We all contribute to AI -- should we get paid for that?
Summary
In Silicon Valley, some of the brightest minds believe a universal basic income (UBI) that guarantees people unrestricted cash payments will help them to survive and thrive as advanced technologies eliminate more careers as we know them, from white collar and creative jobs — lawyers, journalists, artists, software engineers — to labor roles. Lanier argues that in the age of AI, we need to stop doing this, that the powerful models currently working their way into society need instead to “be connected with the humans” who give them so much to ingest and learn from in the first place. The concept isn’t brand new, with Lanier first introducing the notion of data dignity in a 2018 Harvard Business Review piece titled, “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society.” As he wrote at the time with co-author and economist Glen Weyl, “[R]hetoric from the tech sector suggests a coming wave of underemployment due to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.” But the predictions of UBI advocates “leave room for only two outcomes,” and they’re extreme, Lanier and Weyl observed. OpenAI — whose technology in particular is spreading like wildfire — is already in the crosshairs of a growing number of countries, including the Italian authority, which has blocked the use of its popular ChatGPT chatbot. Recognizing people’s contribution to AI systems may be necessary to preserve humans’ sanity over time, suggests Lanier in his New Yorker piece.