Who Owns the Future? (46 page)

One of the keenest reasons to want a middle-class distribution of wealth is to avoid a situation in which a small number of wealthy individuals live very long lives while no one else can afford the same life extensions.

In my breakfast conversations about artificial hearts with Marvin Minsky, so long ago, he proposed that life extension could become so cheap that it would be universal. What we’ve seen, though, is that when some things become very cheap, other things become very expensive. Printers are incredibly cheap, and yet ink for them is incredibly expensive. Phones are cheap and yet connectivity for them is insanely expensive. Wal-Mart is cheap, and yet jobs go away. Software is “free” and yet the Internet is not creating as many jobs as it destroys.

The talking seagull from the first chapter is probably more realistic than universal life extension for all in a world where clout and wealth flow to Siren Servers.

A great showdown will occur when lives are extended significantly for the first time. My guess is that this won’t happen in the United States first. Russian oligarchs
⁶
or Gulf sheiks might step up initially.

If there’s a clock ticking to get a monetized information economy started, this is it. Will there be middle-class wealth and clout to balance the potential of masters of Siren Servers to become near-immortal plutocrats? This is the scenario H. G. Wells foresaw in
The Time Machine
.

If the middle classes are strong when the time comes, some sort of compromise will be sorted out; some new social contract about how medicine is applied once the idea of a “natural” lifetime becomes as anachronistic as the idea of a “natural” climate.

If the middle classes are weak, then chaos will unfold. People usually protest in a reasonably orderly fashion against austerity. If they come to see that their families must die before those of a weird insular upper class, there will be no restraint. As much as we like to romanticize revolutions, they are a form of terror in practice. It would be wise to institute a universal system to strengthen the middle classes before the destined moment arrives.

PART NINE

Transition

CHAPTER 31

The Transition

Can There Be a Digital Golden Rule?

The most common question I have heard since I started talking about the prospects for a Nelsonian economy is about enforcement. Why wouldn’t people copy? Why not cheat? Why not let other people suffer for the risk you bring into the world?

The reason people won’t copy—or exploit information without paying for it—is that to copy would be to undermine the very source of their own wealth. This is what the golden rule looks like on a network.

A social contract must take hold for any orderly economy to be possible. Any functioning, authentic economy has to by definition be sustained more by voluntary participation than by enforcement. In the physical world it’s not all that hard to break into someone’s house or car, or to shoplift, and there aren’t all that many police. The police have a crucial role, but the main reason people don’t go around stealing in the physical world is that they want to live in a world where stealing isn’t commonplace.

Some readers will prefer a moral formulation to an ethical one, and would say that stealing is simply wrong. In either case, the point is that there could never be enough police to enforce a standard of behavior that most people reject.

It saddens me that even idealistic digital activists often assume that enforcement is the key question. We’ve become used to a double standard online, where there’s either an often mean-spirited, hostile anarchy or one submits to institutional control. Anarchy reigns on sites like 4chan or in uncensored comments on videos
or articles. Meanwhile most content and expression flows through institutional channels like app stores or social networks in which censorious policies are enforced. Neither situation supports real freedom. (Many of the most supposedly open and free online designs are often actually choked by a controlling elite.)
¹
Real freedom has to be based on most people choosing to give each other latitude most of the time.

History records many instances of workable social contracts breaking down. States fail and murderous spasms overtake whole populations. But history also records “miracles,” instances of decent social contracts being initiated. The American experiment was one instance, but so is the initiation of any inclusive democracy. The early rise of the World Wide Web, before Siren Servers overtook it, was another miracle.

The instantiation of a social contract “miracle” is a big jump over a valley in an energy landscape. It might take a political figure of rare genius, or the right lucky confluence of events, but it is ridiculous to think that a beneficial social contract could not take hold for the majority of people in their online lives.

Yes, enforcement will be an issue, but it only makes sense to talk about enforcement when only a small minority of a population are offenders. Civilization will remain by definition a mostly voluntary project, a miracle.

The Miracle’s Gauntlet

One of the hardest questions about a humanistic economic scenario is how to get there from where we are. Who will step up and take risks in order to learn if this new world will come about? It’s not only a political challenge, but an economic one, since a present economy of a certain size must somehow fund a quantum leap to a new, larger economy despite a gigantic accounting vacuum. How would the initial surge of required credit be financed?

The higher altitudes of finance have become used to “sure things” that recently flowed rather easily. It’s hard to bring expectations back down to earth after a period like the Great Recession, which
offered such treats to financiers. Finance was freed from having to pay for risk, though that bargain was only a temporary illusion; ordinary people were freed from having to pay for consumption of Internet services, though once again, an illusion was at play.

The temptations of free stuff over digital networks recall problems in American health care finance. No one wants to pay for something if they can possibly avoid it; so young healthy people don’t like to pay for health insurance. In an immediate sense, the ability to not pay seems to increase wealth and freedom for those who can get away with it.

But then later, when inevitable health problems come up, illusion turns out to cost more both in money and in lost freedom than up-front realism. When a system is in place for everyone to share risk in advance, life doesn’t become perfect, but dealing with hard times at least becomes cheaper and more flexible.

Nonetheless, to get people to agree to pay to care for each other in advance requires political genius. Maybe it helps if everyone looks similar. Homogeneous societies seem to have an easier time of it. A common enemy doesn’t hurt, either. The online world fails miserably at providing any such traditional inspirations.

Avatars and Credit

The cognitively gentle mechanism of economic avatars gives a hint about how a transition might work. The fluid nature of digital systems would allow for the coexistence of both old and new economic systems during a transitional period, which would motivate a gradual person-by-person transition.

Each person could remain in the world of fake “free” for as long as desired. However, a person could also eventually decide when she’s had enough of “free” and would prefer to buy into a commercial social contract where she can earn money.

This means that two sets of accounting books would be kept for people who aren’t paying for information, so that they can transition from “free” to universal micropayments whenever the time comes. A delayed choice could give people the best of both worlds.

If the core hypothesis is right—that monetizing more information instead of less will grow the economy—then a lot of people will end up with money due to them after enough time has passed. At some point, you might decide you want to cash in all that’s due to you, even if the price is that you can no longer get free stuff online thereafter.

The Price of Antenimbosia

A trickier question is how to design the initial state of a new information economy to reflect all that had been done by people before the new accounting was initiated.

Wikipedia has procedures in place to incorporate material from the 1911 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which has fallen into the public domain. When we build on the past in that way, how will we acknowledge it in a
monetized
information economy?

Earlier it was pointed out that the seeming magic of cloud-based “automatic” translation between languages is actually based on the use of a corpus of translations performed by real people originally. Had a better-crafted information economy been in play when the original human translators provided their examples to the cloud, then they would be remembered and we could send royalties to those still living.

However, they missed the boat, so now we don’t have a reasonable way to reconstitute the provenance that should have been stored. We threw away crucial information because of incomplete engineering. Whenever an advanced information economy comes into being, this will be a rancorous intergenerational social justice issue. A grand bargain will be needed.

Will everyone from the lost generations—which acquiesced to “free” and “shared” for the sake of the wealth of Siren Servers—get a huge initial credit based on all the off-the-books value that each might have provided? This intuitively sounds like a bad idea. Big payments at the start of a financial adventure often don’t work out well. People who win the lottery don’t necessarily have any of the
money left after a few years. There needs to be a process in which people get used to earning their way in a new game.

Some sort of rough augmentation of income will probably be due to people who contributed a lot but received little from the Sirenic economy.

If this sounds like an outrageous idea to young cyber-activists now, it will sound awfully nice to them in, say, thirty or forty years. At some point, a transition along these lines will have to take place. It will probably happen after the disaster of the crest of the age wave of baby boomers.

CHAPTER 32

Leadership

Audition for the Lead

If we can overcome Panglossian vanities, and we can also accept the possibility that human actors in our drama can and should take responsibility for events they can knowingly steer—two admittedly hard sells in today’s cyber-world—then what actors might step up to take some risks and responsibilities in order to explore the possibility of better information economics?

Here are some of the actors who might show up for an audition:

• A thousand geeks

• Startups

• Traditional governments, central banks, etc.

• Multiplicities of Siren Servers

• Facebook or similar

• Confederacies of Just a few Giant Siren Servers

In the next few sections I’ll sketch what scenes these varied players might play. I expect to hear the usual objections that this is a case where thought is moot. Instead, I am often told, we should simply let events play out.

The future always arrives, eventually. Rome fell, and eventually there was a Renaissance.
*
In order to be concerned with the questions
asked here, one has to be able to evince at least a meek sense of urgency. If there is to be any difference in time to make a difference to people living, or to their children, then some form of action and actor must appear.

*
If gobs of middle-class jobs go away later in this century, and then there is a socialist backlash that seems pleasant for a moment but then turns morbidly corrupt, and then a backlash against the backlash . . . then in the next century or the one after we will eventually still get to the business of creating a humanistic information economy.

A Thousand Geeks

Since no one else can keep up, highly effective technical people can still make up the future, unfettered to an amazing degree. The society of the brightest computer scientists and engineers is also amazingly small. A thousand top geeks working together could steer the future of the world economy.

That is not to say that even this modest scale of cooperation is likely to appear. It could also be said that a thousand top politicians around the world could work together to steer the political future. That is also a true statement, and yet there is no reason to believe it will happen.