This. Lanier is making provocative statements in order to get attention for his book. Whether or not these positions are sincere, I have no idea. It smells like advertising.
Most of the information is voluntarily given and money is worthless in the hands of a very few. In the foreseable future someone will draw users with some kind of financial compensation and things will swing back the other way.
I really dislike it when 'visionaries' declare doom at a period's inception.
When I read an article like this, I try to think of any analogous situations in history and I can't help but think this is similar to a time when, especially in the South, labor was essentially free. Wealth and land were largely concentrated in the elite and until the labor was no longer free, concentrations of wealth continued to increase.
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.
This must be some new definition of the word free I wasn't previous acquainted with.
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".
Slaves had a capital cost, and for a healthy young male I've read it wasn't small.
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
Labor wasn't free in the prewar South. There are costs associated with maintaining slaves. To be effective laborers they required feeding, housing, and clothing, and their acquisition wasn't cheap either!
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?
He talks about technology eliminating (some) jobs at the start, which is true enough, but then there's a strange handwavy bit where people ponying up their information to bigdata providers makes wealth more concentrated and rots social mobility.
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!
In the industrial age people argued the same thing about factories and all the factory workers. This is the dawn of the information age, look what we're arguing about and look how history has shown us this isn't the problem we think it is.
Don't draw lines through one data point. We have no idea which features of economic disruptions of this scale are general and which are incidental. What we do know is a large, prosperous middle class is a historical aberration. It also seems that automation has little in common with mechanization, because automation replaces mental labor. It is not obvious that new industries will create more employees than they replace. Perhaps new industries will advance in lock-step with new automation systems. Gregory Clark compares the modern worker not to farmers before the industrial revolution, but to horses before the widespread adoption of the car. The 'wages' of the workhorses fell below subsistence level. Perhaps the wages of people will, too.
In the long run, different people reap the benefits. I don't see his proposed solution as practical, but denying the problem won't make it disappear. My understanding of the thesis is that large groups of people will be left with only obsolete marketable skills in the not distant future: 5-10 years. I think a historical study of what large populations without work does to society does not argue for optimism about that trend.
[edited because I should know better than to post from my phone as I'm getting off the bus.]
I thought this was a provocative read. I like looking at big picture concepts and theories. I have had similar concerns but am still a firm believer in free information. But I am reconsidering the parameters of this relationship.
>A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of information sharing
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.
Technology has been putting people out of work for millennia. In the process, sometimes it makes new industries (new, but different, jobs), other times it just makes existing industries leaner and more efficient (fewer jobs, but all involved have to optimize to compete, and the resources are freed up to create something new elsewhere). Market forces are never purely to "create jobs", they are to create new or better products more efficiently. The task of "creating jobs", regardless of efficiency, falls to politicians.
It was partly snark, but I think there is some truth to it. A company says "we automated process X, improving quality, reducing production time, and cutting costs by consolidating the Y division" (where Y may be the "grunt work" that was automated, or perhaps less direct---an industry that depended on having warm bodies doing task X). This is considered an unambiguous win in the commercial sector because it makes the company more competitive/profitable.
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.
I am reading his book at the moment. While he brings a lot of good points, I don't think he is correct. His criticism is spot on, there will be a lot of turbulence and not everyone will be able to get a job. But I don't think solution would be what he is suggesting that we get paid for information.
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.
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?
Unfortunately, the grandparent didn't emphasize the "at what they do". They are literally better at being more popular and figuring out how to get people to give them money than the rest of us. This may not be "better" in the engineering sense, and it may be undesirable in the abstract or ethical sense, but it is the differentiator that separates them from "the rest of us".
There's a strong chaotic component to mass popularity, so arguably there isn't even a meritocracy of people who are good at becoming popular, among popular people.
> they won because they were literally better than the rest of us at what they do
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.
Katy Perry is not as technically capable as some other musicians. Yet she is more popular than them. Which is she trying to do, make music or be famous?
I'm arguing that you and I believe Katy Perry has different objectives. You believe she's trying to be an excellent musician, and you're irritated that she's much more popular than superior musicians. I believe she's trying to be popular, and music (err...just performing really) is the tool she's using to make other people like her.
> 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.
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?
Free information is mentioned by title all over, but he describes only the most constrained examples. There is no mention of p2p networks that could provide alternatives to the behemoths of today.
Lanier would like to make a living as a musician the old-fashioned way, by selling albums through the music industry.
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.
Wow, that's not at all what Jaron is talking about, at least from my perspective.
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.
But he doesn't seem to have an appreciation that these trends aren't new or any idea for how to solve it.
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's argument is that you should get paid for your job even if it doesn't suck. We've kind of forgotten about this idea and now we only pay people for things we think of as work. In reality, social networks would have no value without curation, and thus all of the wealth that's created on Facebook should actually belong to the individuals who created this massive information store. It is ironic that Big Data is impossible without humans, and yet, Big Data is almost invariably wielded as a weapon against humanity (particularly in the case of the ridiculous insurance positions which Jaron compares to a risk-focused version of Maxwell's demon).
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.
This is a much better characterization of Jaron's position AFAICT. His notions on middle class are deeply rooted in an economic theory of wealth distribution which is what we have largely today. However it is clear that technology, and information products in particular, are changing the wealth distribution significantly. Combined with observations that corporations in tech share their wealth more widely and you get a community which is distinctly biased toward the 'wealthy' end of the curve with a smaller middle class. Jaron is concerned how that plays out economically.
To me, Jaron's arguing for a robust middle class seems more like an opportunistic smoke screen than the actual core of his argument.
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?
But hardwiring micropayments would probably be an equitable distribution of wealth, at least more so than what we do now. And it resolves the privacy concern; if I can pay you for access to your information and I want it, I can, but if you price your information beyond what I'm willing to pay you get privacy.
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.
I saw Jaron speak last week. My biggest takeaway from his talk was his thought on asymmetric information relationships.
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.
Mine is a short reflection but I crave for the day in which all human beings will be able to work for free, not for money. And then, they will rediscover the interest of art, handcraft, music, conversation, philosophy.
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.
If I didn't need to support my wife (who works as a nanny) and my mother (who is destitute and relies on me completely for financial support), I'd pack my shit and move to the Bay Area to work on Watsi-esq projects for free.
I look forward to the day we can all work on tasks with more purpose.
Mine is a short reflection but I crave for the day in which all human beings will be able to work for free, not for money.
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.
I get it - you're being all "What if..." It's cool. If you keep going and really think it through, it just breaks down. It breaks down, to pick one of many situations, at the training point for any job that requires study. Take boat captains for example. There are millions of "boat captains" who play at captain on their little 25 foot boat on the weekend. However, to captain a boat containing 500 cargo containers from Asia to San Franscico - that requires months or even years of training. Who would go through such training if the "payoff" only was "I get a free trip to San Franscisco"? Oh sure, maybe you'd find someone who would do it once a year, twice a year but then what? Cargo would stop - if you have 10,000 ships laden with 500 cargo containers leaving Asia every day right now (a guess), where would you find the volunteers? Who would check their backgrounds? Who would be in charge of recruiting new volunteers?
It's just never, ever going to be possible. Without some payoff for doing a "job", people will not do it.
I think you're missing an important factor. Consider how many classes of jobs can be automated away over the next 50 years. Boat captains can easily be one of those. Pervasive automation changes the argument, and the fact is, it's already happening across many industries.
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.
> 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.
Yes, who would ever do something for free like be a firefighter or policeman for free? What an absurd concept - 'volunteer firefighter'. How could such a self-contradictory chimera ever exist? No one ever did anything except for money.
We're clearly already in a transitional time where our society produces much more wealth than we need - so much so that we have to artificially increase consumption in order to keep the gears of capitalism turning.
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.
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.
I appreciate what Lanier is trying to communicate here, but I think he's confusing the issue by trying to tie "free information" into it instead of focusing on what the real concern should be, automation. As programmers, we make it our job to automate people out of employment, replace doctors with Watsons, lawyers with search algorithms, and various clerks and cashiers with ATMs, automated checkouts, and online shopping.
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:
"As programmers, we make it our job to automate people out of employment"
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.
"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.
"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?"
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?"
Lanier sounds like the anti-Kurzweil. Like others, I find his vision of the future too pessimistic and his proposed solution not workable.
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.
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
The free market is running its course. If someone were to create a facebook that pays its users for every bit of info that they upload about themselves, would it reach the same level of popularity? That would depend on social factors and how much a user can earn. I do know that "paid to post" online forums are soulless places with very little actual engagement between users, which is not the case with the facebooks of the world. There does seem to be a perceived trade-off in the social networks; you receive information about your peers for free in return for the information you give up about yourself.
68 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI really dislike it when 'visionaries' declare doom at a period's inception.
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?
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!
- Facebook
- Google
- Microsoft
- YouTube
- Twitter
- Pinterest
- 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
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?
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.
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.
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:
http://mxplx.com/reference/547/
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.
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