I was reading on this very interesting use of artificial intelligence to find rare metals for mining when it dawned on me: While this application requires specialized knowledge, much of what artificial intelligence is used for requires a collection of what we have distilled so far in human knowledge.

Now, I’m not a socialist and I’m not saying that we should all have artificial intelligence for free. On principle it sort of makes sense, but it’s largely an oversimplification of apples and oranges.

The way we as individuals get knowledge is by obtaining it. Some is through observation, some is through training institutions, but not one of us is likely to have all the knowledge available for machine learning / deep learning training models. The raw amount of data that they chew through is not something some of us see in our entire lifetimes.

Yet it does seem peculiar that the knowledge of our species benefits some more than others in this way. This is where we get to the universal basic income, which in present day seems a lot like a ‘dole’, but in the future may not because… imagine what we could do as a species if we all created things and worked on things because we wanted to?

What if we could unlock our potential as a species by getting out of our own way?

Yeah, I know, it’s a silly romantic notion and romance is not my specialty.