Attribution

Being alive since the 1970s has some advantages. One of these advantages is that I’ve learned an awful lot of things over the years.

The disadvantage is that I don’t always remember where I first heard about something. Because there’s a constant stream of new ideas in my life being introduced all the time, I’ll sometimes adopt an idea and then behave as though it’s my own, not even paying tribute to the original source from which the idea came.

Paying tribute to good ideas gives us the word attribution, from the Latin tribuere—loosely, to give someone something. The same Proto-Indo-European root word gave the Romans their original three tribus—ethnic groups who shared the power in the region. Each group was given a share of political representation. The share was attributed to them.

Those attributed were assigned a portion of land, too. Over time, tribus became less specific, and more often than not attributed to any group who controlled land. Gradually, even the land-ownership idea fell, and by the time tribe reached the English language (via Old French), it had already come to mean any group that was bound together by something in common.

Tribuere lives on in the English language in lots of words, usually with some kind of reference to giving or assignment at their core. The distribution of these words is widespread, and their contribution to my vocabulary as a kid allowed me to enter the Spelling Bee tribe in fifth grade.

There are many more etymological tributaries, but tribe, contribute, and distribute are the most common places you’ll find tribuere today.

Let’s turn back toward attribution now, where this little detour down a rabbit hole began. Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier has a longstanding idea that I was first introduced to in his book Who Owns the Future?, where ideas and information are viewed as what’s truly valuable in the world, and people can be fairly compensated for their unique contributions.

Jaron Lanier

If you make me chuckle with a meme you just created, and I then share that meme with a couple thousand readers, some of whom also chuckle, then it might be reasonable to reward the person who came up with the idea. This is incredibly intuitive, and probably strikes you as only fair.

The fundamental problem is that it’s just so much to try to track. There are billions of humans, many of whom are contributing dozens of ideas on a daily basis. Prior to the internet, this sort of idea would just seem impossible, cordoned off into the world of wouldn’t-it-be-nice.

Most people know by now that surveillance on the internet is powerful and pervasive. The things you say and do can be tracked back to your actions, and authoritarian governments and cyberterrorists have taken full advantage.

At the same time, the door is open for an incredibly powerful system to track every unique contribution. Back in 2013 when I read Who Owns the Future, this idea blew me away, but I also knew that it just wasn’t going to be possible any time soon.

My view has evolved a great deal since late 2022, when I first experimented with generative AI that actually kind of worked. Now, what Lanier refers to as data dignity is possible. Unique contributions that have economic value are trackable, and it’s just a matter of convincing everyone that this is a good plan.

Of course, AI is a double-edged sword, and while some may see an opportunity for attribution, others will only see potential retribution. Right now is a delicate moment, since both outcomes are possible. We need a lot more people to be aware of this struggle, probably central to the entire future of our existence.

No pressure!