from virtual reality pioneer to anti-singularitarian

This is not the first time Jaron Lanier gets a post on Weird Things, in fact we met him before as he quickly went off the rails in describing AI, then became more incoherent while bemoaning all social media as a dehumanizing waste, all the while trying to pick a fight with the Singularitarian version of a machine-directed utopia. Now, the former virtual reality pioneer has moved on to a book length rumination on how technology is killing the middle class by eliminating jobs. And as per his current modus operandi, he starts off with a tiny kernel of a reasonable statement, and proceeds to strap it to the Hyperbole Rocket and launch it into deep space. Is it true that a new software package or a robot might make your job obsolete? Yes, it absolutely can. But does the technology prevent you from getting a new job? No, it doesn’t because the reasons why you’re going to have trouble finding work in a globalized economy are more political than technological, and it’s short term greed, partisan bickering, and ignorance of the powers that be at fault.

Here’s an example. Lanier’s opening salvo says that when Kodak was at the height of its market domination of personal photography, it employed more than 140,000 people. Now, he says, the face of personal photography is Instagram which has only 13 employees. Therefore, jobs were lost because of technology, Q.E.D. Um, no. First and foremost, Kodak died the slow and painful death it did because it first refused to adapt to a world of digital photography, then couldn’t, as it wasted years assuming that as long as they can at least sell the tools to develop all those digital photos on glossy paper, they’ll be fine. They never even thought that paper may be useless for most of the pictures being taken today as social media and smartphones took off. Secondly, as much as tech blogs may have hyped it, Instagram was not “the new face of photography.” Take away cheap, mainstream digital photography and it couldn’t exist. It was a distribution network, a network that Kodak could’ve built. But instead of innovating, it slowly withered away.

All right, so what happened to those tens of thousands of people laid off by Kodak? Well, they could find new jobs because among those laid off were managers, assistants, chemists, and IT specialists who could’ve applied their skills in other companies, doing other things, and I assure you that there aren’t 140,000 middle class workers out there who haven’t worked a day since a Kodak executive pink slipped them to meet the quarterly numbers. Eeyore would’ve been more optimistic about their future than Lanier, but then again, for optimism, Lanier would’ve needed to see technology as something more than a nefarious tool to use and abuse the populace. Where the disciples of Ray Kurzweil see immorality, sunshine rainbows, and unicorns frolicking in the meadows, he seems to see impending chaos, destruction, and socioeconomic dystopia adapted from the pages of very gloomy science fiction. And yet, Lanier plans to live with this grim future. For a fee of course. You see, in his version of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them, he’s suggesting that if social media sites use our data to survive, they should pay us for it, and that’s how we will start solving the impending job crisis caused by these evil machines taking our place.

Certainly, while being paid to mess around on Facebook would be a great deal, the problem is that paying all of its users even pennies a day would leave the company insolvent. Social media sites simply don’t make all that much money because they fell short of the promises they give a lot of advertisers when it comes to moving product for them. All the data you submit simply won’t give them nearly as good of a picture of who you are and what you like as Lanier and so many tech pundits think it does when they fall for the company’s wild claims. In fact, predicting what a person will do based on his or her social media footprint is an exercise in warm reading. There’s plenty of detail to go on, but a lot of this detail may be useless and lead to broad conclusions or incorrect recommendations. Advertisers are not moving nearly as much product as they thought they would, people are giving them incomplete and misleading information, social media makes money but not as much as it thought it could, and now Lanier wants this struggling ecosystem to pay its users for making it profitably mediocre? Does he also have a bridge to sell us?

Yes, the world is changing. Yes, technology is doing things it’s never done before, and it’s now taking us places where we’ve never been, physically, socially, and economically. But instead of trying to figure out a way to productively deal with with the change of pace, by investing in R&D and shifting more jobs into innovation and design, while letting robots do more of the execution, people like Lanier want to take their ball and go home. The problem is that they can’t. Arguing if our sprawling data centers and powerful software needs to be scaled back and dumbed down is like protesting against the wind blowing. You can waste your oxygen telling it to slow down or go in a direction you’d personally find more acceptable, or you can raise some wind generators for an extra kilowatt hour or two to take advantage of the situation. At no point has any civilization ever grown or met a challenge by saying “no, we’re done,” or demanding payment to participate in new ideas, new economies, and new social structures. Many have died and stagnated doing exactly that, which is why we shouldn’t take Lanier’s technophobic musings seriously.