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Happy Friday, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Future in Five Questions. This week I spoke with Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute and former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. Chilson recently wrote a blog post outlining the implications of this month’s election for artificial intelligence policy, and here he discusses why he thinks “artificial general intelligence” is overblown, why government-held assets can be a benefit to industry, and why he’s optimistic about the next four years. An edited and condensed version follows: What’s one underrated big idea? Be a data pack rat. Keep everything. Use tools that collect data about you and make your day-to-day legible to the future you. Turn on location history, never clear your browser history, back up the past when you swap in new devices. We’re very close to that data being useful to the average person. I think people who spent so much time erasing their digital trails in order to hide from others are going to realize in the future that they were also erasing their past from themselves. It’ll be looked at like self-inflicted digital Alzheimer's. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Artificial general intelligence is overhyped. Not only is the timeline uncertain, it’s also not that useful to have human-style general intelligence. The history of economic growth is a history of specialization of labor. Any general intelligence is going to be deployed to its highest value use. So why work so hard to create a general intelligence only to then have it do hyper-specialized jobs? It’s a much straighter, more economical path to just create deep and narrow tools that apply knowledge in specific domains. What book most shaped your conception of the future?
I don’t have a strong conception of the future except that technology will affect the boundaries of the fractal in- and out-groups that make up human society. This has big implications for institutions at all levels, from nation-states, to firms, to the family unit. Some borders will become more definite, some will blur; some groups will expand in size, some will contract; some will disappear. I suppose this vision is an outgrowth of my lifelong interest in complex adaptive systems, which was spurred by reading Douglas Hofstadter’s “Metamagical Themas” as a tween. I think this tech-driven dynamic evolution
of community at all scales is also reflected well in many of Neal Stephenson’s books, especially “The Diamond Age” and “Anathem.” What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? The government holds important assets that would generate enormous value for our nation in the private sector. This includes government held spectrum, yes, but also things like enormous data sets of many kinds. The government should be looking for more opportunities like GPS: services and assets that could trigger enormous innovation if available to entrepreneurs and founders. What has surprised you the most this year? I think my biggest surprise this year was how undecided I was walking into the voting booth on Nov. 5. And the second biggest surprise was how calm I felt walking out. I’m not a big fan of voting, I think it’s hugely overrated as a way to improve society. But it is a useful provocation for self-examination: what are my own visions and fears about the future? It turns out I’m much more afraid of a future where the U.S. continues to fearfully wrap itself in red tape and carefully policed narratives than I am of a future where ambitious ideas, including really bad ones, are debated loudly.
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