Is open source the modern Plato's aristocracy?

2400 years ago

In the ancient greek Athenas emerged 3 men that we know today as the creators of modern philosofy: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates left us no words, Aristotle wrote a lot about so much subjects and is known for some as the wisest man to ever live, and Aristotle mentor, Plato, left us some of his magnificent books known as probably the first study of society, The Republic.

In that book, Plato discuss about some ways of organizing the men, being Aristocracy, Democracy, Anarchy and Tyranny.

As its known, Plato defends on its time that Aristocracy is the best way to organize the society, and he “proves” (in quotes because its in a dialectica/poem form, not really scientifically) his point by explaining to other philosofers in his time why would that be the case, and how this society should be built in an utopia manner. Plato argue that in this aristocracy, the true philosofers should rule the society, because only them were capable of such task. A man who is not devoted to the truth and does not prioritazy the good of the most over the individual should never rule a nation (and by that Plato also create miserable existence of some jobs in order to make sure his society is, at the overall, better than all other existent ones)

Some will argue that Plato was an elitist, by arguing that the Aristo (the noble/royal, power is held by the nobility) should rule while himself was part of such family, but for one who have read his work, there is no doubt that what he truly means is:

Only someone with true knowledge about the subjects should rule over people. Only someone who deeply understands both faces of the same coin should take the decisions about people’s future.

Which is, by his time, the only ones that could study deeply about subjects were those who did’t need to pratice a profession (like a painter, a soldier, a farmer), being those the members of a noble or royal family. Plato never said they should rule simply because they were royal or better than ordinary man.

Nowadays

Now who has the authority to turn of Google? If its CEO or anyone tries, we have no doubt that such person isnt capable of this task, the other investors or powerful people will undermine him until he is either left no choices or fired of the company.

Now lets not forget we live in a capitalist world (how could one forget about it right?), if something happens to be harmful to people, but it generates revenue, generates money! It will keep existing (what about guns and USA military?), just new narratives will be created to justify the use of it.

Want to imagine something scary? The world of the internet has grown in a way that we believe in most things that makes sense to us. Early days of internet did not have so much spam, ads or bots, so we learned to actually read something and if it looks human, we trust it, its not about agreeing with it or not, its about looking like a human opinion. Nowadays, when I read something in Twitter, I could easy be written by a human, but here is something interesting: Because there is a lot of people that is ignorant to subjects they speak of (and this is of course a product of capitalism and usa imperialism, but would be another gigantic subject to talk about), it becomes really hard to read something stupid and believe its human, but it could very well be a real person (and sometimes it really is), think about elections or any political thing in the internet and you’ll realize it’s very hard to distinguish. The point is, because its stupid, it leads me to think its a bot, and a lot of times it really is!

Its turns out that when its not about a philosofical/social problem, when its not an opinion of something complex, its already really hard to distinguish human and bot behavior. Hate speech, being it against populations or individuals, is very hard to distinguish, you and I could very easy hate some individual because of what we read on twitter comments of such person, and as we don’t really care about that person, we just withtout realizing, don’t like it as well, like: “Yeah I dont know man, I heard this guy speaks X and Y, and I hardly disagree with that. This guy is an imperialist; This guy is a communist; This country is a dictatorship; This government led people to starve.” And many other examples you can think about.

Information is already controled by those who rule and have the power, the USA election of 2020 has something to tell you about that.

The subject to think about is that the power already controls which information is given to the population, with AI, the ones who hold the power can just extend it far beyond to tell you stories through 500 different users that looks real on social media. The media is controlled by money, and who in the world would pay to hear something that it doesn’t want to hear? So you have a lot of reasons to doubt the general media, now you doubt every “human” (human behavior on the internet), whats left?

If someone holds the power of such AI (being it a company or a goverment), what can we do about it? Plato spoke 2400 years ago that the tyrant doesnt even know whether what he is doing is of his interest or for his small group of beneficiaries (and by tyrant I mean by the meaning of it, someone or something that alone holds the power), as he is the poorest of man.

We know that nowadays not only a government dictates how the world goes, but also (and maybe mostly) the private companies.

For me, it looks like open-source is what enables the earth as a being (collectively, human species) to respond to any bad things us humans can produce right now. If AI is dangerous, we need to make it open source so the large collective can combat it with same tooling. On the process, we of course allow individuals to make potentially harm others with more ease (as now individuals have acess to powerful tools to generate NSFW content about people, generate fake audio etc), but also tooling needs to be built to combat this behavior.

Drawing one last time from Plato’s concept in “The Republic,” where he allows for certain individuals to be unhappy for the sake of the collective prosperity, we should similarly permit universal access to AI. Despite the potential misuse by some, the collective will harness its capabilities to both fight the bad use and construct a brighter future.

As we know, those who built the AI models and showed us its incredibly capabilities, were people too, and lots of people are builiding similar tooling and models given the open-source nature of the information, gradually reaching the closed and mysterious ChatGPT.