WhoOwnsTheFuture
Who Owns the Future? (Jaron Lanier)
- Bailed near the end. Interesting, but not getting much out of it.
- Right now is the time when people are learning how to live with digital networks as we've made them so far. Once you understand this, current events that might seem unrelated to each other – and might appear to be rather senseless – will suddenly fit into a coherent story.
- The fact that Big Data is needed is proof that these algorithms are actually only a repackaging of human effort in such a way that it is anonymized and that people aren't acknowledged or paid. Both Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are economic and political constructions that disenfranchise most people.
- Popular digital designs do not treat people as being special enough. People are treated as being small elements in a bigger information machine, when in fact people are the only sources of destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all. My goal is to portray an alternate future in which people are treated appropriately as special.
- If observation of you yields data that makes it easier for a robot to seem more natural, then you ought to be owed money for the use of that valuable data.
- When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive. It used to be that printing presses were expensive, so paying newspaper reporters seemed like a natural expense to fill the pages.
- Digital information is really just people in disguise.
- ML Translation is a giant act of statistics is made practically free because of Moore's law, but at the core the act of translation is based on the real work of people. 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 dont exist.
- In the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows to perform a task, then a nanopayment will be due to the person. This is an idea that takes capitalism more seriously than it has been taken before. A market economy should be about value not just "businesses".
- Any information technology is based fundamentally on design judgments about what to remember and what to forget. Money is simply another information system.
- Some of the money to pay for your house might not have ever existed had you not decided to buy it. It is invented based on the fact that you have made a (credible) promise to earn it somehow in the future. Ordinary people can help create new money by making promises. You constrain the future by making a plan, and a promise to keep to it. Money is created in response, because in making that promise you have created value. New money is created to represent that value. Banks sell assets that are partially made of the future intents of borrowers.
- Why was there so much economic pain at once all over the developed world just as computer networking dug into every aspect of human activity ? Answer: Finance got networked in the wrong way. Making finance "efficient" broke it. It made finance stupid.
- No amount of cost lowering can foster economic dignity when it also means that there are fewer good jobs.
- People have repeatedly proven adaptable enough to lower standards in order to make software seem smart.
- Consciousness provides ontology for particles. If there were no consciousness, the universe would be adequately described by nothing but particles. Only the bits would be left, not the data structures. It would all mean nothing, because it wouldn't be experienced.
- With an ebook you are not a first-class commercial citizen, you have only purchased tenuous rights within something else's company store. It wasn't really a purchase, but a contract entered into, even though neither you nor anyone else ever read such contracts.
- A rational response to global climate change would be to supercharge all large-scale curative climate research, at least at the level of the Manhattan and Apollo projects combined.