Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

the antecedent “goops.”

Maybe a single supergoop would go a long way.

Little blimps that alight on your roof to refill your home printer?

some other imperfection or inconvenience in the cycle will become the nexus of cartel and artificially elevated costs.

no information is packaged with that thing that described how it could best be disassembled into its constituents

to very approximately assess

An object that had been printed will be remembered in the cloud. There will be “deprinters”

unravel the object back to its original goops with precision.

He's kind of being technophillic here... sharing something he's realized, I guess. perhaps it fits back into the main point well, though

separate each striation that originated from a different antecedent goop.

modulo the gotchas

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operation

How could a liberal not like the reduced carbon footprint?

Somehow it’s hard to wrap our heads around a world in which the printers themselves are printed.

well, when you talk about it at the level of printers, yes

coupled with a wave of supposed human obsolescence.

much of the design churn is stupid and pointless,

there will be a stupid cool guitar designer out there who ought to be paid.

Everyone will be dressed exquisitely

kids in those neighborhoods should earn wealth for their fashion trendsetting.

napsterizing teamsters

It’s one of our biggest sources of death and pain.

vehicles wouldn’t have to accelerate from a stop nearly as often.

taking full advantage of the hypothetical bandwidth of the freeway.

If the overall death rate was way down, but accidents when they occurred were more horrific, how would we respond emotionally?

You might be able to drive the car yourself when there’s no one else around, and you can’t kill anyone.

A traditional entry ramp into economic sustenance for fresh arrivals to big cities like New York would be gone.

Whenever an innocent person is killed in an accident involving a cab or a truck, there will be public outrage that human error is still allowed to intrude in its murderous ways to destroy life and love once automated cars become familiar in some guise.

If people are going to be people at all, somebody has to tell the car where to go and something about how to do it,

There has to be some human responsibility,

at least somewhere over t...

Will the rider be compensated beyond a free ride for helping to generate this information? To do otherwise would be considered accounting fraud in a humanistic information economy.

Flattening the city on a hill

middle classes that have already lost their levees

sometimes called the “creative classes.”

A pattern has emerged in which holders of academic posts related to Internet studies tend to join in the acceptance or even the celebration of the decline of the creative classes’ levees. This strikes me as an irony, or an anxious burst of denial.

You can educate yourself without paying a university. All it takes is discipline.

making discipline a little more structured,

Undoubtedly some sort of social coercion site or fantasy game will take off online to help out with the discipline of self-education.

Internet statistics ought to be able to make mincemeat out of old-fashioned degree earning in very short order.

We love those places!

the height of hipness to eschew a traditional degree and unequivocally prove yourself through other means.

the task of building high-tech startups should not be delayed.

Richard Feynman Marvin Minsky

Everyone in the high-tech world appreciates the universities deeply. Yet we are happy to rush headlong into flattening the levees that sustain them, just as we did with music, journalism, and photography.

Factoring the city on a hill

Education in the abstract is not enough

The robotic bedpan

A pharmacology fable that might unfold later this century

End of Vita Bop thought

Will there ever, ever, ever be even the slightest chance that this service will provide even one bit of correct data? There was a tense pause. Was this yet another Asperger’s syndrome–like example of incredible technical intelligence coupled with appalling naïveté about people?

There will never be good data. The whole scheme will run on hope.

Your Lack of Privacy Is Someone Else’s Wealth

actual knowledge brings liabilities.

the pretense that we have a bundle of other people’s secrets is functioning like fine modern

Because spying on you is, for the moment, the official primary business of the information economy, any attempt to avoid being spied on, such as the use of Ghostery,10 can seem like an assault on the very idea of the

Without scrutiny, data isn’t trusted.