by
Jaron Lanier
meh/approach
Eula Biss,
Stian Westlake,
Jonathan Haskel,
Jaron Lanier,
Natasha Brown,
Tim O'Reilly
where i feel like the whole approach is wrong. not just on the level of words, and maybe not even the political analysis, but like something broader
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.
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Algorithmic, market-based solutions to wages in on-demand labor markets provide a potentially interesting alternative to minimum-wage mandates as a way to increase worker incomes. Rather than cracking down on the new online gig economy businesses to make them more like twentieth-century businesses, regulators should be asking traditional low-wage employers to provide greater marketplace liquidity via data sharing. The skills required to work at McDonald’s and Burger King are not that dissimilar; ditto Starbucks and Peet’s, Walmart and Target, or the AT&T and Verizon stores. Letting workers swap shifts or work on demand at competing employers would obviously require some changes to management infrastructure, training, and data sharing between employers. But given that most scheduling is handled by standard software platforms, and that payroll is also handled by large outsourcers, many of whom provide services to the same competing employers, this seems like an intriguingly solvable problem.
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[...] the rise of intangibles might be expected to increase inequality both of wealth and income. Increasingly intangible intensive firms will need better staff to create synergy with their other intangible assets: better managers, better movie stars, better sports heroes. Firms will screen them more thoroughly and pay them more handsomely. [...]
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[...] adult education provides people with option value. It may also help mitigate some of the problems of inequality we described in chapter 6: to the extent that the growth of intangibles disadvantages those with poor skills and makes some skills obsolete, the availability of training offers a way of redressing the imbalance.
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I think he’s wrong on this, but we’re talking about fossil fuels now. Oil and coal are capital, he says, and we need to leave that capital in the ground. We should not mine it, sell it, buy it, or burn it. But people already own it. A journalist recently observed, he says, that the last time we walked away from an accumulation of capital this significant was Emancipation.
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I sip my tea, imagining rich people drowning in the very water I’m drinking, though most of the dead, I know, were third class. I think of the odd pleasure I took in that scene in the movie where water floods the ballroom and roils up the grand staircase. It was the pleasure of seeing wealth come to ruin. A pleasure that lives, strangely, right next to the pleasures of wealth.
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He inches towards me, eyes soft-closed and lips squeezed into a kissy pout. He believes his words in this moment, I believe that. But his is the fleeting belief of a moment, and it will pass. As soon as new fancy strikes, the next adventure. I understand. It’s the impulse of a boy who himself understands, in his flesh and bones and blood and skin, that he was born to helm this great nation – upon which the sun has never set. Not yet. It’s bright, now. And the sky is impossibly blue. He’s himself again. Here. At home, and rendered in sharp contrast to me. But without this place, without that contrast –
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