https://www.weforum.org/stories/artificial-intelligence/ai-community-social-licence
## Dial-up modem
Dial-up modem. Oh, that lovely sound. Oh, I miss you so much. Do you remember the first time you heard the internet? Not saw it. For me, it was so much like those little kids out there. I was nine years old, sitting in the hallway of our childhood home, and I was so excited to go next to that thing, the internet.
## A new portal that opened
It was exciting. It was a new portal that opened, and it didn’t belong to anyone, not a government, not an institution, it belonged to whoever had the courage to step right in. It never left me, but I think what I didn’t have the language to articulate was that the machine was not different than me.
## A curiosity
It was made out of curiosity, my curiosity human curiosity. I believe we are standing on the same portal right now. You see, it’s that little portal, it’s that little mystical new territory, except now, this technology is called artificial intelligence, and the question is not whether the portal is open. It is wide open.
## Who decides what is on the other side?
The question is, who decides what is on the other side? And we keep on asking how AI will change the world, how will it replace jobs, reshape relationships, rewire belonging. But you know what? After 11 years in working, building our own data and AI in Europe, I believe that we have asked the wrong question.
The more important question is, how does the community shape AI? Who authors it? Because if you look carefully, many fascinating things are happening. First of all, the Pope is making statements about how to use these artificial models and what is good and what is bad.
## Faster than babies need diapers
The oldest institution in the Western world is issuing guidance on those models because AI has now entered every layer of human meaning-making. Also, models are changing faster than babies need diapers. You go from Claude 2 to 3, and they just keep going and you just have no time to stay behind.
## Take a step back
You don’t know what’s coming next. There is no slow down, and the people building those models are also actually warning us to take a step back. AI 2027 actually stated that we should maybe slow down, we shouldn’t go that fast, because soon AI could work without human intervention.
## In the back corridors
But what is interesting is that while all of these official announcements are happening, and all the institutions are talking about all those things, the real work, what really makes change happens, in the back corridors. It happens in events, it happens in Slack channels, Discord channels, Telegram groups, when people are advising each other, “Hey, move to this tool, because that is aligned more with our values,” or “Don’t use this later technology, because it’s really outdated, just go and try something else out.”
## Community acts
What stunned me was when OpenAI formed a partnership with the Pentagon, and there was a massive change in users. People moved from OpenAI to Claude, because community acts. They don’t wait on someone to tell them, how to act. They don’t wait on a regulatory institution.
## It’s still governance
It’s when people make change. It’s informal, it is messy, but it is governance, and communities are not an after-thought after AI is made. It’s how AI makes decisions.
## We have built an entire industry on a mistake
And I’m going to tell you something else that is quite provocative. I think that we have built an entire industry on a mistake. We say it’s something external, to be extracted, processed, owned, monetized, like oil or gold.
## Data is us
But data is not oil. Data is us. We are all made of data. Our DNA is data. We contain data. When someone is making a decision in the middle of the night, frantically typing and searching something on the internet, that is not a data point, that is a feeling.
## A human being in pain
When a patient goes to the hospital because they need guidance to be provided medical care, that’s not another row in a database, that’s a human being in pain. So if data is human, AI that treats data as a resource is making a fundamental error.
## They are the decision makers
So the communities that are forming around this technology are not external to AI. They are part of it, and they are the decision makers.
## The Mecca of Berlin
Now let me tell you how AI can be shaped by other communities. So we talked about the Pope. For those here in Berlin that are familiar, they know that behind us is Berghain, which is basically the Mecca of Berlin, where Berliners go to pray.
## A Greek art curator
Well, imagine me in 2015. I come here in Berlin, and I’m an art curator. I’m a Greek art curator, nothing to do with data, but I’m fascinated by data and algorithms, and guess what? Germany is not quite the right place to be fascinated about these things.
## Data makes people nervous here
Imagine that. Data makes people nervous here. So let’s do it. This is a community here. Let’s start the conversation here.
## The Data Natives
So, I started building a community, a community to describe a generation of people that expected technology to work for them, the Data Natives, the fearless. And that’s what I realized. If communities are going to offer the future of AI, we need three things.
## Gatekeeping with Helvetica font
One, we need understanding, not at a PhD level, at a human level, because jargon is just gatekeeping with Helvetica font. We need to know that the tools we’re using have biases, and those biases come from the people who make those tools, so design is very important.
## Spaces for disagreement
Three, we need spaces for disagreement. We need people who don’t agree with each other to come together, safe spaces where people can come together and disagree on the same thing, where an activist can talk with a founder and actually try to figure out, “Okay, how do we do this? How do we build this?”
Because AI and everything else doesn’t come from consensus. Otherwise, we are just going to be a room full of Patagonia vests and ping-pong tables and better snacks. But no, what we want is to progress and to evolve together.
## The stress test
And now, let me tell you the stress test. It’s 2020. We are all familiar with that time that we lived online, really. This is the time when we all waited at home in front of a computer, and there I am again. It’s 2 a.m., and I see a spreadsheet filling out in real time.
## A hackathon and a marathon
We’ve been asked to help organize, together with a lot of other communities, initiated by the European Commission, a hackathon and a marathon to bring solutions to the table to combat the COvid-19. It was again a crisis, and you know what? That was the amazing thing.
## What we were building were bridges
There was no playbook, there was no budget, no one actually paid anyone to be there, no one asked anyone to be there, but yet here we were trying to make this work. And what I realized is that we weren’t really building innovation. What we were building were bridges, bridges between people, investors potentially with startups, people who would want to form a team finding engineers, an AI diagnostics tool trying to connect with a hospital, and in real time, people came together.
## Community-driven co-creation
They organized under the same call, because people can come together when they have a purpose that is beyond themselves. That work was published as a blueprint in a Springer academic book, because it was about co-creation, about a replicable model how community-driven co-creation can work, and it did, it can work again and again.
## The forces are pushing against this
And I think we are standing in a moment where we need to think this way. But I need to be honest, the forces are pushing against this. The economist Yanis Varoufakis says that we are living through techno-feudalism. Basically, very few people own the means that we are using.
## The landlords and the gatekeepers
They are the landlords and the gatekeepers of our digital world. That means that everything that we do goes upstream, and we have no connection to it. Also, it is quite sad, we are more connected than ever, yet more disconnected. There is a huge loneliness epidemic, and it is happening right now.
## We need to make the most of it
There are so many tools to connect us, yet we cannot. But having said that, in every generation, in every time there are forces against us, right? And we all inherit specific technologies to work with, so we need to make the most of it.
## It’s about us taking control of this
AI basically can still make this change. We can still make this change with AI as a community. We can still see how we can evolve together. That’s the important bit. It’s about us evolving with AI. It’s not about us being left behind. It’s about us taking control of this.
## A future I refuse to accept
The tools that we are supposed to connect us are optimized not for belonging but for attention, nor for meaning but for subtraction. And if this is the future of AI, it is a future I refuse to accept, and I don’t think I’m the only one in the room who does so.
## It is our move
It is our move. Your move. That is exactly the principle I’m asking you and all of us to apply to AI. We are not spectators. Every tool we choose to use and refuse, every platform we give our attention, every person we put in the room, every community we join and co-create are all important messages that we send.
## Those are not passive acts
Those are not passive acts. They are decisions about what AI becomes. And of course, we could ask the question, how can I use AI the best to benefit myself? And maybe you will create something useful. Maybe you’ll become successful, the first solopreneur billionaire.
## Something that lasts
But if you ask the question, how can I make AI help each other, then you will make something that lasts.
