ChainCatcher has organized and compiled the content (with reductions).
Core point:
Radical technologies may be more accessible to the wealthy and elite, exacerbating social inequality, leading to disparities in lifespan and advantages between the rich and the poor, and even forming a global underclass.
There is another form of technology abuse, which is manufacturers projecting power over users through data collection, hidden information, etc., which is fundamentally different from the nature of unequal access to technology.
Open source is an underestimated third path that can improve equality of access to technology and producer equality, enhance verifiability, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
Arguments against open source suggest that it carries risks of abuse, but centralized gatekeeper control is untrustworthy, susceptible to military and other abuses, and difficult to guarantee equality between nations.
If there is a high risk of abuse associated with technology, a better solution may be not to do it; if discomfort arises from power dynamic risks, an open-source approach can make it fairer.
Open source does not mean laissez-faire; it can be combined with regulations such as laws, 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 inequality because these technologies will inevitably be limited to use by the wealthy and elite.
Here is a quote from someone who expresses concerns about the consequences of lifespan extension:
"Will some people get left behind? Are we going to make society more unequal than it is now?" he asked. Tuljapurkar predicts that lifespan increases will be limited to wealthy countries where citizens can afford anti-aging technology and governments can fund scientific research. This gap further complicates the current debate about healthcare accessibility, as the rich and poor are increasingly diverging not only in quality of life but also in lifespan.
"Big pharmaceutical companies have a consistent record of being very harsh in providing products to those who cannot afford them," Tuljapurkar says.
If anti-aging technology is distributed in an unregulated free market, 'in my view, it is entirely possible that we will eventually form a permanent global underclass, those countries will be locked in today's mortality conditions,' Tuljapurkar says. 'If that happens, it will form negative feedback, creating a vicious cycle. Those countries that are 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 that they had edited genes in human embryos to remove a pathogenic mutation. This work is astounding and is the answer many parents have prayed for. Who wouldn't want the opportunity to prevent their children from suffering avoidable pain today?
But this will not be the endpoint. Many parents wish to ensure their children gain the best advantages through gene modification. Those capable can access these technologies. With capability comes ethical issues that transcend the ultimate safety of such technologies. The high costs of the programs will create scarcity and worsen the already growing income inequality.
Similar views in other technology industries:
Digital technology overall: 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 (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 granting them rights or complete information about that thing, so from this perspective, older technologies often appear safer. This is also a form of technology that reinforces the elite at the expense of others, but the issue is the projection of power over users through technology by manufacturers, rather than the unequal access described earlier.
I personally strongly support 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 few projects (such as functional acquisition research, weapons, and superintelligent AI).
This is because, overall, the benefits are longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous societies, retaining more human relevance in an era of rapid AI advancement, and maintaining cultural continuity through the elderly generation as living human beings rather than mere memories in history books.
But what if I put myself in the shoes of those who are less optimistic about positive impacts, or who are more concerned about the elite using new technologies to dominate economic control and exert control, or both? For example, I already feel this way about smart home products, where the benefits of being able to converse with light bulbs are outweighed by my concern about sending my personal life toward Google or Apple.
If I have more pessimistic assumptions, I can also imagine myself feeling similarly about certain media technologies: If they allow the elite to broadcast information more effectively than others, then they can be used to exert control and drown out others. For many such technologies, the benefits we gain from better information or better entertainment do not sufficiently compensate for the way they redistribute power.
Open source as a third path.
I think one perspective that is severely underestimated in these cases is: supporting the development of technology only 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 multitude of potentially profitable strategies.
But the most interesting consequence of open source lies in directions unrelated to the speed of progress:
Open source improves access equality. If something is open source, it is naturally accessible to anyone in any country. For physical goods and services, people still need to pay marginal costs, but in many cases, the high prices of proprietary products are due to the fixed costs of inventing those products being too high to attract more competition, hence the marginal costs are often quite low, as is the case with the pharmaceutical industry.
Open source improves access equality for becoming producers. One criticism is that providing terminal products for free to people does not help them gain skills and experience, thus climbing the global economy into prosperity, which is the true reliable guarantee of sustainable high-quality living. Open source is not like that; it is essentially about enabling 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 only outputs but also the processes that invented it, parameter choices, etc., making it easier to verify that what you receive is what the provider claims, and allowing third parties to research and identify hidden flaws.
Open source eliminates vendor lock-in opportunities. If something is open source, manufacturers cannot make it useless by remotely removing features or simply going bankrupt, as highly computerized/networked cars cannot work once the manufacturer shuts down. You always have the right to repair it yourself or request other providers.
We can analyze this from the perspectives of some more radical technologies listed at the beginning of the article:
If we have proprietary lifespan extension technology, then it may be limited to billionaires and political leaders. While I personally expect the price 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 technology, then it may be limited to billionaires and political leaders, creating an upper class. Similarly, I personally believe this type of technology will spread, but there will definitely be a gap between what the rich and ordinary people can access. But if it is open source, the gap between what the well-connected and elite access and what others 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 the technology is more widely distributed, their chances of doing so will be smaller.
If smart cars are open source, then you can verify that the manufacturer is not surveilling you, and you do not depend on the manufacturer to continue using the car.
We can summarize the arguments in a chart:
Image source: Vitalik Buterin
Note that the bubble of 'only build it in an open-source situation' is wider, reflecting greater uncertainty about how much progress open source will bring and how much it will prevent the risk of power concentration. 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 open-source technology is sometimes raised, which 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; we see multiple powerful nations using asymmetrical nuclear access to bully others, but it would almost certainly lead to billions of deaths.
As an example of negative social consequences of unintentional harm, giving everyone access to cosmetic surgery could lead to a zero-sum competition game, where everyone expends vast resources and even risks their health to be more beautiful than others, but in the end, we all get used to a higher standard of beauty, and society doesn't really get better. Some forms of biotechnology may create such effects on a large scale. Many technologies, including many biotechnologies, fall somewhere between these two extremes.
"I only support it if it is carefully controlled by trustworthy gatekeepers." This is a valid argument supporting moving in the opposite direction. Gatekeepers can allow positive applications of technology while excluding negative applications. Gatekeepers can even be given 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 trustworthy gatekeepers truly exist in the modern world. Many of the most zero-sum and highest-risk applications are military applications, and the military has a poor historical record in restraining itself.
A good example is the Soviet biological weapons program:
Given Gorbachev's restraint regarding SDI and nuclear weapons, his actions related to the Soviet Union's 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. Besides anthrax, the Soviet Union was also researching smallpox, plague, and tularemia, but the intentions and targets of such weapons remain unclear.
"Kateyev's documents show that multiple Central Committee resolutions regarding biological warfare programs existed in the mid to late 1980s. It is hard to believe that these were all signed and published without Gorbachev's knowledge," Hoffman says.
"There was even a memo sent to Gorbachev in May 1990 about the biological weapons program—this memo still doesn't tell the whole story. The Soviet Union misled the world and also misled their own leaders."
The Russian Biological Weapons Program: Vanished or Disappeared? argues that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this biological weapons program may have been provided to other countries.
Other countries also have significant errors that need to be explained by themselves. I need not mention the disclosure of all countries' involvement in functional acquisition research and its implied risks. In the digital software industry, such as finance, the history of weaponizing interdependence shows that things intended to prevent abuse 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 motivations to ensure domestic access equality, but there is no strong entity with a mission to ensure equality of access between nations.
Let me clarify, I am not saying that gatekeepers are bad, so let's go laissez-faire, at least not for functional acquisition research. Rather, I am saying two things:
If something has enough 'everyone to everyone abuse' risk that you only feel comfortable with it being done by centralized gatekeepers in a locked manner, the correct solution may be simply not to do it and invest in alternative technologies with better risks.
If something has enough 'power dynamic' risk that you don't feel comfortable seeing it proceed, consider that 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 should also be noted that open source does not mean laissez-faire. For example, I advocate for Earth engineering to be conducted in an open source and open science manner. But this is different from saying 'anyone can divert rivers and spray whatever they want into the atmosphere'; in practice, it would not lead to that: laws and international diplomacy exist, such actions are easily detectable, making any agreement relatively enforceable.
The value of openness is to ensure the democratization of technology, available to many countries rather than just one; and to increase the accessibility of information so that people can more effectively form their own judgments about whether what is being done is effective and safe.
Fundamentally, I view open source as a way to achieve technology's strongest synergies with less wealth, concentration of power, and information asymmetry risks. Perhaps we can try to build more sophisticated institutions to separate the positive and negative effects of technology, but in the chaotic real world, the most likely approach to persist is a guarantee of the public's right to know, which means things happen transparently, and anyone can understand what is happening and participate.
In many cases, the immense value of technological acceleration 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, choosing open source as a means of technological advancement brings incremental improvements as 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 lever to push things in a better direction, which is an underestimated approach.
This article is republished with permission from: (Deep Tide TechFlow)
Original title: ("I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint)
Original author: Vitalik Buterin
Translation: Janna, ChainCatcher
"Technological progress exacerbates inequality, Vitalik: Only through open source can we break the monopoly of the elite" was first published in "Crypto City".
