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by Jaron Lanier

  Will this remaining human role turn into a benefit for the middle classes or only for a Siren Server? If it’s to only benefit a Siren Server, you can imagine that in, say, ten years, when you want to get to the airport, a robot taxi shows up. However, the chosen route might be peculiar. Maybe the taxi lingers in front of billboards along the way, or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something, or whatever scam would come about in a Siren Server–driven car.

  But one thing we can guess even at this early date is that self-driving cars will depend on cloud data about streets, pedestrians, and everything else that can affect a trip. That information will be renewed constantly, with every single ride. Will the rider be compensated beyond a free ride for helping to generate this information? To do otherwise would be considered accounting fraud in a humanistic information economy.

  Flattening the City on a Hill

  The middle classes that have already lost their levees and economic dignity to Siren Servers are sometimes called the “creative classes.” They include recording musicians, journalists, and photographers. There were also a significantly larger number of people who supported these types of creators, like studio musicians and editors, who enjoyed “good jobs” (meaning with security and benefits). Those who have grown up in the networked era might have trouble understanding opportunity lost.

  There is a familiar chorus of reasons why we should find the lousy fates of creative classes to be acceptable. I addressed that controversy in my earlier book. While it’s an important debate, it’s even more urgent to determine if the felling of creative-class careers was an anomaly or an early warning of what is to happen to immeasurably more middle-class jobs later in this century.

  A pattern has emerged in which holders of academic posts related to Internet studies tend to join in the acceptance or even the celebration of the decline of the creative classes’ levees. This strikes me as an irony, or an anxious burst of denial.

  Higher education could be Napsterized and vaporized in a matter of a few short years. In the world of the new kind of network wealth, towering student debt has become yet another destroyer of the middle classes.

  Why are we still bothering with higher education in the network age? We have Wikipedia and a world of other tools. You can educate yourself without paying a university. All it takes is discipline. Tuition pays for making discipline a little more structured, getting some extended years of parental support in a place with a quad and beer, and certification. You also meet elite friends. There’s prestige in getting into a top school, whether you finish or not.

  All these benefits might be had less expensively in other ways, and that is becoming truer every day. The knowledge is no longer held in a dungeon. Anyone with a ’net connection can pretty much get any information that would be presented in a university. Undoubtedly some sort of social coercion site or fantasy game will take off online to help out with the discipline of self-education. As for the degree, the piece of paper, Internet statistics ought to be able to make mincemeat out of old-fashioned degree earning in very short order. Why make do with a GPA when you can get an arbitrarily detailed dossier on your potential hire?

  As for the years of parental support, it is turning out that in a Napsterized overall economy, more and more graduates stay with their parents well after college anyway. Why spend a ton of money supporting kids in college for four years when the same money could last longer to put them up somewhere cheaper?

  As for the beer: Alas, the Internet has not made intoxication free as yet, but it still might. So wouldn’t it be more efficient to get rid of higher education?

  Silicon Valley has a love-hate relationship with universities. It means something to have a PhD from someplace like MIT. We love those places! There are legendary professors and we scramble to recruit their graduating students.

  But it’s also considered the height of hipness to eschew a traditional degree and unequivocally prove yourself through other means. The list of top company runners who dropped out of college is commanding: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg, for a start. Peter Thiel, of Facebook and PayPal fame, started a fund to pay top students to drop out of school, since the task of building high-tech startups should not be delayed.

  Mea culpa. I never earned a real degree (though I have received honorary ones). In my case poverty played a role, as it did for many others. But also, the very thought of slogging through someone else’s procedures to gain abstract approval seemed unacceptably retro and irrelevant.

  I must admit I was utterly dependent on the very institutions I neglected, for despite my not being a student, they introduced me to inspirational figures and mentors. Without MIT or Caltech, I imagine figures like Marvin Minsky or Richard Feynman would have been employed deep in the bunkers of Los Alamos or Bell Labs at the time, which were places less likely to be generous about having a weird kid roaming the hallways without official license.

  Everyone in the high-tech world appreciates the universities deeply. Yet we are happy to rush headlong into flattening the levees that sustain them, just as we did with music, journalism, and photography. Will the result be any different this time?

  Factoring the City on a Hill

  The Khan Academy might be the most celebrated effort of the moment to bring free education to anyone with online access. It is filled with videos teaching every common topic, and its lessons have already been taken hundreds of millions of times.

  Stanford professor and Google researcher Sebastian Thrun was inspired by Khan to share a graduate artificial-intelligence class online, and tens of thousands of people graduated from it. These events have been widely celebrated as a path for raising education levels everywhere by leveraging the Internet.

  It might do great good. I do have some qualms about the way these new efforts are unfolding; the concerns are similar to those expressed in my previous book related to Wikipedia. Qualms about monoculture or treating all subjects as if they were technical subjects don’t fall within the project of this book, however.

  Instead, the question to ask here is whether online efforts of this kind could create Siren Servers, even nonprofit ones, which end up undermining the finances and security of academics. This is not a comfortable topic. Of course I appreciate how beautiful it is to bring great educational materials to people who might not have had access to them before. I have also worked toward that very goal.

  But that doesn’t cancel out a systemic problem that I fear is also accelerated by the same activity. I am certainly not saying there’s something wrong with making great lessons and putting them online. I am saying that the overall pattern in which we are doing these beautiful things is not sustainable. Or perhaps a more constructive way to put it is to say that what we are doing is not enough.

  Here is how it could go: Students at colleges ranked lower than Stanford would tune in to Stanford seminars, and gradually wonder why they’re paying their local, lower-ranked academics at all. If locals are to remain valuable once a globalized star system comes into being over the ’net, it can only be because they are present and interactive.

  But online experts can also be made virtually present and interactive. Perhaps tutors will be Skyped in the cheapest places. Forget people. Artificial intelligence can animate a simulated tutor. Imagine Siri, but as a digital talking head with the faraway look and awkwardly groomed countenance of a graduate assistant in a math class.

  Why should we keep on paying for colleges? Why pay for all those levees that benefit a privileged class of middle-class people? All the pensions and health plans, the insurance, the soaring expenses that are crushing the nation under student debt?

  Education in the Abstract Is Not Enough

  I remember looking at images of all the bright young people in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, right after they had overthrown a dictator. Here was a forward-looking, young, savvy, and high-tech new generation. How would they get jobs? Shouldn’t a bunch of these young people be p
rofessors in Egyptian universities in ten years? Is the Internet going to make it easier or harder for them to get those jobs?

  This is a pattern we’ll see over and over again when people interact with top network servers. You get an incredible bargain up front, like super-easy mortgages, insanely cheap retail items, or free online tools or music, but in the long term you also face reduced job prospects. In this case you get free online education up front but fewer academic jobs in the longer term.

  We need to find a way to make education more available and make the career benefits of education more attainable.

  Now, as levees break and austerity rules, suddenly contracts turn out not to be inviolable. This is what union members and copyright holders have learned. So where will this leave academics, as our century of digital networking proceeds? They’ll be caught like so many before them, clinging to old-fashioned levees, to the pomp of graduation ceremonies, to their employment contracts, and the tenure process, which has lasted for centuries. But all this will be under assault.

  The problem won’t be the price of the buildings or the land of the campus. No, it’s always possible to raise millions of dollars to build a building, even as graduate students are paid so little that they take on lifetimes of debt just to make it through. Buildings are wealth, and wealth begets wealth. Graduate students are not.

  How did anyone ever afford education? Society will not be able to afford the risk of the great debt load that students collectively take on. Austerity will force a contraction of government support of the academy, everywhere in the world at once.

  Is it a coincidence that formal education is starting to become impossibly, cosmically expensive just at the moment that informal education is starting to become free? No, no coincidence. This is just another little fractal reflection of the big picture of the way we’ve designed network information systems. The two trends are a single trend.

  If only we could live for free and get whatever we want without any worry that politics might be messy, that some political process might not make the best decision on our behalves, that cartels would never form around what isn’t perfectly free or automated . . . if only we could carelessly let our levees melt away and throw ourselves into the waiting arms of utopia.

  I imagine that the academics from top technical schools will do fine. Honestly, there’s no way Silicon Valley would stand to see MIT fall. That wouldn’t be a danger anyway because the top technical schools make money from technology. Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies.

  What about liberal arts professors at a state college? Some academics will hang on, but the prospects are grim if education is seduced by the Siren song. A decade or two from now, if nothing changes, the outlook will recall the present state of recorded music. In the case of that industry, making a pre-digital system efficient through the use of a digital network shrank it economically to about a quarter of its size fairly quickly. It will shrink perhaps to about a tenth once people with old habits die off. This is not because of obsolescence. Music is not fading away like buggy whips, any more than the need for education will. Instead wealth is becoming concentrated around Siren Servers, since most of the real value, which still occurs out in the real world, on the ground, is reconceived to be off the books.

  The lure of “free” will beckon. Get educated for free now! But don’t plan on a job as an educator.

  The Robotic Bedpan

  One of the bright spots in the future of middle-class employment is usually taken to be health care. Surely we’ll need millions of new nurses to care for the aging baby boomers. Caregivers will become a huge new middle-class population. If you want to think in terms of social mobility, this would also mean a huge transfer of wealth between generations that isn’t necessarily kept within families. It should be an example of the great wheel of middle-class aspiration turning anew in the United States.

  The undoing of this prospect is already observable in Japan, however. The country faces one of the world’s most severe depopulation spirals in this century. Around 2025 or 2030, Japan can expect a profound shortage of working-age people and a gigantic population of elderly people. Japan has traditionally not welcomed waves of non-Japanese immigrants. And it is at the cutting edge in robotics research.

  Therefore there is talk that robots will become advanced enough in time to take care of the elderly. This is plausible, from a technical point of view. Robots are already able to handle delicate tasks, like certain surgical subroutines, and are getting to be reliable enough to be a less risky choice than humans in some situations, like driving vehicles.

  Would a robot nurse be emotionally acceptable? Japanese culture seems to have anticipated the coming demographic crunch. Robots have been cute in Japan for decades. Trustworthy fictional robots, like Transformers and Tamagotchis, are a primary national cultural export. As with all waves of technological change, it is hard to predict when the inevitable glitches and gotchas will be smoothed out. In this case, though, the motivation is so intense that I expect robots in Japanese nursing homes by 2020, and in widespread use by 2025.

  Sans robots, one would expect waves of immigrants to go to American nursing schools in the next decade to prepare to take care of America’s own age wave. Their children would be raised by parents who practiced a profession, and would tend to become professional themselves. Thus a whole new generation of customers for colleges and a new wave of middle-class families would make their way, continuing the American pattern.

  But those imported robots will be awfully tempting. If you spend any time in elder-care facilities like nursing homes, a few things become apparent. First, there is no way for even the most professional and attentive staffs to help everyone as fast as would be ideal. It’s inconceivable to have twenty-four-hour-a-day, immediately available help for every discomfort that comes up.

  Second, elder care is unbelievably hard and uncomfortable work, if it’s done well. It’s very hard for even the best facility to make absolutely sure that every member of the staff is always doing the best possible job. The elderly make easy victims, like children. Petty thefts and taunts are not uncommon.

  The economics of elder care reflects the destruction of middle-class levees and the rise of Siren Servers just like any other sector. There’s a tremendous drive to hire staff without benefits, since paying for someone else’s health care is an unbounded liability in an era when insurance is run by Siren Servers (this will be discussed in an upcoming section).

  There’s also fear of litigation. In the network age, lawsuits can be organized with network effects. Litigants can be gathered online into swarms. This creates an unfortunate paranoia. I have run into problems trying to get Internet connectivity into elder-care facilities, and the problem is often fear that a webcam will capture a small infraction that turns into an insanely amplified liability. Maybe someone will slip on a wet floor, and then there will be hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal bills to pay.

  If you go to a tolerably decent elder-care facility, almost every resident will be the beneficiary of some form of levee. Almost none will have simply saved cash for old age. There is almost always a pension, or government programs like Medicaid. In every case, the institution that is providing these benefits is being crushed by the obligation.

  Go visit places where residents don’t benefit from levees. It’s not pleasant. The facilities for those left hanging are more smelly and wretched than you’d expect things to be in a rich country. Seriously, go visit the public elder-care facility of last resort where you live. That would be better than me describing them.

  It’s not that the robots will necessarily be cheaper in an immediate sense. There might be significant expenses associated with the goops needed to print them, if they’re printed, or with manufacturing and maintaining them if they are not. But the expenses will be more predictable, and that will make all the difference.

  Hiring a human nurse will mean paying for that person’s health insurance, and ta
king on unpredictable legal liabilities for the mistakes that person might make, like leaving a floor wet. Both of these drags on the ledger will be amplified by network effects, just as has happened with mortgage risks.

  Insurance companies will use computers to weasel out of liability and to extract ever-larger payments. The whole world’s lawyers will be circling online. The liability side of having an employee will be copied and amplified over a network, just like a pirated music file or a securitized mortgage. It will eventually become less risky to choose a robot. When you turn action into software, then no one gets blamed for what happens.

  Humans will always do those jobs that a robot can’t do, but the tasks might be conceived as being low skilled. It might turn out that robots can give massages, but can’t answer the door. Maybe robots will be good at catching patients who fake the ingestion of medicines, but ineffective at soothing patients so that they’ll take them voluntarily.

  The key reason to avoid acknowledging that there’s real skill in doing what robots can’t do—and hiring people for real jobs—will not be to keep the immediate expenses low, but to reduce the amplified liabilities of the network age. So there will be plenty of dead-end jobs without security or benefits.* This will be despite the fact that the humans in the caregiving loop might be absolutely essential to the well-being of those being cared for.

  *This is being written in America, in advance of the 2012 election. It is possible that “Obamacare” will stand or fall, but in either case, the larger pattern described here will persist unless it is addressed more fundamentally than by health-care finance reform.

  Meanwhile, the programming of caregiving robots will be utterly dependent on cloud software that in turn will be dependent on observing millions of situations and outcomes. When a nurse who is particularly good at changing a bedpan feeds data to the clouds—such as a video that can be correlated to improved outcomes, even if the nurse never is told about the correlation—that data might be applied to drive a future generation of caregiving robots so that all patients everywhere can benefit. But will that nurse be compensated?