Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

its rationale is not only legitimate, but unavoidable.

nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on...

framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions of years.

You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty.

this humor doesn’t have to be violent. I embrace it and practice it myself in a lightened form, which could be called homeopathic.

some Rousseauian fetish in the closet.

I find that digital ways of making music are missing something and I will not let go of that thing.

Is there really something essential and vital about acoustic instruments that computers can’t touch? Another incarnation of Pascal’s bargain presents itself. I don’t really know, but the cost of holding on to my perception of a difference is manageable, while the cost if I let go might be great, even if the resulting amnesia would hide the loss from me.

Thomas Malthus articulated fear of an apocalypse in a naturalistic framework instead of the established supernatural ones.

where our own successes grant us gifts we cannot absorb, leading to catastrophe.

“We’re now reaching a point at which technological progress threatens the very existence of humanity.”

Bill joy is Malthus & Strangelove

A wide variety of Icarusian fates for mankind are never far from our thoughts.

It is wholly natural that, as we humans gain more and more influence over our fates, we accrue an ever-greater variety of ways to commit mass suicide.

Anyone who learns to drive has the power to kill himself at any moment.

While global climate change is in my opinion real, and scary, it is also an inevitable species-wide rite of passage.*

how network architecture might be tweaked to make it easier to confront big challenges like global climate change.

We cannot make the world better through expertise without also creating more and more means for people to destroy the world.

That doesn’t mean increasing expertise is inherently self-defeating!

It is better to have more of a say in our fate, even if that means we...

Growing up is good. What is gained is greater th...

technology always have catches.

After we learn how to survive global climate change, the earth will not be the same place it was before. It will be more artificial, more managed.

It is nothing more than another stage in the adventure that started when Eve bit the apple, which we can also think of as Newton’s apple. (Not to mention Turing’s apple.)

how much of the present-day conversation about economic systems, technology, and personhood was already well worn in the century before last.

Just as Aristotle foresaw!

Luddites were often doing better than their ancestors. And yet their good fortune was terrifyingly fragile.

just as we sometimes fear being locked into a plane more than we fear driving in a car,

Something about becoming part of someone else’s machine was terrifying on a fundamental level. We have never overcome that anxiety.

These old paranoias are typically exhumed these days in order to make the case that there’s nothing to worry about.

“I agree completely that the fears were wrong then and wrong today, in terms of what’s actually true. People are and will always be needed. The question is whether we’ll engage in complete enough accounting so that people are honestly valued. If there’s ever an illusion that humans are becoming obsolete, it will in reality be a case of massive accounting fraud. What we’re doing now is initiating that fraud. Let’s stop.”

Marx was one of the first technology writers.

My wife grew up with it in Minsk, Belarus,

Technological change is unfair, at least in the short term. Can we live with that unfairness?

The descendants of the Luddites are with us today, and work as stockbrokers, personal trainers, and computer programmers. But lately, their adult children are still living at home.

The only position at all that is safe is to be the proprietor of a top node on the network. And even that role cannot stand if it is to be the only secure human role.

subtler problem of “alienation,” a sense that one’s imprint on the world is not one’s own anymore when one is part of someone else’s scheme in a high tech factory.

These concerns are an echo of Marx, almost two centuries later, as information becomes the same thing as production.

What was once a divide between rich and poor evolved into a split between species, and the character of each was debased.

the Eloi undoubtedly felt lucky initially, as free tools helped them crash on each other’s couches more efficiently.

When science fiction turns dark, as in The Time Machine, or the works of Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, it is usually because people have been rendered absurd by technological advancement.

science fiction is fundamentally retro, in that it re-creates the setting of early human evolution, when human character was first formed in a setting where meaning was inseparable from survival.

When science fiction is bright, it brings the gift of helping to sort out

what meaning might be like when people are highly empowered by their inventions.

Optimistic science fiction suggests that we need not create artificial struggles against our own inventions in ord...

new gadgets don’t just result in a more instrumented world, but also in a more moral, fun, adventurous, sexy, and meaningful world.

This silly TV show reflected something substantial and lovely in the culture of technologists better than any other well-known point of reference.

†Star Trek also included artificial intelligence characters, such as the Pinocchio-like Data. The conceit was that Data could not be reproduced. Had there been a billion Datas, his character would have become dull and a threat to humankind, and the whole show turned into a dark tale. It would have become Battlestar Galactica.

There is an interaction between optimism and achievement that seems distinctly American to me, but that might only be because I am an American.

Pascal suggested that one ought to believe in God because if God exists, it will have been the correct choice, while if God turns out to not exist, little harm will have been done by holding a false metaphysical belief. Does optimism really affect outcomes? The best bet is to believe that the answer is “Yes.”

the logic behind it is similar to some of the thought games going on in the minds of technologists.