Good Guys Defend Their Territory
...while "open" systems often just serve bad guys.
We’ve all benefitted from open source, yet open source itself failed:
Now AI reignited the discussion about the future of open source, we have the opportunity to rethink the foundations. Do we repeat the old mistakes? Or do we learn from the failures of the past?
Open Source might have broken the dominions of operating systems in the 90s, but it just gave us new dominions on the Internet. There used to be the Open Web, now we’re stuck with apps and Big Tech. Giving power away just creates opportunities for others to seize it where they can.
I had bought into the vision of an open source movement. I was an eager young programmer, contributing to free projects as much as I could. Billions of people use my work, some recognize it. Many also automatically assume I got paid for it. But I got nothing - I just gave it away, for the benefit of humanity. When I complained about this idea to the creator of GPL and Gnu, Richard Stallman, he just quoted Kant [*]. I shrugged and went back to my job, doing what I was told to do.
Consider this aerial photo from the island of Krk in Croatia:
What happened here? It’s probably not what you think. Nobody planted the forest in the middle of the desert.
It was all forest initially. It was the open part of the forest that turned into a desert. The closed forest has kept its trees, even if the desert is now pushing into it.
The open land was free for everyone. So shepherds brought their sheep, goats, and cattle. They cut down the trees. The animals overgrazed, thornbush replaced the grass. Shepherds torched the thornbush, water and wind eroded away the topsoil, rocks reduced the amount of grass. More overgrazing. More burning. More erosion. You see the result.
South of there, you can see how it ended: the farmers were trying to close the little that’s left by building walls around the pockets of remaining soil. But it was too late. It’s all abandoned now, and it will take hundreds, maybe thousands of years for the nature to regenerate itself.
We’re in another downward spiral right now, brought along by artificial intelligence.
AI is mostly made from data. Data is what is concrete and factual about the world. Data is also all the words, ideas, sounds and pictures humanity has put on the Internet. This data contains our civilization’s knowledge, wisdom, learning. This data has been analyzed at massive scale, and summarized in foundation models, like the large language models, video and image models. These models have never existed before, and provide a much better index to humanity than that what we had before.
When you approach an AI with your question or your task, the AI first primes the context by retrieving relevant data. Then it uses the models to extrapolate from the data towards an answer you will get. Sometimes multiple such AI requests are layered inside every request you put in.
The sources of the data used for the answers to your questions is often hidden. In the past we’d have to go to the libraries or to the experts, who’d point us in a good direction, and we’d retrieve books and articles. Then we’d examine these materials, and evaluate sources and ideas, and assemble a report. We’d then share this report with others, helping them build on our work, or stand on our shoulders as Isaac Newton would have put it.
This has been replaced by AI. The publishers, libraries and experts performed quality control over the information. Our research would check and verify information, and our authorship would give us both credit but also accountability. The reports would close the loop of sharing our learning with others, contributing to the body of knowledge.
AI is incredibly useful and powerful: we’re no doomers. AI has been trained on and is primed with data that is the cumulative creative and scientific output of the human civilization. Most of the intelligence is civilizational, not artificial. What’s artificial is the indexing, search, evaluation, and synthesis. By offering AI’s output without disclosing the data roots is like feeding us with dishes while refusing to tell us about the ingredients.
The absence of roots exposes us to massive risks - while also disconnecting the data ecosystem from resources. The impact of AI on the open data ecosystem can prove to be catastrophic. Wikipedia experienced such an onslaught of bots:
Websites that aggregated programmers’ insights have been completely replaced by AI systems:
Websites that curated and organized health information are experiencing similar reductions:
My dear friends, we’re about to find ourselves in the middle of a desert. The idea of open access and open data has made AI possible, the forest has been cut, and the soil is rapidly getting washed out. We need to do something. It’s not an AI question, it’s a data question. It’s a data sustainability question.
It’s almost 20 years since when I stepped out of the status quo. I was teaching students at Columbia University in New York City how to mine data, how to extract data. It was clear to me that this wasn’t sustainable. I left because I felt an obligation to protect and grow data.
It’s not too late to move AI from being an extractive industry to being an industry that will lead to a 1000-year period of flourishing of civilization, engaging in compounding growth of civilizational and planetary intelligence.
Wishful Kantian thinking needs to stop. We need to take ownership of the future. The good guys need to step up, and defend. Being weak is evil. We need to be meek: respectful of the values, but strong towards those who violate them. I’ll end with Casey Muratori’s words:
What happens when you decide that you’re going to give something away for free so that other people can build things on it, they do build things on it. They take all the power and control for themselves and even though your contribution by percentage may be significantly higher than theirs, like building an operating system versus building Amazon Web Services, at least on the software side it’s just it ends up with a bunch of people sitting in a room like we are now talking about how you start to take back ownership of your computers.
Well, all of the ownership would have already been ours if the programmers had asserted that power and control for themselves! But instead we didn’t.
Casey Muratori, 12:00 in “Why Hasn’t Open Source Won?”, Apr 25, 2024
Are you asking what to do? Engage. Spread the word. Point to those individuals and projects who need support. State what you can offer yourself.
great article, and very true ! if nobody is willing to step up to protect the commons, then the commons will fall. anarchy isn’t a valid solution within a multicultural and multi valued system, we need some kind of ‘authority’ that is able to maintain some level of “baseline” for everyone else to build on top of !
Hey Aleks, may I ask your take on Elinor Ostrom's body of work that culminated in her book and framework of "Governing the Commons". She did Nobel prize-winning economics research on the governance of natural commons, which was essentially a refutation of "the tragedy of the commons" as a simple mechanism of degradation. In my understanding, many consider her work to be greatly applicable to thinking about digital commonses.
Are you familiar with her research, but perhaps find it unwise or inapplicable to the work? Do you point to stories of tragic commonses in disagreement with her theories, or might this be new information to potentially integrate about your domain of expertise?
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Governing_the_Commons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom