Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

it optimizes its environment—changes it—instead of changing in order to ad...

A successful Siren Server no longer acts only as a player wit...

Instead it becomes a central planner. This makes it stupid, like a central planne...

Instead it’s a dangerous temptation dangled by Moore’s Law—a temptation we must learn to resist.

These engender failures of the classical economic models, which had been based on competitions between multitudes of players with distinct and limited information positions.

using cloud computer analysis to mostly insure people who didn’t need insurance,

Instead, the economies in which finance and insurance could exist in the first place were weakened.

all Siren Servers as currently construed are likely to eventually falter in similar ways.

Google might eventually become an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, un...

This would happen when so many goods and services become software-centric, and so much information is “free,” that there is nothing left to advert...

Google’s lifeblood is information put online for free. That is what Google’s servers organize. Thus Google’s current business model is a trap in the long term.

The Local/Global Flip also reduces the number of available business plans.

It is pathetic that Google and Facebook, two companies offering very different services, already have to compete over approximately the same customers.

Siren Servers Think the World Is All About Them

the fantasy of being able to accomplish global optimization. It is an illusion.

when I speak to the proprietors, they claim they are optimizing what is spent where in “the world.”

The conceit of optimizing the world is self-serving and self-deceptive.

The optimizations approximated in the real world as a result of Siren Servers are optimal only from the p...

For someone who has scaled a peak, that peak becomes the known world. It becomes hard to remember tha...

the prevalence of vain selective blindness in the assessment of peaks already ...

A derivatives fund manager will suffer the illusion that the fund has brought maximum optimization and risk management to the world. A social network owner will believe that his bu...

What is a market supposed to optimize for? In some abstract sense, a market ought to optimize for efficiency, but market efficiency is a subjective idea.

When it comes to Siren Servers, efficiency is a synonym for how well a server is influencing the human world to align with its own model of the world.

the big data way of stating the fundamental ambiguity of artificial intelligence. We can’t tell how much of the success of an AI algorithm is due to people changing themselves to make it seem successful. People have repeatedly proven adaptabl...

If we are to adhere to the most bloodless abstractions, such as efficiency only as measured from a ...

then a more “efficient” economy would shrink compared to a les...

only one peak, or a single equilibrium, then we might believe that any deviation from the top of this foothill would be a rejection of efficiency and rationality.

Whatever it is we want the mechanism of a marketplace to achieve for us, we will not find the highest peaks if we organize markets to radiate risk and become deterministic accumulators of power around a small number of dominant computing nodes. Too little is learned through that process.

Marvin was astonishingly gracious and generous to me, yet another young weirdo to be taken under wing.

Inside those buildings a ferocious new flavor of intellectual life crouched and glowed.

The nerd assault on everyone else’s reality was just beginning.

including what were probably multiple grand pianos, judging from the shapes of paper mountains.

The scent of aging paper and machine oil.

Fill a small city with top scientists and engineers to make the first really good artificial hearts for some rich guys. Sure there are some interesting projects already going on . . . but small-scale efforts are taking much too much time. Spare no expense! Get it right!

the prices will collapse like they always do. Not long after that, everyone will benefit. What’s killing millions of people is that we’re so squeamish about letting rich people be rich.”

the same reason it didn’t happen with computers. There’s more money to be made selling many millions of cheap things than a few expensive things.”

if the government hadn’t sponsored the start of computer science, computers might have been much more tightly controlled by the first companies.”

The bottom line is that the sooner the technology for a reliable artificial heart is created, the sooner people will benefit from it,

The delay from your social squeamishness is going to waste much more time than it would take for...

Why do you want those millions of people to die so you can have y...

Finally talked out, we didn’t go to sleep, but c...

The feeling of being a techie on the verge of escaping limits is ecstatic, manic, and irresistible. Not only did I feel it intensely, but I also learned to convey it to others.

This idea of “any” is treacherous and deceptive, but I didn’t yet know that.

but I know that meaning comes from struggle with constraints.

Meaning is when creativity has ...

Ultralight, friction-free moments in life are wonderful, but not as f...

The very idea of the computer is that it’s the “general” machine, in that “any” program can be run. That turns out not to be so in practice, even though we often can’t help ourselves and still pretend it is. As we run our lives through computers more and more, we mus...

the work of a composer named Conlon Nancarrow.

Nancarrow started out as a trumpeter and student composer from Depression-era Oklahoma. He volunteered to fight against the fascist Franco regime in Spain, joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was composed of lefty Americans before America entered World War II. Nancarrow was later denied reentry to the United States, and was bizarrely deemed “prematurely anti-Fascist.”

Why must rhythms be organized from regular beats? Why not use irrational numbers* in time signatures, or have sheets of rhythm speed up and slow down, coming in and out of synch, the way waves do in nature?