🧠Mind expanding links 24 Feb 2025: universal basic AI?🤖 💰 cloudalism👑 geopolitical tectonics🌏 🚢 ⚔️ a code upon a code🧬
A world beyond wealth creation
Here’s my regular-ish roundup of longer reads and deeper thinks which have been keeping my overactive mind occupied during February.
In this issue:
🤖 💰Universal basic AI? thinking on how to distribute AI benefits more fairly
👑Economics of AI Cloudalism is the new technofeudalism
🌏 🚢 ⚔️Geopolitical tectonics my pick of the best sensemaking of what Trump 2.0 means for the rest of us, particularly here in the South Pacific. (In a week when Chinese warships started firing live rounds in the sea between Australia and Aotearoa…)
🏭New Economics manufacturing readiness, the mathematics of innovation and cooperatives as city states
🌌Our cosmos Earth’s technosignature and Io’s giant volcano
🧬Science and tech two excellent lectures on epigenetics and synthetic biology, plus a speculative quantum theory of prime numbers
🗣️SocialBit a new research study which finds midlife women speak 3,000 more words daily than men. (Just sayin.) Should we be measuring our social interactions as much as our fitness?
Hopefully a few nuggets of interest for everyone!
🤖 💰Universal basic AI?
The perennial question: is the current AI race going to result in more or less inequality between humans augmented with AI and those without?
OpenAI’s Sam Altman thinks out loud about “Universal Basic Compute” as one theoretical way of distributing the benefits of AI more widely than the current trajectory.
Despite the wide availability of open-weights frontier models like Llama, Mistral and Deepseek, the actual compute required to run the most advanced models is still relatively expensive and hard to come by. As a result most people and businesses still resort to paying a handful of US AI companies for the pleasure of hosting their own proprietary models.
Former CEO of Stability AI Emad Mostaque’s new initiative is now renamed the Intelligent Internet (ii). At the end of last year he published an accessible primer paper outlining the vision for a decentralised, open, more evenly distributed AI commons. The arguments are compelling, if perhaps idealistic:
The problem:
“Amidst the exciting realisation of these [AI] models, the world has under-emphasised one key fact—a handful of entities have amassed control over their development and deployment. The United States and China lead as global AI superpowers, trumping other countries’ private investments in the industry. Even within these superpowers, there are a small number of companies behind these revolutionary models….The leading companies in the AI industry have generally adopted a centralised, proprietary, and profit-centric business model. With the development of these models being resource-heavy, this is the sole approach that has so far been feasible and implemented successfully, resulting in the frontier of AI being dominated by large closed-source companies.”
The proposed solution:
“A World Beyond Wealth Creation The Intelligent Internet paves the way for a change in how humans perceive and generate value, moving beyond narrow financial metrics to encompass broader societal benefits:
Holistic Value Metrics: New systems of value recognition will emerge, accounting for social impact, environmental sustainability, and long-term human prosperity alongside traditional economic measures.
Optimised Resource Allocation: The Intelligent Internet’s distributed nature allows for efficient sharing of computational resources and data, minimising redundancy and maximising utilisation.
Environmental Sustainability: By optimising resource use and reducing the need for redundant infrastructure, the Intelligent Internet can lower the carbon footprint of AI and computing technologies.
Purpose-Driven Innovation: With reduced focus on short-term profits, innovation can be directed towards solving humanity’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to global health issues.
Inclusive AI Development: The democratised nature of the Intelligent Internet ensures that AI development caters to a wide range of cultures, beliefs, and use cases, rather than being limited to the vision of a few companies.
At the heart of this vision is a novel concept called Universal Basic Artificial Intelligence (UBAI). It’s about ensuring that the capabilities of artificial intelligence aren’t just the privilege of the few, but a public good available to all. The Intelligent Internet aims to empower individuals, businesses, and societies globally by distributing intelligence as a resource.
Driving this revolutionary system is an entirely new economic model built around a digital store of value—one backed not by gold or government fiat, but by intelligence itself. Specifically, it’s supported by the computational power (measured in FLOPS, or floating point operations per second) that fuels the algorithms running this intelligent network.
As more devices and systems connect and contribute processing power, the value of this digital currency strengthens and stabilises. This creates a virtuous cycle: network growth bolsters the store of value, attracting more participants and resources, which in turn expands the network further. It's a self-reinforcing ecosystem where technological advancement and societal benefit are perfectly aligned.“
Here’s a conceptual diagram of the Intelligent Internet architecture:
Emad discusses the Intelligent Internet concepts in a recent Cognitive Revolution podcast episode:
Yes, idealistic… he’s a dreamer, for sure. But worth paying attention to… the alternative is that we end up with continuing centralisation of AI power.
(Lots of big questions unanswered: HOW could core economic value be shifted to compute? And how would you divert all those Nvidia GPUs outside the profit-oriented economy?)
👑Economics of AI
On the topic of concentrating technological power…
Cloudalism
Yanis Varoufakis is as uncompromising as ever in his analysis of our new “cloudalist” feudal overlords:
The Revolution will be decentralised
Riffing on a similar theme, Joan Westenberg explores the evolution of power structures from medieval times to the modern digital age. She argues that recent technological advances have created a new form of consolidated control over society through data, algorithms, and digital infrastructure, which traditional political solutions fail to regulate because tech companies' economic and political influence are intertwined.
Decentralised alternatives like ActivityPub (Mastodon), Farcaster (Warpcast), Bluesky and Matrix protocol are all initiatives working towards a goal of re-establishing decentralised democratic control:
“The infrastructure of freedom won’t build itself. But neither did the infrastructure of control. Every system of power depends on the daily choices of millions of individuals. Will we shape the change toward digital democracy or submit to digital feudalism?“
Solo unicorn?
Conversely, will the rise of AI agents give birth to the first one-person unicorn company? At what societal cost?
Porter's 5 forces to model AI industry dynamics Link
From 1 year ago, an instructive tutorial on How to Use Porter’s 5 Forces to Analyse the AI Technology Industry.
(Do the the same age-old competition principles still apply in the dawning age of AGI…?)
Dwarkesh X Satya
Dwarkesh Patel’s content continues to be highly accessible and engaging (and he’s so personable!)… here he loosens up Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to discuss Microsoft’s AGI plan. (Coverage of this and Microsoft’s new Majorana quantum chip coming in Wednesday’s newsletter…).
This passage is illuminating: Nadella doesn’t think A[G]I will be a winner-takes-all market because of open-source competition:
“You could say, hey, there is a winner-take-all model- I just don't see it. This, by the way, is the other thing I’ve learned: being very good at understanding what are winner-take-all markets and what are not winner-take-all markets is, in some sense, everything. I remember even in the early days when I was getting into Azure, Amazon had a very significant lead and people would come to me, and investors would come to me, and say, "Oh, it's game over. You'll never make it. Amazon, it's winner-take-all."
Having competed against Oracle and IBM in client-server, I knew that the buyers will not tolerate winner-take-all. Structurally, hyperscale will never be a winner-take-all because buyers are smart.
Consumer markets sometimes can be winner-take-all, but anything where the buyer is a corporation, an enterprise, an IT department, they will want multiple suppliers. And so you got to be one of the multiple suppliers.
That, I think, is what will happen even on the model side. There will be open-source. There will be a governor. Just like on Windows, one of the big lessons learned for me was, if you have a closed-source operating system, there will be a complement to it, which will be open source.
And so to some degree that's a real check on what happens. I think in models there is one dimension of, maybe there will be a few closed source, but there will definitely be an open source alternative, and the open-source alternative will actually make sure that the closed-source, winner-take-all is mitigated.”
(Question arising: If it’s a “winners (plural) take all” market… how many winners is considered optimum?)
🌏 🚢 ⚔️Geopolitical tectonics
The first month of Trump 2.0 has seen tumultuous attention-grabbing, limbic-hijacking headlines as what’s left of the “rules-based order” seemingly disappears down the gurgler and Trump’s unpredictability / base motivations / bizarre gameplay baffle the commentariat.
Like many I’ve been mainlining geopolitics podcasts and lectures for the past few weeks - two of the more measured macro takes on the US’ suddenly changing position on the world:
(Otherwise not sure what to make of the rest of ARC 2025 talks filling up my Youtube feed this week… the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is a neocon think-tank aiming to “unite conservative voices and propose policy based on traditional Western values”. Ew.🤢)
This chap, however…more my kind of chess player:
Pax Pacifica no more?
Down here in the Pacific, last week saw a new Cook Islands-China strategic partnership “opening up the Pacific to China”, sparking tensions with New Zealand.
Literally only a few days later three Chinese military frigates began live firing exercises in the sea between Australia and New Zealand. A wake up call for many… although not a lot can be done about it militarily. “Increase defence spending to 2% of GDP” when your GDP is a fraction of China’s or the US’s isn’t going to cut it…
Australian ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull is fatalistic about the likely pro-China direction of Pacific and ASEAN nations if the US suddenly withdraws its military influence from the region. (He’s also scathing of the AUKUS deal signed by the Morrison government and gives it a very low probability of surviving much past this year’s general election…)
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