Source: "I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint

Compiled & Edited by: Janna, ChainCatcher

ChainCatcher Editor's Summary

This article originates from Vitalik Buterin's personal website, which primarily publishes his blog posts, opinions, and research covering topics such as blockchain technology, crypto-economics, decentralized governance, and privacy protection. The article delves into how open-source technology can promote fairness and transparency, why emerging technologies may exacerbate inequality, and the concept of open-source as a "Schelling point" for technological governance.

ChainCatcher has organized and compiled the content (with some omissions).

Core Points:

• Radical technologies may exacerbate social inequality as they are more accessible to the wealthy and powerful, leading to disparities in lifespan and advantages between the rich and the poor, potentially creating a global underclass.
• Another form of technological abuse exists where manufacturers project power over users through data collection and information concealment, which is fundamentally different from the inequality of access to technology.
• Open-source is an undervalued third path that can improve access equality and producer equality in technology, enhance verifiability, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
• Opponents of open-source argue that it carries risks of abuse, but centralized gatekeeping is untrustworthy, prone to military and other misuse, and difficult to ensure equality between nations.
• If a technology has a high risk of abuse, a better solution may be to refrain from its use; if the dynamics of power create discomfort, an open-source approach can make it fairer.
• Open-source does not mean laissez-faire; it can be combined with legal and other regulations, with the core goal being to ensure the democratization of technology and the accessibility of information.

A common concern we often hear is that certain radical technologies may exacerbate power inequality, as these technologies are inevitably limited to use by the wealthy and powerful.

Here is a quote from someone expressing concern about the consequences of increased lifespan:

“Will some people be left behind? Are we going to make society more unequal than it is now?” he asked. Tuljapurkar predicts that the surge in lifespan will be confined to wealthy countries, where citizens can afford anti-aging technologies and governments can fund scientific research. This gap further complicates the current debate about healthcare accessibility, as the rich and the poor not only diverge in quality of life but also increasingly in lifespan.

“Big pharmaceutical companies have a consistent record of being very harsh when it comes to providing products to those who cannot afford them,” Tuljapurkar stated.

If anti-aging technologies are distributed in an unregulated free market, “in my view, it is entirely possible that we will ultimately form a permanent global underclass, with those countries locked into today’s mortality conditions,” Tuljapurkar said. “If this happens, it will create negative feedback and a vicious cycle. Those excluded will remain forever excluded.”

Here is a similarly strong statement from an article concerned about the consequences of human genetic enhancement:

Earlier this month, scientists announced they had edited genes in human embryos to remove a pathogenic mutation. This work is astonishing and is the answer many parents have prayed for. Who wouldn’t want the chance to prevent their children from suffering pain that could be avoided today?

But this will not be the end. Many parents hope to ensure their children gain the best advantages through genetic enhancement. Those who are capable can access these technologies. As capabilities emerge, ethical issues transcend the ultimate safety of such technologies. The high costs of the programs will create scarcity and exacerbate the already growing income inequality.

Similar viewpoints in other technological fields:

Digital technology overall: https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/technology/technology-and-inequality/

Space travel: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/What-Does-Billionaires-Dominating-Space-Travel-Mean-for-the-World.html

Solar geoengineering: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/article/hidden-injustices-of-advancing-solar-geoengineering-research/F61C5DCBCA02E18F66CAC7E45CC76C57

This theme can be found in many criticisms of new technologies. A related but fundamentally different theme is that technological products are used as tools for data collection, vendor lock-in, intentional concealment of side effects (as modern vaccines have been criticized in this way), and other forms of abuse.

Emerging technologies often create more opportunities for people to obtain something without granting them rights or complete information about it, making older technologies seem safer from this perspective. This is also a form of technology reinforcing the elite at the expense of others, but the issue is the projection of power by manufacturers over users through technology, rather than the inequality of access mentioned earlier.

I personally support technology very much; if it’s a binary choice between “further advancement” or “maintaining the status quo,” I would be happy to advance everything except for a few projects (like functional gain research, weapons, and superintelligent AI), despite the risks.

This is because, overall, the benefits are longer, healthier lives, more prosperous societies, retaining more human relevance in an era of rapid AI advancement, and maintaining cultural continuity through the elderly as living individuals rather than memories in history books.

But if I put myself in the shoes of those who are less optimistic about the positive impacts, or who are more concerned about the elite using new technologies to dominate economic control and impose control, or both, what then? For example, I already have this feeling about smart home products, where the benefits of being able to converse with light bulbs are offset by my reluctance to let my personal life flow into Google or Apple.

If I had a more pessimistic hypothesis, I could also imagine having similar feelings about certain media technologies: if they allow the elite to broadcast information more effectively than others, then they could be used to impose control and drown out others. For many such technologies, the benefits we gain from better information or better entertainment do not compensate for the way they redistribute power.

Open Source as a Third Path

I believe a severely underestimated viewpoint in these cases is: supporting technology developed only through open-source methods.

The argument that open-source accelerates progress is very credible: it makes it easier for people to build on each other's innovations. At the same time, the argument that requiring open-source slows progress is also very credible: it prevents people from using a multitude of potentially profitable strategies.

But the most interesting consequences of open-source are those unrelated to the speed of progress:

• Open-source improves access equality. If something is open-source, it is naturally accessible to anyone in any country. For physical goods and services, people still need to pay marginal costs, but in many cases, the high prices of proprietary products are due to the high fixed costs of inventing them, which cannot attract more competition, so the marginal costs are often quite low, as is the case in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Open-source improves access equality for becoming producers. One criticism is that providing end products for free does not help people gain skills and experience to ascend the global economy into prosperity, which is the true reliable guarantee of a lasting high quality of life. Open-source is not like that; it is fundamentally designed to allow people anywhere in the world to become producers at all stages of the supply chain, rather than just consumers.
• Open-source improves verifiability. If something is open-source, ideally, it includes not only the output but also the process of inventing it, parameter choices, etc., making it easier to verify that what you received is what the provider claims, and allowing third-party research to identify hidden flaws.
• Open-source eliminates the opportunity for vendor lock-in. If something is open-source, manufacturers cannot render it useless by remotely removing features or simply going bankrupt, as is the case with highly computerized/networked cars that cannot function after the manufacturer shuts down. You always have the right to fix it yourself or request other providers.

We can analyze this from the perspectives of some more radical technologies mentioned at the beginning of the article:

• If we have proprietary lifespan extension technology, it may be limited to billionaires and political leaders. While I personally expect the price of this technology to drop rapidly, if it is open-source, then anyone can use it and provide it cheaply to others.
• If we have proprietary human genetic enhancement technology, it may be limited to billionaires and political leaders, creating an upper class. Similarly, I personally believe such technologies will spread, but there will certainly be a gap between what the rich and ordinary people can access. However, if it is open-source, the gap between what the well-connected and the elite can access and what others can access will be much smaller.
• For any biotechnology in general, an open-source scientific safety testing ecosystem may be more effective and honest than companies endorsing their own products and being stamped by compliant regulators.
• If only a few people can go to space, depending on political trends, some of them may have the opportunity to monopolize an entire planet or moon. If the technology is more widely distributed, their chances of doing so will be smaller.
• If smart cars are open-source, then you can verify that the manufacturer is not surveilling you and you do not rely on the manufacturer to continue using the car.

We can summarize the argument in a chart:

Note that the bubble for “build it only in open-source” is wider, reflecting greater uncertainty about how much progress open-source will bring and how much it will prevent the concentration of power. But even so, in many cases, on average, it is still a good deal.

Open Source and Abuse Risks

One of the main arguments against powerful open-source technology is sometimes raised, namely the risks of zero-sum behavior and non-hierarchical forms of abuse. Giving everyone access to nuclear weapons would certainly end nuclear inequality. This is a real issue, as we see multiple powerful nations using asymmetrical access to nuclear capabilities to bully others, but it would almost certainly lead to billions of deaths.

As an example of negative social consequences without intentional harm, giving everyone the opportunity for cosmetic surgery could lead to a zero-sum competitive game, where everyone spends significant resources and even risks their health to appear more beautiful than others, but ultimately we all become accustomed to higher levels of beauty, and society does not actually improve. Some forms of biotechnology could produce such effects on a large scale. Many technologies, including many biotechnologies, lie somewhere between these two extremes.

“I only support it if it is carefully controlled by trusted gatekeepers.” This is a valid argument that supports moving in the opposite direction. Gatekeepers can allow positive use cases for technology while excluding negative ones. Gatekeepers could even be given a public mission to ensure non-discriminatory access for everyone who does not violate certain rules.

However, I have a strong default skepticism about this approach. The main reason is that I doubt whether trusted gatekeepers truly exist in the modern world. Many of the most zero-sum and highest-risk use cases are military applications, and militaries have a poor historical record of restraining themselves.

A good example is the Soviet biological weapons program:

Given Gorbachev's restraint regarding SDI and nuclear weapons, his actions related to the Soviet illegal biological weapons program are perplexing, Hoffman points out. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, despite being a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention, the Soviet Union already had an extensive biological weapons program initiated by Brezhnev. In addition to anthrax, the Soviet Union was also researching smallpox, plague, and rabbit hemorrhagic disease, but the intentions and targets of such weapons were unclear.

“Documents from Kateyev show that there were multiple Central Committee resolutions regarding biological warfare programs in the mid to late 1980s. It is hard to believe that these were signed and issued without Gorbachev's knowledge,” Hoffman says.

“There was even a memorandum regarding the biological weapons program sent to Gorbachev in May 1990—this memorandum still does not tell the whole story. The Soviet Union misled the world and also misled their own leaders.”

The Russian Biological Weapons Program: Vanished or Disappeared? argues that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this biological weapons program may have been provided to other countries.

Other countries also have significant errors that they need to explain for themselves. I need not mention all the countries involved in functional gain research and the implicit risks of its disclosure. In the realm of digital software, such as finance, the history of weaponized interdependence suggests that things intended to prevent abuse can easily slide into the unilateral projection of power by operators.

This is another weakness of gatekeepers: by default, they will be controlled by national governments, whose political systems may have the motivation to ensure domestic access equality, but no strong entity has the mission to ensure equality of access between nations.

To clarify, I am not saying that gatekeepers are bad, so let’s have laissez-faire, at least not for functional gain research. Rather, I am saying two things:

• If something has enough “everyone-to-everyone abuse risk” that you only feel comfortable with it being conducted under a centralized gatekeeper, the right solution may be to not do it at all and invest in alternative technologies with better risk profiles.
• If something has enough “power dynamics risk” that you currently do not feel comfortable seeing it proceed at all, the right solution is to do it, and to do it in an open-source manner so that everyone has a fair opportunity to understand and participate.

It is also important to note that open-source does not mean laissez-faire. For example, I support conducting geoengineering in an open-source and open-science manner. But this is different from “anyone can divert rivers and spray whatever they want into the atmosphere,” which in practice would not lead to that: laws and international diplomacy exist, and such actions are easily detectable, making any agreements fairly enforceable.

The value of openness is to ensure the democratization of technology, making it available to many countries rather than just one; and to increase the accessibility of information, allowing people to more effectively form their own judgments about whether what is being done is effective and safe.

Fundamentally, I see open-source as a way to achieve technology's strongest Schelling point with less wealth, power concentration, and information asymmetry risk. Perhaps we can try to build more clever institutions to separate the positive and negative effects of technology, but in the chaotic real world, the most likely enduring approach is to guarantee the public's right to know, meaning that things happen transparently, and anyone can go understand what is happening and participate.

In many cases, the tremendous value of accelerating technological development far outweighs these concerns. In a few cases, it is crucial to slow down technological development as much as possible until countermeasures or alternative means to achieve the same goals are available.

However, within the existing framework of technological development, choosing open-source as a means of technological advancement brings incremental improvements as a third option: focusing less on the rate of progress and more on the style of progress, and using the expectation of open-source as a more acceptable lever to push things in a better direction, is an undervalued approach.

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Vitalik's Latest Interview: The Path of Ethereum's World Ledger and Development Ideas in the AI Era

Ten Years Since Ethereum's Genesis: A Major Choice Between Life and Death

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