Who Owns the Future? (45 page)

An online retailer could still compete on pricing, service, user interface and presentation, and all sorts of other things, but it would no longer be profitable to raise prices on those customers who could be predicted to be the easiest victims of a price-gouging ploy. The spy data that would make the targeting of the gambit possible would cost too much. A Siren Server could still make itself better, but it would no longer be profitable to make itself worse. This is an essential benefit of making it cost money to spy on people.

A vendor who finds it worthwhile to use data about you or anyone else would only be able to create a business if the unique value it could add to the data were profitable enough to more than pay for the data. Spy data
in the abstract
would ideally become worthless, because its expenses, in the form of nanopayments out to the people who were measured, would tend to approximately balance the benefits of using it naively.

Using “spy data” will often still make commercial sense, and there will no doubt continue to be controversies about what uses
of data are proper, no matter what economic practices are in place. There will always be a need for advocates of rights, including rights to privacy. Innovative companies will still need to sell themselves to a skeptical public on occasion.

Getting away from extreme outcomes is crucial if we are to find our way to a high-tech but humane future. We can’t turn into zero or one bits. We can’t be expected to either give up privacy entirely or hoard it insanely.

The best ideas are ones that can be pursued fanatically, as digital innovators like to pursue things, but which inherently lead to moderate outcomes. Modern democracies and markets occasionally display this quality when functioning at their best. Ideally the architecture of digital networks, which are so able to enact sudden large-scale social change, will evolve to mediate instead of divide.

SEVENTH INTERLUDE

Limits Are for Mortals

FROM SOCIAL NETWORK TO IMMORTALITY

The Singularity University is located right next to Google, in Mountain View, California, on the grounds of a NASA research center that has been semiprivatized in keeping with the austere trends of our times. The university is a real place with some fine, smart people. It supports interesting research, and offers excellent classes, and yet I tend to make fun of it. Periodically, someone involved in it will reach out and I always feel a little awkward trying to explain my amusement, because there really is something of a gulf of perception that can be quite hard to bridge.

The Singularity, recall, is the idea that not only is technology improving, but the speed of improvement is increasing, as well. If you visit the campus, expect to be browbeaten about how you, as a mere muggle, don’t have the intuition to grasp the implications of that profound fact. We ordinary humans are supposedly staying the same (a claim I reject), while our technology is an autonomous, self-transforming supercreature, and its self-improvement is accelerating. That means it will one day pass us in a great whoosh. In the blink of an eye we will become obsolete. We might then be instantly dead, because the new artificial superintelligence will need our molecules for a much higher purpose. Or maybe we’ll be kept as pets.

Ray Kurzweil, who helped found the university, awaits a Virtual Reality heaven that all our brains will be sucked up into as the Singularity occurs, which will be “soon.” There we will experience “any” scenario, any joy.

Others simply expect that medical knowledge will deterministically be accelerated as well, granting people physical immortality. To the old question about where everyone will live if people live forever but still want to have children, there are answers. Starships, of course. But also, engineer people to be smaller. I remember Marvin Minsky suggesting this option decades ago, and it recurs regularly in Singulatarian circles.

This is the sort of fantasy that drives many—and I would actually guess most—successful young entrepreneurs and engineers in Silicon Valley these days. The idea is that the amazing lift you get from starting a ’net-based business that can become huge in just a few years is the fore-echo of something far more profound that you will be able to achieve almost as quickly. Soon technological prowess will make the cleverest hackers not only immortal but immortal superheroes.

Earlier, I noted that Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and an investor in Facebook, teaches a class at Stanford in which he advocates that students
not
think in terms of competing in a marketplace, but in terms of defining a position they can “monopolize.” This is precisely the idea of the Siren Server. It is a given that in Silicon Valley no one wants to suffer the indignity of sharing a market with competitors.

It is the correlate that must be understood. Thiel also advocates an end to death, to be enjoyed by the alpha proprietors of network-based monopolies. The flood of data about biology ought to be churned by cloud-based algorithms into an antidote to mortality in no time at all. That’s the expectation. The culture of power on the ’net is so different from what people everywhere else are used to that I wonder if it’s even possible to convey it. For instance,
New York Times
columnist David Brooks wrote
¹
about Thiel’s arguments based on a student’s notes,
²
posted online. What he didn’t comment on was the headline on the student’s offering:

Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

What most outsiders have failed to grasp is that the rise to power of ’net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal.

SUPERNATURAL TEMPTATIONS IN TECH CULTURE

Silicon Valley is far from the first society sprouting from protean quests. The modern spectacle of engineers professing a mastery of mortality—and even seeming to also believe themselves on occasion—is not new at all.

Would it surprise you to learn that animal sacrifice once played a critical role in an early contest to be the “most meta” network? The contest for electricity was fought between the master dramatists Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Tesla had a mad, romantic technical career. He rarely missed an opportunity to be notorious and strange. At one party he illuminated the air and in another he injected acoustic frequencies designed to make guests urinate involuntarily. These would be radical things to do today, but at that time they were practically supernatural. Edison on the surface was more the straight man, but actually he played a similar game. Electricity was, aside from being a physical phenomenon, a folk tale with Grand Guignol undertones from its earliest days.

The physician Giovanni Aldini had made a spectacle of using electrodes to make freshly dead corpses twitch at public demonstrations around the beginning of the 19th century. He created a public career a little like Ray Kurzweil’s today, claiming to have highly technical knowledge that would end the old cycle of life and death. He might have inspired Mary Shelley’s character Dr. Frankenstein.

The audacious race to bring the force of life and death into sockets in every home tempted every theatrical impulse. So, Edison made a public spectacle of electrocuting an elephant. Ostensibly, this demonstrated the demon in Tesla’s design of electricity (alternating current, AC), but Edison would certainly have understood that his own offering, direct current, DC, could also kill the beast.

I sometimes think of that elephant when I plug a phone into the wall to charge. The electricity works because of basic and universal laws of nature, but would not be there, as it is, where it is, were it not for the dark mythmaking of technologists.

Singularity University is part of a grand tradition. Most techies are not great showmen, but whenever the combination appears, watch out.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, WHY I MAKE FUN OF THE UNIVERSITY

Obviously, however rich the cultural pedigree might be, I think calling an institution of higher learning the Singularity University is ridiculous. I’ll outline my position: I am not questioning whether any particular piece of technology is possible. In fact I work on some of the components that my friends at the university consider harbingers of the Singularity. For instance, I’ve worked on making predictive models of parts of the human brain, and on direct interfaces between computers and the human nervous system.

The difference is that I think these things are done by researchers, of whom I am but one. I do not think the technology is creating itself. It’s not an autonomous process. It’s something we humans do.

Of course, you can always play with figure-ground reversals, as we saw earlier with the Golden Goblet. The reason to believe in human agency over technological determinism is that you can then have an economy where people earn their own way and invent their own lives. If you structure a society on
not
emphasizing individual human agency, it’s the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination.

So, in an absolute sense, there’s no way to prove that the Singularity would be the wrong way to interpret certain future events. But to embrace the sensibility would be a celebration of bad data and bad politics. Of course, if you really believe people and machines are the same, then you won’t recognize this as a well-formed pragmatic argument.

Where a true believer at the university would see a Singularity occurring sometime in the future, I would see a mess of engineering that was so bad and irresponsible that it was killing a lot of people, as is portrayed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Let’s look at it my way and not kill those people, okay?

WILL THE CONTROL OF DEATH BE A CONVERSATION OR A CONFLAGRATION?

We are witnessing the beginning of a new kind of death denial. Although Facebook arose fairly recently, we already see what happens when a Facebook user dies. For young users, in particular, it sometimes happens that friends will take over the site and keep it animated for some time, as if the person were still there a little bit.
³
The U.S. military funded a research initiative looking into making interactive video simulations of fallen soldiers so that their families could still interact with them.
⁴
The late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur was presented as a “holographic” performer with optical tricks onstage.
⁵

This is an intimate matter, and I’m loath to judge what other people do about their dead, but I do feel it’s essential to point out that when we animate the dead, we reduce the distinction we feel with the living. All is relative. We reduce the sense of the weirdness of being alive.

One of the most successful individual network-oriented financiers is not someone I can name. He has amassed one of the world’s great fortunes using computers to fine-tune complicated international transactions. He feels confident he is doing well for the world, propelling mankind forward, growing capital for everyone. (Whether he is or not is not clear to me.)

He is also an unfettered health and fitness nut. When money is no object, the quest for ultimate health and fitness becomes an often bizarre tour of the world’s visionaries and charlatans, and no amount of money can distinguish them perfectly.

Given all this, I was quite surprised when one day this fellow said to me, “Capitalism is only possible because of death.” He had been visiting with some of the many researchers on the circuit of cyber-insiders who think they can solve the problem of death fairly soon. Genes modulate aging and death, and those genes appear to be tweakable.

Death, he explained, is the foundation of markets. This line of thinking is obvious and perhaps it’s not necessary to state it, but: That people age and die is what makes room for new people to find their places, so that aspiration is possible. If individuals were no longer temporary, then the species would enter into a worse-than-medieval stasis of eternal, absolutely boring winners. Plutocracy would suffocate creativity definitively.

THE TWO TIERS OF IMMORTALITY PLANNED FOR THIS CENTURY

Recall, however, the accelerating technology trends that form the upside-down slide upon which the imaginations of Silicon Valley glide ever upward. Death is under assault. A weird science meeting at Google or one of the other usual venues wouldn’t be complete without presentations on ending death. The message is usually that we’re just a pinch away from it. Correcting for the common illusions, we are probably just decades away from it, at least in theory.

So there are two tech trends related to countering death, one based on a media technology and the other on biology. Both will take decades to advance.

Some years from now, a good-enough simulation of a dead person might “pass the Turing Test,” meaning that a dead soldier’s family might treat a simulation of the soldier as real. In the tech circles where one finds an obsession with the technologies of immortality, the dominant philosophical tendency is to accept artificial intelligence as a well-formed engineering project, a view I reject. But to those who believe in it, a digital ghost that has passed the Turing Test has passed the test of legitimacy.

There is, nonetheless, also a fascination with
actually
living longer through medicine. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. AI and Turing Test–passing ghosts might be good enough for ordinary people, but the tech elites and the superrich would prefer to do better than that. The social outcome we seem to be approaching later in the century would grant simulated immortality for ordinary people, which could only be enjoyed by observers, not the actual dead, while the very rich might enjoy actual methusalization.