Creating ‘fair’ reciprocities in the field of AI: A proposal for general consideration

 

Since attending Professor John Willinsky’s seminar last year on making the copyright system fairer, I have been emboldened to put forward a very early-stage suggestion on another complicated topic in the intellectual property world, i.e., on balancing the various rights involved in the creation and use of artificial intelligence systems.

Context

To provide context, some seminal quotes from the United States National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s (NSCAI) report of 2021, whose sentiments have been repeated by other governments, organisations and experts from different forums, may be useful:

1. ‘We worry that only a few big companies and powerful states will have the resources to make the biggest AI breakthroughs’ (p. 4, italics added)
2. AI ‘technologies will be a source of enormous power for the companies and countries that harness them’ (p.7, italics added)
3. AI ‘is deepening the threat posed by cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns’ (p. 7)
4. ‘…the United States must act now to field AI systems and invest substantially more resources in AI innovation … Today, the government is not organising or investing to win the technology competition’ (p. 8), and
5. ‘We found consensus among nearly all of our partners … that AI is an enormously powerful technology … [and there is] responsibility to develop and use AI guided by democratic principles’ (p. 5).

Putting these statements together, what emerges clearly is what Professor Bradford (2023) has called the ‘American market-driven regulatory model’ to AI policy (Bradford 2023). The approach is marked by commercial corporations developing and deploying AI technologies, and reaping the power and profit resulting from the policies of a government in a supportive role rather than one that stands in oversight over them. The power differential that this creates between the ordinary citizen and the combined might of the government and Big Tech (the large American technology corporations that include Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft) has concerned scholars and activists regarding the space left for meaningfully exercising the freedoms guaranteed to individual citizens by the political system where such freedoms are in conflict with the interests backing fast AI integration in all spheres.

Outside of the United States, too, Professor Bradford (2023) has identified two main political approaches to AI policies, which she calls ‘The Chinese state-driven regulatory model’ and ‘The European rights-driven regulatory model’. The European Union has since passed the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, ‘the first comprehensive regulation on AI by a major regulator anywhere’. However, the EU is the weakest in terms of having the large technology firms that are leading the field in the creation of AI technologies.

China, the other major AI player, has an even closer relationship between the government and technology firms made explicit in a ‘state-driven vision for the digital economy’ (Bradford 2023, p. 8). This state support has seen the emergence of tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu and Xiomi. Professor Bradford asserts that ‘the Chinese government has converted the internet from a tool for advancing democracy to an instrument in service of autocracy’ (Bradford 2023, p. 9).

The global nature of the digital technologies means that these approaches, and cultural visions underpinning them, are projected across national boundaries as each ‘digital empire’ (Bradford 2023) fights to shape the world’s digital future. The fact and method of the spread of AI technologies, which speed up the digital sphere while concentrating control in ever fewer human hands, will affect whose vision ultimately moulds the relationship between the ordinary individual, the political authority and those wielding economic and technological power in the new world being created by Industry 4.0 technologies.

As things currently stand, people and communities are being invited to choose from a vision of

• the political authorities as guardians of democratic rights and freedoms such as dignity, liberty and security, liberty of thought, conscience and religion, and others listed in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,
• or, the more libertarian democratic approach of the United States that prioritises the rights of ‘free market and free speech as cornerstones of digital economy’ (Bradford 2023, p. 21),
• or, China’s approach that seeks to employ technology for ‘economic growth and development while maintaining social harmony and control over its citizens’ communications’ (Bradford 2023, p. 69).

The invitation is not always clear though, nor are the stakes always apparent in the noise and confusion with which AI has suddenly appeared everywhere. The discourse around it, until recently, almost presented it as a divine act beyond human control whose progress could only be challenged at the risk of untenable material harms.

‘Absence of reciprocities’

However, what is emerging only slowly, but still through a considerable body of scholarship, is that the development, use and spread of AI technologies is a complex issue that cannot be reduced to merely a matter of economic growth. The power of the technology is such that it can completely squeeze the ordinary human person between AI-owning powers of authoritarian states and technology corporations controlling the individuals’ socio-economic, behavioural and environmental freedoms, creating novel forms of oppression that press down with all the might that incumbent technologies already tend to acquire.

Beginning from the beginning – the development of artificial intelligence systems itself involves serious conflicts of interest between the rights of the ordinary ‘users’ and the Big Tech providing and controlling major services on the internet. One of the most significant formulations of these conflicts is by-now famous article by Professor Shoshana Zuboff that popularised the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ for the current form of capitalist practices that operate through the digital medium, and of which AI is a formidable part.

According to Professor Zuboff, the new digital systems (which are set to be sped up even further with AI deployment) ‘take direct aim at individual autonomy, systematically replacing self-determined action with a range of hidden operations designed to shape behaviour at the source’ (Zuboff 2019). This behavioural control, which keeps the user locked into a digital dependency on the platforms, is then exploited for commercial gain in the form of data extraction to enrich the data coffers of the companies that mine information about our likes, dislikes, vulnerabilities, moods and desires. Imagine your best friend making money on the side out of your heartfelt confidences!

This is a game-changer, Professor Zuboff goes on to explain, because until now in the modern era of world history ‘reciprocities in economics produced and sustained reciprocities in politics’ (Zuboff 2019). The money power of the capitalists was balanced by their need for workers, whose collective bargaining ensured that it was ‘more difficult for elites to “crush the masses” rather than accede to their demands’ (Zuboff 2019).

In the digital world, however, apps and services even come free oftentimes because the currency of payment, the raw material that delivers profits, is ‘data’ from the users, and not necessarily their small-time dollars. Thus, being able to attract ‘users’, keep them engaged and shifting ever larger areas of their lives to the digital sphere is far more profitable to the platform providers. Their real clients are the the other companies – those wishing to sell TVs, trainers and toys, or even political influence – who pay handsomely for insights into user behaviour and ways to influence or even control it to sell their goods. There are algorithms that have predicted people’s behaviours with greater accuracy than the people themselves.

At the same time, the ‘hyperscale’ at which these companies operate frees them of the need to have large workforces from the societies they operate in. Their employees are fewer, more specialised and able to operate from anywhere in the world. This means that while the companies have the motive, the knowledge, the resources and the political leverage to wield control over the ordinary user’s behaviour, the users have suffered a loss in their reciprocal power to influence the companies’ behaviour in their own favour. Professor Zuboff warns that the ‘choice mechanisms that once adhered to the private realm—exit, voice, and loyalty’ (Zuboff 2019) have been eroded, leaving the users with a serious power deficit compared to the tech companies.

Discourse and hegemony

This worrying gap between the power of the AI developers and deployers and the ordinary citizens in the digital world is further widened by the power of discourse on the subject. The political elite in the United States and elsewhere have identified it as a matter of national security to ‘incentivize investments in and protect the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies’ (NSCAI 2021).  The discourse of national security ties AI to the firmly established ideological hegemony and venerated interests of nationalism that remain difficult to argue with.

Consequently, without much debate at the popular level, ‘AI is not just playing games and doing research; it is doing all sorts of basic activities which until recently could only be done by a person’ from taking restaurant orders, to driving cars, to advising on prisoner parole and sentencing, writing legal documents, plays and music, diagnosing certain medical conditions, and providing care, comfort and companionship to those who may have only their devices for company.

Veale and Borgius (2021) noted in connection with the public consultation on EU’s draft AI Act that ‘[I]t is unclear whether limited existing efforts to include stakeholder representation will enable the deep and meaningful engagement needed from affected communities’. This is because the ‘dual-use’ nature of AI, the possibilities of developing it for military and economic purposes both, has begun a power rivalry amongst the dominant nations that has left the public behind. Bareis and Katzenbach (2022) have expostulated that governments ‘are themselves powerful players in shaping our perception and expectation of AI’ in an article that was tellingly titled ‘Talking AI into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national AI strategies and their performative politics’. Veale further analysed the policy stance even in the most sympathetic of regulators, i.e., the EU, in 2020 and found that

considerations of whether ‘computing’ was useful in a given context were often felt to be less important than simply increasing the availability or intensity of digital use.

The desirability of digital is often taken as a given in the current state of discourse on the subject around the globe.

People on the global power periphery

What all this amounts to is that the loss of power experienced by the citizens in the Global North is in danger of being magnified manifold in the Global South, particularly with respect to those at the periphery. The promise of the internet, in its early era, was of promoting freedom and democratic rights for people around the world. The potential of the digital to enable connectivity and voice for millions of people who were without any means of creating solidarities of action with others still survives in popular imagination and in the policy initiatives of multinational organisations like the United Nations. Since 2003, the United Nations has been a staunch supporter of promoting digital solutions to developmental and climate problems, declaring them to be a ‘major catalyst[s] for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ in 2020.

Yet, as Png points out ‘[B]oth the Global South and Global North are heterogeneous’ (2023). It is therefore somewhat dangerous to continue with discussing ‘power asymmetries and unequal distribution of AI risks’ (Png 2023) as if they fall neatly into one of the two categories of those applying to the Global North and those applying to the Global South. The difficulties arising from putting the power of AI in the hands of governments that may not have the capacity or the will to resist economic incentives should not be minimised. Cutler (2021) further highlights that in the current climate of international capitalism,

transnational legal regimes prioritise ‘“the protection of the property and economic interests of transnational corporations over the right to regulate of states and the right to the self-determination of peoples”’.

Thus even democratically-minded governments in the Global South are in an unequal position against corporations that can often command more resources than a majority of governments.

This emasculation of the political and legal structures leaves the most vulnerable communities fighting ‘for resources, for rights, for territory, for survival and for profit’ in a grossly unjust and untenable manner. In the ‘Introduction’ to the 2020 report on ‘Technology, the environment and a sustainable world’ by Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch), Alan Finlay points out the importance of framing issues in making visible ‘what is governable, or can be governed’.

Once discussion begins from taking the digital as the best possible option under all circumstances, it becomes arduous to weigh up the benefits and losses of situations like the ones reported on by Nobrega and Varon in this report. With data, images and academic discussion, the authors clearly establish that while Google’s supply chain for its electronics business includes suppliers mining the Amazon rainforest for minerals, it also proposes to save the forest by putting sensors on the trees that will feed local sounds to its AI for recognising such information as the sound of chainsaws. They say,

‘On one hand, the company extracts minerals causing deforestation and threatening Indigenous lands and ways of living, on the other, it offers AI to connect with what some have awkwardly called the “Internet of Trees”‘.

‘Exercise of power through technical strategies’

Google’s approach, typical of all large digital technology firms whether from the US or China fits into Andrew Feenberg’s description of exercising power through such technical strategies. With multistakeholder organisations like the United Nations also providing the technology companies further platforms to showcase their visions, the entire global discourse is structured to enable the identification of ‘problems’ to be solved by technical means only. To use Martin Heidegger’s words, ‘the technological mood’ of our era has scarcely any space for non-technological solutions.

The collection of data from the forest, when subsumed in the virtuous categories of environmentalism, seems like a common-sense beneficial solution to help the local communities. However, what is hidden in plain sight is that the clear objective of commercial firms is to make profit. Hence, data extraction becomes a form of control exerted under a hegemony created by such discourses when the solutions demanded by the local people clash with ‘top-down solutions’ (Nobrega and Varon 2020).

Identifying with the indigenous people of the rainforest, Nobrega and Varon, (‘As [they]… are both originally from Brazil’), clarify instead that the people there want to decide for themselves, they ‘want to get to where the production chains connect; to identify the territories, relationships, common goods and imaginaries they affect. What dynamics are behind the production and use of technology? Which inequalities are reinforced?’ (Nobrega and Varon 2020).

Returning to Professor Zuboff, under the present surveillance capitalism, ‘“User” dependency is … a classic Faustian pact … which … produces a psychic numbing that inures users to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified’ (Zuboff 2019).

Technology has become a form of domination that imposes, though only little-by-little and couched in benevolence-speak, an alien vision of life upon lifeworlds that may choose to value objectives other than commercial profits.

If vocal support for democracy is to carry real weight, the multistakeholder global institutions need to ensure that the people on the global periphery are allowed the power and the space to articulate their alternative visions of the future with adequate force, even when their forests hold the minerals required for commercial and technological development identified by some of the most powerful state and non-state interests.

Png suggests that a truly democratic and equitable AI governance debate will allow 3 roles for the Global South voices: to challenge ‘exclusionary governance mechanisms’, to provide local expertise grounded in historic and whole-system approaches, and provide alternative governance mechanisms (Png 2023).

Proposal for creation of fairer reciprocities

In that same spirit of proposing simple but concrete ways to remove such glaring inequities from the prevailing environment for the use of AI, I propose a global remuneration system for the data providers that should go some way towards the creation of the missing reciprocities that Professor Zuboff has pointed out. Though I have little experience or knowledge of the banking and accounting systems but I am hoping that those with better knowledge will still see the germ of a usable idea in what I am proposing here.

Following Marx’s theory of surplus value in the 19th century, Morreale et al have proposed that what is being extracted in the data extraction process of AI development is ‘humanness’, which is the real source of value in the AI development process.

Agreeing with Morreale et al, I suggest that it is, therefore, reasonable to assert that even the free internet services and apps are not truly ‘free’ and a small remuneration for the raw material of data is in order. My proposal has the following steps:

1.  A monetary value should be attached to each datum, such as each ‘like’ or ‘share’ that is ‘harvested’ by a company.
2. The value can be a small, almost infinitesimal amount. However, it should be mandatory for all AI systems to have the built-in facility to monitor and calculate this value per piece of data for each time of its use.
3. As there are machine learning systems that are opaque in the way they reach a decision, all the training data ever entered in their systems shall be presumed to have been used each time they act.
4. The value against each piece of data, for each time of use, for each AI system used commercially, whether for a ‘free’ service or a paid one, throughout the world, will be deposited with a global agency under the aegis of the United Nations.
5. Each month, in a well-publicised event, a worldwide lottery draw will choose winners.
6. The names of the people in the draw will be entered from national censuses around the world and no actual lottery tickets will be sold.
7. Prizes will only go to individuals, with extra weightage awarded to those of the poorest means.
8. Those above a given threshold of income from each country will not be eligible. 
9. There will be a ceiling on the amount that any one individual can acquire through this process.
10. No one will be entered into the draw in the same year they have already been a winner.
11. The administration charges for the work will be deducted before the prize draws are made.

I visualise the benefits of this system as:

• to effect a fairer distribution of wealth being generated through the use of AI than is currently the case.
• to encourage debates and awareness of AI in affected communities.
• to allow alternative visions to form and crystallise about problems that are currently being solved with AI or other technologies only.
• the digital solutions can continue to be proposed by the companies, but their profit-making nature will be clearer.
• the data providers will become more aware of the value of their data, helping them to choose how they share their data in a more informed manner.
• the lottery draws can also become a monthly forum for debating non-digital solutions to given problems, balancing costs and benefits of digital solutions in a more holistic and not merely in a monetary context.

I am aware that this is a step that will need to be refined if it is to be implemented and I hope others will build on it. In the context of the US–China rivalry in the AI field, it may be fitting to end with the words of Mao Zedong, whose spirit was not observed at the time, but let’s hope can be captured now: ‘Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture’.

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