Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

We believe that all this work will make the future better than the past. The negative side effects, we are convinced, will not be so bad as to make the whole project a mistake. We keep pushing forever forward, not knowing quite where we are going.

It's missing the dimension of possibility through communication

Whatever you think of Pascal, Kirk’s Wager is actually a good bet.

The best way to defend it is to assess the alternatives, which I will do in the coming pages.

The core of my dispute with many of my fellow technologists is that I think they’ve swit...

They still want to build the starship, but with Kirk evicted from the captain’s chair at...

we technologists don’t usually feel a need to talk about our psychological motiva...

Technologists have less motivation to talk about these things because we don’t have a problem with patronage.

the cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic ideas of scientists are a public conversation, while technologists use the rather large slice of public attention we attract primarily for the purpose of promoting our latest offerings.

This situation is more than a little perverse, since the motivating ideas in the heads of technologists have a far greater effect on the world than the ideas that scientists talk about when they exceed the boundaries of their expertise.

The actions of the technologist change events directly, not just indirectly,

the nontechnical ideas of scientists influence general trends, but the ideas of technologists create facts on the ground.

The Technology of Ambient Cheating

Siren Servers do what comes naturally due to the very idea of computation.

it closely approximates a deterministic, non-entropic process.

*A rare experimental machine called a “reversible” computer never forgets, so that any computation can be run backward as well as forward. Such devices run cool! This is an example of how thermodynamics and computation interact.

as much heat;

forgetting radiates randomness, which is the same thing as heating...

There is a fundamental problem with transposing that plan to economics: A marketplace is a system of competing players, each of whom would ideally be working from a different, but not ...

While it technically need not be so, the Internet is being used to force local players to lose what used to be local information-access advantages.

This problem is related to historic problems that motivated antitrust regulation but it is also distinct.

an automated, sterile “unintentional manipulation” that seems external to human agency and therefore is above the law.

Owning a top server on a network is like collecting rent...

Traditionally, market positions are set to compete in a ps...

the perspective of a single player,

Which is a fiction anyway - even in a communist regime with a centralized directorship.

The rise of top servers as businesses amounts to an ironic intellectual turnaround that gets a pass when it shouldn’t.

On the one hand, it is fashionable to overly praise automatic, evolutionary processes in the computing cloud and to underplay the capabil...

the very success of these businesses is based precisely in reducing the degree of evolutionary competition in a market.

Individuals are to be underappreciated unless they are connected to the biggest computers on the ’net, in which case they are to be overappreciated.

You can think of a marketplace as a form of what’s called an optimization problem.

This is the kind of problem where you figure what set of conditions leads to a most desired outcome.

a shower with only hot and cold knobs. Then you can’t set the qualities you want directly.

This leads to the idea of a very “high-dimensional” problem, like a shower with many millions of knobs. Dimensions are a way of thinking about the conditions you are able to set.

A picture of the range of outcomes is sometimes called an “energy landscape” because of the cliffs and peaks.

The overwhelming practical issue is that when you have millions of “shower knobs,” you can’t readily calculate the ideal positions for them all.

You can only make progress by starting at one point on the landscape and then tweaking inputs incrementally to see if the goal you seek seems to be furthered. You crawl on the landscape instead of leaping.

You can’t really explore every combination of shower knob positions in advance because that would take much too long.

Evolution is dealing with many billions of “knobs” in genomes.

If some new genetic variation reproduces a little more, it gets emphasized.

The process is incremental, because there isn’t an alternative when the landscape gets extremely big and complicated.

Except thought and modeling

The eternal frustration is that incremental exploration might lead up to a nice high peak, but an even higher peak might exist across a valley.

Evolution takes place in millions of species at once, so there are millions of explorations of the peaks and valleys. This is one reason why biodiversity is so important.

Biodiversity helps evolution be a broader explorer of the gigantic hidden landscape ...

marketplace is similar to evolution,

A multitude of businesses coexist in a market, each like a species, or a mountaineer on an imaginary landscape, each trying different routes.

eccentricities of mou...

finding higher peaks that would otherwise rema...

not only have different information to work with, but also different natures.

The overlap on the former could be nearly identical, while the latter, in terms of subjectivity, are singularly nonoverlapping...

even if that one player has raided all the others of their private information.

How 'personal' does Lanier see information? Interesting opening for conversation..

The variations that make different players in a market importantly different aren’t fully expressible within a single Siren Server.

Yes... And yet, cybernetic totalism would seek to model every potential modeler...

A crowd of mountaineers who are all using the same guidebook will tend to swarm together and discover less overall.