Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Lanier, Jaron (2013-05-07), Who Owns the Future?, Simon & Schuster, Retrieved on 2013-05-17Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: computers Memes
17 MAY 2013
Kodak, Instagram, and Automation
Here’s a current example of the challenge we face... At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-cl...Folksonomies: automation unemployment
Folksonomies: automation unemployment
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1 A cautionary tale of how automation is running people out of employment.
08 AUG 2013
What's Good for a Business Can be Bad for Society
Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell’s Demon, separating the state of “one” from the state of “zero” for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved. For instance, a Siren Server might allow only those who would be cheap to insure through a doorway (to become insured) in order to make a supernat... 1 
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notesBusinesses that refuse to insure high-risk individuals leave the burden of those individuals on the whole community.
08 AUG 2013
The Siren Server
A Siren Server, as I will refer to such a thing, is an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest, and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact with it. Siren Servers gather data from the network, often without having to pay for it. The data is analyzed using the most powerful available computers, ... 1 notes
notesWeb services that entice people to contribute to them, and whose contributions are then aggregated in various forms for the profit of the server owner.
08 AUG 2013
New Money is Created with Promises
Ordinary people can help create new money by making promises. You constrain the future by making a plan, and a promise to keep to it. Money is created in response, because in making that promise you have created value. New money is created to represent that value. This is why it is possible for banks to fall apart when people don’t pay their mortgages back. Banks sell assets that are partially made of the future intents of borrowers. When borrowers do something other than promised, those as... 1 notes
notesPromises of the future grow the economy and create new wealth, making the economy an expanding universe.
14 OCT 2013
Everything Won't Become Free at Once
Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap, while at the same time crucial fundamentals for survival could become expensive. The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the work of Philip K. Dick.
Basics like water and food could soar in cost even as intensely sophisticated gadgets, like automated nanorobotic heart surgeons, float about as dust i... 1 notes
notesThe irony of society is that digital content is growing cheaper as is technology, but food and electricity are growing more expensive.
14 OCT 2013
Automation Comes to China
The key question isn’t “How much will be automated?” It’s how we’ll conceive of whatever can’t be automated at a given time. Even if there are new demands for people to perform new tasks in support of what we perceive as automation, we might apply antihuman values that define the new roles as not being “genuine work.” Maybe people will be expected to “share” instead. So the right question is “How many jobs might be lost to automation if we think about automation the wron... 1 notes
notesWould China, a centrally-planned society, replace its factory workers with robots and put a huge portion of the population out of work? Tagging this with a "todo" so I can follow up on it in the future and see if China does go down the automation route.
14 OCT 2013
The Problem of Machine-Aggregated Knowledge
he nuts and bolts of artificial-intelligence research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of AI at all. For example, in 2011, IBM scientists unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Suppose IBM had dispensed with the theatrics, and declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained IBM’s team as much (deserved) rec... 1 notes
notesIf an AI works by aggregating the works of the sum total of human knowledge, should the humans that discovered that knowledge be compensated? Science works the same way, but ideas remain free.
14 OCT 2013
eBook Purchasers are Second-Class
We have come to accept as inevitable a duo of coexisting lousy extremes. Sometimes information is supposedly free but people are subject to weird surveillance and influence, with insufficient commensurate rights. This is the familiar world of Google, Facebook, et al. It will not be a sustainable path as technology advances.
On the flip side, customers can be locked into one-sided contracts in order to have access to what they want online. This is the world of proprietary tree-shaped stores f... 1 notes
notesThey are not making an investment with their purchase, they are renting. A physical book can be signed, manipulated, and resold.
14 OCT 2013
The Implications of a Facebook Bankruptcy
One reason companies like Facebook should be interested in what I am proposing is that planning a regulation regime is better than morphing involuntarily into a dull regulated utility, which is what would probably happen otherwise. Suppose Facebook never gets good enough at snatching the “advertising” business from Google. That’s still a possibility as I write this. In that event, Facebook could go into decline, which would present a global emergency.
It’s not an outlandish scenario....Folksonomies: social media
Folksonomies: social media
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notesPeople would lose their friends, contacts, and much online history.
14 OCT 2013
Our Algorithms Must Continue Evolving
Actually, if cloud algorithms ever seem to come to rest and need little tending, that should be taken as a danger sign. In that eventuality, stasis would be an indication that people have allowed themselves to be overly defined and guided by old software and have stopped changing, or to put it another way, have stopped living fully. Living languages ought to require continued examples from living people in order for automated translation services to stay up to date. If the cloud has learned a... 1 notes
notesIf our translation algorithms become fixed, that means our language has become fixed.
