Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future?

[Applause] in his new book author jaron lanier points to a world where the once mighty kodak a multi-billion dollar company with more than 140 000 employees had been replaced by the 13 employee firm of instagram with the disappearance of this old guard also comes the disappearance of middle class wages and security but sharon lanier says all is not lost and joining us now to tell us how we can reverse the trend on the line from berkeley california there's jaren lanier author of who owns the future you are not a gadget jaren it's good of you to join us again here on tvo you were on our program several years ago from the perimeter institute in waterloo and it's great to see you again how are you oh i'm doing great thanks for having me on not at all a pleasure just before we get into the book uh i want to give people just who may not know of your work as much as we do a general sense of sort of what you've been up to lately give us an idea of some of the work you've been doing lately ah well uh i'm a computer scientist i have worked on all sorts of things i'm best known for my work in virtual reality although that was mostly a lot a lot earlier in my life i work on algorithms that model parts of the brain i work with physicists on building models of how time and space work i work on consumer products once in a while something called connect from microsoft is one of those things and i write books uh one is called you're not a gadget another is called who owns the future and i mostly write about how i think computers aren't serving people well enough yet yeah i just wanted to clarify when i said off the top you are not a gadget that was a previous work that you had done but we also remember you from your yeah we remember you from um well after our panel discussion was over you came up to the perimeter institute the top floor and joined the music the musicians who were already there and started jamming with them even though you'd never played with them before and i gotta say many of us thought that was pretty cool how many different instruments do you play oh right well this is my other life i'm a musician and i i have sort of a fetish for learning unusual and obscure instruments and i don't have a current count but there are many many many instruments in our house that i play and i've had opportunities to play in toronto more than a few times and i adore playing up there i love canadian audiences and did i read this right you opened for bob dylan once uh yeah once people make a too much of that if it was more than once it'd be worth reporting it was just once okay at a jazz festival in switzerland a million years ago jaren i think even if you open for bob dylan just once that's something you can brag about my friend so we're gonna mention it okay now if i could open for leonard cohen that would be something then you'd hit the that's be the big time let's i want to pick up on this issue of virtual reality because you did you know pioneer a lot of the conversation that that people have around that and have been critical about how technology has been affecting us and i wonder when you started to see as we pointed out in the opening those red flags that have accompanied the technological boom that we're now experiencing well for me it happened on two levels one thing is you have to understand that for over three decades i and my colleagues had been anticipating what wonders how the benefits we would bring to the world when networking became pervasive and cheap and as the century turned and our long-term dream finally was unfolding what we saw was something different we saw the developed world folding into austerity we saw a decline in the middle class in the u.s we saw a decline in social mobility and we saw this phenomenon of intense wealth concentration and whenever i looked at one of these examples of intense wealth concentration around some financial scheme or something there was always some giant computer on the network associated with that scheme and what i started to realize is that we kind of screwed up we had thought in sort of naive terms that by making a network with open information all these benefits would accrue because everybody would have access to the information but the problem is that even if people are created equal computers are not and whoever has the biggest computer just naturally even if they don't intend to do anything improper will use that superior ability to gain this incredible advantage of being able to calculate all the risks and costs to other people and it's just a phenomenon that builds up so much wealth and power around the big computers that it turns out not to be in architecture not to be a way of doing things that we can live with so that came as a surprise i have to admit i didn't see it i don't think anybody did uh we didn't see it in advance but now we've seen it and if we're going to be good engineers if we're going to be empirical we just have to rethink what we're doing and let's follow up on the example that you gave in the continuous process of trying to see the results of what you do and trying to improve upon them sure let's follow up on the example that we gave in the opening because the implications as as the kodak example goes forward many times over the implications on the middle class the implications on society in general can be well potentially cataclysmic what do you see in that case well um kodak created not just hundreds of thousands of jobs but hundreds hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs with uh security uh and instagram i have nothing against great success so i'm a silicon valley guy i think it's great if somebody can innovate and have great success but the problem with the way we're creating success is we create it by pretending that all the people who actually do the work don't exist and we just concentrate the benefits around whoever has the most central computer so in the case of instagram it's a computer that routed uh photographs and here you have 13 people being worth a billion dollars whereas all the millions of people who are adding data to their network to make it valuable don't get paid and now i i know that a lot of your viewers are going to say but but they get free benefits and all i can say is that informal benefits like getting a free service doesn't help you raise kids it doesn't get you it doesn't pay your rent it doesn't it doesn't get you through life you need to have a society that generates formal benefits for people um so as i say you know this particular way we're doing things just concentrates wealth too much around the big computers there's nothing wrong with big computers i think a lot of what they do is essential for us we just need to recalibrate the way we run our networks so that the ordinary people who always provide the value get some get more out of them get formal benefits out of them uh and and i think there's there's ways to do that i don't think it's that hard a problem but there's this orthodoxy now around open software and open source and open culture all this stuff that and that orthodoxy is so intense it's become so entrenched that people are blind to seeing when it's not working uh and it's not working i mean we talk about how our open networks are letting us uh decentralize power because we can all tweet about complaints and yet the the opposite is actually happening power and wealth are getting more and more concentrated and until people can release themselves from their dogma and see that that truth um that what they hope and believe is not what's actually happening until we can get there we won't be able to change things but common sense tells you that if new ventures for example out of silicon valley can have 15 people do the work that formerly a hundred thousand people could do that if that gets replicated over and over and over we're going to have a society that's in a heck of a lot of trouble as you look at that i mean that's a that's a pretty troubling outlook how do you think we can handle that well you know i think just honesty and accounting will solve the problem i i mean in a way once you see the nature of the problem it's not that daunting anymore let me use a different example right now there are services where you can upload a text in english and it comes back in french right google and microsoft offer these as do other companies and the usual way we talk about that is we say there's this giant brain online that understands language and translates but that's not true the way it actually works is real people out there provided examples without intending to as it happens of translations from english to french and back again and all of these translations are gathered gathered gathered into a giant database and a giant computer and pattern matched against a new example and a mashup of matches creates your translation so it's all real work real people doing the work you know it's it and and so as long as we remember where the real value comes that run the advanced machines we're building we'll still have employment for people i mean it's it's really very simple yes i think in 20 or 30 years robots will be driving the trucks and the cabs and mining the minerals and yet every bit of data that drives those robots will come from real people and as long as we remember people and and don't go into this fantasy that it's all the machine and that the people don't exist we can have a better and better economy with a stronger middle class the only thing standing in a way is this fantasy that the machines are self-standing you know intelligent weird alien species or something when nothing could be further from the truth richard stulman the founder of the free software foundation wrote almost a quarter of a century ago the following he said i believe that all generally useful information should be free by free i'm not referring to price but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses when information is generally useful redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing no matter who is receiving what are your thoughts on that hey richard richard and i were friends back there i was there right when he came up with this stuff so i'm extremely familiar with the circumstances and he had tremendous passions tremendous emotion around his software uh some of his software had been sort of lost to the world through the failure of a little company and he was very upset about it and i completely understand where he's coming from i believe the same thing for a long time you know but we have to be empiricists we have to see things are working out differently than we intended um you know if information costs money it doesn't mean that it's not available you know the magic of a marketplace is that when you start to treat things as having a value sometimes there are more of those things and more people benefiting than if you're in a pure informal barter situation or sharing situation the informal sharing idea sounded just beautiful back then i remember how sweet it felt and i remember how fondly we looked forward to this world and as i said before we just didn't take into consideration that if somebody has a gigantic computer off in some remote location who can out crunch your computer it doesn't matter how much information is shared the guy with the bigger computer is going to have this gigantic benefit over you and um i it so it was a good idea it was a sweet idea it just didn't work that's all well let's get into one of the ideas that you present in your new book who owns the future a middle class created by intervention or what you call in the book levies what's that a reference to ah okay so if we go back to the 19th century there was a tremendous anxiety that new technologies would put people out of work this was one of the the signal qualities of 19th century thought there were the luddite riots and the ballad of john henry marxism and indeed science fiction started out of this anxiety and it was it was not an unfounded anxiety there were cases of better technologies creating waves of unemployment and then in the 20th century a remarkable thing happened there was this movement called the labor movement and one way to think about the labor movement is it argued the case that even if a new job that comes about because of better technology is not as dangerous or miserable or dirty as an old job that it replaces whoever does the job can still get paid so even if it's easier and cleaner and safer to drive a truck than to deal with horses and it is i've done both the truck driver still gets paid and that's because there was a union to fight for it so we decided we can have better jobs instead of no jobs as machines get better now the only difference in the 21st century is we've undone that covenant that created middle classes in the 20th century we've undone it because the new kinds of roles that people play of providing information to giant algorithms so that they can automate things we've suddenly decided that's just too easy we're not going to pay people for it so we've we've kind of shot ourselves in the foot at this point and we have to make a decision do we adopt some kind of very broad socialism or something like that where everybody gets paid in general and you know the problem with that is that it tends to concentrate power in some socialist committee or something i'm very skeptical that can work or do we decide that providing information to the giant computers is actually kind of a new job and that people can get paid for it and of course what richard stallman and i and a lot of other idealistic young technical people had thought is that no we'll make the information free but we can try a different way now we can say no the information costs something that provides sustenance to the people who provide it and it also puts a check on the power of the biggest computers you know like right now when when the government can watch everybody with street cameras and track everyone's movements or when google will be able to through cameras worn on people's heads or whatever it's the first time the government's gained an ability to have power without any budgetary restraint because the data doesn't cost anything if the government had to pay you a dime or something well we're in canada so if they they had they have to pay you some money um whenever you're tracked that would create a budgetary restraint so it wouldn't be entirely up to lawyers and politicians to try to enforce prohibitions um and that probably won't work because programmers are faster than politicians so putting a cost on information is a way to restrain this unbridled power of whoever runs the biggest computer so i think it both creates sustenance for a middle class and it constrains the power of corporations and governments but just so i'm clear in the example that you just gave the union was the levy that helped protect the middle class once upon a time so going forward what's going to be the levy in the future that helps protect the middle class well there were all kinds of levees there were unions there was academic tenure there were licenses all these things and in the future you know there's an amazing thing to me which is if you look at how people share information on social networking sites they don't form themselves into a star system in the way they do when they go through some central hub like in apple or an amazon and that's that's a bit of a technical point but it's really important if if uh in in a in a youtube video only a tiny number of people have hit videos and then there's this huge long tail of wannabes right and only a handful of people actually get tangible formal benefits out of participating in the system if you look at the way people access information on something like facebook it's it's very dense like most people are interested in large numbers of people and so you don't have as much of a star system and that means if it was monetized it would naturally give rise to a middle class so there's this amazing possibility that if if information costs something the way the benefits would accrue to the society would not be like another star system of winner takes all but instead a middle class without having specific levies it might happen naturally for the very first time in the history of capitalism i don't know it's a hypothesis i'd like to at least give it a fair test because if it works it'd be great i think okay let's introduce another new term from your book a siren server what is that yes a siren server is one of these giant computers that's accruing fantastic benefits so let me explain what i uh i'll give you some examples um let's suppose you're an american health insurance company uh as you know in america we have private health insurance thus far unlike the canadian system it might or much might not change under obama so if you're in the past when actuaries who are the statisticians statisticians who work for insurance companies when they have to try to calculate how much a policy should cost they had to do it by hand and they didn't have much data coming in but now with giant gathering capabilities because of the internet and because of the size of computers they can crunch the numbers really effectively and it becomes an impossible to resist temptation to try to create a perfect insurance company and what that means is you only insure the people who are the least likely to need insurance and you exclude all the people who are likely to need insurance and it seems like you're just writing on this magic carpet where it's just all profit and everybody else takes the risk the rest of society takes the risk but of course what happens is the rest of society isn't big enough to absorb the risk so gradually the whole basis in which your wealth made sense starts to crumble this is what's happened with finance specifically financiers used giant computers which i call siren servers to try to calculate a way to have a perfect scheme and shunt the risk off to everybody else and whole nation states are losing their credit ratings the whole developed world has been thrown into this very strange austerity wave in the midst of wealth i mean it's really a bizarre circumstance because of the incredible inequity that the people with the biggest computers had such an an extraordinary advantage over everybody else so the the there are a bunch of different siren servers they have totally different names and yet to me they seem similar they include the national intelligence agencies the consumer-facing schemes like facebook and google from silicon valley the giant the high-frequency trading firms and the leveraged bundled hedge fund derivative monstrosities and uh many many others modern elections are run like siren servers wherever you see new centers of power rising just dig a little bit and you'll find a giant computer and that's a siren server so the siren servers the way you make it sound are nefarious would you put google and facebook in those categories as well you know that's the thing about it is we all fell into it innocently or at least i i think so maybe in some of the cases of finance and insurance it's not so innocent but i was there for the creation of this thing i was there at the creation of google a startup of mine became part of google i was around at the birth of some of the big financial schemes even and i don't think anyone really fully foresaw how seductive and power concentrating having giant computers would be i actually think this is a problem we fell into innocently i know that that sounds hard to believe but i like i say i was there for a lot of this and i believe that's what happened so i don't think it was a nefarious scheme i think it was ideas that seemed good that just turned out to have side effects of just vast implications can siren servers learn anything from let's say walmart ah yeah walmart's a really interesting one walmart was super early so starting in the 80s they were already trying to create a big computer and they succeeded and what they did is they used it to make models of the business interests of everybody else they would deal with not just their customers but their suppliers and the transportation industry and by creating a global model they put themselves in a position that was unlike any in the history of capitalism before where they had like this perfect spy service and they knew in advance or they had a pretty good idea of what everybody's bottom line would be so that they could negotiate everyone else right down to the bare bones prices that they could accept they forced everyone to optimize their operations just to serve walmart and honestly i think walmart did a lot of good because it helped manage the growth of china in a smooth way i i don't think that this is all bad i think you can find a lot of good and what's happened but the problem with it is that walmart is so successful at concentrating power that it starts to undermine its own wealth i mean walmart has been so good at leaching all the benefits to itself and and uh forcing everybody else to the bare minimum that its own customers are having trouble affording to buy its products and that's become the limits to its growth and it's absurd to run a market economy that way you know undermining your own customer base cannot be a business plan if we're if market economies are going to work into the future but that's exactly what happens when you have this outsized benefit of a giant computer do you make a distinction google will do it to its own users as well well that's where i was going to go next do you make a distinction between when we're talking siren servers the merchant banks on wall street for example or the big insurance companies that you were talking about or the facebook and um and google's which theoretically at least are free of charge for us to use do you make a distinction between the two well of of course you can find distinctions but i'm interested in emphasizing the underappreciated similarities between all these schemes so in the case of facebook and google just like with the financial servers or the insurance companies the idea is to get as much information about the world as possible to be able to compute on that information better than anyone else by having the biggest computer and then to very subtly make decisions that make other people take the risk and create an approximation of a perfect business for oneself so in the case of finance in order to get people to buy into this game super cheap and easy mortgages were dangled now i think canada didn't fall into this trap as much as the us and europe did but boy did we i'll tell you and what happens is you accept the bait and then you enter into this information relationship with some remote giant computer and the way that you pay for it is very gradual over time all of a sudden credit gets tight or property values are constrained or something like that in the case of google and facebook what's dangled in front of you is free services free search or free translation free social networking free free but what's happening is that in order to get make all that stuff free it has to be fed with data from people and that data has to be free or the service can't be free so music has to become free and the work of journalism has to be copied all the time and be made you know more and more free and so your own career prospects are being leeched away you might get free lessons but your prospects of becoming a teacher are reduced you might get free music but your prospects of making a living as a musician are reduced and eventually this will apply to every profession because everything will become more and more software mediated as we get better technology in this century and then what google does to make money is they let third parties come and pay to to micromanage the options in front of you all those little links and uh that also is is a bit of a creepy thing because people are gradually accepting this sort of rising tide of subtle manipulations where these giant computers are recommending who you date and you know all these very intimate decisions which are influenced by third parties it's it's there's a creepiness there but for the moment even if we leave the creepiness aside what we have to notice is the long-term slow loss of opportunity that's a much too high price to pay for the immediate free treats that we get in our last couple of minutes here then i wonder if you could help us um your book is called who owns the future let's see if you can help us see the future how do we begin to create a more humanistic information economy well i think the first step is to do experiments with charging for information and this is anathema it's it's considered evil by a lot of people who think that making information freely copyable is the only path to openness and to goodness but uh i think we should experiment with alternatives to that uh i think we should experiment with making the information for some of the new waves of technology that are coming out paid instead of free like we'll have a great one coming up with 3d printers these are these devices that are sort of like microwave ovens you program in an object you want in little spigots squirt out materials very carefully to create your object then you pull it out and so there's this object that's created out of pure information without a factory and so those things are a huge hobbyist craze now people love them they're really fun there's a whole new platform where information could throw factory workers out of work why not make the information for 3d printers be paid just as an experiment why not make it instead of being like linux something that's a new exchange where designers can earn a living from people printing out their designs and let's see what happens let's be experimental maybe what i'm proposing will be worse but let's have the courage to try the experiment and see this notion of being so dogmatic that we already know the best way of doing things as the world is not doing so well is madness let's at least try some alternatives the book is called who owns the future by today's guest chair and lanier we're so grateful you could spare some time for us from california tonight jaren thanks so much i wish i was there in toronto i just love being there next time you're in town please call on us we'll have you on again wonderful all the best take care support ontario's public television donate at tvo.org you

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

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Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2013