Stephen Downes

I don't for a moment believe that 'learning' is the same as 'stealing knowledge', but I get the concern expressed here that the result of AI learning from books and online text is a concentration of capability (I won't call it 'knowledge' because it's arguable that current AIs do not 'know' in the sense of, say, justified true belief). This centralization is a concern, but in my view the response is not to restrict access to books and online text (as much as publishers and commercial enterprise would like us to) but rather to develop additional and alternative AI. After all, current AI is nothing more than mathematics plus data plus (to a lesser extend) algorithms. The key inputs are access and computing power. Today the bottleneck is computing power, but this is not a permanent condition. Let's not turn off the tap after only the rich have had their fill; let's keep access to data open so we can all sate out thirst.