by
Jaron Lanier
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[...] 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?
omg this is SO ripe for deconstruction. the fact that he uses the word "lucky" makes it clear that even he realises these people aren't fully "legitimate", to use his word--there's always an element of luck involved, and that element always undermines the legitimacy of their achievements.
here's another vision of progress: one where you don't need to be a "lucky star" in order to have access to the material goods needed for survival
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?"
possibly, but only if we manage to convince enough of the corporate world to downgrade their profit expectations. that would be a monumental undertaking just for more of the same sort of exploitation so why even bother????
this book is the most centrist thing i've ever read
Someday it might be the case that your offhanded grunt helps an automated assistant interact more successfully with grumpy people. Decades or centuries from now, when the global or interplanetary cloud algorithms for language translation are so refined that there's only very occasional room for improvement, your grunt might turn out to be worth a million dollars. It might sound strange today, but imagine how strange it would sound to a hunter-gatherer from thirty thousand years ago that a star's grunt on a movie screen would be worth a million dollars today.
it should sound strange to someone today because it's inherently absolutely ridiculous. this is not a good supporting point
Should a day arrive when it really becomes true that very few people are able to offer anything of value to anyone else--if everything becomes automated to the point that almost no one is really needed, but only needs--then obviously the very idea of a market must be retired.
I see no evidence to support that dark fear.
i am shedding a single tear
Any desirable alternative economic future must include an idea about a user interface that brings at least as much simplicity to people as acquiescing to a Siren Server does today. This means reducing the density of decisions people are expected to make to a level that leaves cognitive room to live life in free and creative ways.
true
The possibility of new kinds of personal assistants adds to the arsenal of answers to the question "What would people do?" In a world of thorough and honest accounting, whole new large classes of service professions should naturally pop up.
again with the honest accounting. this phrase is driving me up the wall
The price of computation in a humanistic information economy ought never to be set exclusively by rote, but always be determined to a significant degree by market negotiation. We will never know for sure in advance how valuable a particular datum might turn out to be. Each use of data will determine a fresh valuation of it in context.
There will be vastly more commercial events than in the world we are used to. Every time code runs, a lot of people will be paid a tiny bit each. There is no such thing as calculation without data. Therefore, if the provenance of the data has been preserved, then calculations can generally be expanded to yield additional results about who should get credit for making them possible.
this is giving me cancer
The principle would apply to code as well as data. Computer code these days tends to be either proprietary or open-source. A third option would come into being in the future proposed here, and perhaps into ubiquity. Code would remember the people who coded each line, and those people would be sent nanopayments as part of code execution. A programmer who writes code everyone uses will be able to benefit directly, instead of having to leverage code into a Siren Server scheme. The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency. At the same time, an open community of programmers would have been able to contribute incrementally, without any more barriers than are found in today's open-source community.
it gets even worse. is each line supposed to be treated as the same amount of value????? what happens when different people write the same line, or code is refactored, or someone is just more prolix than others???? Lanier is a coder should really know better
he is so focused on coming up with new and increasingly ridiculous ways of allowing people to "get rich" that he doesn't stop to think about whether his frantic search is worth conducting in the first place
You meet a future spouse on an online dating service. The algorithms that implement that service take note of your marriage. As the years go by, and you're still together, the algorithms increasingly apply what seemed to be the correlations between you and your spouse to matching other prospective couples. When some of them also get married, it is automatically calculated that the correlations from your case were particularly relevant to the recommendations. You get extra nanopayments as a result.
oh god ... for one, this does not work economically. if implemented in a way that it actually provided a substantial amount of money to the creators of the data, it would destroy the dating service's business model. or they would just do their best to pay out as little as possible (since they can choose the amount). what incentive do they have to actually pay out as much value as they've extracted?
surely he must know all this ... is he being deliberately obtuse? please tell me he is.
[...] Once in a risk pool, you'd have a much better shot at attracting investors than as individuals. Maybe then you could issue a bond to the newspaper in order to read it.
WHAT THE FUCK