Who Owns the Future? Author: Jaron Lanier | Language: English | ISBN:
B008J2AEY8 | Format: EPUB
Who Owns the Future? Description
Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers.
Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks.
Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.
But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.
- File Size: 5112 KB
- Print Length: 449 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1451654979
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 7, 2013)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008J2AEY8
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,443 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Industries > E-commerce - #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Technology - #6
in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Management > Culture
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Industries > E-commerce - #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Technology - #6
in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Management > Culture
If you've read "Race against the machine" and "The lights in the tunnel" you'll be familiar with part of Lanier's thesis, though Lanier also goes further and ties in the demonetization of information in his predictions about the future. There are some quotable lines in the book, one of which stayed with me even though I hadn't thought of it precisely in this way - something like "the internet destroys more jobs that it creates". In a nutshell, by introducing efficiencies, by disrupting existing markets, the internet makes things more efficient so that a greatly reduced number of people can perform the same tasks. What Lanier also highlights is that the "new jobs" that were meant to replace the ones lost to automation aren't appearing. In part because there has also been as strong push to make "information free", so jobs creating that information that "wants to be free" won't put the bread on the table. Lanier suggests that the Internet is shrinking the economy because by making information free, it's taken the value/wealth that once existed in creating that information out of the economy. That the number of jobs that the internet creates is a fraction of the number that it has automated away.
Lanier proposes some solutions to this problem which would involve a seismic shift in the way that current users of the internet consider the cost of information. He suggests that the Internet could create jobs if only the creation and distribution of information could be monetized. He provides some ideas in this direction. He also makes some predictions about what happens if something doesn't change.
I felt that Lanier described the problem well without going into an approach where he over did it.
"Who Owns the Future" looks at how technology and the internet are evolving and argues that the ultimate destination is not going to be a very happy place for most ordinary people. Lanier expands on his previous work, which dealt more with artists, musicians and other creative types, and shows that information technology and big data are going to destroy jobs and livelihoods all over the place. He gives lots of examples in areas like robotics, 3d printing and other kinds of automation.
I'd also recommend another book that Lanier mentions on page 56, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. This book lays out many of the same issues but has a much more straightforward approach and writing style. The proposed solutions are also different.
Lanier focuses on what he calls "Siren Servers," meaning powerful computing centers that totally dominate some area of the economy, suck up vast amounts of data and create a strong winner-take-all effect (obvious examples are Google, Amazon and Facebook). Siren Servers initially offer attractive benefits to average people (lower prices, convenience), but over time the disadvantages far outweigh the benefits as jobs, livelihoods and opportunities are destroyed for everyone except the very few who either own or are close to the server.
One caveat: Lanier is what might be called a "techno-philosopher" and the content and style of this book strongly reflects that. As just one example, he goes into some depth about ten tropes (or what he calls "humors") of futurism.
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