[dhairya]

Part of the challenge of pursuing this comprehensive type of AI infrastructure is that it requires massive coordination and collaboration. Unfortunately the incentives in both industry and academia make it difficult to even start such a project. As a result we're stuck with incremental work on narrow problems.

I've been on both sides of table (started in industry developing AI solutions and now in academia pursuing phd in AI). When I was on the industry side, where the information and infrastructure was there to build such a system, you had to deal with the bureaucracy and institutional politics.

In academia, the incentives are aligned for individual production of knowledge (publishing). The academic work focuses on small defined end-to-end problems that are amenable to deep learning and machine learning. The types of AI models that emerge are specific models solving specific problems (NLP, vision, play go, etc).

It seems to move towards developing large AI systems we need a model of new collaboration. There are existing models in the world of astrophysics and medical research that we can look to for inspiration. Granted they have they have their own issues of politics but it's interesting that similar scope projects haven't emerged on the AI side yet.

[thundergolfer]

The incentive structure that seems clearly best (though not greatly) suited to this large-scale intelligence infrastructure is public investment in publicly owned systems.

Jordan seems to maybe gesture at this, as who owns all the bridges in the the USA? Governments. If we are talking “societal-scale medical system” a majority of people would want that publicly owned and operated and universally accessible.

We’ve already seen in industry that the incentives are to massively in favour of creating walled-gardens that lock in users and thus profits. No societal-wide system should work like our social media ecosystem (FB, Snapchat, TikTok). The dominant profit incentives are also not “human-centric”, as Jordan constantly emphasises. Well, they’re only so if we assume profit-making activity is tightly aligned with “human-centric” concerns. Some will say yes, but to me our climate disaster and the USA mass incarceration system are strong enough evidence that the answer is no.

I think some wealthy Northern European countries are setup well enough to produce “Intelligent Infrastructure”, except for the fact that most of the talent is in the USA.

[randcraw]

If the rising trend toward putting the giant info-broker corporations on tighter leashes continues, I'm hopeful that we might finally start to discuss the 'civil rights of data' — who actually owns data of all kinds, but especially personal data, and what obligations come with using it, sharing it and ensuring that it not be abused.