Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

  Earlier, I noted that Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and an investor in Facebook, teaches a class at Stanford in which he advocates that students not think in terms of competing in a marketplace, but in terms of defining a position they can “monopolize.” This is precisely the idea of the Siren Server. It is a given that in Silicon Valley no one wants to suffer the indignity of sharing a market with competitors.

  It is the correlate that must be understood. Thiel also advocates an end to death, to be enjoyed by the alpha proprietors of network-based monopolies. The flood of data about biology ought to be churned by cloud-based algorithms into an antidote to mortality in no time at all. That’s the expectation. The culture of power on the ’net is so different from what people everywhere else are used to that I wonder if it’s even possible to convey it. For instance, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote1 about Thiel’s arguments based on a student’s notes,2 posted online. What he didn’t comment on was the headline on the student’s offering:

  Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

  What most outsiders have failed to grasp is that the rise to power of ’net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal.

  SUPERNATURAL TEMPTATIONS IN TECH CULTURE

  Silicon Valley is far from the first society sprouting from protean quests. The modern spectacle of engineers professing a mastery of mortality—and even seeming to also believe themselves on occasion—is not new at all.

  Would it surprise you to learn that animal sacrifice once played a critical role in an early contest to be the “most meta” network? The contest for electricity was fought between the master dramatists Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Tesla had a mad, romantic technical career. He rarely missed an opportunity to be notorious and strange. At one party he illuminated the air and in another he injected acoustic frequencies designed to make guests urinate involuntarily. These would be radical things to do today, but at that time they were practically supernatural. Edison on the surface was more the straight man, but actually he played a similar game. Electricity was, aside from being a physical phenomenon, a folk tale with Grand Guignol undertones from its earliest days.

  The physician Giovanni Aldini had made a spectacle of using electrodes to make freshly dead corpses twitch at public demonstrations around the beginning of the 19th century. He created a public career a little like Ray Kurzweil’s today, claiming to have highly technical knowledge that would end the old cycle of life and death. He might have inspired Mary Shelley’s character Dr. Frankenstein.

  The audacious race to bring the force of life and death into sockets in every home tempted every theatrical impulse. So, Edison made a public spectacle of electrocuting an elephant. Ostensibly, this demonstrated the demon in Tesla’s design of electricity (alternating current, AC), but Edison would certainly have understood that his own offering, direct current, DC, could also kill the beast.

  I sometimes think of that elephant when I plug a phone into the wall to charge. The electricity works because of basic and universal laws of nature, but would not be there, as it is, where it is, were it not for the dark mythmaking of technologists.

  Singularity University is part of a grand tradition. Most techies are not great showmen, but whenever the combination appears, watch out.

  JUST FOR THE RECORD, WHY I MAKE FUN OF THE UNIVERSITY

  Obviously, however rich the cultural pedigree might be, I think calling an institution of higher learning the Singularity University is ridiculous. I’ll outline my position: I am not questioning whether any particular piece of technology is possible. In fact I work on some of the components that my friends at the university consider harbingers of the Singularity. For instance, I’ve worked on making predictive models of parts of the human brain, and on direct interfaces between computers and the human nervous system.

  The difference is that I think these things are done by researchers, of whom I am but one. I do not think the technology is creating itself. It’s not an autonomous process. It’s something we humans do.

  Of course, you can always play with figure-ground reversals, as we saw earlier with the Golden Goblet. The reason to believe in human agency over technological determinism is that you can then have an economy where people earn their own way and invent their own lives. If you structure a society on not emphasizing individual human agency, it’s the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination.

  So, in an absolute sense, there’s no way to prove that the Singularity would be the wrong way to interpret certain future events. But to embrace the sensibility would be a celebration of bad data and bad politics. Of course, if you really believe people and machines are the same, then you won’t recognize this as a well-formed pragmatic argument.

  Where a true believer at the university would see a Singularity occurring sometime in the future, I would see a mess of engineering that was so bad and irresponsible that it was killing a lot of people, as is portrayed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Let’s look at it my way and not kill those people, okay?

  WILL THE CONTROL OF DEATH BE A CONVERSATION OR A CONFLAGRATION?

  We are witnessing the beginning of a new kind of death denial. Although Facebook arose fairly recently, we already see what happens when a Facebook user dies. For young users, in particular, it sometimes happens that friends will take over the site and keep it animated for some time, as if the person were still there a little bit.3 The U.S. military funded a research initiative looking into making interactive video simulations of fallen soldiers so that their families could still interact with them.4 The late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur was presented as a “holographic” performer with optical tricks onstage.5

  This is an intimate matter, and I’m loath to judge what other people do about their dead, but I do feel it’s essential to point out that when we animate the dead, we reduce the distinction we feel with the living. All is relative. We reduce the sense of the weirdness of being alive.

  One of the most successful individual network-oriented financiers is not someone I can name. He has amassed one of the world’s great fortunes using computers to fine-tune complicated international transactions. He feels confident he is doing well for the world, propelling mankind forward, growing capital for everyone. (Whether he is or not is not clear to me.)

  He is also an unfettered health and fitness nut. When money is no object, the quest for ultimate health and fitness becomes an often bizarre tour of the world’s visionaries and charlatans, and no amount of money can distinguish them perfectly.

  Given all this, I was quite surprised when one day this fellow said to me, “Capitalism is only possible because of death.” He had been visiting with some of the many researchers on the circuit of cyber-insiders who think they can solve the problem of death fairly soon. Genes modulate aging and death, and those genes appear to be tweakable.

  Death, he explained, is the foundation of markets. This line of thinking is obvious and perhaps it’s not necessary to state it, but: That people age and die is what makes room for new people to find their places, so that aspiration is possible. If individuals were no longer temporary, then the species would enter into a worse-than-medieval stasis of eternal, absolutely boring winners. Plutocracy would suffocate creativity definitively.

  THE TWO TIERS OF IMMORTALITY PLANNED FOR THIS CENTURY

  Recall, however, the accelerating technology trends that form the upside-down slide upon which the imaginations of Silicon Valley glide ever upward. Death is under assault. A weird science meeting at Google or one of the other usual venues wouldn’t be complete without presentations on ending death. The message is usually that we’re just a pinch away from it. Correcting for the common illusions, we are probably just decades away from it, at least in theory.

  So there are two tech trends related to countering death, one based on a media technology and the other on b
iology. Both will take decades to advance.

  Some years from now, a good-enough simulation of a dead person might “pass the Turing Test,” meaning that a dead soldier’s family might treat a simulation of the soldier as real. In the tech circles where one finds an obsession with the technologies of immortality, the dominant philosophical tendency is to accept artificial intelligence as a well-formed engineering project, a view I reject. But to those who believe in it, a digital ghost that has passed the Turing Test has passed the test of legitimacy.

  There is, nonetheless, also a fascination with actually living longer through medicine. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. AI and Turing Test–passing ghosts might be good enough for ordinary people, but the tech elites and the superrich would prefer to do better than that. The social outcome we seem to be approaching later in the century would grant simulated immortality for ordinary people, which could only be enjoyed by observers, not the actual dead, while the very rich might enjoy actual methusalization.

  One of the keenest reasons to want a middle-class distribution of wealth is to avoid a situation in which a small number of wealthy individuals live very long lives while no one else can afford the same life extensions.

  In my breakfast conversations about artificial hearts with Marvin Minsky, so long ago, he proposed that life extension could become so cheap that it would be universal. What we’ve seen, though, is that when some things become very cheap, other things become very expensive. Printers are incredibly cheap, and yet ink for them is incredibly expensive. Phones are cheap and yet connectivity for them is insanely expensive. Wal-Mart is cheap, and yet jobs go away. Software is “free” and yet the Internet is not creating as many jobs as it destroys.

  The talking seagull from the first chapter is probably more realistic than universal life extension for all in a world where clout and wealth flow to Siren Servers.

  A great showdown will occur when lives are extended significantly for the first time. My guess is that this won’t happen in the United States first. Russian oligarchs6 or Gulf sheiks might step up initially.

  If there’s a clock ticking to get a monetized information economy started, this is it. Will there be middle-class wealth and clout to balance the potential of masters of Siren Servers to become near-immortal plutocrats? This is the scenario H. G. Wells foresaw in The Time Machine.

  If the middle classes are strong when the time comes, some sort of compromise will be sorted out; some new social contract about how medicine is applied once the idea of a “natural” lifetime becomes as anachronistic as the idea of a “natural” climate.

  If the middle classes are weak, then chaos will unfold. People usually protest in a reasonably orderly fashion against austerity. If they come to see that their families must die before those of a weird insular upper class, there will be no restraint. As much as we like to romanticize revolutions, they are a form of terror in practice. It would be wise to institute a universal system to strengthen the middle classes before the destined moment arrives.

  PART NINE

  Transition

  CHAPTER 31

  The Transition

  Can There Be a Digital Golden Rule?

  The most common question I have heard since I started talking about the prospects for a Nelsonian economy is about enforcement. Why wouldn’t people copy? Why not cheat? Why not let other people suffer for the risk you bring into the world?

  The reason people won’t copy—or exploit information without paying for it—is that to copy would be to undermine the very source of their own wealth. This is what the golden rule looks like on a network.

  A social contract must take hold for any orderly economy to be possible. Any functioning, authentic economy has to by definition be sustained more by voluntary participation than by enforcement. In the physical world it’s not all that hard to break into someone’s house or car, or to shoplift, and there aren’t all that many police. The police have a crucial role, but the main reason people don’t go around stealing in the physical world is that they want to live in a world where stealing isn’t commonplace.

  Some readers will prefer a moral formulation to an ethical one, and would say that stealing is simply wrong. In either case, the point is that there could never be enough police to enforce a standard of behavior that most people reject.

  It saddens me that even idealistic digital activists often assume that enforcement is the key question. We’ve become used to a double standard online, where there’s either an often mean-spirited, hostile anarchy or one submits to institutional control. Anarchy reigns on sites like 4chan or in uncensored comments on videos or articles. Meanwhile most content and expression flows through institutional channels like app stores or social networks in which censorious policies are enforced. Neither situation supports real freedom. (Many of the most supposedly open and free online designs are often actually choked by a controlling elite.)1 Real freedom has to be based on most people choosing to give each other latitude most of the time.

  History records many instances of workable social contracts breaking down. States fail and murderous spasms overtake whole populations. But history also records “miracles,” instances of decent social contracts being initiated. The American experiment was one instance, but so is the initiation of any inclusive democracy. The early rise of the World Wide Web, before Siren Servers overtook it, was another miracle.

  The instantiation of a social contract “miracle” is a big jump over a valley in an energy landscape. It might take a political figure of rare genius, or the right lucky confluence of events, but it is ridiculous to think that a beneficial social contract could not take hold for the majority of people in their online lives.

  Yes, enforcement will be an issue, but it only makes sense to talk about enforcement when only a small minority of a population are offenders. Civilization will remain by definition a mostly voluntary project, a miracle.

  The Miracle’s Gauntlet

  One of the hardest questions about a humanistic economic scenario is how to get there from where we are. Who will step up and take risks in order to learn if this new world will come about? It’s not only a political challenge, but an economic one, since a present economy of a certain size must somehow fund a quantum leap to a new, larger economy despite a gigantic accounting vacuum. How would the initial surge of required credit be financed?

  The higher altitudes of finance have become used to “sure things” that recently flowed rather easily. It’s hard to bring expectations back down to earth after a period like the Great Recession, which offered such treats to financiers. Finance was freed from having to pay for risk, though that bargain was only a temporary illusion; ordinary people were freed from having to pay for consumption of Internet services, though once again, an illusion was at play.

  The temptations of free stuff over digital networks recall problems in American health care finance. No one wants to pay for something if they can possibly avoid it; so young healthy people don’t like to pay for health insurance. In an immediate sense, the ability to not pay seems to increase wealth and freedom for those who can get away with it.

  But then later, when inevitable health problems come up, illusion turns out to cost more both in money and in lost freedom than up-front realism. When a system is in place for everyone to share risk in advance, life doesn’t become perfect, but dealing with hard times at least becomes cheaper and more flexible.

  Nonetheless, to get people to agree to pay to care for each other in advance requires political genius. Maybe it helps if everyone looks similar. Homogeneous societies seem to have an easier time of it. A common enemy doesn’t hurt, either. The online world fails miserably at providing any such traditional inspirations.

  Avatars and Credit

  The cognitively gentle mechanism of economic avatars gives a hint about how a transition might work. The fluid nature of digital systems would allow for the coexistence of both old and new economic systems during a transitional period, which would motivat
e a gradual person-by-person transition.

  Each person could remain in the world of fake “free” for as long as desired. However, a person could also eventually decide when she’s had enough of “free” and would prefer to buy into a commercial social contract where she can earn money.

  This means that two sets of accounting books would be kept for people who aren’t paying for information, so that they can transition from “free” to universal micropayments whenever the time comes. A delayed choice could give people the best of both worlds.

  If the core hypothesis is right—that monetizing more information instead of less will grow the economy—then a lot of people will end up with money due to them after enough time has passed. At some point, you might decide you want to cash in all that’s due to you, even if the price is that you can no longer get free stuff online thereafter.

  The Price of Antenimbosia

  A trickier question is how to design the initial state of a new information economy to reflect all that had been done by people before the new accounting was initiated.

  Wikipedia has procedures in place to incorporate material from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has fallen into the public domain. When we build on the past in that way, how will we acknowledge it in a monetized information economy?

  Earlier it was pointed out that the seeming magic of cloud-based “automatic” translation between languages is actually based on the use of a corpus of translations performed by real people originally. Had a better-crafted information economy been in play when the original human translators provided their examples to the cloud, then they would be remembered and we could send royalties to those still living.