Summary of Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future?

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822503083

IRB Media

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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,