Who Owns the Future? (49 page)

• A book won’t necessarily be the same for each person who reads it or if the same person reads it twice. On the one hand this will mean better updates for some kinds of information and fewer encounters with typos, but on the other will deemphasize the rhythm and poetics of prose, minimize the stakes of declaring a manuscript complete, and expand the “filter bubble” effect.

• The means to find reading material will be where business battles are fought. The fights often will not be pretty. The interface between readers and books will be contested and often corrupted by spam and deception.

• Writing a book won’t mean as much. Some will think of this as a democratic, antielitist benefit, and others will think of it as a lowering of standards.

• Readers will spend a lot of time hassling with forgotten passwords, expired credit cards, and being locked into the wrong device or mobile-service contract for years at a time. They’ll lose their own libraries, notes, and even their own writing when they switch vendors. Net neutrality will exist in celebrated theory but not in practice.

• Technically adept readers will make fun of other readers who have trouble dealing with the new system. The more hackerlike you are, the more you will feel advantaged.

• Overall, people will pay less to read, which will be lauded as being good for consumers, while people will earn still less from writing. If this pattern held only for music, writing, and other media, it would be just one feature in the transition to an ever-more digital world in which software swallows everything.
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However, if it is a precedent to be repeated in transportation, manufacturing, medicine, education, and other major sectors, the overall economy will shrink, making capitalism a little less viable in the long term. Well, that’s a restatement of a core idea of this book, but at any rate this much can be said:

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The portrayal of software as an insatiable gourmand is common in Silicon Valley. “Software Will Eat Everything” is the phrasing from a well-known essay by Web pioneer and tycoon Marc Andreessen.

• By the time books have mostly gone digital, the owners of the top Internet servers that route readers, probably run by Silicon Valley companies, will be more powerful and richer than they were before.

Some of these prospects appeal to me. My favorite is the potential for experiments merging books with apps, games, music, movies, virtual worlds, and all the other forms that can be sent over the ’net. This ought to yield some interesting fruit, though remember culture still takes its time, however fast a technology transition occurs. With time, probably enough time for another generation to come of age, there ought to be some good fun to be had.

The desirability of being more directly connected to readers will vary with each author. I would love it if all I did were write. Since I also make technology and music and parent, I find it’s absolutely impossible to find the moments to authentically respond to all the readers who contact me. This is a drag, since there are such lovely notes that come in, but what can one do? I don’t want to use lazy social-media interactions to pretend to be more responsive than I really can be, even though that’s the fashion. I do know writers, particularly of genre fiction, business books, and self-help books, who adore being tightly connected to their readers and spend hours a day interacting with them.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT A BOOK THAT IS WORTH SAVING?

What’s wrong with this bulleted list overall? There are both good and bad things in it, but there’s an overall pattern that feels off kilter, a throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater feeling.

A book isn’t an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity. The economic model of our networks has to be optimized to preserve that synthesis, or it will not serve mankind.

This email is completely typical of what shows up every morning:

I’m a postdoc at [ . . .] working on a paper about collaborative creativity and we wanted to see if you can point us to some relevant literature. To be more specific, we are finding empirical evidence [ . . .] that collaborative works are more positively received than single-authored works. We are studying this in the context of [ . . .] an online community where kids can create their animations, video games, and interactive art.

We read your article on Edge.org on Digital Maoism and we were wondering if you know of anyone else who might be arguing that individual works are of higher quality than collective works.

This came from one of the top computer science labs in the world. Unfortunately, I can become impatient when I attempt to answer questions like this.

No one in the tech world practices what we preach about these ideas. We treat the top entrepreneurs as irreplaceable heroes. I’ve never, ever seen a serious proposal that a collective or artificial cloud software experiment could replicate the value of a Steve Jobs.

So it’s hard to even know where to start to answer email like this. Look at the world, look at history. Rock stars, novels, great physicists . . . . Even the entries in Wikipedia about human achievements are mostly about individuals rather than collectives. How could an old essay of mine from 2006 be the sole reference to the preponderant pattern in the whole of human history?

First, I might point out, the assumption is put forward with no justification that the human role is to produce an output in the same sense that an algorithm or a collective could.
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That is wrong. Then, a marketplace method, typically formulated as winner-takes-all, is put forward as the only means of valuing outputs from people and machines.

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To restate a point made earlier, artificial intelligence programs over networks typically repackage huge amounts of data taken from people, therefore it is ever harder to distinguish a collective output from an “artificially intelligent” algorithmic one.

I do my best to explain this nicely, but end up getting snarky: “Would you want to send a collectively programmed robot to have sex on your behalf because it was better at it than you, or would you want to have the sex yourself and get better by doing?”

Human life is its own purpose. What other way of thinking can make sense? But no, that argument fails. This is a response I’ve heard, paraphrased: “I’d prefer to have the best available robot to please me sexually. Other people should enjoy that benefit too. If I insist on still having real sex once robot partners begin to become available, then I’d be selfishly delaying the improvement of robots by delaying the appearance of data from early robotic sex experiences.”

You can try logic: “You can have robotic sex without a robot, but you can’t have challenge, weirdness, tenderness, the building of trust, intimacy, or love without a person.” No luck, generally.

And then about the criteria for success: “If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proving theorems? Why don’t we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better we’ll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millions of people who don’t understand the math. Would that satisfy you?”

If I argue for a half day with people who are imbedded in the new thinking that is amplified by the latest versions of network-based wealth and power, then I can usually get them to think differently for another half day. By the following day, however, the specter of perfect robot-sex partners returns to glory.

Thinking about people in the terms of components on a network is—in intellectual and spiritual terms—a slow suicide for the researchers and slow homicide against everyone else. If the world is to be reconceived and engineered as a place where people are not particularly distinguished from other components, then people will fade.

It’s hard to escape the ideas imbedded in the system in which you survive and seek success. If thinking about people as components of network architecture is what creates the greatest economic success, then that thinking is reinforced every moment that you strive to succeed.

We haven’t found any more fundamental way to think about a system than as an information system. My argument is
not
against thinking about us in the terms of information. I live that life. Instead, I am arguing that there is more than one way to build an information economy, and we’ve chosen the self-destructive option.

CONCLUSION

What Is to Be Remembered?

All This, Just for the Whiff of Possibility

Human beings have been treated with suspicion in these pages. Despite my unapologetic optimism about the big picture, I have at times anticipated that our kind will be gullible and vain, or will attempt to cheat and dominate. I have assumed that we will often choose the lazy answer and suffer indignity happily so long as it is glazed with coolness. And yet at the start, I professed love for people, and said the whole project was about how special people are, and how deserving.

There is no contradiction. To love people is not to be infatuated with them. It’s hard to perceive us realistically; it is a leap of faith. What will be left after we acknowledge all our failings?

There are many questions left unanswered, as they should be. My space elevator pitch did not specify the proper limits of government in an advanced information economy. Nor did it consider whether there might be national variations in information economies, or if there must be global coherence.

These and many other huge questions cannot be addressed yet. The purpose for now can only be to demonstrate that there is unexplored legitimate possibility. I hope the pitch persuaded you that we are not bound by the conventions of the current mania for deterministic information technology evolution.

My sketch of a possible future will hopefully prod hotshot young computer scientists and economists to prove they can do better, and to present improved designs.

Please do that, but also please stop once per hour and check
yourself: Are you still keeping people in the center? Is it still all about the people? Are you really avoiding the lazy trapdoor of falling back into thinking of people as components and a central server as being the only point of view for defining efficiency or testing efficacy?

The Economics of the Future Is User Interface Design

As technology gets better, economics will have to become less abstract. Economics used to be about the patterns of results that emerged from rules that influenced human social behavior. It focused on the ways that policy engendered outcomes.

But with every passing year economics must become more and more about the design of the machines that mediate human social behavior. A networked information system guides people in a more direct, detailed, and literal way than does policy. Another way to put it is that economics must turn into a large-scale, systemic version of user interface design.
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Here I am, a computer scientist, seeing the world my way. Economists are invited to respond that computer science ought to start looking more like economics, and they’ll receive a friendly reception from at least this computer scientist.

Some user interfaces are meant to be deliberately challenging, as is the case for games, while others are meant to make complexity easier. The latter variety powers the bigger industries by far, encompassing consumer devices, professional tools, and business productivity. I have engaged for many years in both idioms. They’re both hard!

Making a game enticing and addictive is a balancing act. You need to find just the right quivering back and forth between challenge and reward.
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The point is not to make the game as hard to use as possible, but to dangle usability just out of reach.

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If you’re curious, you can probably find an old psychedelic game of mine, called Moondust, which I wrote when I was about twenty. It runs on Commodore 64 emulators. It was a commercial success and its proceeds funded the first virtual reality systems in a garage in Palo Alto.

Games are fun and can be wonderful learning tools, but helping
people achieve things in the real world on more complex terms than before is the endgame of computer science. There’s no greater pleasure for a computer scientist than seeing someone become able to do something that had once been impossible, simply because good data with a good user interface clarified the situation. I have seen surgeons understand how to destroy a tumor because of a better computer simulation and display. I have seen patients with learning disabilities become productive. The everyday sight of people able to use their personal devices is as much a pleasure. This is what we live for.

Making complexity easier is the great craft of our era.

The Tease of the Tease

Thus far, the information economy has resembled gaming more than the practical side of user interface design. That’s not to say that online economic activity is being made more difficult than it needs to be, but that it engages the human brain in a teasing way.

The human mind is particularly susceptible to engagement by rapid-fire feedback that taunts on the edge of granting treats. Semi-random feedback is a more intense dominator of attention than consistent feedback.

Before the arrival of digital computation, pastimes that embodied this pattern of seduction were the obsessions of the global human experience. Sports and gambling provide fine examples.