Who Owns the Future? (5 page)

Need I add the obvious disclaimer? Even if the ideas turn out to be as good as they could possibly be, they won’t be perfect. But if you believe that things can’t really change, you might try wearing sunglasses as you read on.

FIRST INTERLUDE

Ancient Anticipation of the singularity

ARISTOTLE FRETS

Aristotle directly addressed the role of people in a hypothetical high-tech world:

If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
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At this ancient date, a number of possibilities were at least slightly visible to Aristotle’s imagination. One was that the human condition was in part a function of what machines could not do. Another was that it was possible to imagine, at least hypothetically, that machines could do more. The synthesis was also conceived: Better machines could free and elevate people, even slaves.

If we could show Aristotle the technology of our times, I wonder what he would make of the problem of unemployment. Would he take Marx’s position that better machines create an obligation (to be carried out by political bodies) to provide care and dignity to people who no longer need to work? Or would Aristotle say, “Kick the unneeded ones out of town. The polis is only for the people who own the machines, or do what machines still cannot do.” Would he stand by idly as Athens was eventually depopulated?

I’d like to think the best of Aristotle, and assume he would realize that both choices are bogus; machine autonomy is nothing but theater. Information needn’t be thought of as a freestanding thing, but rather as a human product. It is entirely legitimate to understand that people are still needed and valuable even when the loom can run without human muscle power. It is still running on human thought.

Aristotle was recalling Homer’s account of the god Hephaestus’s robotic servant creations. They were nerd’s delights: golden, female, and servile. If it occurred to Aristotle that people might take it upon themselves to invent the robots to play music and operate looms, he didn’t make that clear. So it reads as if people would wait around for the gods to gift some of us with automata so that we wouldn’t have to pay others. That sounds so early 21st century to my ears. The artificial intelligence in the server gifts us with automation so we don’t need to pay each other.

DO PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE PAID IF THEY AREN’T MISERABLE?

Aristotle is practically saying, “What a shame about enslaving people, but we need to do it so someone will play the music, since we need music. I mean somebody’s got to endure the suffering to make the music happen. If we could only get by without music, then maybe we could free some of these pathetic slaves and be done with them.”
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How prescient that Aristotle chose musical instruments and looms as his examples for machines that might one day operate automatically! These two types of machines did indeed turn out to be central to the prehistory of computation. The Jacquard programmable loom helped inspire calculating engines, while music theory and notation helped further the concept of abstract computation, as when Mozart wrote algorithmic, nondeterministic music incorporating dice throws. Both developments occurred around the turn of the 19th century.

One of my passions is learning to play obscure and archaic musical instruments, and so I know through direct experience that playing the instruments available to ancient Greeks was a pain in the butt.
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As hard as it is to imagine now, to the ancient Greeks, playing musical instruments was a misery to be forced on hired help or slaves.

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Getting strings to stay in tune on a lyre is not just difficult, but painful. You have to keep on twisting them and nudging them. Sometimes your fingers bleed. It’s constant misery. The reeds on an aulos were probably a great annoyance as well, always too wet or too dry, too closed or too open. You futz with such reeds until they break, then you make new ones, and most of the time those don’t work.

These days music is more than a need to be met. Musicians who seek to make a living are goaded by the preferences of the marketplace into becoming symbols of a culture or a counterculture. The counter-cultural ones become a little wounded, vulnerable, wild, dangerous, or strange. Music is no longer a nutrient to be supplied, but something more mystical, a forge of meaning and identity: the realization of flow in life.

Multitudes of people want nothing more than to be able to play music for a living. We know this because we see their attempts online. There’s a constant retweeting of the lie that there’s a substantial new class of musicians succeeding financially through Internet publicity. Such people do exist, but only in token numbers.

However, a remarkable number of people do get attention and build followings for their music online. This book imagines that people like that might someday make a living at what they do. Improving the designs of information networks could result in the improvement of life for everyone as machines get better and better.

THE PLOT

Aristotle seems to want to escape the burden of accommodating lesser people. His quote about self-operating lutes and looms could be interpreted as a daydream that better technology will free us to some degree from having to deal with one another.

It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities first formed. Athens was a necessity first, and a luxury second. No one wants to accommodate the diversity of strangers. People deal with each other politically because the material advantages are compelling. We find relative safety and sustenance in numbers. Agriculture and armies happened to work better as those enterprises got bigger, and cities built walls.

But in Aristotle’s words you get a taste of what a nuisance it can be to accommodate others. Something was lost with the advent of the polis, and we still dream of getting it back.

The reward for a Roman general, upon retiring after years of combat, was a plot of land he could farm for himself. To be left alone, to be able to live off the land with the illusion of no polis to bug you, that was the dream. The American West offered that dream again, and still loathes giving it up. Justice Louis Brandeis famously defined privacy as the “right to be left alone.”

In every case, however, abundance without politics was an illusion that could only be sustained in temporary bubbles, supported by armies. The ghosts of the losers haunt every acre of easy abundance. The greatest beneficiaries of civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from politics. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to pretend to not need anyone else, if only for a moment. In Aristotle’s quote, we find the earliest glimmer of the hope that technological advancement could replace territorial conquest as a way of implementing an insulating bubble around a person.

People naturally seek the benefits of society, meaning the accommodation of strangers, while avoiding direct vulnerabilities to specific others as much as possible. This is a clichéd criticism of the online culture of the moment. People have thousands of “friends” and yet stare at a little screen when in the proximity of other people. As it was in Athens, so it is online.

PART TWO

The Cybernetic Tempest

CHAPTER 3

Money as Seen Through One Computer Scientist’s Eyes

Money, God, and the Old Technology of Forgetting

Even if you think God is no more than a human invention, you must admit that another profoundly ancient idea we humans have invented has ensnared us even more. I am referring, of course, to money.

Money might have begun as a mnemonic counter for assets you couldn’t keep under direct observation, like wandering sheep. A stone per sheep, so the shepherd would be confident all had been reunited after a day at pasture. In other words, artifacts took on information storage duties.
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This is a use beyond symbolic meaning, because the information that is stored can vary with increasing independence from any sense of flavorful symbolism. Three shells means the same thing as three stones. In other words, some embryonic prototype of nerdiness must have appeared.

Ancient people in Sumer and elsewhere made markings to keep track of trades and debts. A record of debt requires more complexity than a simple count of sheep. Individuals and intent must be joined to mere numbers, so some form of marking is required.

It used to be a huge bother to carve or paint records. That kind of hassle could not be sustained for just any information. Information storage was reserved for only a few special topics, such as laws and stories of kings and divinity. And yet debt made the cut.

Ancient money was information storage that represented events in the past. To the ears of many a financier, at this early stage
“money” had not been born yet, only accounting. That kind of money can be called “past-oriented money.”

The accounting, past-oriented, concept of money is concrete, which makes it cognitively natural. It is easier to think about a concrete number of sheep than about something abstract like statistics predicting the prospects of bundled derivatives.
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Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
(Brooklyn, NY: Chelsea House, 2010), proposes that debt is as old as civilization. However, simple debts are still representations of past events, rather than anticipations of future growth in value; the latter is what we call “finance.”

Modern future-oriented concepts of money only make sense in a universe that is pregnant with possibility. In the ancient world, when money and numbers were born as one, no one seems to have expected the world to embark on a project of inexorable improvement. Ancient cosmologies are often cyclic, or else the world was expected to slam into a wall, an Armageddon or Ragnarok. If all that will ever be known is already known, then information systems need only consider the past and the present.

Money has changed as the technology of representing it has changed. You probably like having modern money around, but it has a benefit you may not appreciate enough: You don’t need to know where it comes from.

Money forgets. Unlike the earliest ancient clay markings, mass-produced money, created first as coins—and much later on a printing press—no longer remembered the story of its individual conception. If we were to know the history of each dollar, the world would be torn apart by war to an even greater degree than it already is, because people are even more clannish than greedy. Money allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a moment the history of conflict and the potential for revenge.

Money forgets, but “god” remembers. God
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knows how you earned that dollar and keeps a different set of books—moral books—based on that memory. If not god, then karma or Santa Claus.

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Here I am addressing only a moral aspect of divinity, not the whole of divinity.

Some conceptions of god seem to date back to the same era of
antiquity as money. You can think of some aspects of god, even today, as being similar to the sum of the karmic memories that coins were fated to forget. God as a moral authority is almost the opposite of money.

Money was the first computation, and in this age of computation, the nature of money will be transformed yet again. Alas, the combination of relentlessly improving digital technology and lazy ideals has created a new era in which money sometimes doesn’t forget all it should. This is not a healthy development.

In today’s networked world, money stored in some computers remembers more than money stored in other computers. This can cause problems. One problem is a temptation to corruption.

Liars have to have the best memories. It’s more work to keep two sets of books than one set of books. The plague of toxic assets and mega-pyramid schemes, and the pointless growth spurt of the financial services sector would all have been impossible without vast computational resources remembering and sorting all the details needed to snooker people. The most egregious modern liars not only need computers, they can be inspired by them.