Source: "I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
Organized & compiled: Janna, ChainCatcher
ChainCatcher editorial summary
This article originates from Vitalik Buterin's personal website, primarily used to publish Vitalik Buterin's blog posts, opinions, and research covering topics such as blockchain technology, cryptoeconomics, decentralized governance, and privacy protection. This article delves into how open-source technology promotes fairness and transparency, why emerging technologies may exacerbate inequality, and open source as a 'Schelling point' for technology governance.
ChainCatcher has organized and compiled the content (with edits).
Core point:
Radical technologies may exacerbate social inequality because they are more accessible to the rich and powerful, leading to a gap in lifespan and advantages between the rich and the poor, and even forming a global underclass.
Another form of technological abuse exists, where manufacturers project power over users through data collection, information hiding, etc., which is fundamentally different from the inequality of technology access.
Open source is an underrated third path that can improve equality of access to technology and producers, enhance verifiability, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
Opponents of open source argue that it carries risks of abuse, but centralized gatekeeping is untrustworthy, easily abused for military purposes, and difficult to guarantee equality between nations.
If technology carries a high risk of abuse, a better solution might be to not do it; if the power dynamics risk is uncomfortable, an open-source approach can make it fairer.
Open source does not mean laissez-faire; it can be combined with laws and other regulations, with the core being to ensure the democratization of technology and accessibility of information.
One concern we often hear is that certain radical technologies may exacerbate power inequalities, as these technologies will inevitably be limited to use by the rich and elite.
Here is a quote from someone who expresses concerns about the consequences of extended lifespans:
"Will some people be left behind? Will we make society more unequal than it is now?" he asked. Tuljapurkar predicts that the surge in lifespan will be limited to wealthy countries where citizens can afford anti-aging technologies, and governments can fund scientific research. This gap further complicates the current debate about healthcare accessibility, as the rich and the poor not only pull away from each other in quality of life but also become increasingly distant in lifespan.
"Big pharmaceutical companies have a consistent track record of being very harsh when it comes to providing products to those who cannot afford them," Tuljapurkar said.
If anti-aging technology is distributed in an unregulated free market, "in my view, it is entirely possible that we will ultimately form a permanent global underclass, with those countries locked into today's mortality conditions," Tuljapurkar said. "If this happens, it will create negative feedback, leading to a vicious cycle. Those countries that are excluded will remain excluded forever."
Here is a similarly strong statement from an article expressing concerns about the consequences of human genetic enhancement:
Earlier this month, scientists announced they had edited genes in human embryos to remove a pathogenic mutation. This work is astonishing and is the answer many parents pray for. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to prevent their children from suffering pain that could be avoided today?
But this won't be the end. Many parents hope to ensure their children have the best advantages through genetic enhancements. Those with means can access these technologies. As capabilities emerge, ethical issues transcend the ultimate safety of such technologies. The high costs of programs will create scarcity and exacerbate already growing income inequality.
Similar views in other technical fields:
Digital technology in general: https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/technology/technology-and-inequality/
Space travel: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/What-Does-Billionaires-Dominating-Space-Travel-Mean-for-the-World.html
Solar geoengineering: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/article/hidden-injustices-of-advancing-solar-geoengineering-research/F61C5DCBCA02E18F66CAC7E45CC76C57
In many criticisms of new technologies, this theme can be found. A related but essentially different theme is that technological products are used as tools for data collection, vendor lock-in, willfully hiding side effects (as modern vaccines have been criticized in this way), and other forms of abuse.
Emerging technologies often create more opportunities for people to obtain something without giving them rights or complete information about that thing, so from this perspective, old technologies often seem safer. This is also a form of technology that empowers the elite at the expense of others, but the issue is the projection of power by manufacturers over users through technology, rather than the inequality of access mentioned earlier.
I am personally very supportive of technology, and if it were a binary choice between 'further advancement' or 'maintaining the status quo,' I would be happy to advance everything except for a very few projects (like functional gain research, weapons, and superintelligent AI), despite the risks.
This is because, overall, the benefits are longer, healthier lives, a more prosperous society, maintaining more human relevance in an era of rapid AI advancement, and preserving cultural continuity through the elderly generation as living people rather than memories in history books.
But what if I put myself in the shoes of those who are less optimistic about the positive impacts, or more concerned about elites using new technologies to dominate economic control and impose control, or both? For example, I have held this sentiment about smart home products, where the benefits of being able to talk to light bulbs are outweighed by my reluctance to let my personal life flow to Google or Apple.
If I had a more pessimistic assumption, I could also imagine holding a similar sentiment toward certain media technologies: if they allow elites to broadcast information more effectively than others, then they can be used to impose control and drown out others. For many such technologies, the gains we get from better information or better entertainment do not sufficiently compensate for the way they redistribute power.
Open source as a third path
I believe a severely underestimated viewpoint in these cases is: only support the development of technologies that are open source.
The argument that open source accelerates progress is very credible: it makes it easier for people to build on each other's innovations. At the same time, the argument that requiring open source will slow progress is also very credible: it prevents people from using a multitude of potentially profitable strategies.
But the most interesting consequence of open source is those directions that are unrelated to the speed of progress:
Open source improves equality of access. If something is open source, it is naturally accessible to anyone in any country. For tangible goods and services, people still need to pay the marginal cost, but in many cases, the high prices of proprietary products are due to the fixed costs of inventing that item being too high to attract more competition, so the marginal cost is often quite low, as is the case in the pharmaceutical industry.
Open source improves equality of access to becoming producers. One criticism is that providing terminal products to people for free does not help these individuals acquire skills and experience, thus climbing the global economy into prosperity, which is the true reliable guarantee of living a high-quality life. Open source is not so; it is essentially about enabling people anywhere in the world to become producers at all stages of the supply chain, not just consumers.
Open source improves verifiability. If something is open source, ideally, it includes not only the output but also the process of inventing it, parameter choices, etc., making it easier to verify that what you receive is what the provider claims and allowing third-party research to identify hidden flaws.
Open source eliminates the opportunity for vendor lock-in. If something is open source, manufacturers cannot make it useless by remotely removing features or simply going bankrupt, as highly computerized/networked cars may not work after the manufacturer shuts down. You always have the right to fix it yourself or request other providers.
We can analyze this from the perspective of some of the more radical technologies listed at the beginning of the article:
If we have proprietary lifespan-extending technology, it may be limited only to billionaires and political leaders. Although I personally expect the price of this technology to drop quickly, if it is open source, then anyone can use it and provide it to others cheaply.
If we have specialized human genetic enhancement technologies, then they may be limited only to billionaires and political leaders, creating an upper class. Similarly, I personally believe such technologies will spread, but there will certainly be a gap between what the rich and the average person can access. But if it is open source, the gap between what is available to well-connected elites and what others can access will be much smaller.
For any biotechnology in general, an open-source scientific safety testing ecosystem may be more effective and honest than companies endorsing their own products and being stamped by compliant regulators.
If only a few people can go to space, depending on political trends, some of them may have the opportunity to monopolize an entire planet or moon. If technology is more widely distributed, their chances of doing so will be smaller.
If smart cars were open source, then you could verify that manufacturers are not monitoring you and that you do not depend on manufacturers to continue using the car.
We can summarize the arguments in a chart:
Note that the bubble of 'build it only in open source' is wider, reflecting greater uncertainty about how much progress open source will bring and how much it will prevent the concentration of power. But even so, in many cases, on average, it is still a good deal.
Open source and abuse risks
One of the main arguments against powerful technologies being open source is sometimes raised, namely the risks of zero-sum behavior and non-hierarchical forms of abuse. Giving everyone nuclear weapons would certainly end nuclear inequality. This is a real issue, and we see multiple powerful nations leveraging nuclear access asymmetry to bully others, but it would almost certainly also lead to billions of deaths.
As an example of negative social consequences without intentional harm, giving everyone the opportunity for cosmetic surgery may lead to zero-sum competition games, where everyone spends significant resources and even risks their health to be more beautiful than others, but in the end, we all become accustomed to a higher level of beauty, and society does not really get better. Some forms of biotechnology may produce such effects on a large scale. Many technologies, including many biotechnologies, lie between these two extremes.
"I only support it if it's carefully controlled by trustworthy gatekeepers." This is a valid argument that supports moving in the opposite direction. Gatekeepers can allow for positive use cases of technology while excluding negative ones. Gatekeepers can even be given a public mission to ensure non-discriminatory access for everyone who does not violate certain rules.
However, I have a strong default skepticism about this approach. The main reason is that I doubt whether trustworthy gatekeepers truly exist in the modern world. Many of the most zero-sum and highest-risk use cases are military use cases, and the military has a poor historical track record of restraining itself.
A good example is the Soviet biological weapons program:
In light of Gorbachev’s restraint regarding SDI and nuclear weapons, his actions related to the Soviet illegal biological weapons program are perplexing, Hoffman points out. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the Soviet Union had already initiated a widespread biological weapons program started by Brezhnev, despite being a signatory of the (Biological Weapons Convention). In addition to anthrax, the Soviet Union was also researching smallpox, plague, and rabbit hemorrhagic disease, but the intentions and objectives of such weapons remain unclear.
"The documents from Kateyev show that there were multiple Central Committee resolutions regarding biological warfare programs in the mid to late 1980s. It's hard to believe that these were signed and released without Gorbachev being aware of them," Hoffman said.
"There was even a memo to Gorbachev in May 1990 regarding the biological weapons program—this memo still does not tell the whole story. The Soviet Union misled the world and misled their own leaders as well."
The Russian Biological Weapons Program: Vanished or Disappeared? argues that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the biological weapons program may have been provided to other countries.
Other countries also have significant mistakes they need to explain for themselves. I need not mention all countries involved in functional gain research and the disclosures of its implied risks. In the field of digital software, such as finance, the history of weaponized interdependence shows that things intended to prevent abuse can easily slip into unilateral power projection by operators.
This is another weakness of gatekeepers: by default, they will be controlled by national governments, which may have motives to ensure domestic access equality, but no strong entities exist with a mission to ensure equality of access between nations.
To clarify, I'm not saying that gatekeepers are bad, so let's go laissez-faire, at least not for functional gain research. Rather, I'm saying two things:
If something has sufficient 'everyone-to-everyone abuse' risk that you feel comfortable only if it is conducted by a centralized gatekeeper under lock and key, the right solution may be to not do it at all and invest in safer alternative technologies.
If something has sufficient 'power dynamics' risk that you currently feel uncomfortable seeing it happen at all, the right solution is to do it, and do it in an open-source way so that everyone has a fair opportunity to understand and participate.
It's also worth noting that open source does not mean laissez-faire. For example, I support conducting geoengineering in an open-source and open-science manner. But this is different from "anyone can divert rivers and sprinkle whatever they want into the atmosphere"; in practice, it won't lead to that: laws and international diplomacy exist, making such actions easily detectable and any agreements quite enforceable.
The value of openness is to ensure the democratization of technology, available for many countries to use rather than just one; and to increase the accessibility of information so that people can more effectively form their judgments about whether what is being done is effective and safe.
Fundamentally, I view open source as a way to achieve the most robust Schelling point for technology with less wealth, power concentration, and risks of information asymmetry. Perhaps we can try to build more clever institutions to separate the positive and negative effects of technology, but in the chaotic real world, the most likely approach to stick is guaranteeing the public's right to know, meaning things happen openly, and anyone can understand what is happening and participate.
In many cases, the immense value of accelerating technological development far outweighs these concerns. In a few cases, it is crucial to slow down technological progress as much as possible until countermeasures or alternative ways to achieve the same goals are available.
However, under the existing framework of technological development, choosing open source as a means of technological advancement brings incremental improvements that is a third option: focusing less on the rate of progress and more on the style of progress, using the expectation of open source as a more acceptable leverage to push things in a better direction is an underestimated approach.
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