Who Owns the Future? Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DZ7UZDW | Format: PDF
Who Owns the Future? Description
The dazzling new masterwork from the prophet of Silicon Valley
Jaron Lanier is the best-selling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.
Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries - from media to medicine to manufacturing - we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth.
But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.
Insightful, original, and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary listening for all who live a part of their lives online.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 2 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: July 16, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DZ7UZDW
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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