Who Owns the Future? Read Free

Moore’s Law
    A heavenly idea comes up a lot in what might be called Silicon Valley metaphysics. We anticipate immortality through mechanization. A common claim in utopian technology culture is that people—well, perhaps not everyone—will be uploaded into cloud computing servers * later in this century, perhaps in a decade or two, to become immortal in Virtual Reality. Or, if we are to remain physical, we will be surrounded by a world animated with robotic technology. We will float from joy to joy, even the poorest among us living like a sybaritic magician. We will not have to call forth what we wish from the world, for we will be so well modeled by statistics in the computing clouds that the dust will know what we want.
* A “server” is just a computer on a network that serves up responses to other computers. Generally home computers or portable devices aren’t set up to acknowledge connections from arbitrary other computers, so they aren’t servers. A “cloud” is a collection of servers that act in a coordinated way.
    Picture this: It’s sometime later in the 21st century, and you’re at the beach. A neuro-interfaced seagull perches and seems to speak, telling you that you might want to know that nanobots are repairingyour heart valve at the moment (who knew you had a looming heart problem?) and the sponsor is the casino up the road, which paid for this avian message and the automatic cardiology through Google or whatever company is running that sort of switchboard decades hence.
    If the wind starts to blow, swarms of leaves turn out to be subtle bioengineered robots that harness that very wind to propel themselves into an emergent shelter that surrounds you. Your wants and needs are automatically analyzed and a robotic masseuse forms out of the sand and delivers shiatsu as you contemplate the wind’s whispers from your pop-up cocoon.
    There are endless variations of this sort of tale of soon-to-appear high-tech abundance. Some of them are found in science fiction, but more often these visions come up in ordinary conversations. They are so ambient in Silicon Valley culture that they become part of the atmosphere of the place. Typically, you might hear a thought experiment about how cheap computing will be, how much more advanced materials science will become, and so on, and from there your interlocutor extrapolates that supernatural-seeming possibilities will reliably open up later in this century.
    This is the thought schema of a thousand inspirational talks, and the motivation behind a great many startups, courses, and careers. The key terms associated with this sensibility are accelerating change, abundance, and singularity .
The Price of Heaven
    My tale of a talking seagull strikes me as being kitschy and contrived, but any scenario in which humans imagine living without constraints feels like that.
    But we needn’t fear a loss of constraints. Utopians presume the advent of abundance not because it will be affordable, but because it will be free, provided we accept surveillance.
    Starting back in the early 1980s, an initially tiny stratum of gifted technologists conceived new interpretations of concepts like privacy, liberty, and power. I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book.What was once a tiny subculture has blossomed into the dominant interpretation of computation and software-mediated society.
    One strain of what might be called “hacker culture” held that liberty means absolute privacy through the use of cryptography. I remember the thrill of using military-grade stealth just to argue about who should pay for a pizza at MIT in 1983 or so.
    On the other hand, some of my friends from that era, who consumed that pizza, eventually became very rich building giant cross-referenced dossiers on masses of people, which were put to use by financiers, advertisers, insurers, or other concerns nurturing fantasies of operating the world