police officers or MPs.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for the sewage in our rivers or on our beaches.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for our crumbling hospitals, schools and courts, or the potholes in our roads.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for the lack of funding for legal aid, social care, education or social housing.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for our declining incomes, higher taxes and inflation.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for our bankrupt councils or the lack of government in Northern Ireland.

We were, and we are, responsible for all those things.

We elected the people responsible for those things and we keep electing the people who are responsible for those things.

Our enemies are within.

And we have a responsibility to put those things right. A responsibility to defeat the enemies within. 

Not to blame vulnerable people in rubber dinghies for the problems that we created, that we tolerate, among the politicians and their donors and cronies.

We get the government we deserve. It's up to us to choose to deserve better.

Why The British Government Wants You To Pay For Fraud, Not Stop It.

Through its own efforts and inattention, the British government has made fraud one of Britain's largest industry sectors. But it's chief response is to make you pay for it, rather than stop it, because the boom in fraud is also reflected in a boom in political donations, even while the rest of the economy is flat... 

In 2021, the financial cost of fraud was £137bn, making it the UK's sixth biggest industry sector. There were 3.7 million incidents of fraud in England and Wales in 2022, yet 86% of incidents are estimated to go under-reported. Virtually all UK adult internet users say they have seen fraudulent content. The UK was third internationally in the growth of attempted digital fraud between 2019 and 2022. The UK government's own contribution to fraud has been enormous, but not in a good way. According to the National Audit Office:

Most public bodies do not know how much fraud they face and cannot demonstrate that they have the correct level of counter fraud resources... 

The amount of fraud in government expenditure that was reported in the accounts audited by the NAO rose from £5.5 billion total in the two years before the pandemic (2018-19 and 2019-20) to £21 billion in total in the following two years. 

Of the £21 billion, £7.3 billion relates to temporary COVID-19 schemes. These estimates are in addition to an estimated around £10 billion of tax revenue lost to evasion and crime every year. The Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA) ...estimates that in 2020-21 there was between £33.2 billion and £58.8 billion of fraud and error in government spending and income unrelated to the pandemic. 

These figures likely understate the scale of the problem because they exclude any amounts that are too small to be reported in the context of any one set of accounts and no estimate was made of the level of fraud in the Department for Health and Social Care’s COVID-19 spend.

Not only is the UK government careless with how much taxpayers' money is lost to fraudsters, it is finding new ways to distribute the burden among consumers: in other words, you are paying for industrial quantities of fraud through both your income and expenditure while the government actively contributes to the problem. The Online Safety Act is designed to shift the burden of addressing online fraud onto tech companies, whose only means of recouping their costs is via consumers. Similarly, the Payment Systems Regulator has been tasked with ensuring that banks and payment service providers - and ultimately their customers - pay for increased 'authorised push payment' fraud.

In these circumstances it should come as no surprise that the UK government is also resisting checks on the sources of political donations. By creating a boom in dirty money, and leaving key loopholes for dodgy donations, the politicians have experienced a boom in political donations:

"...donations have almost trebled... rising from £41 million in 2001 to £101 million in 2019... with 60% of donations in 2019 coming from private individuals. 

The increases in donations have favoured the Conservative party, which had £27 million more in financial resources than Labour in 2019, even when taking account of the public funding received by Labour (known as ‘Short Money’) that is designed to balance resources across the parties."

You see what they did there?

Machine Unlearning: The Death Knell for Artificial General Intelligence?

Dall-E and toppng.com

Just as AI systems seem to be creating a world of their own through various 'hallucinations', Google has announced a competition between now and mid-September to help develop ways for AI systems to unlearn by removing "the influence of a specific subset of training examples — the "forget set" — from a trained model." This is key to allow individuals to exercise their rights 'to be forgotten', to object to processing, restrict processing or rectify errors under EU and UK privacy regulation, for example: Google accepts that in some cases it's possible to infer that an individual's personal data was used to train an AI model even after the personal data was deleted. But what does machine unlearning mean for the 'holy grail' of general artificial intelligence?

Unlearning is intended to be a cost effective alternative to completely retraining the AI model from scratch with the "forget set" removed from the training dataset. The idea is to remove  certain data and its 'influence' while retaining the accuracy or fairness of an AI model and its ability to generalize in ways that have already been held out as examples of what the model can achieve.

A problem with approaches to 'machine unlearning' to date has been inconsistency in the measures for evaluating their effectiveness, making comparisons impracticable. 

By standardizing the evaluation metrics Google hopes to identify the strengths and weaknesses of different algorithms and spark broader work on this aspect of AI.

As part of the challenge, Google will offer a set of information, some of which must be forgotten if unlearning is successful: the unlearned model should contain no traces of the forgotten examples, so that 'membership inference attacks' (MIAs) would be unable to infer that any of them was part of the original training dataset. 

Perhaps unlike the problem of hallucinations or fabrication (from which humans also suffer) - the advent of 'machine unlearning' provides another reason why 'artificial general intelligence' - a computer's ability to replicate human intelligence - will remain elusive, since humans often forget things only to recall them later, or are unable to recall events or aspects of them that we witnessed firsthand and/or were 'supposed' to remember (like an accident or a birthday or wedding anniversary).