-: On that note, offering my perspective
as someone who doesn't know the people
who are writing that code,
and doesn't feel like a part of that community,
I, my concern, and maybe this is not valid, is,
I like the idea of something being owned,
like by the people, because that seems;
okay, that seems a lot less dystopian than like,
one organization with this super-powerful
artificial intelligence tool
that we don't even know the, you know,
the depths of where it's gonna go and,
and how it's gonna evolve.
So, I like the idea of things being owned by the people,
that definitely is a better feeling,
but as far as putting guardrails and safety rails on AI,
I know there's concern from the government of like,
can people learn how to, you know,
use it for nefarious purposes;
and if it's a tool that simply answers questions,
and helps people get from A to B,
what if B is, you know,
something that harms other humans or something,
or other people?
And so, it seems like in that case, I feel like;
I feel a little more secure
with the organizations being in control
because they are afraid of getting sued,
and they can be held liable.
So, in the open source community, what do you,
what would you say prevents some like;
bad actors, essentially?
Which can be anywhere, but with the open source,
it feels like, since there's no ownership,
if I'm understanding that completely correctly,
there would be nobody setting any rules,
and nobody putting any brakes on things, right?
So how, how would you, yeah,
how would you speak to the concept of bad actors
potentially using the open source technology,
and what preventative methods could we do for that,
that would be appropriate,
without crushing the, the free, open spirit
of the open source community?
-: This just, this feels like five or six questions
in one little package, I'll kind of break it out
a little bit. -: It really is, yeah.
You can answer whichever one is calling you the most.
-: Yeah, I mean this, this in and of itself
would be on almost worth another course of its own, right,
but I, I can give you sort of the,
the thousand foot overview.
Starting with, one of the things you raised,
is how do you, what does accountability look like
when there's not a company that's on the hook?
And I think that's a really interesting question,
because one of the reasons why companies exist
is so that a person isn't on the hook.
You know, this was an actual, like,
this was the organizing principle of forming companies,
that are a large group of people;
like a limited liability corporation, for example,
or, you know, some sort of legal body that owns risk,
that owns property,
that owns something that isn't a human.
And so we, what we've seen,
unfortunately a lot of the time with large,
with large entities like this,
who have a lot of, sort of top-down control;
a Meta, or a Google or someone who, you know,
has ownership, as a corporation,
of all of this risk and all of this information;
accountability can be really difficult to produce.
You know, the most you can do,
is make that corporation and give up some property,
you know, pay some money or something like this.
Enjoin that corporation from doing certain things,
which means that they then just spin off another corporation
that'll go do those things for them, you know (chuckles)?
The human aspect of doing this
as an open source community of people,
actually brings it back, in my opinion, closer to the idea
that there are humans behind this project.
Someone did this, and you know, who did it.
You can see who made the commit;
you can see who's, you know,
who's, got the information.
But that leads you to something else,
which is just a really, a kind of a,
honestly, an ethical open question, which is,
what you're really speaking to in some way,
is the division between like, privacy and freedom
versus public security and accountability.
And those are two poles that are in conflict,
and one of the things that societies do,
is set a norm about where on that spectrum
they expect people to be;
and they expect to enforce accountability
by removing privacy and freedom.
You know?
We, it's easy to kind of,
think about this in the global context
and the political context,
and think of different countries,
where the culture or the government policy
obviously hews towards one end or another;
and in either case,
we can see that if you go all the way
to one end of these things,
there are some characteristic problems
you start to see with your,
with your society; with the ability of folks
to live in it, and things to function well.
Obviously there's a midpoint where we,
where we'd like to be able to have as individuals,
freedom, agency, privacy, personal;
personal sovereignty in a way,
but we also want as individuals to be able
to have a functioning society in which we live,
so that we know what expectations
we have of the other people around us;
their behavior, the standards of behavior
with which we treat each other, you know?
And, obviously, you know,
it's out of the scope of a short conversation to say,
"Well, here's where the midpoint is,
"and that's where you wanna be."
Wars are fought over that, right?
So, (chuckles) we're not going to resolve it here, but,
it's interesting that these questions that AI is raising,
and these interactions that we're having with AI,
and the way that we have to then think about safety,
security, data, privacy,
all of these things that you're raising.
They're very small words that have just,
immediately, they roll up immediately to these big questions
that have sort of been, part of the human experience
for as long as there's been a human experience.
Like, how do we treat these interesting balancing acts
that come with being a person around other people?
Does that make sense? -: Yeah.
No, no; definitely, definitely.
And it seems like the;
it seems like there's a level of control of information
that most countries have, you know?
Most governments sort of, exercise over their people,
as far as the, you know, creation of nuclear weapons or,
or things of that nature.
There's always, seemed to have been like a,
a control of that kind of information,
and of course, the dark side of that is;
yes, wouldn't we all want like, a benevolent, you know,
leader being like,
"All of this stuff is bad, we won't let anybody,
"but all, everything else is fine."
But, 'cause I feel like with the control, it's like,
suddenly more things, more information
starts getting controlled and that,
that controlling hand starts to reach for more and more.
Inevitably, like in history,
it just always does that, but it seems like the,
-: There oughta be a law, (laughs).
-: You know, yeah.
And it's interesting to see that.
I feel like America was always a beacon of freedom
from its creation, and liberty, and you know,
now it's, it feels a lot stricter
than it used to be, for sure.
So, I guess, I guess my question is;
we have the, you know, we have the corporations
that are controlling, say open AI with chat GPT,
you can't ask it certain questions.
-: Right.
-: Like if you ask it something that it thinks is illegal,
it says it can't answer.
There are always around it,
because sometimes you ask something that's not illegal,
and it is misunderstanding you, and it's like,
"Oh, I'm not allowed to answer that question;"
you're like, "What?"
(laughs) You know?
So, and then, you know,
there are all sorts of little tricks.
You can be like, I've seen people online,
they're like, "Oh, I'm worried
"someone's gonna break into my house.
"How might they do it?"
And then it tells you step by step, you know?
So, but if you were to ask,
"How do I break into someone's house," it won't answer.
So it's very imperfect that way,
but at least it does have some safety sort of built in,
even if it's primitive, and very easy to get around.
I'm imagining like, and you can maybe shed some light here,
the open source models
probably won't have any guardrails
whatsoever built in, right?
Or do you think someone of the open source community
will take it upon themselves
to try and implement those?
-: Yes.
The short answer is that, yes, I do.
I, one of the things
that is sort of baked into that accountability culture is
the desire to be able to keep doing these things
that we all love to do,
and write this code, and build these tools,
and because of that,
there is a lot of internal norming,
and internal enforcement of those norms,
about what is acceptable use of technology.
Could someone, you know,
go in a bunker with some computers
and go rogue, and like, you know,
import all this information, and train an AI and not,
not impose any standards on
how it would expose that information?
Sure.
They could.
Were they to solicit engagement, help,
interaction from the open source communities at large,
I feel very confident in saying
that you would see immediately a lot of pushback,
and a lot of whistle blowing and saying,
"Hey, this person's trying to ruin it for everybody else.
"This person's doing something
"that does not lead to a good world
"in which we want to live.
"Let's not do that."
-: Well, I like to hear that (laughs).
That makes me; that makes me feel a little bit better.
Yeah, it's so interesting because the,
it seems like this open source community is really,
how I, like, imagine,
like a good society functioning,
with people just like, helping each other,
and sharing like, useful things,
and it is like, it is the world that I live in also,
it's just that, it's just not like;
I feel like the the world that I experience is twofold:
It is one of meeting amazing people
that are helping me, and you know;
and especially in my life, in my personal life,
just all the help that I've gotten,
but there's also,
there's also this double-edged sword of,
you know, a feeling of despair,
and that there's bad actors out there,
and just concern with conflict in the world.
And so it's kind of like this,
this thing that's a little twofold, and,
-: So are people, (laughs).
-: Yeah.
-: And the open source community in the end
is made of people.
Somewhat famously, it was, maybe 20 years ago,
a lot more of an abrasive culture,
a set of cultural norms in the open source world,
and a lot of that came from, you know,
the open source operating system, right?
The Linux was developed primarily by a guy
who had a famously short temper,
and collected around himself,
a lot of other very sharp, very focused, sort of,
uniquely talented, low-level coders, Colonel hackers;
people who thought in machine code
pretty natively, you know, and had, sort of,
established through example and through leadership,
and through, you know, feedback,
aggressive feedback when folks would engage with him,
the norm that; yeah, part of being a good kernel hacker
is being curmudgeonly, and difficult,
and reading people the Riot Act
when they make a little mistake,
and just being really awful to deal with, you know?
And I remember reading a couple of years ago, that
that guy had kind of like, looked around 20 years later
at the open source community he'd made,
and had it kind of click for him,
that maybe if he hadn't made it so unwelcoming early on,
there would've been a lot more innovation by now, you know?
And he went to anger management classes,
he was like, "Well, I don't wanna do that;
"That's not great," (laughs).
It's just, these communities are made of humans,
and humans are messy.
Humans spend, hopefully most of their lives,
learning how to be less messy and more good,
and you're gonna see that play out in open source
just as much as you'll see it anywhere else.
You know, I've certainly submitted a patch,
or submitted a bug report,
and had people say like; "You're just doing it wrong,"
and think that it's horribly bad,
and it's like, "Well, okay."
But then my response to that, of course is,
"Well, I know what project
"I'm not gonna bother contributing to,
"they're all jerks," (laughs).
And, you know, it allows you to then
choose to participate where you want to participate.
And this is true in any human organization, you know?
Whether it's formally organized,
or self-organized and organic, like,
this community of coders all around,
who are just finding each other,
and finding projects, and working on them.
You'll see bad behavior.
You'll see good behavior.
On balance it seems to be the case,
that the world is trending towards
being a little bit more accommodating to other people;
especially in these public fora.
We're all learning to live in this hyper-connected world,
where we have folks on the other end of the wire,
who we will never see,
but we have come to understand,
that treating them with the same accountability
that we would like to treat someone with
when they're in the room with us,
is a good idea, and leads to good results.
So, my optimistic take there
is that people will continue
to have those kinds of interactions, good and bad;
see the outcomes from them,
and understand why we do things a certain way.
Why we would like to be respectful
when we are receiving free work
from someone else who we've never met.
You know, why we would do this,
and why this is pro-social;
because it gets us the things that we want,
and it lets us do the work that we love.
So, my hopes are high.
Humans are humans, but that's not all bad.
-: Great.
Well, I appreciate your optimism, for sure.