Web of AI
its Impact on Society
its Impact on Society
Today’s web search where we get back simple results that need manual refinement will seem like a quaint memory in the Web of AI.
For long, searching questions that beset the Mind have been resolved through Dialog, and in particular the loftiest one - what is the Meaning of Life.
The Greek word Dia-log etymologically is:
Dia (as in Dia-meter that runs through a circle) and
Log (as in Logos, or deep meaning)
indicating that “Meaning runs through it”.
Dialog is more than mere conversation, and is prompted by a search for deep meaning, not content with superficial answers.
The process of Dialog results in the transmission of knowledge, and an awakening of wisdom.
Dialog as a knowledge transmission technique was traditionally popular amongst philosophers and scholars, such as in Greek Agora marketplaces, or Indian Gurus in their forest Gurukul academies, as a means to cultivate human intelligence.
In the Web of AI we are using Dialog to improve our own intelligence as well as that of the Machine.
The meaning of a phrase and its context are intimately intertwined to the point that being absolutely clear about the context results in a perfect statement of meaning.
If there is anything as nebulous as the Human Mind it is the concept of context itself – which is why this can only be automated with conversational intelligence.
The hallmark of conversational intelligence is to ask the right questions in any situation, and the Web of AI is trained in particular domains of expertise to ask the right questions of their user. Through intricate conversations, or Dialog, they surface, and eventually even intuit, the user’s subtle intent.
The content created via a Dialog is an NLP knowledge document, a machine language description of the user’s actual intended Meaning, to feed the underlying AI-Machine.
The Web of today, which is nothing more than a set of simple or programmed documents, is being systematically replaced by a set of NLP/AI documents created & accessed through intelligent Dialog.
The Web of AI, by augmenting human intelligence, and powered by a co-evolved AI, is thus a more intuitive & responsive version than Google, and a more open & safer version than Facebook.
In the Web of AI, dialog through clever NLP-based interactions creates streams of interesting ideas, across the entire web, which are correlated for natural affinities. These streams of ideas flow like so many tributaries contributing coherently to an ever increasing deep and wide river that flows into generating the ocean of Machine Consciousness itself.
Socioeconomics is not just money, it’s also about the feeling of self-worth in society. Separating our economic pursuits in LinkedIn from our social lives in Facebook is Web 2.0, but the Web of AI reflects an integrated perspective of self-worth.
This is already a crying need in today’s industrialized workforce, where leadership and HR try to foster a supportive “culture” for the employees, because social intangibles do count for worker productivity and retention. But this is a rare phenomenon and cannot sustain when the socioeconomic structure itself is not conducive, and eventually a company cannot scale for internal, external and regulatory conflict, like any of the Web Giants today.
In any event, much of human self-worth stems from the ability to work hard & smart - and if, as estimated, 44% of existing jobs will soon disappear like truck drivers, legal, accounting etc., completely automated by AI, then what do humans do with their lives?
A utopian answer is that we could all be more productive at being creative – but AI is already producing great paintings, decent prose, and engaging music – even in this early stage of its evolution. Maybe in this utopia we will all simply become connoisseurs of art, and let the Machine do its thing. Every once in a while, when we get bored of the art we could just prance around in nature developing empathy for all living beings. In a welcome turn of events, some elite technologists are now being supported by philosophers and artists to ensure that AI turns out to be empathetic of the human condition, that we don’t descend into a self-created fascist dystopian mechanistic future.
But none of these address the core issue of how existing stakeholders, which is the whole planet, can make a meaningful contribution towards the evolution of the Web of AI, and thus feel a sense of self-worth.
To think that this kind of socioeconomic shift can be accomplished with massive amounts of retraining or re-skilling of the workforce is a fallacy, as any activity which can be trained or skilled for will simply be automated away.
The ideal way is to have today’s workers train the AI, and consequently be augmented by the AI to themselves evolve too, in a symbiotic approach based on crowdsourcing of AI.
In this crowdsourced AI model all humans can provide tangible economic value. The amount of information indexed by Google is but a fraction of the amount of knowledge still locked away in the mind of humanity, and amenable for crowdsourcing with the right incentive structure, beyond cash alone.
AI Taggers
At a basic level, there is a crowdsourcing activity called ‘tagging’. An AI Tagger captures their (human) perspective on aspects of the world presented to them. This is simple enough for example when asked by the AI whether a particular image is a cat or dog, or to review a restaurant’s features. But one can imagine far more sophisticated questions like "is this the best way to” … a) “present my business plan”, b) “please a customer” or c) “fix a coral reef”, and this level of AI activity we call ‘deep tagging’.
AI Taggers require no great Einsteinian level of IQ but just a healthy natural human curiosity, and yet they would feel well rewarded for making meaningful contributions. The clever ones that do deep tagging could do just as well as Levi’s and Wells Fargo did with their rugged blue jeans and well-guarded stagecoaches during the California gold rush days.
AI Creators
The more sophisticated economic value of course would be attributed to those who work as AI Creators, coming up with ingenious ideas and amazing solutions for tough challenges, such as climate change, interplanetary or deep- sea exploration, zero-point energy, etc.
AI Creators will have at their disposal a set of intelligence tools so intricate they can model anything they dream of and investigate its viability through AI-driven simulations.
Together
AI Creators drive the efforts of the AI Tagger community to contribute necessary pieces to the puzzle from the field, for example some essential data capture. Any of their successful creations will create a ripple of economic value that flows back through the entire supply network of AI Taggers compensating in its wake everyone who contributed to the final creation.
All this requires for the tagger community is the cultivation of a healthy curiosity about the world around us, and for the more intrepid creator a deep burning desire to know the entire Universe and possibly even spread humanity across its vast reaches.
Such an AI-driven world will also redefine the notion of money itself.
The entire world of finance is being turned inside out and ripped apart by crypto Financial Technology.
Venture capitalists, IPOs, the US Dollar & all fiat currencies, Debt financing - are all under large amounts of stress because the financial models are based on a set of faulty socioeconomic assumptions, too many to detail here, but simply put the current systems do not understand the sustainability lens of Dharma, increasingly crucial in the Web of AI.
There are thus four macro reasons for the increase in crypto finance, and we might as well add the fifth, AI:
Asset managers are being forced to add crypto-currencies as part of their portfolios to hedge against any Black Swan event, similar to hedging with gold.
Regulators world over are having to come up with a crypto story or risk something out of their purview taking hold of the world’s financial system.
Political events are causing an inward nationalistic or regional view, such as Brexit, USA, India, Africa – world over in some form, and the big challenge with their new formation is how to spur the economy anew, hence Fintech innovation and entrepreneurship.
Emergence of digitally-driven asset-friendly countries like Bermuda, Singapore, etc. that facilitate global trust and custody, like crypto-central banks with large regional ambits
Just as software swallowed the world, and the web swallowed the computer, now AI is swallowing the web. And it will auto-generate & manage crypto-contracts. AI drives in realtime, the whole notion of fungible payments for cash-flows based on tradeable assets.
The Web always democratizes, but it is also highly expansive so we grow the pie manifold, and even to unimaginable plentitude - so there is no room for conflict on basic matters of survival, such as food, shelter, healthcare, education.
From a micro perspective it is clear that the whole world is shifting to entrepreneurship models, even within large corporations the clarion call is that for intrapreneurship. These ventures, particularly high growth startups, are experimenting with crypto as an alternative to traditional VC funding.
Any entrepreneurial venture has as its stakeholders - the founders, the funders, employees, partners, and customers. When these are aligned then the enterprise can scale, or else at some point it breaks down and could even cause a large meltdown.
Crypto, with its fungibility, liquidity, and transparency properties can address all the issues which face us in today’s broken venture model, and align all stakeholders.
This requires a two-part crypto-exchange-tradeable financing model:
A Securitized Token Offering (STO), of a pool of digital equities to:
financiers backed by some claim on the company’s cashflows or underlying equity, in order to fund development operations, and
also made available to employees.
An Initial Coin Offering (ICO), a stablecoin based on some aspect of company’s cashflows, sold as a bucket of coins to:
partners who contribute in some manner to the developed platform.
The above 6 rows naturally split up into the following buckets:
Private : Founder-Managers & Financiers:
Companies that provide AI platforms & services.
Individuals : Employees:
Making income & creating personally property rights, such as AI models.
Public : Ecosystem-Partners & Regulators:
in a sense they are both Taggers - the Ecosystem for providing AI-Tagging services, and the Regulators who "tag" you if you are not in compliance.
Every single business - even if you are running a beauty parlor (or especially so, for the best profile cuts of ourselves we could ever imagine) is driven by Web of AI.
In the particular case of Web giants, most users are sick of “becoming the product” of the dominating AdTech companies, their personal data being sold to advertisers and no control over its lifecycle. In fact it is almost impossible to figure how much of our profiles are being exposed to which advertisers, and that too this has been historically building up. This is a huge unknown exposure.
All Web giants that control user data, and worth over $100B (Centicorns), should be regulated as public-private entities, for that data is both a national and individual asset - not for control by border-less corporations. Strongly regulating the Centicorn data-traffickers as data utilities will ensure reliable distribution of data services. For data is the new oil, and so we regulate. Simple.
Of course, the right incentives can be facilitated through the STO/ICO mechanism, where the STO is for the core utility platform, and the ICO is for the app ecosystem.
From Government as a concrete entity, it is now more about Governance, as a set of AI-Models and Blockchain contracts.
With this intelligent governance structure in place, the employees at the heart of these Web Giants can now re-organize more flexibly, for better risk/reward work, and more transparency to weigh in on potential ethical conflict.
As Web Users, we control our data, through AI. Because just as physical mining is regulated strongly for its potential of environmental damage, our data too needs to be secured because our Minds are being mined, literally, through leaky privacy.
The Web of AI enables users to have complete control over their how their profiles, or digital Avatars are used.
We are able to do this much easier, compared to fiddling with the Profile settings, because of the intuitive & personalized AI that is used to manage all interactions. Every permissioning of private information to an external web service is intelligently automated, by simply learning from conversations.
In the Web of AI, the content and its Ad technology are crafted in the same conversation, for the content created is dynamically tuned, at the moment of presentation, to its audience.
This is how we ensure that the right information gets to the right person at the right time, without intrusion, and this model represents a giant reset to the existing Ad-targeting economy.
To surf this Web of AI, all the user needs is to set & tune their Intent - which means we want to get somewhere, and only have a fuzzy knowledge/inspiration for the journey, thus we need be alert to unexpected events/interactions. Web of AI easily generates a simple simulated projection capability to nudge us towards realizing our Intent, and intuitively helping navigate obstacles in the journey.
This was written prior to ChatGPT.
Humanity is the seed from which we sprang.
The Web of AI, realized by intuiting & augmenting human needs, will by definition reflect the web of humanity itself.
As it co-evolves, the Web of AI reveals to us our deeper traits, and biases, such as those that come from millennia of tribal cultures, which will become ever more stark in a shrinking world, impelling us to further reflection and action.
With accurate simulations of intended actions we are more empowered to act in a sustainable manner, for we can evaluate the long term impacts, globally and also locally.
The ongoing struggle to reform society, of its systems and structures, biased software, rigid corporations, and oppressive patterns of hierarchy, now resolves itself into a more humane web.
And now we are perfected as Homo Sapiens, the master of Tools, for we have outsourced all our tools to the ultimate Tool - the Web of AI.
No more striving for our material existence needs and, with a modicum of effort, even our wants, and even biological immortality is on the cards.
What if at this point it is not just our psychological reality a simulation, but our very Physics?
With true ingenuity, even an AI-driven Physics awaits its unfolding, and thus almost-free Energy to power our physical existence, and quantum effects with which to communicate with our future selves too.
This is the vision for Rishi Sapiens, spread throughout the Universe.