Jaron Lanier: Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all
qz.com
qz.com
Since the copyright-exploitation industry has been under threat he has cobbled together all kinds of far fetched "visionary" theories as to why we should go back to the way things were, or else there will be doom.
Never at any point has he come up with a solution, or even a direction in which to look for a solution. Or at least anything that can be taken seriously:
"But what if you were owed money for the use of information that exists because you exist? This is what accountants and lawyers are for."
That's the logic of an 8-year old. Basically his entire vision comes down to "we are doomed, and the only way to save us is to artificially re-create scarcity, but fuck if I know how".
The robotic surgery example (which has fuck all to do with free and open information) shows how sickeningly selfish that is. We may be able to live without musicians, but people are fucking dying because of shortage of surgeons. But Mr. Lanier prefers a world in which surgeons are, like himself of course, part of a well-paid and taken care of middle class, and fuck everyone else.
His argument is for an aggregate middle class that outspends the elite because without a large middle class there is no Market. His conjectures are much less about building an elite plutocracy as they are about maintaining a strong middle class to support robust economic growth.
In fact, the book specifically says that what happened to musicians can, and will, happen to other sectors of society, specifically spelling out how surgeons may be replaced eventually by robotics.
The argument is not against technical evolution, but rather against a spying society. The headline, as is usual for QZ, is inflammatory, and people like to grab onto Jaron's most flamboyant statements because of how he looks, but his ideas are a lot more reasonable than your post makes them out to be.
In short, I don't agree with what Jaron says, but his points are about the growth of a middle class that he sees as an artificial construct, but one that modern society cannot function without.
TL;DR: Jaron says some crazy shit, but he's mostly arguing for a robust middle class. See his repetitive mentions of Henry Ford making cars affordable for his factory workers.
We've faced these problems before. Cars made horses obsolete and left many (horse) drivers, stablehands, and others without jobs. Mechanization got rid of most jobs in agriculture. Just because something eliminates jobs doesn't mean it's a bad thing (in fact, because we no longer need to spend all day in the fields, we can do things like sit in offices and develop new innovations) but if you listen to Jaron Lanier, that's what you'd think.
Jaron says that if we're all going into a new socialist utopia, that's awesome, but if only some of us are entering a new socialist utopia, on the backs of others, that's bad.
That's a sentiment that is, at the very least, worth considering. The argument Jaron is making is definitely a long term argument, but I'm happy someone is still thinking about the future.
Again, I don't necessarily agree with him, but I think he has a lot to say of considerable value.
Think of the South in the civil war in the US. They were grasping to understand how industrialization would bring more economic safety than slavery.
Especially if you look at his utterings from the point where he first "turned against the internet" (he used to actually see piracy as good thing!), which initially solely consisted of ranting against piracy and anonymity. It was only later that he came up with grander social theories to justify his rants.
Yes, the man is smart enough (certainly smarter than me) to identify some actual social and economic problems caused by the free flow of information.
But he's not interested in constructive solutions, because he the solution he has in mind was his starting point: re-establish the reign of copyright, abolish anonymity and stop the free flow of information.
And of course, micropayments to make sure he gets his share. It's funny how it always comes down to that one solution: hardwire micropayments into everything.
Does that sound like something that will solve the "surgeons replaced by robots" problem, or any of the myriad of other jobs replaced by technology, or just his personal problem?
That sort of system of consent for spying is one potential equitable way to distribute wealth.
The most quixotic thing about Jaron is that stance on copying, because you can tell from an engineering perspective it still vexes him. His viewpoint is that when someone "copies" something over a network, you're not actually copying as there's only one logical copy (Apps in iTunes all deploy from one master copy, there aren't 500Million individual copies of the Facebook app, there's one app and 500Million caches) but that's playing with semantics as far as I can tell. I believe Jaron still wants to enter a socialist utopia, but only if we can all go at once instead of just the rich folk.
Again, I don't necessarily agree with what he has to say BUT I do want to help clarify his arguments, because I think they're worth exploring.
When you buy something through amazon, you are exposed to the price they think you should pay (there's some truth to the idea that Amazon varies their price depending on how much money they think you have to spend). This is an example of an asymmetrical information relationship.
Amazon has global pricing information and a big data system that they can leverage to push all of the risk onto local bookstores, but while you can remove risk from a particular part of a system, that risk is always offloaded elsewhere. Companies with these big data systems have the ability to push risk onto the other companies in the system.
The example Jaron uses that is easiest to understand is healthcare, particularly insurance. Essentially, with enough data, insurance providers can insure people right to the point of predictable illness and then cut care, thereby transitioning risk to the public sector. If you look at this situation from the perspective of the shareholder, that's fucking awesome, but if you look at it in a larger societal context, the public is paying for the insurance companies profits.
In short, there's a lot of information asymmetry in the world. This asymmetry is the new definition of power. Even if you think Jaron is an idiot, this is a profound point.
Who will earn wealth?
This goes back to PG's Wealth essay[1] -- his daddy view of wealth, where wealth is something finite, and we as a society must share it. This is incorrect, for wealth isn't a thing, it's a large amount of something else.
Wealth is what we create when we build and improve things. Your house is a wealth of shelter, and the improvements you've made to it (such as fresh paint, landscaping, and heat), relative to other houses, show your wealth relative to other houseowners.
Money is just an exchanger of wealth -- something we trade with others to facilitate the transfer of wealth from others to ourselves. We earn money by transferring some of our wealth to others, and usually we draw from our wealth of time.
Humans don't need money to survive, so long as they grow their own food and build their own shelters, or have robots do this for them. And humans don't need to buy robots if we can 3d print them. And have solar or other personal power generation facilities on our own land.
Who will create wealth?
Those are the big winners who strike gold on Kickstarter and Youtube. They didn't win because they were "luckier" than us, they won because they were literally better than the rest of us at what they do.
We'll download and print new clothes each day. Who will design them? Who will design new buildings for the robots to build? Who gives robots purpose? For now, humans.
I'm more concerned about the Butlerian Jihad[2] than I am concerned with farming companies hoarding food away from us, which is essentially what the concern here is about -- if we don't have money, how will we buy food?
Only if "more popular = better".
I was more thinking of music where few people would argue that the Top 40 or top YouTube hits represented the tracks with the most "quality".
That's just not true. Are you saying Katy Perry, for example, is better than the rest of musicians at what she does? It's just not true that "success" follows "better than the rest". It trivializes what success is to frame it in that way. There are many, many more factors that contribute to "they won because..." other than being good/better/best.
What made/make those people better? Their drive, their talent, their education? How much of this can you attribute as their merit and how much is actually luck?
I've come to the conclusion that most (an unscientific 99%) of a person's success is due to luck. To me, the biggest evidence of this is: we don't choose where we're born.
The above means that we have no control over what genes we get, as well as our initial social and economical situation, and our general environment. Given that pretty much everything else evolves from there, what can you truly attribute to anything else than luck?
As long as we keep doing things the way we are, every big computer will hide a crowd of disenfranchised people. In the case of translation, the people are translators, and in the case of surgery, someday they will be surgeons.
Eh? The tech that's driving surgeon automation is NOT big data, but robotics. Nothing whatsoever to do with free information, mostly about extremely expensive information, in fact. And then it gets even more strange as he starts pushing micropayments as a remedy for this:
Just because things have a cost, that does not mean they can’t be affordable. To demand that things be free is to embrace an eternal place for poverty. The problem is not cost, but poverty.
Erm, ok. Let's play this through. Let's say that the self-driving car is built upon the bigdata analysis of lots of publically-gathered location and environment data from phones. Which it isn't really, but play along. The self-driving car puts cabbies and truckers out of business and puts them in poverty.
Now, with this micropayments scheme, the self-driving car company has to pay the phone users $0.001 each for the use of their data. And this remedies the situation... how? These itsy bitsy micropayments are going to be spread out across everyone with a phone, i.e. everyone. They wouldn't be enough to live on, or probably even buy a sandwich with. Facebook, which seems to me to get much more valuable data from folks than anyone else, has an ARPU of $4. Four bucks a month, per user. Let's be generous, say we can get folks ten times that. What exactly is $40 a month going to fix? Barely covers your broadband bill!
- Microsoft
- YouTube
- Good old Gov't
- Medical insurance
- Pension funds
=> 9 * 40 = $360 Still not a wage, but nothing to sneeze at.
Not that I believe this is feasible, but it's not just FB collecting massive data and translating it into revenues.
The world described by Lanier is very much one in which people can live without caring about earning money to survive: "subsistence" will be dealt with by robots.
I see that as a liberation.
Of course there are other problems but solving the 'earn money or otherwise live as a pariah/die' seems to me interesting.
Work is much more important for man than a mere means of making money, as I see it. If it is just that (emphasis), then the feeling of slavery must be great.
Which is probably what a lot of people nowadays feel, sadly.
EDIT: [Just not to look too 'asinine']. Obviously I am aware this is utopian. Please bear with me. However, the abstract reflection stands as it is.
And, by the way: it is important to realize that what is 'dirty' for some is 'beautiful' for others. Even law enforcement and (I've lived with one) even 'Administrative Law'. Yes, even pig-herding and trash-cleaning can be seen as 'liberating' works.
It is not what you do: it is what you aim to.
I look forward to the day we can all work on tasks with more purpose.
That's just never, ever going to happen. Never. No one would do the "dirty jobs" if there was no reward for doing so. Take law enforcement for example. Sure, everyone would "play detective" for free, or everyone would be the captain. But who would be the guys who ride in the motorcade to protect a child rapist while he rides to prison? No one would do it "for free". There's too much risk. Who would be a prison guard "for free"? It's absolutely asinine to think that "technology" will progress to a point at which humans are not needed for any menial/dirty/dangerous jobs ever.
Dealing with dirt and feeling it as humiliating is subjective (there are plenty of satisfied janitors and trash-cleaners out there).
Menial does not necessarily mean 'hideous'. There are plenty of happy nurses and people working at hospices.
Serving others can be a real motivator.
I edited my post above just to clarify I am no fool on this.
It's just never, ever going to be possible. Without some payoff for doing a "job", people will not do it.
I think it's about time to start thinking about a society where employment is only available to a small fraction of people. It would be much better to have a controlled, thought out transition than to deny the possibility until we end up with mass unemployment.
The key, as I see it, is to aggressively pursue a more broad distribution of capital, and to move old age/disability safety net programs (and non-elite health insurance) away from the premise that those who will need them will be people whose income is derived largely from labor.
In a sense, this is the "ownership society" that Republicans liked to talk about around the first term of the second Bush Administration, but the actual policies that they pushed (which rewarded current holders of capital and increased the burden on current laborers) were pretty much the exact opposite of what is needed to get there.
There are people who are already advocating for a "guaranteed minimum income" - part of the idea is that if it wasn't so painful to be unemployed, then people would be less likely to oppose automating jobs away.
The post that introduced me to the concept is this one: http://itself.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/from-the-generalized-... . It's a little bit ranty, and I'm not sure it's the best introduction, so if anyone has a better link I'd love to read it.
Yes, I do not understand very much the mechanics of the basic income but the problem I try to think of is not exactly 'have enough money for a decent living', which is serious, but something more abstract: being able to work at what you are good, because you like it, just for that.
Nowadays unemployment is exactly the opposite: being unable to do anything at all. This is a real drama.
As with all analogies, it's not perfect. No one is forcing us to give up our information, we're willingly giving it up for free. However, I can see a future where our data is used in ways we had no intention of allowing and the people in charge of the "big computers" will exploit that data.
Slaves had a capital cost, and for a healthy young male I've read it wasn't small. They then had to be provided with food and shelter, and armed "management". Not sure if it's relevant or not if they got what went for medical care back then, the Civil War is around when antiseptics were getting experimented upon and later accepted. But again note the capital cost.
Which ... Paul Johnson? ... pointed out was unique about the American experience. The 19th century was when slavery and serfdom was technically abolished in much of the world, but the US was the only place where that loss of wealth was not compensated, and the country as a whole suffered from the impoverishment of the South. Then again, a failure to get that right is partly credited with establishing the conditions that lead to the Russian revolution, which was done so badly the Bolsheviks were able to coop that and....
So, substitute "cheap" for "free" labor. One step up from that, but a huge one in principle, was indentured servitude, and today's H-1B visa holders are with some justice often compared to the indentured servants of old.
As you note coercion is not implicated today, but I'd note the vast majority of people don't even realize how much information they're "giving up for free".
True, but you also got new ones for free when your existing slaves had children.
They then had to be provided with food and shelter
... which was provided at the absolute minimum level required to keep them alive. Clapboard shacks and gruel are not exactly expensive.
Not sure if it's relevant or not if they got what went for medical care back then
Medical care? For serious? Slaves cared for each other more than their owners cared for them.
The 19th century was when slavery and serfdom was technically abolished in much of the world, but the US was the only place where that loss of wealth was not compensated, and the country as a whole suffered from the impoverishment of the South.
Blame the slaveholders for that one. Proposals for compensated emancipation were routine in the years leading up to the Civil War. But the slaveholders weren't interested in compromise; they took a hard line against any proposal that involved emancipation, compensated or no. And when it looked like they couldn't hold that line any more, they seceded.
Ugly to discuss this in purely economic terms, but there is an obvious opportunity cost of having a slave woman bear and raise a child to the age where the latter can start working vs. her just working.
And your argument that they got "the absolute minimum level required to keep them alive" is in tension with them getting enough to work productively. As I mentioned in a previous discussion, one of the reasons the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union was that they couldn't provide enough food to e.g. the coal miners of the occupied Lowlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733372
This isn't fatal to whatever your point is, because computers also require the equivalents of these things. Yet...
>However, I can see a future where our data is used in ways we had no intention of allowing and the people in charge of the "big computers" will exploit that data.
So you are claiming that the future will be much like the present?
"The task of "creating jobs", regardless of efficiency, falls to politicians."
Really????
Politicians, on the other hand, see all the people from division Y that are now unemployed and don't have marketable skills. Depending on the industry and locality, increased competitiveness can increase revenue and local spending, keeping a neutral or positive effect on employment rate. But in general, automation is bad for politicians in places that lose jobs. Those politicians are tasked with providing incentives or otherwise stimulating the market to bring jobs back to the region. Efficiency is a second-order effect for politicians: it only matters insofar as it affects the solvency of the company or the ability to keep the local facility running. But many industries have de-facto local monopolies (e.g., due to high cost to enter a local market) or other circumstances such that maximum efficiency for the corporation is not optimal for local politics.
If you want to sell a new technology to a politician, you have to show the new jobs that will grow up around the technology rather than showing the efficiency gains from replacing workers.
The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He predicted devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers would reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class would continue to shrink and the workplace become ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that would create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers
Here is why I think that: when you are required to licence and pay for every little piece of info, it is like licensing pics on site, it makes it extra work just to get everything right, make sure you read all the licences etc. I think this creates barrier and business tends to flow where there are less barriers, and freer flow of information would be more likely to became a norm.
There is nothing villainous in automation. Automation is of great benefit to civilization and makes our lives easier, but it's also moving us into a "post-scarcity" society. We live in an economy that is a mix of capitalism and socialism, with the capitalism driving growth and the socialism providing a safety net, but the capitalism side demands scarcity to thrive. If automation increases unemployment without generating new jobs, our economy and cultural norms will need to undergo a paradigm shift, or wealth and power will be concentrated to the detriment of the majority of people without it.
A much better book on these realities is "Race Against the Machine," which focuses just on the issue of automation without bringing these spurious claims that "free information" is the culprit:
We are not at any acute risk of running out of scarcity. Get back to me when we have conquered the ultimate scarce resource, Time.
This is a Luddite view: you are focusing on the particular form of employment that is made obsolete, while ignoring the bigger picture. Automation puts some people out of work. It also creates jobs for others.
This will not change until we create machines that can not only repair themselves, but also design better versions of themselves. We still need people just to keep software systems running -- if even our software, which is supposedly automating people out of work, needs constant attention from people to keep it in a sane state, what sort of automation do you think is putting us into a post-scarcity society (rather than simply shifting the scarcity around)?
No it isn't. I finely articulated my argument and you chose to focus on one sentence of my post out of context to make my position appear extreme. I agree that automation tends to create jobs, but that is not a law of nature. The combustion engine didn't create more jobs for horses, it dramatically cut their populations. In 1915 there were 21 million domestic horses in America, by 1960 there were 3 million because they were automated out of existence and only remain for recreational use.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=144565
Now let's take one of Lanier's examples:
"Here’s a current example of the challenge we face... At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?"
So my honest question is this: How did digital photography, which put 140,000 people out of work and, as Yahoo's CEO correctly notes, eliminated the business of professional photography, create more jobs than it eliminated? How does an ATM machine, which replaces a dozen bank tellers, create more jobs than it eliminates? How does a shopping website, which eliminates a dozen local small businesses, create more jobs than it eliminates?
I want to believe this is all going to turn out okay, but I'm also watching private companies making record profits and the stock market shooting for the moon while unemployment numbers remain unchanged. I don't know how we are going to correct this or if our worldviews will allow us to even consider it a problem. We can't just dismiss anyone who points out these market shifts as a "luddite" and move on.
It put 140k involved in the film photography industry out of work. We still have professional photographers (now using digital cameras), and the demand for CCDs and technologies related to digital photography created jobs in the semiconductor industry. The uses of digital photographs for online businesses (like Facebook) has helped to create jobs in that industry. Many people switched to GMail because of the large amount of mail storage it offers, in part because of the space that high-resolution digital images require -- and thus many jobs at Google have resulted. Think of all the people who had to work to expand network capacities, expand storage capacities, and the various services involved with that, to meet the demand of people who send and receive digital photos and videos. A text-only Internet, or an Internet where the only graphics were cartoons, would not have required nearly as much capacity as today's Internet requires, nor would a cell phone network that only carries voice calls or sends text messages.
Digital cameras are not just film camera replacements. A digital camera enables ways of using photos and videos that were substantially harder (or even impossible) with film. You cannot truly believe that something like Youtube would have become popular if people did not have an easy way to record and upload videos. You cannot believe that Facebook would have been a hit if people did not have an easy way to take their own picture.
"How does a shopping website, which eliminates a dozen local small businesses, create more jobs than it eliminates?"
Who packs the site's shipments into boxes and onto trucks? Who builds the site's computers? Who mines the silicon and rare earths used to make those computers? Who maintains the communications systems that enable you to buy things online?
This argument is no different from stage coach drivers who complained about how railroads were killing their business. It is the argument the Luddites made when they smashed industrial equipment.
"I want to believe this is all going to turn out okay, but I'm also watching private companies making record profits and the stock market shooting for the moon while unemployment numbers remain unchanged."
Much like the unemployment of blacksmiths. If people lack the skills needed for this day and age -- if they do not know how to use computers effectively or competitively -- then of course they are going to be unemployed. The unemployment rate for programmers and computer scientists is about one-fifth that of the general population. People need computer programmers, not film photographers or local shop keepers.
Look, I am all for criticizing capitalism, but your criticisms are all wrong. You are complaining about the progress of technology. You are complaining about the fact that I can record a video of the local cops beating up a black guy and within minutes have the rest of the world seeing what I see. Why not instead ask this: why, when new technology doubles the productivity of a single person, do we double our expectations of what that person can do? If one person can do as much as two people, why do we fire half the work force, instead of halving the number of hours we expect people to work? I am not saying this is necessarily a solution, but it is a better question to ask than, "Where did all those Kodak jobs go?"
He rightly raises concerns about how our roles/jobs/lives will change in the future.
But, I am much more bullish with developments like decentralized currencies, micro loans and other new banking models, advances in clean energy technology, and possibly even remote space colonies in the not too far distant future.
In this future, I imagine more opportunities for individuals.
That is quite a thesis. In reality, however, if everyone starts charging companies in currency to collect information, only the Big Companies will be able to afford it, exacerbating the problem Lanier rails against.
I really dislike it when 'visionaries' declare doom at a period's inception.