E. Glen Weyl, Shrey Jain, Karen Easterbrook, Jason Entenmann
We are excited to introduce the Plural Technology Collaboratory (PTC), a cross-company and multi-partner collaboration with a home base within Microsoft Research (MSR) Special Projects.
Collectively, we are exploring how to responsibly create a technological foundation for Plurality (opens in new tab), a future where technology enables, recognizes and empowers trust and collaboration across social diversity, respecting intersectional personal identity and context in communication. The conceptual framework of Plurality was prominently articulated by digital democracy activist and Digital Minister in Taipei, Audrey Tang, and is being expressed in greater detail in a joint book (opens in new tab) with one of us and an online open source community. PTC brings together dozens of MSR researchers across disciplines from the social sciences and economics to mathematics and cryptography with a range of external collaborators: the Harvard Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics (opens in new tab) (which is today launching an allied GETTING-Plurality (opens in new tab) initiative), the University of California Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (opens in new tab), Collective Intelligence Project (opens in new tab), Plurality Institute (opens in new tab), EY (opens in new tab), Haun Ventures (opens in new tab), and Protocol Labs (opens in new tab). Together, we hope to build the largest, strongest, socially-focused, and industry-connected plural technology research group in the world to tackle the unique opportunities and challenges for Plurality posed by the unprecedented technological changes we are living through.
Plural Technology and Generative Foundation Models
The PTC relaunch is motivated by the potential of Generative Foundation Models (opens in new tab) (GFMs), such as GPT-4, to become general-purpose technology, comparable to electricity or computation, but emerging into broad use far faster than either of those examples. GFMs have the capacity to reshape and disrupt much of our society, including the economy, politics, governance, social structures, and the organization of production. Not all of these changes will be beneficial: as Brad Smith highlighted in his recent blog post (opens in new tab), AI-driven innovations can be used to powerfully target individuals with false information, compromise privacy, undermine democracy, and erode trust in society and institutions. As machines come closer to passing all Turing Tests (opens in new tab) (being indistinguishable from human beings), we must remember the capacity for deception this entails and thus we should expect the cost of deception to fall and its quality to rise, dramatically.
Realizing the full potential of GFMs and reaping their widespread social benefits, while avoiding these risks, will thus require social and organizational adaptations, supported by technology, that keeps pace with this GFM revolution. As such, the PTC will research how Plural Technologies (PTs) can facilitate these sociotechnical transformations to ensure they protect and even strengthen social diversity and cooperation.
MSR is called to this work by the sense of responsibility we feel as developers of many foundational PTs, such as Proof of Work (developed (opens in new tab) by Cynthia Dwork), Data Dignity (developed (opens in new tab) by Jaron Lanier), and Quadratic Voting and Funding (developed (opens in new tab) by one of the authors), as pioneers of social science (such as contextual privacy (opens in new tab) pioneered by danah boyd, (opens in new tab) respect for digital labor (opens in new tab) emphasized by Mary L. Gray (opens in new tab) and Siddarth Suri (opens in new tab) and online community (opens in new tab) studied by Nancy Baym (opens in new tab)) that underlies the aspirations of Plurality. Our experience with such technologies has taught us that we can only maximize their potential if we address their real risks through broad interdisciplinary and cross-sector partnerships, which motivates the approach we are launching today.
Phase one collaborations
Microsoft researchers will be working with collaborators globally to study, design and deploy PTs, focused on the following pillars:
- Verifiability and Provenance: As GFMs make persuasive and misleading content increasingly easy to create, verifiable content and identity will be increasingly essential across social, business, and democratic systems. PTC is researching cryptographic techniques to address these challenges, fostering secure, private, and trustworthy online experiences, grounded in meaningful and authentic community connections.
- Economy: To foster a sustainable creator economy, we will research strategies like Data Dignity (opens in new tab) and non-speculative token designs (opens in new tab) (both concepts pioneered by PTC researchers) to protect creators’ data and ensure value returns.
- Society: While GFMs face criticism for potentially reinforcing social hierarchies, they hold the promise of fostering diverse experiences when applied with contextual consideration and equitable distribution. GETTING-Plurality leader Danielle Allen developed a consortium around «next-generation badging» (opens in new tab) system to make educational evaluation more flexible harnessing PTs and GFMs.
- Politics and Governance: GFMs can both centralize power and enable large-scale democratic participation, challenging traditional democratic structures. PTC plans to research technologies to foster deliberative discussions, implement innovative mechanisms. A critical exploration is Gov4Git, (opens in new tab) a protocol designed by our partner Petar Maymounkov at Protocol Labs that harnesses the git version control protocol as a foundation for blockchain-like, but low cost, governance on which the Plurality book will be developed harnessing governance systems developed by our partners at the Collective Intelligence Project and Plurality Institute.
- Organization of Production: GFMs reliance on centralized computing and public data restricts scalability, but decentralized protocols like Interplanetary File System (opens in new tab) and FileCoin (opens in new tab) designed by our partners at Protocol Labs can harness underutilized edge devices for distributed computation. PTC partners are developing privacy-aware and security-centric training approaches to access valuable private data, unlocking the full potential of GFMs.
Road Ahead
We are only at the beginning of the journey of developing plural technologies. For example, today many people ask how to know if a piece of content was created by a GFM; tomorrow they are likely to ask how they can know if anything is created by a human; and not soon thereafter even these questions may seem quaint as the patterns of recombination of humans and machine may strain the way we think about agency. Where privacy is today seen as a fundamental human right but mostly separable from other rights, soon preserving the integrity of communications and their context may be necessary for the protecting all property, identity and access control, as public information can increasingly be used to synthesize personalities, voices and more.
The complex sociotechnical issues surrounding privacy, authentication and provenance have historically taken decades to adjust. The rapid ride of GFMs may force a dramatic acceleration of this timeline if we hope to preserve and enhance core principles of pluralism, sustainability, and accountability. The PTC is embracing this generational challenge and welcomes every partner willing to join us in confronting it.