Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

  How will Kickstarter know whether something is a simulation or rendering [ . . . instead of a photograph of a physical prototype]?

  We may not know. We do only a quick review to make sure a project meets our guidelines.

  I would like to see Kickstarter grow to be larger than Amazon, since it embodies a more fundamental mechanism of overall economic growth. Instead of just driving prices down, it turns consumers into a priori funders of innovation. But at an Amazon-like scale there would inevitably be an even bigger wave of tricksters, scammers, and the clueless to be dealt with.

  Kickstarter continues to produce some wonderful success stories and a huge ocean of doomed or befuddled proposals. Maybe the site will enter into an endless game with scammers and the clueless, as it scales up, and render itself irrelevant. Or it might adopt crowdsourced voting or automatic filters to keep out crap, only to find that crap is smart and happy to jump through hoops to get through. Or maybe Kickstarter will become more expensive to use, and less naïvely “democratic,” because human editors will block useless proposals. Maybe it will learn to take on at least a little risk to go with the benefits. Whatever happens, success will be dependent on finding some imperfect but survivable compromise.

  The Nature of Our Confusion

  Successful network ventures that become known to the public are always eventually gamed by epidemics of scammers. Unscrupulous “content farms” turn out drivel and link to themselves in an attempt to climb high on Google’s search results, and bloggers herded by major media companies are encouraged to spice up their writing with key words and phrases not to grab human attention, but the attention of Google’s algorithms.

  To Google’s credit, the company has engaged in battle with these encroachments, but the war is never over. When Google measures people, and the result has something to do with who gets rich and powerful, people don’t sit around like flu viruses awaiting impartial assessment. Instead they play the game.

  Sites with reviews are stuffed with fake reviews. When education is driven by big data, not only must teachers teach to the test, but it often turns out that there’s widespread cheating.

  What is odd, over and over, is that computer scientists and technology entrepreneurs are always shocked at this turn of events. We geeky sorts would prefer that the world passively await our mastery to overtake it, though that is never so.

  Our core illusion is that we imagine big data as a substance, like a natural resource waiting to be mined. We use terms like data-mining routinely to reinforce that illusion. Indeed some data is like that. Scientific big data, like data about galaxy formation, weather, or flu outbreaks, can be gathered and mined, just like gold, provided you put in the hard work.

  But big data about people is different. It doesn’t sit there; it plays against you. It isn’t like a view through a microscope, but more like a view of a chessboard.

  A classic optical illusion might be helpful.

  This is the famous figure/ground illusion popularized by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915. A contour can be seen equally as a golden goblet or two faces. Neither interpretation is more correct than the other. (In this case I have used Adam Smith’s face.)

  In the same way, cloud information generated by people can be perceived either as a valuable resource you might be able to plunder, like a golden vase, or as waves of human behavior, much of it directed against you. From a disinterested abstract perspective, both perceptions are legitimate.

  However, if you are an interested participant in a game, it is in your interest to perceive those faces first and foremost.

  Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something.

  The Most Elite Naïveté

  Attentive readers will note a continuing rotation in perspectives as I ridicule the illusions of big human data. Sometimes I write as if I were complaining from an everyman’s perspective about being analyzed and treated as a pawn in a big data game. Other times I write as if I were playing a big data game and am annoyed at how my game is being ruined because so many others also play against me.

  No one knew how digital networking and economics would interact in advance. Instead of a story of villains, I see a story of technologists and entrepreneurs who were pioneers, challenging us to learn from their results.

  My argument is not so much that we should “fight the power,” but that a better way of conceiving information technology would really be better for most people, including those ambitious people who plan to accomplish giant feats. So I am arguing both from the perspective of a big-time macher and from the perspective of a more typical person, because any solution has to be a solution from both perspectives.

  Big human data, that vase-shaped gap, is the arbiter of influence and power in our times. Finance is no longer about the case-by-case judgment of financiers, but about how good they are at locking in the best big-data scientists and technologists into exclusive contracts. Politicians target voters using similar algorithms to those that evaluate people for access to credit or insurance. The list goes on and on.

  As technology advances, Siren Servers will be ever more the objects of the struggle for wealth and power, because they are the only links in the chain that will not be commoditized. If present trends continue, you’ll always be able to seek information supremacy, just as old-fashioned barons could struggle for supremacy over land or natural resources. A new energy cycle will someday make oil much less central to geopolitics, but the information system that manages that new kind of energy could easily become an impregnable castle. The illusory golden vase becomes more and more valuable.

  THIRD INTERLUDE

  Modernity Conceives the Future

  MAPPING OUT WHERE THE CONVERSATION CAN GO

  An endgame for civilization has been foreseen since Aristotle. As technology reaches heights of efficiency, civilization will have to find a way to resolve a peculiar puzzle: What should the role of “extra” humans be if not everyone is still strictly needed? Do the extra people—the ones whose roles have withered—starve? Or get easy lives? Who decides? How?

  The same core questions, stated in a multitude of ways, have elicited only a small number of answers, because only a few are possible.

  What will people be when technology becomes much more advanced? With each passing year our abilities to act on our ideas are increased by technological progress. Ideas matter more and more. The ancient conversations about where human purpose is headed continue today, with rising implications.

  Suppose that machines eventually gain sufficient functionality that one will be able to say that a lot of people have become extraneous. This might take place in nursing, pharmaceuticals, transportation, manufacturing, or in any other imaginable field of employment.

  The right question to then ask isn’t really about what should be done with the people who used to perform the tasks now colonized by machines. By the time one gets to that question, a conceptual mistake has already been made.

  Instead, it has to be pointed out that outside of the spell of bad philosophy human obsolescence wouldn’t in fact happen. The data that drives “automation” has to ultimately come from people, in the form of “big data.” Automation can always be understood as elaborate puppetry.

  The most crucial quality of our response to very high-functioning machines, artificial intelligences and the like, is how we conceive of the things that the machines can’t do, and whether those tasks are considered real jobs for people or not. We used to imagine that elite engineers would be automation’s only puppeteers. It turns out instead that big data coming from vast numbers of people is needed to make machines appear to be “automated.” Do the puppeteers still get paid once the whole audience has joined their ranks?

  NINE DISMAL HUMORS OF FUTURISM, AND A HOPEFUL ONE

  Each of ten tropes, which I call “humors,”* can be compressed into simple statements about how human id
entity, changing technology, and the design of civilization fit together. Since technological culture influences what technologists create, and technology is what makes the future different from the past, techie vocabulary is important.

  *Ancient physicians like Hippocrates understood the original humors as a small set of forces or essences that flowed through the human body. They were each a kind of fluid (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, or blood) but also elements (air, fire, water, earth) and personality type. Black bile corresponded to melancholy, for instance.

  I choose to avoid the loaded term meme. There are many reasons to avoid meme in this case; the primary one being that good ideas are not remotely as plentiful as varieties of traits in natural organisms. You might find this set of “technological humors” to be useful. If so, it is only because the solution space for how a person can react to accelerating technological change is small.†

  †An admonition: Please, please don’t try to implement my classification scheme of humors in some cloud software startup in order to organize the expressions of other people. They are only offered as thoughts, not as truth. In other words, I hope you find it helpful to consider them analytically, in a personal, skeptical fashion, but not as a way to constrain or determine future events through the structure of software.

  No end of ontologies has been proposed to describe the human condition, from the enneagram to the DSM. Ontologies can be fun and useful, but of course it’s essential to not take them too seriously. As with all ontological schemes, my humors are not meant to be confused with reality itself.

  Each humor is a trefoil binding politics, money, and technology to the human condition:

  • Theocracy: Politics is the means to supernatural immortality.

  This is the oldest and still most common humor, which proposes that the natural world is but a political theater that functions as a remote control of a more significant supernatural world. Politics here serves as the interface to that other world.*

  *Yes, of course this is not a blanket definition of all religion or spirituality. Also, as I argue all the time, materialism doesn’t even break a sweat to become as crazy and cruel as religion can be at its worst. A Stalin can keep up with any religious inquisition. Yet, there is a global ancient political phenomenon that must be given a name.

  Eight of the other humors collected here are naturalistic. A rapture, messiah, or other supernatural discontinuity in the future has not, as a matter of definition, been part of the discussion of the natural future until fairly recently, with the advent of the idea of the Singularity. Now we must include old religion in order to put new religion in context.

  • Abundance: Technology is the means to escape politics and approach material immortality.

  Tech will someday become so good that everyone will have everything and there will be no need for politics. “Abundance” is a commanding humor in Silicon Valley, though it was pioneered in ancient Greece. It is both futuristic and ancient.

  This humor often presents itself arrogantly, to bring the naïve intuitions held by nontechnical people to shame.†

  †It is true that people consistently underestimate technological change in some ways. The information technology gadgets imagined in the 1960s or 1980s for the starship Enterprise (as it would be centuries in the future) already feel antiquated. People are unable to appreciate how significant technological change is likely to be, even in their own lifetimes. On the other hand there is still no consumer flying car, and probably won’t be one for a long time. So technological change is overestimated just as frequently.

  • Malthus: Politics is the means to material extinction.

  Our successes will be our undoing. As we approach abundance, we will overpopulate and overconsume, or otherwise screw up, until catastrophe strikes. The Malthusian humor suggests a fatal, deterministic ineptitude in politics.

  • Rousseau: Technology is the means to spiritual malaise.

  As we approach Abundance, we become inauthentic and absurd.

  • Invisible Hand: Information technology ought to subsume politics.

  Adam Smith sketched a character known as the “Invisible Hand,” who can serve as a figurehead for subsuming politics under information technology. Markets (or more recently, other, fundamentally similar algorithms) make decisions instead of human, political deliberations. This humor either ignores or rejects Abundance, for markets become absurd as supply approaches infinity.

  • Marx: Politics ought to subsume information technology.

  Marxism anticipates Abundance but elevates politics infinitely and indefinitely. Once the machines can do all the work, politics will decide what’s best for people, so that all will benefit from the bounty.

  • H. G. Wells: Human life will be meaningful because primordial, pretechnological tribal drama will be reinstated once we are sufficiently challenged by either our own machines or by aliens. So, technology creates human meaning through challenge rather than through providing Abundance.

  The genre of science fiction was born to express a distinct humor, which contemplates the possibility that the future might not necessarily be framed with people at the center. Humans might instead face potential irrelevance in a world dominated by either our own future machines or superior aliens. Most science fiction constructs a narrative of the triumph of human relevance against all odds.

  Much science fiction ends badly, however, and so serves either as a cautionary tale or a fascinating display of nihilism. In any case, anticipating a struggle for relevance suggests a new meaning of life or natural mission for humanity when technology gets good. This humor is dubbed “Wells’s Humor” in honor of H. G.’s novel The Time Machine, a superb early example.

  These seven humors mapped conversations about the human future up until the end of World War II. The 20th century brought two more humors into prominence, and a third into being, though that final one still hasn’t gained the prominence it deserves.

  • Strangelove: Some person will destroy us all when technology gets good enough. Human nature plus good technology equals extinction.

  With the bomb came the Strangelovian possibility of species-wide suicide. This was darker than Malthus, as it replaced unintentional self-destruction with instantaneous decisive destruction accessible with the simple press of a button.

  • Turing: Politics and people won’t even exist. Only technology will exist when it gets good enough, which means it will become supernatural.

  Not long after Hiroshima, Alan Turing hatched the idea that people are creating a successor reality in information. Obviously Turing’s humor inspired a great deal of science fiction, but I’ll argue it’s distinct because it poses the possibility of a new metaphysics. People might turn into information rather than be replaced by it. This is why Ray Kurzweil can await being uploaded into a virtual heaven. Turing brought metaphysics into the modern conversation about the natural future.

  Turing’s humor also provides a destination, or an eschatology that the Invisible Hand’s humor lacks. Turing’s algorithms could inherit the world in a way that the Hand could not. This is because we can imagine software, improperly, I’ll argue, operating without the need for human operators, and even in an era of Abundance depopulated of people. Abundance kills the hand, but not Turing’s ghosts.

  • Nelson: Information technology of a particular design could help people remain people without resorting to extreme politics when any of the other, creepily eschatological humors seem to be imminent.

  Ted Nelson, in 1960, came up with a brand-new, still-emerging humor, which suggests information as a way to avoid excesses of politics even as we approach an inevitably imperfect Abundance. It essentially proposes a consilience between the Invisible Hand and Abundance. This is the humor I am hoping to further with this book.

  Each humor captures a distinct hypothesis about how politics, what it means to be human, and technology are related. They all concern the role of politics and the human will, or intentionality, in ever higher-
tech futures. Will politics become obsolete or absolute? Will people be subsumed or will we transcend what had been our condition?

  There’s a way the humors cycle around into each other. Someone might be playing the technological triumphalist, celebrating the brashest entrepreneurs of the moment, but then end up imagining a weirdly socialist utopia in the future. This is one of the most common switch-backs, one that never fails to amaze me. “Free Google tools and free Twitter are leading to a world where everything is free because people share, but isn’t it great that we can corner billions of dollars by gathering data no one else has?” If everything will be free, why are we trying to corner anything? Are our fortunes only temporary? Will they become moot when we’re done?

  It’s not the only twist of its kind. If you play the back-to-nature card, you end up in an artificial game, chasing authenticity without a map or a way to verify that you’ve found it. “What this music software is about is getting in touch with the real emotion and meaning of music, which is done in this case by adjusting the pitches of people who can barely sing so that they can sing in perfect harmony, together. Singing in harmony is the most wonderful musical connection. But wait—maybe it would be more authentic if they weren’t singing perfectly. That’s too robotic. What is the percentage of perfection that represents authenticity? Ten percent? Fifteen percent?” This is a ricochet between the “Abundance” and “Rousseau” humors.

  I hear variations of familiar switchbacks almost every day. These ubiquitous conversations of the tech community retrace the moves of older conversations—sometimes much older ones.