Who Owns the Future? (41 page)

The nexus of problems around motivation and responsibility
will still be with us, no matter how advanced our information systems become. It goes without saying that all people will need to have access to information services or else there will be a crushing end to social and economic mobility. That would be a terribly destructive development.

My tendency is toward liberalism, so I would advocate a state role, but on the other hand, the project of a humanistic economy doesn’t rest on liberal or conservative thinking. A liberal might be inclined to extend the safety net, perhaps including a highly evolved version of the public library. In such a place you might be able to print out the medical prosthetic you need for free. In that scenario, the state would serve as a surrogate customer for information services for those who cannot afford to be customers directly. Beneficiaries would have access, but perhaps not in precisely the most convenient way.

A conservative might prefer to send those who cannot afford information services to churches or foundations to find access to information. There are precedents for that in the pre-digital world as well. In my youth I occasionally made use of Christian Science reading rooms, which could be found most anywhere and graciously offered access to a wide variety of information, with far less preaching or advertising for the church than you find in any modern social network or search engine, at no charge. Neither the libraries nor the reading rooms demanded that authors not be paid.

Wealth and Civility

My current guess is that in a humanistic information economy, it would be best if it were easy for people to keep their wealth secret. The reason for this is that it would defuse the tendency of prejudices to congeal around a single status hierarchy. I have found that people behave better when there are multiple status hierarchies present, overlapped and confused.

Of course, one’s wealth is the very first datum every Siren Server covets. But in a world where the sirens have been silenced, or at least where the volume has been turned down, maybe that particular
signal would remain hidden under the cloak of personal privacy.

In Silicon Valley, a high-status person might be rich, or an accomplished engineer, or renowned in some other way. They all mix. It isn’t always clear which kind of status is the most important.

This is a lovely quality of our little society that deserves emulation.

CHAPTER 28

The Interface to Reality

How Great Are Our Powers?

If the climate is getting screwed up, technologists propose infusing the atmosphere with corrective particles, or positioning mirrors in space to deflect excess solar energy. When politics is dysfunctional, we propose new floating nations at sea. If rare elements are in short supply, we’ll mine asteroids. We’ll find new sources of water on the moon. We don’t accept the limits of earthly physicality.

Technologists can therefore become complacent about the lure of Panglossian economic daydreams. We have faith that tech fixes will come along in time to fix core problems, whether or not an economic system is blind to them. Furthermore, we presume that a competent technologist will always be well positioned to implement a fix, and will easily outmaneuver any obstacles presented by economics or politics.

It’s easy to doubt the faiths of technologists, and it’s healthy for us to be questioned so that we don’t get too full of ourselves. At the same time, our faith is not completely off base. I am genuinely optimistic that people will figure out how to do more and more. However, it’s foolish to pretend to know how long it will take for any particular technology to mature.

Waiting for Technology Waiting for Politics

Suppose it is true that various tech fixes can moderate the global climate, but that it will take two hundred years for them to become
viable? That would be an impressive achievement, but we need a solution for this century.
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There’s a wise old joke that if a programmer thinks a project will be done in two weeks, that really means “I have no idea.” If he says it’ll take a year, then that might be right. “Two weeks” is how uncertainty reads inside a programmer’s brain.

In the realm of big real-world problems, I often hear my fellow technologists declare that a solution or transformation will occur in fifteen or twenty years. That is like “two weeks.” If you hear a date like 2030 as the expected time frame for solving global warming or water shortages through quick tech fixes, be worried. That sense of timing is usually just a way of saying we have no idea how long it will take. (Yes, you are welcome to note that this is the time frame I used to anticipate elder-care robots and other events. It’s the best I can do.)

Despite the uncertainty of the timing of tech fixes for the biggest core problems we face, it is bizarre that they are only funded in token ways, and in scattershot, weird situations. If we were for a moment to forget the mirror maze of economics, and the circular firing squad of politics, and only think about the fundamentals, then a rational response to global climate change would be to supercharge all large-scale curative climate research, at least at the scale of the Manhattan and Apollo projects combined. There would also be massive social engineering experiments in order to reduce the carbon footprint of humanity in case the tech fixes don’t work as soon as we’d like.

Doing these things seems unimaginable now, and yet the creation of giant stupid ghost suburbs in places like Las Vegas during the leveraged mortgage debacle of the last decade was practically automatic. This was a remarkably expensive activity at the time and turned out after only a few more years had passed to be catastrophically more expensive than anyone anticipated.

There is no shortage of explanations for why politics has become impossible just when we need it most. We’ve never faced genuinely global long-term political issues before, so never needed genuinely global politics. For instance, nuclear weapons treaties were multilateral, but not genuinely global. Only a small number of people needed to agree.

People are clannish, and politics among humans is therefore by nature about tribal inclusion and confrontations between tribes. We
can have conferences about global climate change, but the outcomes don’t really stick. The very idea of global politics can make sense to the human mind but is usually nonsense to the human heart.

What Can We Do About Big Data and the Reality Problem?

It’s worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economics and politics have gone insane. We can’t function alone. What we do is empower people. The world needs to be approximately sane for us to make any positive difference.

But the world is not converging on sanity. For evidence, look no further than the lack of action on the matter of global climate change. As discussed earlier, we only know about global climate change because of scientific big data, but big business data is more influential and undermines the benefits we should gain from the insights of big climate science.

I am not condemning big business data, but celebrating it. People might find better liberty in the extremely automated economies of the future by making the accounting of big business data more comprehensive.

However, we confuse big business data with big science data at our peril.

So let’s reframe the global sanity question this way: How can big science data interface with big business data in a way that doesn’t confuse the two? Instead of suppressing big business data, and favoring big science data, I suspect that the best results would come from making big business data
more
successful. The happier markets get, the less they will interfere with science.

Markets are happier when they are expanding. This point becomes critical in considering how markets can be better aligned with reality.

If a market is stagnant or contracting, it is in the interests of players to protect their positions and contest the positions of others. Antagonism becomes more prevalent in a zero-sum game. The whole of the game becomes the besting of others.

If a market is expanding, the game is non-zero-sum. Then win-win thinking becomes rational more frequently. The opportunity of the new can often outweigh the opportunity of fighting over the old.

This is not to say that an expanding market is automatically aligned to reality. The real estate market was expanding in Las Vegas during the stupid boom. But I am claiming here that if a market is not expanding, then players will find it hard to look beyond their immediate contests with each other. Fights over redistribution or concentration of wealth are necessarily focused inward on the affairs of people, and not outward at the larger reality.

For this reason alone, the Siren Server model of wealth that emerged in the first decade of this century is pro-stupidity. When a venture capital firm openly advertises that it is
only
looking for investment opportunities that shrink markets,
¹
we should know we have entered into a game in which we are choosing zero-sum thinking, and baiting the world to ignore reality.

What should happen instead is that information technology should create a persistent expansion of markets by monetizing more and more information, enshrining the potential for non-zero-sum thinking.

Carbon Copies Ruin Carbon Credits

If economics were perfect, then human activity would be aligned with human interests—or at least that ideal is the only imaginable one for economics. So when human activities are obviously not well aligned with human interests, it’s worth searching for sources of illusion that might distance economic motivations from reality.

I suspect that Sirenic effects are already creating illusions that dilute the potential benefits of carbon credits, for example. Such credits are one approach to making markets rally to fundamental needs—as opposed to random projects like building empty suburbs.

The very idea of economics is based on a feedback model that is fast enough to be relevant to one’s decisions. Long-term global outcomes are not fast enough. Carbon credits attempt to bridge that gap.

However, in the context of today’s dysfunctional, one-sided networked finance, there is a risk that catastrophic speculation and derivatives bundling of carbon credits would overwhelm the original purpose, should those credits become more widely used. On the other hand, absent those scams, carbon credits will have a hard time gaining traction.

Governments can introduce exceptional mechanisms like carbon credits, but these don’t seem to rise to the forefront of investment strategies in their own right. The reason why is that “scammy” investments offer better returns, and for carbon credits to compete, they’d have to become scammy, too, but they benefit from too many altruistic guardians to allow that to happen. Therefore, the prominence and influence of carbon credits are limited.

How Fighting “Fraud” Might Also Fight “Scams”

Exotic and experimental ideas in finance are not necessarily scammy. Betting on the climate has a place. In my previous book I advocated the exploration of new exotic financial instruments for just this reason. We need them. But we need a more honest and sustainable approach to networked economics even more—an approach that could bring about the very positive side benefit of subduing the scams that blind.

Consider an old-fashioned way to fight economic scamminess, regulation. Critics of financial deregulation in the United States point out that before the Great Depression there had been a decades-long sequence of frequent and destructive market busts. Regulations put in place in response to the Depression seemed to lead to happier market conditions until deregulation in the late 20th century ushered back in the same old chaos.

The politics of reinstating old regulations appear to be uncertain, but also it’s becoming harder for regulation to keep up with technology. It is doubtful that new language in a law could anticipate the cleverness of programmers. A rejection of Siren Servers in network architecture might, however, do the same job as old-fashioned
regulation, but in a way that forestalls even highly inventive network schemes.

If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start, and would have been paid for by the investor creating the risk. Benefits would have been shared with those who were creating the fundamental value: homeowners who promised to pay the mortgages. Economic symmetry would have prevented investors from taking risks on other people’s uninformed behavior, using yet other people’s money.

A more honest and complete accounting of who is responsible for data could perhaps accomplish the same good as old-fashioned regulation, but in a new, less political way.
*
If we demand that sources of data always be tied to the real people who are responsible for the data’s presence in the first place, not only would those people be compensated, but also the value of data could not be fraudulently multiplied.

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Though newness is in the eye of the beholder. In a sense the project of this book was foreseen by one of the Ten Commandments, the one about not bearing false witness. As a technologist I feel entitled to claim newness for things, and it seems to work in raising interest in them.

A more honest network economy wouldn’t be one where no risks are taken, but one where risks would be taken more wisely, as there would be informed participation by the ground level creators of value. It’s a simple principle that could reach far. A scam is always an illusion of creating something from nothing, but there is no nothing. A well-implemented information economy would always remember the source, the something.