The link between computation asymmetry and openness
by Sebastian Benthall
I want to jot something down while it is on my mind. It’s rather speculative, but may wind up being the theme of my thesis work.
I’ve written here about computational asymmetry in the economy. The idea is that when different agents are endowed with different capacity to compute (or are differently boundedly rational)), then that can become an extreme inequality (power law distributed, as is income) as computational power is stockpiled as a kind of capital accumulation.
Whereas a solution to unequal income is redistribution and a solution to unequal physical is regulation against violence, for computational asymmetry there is a simpler solution: “openness” in the products of computation. In particular, high quality data goods–data that is computationally rich (has more logical depth)–can be made available as public goods.
There are several challenges to this idea. One is the problem of funding. How do you encourage the production of costly public goods? The classic answer is state funding. Today we have another viable option, crowdfunding.
Another involves questions of security and privacy. Can a policy of ‘openness’ lead to problematic invasions of privacy? Viewing the problem in light of computational assymetry sheds light into this dynamic. Privacy should be a privilege of the disempowered, openness a requirement of the powerful.
In an ideal economy, agents are rewarded for their contribution to social welfare. For high quality data goods, openness leads to the maximum social welfare. So in theory, agents should be willingly adopting an open policy of their own volition. What has prevented them in the past is transactions costs and the problem of incurred risk. As institutions that reduce transaction costs and absorb risks get better, the remaining problems will be ones of regulation of noncompetitive practices.
Digifesto 
Another solution seems to be distributed computing ala SETI@home. I guess that’s similar to crowd funding but with people contributing resources rather than money directly. (Maybe jsperf.com is another good example?) And maybe Bittorrent can be seen as solving the “memory” issues?
Private “charity” funding still seems significant too — “Common Crawl” comes to mind — as well as other large data sets curated by private companies but made public for various reasons.
Yeah, good points. I think those are all significant and qualitatively different from what I mentioned in the post.
As far as private funding goes, I’m in two minds about it. I’m curious what you think. It seems like either it is:
– pure fluke. Somebody with disposable wealth decides that they care about some vision, and invests it in a non-profit.
– strategic action. As something on the side of an organization’s main revenue stream, they decide to open some resource or invest in it as a complement.
The problem I’ve got is that I don’t yet see a systematic explanation for either of these kinds of behavior. Anything that would establish it as normative activity. I have hunches only at this point.