Who Owns the Future? (4 page)

In the telling of digital utopias, when computing gets ultragood and ultracheap we won’t have to worry about the reach of elite network players descended from today’s derivatives funds, or Silicon Valley companies like Google or Facebook. In a future world of abundance, everyone will be motivated to be open and generous.

Bizarrely, the endgame utopias of even the most ardent high-tech libertarians always seem to take socialist turns. The joys of life will be too cheap to meter, we imagine. So abundance will go ambient.

This is what diverse cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups all share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks. Eventually, they imagine, there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball. In the meantime, those true
believers encrypt their servers even as they seek to gather the rest of the world’s information and find the best way to leverage it.

It is all too easy to forget that “free” inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.

The Problem Is Not the Technology, but the Way We Think About the Technology

I will argue that up until about the turn of this century we didn’t need to worry about technological advancement devaluing people, because new technologies always created new kinds of jobs even as old ones were destroyed. But the dominant principle of the new economy, the information economy, has lately been to conceal the value of information, of all things.

We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest technologies. Ordinary people “share,” while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.

Whether these elite new presences are consumer-facing services like Google, or more hidden operations like high-frequency-trading firms, is mostly a matter of semantics. In either case, the biggest and best-connected computers provide the settings in which information turns into money. Meanwhile, trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes that the emerging information economy is benefiting the majority of those who provide the information that drives it.

If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, “raw” information, or information that hasn’t yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn’t valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will take place. As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead and empowered to apocalyptic proportions. Ordinary people will be unvalued by the new economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable.

Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn’t improved.

Digital technologists are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything—and they’re doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

Saving the Winners from Themselves

Is the present trend really a benefit for those who run the top servers that have come to organize the world? In the short term, of course, yes. The greatest fortunes in history have been created recently by using network technology as a way to concentrate information and therefore wealth and power.

However, in the long term, this way of using network technology is not even good for the richest and most powerful players, because their ultimate source of wealth can only be a growing economy. Pretending that data came from the heavens instead of from people can’t help but eventually shrink the overall economy.

The more advanced technology becomes, the more all activity becomes mediated by information tools. Therefore, as our economy turns more fully into an information economy, it will only grow if more information is monetized, instead of less. That’s not what we’re doing.

Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market
system can only be sustainable when the accounting is thorough enough to reflect where value comes from, which, I’ll demonstrate, is another way of saying that an information age middle class must come into being.

Progress Is Compulsory

Two great trends are colliding, one in our favor, and the other against us. Balancing our heavenly expectations, there are also countervailing fears about such things as global climate change and the problem of finding food and drinking water for the human population when it peaks later in this century. Billions more people than have ever been sustained before will need water and food.

We bring the great problems of our times on ourselves, and yet we have little choice but to do so. The human condition is an evolving technological puzzle. Solving one problem creates new ones. This has always been true and is not a special quality of present times.

The ability to grow a larger population, through reduced infant mortality rates, sets up the conditions for a greater famine. People are cracking the inner codes of biology, creating amazing new chemistries, and amplifying our capabilities with digital networks just as we are also undermining our climate, and critical resources are starting to run out. And yet we are compelled to plunge forward, because history isn’t reversible. Besides, we must be honest about how bad things were in lower-tech times.

New technological syntheses that will solve the great challenges of the day are less likely to come from garages than from collaborations by many people over giant computer networks. It is the politics and economics of these networks that will determine how new capabilities translate into new benefits for ordinary people.

Progress Is Never Free of Politics

Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap,
while at the same time
crucial fundamentals for survival could become expensive.
The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the work of Philip K. Dick.

Basics like water and food could soar in cost
even as
intensely sophisticated gadgets, like automated nanorobotic heart surgeons, float about as dust in the air in case they are needed, sponsored by advertisers.

Everything can’t become free at once, because the real world is messy. Software and networks are messy. And the sprawling miracle of information-animated technology rests on limited resources.

The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels exploiting whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so. You have to look at the whole system. No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused.

Back to the Beach

You sit at the edge of the ocean, wherever the coast will be after Miami is abandoned to the waves. You are thirsty. Random little clots of dust are full-on robotic interactive devices, since advertising companies long ago released plagues of smart dust upon the world. That means you can always speak and some machine will be listening. “I’m thirsty, I need water.”

The seagull responds, “You are not rated as enough of a commercial prospect for any of our sponsors to pay for freshwater for you.” You say, “But I have a penny.” “Water costs two pennies.” “There’s an ocean three feet away. Just desalinate some water!” “Desalinization is licensed to water carriers. You need to subscribe. However, you can enjoy free access to any movie ever made, or pornography, or a simulation of a deceased family member for you to interact with as you die from dehydration. Your social networks will be automatically updated with the news of your death.” And finally, “Don’t you want to play that last penny at the casino that just repaired your heart? You might win big and be able to enjoy it.”

CHAPTER 2

A Simple Idea

Just Blurt the Idea Out

Given both the momentum to screw up the human world and the capability to vastly improve it, how will people behave?

This book asserts that the choices we make in the architecture of our digital networks might tip the balance between the opposing waves of invention and calamity.

Digital technology changes the way power (or an avatar of power, such as money or political office) is gained, lost, distributed, and defended in human affairs. Lately, network-empowered finance has amplified corruption and illusion, and the Internet has destroyed more jobs than it has created.

So we begin with the simple question of how to design digital networks to deliver more help than harm in aligning human intention to meet great challenges. A starting point for an answer can be summarized: “Digital information is really just people in disguise.”

A Simple Example

It’s magic that you can upload a phrase in Spanish into the cloud services of companies like Google or Microsoft, and a workable, if imperfect, translation to English is returned. It’s as if there’s a polyglot artificial intelligence residing up there in the great cloud server farms.

But that is not how cloud services work. Instead, a multitude of examples of translations made by real human translators are gathered over the Internet. These are correlated with the example
you send for translation. It will almost always turn out that multiple previous translations by real human translators had to contend with similar passages, so a collage of those previous translations will yield a usable result.

A giant act of statistics is made practically free because of Moore’s Law, but at core the act of translation is based on the real work of people.

Alas, 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 don’t exist. With each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment.

At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.

In a world of digital dignity, each individual will be the commercial owner of any data that can be measured from that person’s state or behavior. Treating information as a mask behind which real people are invariably hiding means that digital data will be treated as being consistently valuable, rather than inconsistently valuable.

In the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows, say, a machine language translation algorithm, or a market prediction algorithm, to perform a task, then a nanopayment, proportional
both
to the degree of contribution
and
the resultant value, will be due to the person.

These nanopayments will add up, and lead to a new social contract in which people are motivated to contribute to an information economy in ever more substantial ways. This is an idea that takes capitalism more seriously than it has been taken before. A market economy should not just be about “businesses,” but about everyone who contributes value.

I could just as well frame my argument in the language of barter and sharing. Leveraging cloud computing to make barter more efficient, comprehensive, and fair would ultimately lead to a similar design to what I am proposing. The usual Manichaean portrayal of
the digital world is “new versus old.” Crowdsourcing is “new,” for instance, while salaries and pensions are “old.” This book proposes pushing what is “new” all the way instead of part of the way. We need not shy away.

Big Talk, I Know . . .

Am I making a Swiftian modest proposal, or am I presenting a plan on the level? It’s a little of both. I hope to widen the way people think about digital information and human progress. We need a palate cleansing, a broadening of horizons.

Maybe the approach described here to a humanistic information economy will be successfully adopted in the real world after some further refinement. Or maybe a new set of better ideas unrelated to and unforeseen by this book will have an easier time being heard because the deep freeze of convention will have been thawed a little by this exercise. It might merely serve as a check on the excesses of conventions that might otherwise become enshrined.

If this all sounds a little grandiose, understand that in the context of the community in which I function my presentation is practically self-deprecating. It is commonplace in Silicon Valley for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profoundly, within a few years, and that they aren’t ready yet to worry about money, because acquiring a great fortune is a petty matter that will take care of itself. Furthermore, these bright little young bands succeed regularly. This is just Silicon Valley’s version of normal.

Our idealisms and dreams often turn out to find fulfillment in events in the real world. Hopefully the ideas presented here work fractionally, and not just in the useless theater of ultimates. Even in the near term this framework of ideas offers an immediate way to understand how digital technology is changing economics and politics.