by Jaron Lanier
However, in the long term, this way of using network technology is not even good for the richest and most powerful players, because their ultimate source of wealth can only be a growing economy. Pretending that data came from the heavens instead of from people can’t help but eventually shrink the overall economy.
The more advanced technology becomes, the more all activity becomes mediated by information tools. Therefore, as our economy turns more fully into an information economy, it will only grow if more information is monetized, instead of less. That’s not what we’re doing.
Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is thorough enough to reflect where value comes from, which, I’ll demonstrate, is another way of saying that an information age middle class must come into being.
Progress Is Compulsory
Two great trends are colliding, one in our favor, and the other against us. Balancing our heavenly expectations, there are also countervailing fears about such things as global climate change and the problem of finding food and drinking water for the human population when it peaks later in this century. Billions more people than have ever been sustained before will need water and food.
We bring the great problems of our times on ourselves, and yet we have little choice but to do so. The human condition is an evolving technological puzzle. Solving one problem creates new ones. This has always been true and is not a special quality of present times.
The ability to grow a larger population, through reduced infant mortality rates, sets up the conditions for a greater famine. People are cracking the inner codes of biology, creating amazing new chemistries, and amplifying our capabilities with digital networks just as we are also undermining our climate, and critical resources are starting to run out. And yet we are compelled to plunge forward, because history isn’t reversible. Besides, we must be honest about how bad things were in lower-tech times.
New technological syntheses that will solve the great challenges of the day are less likely to come from garages than from collaborations by many people over giant computer networks. It is the politics and economics of these networks that will determine how new capabilities translate into new benefits for ordinary people.
Progress Is Never Free of Politics
Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap, while at the same time crucial fundamentals for survival could become expensive. The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the work of Philip K. Dick.
Basics like water and food could soar in cost even as intensely sophisticated gadgets, like automated nanorobotic heart surgeons, float about as dust in the air in case they are needed, sponsored by advertisers.
Everything can’t become free at once, because the real world is messy. Software and networks are messy. And the sprawling miracle of information-animated technology rests on limited resources.
The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels exploiting whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so. You have to look at the whole system. No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused.
Back to the Beach
You sit at the edge of the ocean, wherever the coast will be after Miami is abandoned to the waves. You are thirsty. Random little clots of dust are full-on robotic interactive devices, since advertising companies long ago released plagues of smart dust upon the world. That means you can always speak and some machine will be listening. “I’m thirsty, I need water.”
The seagull responds, “You are not rated as enough of a commercial prospect for any of our sponsors to pay for freshwater for you.” You say, “But I have a penny.” “Water costs two pennies.” “There’s an ocean three feet away. Just desalinate some water!” “Desalinization is licensed to water carriers. You need to subscribe. However, you can enjoy free access to any movie ever made, or pornography, or a simulation of a deceased family member for you to interact with as you die from dehydration. Your social networks will be automatically updated with the news of your death.” And finally, “Don’t you want to play that last penny at the casino that just repaired your heart? You might win big and be able to enjoy it.”
CHAPTER 2
A Simple Idea
Just Blurt the Idea Out
Given both the momentum to screw up the human world and the capability to vastly improve it, how will people behave?
This book asserts that the choices we make in the architecture of our digital networks might tip the balance between the opposing waves of invention and calamity.
Digital technology changes the way power (or an avatar of power, such as money or political office) is gained, lost, distributed, and defended in human affairs. Lately, network-empowered finance has amplified corruption and illusion, and the Internet has destroyed more jobs than it has created.
So we begin with the simple question of how to design digital networks to deliver more help than harm in aligning human intention to meet great challenges. A starting point for an answer can be summarized: “Digital information is really just people in disguise.”
A Simple Example
It’s magic that you can upload a phrase in Spanish into the cloud services of companies like Google or Microsoft, and a workable, if imperfect, translation to English is returned. It’s as if there’s a polyglot artificial intelligence residing up there in the great cloud server farms.
But that is not how cloud services work. Instead, a multitude of examples of translations made by real human translators are gathered over the Internet. These are correlated with the example you send for translation. It will almost always turn out that multiple previous translations by real human translators had to contend with similar passages, so a collage of those previous translations will yield a usable result.
A giant act of statistics is made practically free because of Moore’s Law, but at core the act of translation is based on the real work of people.
Alas, the human translators are anonymous and off the books. The act of cloud-based translation shrinks the economy by pretending the translators who provided the examples don’t exist. With each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment.
At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.
In a world of digital dignity, each individual will be the commercial owner of any data that can be measured from that person’s state or behavior. Treating information as a mask behind which real people are invariably hiding means that digital data will be treated as being consistently valuable, rather than inconsistently valuable.
In the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows, say, a machine language translation algorithm, or a market prediction algorithm, to perform a task, then a nanopayment, proportional both to the degree of contribution and the resultant value, will be due to the person.
These nanopayments will add up, and lead to a new social contract in which people are motivated to contribute to an information economy in ever more substantial ways. This is an idea that takes capitalism more seriously than it has been taken before. A market economy should not just be about “businesses,” but about everyone who contributes value.
I could just as well frame my argument in the language of barter and sharing. Leveraging cloud computing to make barter more efficient, comprehensive, and fair would ultimately lead
to a similar design to what I am proposing. The usual Manichaean portrayal of the digital world is “new versus old.” Crowdsourcing is “new,” for instance, while salaries and pensions are “old.” This book proposes pushing what is “new” all the way instead of part of the way. We need not shy away.
Big Talk, I Know . . .
Am I making a Swiftian modest proposal, or am I presenting a plan on the level? It’s a little of both. I hope to widen the way people think about digital information and human progress. We need a palate cleansing, a broadening of horizons.
Maybe the approach described here to a humanistic information economy will be successfully adopted in the real world after some further refinement. Or maybe a new set of better ideas unrelated to and unforeseen by this book will have an easier time being heard because the deep freeze of convention will have been thawed a little by this exercise. It might merely serve as a check on the excesses of conventions that might otherwise become enshrined.
If this all sounds a little grandiose, understand that in the context of the community in which I function my presentation is practically self-deprecating. It is commonplace in Silicon Valley for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profoundly, within a few years, and that they aren’t ready yet to worry about money, because acquiring a great fortune is a petty matter that will take care of itself. Furthermore, these bright little young bands succeed regularly. This is just Silicon Valley’s version of normal.
Our idealisms and dreams often turn out to find fulfillment in events in the real world. Hopefully the ideas presented here work fractionally, and not just in the useless theater of ultimates. Even in the near term this framework of ideas offers an immediate way to understand how digital technology is changing economics and politics.
Need I add the obvious disclaimer? Even if the ideas turn out to be as good as they could possibly be, they won’t be perfect. But if you believe that things can’t really change, you might try wearing sunglasses as you read on.
FIRST INTERLUDE
Ancient Anticipation of the singularity
ARISTOTLE FRETS
Aristotle directly addressed the role of people in a hypothetical high-tech world:
If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.1
At this ancient date, a number of possibilities were at least slightly visible to Aristotle’s imagination. One was that the human condition was in part a function of what machines could not do. Another was that it was possible to imagine, at least hypothetically, that machines could do more. The synthesis was also conceived: Better machines could free and elevate people, even slaves.
If we could show Aristotle the technology of our times, I wonder what he would make of the problem of unemployment. Would he take Marx’s position that better machines create an obligation (to be carried out by political bodies) to provide care and dignity to people who no longer need to work? Or would Aristotle say, “Kick the unneeded ones out of town. The polis is only for the people who own the machines, or do what machines still cannot do.” Would he stand by idly as Athens was eventually depopulated?
I’d like to think the best of Aristotle, and assume he would realize that both choices are bogus; machine autonomy is nothing but theater. Information needn’t be thought of as a freestanding thing, but rather as a human product. It is entirely legitimate to understand that people are still needed and valuable even when the loom can run without human muscle power. It is still running on human thought.
Aristotle was recalling Homer’s account of the god Hephaestus’s robotic servant creations. They were nerd’s delights: golden, female, and servile. If it occurred to Aristotle that people might take it upon themselves to invent the robots to play music and operate looms, he didn’t make that clear. So it reads as if people would wait around for the gods to gift some of us with automata so that we wouldn’t have to pay others. That sounds so early 21st century to my ears. The artificial intelligence in the server gifts us with automation so we don’t need to pay each other.
DO PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE PAID IF THEY AREN’T MISERABLE?
Aristotle is practically saying, “What a shame about enslaving people, but we need to do it so someone will play the music, since we need music. I mean somebody’s got to endure the suffering to make the music happen. If we could only get by without music, then maybe we could free some of these pathetic slaves and be done with them.”*
*How prescient that Aristotle chose musical instruments and looms as his examples for machines that might one day operate automatically! These two types of machines did indeed turn out to be central to the prehistory of computation. The Jacquard programmable loom helped inspire calculating engines, while music theory and notation helped further the concept of abstract computation, as when Mozart wrote algorithmic, nondeterministic music incorporating dice throws. Both developments occurred around the turn of the 19th century.
One of my passions is learning to play obscure and archaic musical instruments, and so I know through direct experience that playing the instruments available to ancient Greeks was a pain in the butt.† As hard as it is to imagine now, to the ancient Greeks, playing musical instruments was a misery to be forced on hired help or slaves.
†Getting strings to stay in tune on a lyre is not just difficult, but painful. You have to keep on twisting them and nudging them. Sometimes your fingers bleed. It’s constant misery. The reeds on an aulos were probably a great annoyance as well, always too wet or too dry, too closed or too open. You futz with such reeds until they break, then you make new ones, and most of the time those don’t work.
These days music is more than a need to be met. Musicians who seek to make a living are goaded by the preferences of the marketplace into becoming symbols of a culture or a counterculture. The counter-cultural ones become a little wounded, vulnerable, wild, dangerous, or strange. Music is no longer a nutrient to be supplied, but something more mystical, a forge of meaning and identity: the realization of flow in life.
Multitudes of people want nothing more than to be able to play music for a living. We know this because we see their attempts online. There’s a constant retweeting of the lie that there’s a substantial new class of musicians succeeding financially through Internet publicity. Such people do exist, but only in token numbers.
However, a remarkable number of people do get attention and build followings for their music online. This book imagines that people like that might someday make a living at what they do. Improving the designs of information networks could result in the improvement of life for everyone as machines get better and better.
THE PLOT
Aristotle seems to want to escape the burden of accommodating lesser people. His quote about self-operating lutes and looms could be interpreted as a daydream that better technology will free us to some degree from having to deal with one another.
It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities first formed. Athens was a necessity first, and a luxury second. No one wants to accommodate the diversity of strangers. People deal with each other politically because the material advantages are compelling. We find relative safety and sustenance in numbers. Agriculture and armies happened to work better as those enterprises got bigger, and cities built walls.
But in Aristotle’s words you get a taste of what a nuisance it can be to accommodate others. Something was lost with the advent of the polis, and we still dream of getting it back.
The reward for a Roman general, upon retiring after years of combat, was a plot of land he could farm for himself. To be left alone, to be able to live off the land with the illusion of no polis
to bug you, that was the dream. The American West offered that dream again, and still loathes giving it up. Justice Louis Brandeis famously defined privacy as the “right to be left alone.”
In every case, however, abundance without politics was an illusion that could only be sustained in temporary bubbles, supported by armies. The ghosts of the losers haunt every acre of easy abundance. The greatest beneficiaries of civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from politics. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to pretend to not need anyone else, if only for a moment. In Aristotle’s quote, we find the earliest glimmer of the hope that technological advancement could replace territorial conquest as a way of implementing an insulating bubble around a person.
People naturally seek the benefits of society, meaning the accommodation of strangers, while avoiding direct vulnerabilities to specific others as much as possible. This is a clichéd criticism of the online culture of the moment. People have thousands of “friends” and yet stare at a little screen when in the proximity of other people. As it was in Athens, so it is online.
PART TWO
The Cybernetic Tempest
CHAPTER 3
Money as Seen Through One Computer Scientist’s Eyes
Money, God, and the Old Technology of Forgetting
Even if you think God is no more than a human invention, you must admit that another profoundly ancient idea we humans have invented has ensnared us even more. I am referring, of course, to money.