HFR Podcast: Technologies of Freedom with AI - Amir Husain, Technologist and CEO

Thank you so much, Anika. It's an absolute pleasure to be with you.

Well, in my case, I suppose a technologist is somebody who incessantly wants to build things, primarily with instruments of the future, tools that perhaps haven't fully matured, ideas that can one day become scaffoldings on which to build companies, societies, products, and solutions. So in my case, that's really what it is: somebody who since the age of four has been fascinated with technology, particularly software and computers, and looks upon it as a telescope for the mind. Much like the invention of the telescope allowed us to explore the heavens and test our hypotheses about what exists in the universe, I think a true understanding of computation, enabled by software and the underlying computer systems, is similarly a telescope for the mind and a simulational gateway into many possible futures. That has been utterly fascinating to me. Everything else I've done, the pursuit of artificial intelligence which is one such maturation of a tool that could change the future, and numerous other things, have been driven by this incessant love for building. It's not something by design or tutelage, it's more by some genetic fluke—this is just who I am. So I suppose that's one interpretation of the word.

Well, I think there are so many different views of this. Of course, in The Sentient Machine, much of the book was about what mankind does in the age of artificial intelligence, in a post-AI society, what the purpose of human beings is. But not to rehash all of that, I'll say that one can apply a very practical lens to this, and one can apply a philosophical lens. If you apply a philosophical lens, the point here is: what is man's purpose? There are many interpretations. My view is that one of the purposes of humankind, perhaps the higher purpose, is to in some sense reverse entropy. Left to itself, there is disorder and entropy that increases in the universe. Consciousness is something that can reverse that within a bubble—not globally, but within a sphere of influence. Every human being born has a sphere of influence, and applying mental faculties which are uniquely human to do what nothing else in creation can do—to bring order even within a sphere—to me is a high purpose. So with artificial intelligence, we are inventing something that will be the first known thing other than us that can do that sort of thing, that can be a builder, an entity, a system, a machine that will be more than just a set of mechanistic rules and will be able to transcend perhaps the limitations of whatever we've built in the past or observed in nature. So I think that is aspirational—that's the philosophy. There's a very practical view: there are people who came together over thousands of years and built societies, countries, cities, companies. Today, we're at a point where 100 years ago, 70-80-90% of the population of most Western countries was employed to produce food. Today in the United States, it's under 2%. That is not a bad thing, because the rest of the 98% are now able to go and do higher-order things: build economies, build technology, build society, explore the Moon, think about living on Mars, whatever dreams human beings have. But the only way you can do that is with technology that frees you up from the basic brutish reality of human life. So in many ways, this question starts to get applied in specific jobs: such and such person delivers the mail, drives a truck, and tomorrow technology might do those jobs. We have to think: is there a higher purpose to shift to? In my case, I look to the philosophical underpinnings—it is to dream, invent, and build. Of course, there are pesky details like who's paying my bills and how do I get compensated for just sitting and thinking if many people imagine that as a possible future? There again, there are practical solutions, whether we have universal basic income or decentralized systems like blockchains which we all own a part of, tracking the discovery of ideas—an idea coin, a concept I thought up and wrote about in The Sentient Machine. It's not an unsolvable issue, and it's not something that attacks our humanity in the way many people imagine.

There are two fundamental things about economics at a basic level. One is there are factors of production: land, labor, and capital. Historically, these three have had a relationship between them, and there's been a balance. Land is easy because there's no more of it until we colonize another planet. But labor and capital have always been in this slightly awkward dance. We are now at a point where many of the systems that have resulted from us wanting to balance these two things—the monetary system, the post-World War II system of international agreements, the idea of what a state is, the idea of what is valuable and what isn't—all of those have changed. The most valuable companies now are companies that don't really have plant, equipment, and traditional artifacts, but rather have intellectual property, software, algorithms, and people who can continue to improve those. Those are the most valuable companies in the world. Similarly, as AI becomes a form of labor for the first time, we delink the ability to deliver on capital's desires by simply employing the owner of capital and the fulfillers of those desires—either machine or man that can deliver the labor. I think that will create a disturbance in the Force. The thing I worry about most is that if this is left unaddressed, there is this theory of cliodynamics put forward by Peter Turchin for many years. He's written a number of books, and I talk about this in depth in my upcoming book. The idea is that there are cycles, and societies destabilize sometimes when there is this phenomenon of elite overproduction. By that, we mean that when there are only a certain number of points in a hierarchy in a society to occupy, many people in a developed society who have attained education and see themselves as deserving of those spots in the hierarchy by definition can't get those spots. What happens is that a prosperous society produces an abundance of elites, but the tyranny of hierarchy is such that there is only one president, one vice president, only so many people in a cabinet, only so many CEOs, and so on. The number of slots that those people who think they deserve that position can occupy is smaller, and the number of people who are now unhappy is quite large. Peter Turchin goes back and looks at history and says it's actually not what was called the peasant revolt—the principal means for destabilizing society internally—it's actually the disenfranchised unhappy elites that light the spark that causes the rest of society to go in the direction of chaos and destabilization. The thing to worry about with AI is that there will be even less for this overproduced elite to do unless we rethink hierarchy. There are centralized systems that run our countries and economies, and there is no structural way to account for a true democracy in the sense that you vote once, then you elect somebody, and then for four or five years that person does whatever they want, and you feel quite disenfranchised. Maybe you get one or two additional asks down the road, but now the level of technology is such that democracy can be rethought. There can be a decentralized democracy, a digital democracy, where a lot of people feel more empowered to speak on individual issues. The level of knowledge that now exists in society, that citizens now have, is far superior. Today, we have technology that, say, when Bill Clinton was president, he didn't have; we learn facts quicker than just five American presidents ago. We are an empowered citizenry. How can we rethink our democracies to make them more decentralized, federate control, enable people to feel they are part of the system, and prevent this problem of elite overproduction which will only get compounded with artificial intelligence? That is the core issue. The manifestations of unhappiness are many: there is the othering within society, rivalries that undermine institutions, numerous manifestations of this underlying disease. One has to think about systems which are more inclusive in the sense of being decentralized, things that allow people in society who feel they deserve and want to have a voice to have a voice.

My view is that none of our problems are unsolvable. My own remaining part of my life I've dedicated to what I call 'Technologies of Freedom.' When I talk about Technologies of Freedom, what I mean is that I feel there is too much power that cloud companies now have. If you look at the larger cloud companies, four of them have a combined market cap of over $10-12 trillion, and all the unicorns of the world have a combined market cap of about three to three and a half trillion (this varies). To me, this is ridiculous. There are over a thousand unicorns, and all these companies are where a lot of the innovation happens. The large companies end up buying these smaller companies, but the way this disparity has come to be is because these large companies are essentially rent seekers. They have the capital to put up infrastructure, and once that infrastructure is at a certain level, it's very hard to compete with that ability to raise a similar amount of capital. Capital becomes the moat, as opposed to an idea, technology, or superior execution. When that happens, you become a rent seeker. Every startup, every unicorn, every company that can't have the types of cloud data centers that these three or four companies have takes a part of their revenue and pays it to these cloud companies. I think that kind of centralization damages creativity and the possibilities in an economy, and it needs to change. Decentralized infrastructure—there's a whole set of technologies heading in that area—is very important. One is decentralized communications. I serve on the board of a company called Spec 5, which is building mesh networks with very inexpensive devices. You get these devices, they tie up with your phone, you can send messages without paying a subscription fee and without physical infrastructure in the country, because each device piggybacks off the other. As long as there's a concentration of these devices over a number of miles—because they use long-range radio—they can build a community network. That is a good thing. My wife Zainab is building a robotics company which is really all about a humanoid that does manufacturing, but the idea is decentralized manufacturing. Instead of having concentrated supply chains where every little thing you want you have to order from another country—you can't even order a screw locally; most things come from foreign supply chains—how can you bring some of that back? Use technology to decentralize some manufacturing. Robotics is one way of doing that. The last thing I'll tell you is Navigate, which is a decentralized data company built on top of a crypto ecosystem. The idea is that all of us have data. All of this data is scraped by Google, taken by OpenAI, and they make money off it. What do we get? Nothing. How can we create blockchain-based systems where people can say, 'Look, I allow you to take this data. You put my data in a data marketplace, and I will track what I put in there; tracking will be done on a blockchain, and anytime somebody uses my data I get micro payments in the form of tokens back'? I become an active participant. I don't feel like I am the other, that I have been removed from the equation and people are taking advantage of me. These are just three examples of what I call Technologies of Freedom: in communication, manufacturing, and in finance and data, where decentralization is the operative phrase. Connectivity exists, intelligence exists, awareness exists. Persisting with highly centralized monopolistic schemes is not serving a country, society, or group of people; it's only serving the status quo and people with vested interests in that status quo.