Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

Big data can occasionally reverse the sequence and confuse the incentives that have driven science and commerce since the beginnings of each.

The way it worked was approximately this: Each subject was shown a batch of movie clips. Their brain activation patterns were recorded each time. Then, when the person watched a new, previously unseen clip, activation patterns were once again recorded. Then the original clips were mixed into a new clip proportionally, according to how similar the activation pattern for the new clip was to each original clip. With enough previously seen clips mixed together, a fuzzy new clip emerges that does look like what the subject is watching.

it was only the first step of scientific inquiry. It didn’t reveal how the brain codes visual memories. It did achieve something very important, which was that researchers had found a way to measure the brain that was relevant to specific visual cognition.

Science gives up the best punch lines ever, but delivers them with the most inconsistent timing.

We have become used to treating big business data as legitimate, even though it might really only seem so because of its special position in a network.

valid by dint of tautology to an unknowable degree.

It’s hard to tell if a king is wise or feared. Either explanation suffices, on those occasions when what the king predicts is what turns out to happen.

Suppose a book vendor pitches an eBook on a tablet and the user clicks to pay for it. To a degree that might be because the vendor has cloud software that includes a scientifically valid prediction algorithm that has modeled the user correctly. Or it might be because users have been told the algorithms are smart, or maybe the user’s attention is monopolized through a proprietary tablet. Perhaps the user would have equally been ready to buy any number of other books. It’s not easy to tell which cause is more important.

Engineers will tend to assume it’s the smartness ...

In my previous book I described how it’s empirically difficult to distinguish an artificial-intelligence success from people adjusting themselves to make a program look smart.

predicting events that enlighten the human world—while it is actually just proving it has accumulated power, then nothing useful has been accomplished.

This is one of the great illusions of our times: that you can game without being gamed.

it isn’t as if that secret version could be sent to you for review anyway.

It might be a truth that people with bushy eyebrows who like purple toadstools in autumn are more likely to try hot sauce on their mashed potatoes in the spring.

there would never be a purpose to explicitly revealing that such a correlation had been detected.

Big data commercial correlations are almost always eternally hidden; they are no more than tiny atoms of mathematics in the programs that spit out profits or power for certain kinds of cloud-based concerns.

If a particular unexpected correlation were isolated, articulated, and revealed, what use would it be? Unlike an atom of scientific data, it is not rooted in an articulate framework and is not necessarily meaningful in isolation at all.

To the degree big data can seem magical it can also be spectacularly misleading. Is this not clear? Perceiving magic is precisely the same thing as perceiving the limits of your own understanding. When correlation is mistaken for understanding, we pay a heavy price.

The answer is of course that big business data happens to facilitate superquick and vast near-term accumulations of wealth and influence.

A wannabe Siren Server might enjoy honest access to data at first, as if it were an invisible observer, but if it becomes successful enough to become a real Siren Server, then everything changes. A tide of manipulation rises, and the data gathered becomes suspect.

The Server hires mathematicians and Artificial Intelligence experts who try to use pure logic at a distance to filter out the lies. But to lie is not to be dumb.

What is remarkable is not that the same old games people have always played continue to be played over digital networks, but that smart entrepreneurs continue to be drawn into the illusion that this time they’ll be the only one playing the game, while everyone else will passively accept being studied for the profit of a distant observer. It is never so simple.

enjoy the information advantage of being able to do these things to strangers while remaining anonymous.

reporter (in the parent organization of Gizmodo) revealed a ringleader, and that was considered unforgivable.

The desire to manipulate others while remaining invulnerable is just the ordinary person’s way of pretending to...

Whenever you see a den of iniquity on the Web, look closer and you’ll f...

This is an instance in which a classic problem in pre-digital markets should have been put to rest to a significant degree by digital designs.

The supposed transparency of the way we have structured our present information economy turned out to be unusable.

The problem in question is known as the “Market for Lemons,” after the title of the famous paper, which helped earn its author, George ...

That rule supposedly reduced the risk that a supporter would perceive a project to be closer to fruition than it really was.

is it not absurd to deny inventors the ability to show pictures of what they intend to create?

I would like to see Kickstarter grow to be larger than Amazon, since it embodies a more fundamental mechanism of overall economic growth.

at an Amazon-like scale there would inevitably be an even bigger wave of tricksters, scammers, and the clueless to be dealt with.

When Google measures people, and the result has something to do with who gets rich and powerful, people don’t sit around like flu viruses awaiting impartial assessment. Instead they play the game.

In the same way, cloud information generated by people can be perceived either as a valuable resource you might be able to plunder, like a golden vase, or as waves of human behavior, much of it directed against you. From a disinterested abstract perspective, both perceptions are legitimate.

Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something.

Instead of a story of villains, I see a story of technologists and entrepreneurs who were pioneers, challenging us to learn from their results.

My argument is not so much that we should “fight the power,” but that a better way of conceiving information technology would really be better for most people, including those ambitious people who plan to accomplish giant feats. So I am arguing both from the perspective of a big-time macher and from the perspective of a more typical person, because any solution has to be a solution from both perspectives.

As technology advances, Siren Servers will be ever more the objects of the struggle for wealth and power, because they are the only links in the chain that will not be commoditized.

A new energy cycle will someday make oil much less central to geopolitics, but the information system that manages that new kind of energy could easily become an impregnable castle.

The illusory golden vase becomes more and more valuable.

An endgame for civilization has been foreseen since Aristotle.

As technology reaches heights of efficiency, civilization will have to find a way to resolve a peculiar puzzle: What should the role of “extra” humans be if not everyone is still strictly needed?

The same core questions, stated in a multitude of ways, have elicited only a small number of answers, because only a few are possible.

With each passing year our abilities to act on our ideas are increased by technological progress. Ideas matter more and more.

It turns out instead that big data coming from vast numbers of people is needed to make machines appear to be “automated.”

Indefinately?

only because the solution space for how a person can react to accelerating technological change is small.†

Each humor is a trefoil binding politics, money, and technology to the human condition:

the natural world is but a political theater that functions as a remote control of a more significant supernatural world.