Who Owns the Future? (36 page)

Any society that is composed of real biological people has to succeed at providing a balance to the frustrations of biological reality. There must be economic dignity, defined here as knowing you won’t fall off a cliff into abject poverty if you get sick, become a parent, or grow old. (Young, healthy, childless adults perhaps need not be protected from the danger of falling off that cliff. I certainly wasn’t protected from it when I was young. I’ll leave that question to the liberal-versus-conservative debates, which are separable from the project at hand.)

If we demand that everyone turn into a freelancer, then we will all eventually pay an untenable price in heartbreak. Most people won’t be able to pull freelancing off through the contingencies of a
lifetime. We need those levees, not because we’re lazy, but because we are real.

When enough people lack economic dignity, there’s no way for the economy overall to function well. Even those who are reasonably successful on their own can get stuck in damage control, helping their family and friends. The recent absurdities of the financial markets served to disenfranchise aging people in particular. Their savings, jobs, and equity evaporated.

There are always feel-good ways to help out in a few of the most outrageous and visible tragedies. A local jazz club will have a night to raise money for an aging musician’s medical bills, for instance. But for every aging musician helped a little by a special benefit, there are dozens lost to the shadows.

Some decades from now all those idealistic people who contributed to open software or Wikipedia will be in the same position as today’s aging jazz musicians. We’ll help one per week through fund-raising on Reddit in order to feel good, even though on average that will be the equivalent of doing nothing.

In a humanistic information economy, as people age, they will collect royalties on value they brought into the world when they were younger. This seems to me to be a highly moral use of information technology. It remembers the right data. The very idea that our world is construed in such a way that the lifetime contributions of hardworking, creative people can be forgotten, that they can be sent perpetually back to the starting gate, is a deep injustice.

Putting it that way makes the complaint sound leftist. But today there’s also an erasure of what should be legitimate capital. The right should be just as outraged. The proposal here is not redistributionist or socialist. Royalties based on creative contributions from a whole lifetime would always be flowing freshly. It would be wealth earned, not entitlement.

The Psychology of Deserving

The idea that you ought to suffer and fight your inner laziness demons in order to earn your keep is deeply ingrained in anyone
who has learned to succeed in a market economy, and that’s for a very good reason. Astounding improvements to life in general since the Enlightenment have been brought about by multitudes of individuals acting like grown-ups and keeping the commitments they’ve made. In particular, they have paid their debts, allowing the idea of finance to be realized.

Thus each recent generation of modern humans feels compelled to impart a moral code to its progeny that might be expressed this way: “Responsibility and maturity are what built most of the comforts of our world, which are almost entirely recent innovations. We forget how bad things were before modernity. The possibility of childish laziness wasn’t even a remotely survivable option before the advent of modern comforts. Children used to die all the time from preventable disease and exploitation. But now things are almost too easy. Letting you children get lazy now because of the work of the earlier generations could bring the cumulative achievement of many generations of people down to rubble in a single generation.”

You don’t need to remind me how easy it is to slough off and become lazy. Oh, I know how sweet the temptation is.

So modernity has brought with it an endless internal mental conflict between stern, rather parental inner voices and lazy childish ones. Unfortunately, these two voices, which have functioned as opposites, checking each other for centuries, have been confounded into idiotic agreement and collusion with the appearance of digital network technology.

Upon hearing that I propose that people be able to earn their livings in part just for doing what they do while being watched by cloud algorithms, the parent voice can be expected to say: “Doing what you want shouldn’t be a way of earning a living. Allowing even a hint of that is the very core of moral hazard. The moment kids get a whiff of the notion, they’ll never learn to take on the sheer pain of growing up—or the self-sacrifice of doing a job or paying a mortgage—and civilization will fall apart.”

The child voice doesn’t listen to any of this, naturally, but instead demands exactly the same thing using a different argument: “Why bring money into it? Money is all about greed and getting ahead
and getting old and boring. Anarchy is true and real and direct. If money enters the equation, then the feeling of freedom will soon be ruined.”

In other words, both sides are saying that if technology makes life easier, it should also make you poor. When parent and child agree, it can be almost impossible to get a word in edgewise. This is the stupidity of our age, a conclusion so utterly bankrupt that no single generation could muster a sufficient momentum of mental failure to express it alone. Only a collaboration of generations could manage to spread a dusting of credence over such a gaping, appalling, vacant falsehood.

One way to notice that this approach to being responsible is becoming obsolete is to observe how modernity is already working for the luckiest people. We’ve grown used to the idea that success comes easier to some people than others, and comes easily indeed to the luckiest people. There’s an old Buck Owens song called “Act Naturally,” which was also famously sung by Ringo Starr. “They’re gonna make a big star out of me . . . and all I have to do is act naturally.”

This isn’t to say that all stars are lazy; many of them clearly work very hard, especially early in their careers. And yet, there is a certain almost unseemly grace that propels some careers, not only in the movies, but also in finance and other fields.

And yet: Natural stars are celebrated by society overall, even though they earn well, despite not suffering as much as some might hope they would. We’re used to the idea that in a market economy, you can be annoyed about the success of others, but you have to live with it.

I hesitate to even invoke the topic, since so many people are on a hair trigger about it. One side might declare, “The one percent didn’t earn it!” and the other might admonish, “The market says they did, so you should stop being jealous.” Neither the left nor the right seems to anticipate that the future might hold many, many more legitimate, self-propelled lucky stars.

Is it such an awful thing to suggest that what technological progress should look like is more and more people becoming a little more like lucky stars? What other vision of progress is viable?

The existence of more lucky stars does not mean socialism, nor does it mean the triumph of lazy childhood demons. It just means a market in an expanding information economy functioning honestly instead of being hampered by obsolete parental admonitions or childish fears, no matter how appropriate they might have been in times past.

The crazy network-based wealth of inscrutable investors lately can serve as both a warning and an inspiration. What I’m arguing is that just because networked finance boomed at everyone else’s long-term expense, there’s no reason in principle a similar outbreak of lucky-starism couldn’t happen much more broadly, so that more people could enjoy the fruits of modernity based on more complete accounting.

But Will There Be Enough Value from People?

The employment picture is increasingly “hollowed out” in physicality. People increasingly find their sustenance in dead-end jobs at the bottom, or in elite jobs at the top.

To me that means our economy is obsolete and needs to be reformed to keep up with technological progress. But to others it means that people are becoming obsolete.

As I complained earlier, I hear this infuriating comment all the time: “If a lot of ordinary people aren’t earning much in today’s markets, that means they have little of value to offer. You can’t intervene to create the illusion that they’re valuable. It’s up to people to make themselves valuable.”

Well yes, I agree. I don’t advocate making up fake jobs to create the illusion that people are employed. That would be demeaning and a magnet for fraud and corruption.

But network-oriented companies routinely raise huge amounts of money based precisely on placing a value on what ordinary people do online. It’s not that the market is saying ordinary people aren’t valuable online; it’s that most people have been repositioned out of the loop of their own commercial value.

A dismissive smirk often greets proposals for a humanistic information
economy. How could nongenius, ordinary people have anything valuable to offer in a world dominated by elite technical people and advanced machines?

This reaction is understandable, since we have become used to seeing the underemployed languish. But there are occasions when this kind of doubt in the value of others betrays gross prejudices.

One example is when investors are perfectly confident to value a Siren Server that accumulates data about people in the tens of billions of dollars, no matter how remote the possibility of an actual business plan that would make a commensurate amount of profit. And yet, at the same time, these same investors can’t imagine that the people who are the sole sources of what is so valuable can have any value.

And then there are ideological pundits from the sidelines who strike out at anyone who points out the absurdities of what we’re up to in Silicon Valley lately. If someone complains that all those brilliant recent PhDs ought to perhaps be working on something more substantive than putting yet more paid links in front of people, you can expect a rigorous defense of the nonmonetary value being created by today’s cloud computing. Twitter doesn’t yet know how to make much money, for instance, but it is defended this way: “Look at all the value it is creating off the books by connecting people better!”
¹

Yes, let’s look at that value. It is real, and if we want to have a growing information-based economy, that real value ought to be part of our economy. Why is it suddenly a service to capitalism to keep more and more value off the books?

Why must it be the case that from the perspective of the Siren Server, knowing what ordinary people do is breathtakingly valuable, while from a personal perspective, exactly the same data usually earns only transient crumbs in the form of easier-to-find couches to crash on and lightweight ego boosts?

Or to put it another way, once industries like transportation, energy, and health care start to become software-mediated, shouldn’t the communication and entertainment industries becomes relatively more important to the economy, to take up the slack? And yet these are precisely the industries that software has sapped so far.

A Question That Really Isn’t That Hard to Answer

Whenever one sort of task can be automated, others that can’t be automated come into view. The economic question is who gets paid for what people at ground level do beyond the horizon of automation in a given historical phase.

As long as the people who actually do whatever it is that can’t be automated are paid for what they do, an honest human economy will persist. If third parties who run the biggest network computers are the ones who are paid, then there will no longer be an honest economy.

So will people in a humanistic economy find enough value in each other to earn a living, once cloud software coupled with robots and other gadgets can meet most of life’s needs and wants? Or even more bluntly, “Will there be enough value from ordinary people in the long term to justify the existence of an economy?”

In order to answer, we can start with familiar ideas about what people can do for Siren Servers, and change the question ever so slightly to be about what people can do for themselves and each other. At least two answers are immediately apparent.

One manifest answer is that people are infinitely interested in what other people express online. Huge numbers of people find audiences for their tweets, blogs, social network updates, Wikipedia article tweaks, YouTube videos, snapshots, image collections, meanderings, and from second-order reactions and mash-ups of all of the above. Is it really such a flight of fancy to predict that a large number of people will still be offering this type of value online, so long as the accounting is complete and honest, into the foreseeable future?

Now is when I expect to hear that this kind of activity is all fluff and not the stuff of an economy. Once again, why is it fluff if it’s for the benefit of the people who do it, while it’s real value if it’s for the benefit of a distant central server?

Economics is not about your taste. Economics, once people have risen above basic needs into the middle class, is about the tastes of
other
people, whether you like it or not.

It’s hard to say how much of the present-day economy is based on taste instead of need, since, as Abraham Maslow pointed out, the line shifts. At the very least, not only entertainment, but titanic industries like cosmetics, sports and recreation, tourism, design, fashion, hospitality, dining, hobbies, grooming, cosmetic surgery, and the majority of the activities of geekdom ought to count as “tastes” that have turned into needs as far as commerce is concerned.

All of these industries, whether they are construed as answering wants or needs, would remain monetizable in the terms of humanistic computation no matter how advanced technology gets. When home robots make other home robots that sew dresses from designs found online, then either the fashion business will be demonetized or not, depending on whether the accounting is complete. In a humanistic information economy, accounting will be complete, and people will continue to make their livings as fashion designers, fashion photographers, and fashion models, and will achieve dignity.