A few weeks ago, stock prices for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies have dropped significantly. It seems that many people expect AI to be capable of writing such tools at very low cost soon. But these events could be only forerunners for much bigger things yet to come. What happens on a broad scale if intelligence becomes abundant?
It‘s maybe time to think about the theoretical limits of the current economic system (which could surprisingly soon become very practical).
To get an intuition of what could happen, let’s start with some practical examples.
AI is already now able to speed up the development of new software by a factor of - maybe - ten. Current LLM based systems do this mainly by using software patterns, methods and ideas they have seen during training.
But they can be used to steal other people's code even much more aggressively: they are capable of transpiling source code into a different programming language which, if done properly, removes in many cases enough „character“ from the code to make the generated code count as „new“: Code can be compiled into some sort of intermediate code first. This preserves the functionality of the software but removes the know-how of „how to create the software“ to a large extent (comments, variable names etc.). This intermediate code can then, using knowledge about the application, decompiled into „novel“ source code in any language.
This method can be also used to create „proprietary“ source code out of open-source code. But such code would have, as everybody could do the same quickly, no value at all.
Ultimately this means that soon software cannot be owned at all anymore. Anybody who gets access to the application in any form, can recreate a new version out of it which is freed from copyright. The ways how software code can get lost are manyfold:
- A lot of software is already distributed in binary form („.exe file or .app“). This can be used easily in the near future to create „new“ software.
- Employees in software companies could copy the source code, take it home and use it as the foundation for their own startup.
- Cloud hosting providers (like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud) and cloud hosters for source code (like GitHub) have access to a lot of source code too. Some already use it for training their AIs, but one can easily imagine more interesting use cases for it.
Therefore, in the near future, if somebody gets somehow access to the software, it will be immediately lost to a competitor or even the public. Of course this will reduce its value to little or even zero.
But what about AI systems? It will not be possible to own them too. We have already read the news about the allegations of some large US AI companies that some smaller chinese competitors (ab)used their LLMs to generate training data for their own AIs. This process is called distillation. Distillation is also possible if you use a stolen AI model. And AI’s are extremely easy to copy. Again, an employee could walk out of a large AI company with the most valuable model on a tiny memory stick. And as AI models are ultimately only a (large) bunch of numbers, it is also possible to just train a stolen model a bit further. This alters all the weights (the numbers which make up the model) and can make it very hard to prove that the „new“ model is actually a close descendant of the stolen model.
What about other forms of intellectual property? All books, illustrations, fotos and movies are already lost. In exactly the same way as described above they have been integrated into the AI models in a way which disguises their true origin and gives the copyright holders no means to claim their rights.
It would be completely naive to believe that this mechanism will spare the AI model manufacturers themselves. Their products will have no value anymore very soon too. All the billions of dollars invested will be lost. It's just a matter of time until this unfolds.
So in what should I invest now? Hardware manufacturers? Or any other manufacturers? Their value comes from knowledge about manufacturing and management processes. These will be soon fully incorporated into AI too, as humans will heavily require AI to amplify their skills.
Therefore all this will have no value anymore soon too.
Soon, a bunch of robots will be able to build any kind of factory. The speed of this process will only depend on the number of robots deployed (which themselves are built mainly by AI controlled robots).
Now we see a general pattern emerging. It's not money which is controlling the world, but intelligence. Money is only a tool used by intelligence to exert control.
What does all this mean for owning in general? There are two ways how something can be owned. The first one is, if society tolerates that the owner exerts power over something. This is the case if people believe that the owner made unusual sacrifices in his live to be able to own the thing. This could be time invested into education or hard work (by the owner or his ancestors). That he deserves owning the thing.
But very soon neither human skills nor human labour will be required to invent and produce goods! It will be AI which makes all the inventions (including new AI!) and runs all the factories.
Therefore people will not tolerate ownership on them anymore.
If people don’t tolerate ownership, only the second way to own remains: people must be forced to accept it. But this will become extremely tricky, because the power (political and/or military) required to do so will come from AI too. And as we have just seen above, AI will be extremely tricky to own. Of course people will try to use AI to prevail ...
I have absolutely no idea how this will end. But I have a really bad feeling about it.
Therefore we might be well advised to prepare ourselves for a world without owning.
Image: Shutterstock / U2M Brand