The idea for this post came from a three-year old article that HannahD just sent me, What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
“Well, that’s what my new book’s about. It’s called The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity, and it doesn’t focus as much on free music files as it does on the world of finance—but what it suggests is that a file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there’s this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. [Meanwhile], it’s shrinking the overall economy. I think it’s the mistake of our age.”
The mistake of our age? That’s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction). “I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”
I originally wrote the following as a reply to Hannah.
There is some truth in the computer’s responsibility for the diminishing middle-class, but I think the real problem is society’s not realizing that it needs to adapt to the new reality.
I have a thought experiment I like to propose. I am amazed at how many people are simply unable to carry it out, but I found it embodied in a quote that I have retained on my blog.
Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source of quote
If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?
My thought experiment is to imagine the day when the production of everything is automated. All society’s needs can be produced without any human thought or labor. Does all the wealth get concentrated into the hands of a very few, or is it spread out so that everybody can have a decent life?
The ultimate vision of my thought experiment won’t happen suddenly if it happens at all. However, we are creeping up on it, so it is a serious question. By imagining the distant end point it can focus our thinking on the problem that we need to solve. How does society rearrange itself to this new reality so that we all have a decent life?
Most Democrats and Republicans, certainly the leaders, don’t seem to have thought about this. I believe Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein know the issue very well. I don’t even think that Elizabeth Warren has the imagination to conceive of this issue.
I don’t have answers, but I have the question. The way we get to the answers is to experiment with different ways of addressing the problem and find out by experience which ones work and which ones don’t. Each experiment can stimulate us to new thinking about solutions we haven’t dreamed of yet. The job guarantee and the income guarantee are two ideas that people are giving serious thought to.