Superagency

In Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future, Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato celebrate the potential of AI to transform our lives. Hoffman was the co-founder of LinkedIn, was on the board of PayPal, and was an early philanthropic investor in OpenAI. While he makes a passionate case for AI, the work doesn’t dwell much on the fears around AI.

Anyway, some ideas that I gleaned from the book:

1. The four key constituencies informing the discourse around AI:

• Doomers: Self-explanatory
• Gloomers: Against the Doomers but are also worried about the potential harms of AI. They are all for Government regulation and oversight
• Zoomers: The AI-optimists who believe in permissionless regulation and are against precautionary regulation
• Bloomers: Similar to Zoomers but believe in transparency, iterative experiments, mass feedback loops, and learning in public.

2. So far, humans use just a fraction of all available knowledge. AI has changed that. It converts Big Data into Big Knowledge.

Intelligence itself is now a tool—a scalable, highly configurable, self-compounding engine for progress.

3. Using Elinor Ostrom’s work on Public Commons as an analogy, Hoffman calls the new age private corporations with billions of data points as Private Commons. The consumer surplus provided by the Internet and social media corporations is simply too high to ignore them.

Since the internet’s first commercial stirrings in the early 1990s, privately owned or administrated platforms that enlist users as producers and stewards have proliferated. Various labels have been applied to different aspects and instances of this template, including Web 2.0, social media, the sharing economy, the gig economy, and surveillance capitalism. But none of these—approving or pejorative—aptly convey the emergence of free and near-free life-management resources that effectively function as privatized social services and utilities, the welfare state moving at the speed of capitalism. The term private commons does this.

We don’t realize that the world we’re living in has transformed in an irreversible manner since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.

PS: Sam Altman just published this piece earlier today.

Image Courtesy