Composable Commons-Based Infrastructures for AI
Discussion
Nathan Schneider et al. , CIP:
"AI is poised to become a foundational digital infrastructure underpinning nearly all sectors of society. On its surface, AI exhibits many characteristics that economists associate with natural monopolies well-suited for public utility models: immense upfront costs, non-rivalrous access, and vast potential to create downstream value. However, emerging research reveals such core infrastructure creates societal value that transcends classical economic framings, and as such requires novel organization forms in order to best capture and redistribute its benefits.
To the extent that it becomes enmeshed in our lives, AI could be seen as digital public infrastructure (DPI) in its own right - in which case it’s governance is vital to the health of our core civic institutions and for human self-determination. Treating AI as merely another enterprise technology ignores the scale of its impacts. If AI is a transformative technology, we need robust ways to steward its sociotechnical integration. Failing to do so risks enshrining an anti-democratic AI regime misaligned with the principles of pluralism.
A key risk in the AI industry is power consolidation, as this skews both the incentives and market structure, in turn creating a more fragile ecosystem. AI companies could take a proactive approach in establishing new standards and protocols across the AI stack that allow for better alignment of principles across the ecosystem and guarantee multistakeholder governance. An open and diverse ecosystem is more robust to market collapse.
For instance, the Visa payment network was originally set up as a member-owned cooperative for financial transactions among regional banks. Founder Dee Hock recognized that the credit card system would not work if owned by a single institution, and he persuaded Bank of America to spin its BankAmericard product out as a separate company, owned by the smaller banks that used it. Although the company later transitioned to investor ownership, Visa’s early life as a cooperative enabled the credit-card industry to spread through the trust engendered by shared ownership. Similarly, starting in the mid-19th century, the Associated Press formed as a cooperative among local newspapers. Thanks to the trust across ideological lines that the cooperative structure enables, the AP remains a widely trusted source for news and even electoral results.
The development of open-source technologies has shown the power of organizational stacks that are composable and dynamic. The Linux operating system that much of the internet runs on depends on diverse organizational structures that interoperate. While a “benevolent dictator for life” oversees the Linux kernel, the constitutional democracy of Debian provides critical maintenance work, while startup-style companies like Ubuntu adapt those products for end users. More recently, the emerging social media platform Bluesky has developed an ingenious strategy for “composable moderation” designed to prevent moderation decisions from being monopolized at any one bottleneck.
The AI industry can add another chapter to this story by exploring composability and distributed ownership across its own technical and organizational stack.
Recommendations:
- Explore ways of dividing up the AI stack into composable parts and distribute ownership and control in diverse ways across them.
- Identify opportunities for cooperative models to build shared infrastructures."