It's by now common wisdom that American copyright law is burdensome, excessive, and failing to promote the ideals that protection ought to. Too many things, critics argue, are subject to copyright protections, and the result is an inefficient legal morass that serves few benefits to society and has failed to keep up with the radical transformations in technology and culture of the last several decades. To reform and streamline our copyright system, the thinking goes, we need to get rid of our free-for-all regime of copyrightability and institute reasonable barriers to protection.

But what if these commentators are missing the forest for the trees, and America's frequently derided copyright regime is actually particularly well-suited to the digital age? Could copyright protections—applied universally at the moment of authorship—provide a level of autonomy that matches the democratization of authorship augured by the digital age?

The past few years have made abundantly clear that the artificially intelligent systems that organizations increasingly rely on to make important decisions can exhibit morally problematic behavior if not properly designed. Facebook, for instance, uses artificial intelligence to screen targeted advertisements for violations of applicable laws or its community standards. While offloading the sales process to automated systems allows Facebook to cut costs dramatically, design flaws in these systems have facilitated the spread of political misinformation, malware, hate speech, and discriminatory housing and employment ads. How can the designers of artificially intelligent systems ensure that they behave in ways that are morally acceptable--ways that show appropriate respect for the rights and interests of the humans they interact with?

The nascent field of machine ethics seeks to answer this question by conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence. This series of posts will provide a gentle introduction to this new field, beginning with an illustrative case study taken from research I conducted last year at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS). CAIS is a joint effort between the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California, and is devoted to “conducting research in Artificial Intelligence to help solve the most difficult social problems facing our world.” This makes the center’s efforts part of a broader movement in applied artificial intelligence commonly known as “AI for Social Good,” the goal of which is to address pressing and hitherto intractable social problems through the application of cutting-edge techniques from the field of artificial intelligence.

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Three competing theories of money

In the past year, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shifted the policy debate in a way that few heterodox schools of economic thought have in recent memory. MMT’s central notion—that nations with their own strong currencies face no inherent financial constraints—has made its way into politics and, notably, the world of finance. The last few months have brought MMT explainers from financial media outlets including Reuters, CNBC, Bloomberg, Barron’s, and Business Insider, as well as from investment analysts at Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Fitch, Standard Chartered and Citigroup.

Popularizing the shorthand notion that “deficits don’t matter” has been an achievement for those promulgating MMT. Yet one largely unappreciated change brought about by the MMT debates involves a somewhat subtler point: a shift in the implicit story we tell about money.

The rise of MMT poses a challenge to the mainstream commodity money story. That parable, familiar to anyone who has taken high school economics or read Adam Smith, involves an inefficient barter system that gives way to the more convenient use of some token that represents value, typically a precious metal. If government plays a role in this story, it is only to regulate money after the marketplace births it.

The MMT parable—known in the literature as chartalism—reverses the commodity money view. For chartalists, money arises through an act of law, namely the levying of a tax which requires citizens to go out and get that which pays taxes; the state comes first and markets are subsequent. As Abba Lerner puts it, money is “a creature of the state.”

Can you fix political problems with new web infrastructures?

The internet's early proliferation was steeped in cyber-utopian ideals. The circumvention of censorship and gatekeeping, digital public squares, direct democracy, revitalized civic engagement, the “global village”—these were all anticipated characteristics of the internet age, premised on the notion that digital communication would provide the necessary conditions for the world to change. In a dramatic reversal, we now associate the internet era with eroding privacy, widespread surveillance, state censorship, asymmetries of influence, and monopolies of attention—exacerbations of the exact problems it portended to fix.

Such problems are frequently understood as being problems of centralization—both infrastructural and political. If mass surveillance and censorship are problems of combined infrastructural and political centralization, then decentralization looks like a natural remedy. In the context of the internet, decentralization generally refers to peer-to-peer (p2p) technologies. In this post, I consider whether infrastructural decentralization is an effective way to counter existing regimes of political centralization. The cyber-utopian dream failed to account for the exogenous pressures that would shape the internet—the rosy narrative of infrastructural decentralization seems to be making a similar misstep.