Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

the sources of value, whatever they may be, are left more off-the-books than they used to be, but we end up in control o...

serving increasingly as nodes in a scheme

Physicians should be empowered by networked information, but instead they are constrained

why should it have been their job to worry about that?

who in humanity is concerned with this

undermines the very idea of markets and capitalism.

Instead of economics being about a bunch of players with unique positions in a market, we devolve toward a small number of spying operations in omniscient positions, which means ...

the same principles of how human clout is expressed and constrained by digital networks would overwhelm or flatter the surprised participants.

whether there are new options for solutions available now

a real-world, “brick and mortar” concern

driven by real-time data and enormous amounts of computation well in advance of

vastly more inscrutable even than the Soviet Union.

Instead, Wal-Mart’s servers helped coordinate the demand side of the rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse.

So Siren Servers can achieve good. My argument is not that Siren Servers always do harm.

great good in the short term.

We are, however, using the power of networks to optimize for the ...

The company became a sculptor if its own environment.. indirect spying sets prices so you as a supplier just gets by

by collecting a lot of such information in one place, an overall, global picture emerged.

The company gradually became the sculptor of its own environment.

dictate price and delivery targets, with the reduced risk and...

decreed a price for our product that doesn’t allow us to pay you as much as you want.

Wal-Mart had calculated a pretty good guess before you showed up about what everyone’s real bottom lines would be.

you would realize that you could (barely) accept ...

Wal-Mart didn’t need to get direct information about everyone in the loop. A sampling of information about a system is good enough to form an approximate model of that system. That means that someone can be indirectly spied on without any information about that person being gathered directly. Instead, the behaviors of those who interact with a ...

too late. Wal-Mart had already repatterned the world, giving itself a special place in it.

The supply chain had become optimized to deliver to Wal-Mart’s door.

I see a collective mistake rather than a class of villains.

Everyone else’s margins got slammed to the bare minimums.

like playing blackjack with an idiot savant who can’t hel...

Walmart irony

In the network age there can be collusion without colluders, conspiracies...

Wal-Mart plays a role in the reduction of employment prospects for the very people who tend to be its

moved manufacturing to any spot in the world that could accomplish it at the very lowest

making economic activities more efficient ought to increase opportunity for everyone in the longer

you can’t really compare the two sides

only if we don’t remove massive amounts of value from our ledgers.

Saving is not equivalent to earning

So: If you already have enough to live on, saving some money on a purchase is a nice perk. But if you haven’t reached that threshold, or if you had been there but lost your perch, then

saving is not the equivalent of making;

You can never save enough to get ahead if you don’t have adequa...

What the siren server says

No amount of cost lowering can foster economic dignity when it also means that there are fewer good jobs.

All Siren Servers deliver dual messages similar to the pair pioneered by Wal-Mart. On the one hand, “Good news! Treats await! Information systems have made the world more efficient for you.” On the other hand, a little later: “It turns out you, your needs, and your expectations are not maximally efficient from the lofty point of view of our server. Therefore, we are reshaping the world so that in the long term, your prospects are being reduced.”

you loved getting music for free, but then realized that you couldn’t pursue a music career yourself

Financial siren servers

quants

schemes were for the first time able to exceed the pre-digital limitations of human deception.

do well to read up on these rehearsals of our current global troubles.

concentrate wealth while at the same time causing volatility and trauma for ordinary people,

interesting that the lost regulations dated from market failures of old,

I worry that regulators might be inclined to look only backward.

quants sipping expressos. breaking

had many long conversations about the statistics and the architectures.