Summary of Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future?

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The price we pay for the illusion of free information is that most of the overall economy isn’t about information. Eventually, most productivity will become software-mediated. This could lead to a period of hyper-unemployment and political and social chaos.
#2 People are becoming poorer than they need to be because popular digital designs do not treat people as being special enough in the digital world. People are treated as small elements in a bigger information machine when in fact people are the only sources or destinations of information.
#3 The primary influence on the way technologists think about the future is their direct experience of digital networks through consumer electronics. As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes cheaper.
#4 The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not.

Sujets

• Vente
• General
• Business
• Economics
• Electronic commerce
• General officer
• E-Commerce
• Marketing et communication
• Commerce électronique
• E-commerce
• E-Commerce
• E-Commerce
• E-commerce
• E-Commerce

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822503083
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future?
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The price we pay for the illusion of free information is that most of the overall economy isn’t about information. Eventually, most productivity will become software-mediated. This could lead to a period of hyper-unemployment and political and social chaos.

#2

People are becoming poorer than they need to be because popular digital designs do not treat people as being special enough in the digital world. People are treated as small elements in a bigger information machine when in fact people are the only sources or destinations of information.

#3

The primary influence on the way technologists think about the future is their direct experience of digital networks through consumer electronics. As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes cheaper.

#4

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not.

#5

A heavenly idea that comes up a lot in Silicon Valley metaphysics is that people will be uploaded into cloud computing servers later in this century, and will become immortal in Virtual Reality.

#6

The idea of abundance is not affordable because it will be free provided we accept surveillance. This is what many cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks.

#7

The digital economy is devaluing people, and it’s not just the middle classes that are being affected, but the upper classes as well. The more central information becomes to our economy, the less value we will have.

#8

The more advanced technology becomes, the more all activity becomes mediated by information tools. As our economy becomes more fully an information economy, it will only grow if more information is monetized, instead of less.

#9

The human condition is an evolving technological puzzle. We must solve one problem to create new ones. This has always been the case, and is not a special quality of present times.

#10

The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels to exploit whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive.

#11

You are sitting at the edge of the ocean, wherever the coast will be after Miami is abandoned to the waves. You are thirsty. Random little clots of dust are full-on robotic interactive devices, since advertising companies have released plagues of smart dust upon the world.

#12

We must ask ourselves: How can we design digital networks that deliver more help than harm in aligning human intention with great challenges. A starting point for an answer can be summarized: Digital information is just people in disguise.

#13

The act of cloud-based translation shrinks the economy by pretending the translators who provided the examples don’t exist. With each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment.

#14

The ideas in this book are not perfect, but they are a step in the right direction. They offer an immediate way to understand how digital technology is changing economics and politics.

#15

Aristotle believed that the human condition was in part a function of what machines could not do. He thought that if machines could do more, people would be free and elevated. But he didn’t consider the possibility that people might invent the machines to play music and operate looms.

#16

Music is a necessity to be met, and millions of people want to be able to play music for a living. We see their attempts online, which are usually retweeted as the lie that there is a new class of musicians succeeding financially through Internet publicity.

#17

The Roman Empire was the first to use abundance without politics, but it was an illusion that could only be sustained in temporary bubbles. The rich lived behind gates to pretend they didn’t need anyone else.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Money is a human invention that has ensnared us. It is past-oriented, and it allows us to forget about the history of how we got that money.

#2

The nature of money will be transformed yet again in the age of computation. Money now can remember more than money previously could. This can cause problems. It is becoming more and more difficult to corrupt money.

#3

The essential questions about money are the same as they have always been with information systems: What is remembered. What is forgotten. When professional economics is unsettled, popular ideas about wealth creation can veer toward paranoia.

#4

The fractional reserve banking system is fraudulent, a tool of international bankers, and a form of indentured servitude. However, it is important to understand that growth is necessary in a healthy market.

#5

The transformation of money into an abstract representation of the future began about four hundred years ago. Money is only valuable as interpreted by people, so talking about the absolute value of money is meaningless.

#6

The rise of finance has been accompanied by rising ideals, technologies that have brought comfort and health to millions of people, and even the rise of middle classes. However, it has been proven that market systems will always degrade into the rut of plutocracy.

#7

The markets that are networked and hyperefficient tend to have winner-take-all distributions of outcomes. This is true for tech startups, for instance, and it is also true for new kinds of individual success stories in the online world.

#8

When used properly, winner-take-all systems are beneficial. But when they are used excessively or inappropriately, they can amplify errors and make outcomes less meaningful.

#9

In a star system, the top players are rewarded tremendously, while almost everyone else is driven toward poverty because of competition or perhaps automation. To get a bell curve of outcomes, there must be an unbounded variety of paths that can lead to success.

#10

The fatal conundrum of a hyperefficient market is that it will not create enough of a middle class to support a real market dynamic. A market economy cannot thrive without the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.

#11

The internet has the potential to create a middle class mountain, but it can also create a winner-take-all economy. Levees, or broad dams of modest altitude, can be used to protect something precious.

#12

The middle class was created through many different types of levees. Some were government-based, while others were pseudo-governmental. Without these exceptions to the torrential rule of the open flow of capital, capitalism could not have thrived.

#13

The debate between government and markets is a distraction from the real issue: how to make capitalism better instead of worse. The technology can't be tweaked if you want it to be perfect. You fix bugs.

#14

The ideal mechanism would be fluid enough to reward creativity, and not turn into a moribund power base for committees. The design should nonetheless be tough enough to withstand inevitable giant hurricanes of capital flow.

#15

The beneficiaries of middle-class-sustaining levees have been subject to assault from two directions. From above, the rich, who had been elevated by the upward drafts of capital flow, sometimes look down and see an artificial blockage in their flow. From below, those who do not enjoy a particular sort of levee may resent the levees of others.

#16

Levees are a rejection of unbridled algorithm and an insertion of human will into the flow of capital. Without our system of levees, rising like a glimmering bell-curved mountain of rice paddies, capitalism might have decayed into Marx’s attractor nightmare in which markets decay into plutocracy.

#17

With the levees of the middle classes breached, the old adversaries of the levees were pleased. The Wall Street mogul and the young Pirate Party voter sang the same song: all must be made fluid.