Disentangling the Information Age with Azeem Azhar

An overview of concepts and ideas discussed with Azeem in our latest podcast.

Listening to Azeem Azhar for an hour is an investment everyone should make. In our last podcast, we spoke with Azeem about AGI and the political economy. Various concepts and references were mentioned, and for that reason, we are giving an overview of the content from this thought-provoking discussion between our esteemed guest Azeem Azhar and our very own Arif Khan, VP of Marketing at SingularityNET.

Find the latest podcast with Azeem Azhar here.

The narrative flow of the dialogue takes you from the formation of the information revolution to its specific impacts on democratic processes, free markets, socio-economic inequalities, and the environment.

The Information Age

Before diving into the intricacies of the current affairs in political economy, Azeem anchors the debate by recognizing a fundamental shift, namely, that of the industrial age to the information age. In contrast to the industrial age which saw the mechanization of production and concentration of industry, the information age is: characterized by production based on information and computerization. It is an age where we are experiencing an information revolution by which ‘the exponentially growing number of social changes and challenges enabled by electronic technology, the scientific study of information and the birth of cybernetics’.

Why does it matter? Simply put, the design of our current political economy is rooted in an intellectual heritage laid down in part by David Ricardo, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mills, and Isaac Newton. As a consequence, the institutions that emerged to organize the political economy of the industrial age are often outdated and “over-stretched” in the Information age.

A suspected pull on these institutions’ capacities could be coming from current mass media, as argued by Mr. Azhar. A new tool was added to the mass media platforms: the Internet. Indeed, the Internet also serves as an amplifier of all traditional platforms like newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. The reliance of the general public on these information providers has undoubtedly grown and enabled new forms of mass democracy.

The problem: a semi-regulated online mass media landscape today is fuelling mass democracy.

Trusting the Leviathans

When introduced to a discussion that has been taking place on SingularityNET’s blog regarding the big tech whales — to borrow the biblical interpretation of the word — of the information age, Azeem contemplated power and trust. How much power has been accumulated? By whom? Intentionally? Legally? How much is this power understood? And how good are the GAFAM (Google, Alphabet, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) at communicating how much power they exert on societies?

Power: ‘…the ability of A to get B to do something he or she would otherwise not do.’ (Robert Dahl, 1957)

Trust (in the context of human systems) is henceforth defined as: “…related to a sense that something is going to be consistent and reliable and to some extent beneficial to ‘me’.” (Azeem Azhar)

Fortunately, sometimes, regulators can arbitrate the trust relationship between the public and private “power holders”. By holding companies accountable and operating within defined limits, the state can affect the state.

It is important to understand technology as “enabling science” and being closely linked to the “scientific method”: ‘involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses’. The state is playing a role today in restoring and eroding trust in technology and innovation. With the role comes potential dangerous ramifications such as the rise of anti-vaccination movements.

It is crucial to educate on the difference between “bad” social network activities and life-saving technology reliant on data. This idea will accompany Azeem’s narrative during the discussion.

Striking a balance: central planner and libertarian dystopia

Marianna Mazzucato’s ‘The Entrepreneurial state’ and Bill Janeway’s ‘Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets’ are mentioned in the dialogue to invoke the notion of “investors of first resort”.

Boiled down the “investor of first resorts” takes “absurd risks” by investing in expensive technology at very early stages. The State as an “investor of first resort” can incentivize the research for a technology and provide positive spillover effects on a whole industry. However, the effects of new companies and technologies can be both positive or negative according to their context and the oversight they are submitted to.

Externalities, defined as a gain or loss for an actor that did not intend to incur it, explain much of this phenomena. Examples include: generating extensive amounts of public knowledge (positive), developing cities (positive), Greenhouse Gas Emissions (negative).

The “tragedy of the commons”: describes a situation whereby the selfish acts of individuals will work against the common good of the group they share a resource with. Azeem also refers to it later on in the interview to point at “all the different apps trying to capture our attention”.

The state can provide effective tools to address market failures but has to allow for markets to develop independently as well.

Data and us

Data is like aluminum before 1886, Azeem would posit. By 1886, the Hall-Héroult process allowed taking aluminum from a highly valued metal to a cheap-to-extract commodified material.

Analogously, usable data is spoiled today with “less than 1% of data gathered by IoT” devices being used. Data rights, or the rights subjects have over the data they generate, along with some technological limitations, lock away data and could be the reason for its underuse.

Which data should be available? For starters, Azeem hopes to see an increase in access to and trust in reliable information related to health. Again, the mishandling by some major tech companies of our data should not be indicative of the whole industry and our measures to secure data rights ought not to be too wide-ranging.

Assumed consent is evoked by Azeem; referencing a law existing in countries including Spain, Belgium, France, by which the donation of organs is assumed unless the subject ‘opted-out’ of the system. The same format could be applied in the handling of the so-called “health data” that could be used to improve medical techniques. Academia and some regulatory powers have in fact flirted with the subject.

Disclosure: for tech companies processing large volumes of data, this should be clear if we are going to see open data or “putting data in common pools for the benefit of all” it must be made clear to customers what type of agreements they are entering.

It must be recognized that consumers have little to no choice but to accept social networks or smartphones in their life today. Thus, the information they are sharing regarding ‘data protection’ and “terms and conditions” should be less opaque. This is the first step toward re-establishing trust.

The ‘end of history’?

With a reference to Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ (1992) in which the 20th-century political scientist hailed the end of sociocultural development, Azeem questions the stagnation in the emergence of new markets and new leaders.

Business law of entropy: “…[even a large company] will start to fritter away and lose little bits of its relevance”.

Blockchain can be seen as a new market. It is enabling a build-up of new types of companies -a new ecosystem. New industry leaders might very well rise with the blockchain wave; old companies like Facebook could try to adapt to it, bend it, and shape it.

Conway’s law: ‘Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.’

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes” reminds Azeem as he compares Facebook and blockchain today with Microsoft and the Internet in the 1990s.

To emphasize this Azeem refers back to Bill Gates: The internet Tidal Wave (referred to as Pearl Harbor memo) which tells the story of Microsoft’s decade-long transition from a ‘closed system’ competitor of the Internet to enabler and user of the open Internet.

The application of blockchain and of integrating trust as a “software primitive”, could be a smart solution to part of the trust problem previously mentioned.

Attention! Now monetize.

Blockchain and Tokenomics could be applied to ever more human interactions, it could “price everything” and just as easily “dehumanize everything”. The application of both also comes with related questions: should data be sold liberally and risk creating inequalities between those needing to sell and those that do not? Will the value of the former’s data decrease as a consequence? Finally, would companies make better use of the value they would get from free data and create more positive externalities for society than individuals would?

“Attention” or the amount of time spent by an individual noticing something or someone, is finite. There is a quantifiable amount of maximum human attention being available everyday i.e around 16h for every user of Information Communication Technologies. This scarce resource would be central to a potential “tragedy of the commons”.

Attention tax: by recognition of the above fact, and the difficulty of simply “increasing the amount of humans” to increase the volume of available “attention”, it could be envisioned that all different platforms that seek this resource, namely, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, etc. would be required to set the amount of time they would like to retrieve per day from users. The tax could also look at penalizing companies for not intervening in analytically discoverable unhealthy user behavior.

Afterword

I would invite everyone to listen to this podcast in order to fully capture the insight that was shared about the rapidly changing environment we all live in. As in all intellectual discussions, a lot of nuance is added to seemingly mundane observations and it only by following the narrator from start to finish that one can grasp the true extent of the knowledge being shared.

You can also hear more from Azeem and his take on technology directly on his online journal.

Other topics discussed and open questions:

Incentivizing participation online.

Creative Commons agreements.

Rights and responsibility: assessing the content posted on third-party platforms.

How do we tackle new forms of inequalities that are emerging with technology?

How to think about climate change today?

Cognitive load of hyper-connection.

How can we better use technology in fighting climate change?

“Screen time” option on iPhone.

Will technology allow us to track our own attention dissipation?

Resources recommended and where to find them:

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