Who Owns The Future?

by Jaron Lanier

Throughout human history, humans have been their own worst enemies, and whenever someone is oppressing someone else, the oppressor seeks to control the tools of communication.

Because digital technology is still somewhat novel, it’s possible to succumb to an illusion that there is only one way to design it.

The disruption and decentralization of power coincides with an intense and seemingly unbounded concentration of power.

People are created equal, but computers are not. A top computer can bring limitless wealth and influence to that lucky computer’s owner and the onset of insecurity, austerity and unemployment for everyone else.

Since networking got cheap and computers became enormous, the financial sector has grown fantastically in proportion to the rest of the economy, even though it has done so by putting the rest of the economy at increased risk. This is precisely what happens naturally, without any evil plan, if you have a more effective computer than anyone else in an open network. Your superior calculation ability allows you to choose the least risky options for yourself, leaving riskier options for everyone else.

Back at the dawn of personal computing, the ideal that drove most of us was that computers were tools for leveraging human intelligence to ever-greater achievement and fulfillment.

In order to make tech into something that empowers people, people have to be willing to act as if we can handle being powerful.

If we demand free services in the present, we must also learn that we’ll actually pay a price for them in the future. We must demand an information economy in which a rising tide raises all boats, because the alternative is an unbounded concentration of power. A surveillance economy is neither sustainable nor democratic.

When will we grow proud enough to be a match for our own inventions?

Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they do, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.

The wise course is to consider in advance how we can live in the long term with a high degree of automation.

Popular digital designs do not treat people as being ‘special enough.’ People are treated as small elements in a bigger information machine, when in fact people are the only sources or destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all. My goal is to portray an alternate future in which people are treated appropriately as being special.

This is a book about futuristic economics, but it’s really about how we can remain human beings as our machines become so sophisticated that we can perceive them as autonomous.

No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused.

So we begin with the simple question of how to design digital networks to deliver more help than harm in aligning human intention to meet great challenges.