Hey readers,

Kelsey will be back from vacation next week, but in the meantime we’re looking at better public alternatives to tech’s attention economy, why your burgers are sucking the Colorado River dry, and the unwelcome return of syphilis. Have a great weekend, and as always, let us know what you think! Send us an email at futureperfect@vox.com with your burning questions, thoughts, feedback.

—Bryan Walsh, editor

How public options can challenge some of Big Tech's harms

Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The attention economy, as it has come to be known, is the competition for our limited attention as it grows ever more valuable in the digital age. It’s the ethos that drove Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to declare in 2017 that one of their primary competitors is sleep. Tech-charged capitalism, critics like the writer Johann Hari have written, is “killing our attention spans,” as a handful of dominant companies look to squeeze revenue from every sliver of collective attention they manage to capture.

Now, the same mix of factors is shaping the industries emerging around generative AI, driving toward outcomes that may prove toxic in a different way. Some experts warn that the present course of artificial intelligence will simply enrich the elite and leave everyone else behind.

Since both AI and more conventional tech lack business model diversity, they might also share a remedy: public options, or tax-funded alternatives. “Business model diversity is an important part of the rich variety that capitalism can bring you,” says Diane Coyle, an economist at the University of Cambridge and former advisor to the UK Treasury.

Merely breaking up the tech giants doesn’t go far enough, she argues. In addition, we should create public options, like the BBC in media. Public options introduce a new kind of business model into their industries, leading to different incentives, and ultimately, wider competition.

More diversity means more innovation, and better odds that these industries might evolve toward socially desirable outcomes. I spoke with Coyle about public options and the value of business model diversity in both media and AI. — Oshan Jarow, fellow

You’ve argued that one way to address some of the critiques of the attention economy is to introduce a public media platform, like a BBC for the US. How would that help?

The key point would be having a different business model competing in the ecosystem with different kinds of incentives. That might then tilt the incentives of all of the other companies. Forgive the economists' term, but you would start to see product differentiation. There’d be more of a spectrum, broadening out the offer rather than narrowing down. As a British person I’m drawing on the BBC, which has a publicly funded model. Because it doesn't need to hunt for advertising, that means that other broadcasters who are advertising-funded compete on quality.

So it's all about putting a different kind of plant into the jungle to change the incentive structures and modify behavior. It's worked really well in broadcast, we've got a really healthy ecosystem, which helps Britain export massively in the creative industries. Now, would it work in the digital world? We don't know. But it seems to me worth exploring that idea.

"Those polarizing debates about whether you nationalize things in the public sector or you have the private sector do it just seem like a false dichotomy."

How much of a parallel do you see between the media industry and the burgeoning industries around generative AI? Could public options have similar benefits?

The business models are going to be different [in AI]. They'll be subscription models where you can pay for access to the underlying model and we’ll probably see a lot of competition being built on them.

A somewhat different concern is that they’re all very similar because they’ve been built by similar people in the same place and using a very similar body of training data. There’s something about getting a diversity of experiences in the training data, because I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg has many fine qualities, but do we want a small number of people like him in Silicon Valley to be at the helm of such a profound technology that’s going to change so many things? So that diversity would really be welcome.

But it's very hard to tell, isn't it? The BBC itself was not set up for any highfalutin public service reasons. It was set up to compete with RCA [the Radio Corporation of America] because the Brits didn't want to be left behind in this newfangled radio business. And so we shouldn't be too precious about it. But we've got a world where there are either big American companies or big Chinese companies, and to have an alternative seems like healthy competition. I'm an economist. I think competition and the diversification you would get is a good thing.

Your view doesn’t revolve around arguing that public options are superior to private companies, but that the diversity they introduce is beneficial. Why argue for more diversity, rather than particular outcomes or business models?

The world of uniform business models came about because of the philosophy that the market was always right. That gave us a uniform model of how businesses should operate. But that wasn’t always the case. There was more variety in the past. The 19th century was a period of great institutional innovation, not all of which lasted, but we haven’t thought for a long time that business model diversity is an important part of the rich variety that capitalism can bring you. And I increasingly think that was a mistake.

Those polarizing debates about whether you nationalize things in the public sector or you have the private sector do it just seem like a false dichotomy. If there’s more choice in the deeper economic structures than just the product that you buy at the end, you’re going to get a more innovative and more sustainably healthy economy. I think we’re seeing a little bit of that with the B Corp movement, as a reaction to this unpleasant monoculture that we find ourselves in. I’m just trying to push a bit more in that direction.

Are there any other public policy approaches you feel should be part of the conversation around AI?

It's very difficult to know how to regulate this avalanche that's just been launched upon us. The world of regulation moves very slowly, so I’m not particularly optimistic that it will happen soon. And therefore, you are relying on the incentive structures that the people face.

So you might ask, why are [AI experts] doing it? And the answer must be, it's not because they're bad people. It's because of the incentive structures that they face. I think incentives are very powerful, so let's think about intervening in those. You might not get quick agreement on passing a new piece of legislation to prevent large language models from doing something or other, but you might get agreement to try an experiment in providing a different public model that will give people some choice. Maybe.

Let’s talk about the biggest cause of the West’s water crisis

Wyatt Hersey for Vox

The Colorado River is going dry ... to feed cows. But despite news stories about drought-stricken Americans in the West taking shorter showers and ditching lawns to conserve their water supply, those efforts are unlikely to amount to much. That’s because residential water use accounts for just 13 percent of water drawn from the Colorado River. As local and state governments are forced to adapt their water use to a changing climate, staff writer Kenny Torrella asks whether we also need to change our diet.

More on this topic from Vox:

3 theories to explain why syphilis rates are exploding among women

Octavio Jones/Getty Images

Rising syphilis rates in women — and their babies — are a signal that multiple social failsafes have, in fact, failed. This is a big red flag that should provoke us to wonder what’s gone wrong, and to think urgently about fixes. Senior reporter (and doctor!) Keren Landman explores the three potential reasons why this trend is happening.

More on this topic from Vox:

WHAT WE'RE THINKING ABOUT

Photo by Gil Cohen Magen/Xinhua via Getty Images

GOP Indiana lawmakers are trying to block Indianapolis’s proposal to ban turning right on red lights, a policy meant to save pedestrians’ lives. The culture war is stupid and state legislators might be the most destructive force in the country. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor

It’s one thing when an anti-doomer progress guy like myself says we should build, build, build our way out of climate change. It’s another thing when that message comes from the famous environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben — and in the pages of Mother Jones, no less. I hope everyone reads it, and I hope the environmental movement listens to it closely. —Bryan Walsh, editor

In recent years, European officials have launched numerous trials to develop a vaccine against the bird flu that’s wiping out tens of millions of farmed and wild birds around the world (the French have already vaccinated their ducks). The US has resisted vaccination out of fear it could disrupt its poultry trade, but in a surprising turn, the United States Department of Agriculture just announced it’s trialing four vaccines that could be deployed as soon as 18 to 24 months from now. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer

“Poetry,” the philosopher of literature Peli Grietzer recently argued in Aeon Magazine, is “a variety of mathematical experience.” In a world transfixed by artificial intelligence and machine speech, understanding poetry as a “computational relation between mind and world” or the “pleasurable hint of an unspeakable coherence” may sustain a sense of the sacred, not against a computational image of the mind, but through it. —Oshan Jarow, fellow

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