Author: Vitalik Buterin
Organized & Compiled: Janna, ChainCatcher
ChainCatcher Editorial Summary
This article comes from Vitalik Buterin's personal website, which is primarily used to publish Vitalik Buterin's blog posts, opinions, and research, covering topics such as blockchain technology, cryptoeconomics, decentralized governance, privacy protection, etc. This article explores how open-source technology promotes fairness and transparency, why emerging technologies may exacerbate inequality, and open-source as a ‘Schelling point’ for technological governance.
ChainCatcher has organized and compiled the content (with edits).
Core Point:
Radical technologies may exacerbate social inequality as the wealthy and elite can access them more easily, leading to gaps in lifespan and advantages between the rich and the poor, and even creating a global underclass.
Another form of technological abuse is manufacturers projecting power over users through data collection, hidden information, etc., which is fundamentally different from the nature of technological access inequality.
Open-source is an underestimated third way, which can improve equality of access to technology and equality of producers, enhance verifiability, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
Arguments against open-source claim it exists abuse risks, but centralized gatekeeper control is untrustworthy, prone to military and other abuses, and difficult to guarantee equality of access between nations.
If technology has a high risk of abuse, a better solution may be to not do it; if it’s uncomfortable due to power dynamics risk, it can be made fairer through open-source.
Open-source does not mean laissez-faire; it can be combined with laws and other norms, with the core being to ensure the democratization of technology and information accessibility.
One concern we often hear is that certain radical technologies could exacerbate power inequalities, as these technologies are inevitably limited to the use of the wealthy and the elite.
Here is a quote from someone expressing concerns about the consequences of life extension:
‘Will some people be left behind? Will we make society more unequal than it currently is?’ he asked. Tuljapurkar predicts that life extension 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 around healthcare accessibility, as the wealthy and the poor not only distance themselves in quality of life but also increasingly in lifespan.
‘Big pharmaceutical companies have a consistent record of being very harsh when it comes to providing products to those who cannot afford them,’ Tuljapurkar states.
If anti-aging technologies are distributed in an unregulated free market, ‘in my view, it is entirely possible that we will ultimately form a permanent global underclass, those countries will be locked into today's mortality conditions,’ Tuljapurkar said. ‘If this happens, it will create negative feedback, forming a vicious cycle. Those excluded will be forever excluded.’
Here is a similarly strong statement from an article concerned about the consequences of human gene 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 have prayed for. Who wouldn’t want the chance to prevent their children from suffering avoidable pain?
But this will not be the endpoint. Many parents hope to ensure their children have the best advantages through genetic enhancements. Those with the means can access these technologies. As capabilities arise, ethical issues transcend the ultimate safety of such technologies. The high costs of the programs will create scarcity and exacerbate the already growing income inequality.
Similar viewpoints in other technological fields:
Overall Digital Technology: 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
This theme can be found in many criticisms of new technologies. A related but fundamentally different theme is that technological products are used as tools for data collection, vendor lock-in, deliberately hiding side effects (such as modern vaccines have been criticized in this way), and other forms of abuse.
Emerging technologies often create more opportunities for people to acquire something without granting them rights or complete information about it, so from this perspective, older technologies often seem safer. This is also a form of technology reinforcing the elite at the expense of others, but the issue is the power projection of manufacturers over users through technology, rather than the access inequality mentioned in the earlier examples.
I am personally very supportive of technology. If it’s a binary choice between ‘further advancement’ and ‘maintaining the status quo,’ despite the risks, I would be happy to advance everything except for a very few projects (such as functional gain research, weapons, and superintelligent AI).
This is because, overall, the benefits are longer lives, healthier living, more prosperous societies, retaining more human relevance in an age of rapid AI advancements, and maintaining cultural continuity through the elderly as living beings rather than just memories in history books.
But if I were to put myself in the shoes of those who are less optimistic about the positive impacts, or more worried about the elite using new technologies to dominate economic rule and exert control, or both? For example, I have had this feeling about smart home products, where the benefits of talking to light bulbs are outweighed by my reluctance to stream my personal life to Google or Apple.
If I have a more pessimistic assumption, I can also imagine having a similar feeling about certain media technologies: if they allow the elite to broadcast information more effectively than others, they can be used to exert control and drown out others, for many such technologies, the gains we get from better information or better entertainment are not enough to compensate for the ways in which they redistribute power.
Open-source as a third way
I believe that one perspective that is severely underestimated in these cases is: only support technology developed in an open-source manner.
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 slows progress is also very credible: it prevents people from using a myriad of potentially profitable strategies.
But the most interesting consequence of open-source is those directions that have nothing to do with the pace of progress:
Open-source improves access equality. If something is open-source, it is naturally available to anyone in any country. For tangible goods and services, people still need to pay marginal costs, but in many cases, the high prices of proprietary products are due to the high fixed costs of inventing them, which prevents more competition, hence marginal costs are often quite low, as seen in the pharmaceutical industry.
Open-source improves access equality for becoming producers. One criticism is that providing people with free end products does not help them gain skills and experience to climb the global economy into prosperity, which is the real reliable guarantee of a lasting high quality of life. Open-source is not so; it is essentially to enable people anywhere in the world to become producers at all stages of the supply chain, rather than just consumers.
Open-source improves verifiability. If something is open-source, ideally, it includes not just the output but also the process of inventing it, parameter choices, etc., making it easier to verify that what you received is indeed what the provider claims and allowing third parties to research and identify hidden flaws.
Open-source eliminates the opportunity for vendor lock-in. If something is open-source, manufacturers cannot render it useless through remote disabling of features or simple bankruptcy, as highly computerized/networked cars would not work after the manufacturer shuts down. You always have the right to repair it yourself or seek other providers.
We can analyze this from the perspective of some more radical technologies mentioned at the beginning of the article:
If we have proprietary life extension technologies, then they might only be available to billionaires and political leaders. While I personally expect the prices of this technology to drop rapidly. But if it is open-source, then anyone can use it and provide it cheaply to others.
If we have proprietary human gene enhancement technologies, then they might only be available to billionaires and political leaders, creating an upper class. Similarly, I personally believe that such technologies will spread, but there will certainly be a gap between what the wealthy and the average person can access. But if it is open-source, the gap between what the well-connected and the powerful can access 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 might have the opportunity to monopolize an entire planet or moon. If technology is more widely distributed, their chances of doing so would be smaller.
If smart cars are open-source, then you can verify that the manufacturer is not monitoring you and that you do not depend on the manufacturer 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 risks of power concentration. But even so, in many cases, on average it is still a good deal.
Open-source and abuse risks
One major argument against powerful open-source technologies is the risk 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 exploiting nuclear access asymmetry to bully others, but it would almost certainly lead to billions of deaths.
As an example of negative social consequences without intentional harm, giving everyone access to cosmetic surgery might lead to a zero-sum competitive game, where everyone spends significant resources and even risks health to appear more beautiful than others, but in the end, we all get accustomed to higher levels of beauty, and society does not actually become better. Some forms of biotechnology might produce such effects on a large scale. Many technologies, including many biotechnologies, lie between these two extremes.
‘I only support it if it is carefully controlled by trustworthy gatekeepers.’ This is a valid argument, supporting the opposite direction. Gatekeepers can allow positive use cases of technology while excluding negative use cases. Gatekeepers could even be entrusted with a public mission to ensure non-discriminatory access for everyone who does not violate certain rules.
However, I have strong default skepticism about this approach. The main reason is that I doubt whether there are truly trustworthy gatekeepers 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 record of self-restraint.
A good example is the Soviet biological weapons program:
Given Gorbachev's restraint on 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, despite being a signatory of the (Biological Weapons Convention), the Soviet Union already had an extensive biological weapons program initiated by Brezhnev. In addition to anthrax, the Soviet Union was also researching smallpox, plague, and rabbit fever, but the intentions and targets of such weapons remain unclear.
‘Kateyev's documents show that there were multiple resolutions from the Central Committee regarding biological warfare programs in the late 1980s. It is hard to believe these were all signed and published without Gorbachev's knowledge,’ Hoffman says.
‘There was even a memorandum from May 1990 to Gorbachev regarding the biological weapons program — this memorandum still does not tell the whole story. The Soviet Union misled the world and misled their own leaders.’
The Russian Biological Weapons Program: Vanished or Disappeared? argues that after the Soviet Union's dissolution, the biological weapons program may have been provided to other countries.
Other countries also have significant mistakes that they need to explain themselves. I need not mention all the countries involved in functional gain research and the revelations of its implied risks. In the realm of digital software, such as finance, the historical weaponization of interdependence shows that what is intended to prevent abuse can easily slide into unilateral power projection by operators.
This is another weakness of gatekeepers: by default, they will be controlled by national governments, whose political systems may have motives to ensure domestic access equality, but there are no strong entities with a mission to ensure equality of access between countries.
To clarify, I am not saying 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 enough ‘everyone-to-everyone abuse’ risk that you only feel comfortable seeing it done under the lock of a centralized gatekeeper, a correct solution may be to not do it at all and invest in better risk-aligned alternative technologies.
If something has enough ‘power dynamics’ risk that you currently feel uncomfortable seeing it proceed, a correct solution may be to do it and do it in an open-source way so that everyone has a fair chance to understand and participate.
It is also important to note that open-source does not mean laissez-faire. For example, I advocate for geoengineering to be done in an open-source and open-science manner. But this is different from ‘anyone can change the river's course and dump whatever they want into the atmosphere,’ which in practice would not lead to that: laws and international diplomacy exist, and such actions are easily detectable, making any agreements fairly enforceable.
The value of openness is to ensure the democratization of technology, making it accessible to many countries rather than just one; and increasing information accessibility so that people can more effectively form their own judgments about whether what is being done is effective and safe.
Fundamentally, I see open-source as how to achieve the strongest Schelling point of technology with less wealth, power concentration, and information asymmetry risks. Perhaps we can try to construct more clever institutions to separate the positive and negative effects of technology, but in the chaotic real world, the method most likely to persist is the guarantee of public right to know, that things happen transparently, 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 technological development as much as possible until countermeasures or alternative means to achieve the same goals become available.
However, within the existing framework of technological development, the incremental improvements brought by choosing open-source as a means of technological advancement represent a third option: less focus on the speed of progress, and more focus on the style of progress, and using the expectation of open-source as a more acceptable leverage to push things in a better direction, which is an underestimated approach.