Who Owns the Future? (37 page)

In a humanistic digital economy, the economy will be more ambient, and designers will still make a living, even when a dress is sewn in a home by a robot. Someone who wears the dress well might also make a little money inadvertently by popularizing it.

There will also presumably be new wants/needs appearing on the horizon into the future without end. Who can say what they will be? In addition to recipes to be mixed by artificial glands, there might be genetic modifications to make space travel more enjoyable, or neural patterns to excite special capabilities in your brain, such as an increased aptitude for math.

Whatever may come, if the control of it can be transmitted on a network as information, then there will be a choice about whether to monetize that information. Even if the idea of money becomes obsolete, the choice will remain of whether the distribution of clout and influence will be centralized or proximate to the people who are the origin of value. That choice will remain the same no matter which science fiction technologies come about.

If the answering of wants or needs is to be instead
demonetized
except for the central, all-seeing Siren Server, then both capitalism
and democracy will gradually grind to a halt with the advancement of digital technology.

Nothing More to Offer?

“Won’t the cloud be trained enough eventually to forever-after do things like translate between English and Chinese, or to customize a robot-built house properly? After some future date no one will need to be paid much anymore to keep the cloud competent at serving us.”

An addled and useless, leech-like and lecherous humanity drearily lives off the legacy machines set in motion long ago by ancestors. This was the premise of Wells’s
The Time Machine
and Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”

Admittedly, some well-established cloud services will gradually become less dependent on the fresh contributions of living people. There are cloud services that one can imagine becoming well enough automated by some date, and allowed to run on autopilot thereafter, generating royalties for no one. A time might come when enough old English/Chinese translations have been observed to drive new translations for the foreseeable future.

Here the key observation is that there is no absolute measure for the value of something in a marketplace. The whole point of a market is to allow prices to emerge in context. It isn’t shocking for a movie star to earn a huge paycheck for offering very few lines in a movie. It is reasonable to guess that some action movie stars have earned about a million dollars per grunt on occasion. If it turns out that someone’s grunt is worth a million dollars in just the right circumstances, then that’s the value of the grunt.

Someday it might be the case that your offhanded grunt helps an automated assistant interact more successfully with grumpy people. Decades or centuries from now, when the global or interplanetary cloud algorithms for language translation are so refined that there’s only very occasional room for improvement, your grunt might turn out to be worth a million dollars. It might sound strange today, but imagine how strange it would sound to a hunter-gatherer from
thirty thousand years ago that a star’s grunt on a movie screen would be worth a million dollars today.

Actually, if cloud algorithms ever seem to come to rest and need little tending, that should be taken as a danger sign. In that eventuality, stasis would be an indication that people have allowed themselves to be overly defined and guided by old software and have stopped changing, or to put it another way, have stopped living fully.

Living languages ought to require continued examples from living people in order for automated translation services to stay up to date. If the cloud has learned all it will ever need to learn to translate between English and Chinese, it means those languages have become fixed.

People ought to be in the driver’s seat and not allow the network to define and capture a language for all time. A humanistic economy would remove moral hazards that might incentivize artificial language stasis, and other similar traps.

If a language translation service becomes so refined that it requires only one one-hundredth of the data gathering it did in its early years, just to keep up to date with new expressions, then that service should not be surprised to pay a hundred times more for a given amount of the latest data it requires.

I expect to hear familiar objections. For instance, if only a very small number of people are contributing to a mature cloud service, then wouldn’t the middle-class bell curve distribution of rewards be ruined? It isn’t strange to hear this anxiety from a neo-Marxist who distrusts capitalism in all cases, but I often hear it from cyber-libertarians who only become skeptical when ordinary people might be the beneficiaries of an information economy.

It seems to me that any market economy takes the risk that a preponderance of people will turn out to be uncreative, lazy, antisocial, or otherwise dysfunctional. In order to accept the very idea of markets for ordinary people, you have to somehow find faith that people you would never suspect of having anything to offer will keep on showing up out of the blue to offer value you never suspected could exist. I can’t prove that faith is justified, but it’s what we have to work with if we want to create a market system where
people are free agents. The question we
can
address is whether the overall game is rigged to allow them to do that or not, presuming they can and want to.

Should a day arrive when it really becomes true that very few people are able to offer anything of value to anyone else—if everything becomes automated to the point that almost no one is really needed, but only needs—then obviously the very idea of a market must be retired.

I see no evidence to support that dark fear.

To the Dead Their Due

Suppose an information society is based on individuals accruing multitudinous, diverse, tiny flows of royalties, and that these build into a new kind of more organic “middle-class levee” system. What happens when someone dies?

Do the flows stop? Do they go to a general fund, to taxes? To charity? Would the dues to the dead eventually outpace dues to the living, and even then continue to grow until the living were squeezed out of the economy, just like the poor are today? Or might a system of cyber-inheritance lead to a new kind of plutocracy?

A primary advantage of a more generally monetized information economy is that levees are built up gradually instead of in all-or-nothing, career-making quantum leaps. That means that we needn’t import the old limitations from eras that were hobbled by cruder information technologies. The levees can be eroded after death as smoothly as they were built up, instead of being breached in an instant.

The dues to the dead can be rolled off according to a smooth function. At first, some money can flow to descendants, but the amount can taper off, so that the grandchildren will have to learn to earn their keep more and more as they grow up.

On the whole, the total due to the dead would taper off, so that the ghosts of the future’s Beethovens, Edisons, and Shakespeares will not hog all wealth forever.

Tapering addresses one of the passions of copyright reformers.
By making copyright and related benefits taper off, the problem of orphaned or inaccessible works ceases to be a dilemma. The use of the work of the dead gradually becomes less and less expensive, until it’s free or virtually free. Our present all-or-nothing way of dealing with intellectual property prompts high-stakes end-of-term games that always leave someone unhappy. Tapering will make reasonable compromise predictable and normal.

CHAPTER 23

Big Business

What Will Big Companies Do?

Even stranger than the question about what ordinary people would do is the question “What would big companies do?” Some of the people who ask this question are the usual ultra-cyber-idealists. In their view, the great institutions of today, whether governments, churches, banks, or giant Internet corporations, will simply blur into nothingness. In their places there would only be spontaneous, instant outbursts of coordination as needed: the occasional Kickstarter barn-raising to initiate a Martian colony, for instance.

There are many reasons to doubt this point of view, even though it is often presented with great purity of heart. There is often a lefty undercurrent of thinking that a utopian information economy ought to mean the end of big institutions, including corporations. I often find I am introduced at lectures as being “anticorporate,” perhaps because I have what at one time would have been countercultural hair. The truth is that I find big companies to be essential, and have enjoyed working with them. I have helped to create startups that are now parts of Oracle, Adobe, Pfizer, and Google.

Working in Microsoft’s research labs has been great fun in part because of the Kinect project. Thousands of people were needed to bring what we once upon a time called an “avatar camera” to market for the first time and to promptly sell tens of millions of them. It was the selling of tens of millions that facilitated a spontaneous hacker community of thousands to create hacks. To pretend that a bottom-up approach by itself could have done the same is nuts.

The future is not predictable enough to know what kinds of big,
inherently top-down jobs will need to get done, but it is extremely unlikely that there will be none. Big data requires big data centers, and big companies build them. Some new niches for big companies are suggested by the notion of a humanistic digital economy, such as the commoditized decision reduction services to be described later on. Other futuristic candidates for jobs for big companies are stabilization of the climate, repositioning earthquakes,
*
or creating launch structures that make space access inexpensive.
^†

*
Gluing existing faults and using explosives to open up new ones in less destructive locations, such as in the oceans, might accomplish this. Yes, this is one of my crazy, speculative side projects.

†
In a humanistic economy, big companies would trade within the chain of commerce just as they do today. Big companies should do better in the world proposed here, not only because the economy would be expanding but because regulation in a high-tech information economy would be more readily expressed incrementally instead of in big, unpredictable, punitive chunks.

Big companies are the flywheels and ballast of a market economy, creating a degree of stability. (To put it in geekspeak, they act as lowpass filters.) The resulting lessened turbulence will always annoy the most peripatetic and impatient young innovators, but it also makes it easier for most people in most phases in life to understand and navigate the economic environment.

The Role of Advertising

The dominant current business plan for consumer networking is advertising. What would the role of advertising be in a humanistic information economy?

Advertising can be manipulative, sneaky, and a maddening source of distortions. It is also purely human, a part of us we couldn’t remove any more easily than we could sever our limbs.

In a cab in New York City, some sweaty summer day in the 1990s, a cloying, intrusive jingle blared from the radio. “Can you turn the radio down, please?” Was I heard? Louder. “Turn the radio down, driver, please!” It was an ad for a chain of furniture stores. A percussive Pakistani accent penetrated the barrier between driver
and passenger, “Mister, when you own your own cab you can turn the radio off. This is my cab, not yours. Stop shouting at me.”

Then it hit me. That was
me
playing the annoying melody on the flute. My friend Mario Grigorov, a soundtrack composer, and I picked up jingle work from time to time. We had produced this one for an ad agency a year ago, and I remembered we had to go back and forth many times to please the client—to make sure the music was sufficiently piercing to ruin the precious solitude one might hope to enjoy in a cab on a sweltering day.

Advertising was one of the main business plans of the age of mass media from well before the appearance of digital technology, and there is no reason to expect it to disappear as technology evolves. In fact, advertising ought to be celebrated for the starring role it has played—for centuries—in the onset of modernity. Ads romanticized progress. Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits.

It bothers me that link placement in search engines and social networks is called “advertising” in the online world. That is at most a tactical sort of advertisement, but it’s more a form of direct micromanagement of the options in front of a person from moment to moment. Real advertising romanticizes the offerings of people to each other. This is usually called “brand advertising” these days, but romantic—or if you prefer, heroic—advertising isn’t limited to brands.

Brand advertising is what Apple did, for instance, in huge outlays for TV, billboards, and print in order to introduce a product like the iPad. Tactical link placement of the kind pioneered by Google could not have accomplished that. Instead, such links, placed for pay in front of your eyes, might influence where you buy something like an iPad. It remains a bit of a mystery how to best transfer true brand advertising from TV, billboards, or steaming New York City taxicabs into the frenetic jumble of online experience.

My purpose here is not to dictate what a utopia would be like, but I imagine that a romantic, stylish form of advertising will continue to be a central part of human experience in any advanced economy. I am a little less sanguine about paid link placement. Our online world should function well enough that we see the best links as a matter of course.

CHAPTER 24

How Will We Earn and Spend?