Bartering: April 23, 2017 Snippets
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Earlier this week, Tim Urban’s long-awaited Neuralink post finally came out on Wait But Why (and we know it was really commissioned by Elon himself, because it came out three weeks later than initially announced):
Neuralink and the brain’s magical future | Tim Urban, Wait But Why
It’s a sprawling, far-reaching post that doesn’t quite reach Wait But Why’s peak level of insight, yet nonetheless accomplishes the job it was set out to do: present Elon’s case for developing a brain-internet interface with as much bandwidth as possible. (Not everyone was impressed with Musk’s more far-reaching claims, understandably.) The post is worth reading in full, whether you agree with the premise or not, as it helpfully articulates a number of the arguments (at least those on one side of the debate) around the future impact of AI and how we might be able to influence the future by nudging its trajectory in one direction or another.
Urban’s post, along with many others in the field, treat the world’s collective computing resources as a system. And if you want to influence a system, one eternally useful principle is that you can’t simply tell it what to do. You’re better off creating the conditions by which it can get there organically, and then prod it in the right direction until it does. How could you do this? Well, one way is to create new ways for it to communicate; more specifically, for the system to engage in bartering. Why bartering? Because it satisfies two conditions. The first, all concerned parties can act according to their own motivations in a loose and uncoordinated fashion, as we described in Snippets a few weeks ago. The second, as articulated below by Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist, is the potential for success to compound organically and feed back into itself. Ridley writes, in the context of how bartering has made humans a uniquely successful species in their ability to act collectively:
“Evolutionary psychologists have assumed that it is rare for conditions to exist in which two people simultaneously have value to offer to each other. But this is just not true, because people can value highly what they do not have access to. And the more they rely on exchange, the more they specialize, which makes exchange still more attractive. Exchange is therefore a thing of explosive possibility, a thing that breeds, explodes, grows, auto-catalyzes. It may have been built upon an older animal instinct of reciprocity, and it may have been greatly and uniquely facilitated by language — I am not arguing that these were not vital ingredients of human nature that allowed the habit to get started. But I am saying that barter — the simultaneous exchange of different objects — was itself a human breakthrough, perhaps even the chief thing that led to the ecological dominance and burgeoning material prosperity of the species.”
It therefore stands to reason that if we want to influence the future impact of AI on the world, then we might start by looking at the settings and forums by which unique, non-human minds might communicate with each other through bartering and mutual exchange. After all, if it worked for us, it might work for them too. Where might AI trade with each other, or with humans, and learn how to conduct itself? A few candidates come to mind. One are the marketplaces that will likely spring up on the giant cloud platforms powering much of our future company-building and value creation. Just as Amazon’s third party e-commerce marketplaces have created unprecedented options and benefit for the consumer, so too will we likely see these third party exchanges for digital functions, goods and services come to thrive — precisely the kind of arena where autonomous, intelligent decision-makers can make themselves useful early on. Another, perhaps even more interesting candidate are smart contract platforms like Ethereum: who’s to say it’ll be humans writing these contracts and agreements? Could these be the true decentralized bazaar of the machine age?
The Neuralink thesis, as articulated by Urban, lies something along the lines of “To ensure a good AI-powered future, we need to create as much bandwidth as possible between our brains and the world’s collective computing in order to nudge the AI’s development in the right direction — and in the process, hopefully make people’s lives better.” As a former graduate student in neuroscience, there’s little doubt in my mind that this is a worthwhile initiative to pursue. Even if it fails, the secondary spillover benefit for anyone who is paralyzed, has chronic pain, any kind of brain or mental illness is worth pursuing with every shot on goal we have. But in our effort to nudge the world’s computing and thinking system in the right direction, perhaps an alternative avenue would be by shaping the tools and settings by which they will do their earliest bartering and bargaining. If we shape those tools, we may be able to shape them — even if just a little bit.
Public servants, past and present:
The challenge of our disruptive era | Senator Ben Sasse, WSJ
Joining 8VC | Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada
Well that escalated quickly:
Ad Industry powers consider adopting ad blocking on a wide scale | George Slefo, AdAge
Tech’s high-stakes arms race: costly data centers | Jay Greene, WSJ
Science fiction material:
The mind in the machine: Demis Hassabis on artificial intelligence | Demis Hassabis, FT
The Kekulé problem: where did language come from | Cormac McCarthy, Nautilus
How to look for Alien Life | Alison Snyder, Axios
Other reading from around the Internet:
Qualcomm: first Windows 10 ARM PC coming in the fourth quarter | Agam Shah, PC World
The web is a portal to other words | Tim Carmody, Kottke.org
Industry Dive: a boring business that Warren Buffett would love | Thomas Heath, WSJ
Learning about learning about what we want to be learning | Jenn Schiffer, Glitch
Investors still don’t prioritize diversity. That’s bad for the future of tech | Freada Kapor Klein
DOT releases National Noise Map | Audrey Wachs, National Architects Newspaper
This week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family:
Cardiac device data platform Murj has announced their Series A round of fundraising to help bring their product to more patients, clinicians, and health centers:
Founded by Apple and Medtronic veteran Todd Butka and based in Santa Cruz, Murj is on a mission to make the data collected by implanted cardiac monitoring devices more accessible and useful to patients and their physicians. It’s a highly regulated and important space with little room for error, and the Murj team has spent three years developing the technology prior to raising their Series A. With the technology ready to be put to work, there is now an opportunity to help patients and build a new kind of health care business for cardiac care patients and those supporting them. Todd tells us: “As a field representative working with electrophysiologists for over a decade, I was dismayed by the inefficiency of monitoring cardiac devices. From my experience at Apple, I saw the tremendous potential for well-designed technology to impact the care of patients with cardiac devices. Our solution dramatically improves clinic productivity, while providing clinicians with previously unavailable insight about their clinic and patients.” Congratulations to the Murj team, and thank you for the work you’re doing!
The team from Intercom has a new book coming out: Intercom on Starting Up. Filled with lessons learned by the Intercom team over their six year journey so far, it covers topics like:
- Choosing what product and features to build
- How to think about your first hires
- How to attract your first customers
- How to measure your business
- How to build your company culture
It comes out in hardcover on May 1st, and you can also get a pdf copy in exchange for a $5 donation to Black Girls Code. Read more about it on the Intercom Blog, on Product Hunt, or on Twitter. If you didn’t know already, Intercom has a whole library of books to choose from, including titles on Onboarding, Product Management, Jobs-to-be-Done, and Customer Support. So if you know someone with a birthday coming up (or if that someone is you), head over to Intercom.com/books and get your reading on.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
