Local AI & Home-Grown Unicorns

Restoring Balance to The Force via Local Content and Education Policy

Summary: The latest generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software platforms is catalyzing a big wave of innovation and new startups. Despite the fact that we are feeding essential training content to AI platforms, small towns and organizations are largely sidelined from the action, relegated to the role of customers and users rather than partners and managers. To address this and restore balance to The Force, local networks can more effectively manage their information and content, for local benefit and protection, by aligning the Terms of Service (TOS) these tech platforms critically depend on with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Real-time access to intelligence as a service is enabling fundamentally new social use cases, types of organizations and applications. The efficiency potential of AI is so multiplicative that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, expects a single-person unicorn company to soon emerge thanks to AI. 

“In my little groupchat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion dollar company,” said Altman,  “Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.”

Venture Capitalist Mark Cuban fully agrees, arguing, “The world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of.”

Leading corporations are so attuned to the power of AI that they’re now locked into “the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!” per Tesla/SpaceX/X CEO Elon Musk.

To benefit from the AI gold rush, sovereign nations are cooperating and competing with multinational megacorps, open source AI initiatives and myriad smaller companies to develop and serve useful AI platforms domestically, as pointed out by Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA: 

“Every country need sovereign AI. It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history – you own your own data,” Huang said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. 

The same logic applies at the local level. Localized AI has the potential to be a Miracle-Gro for local networks and reverse their ongoing disintegration, if applied properly. By directly improving civic, economic, recreational, informational and social systems and experiences, Localized AI can meaningfully help to turn the tide of persistent local brain and capital drain.

If American small towns and communities are to participate in the AI boom, local AI expertise must be cultivated, leading AI platforms must be used appropriately, and local experiments with AI must proliferate. Ideally, this is accomplished in the context of local code culture, making, digital era entrepreneurship and public health. 

At the same time, local actors and networks must also be protected from emerging AI, web 3.0 and interface platforms owned by sophisticated non-local managers. Overly centralized digital platforms spanning smartphones, digital media and social media (aka Web 2.0) have been implicated in the steady erosion of US national IQ, happiness, health, cohesion, wealth equality and actualization. Left unmanaged, corporatized non-local AI, hi-def augmented reality and the emerging metaverse will make things worse.

How do we turn the tide? What are the sensible, implementable policies that can make a real impact at the local level? While many logically now clamor for the breakup of leading American technopolies, such policies are likely to have minimal long-term impact on the growing US wealth divide. We must instead address the core sources of these maladies, the End-User license Agreements (UA) and Terms of Service (TOS), while also establishing a clear digital ownership structure for locally generated data.

In “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society”, Microsoft gurus Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl advance the concept of Data Dignity, convincingly arguing that “Any dignified future economy that relies heavily on information technology must value the people who add the data.” They specifically point out that, “This cannot just be an idea; there needs to be a structure to make it so.”

Lanier and Weyl propose a new platform layer consisting of Mediators of Individual Data (MIDs) that “negotiate data royalties or wages, to bring the power of collective bargaining to the people who are the sources of valuable data,” and that such an emerging marketplace will “help focus the scarce attention of their members in the interest of those members rather than for an ulterior motive, such as targeted advertising.”

To begin fixing the core problem holding back the profitable development of MIDs, we need an effective way to track individually- and locally-generated content, model its flows and establish fair market value. Since leading platforms refuse to share this data across the moat with consumers, this can be accomplished via simple tags, protocols and blockchain technology mandated by local and State governments. For a long laundry list of reasons, local networks should be able to measure how the content they create is utilized and transacted.  There’s no technical reason why everything can’t be as trackable as Bitcoin.

Meanwhile, TOS, and EULA and profit-sharing protocols must be updated to reflect the US constitution, public health priorities and national competitiveness (aka life, liberty, pursuit of happiness).

These two steps are the necessary precursors to the advancement of the effective, democratic, narrowly-focused MIDs markets advocated by Lanier and Weyl. 

When Facebook states that selling deanonymized private Direct Message content to Netflix for approximately $40 million/year is “standard industry practice”, that should set off alarm bells. It should also make us wonder to what extent our data, profiles and communications are transacted - and what they’re worth.

Here in SE Michigan, a host of multinational mobility-oriented companies are actively scanning our roadways, communities, main streets, homes and local businesses. They are integrating that data into their logistics, future products and sales practices, but not much advancement can be seen on the consumer side, as they are leery of creeping people out with their own data. What are those scans worth? What are we giving up?

Ultimately, the blurry line of content ownership, deliberately established by the titans of social media and search and their investors, is now actively holding back both the next generation of integrated products, local economies (Michigan towns included) and our collective social development and actualization.

To unfetter our potential, local-first protocols, systems and protections must be implemented that allow for the fluid, legal, profitable and fair remixing of local data. 

Only then will we start cultivating local unicorn soil, rather than continuing its persistent erosion, thus restoring balance to The Force, one local social network at a time.

This way, the next time AI says “Feed me Seymour!”, we can reply, “Sure, buddy, but it’ll cost you.”

Note: Images generated by OpenAI DALL-E 2. Thanks to Garry Golden, John Smart, Tony Manfredi and Dinara Strikis for insights!