Books: 24/7 and Who owns the future

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+[[!meta title="24/7 - Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep"]]
+
+* Author: Jonathan Crary
+* Publisher: Verso
+* Year:  2013
+
+## Concepts
+
+* Serialization, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.
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+[[!meta title="Who owns the future?"]]
+
+* Author: Jaron Lanier
+* Year: 2013
+* Publisher: Simon & Schuster
+
+## Index
+
+* Star system versus the bell curve as network designs.
+* Siren Servers: narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry.
+* Siren Servers and Maxwell’s Demon.
+* Disruptive innovation as the tedious scheme to shrink markets.
+* Science isn't automatic.
+* Nine dismal humors of futurism, and a hopeful one.
+* Marx as one of the first technology writers (when discussing Luddites).
+* Human obsolescence is avoidable.
+* Keynes Considered as a Big Data Pioneer.
+* Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
+* Humanistic information economics.
+* What is experience? If personal experience were missing from the universe, how would things be different?
+* Gurus and New Age at the Sillicon Valley: Gurdjieff, Steve Jobs.
+
+## Prelude
+
+    Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees
+    are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who
+    contribute to the network without being paid for it. Networks need a great
+    number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when
+    they have them, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect
+    of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.
+
+    [...]
+
+    By “digital networking” I mean not only the Internet and the Web, but also
+    other networks operated by outfits like financial institutions and intelligence
+    agencies. In all these cases, we see the phenomenon of power and money becoming
+    concentrated around the people who operate the most central computers in a
+    network, undervaluing everyone else. That is the pattern we have come to
+    expect, but it is not the only way things can go.
+
+## The Price of Heaven
+
+    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 by remote control.
+
+    It is typical of human nature to ignore hypocrisy. The greater a hypocrisy, the
+    more invisible it typically becomes, but we technical folk are inclined to seek
+    an airtight whole of ideas. Here is one such synthesis—of cryptography for
+    techies and massive spying on others—which I continue to hear fairly often:
+    Privacy for ordinary people can be forfeited in the near term because it will
+    become moot anyway.
+
+    Surveillance by the technical few on the less technical many can be tolerated
+    for now because of hopes for an endgame in which everything will become
+    transparent to everyone. Network entrepreneurs and cyber-activists alike seem
+    to imagine that today’s elite network servers in positions of information
+    supremacy will eventually become eternally benign, or just dissolve.
+
+    Bizarrely, the endgame utopias of even the most ardent high-tech libertarians
+    always seem to take socialist turns. The joys of life will be too cheap to
+    meter, we imagine. So abundance will go ambient.
+
+    This is what diverse cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups
+    all share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks. Eventually, they imagine,
+    there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will
+    be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball. In the
+    meantime, those true believers encrypt their servers even as they seek to
+    gather the rest of the world’s information and find the best way to leverage
+    it.
+
+    It is all too easy to forget that “free” inevitably means that someone else
+    will be deciding how you live.
+
+## Just Blurt the Idea Out
+
+    So we begin with the simple question of how to design digital networks to
+    deliver more help than harm in aligning human intention to meet great
+    challenges. A starting point for an answer can be summarized: “Digital
+    information is really just people in disguise.”
+
+### Aristotle frets
+
+    Aristotle directly addressed the role of people in a hypothetical high-tech
+    world: If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or
+    anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods
+    of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own accord entered the assembly
+    of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch
+    the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants,
+    nor masters slaves.1
+
+    At this ancient date, a number of possibilities were at least slightly visible
+    to Aristotle’s imagination. One was that the human condition was in part a
+    function of what machines could not do. Another was that it was possible to
+    imagine, at least hypothetically, that machines could do more. The synthesis
+    was also conceived: Better machines could free and elevate people, even slaves.
+
+    If we could show Aristotle the technology of our times, I wonder what he would
+    make of the problem of unemployment. Would he take Marx’s position that better
+    machines create an obligation (to be carried out by political bodies) to
+    provide care and dignity to people who no longer need to work? Or would
+    Aristotle say, “Kick the unneeded ones out of town. The polis is only for the
+    people who own the machines, or do what machines still cannot do.” Would he
+    stand by idly as Athens was eventually depopulated?
+
+    I’d like to think the best of Aristotle, and assume he would realize that both
+    choices are bogus; machine autonomy is nothing but theater. Information needn’t
+    be thought of as a freestanding thing, but rather as a human product. It is
+    entirely legitimate to understand that people are still needed and valuable
+    even when the loom can run without human muscle power. It is still running on
+    human thought.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Note: How prescient that Aristotle chose musical instruments and looms as his
+    examples for machines that might one day operate automatically! These two types
+    of machines did indeed turn out to be central to the prehistory of computation.
+    The Jacquard programmable loom helped inspire calculating engines, while music
+    theory and notation helped further the concept of abstract computation, as when
+    Mozart wrote algorithmic, nondeterministic music incorporating dice throws.
+    Both developments occurred around the turn of the 19th century.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Aristotle seems to want to escape the burden of accommodating lesser people.
+    His quote about self-operating lutes and looms could be interpreted as a
+    daydream that better technology will free us to some degree from having to deal
+    with one another.
+
+    It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities
+    first formed. Athens was a necessity first, and a luxury second. No one wants
+    to accommodate the diversity of strangers. People deal with each other
+    politically because the material advantages are compelling. We find relative
+    safety and sustenance in numbers. Agriculture and armies happened to work
+    better as those enterprises got bigger, and cities built walls.
+
+    But in Aristotle’s words you get a taste of what a nuisance it can be to
+    accommodate others. Something was lost with the advent of the polis, and we
+    still dream of getting it back.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The reward for a Roman general, upon retiring after years of combat, was a plot
+    of land he could farm for himself. To be left alone, to be able to live off the
+    land with the illusion of no polis to bug you, that was the dream. The American
+    West offered that dream again, and still loathes giving it up. Justice Louis
+    Brandeis famously defined privacy as the “right to be left alone.”
+
+    In every case, however, abundance without politics was an illusion that could
+    only be sustained in temporary bubbles, supported by armies. The ghosts of the
+    losers haunt every acre of easy abundance. The greatest beneficiaries of
+    civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from
+    politics. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to
+    pretend to not need anyone else, if only for a moment. In Aristotle’s quote, we
+    find the earliest glimmer of the hope that technological advancement could
+    replace territorial conquest as a way of implementing an insulating bubble
+    around a person.
+
+    [...]
+
+    People naturally seek the benefits of society, meaning the accommodation of
+    strangers, while avoiding direct vulnerabilities to specific others as much as
+    possible. This is a clichéd criticism of the online culture of the moment.
+    People have thousands of “friends” and yet stare at a little screen when in the
+    proximity of other people. As it was in Athens, so it is online.
+
+## Money
+
+    Money might have begun as a mnemonic counter for assets you couldn’t keep under
+    direct observation, like wandering sheep. A stone per sheep, so the shepherd
+    would be confident all had been reunited after a day at pasture. In other
+    words, artifacts took on information storage duties.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Ancient money was information storage that represented events in the past. To
+    the ears of many a financier, at this early stage “money” had not been born
+    yet, only accounting. That kind of money can be called “past-oriented money.”
+
+## Noise and luck
+
+    Consider the problem of noise, or what is known as luck in human affairs.
+
+    [...]
+
+    And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some
+    critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes,
+    a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a
+    societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity
+    of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based.
+
+    When a bell curve distribution is appreciated as a bell curve instead of as a
+    winner-take-all distribution, then noise, luck, and conceptual ambiguity aren’t
+    amplified. It makes statistical sense to talk about average intelligence or
+    high intelligence, but not to identify the single most intelligent person.
+
+## Letting Bell Curves Be Bell Curves
+
+    In a star system, the top players are rewarded tremendously, while almost
+    everyone else—facing in our era an ever-larger, more global body of competitive
+    peers—is driven toward poverty (because of competition or perhaps automation).
+
+## Absolutism
+
+    Being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist.
+
+    Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can’t be
+    tweaked. If market technology can’t be fully automatic and needs some
+    “buttons,” then there’s no use in trying to pretend otherwise. You don’t stay
+    attached to poorly performing quests for perfection. You fix bugs.
+
+## The Taste of Politics
+
+    Despite my favorable regard for organized labor, for the purposes of this book
+    I have to focus somewhat on certain failings. The problems of interest to me
+    are not really with the labor movement, but with the nature of levees. What
+    might be called “upper-class levees,” like exclusive investment funds, have
+    been known to blur into Ponzi schemes or other criminal enterprises, and the
+    same pattern exists for levees at all levels.
+
+    Levees are more human than algorithmic, and that is not an entirely good thing.
+    Whether for the rich or the middle class, levees are inevitably a little
+    conspiratorial, and conspiracy naturally attracts corruption. Criminals easily
+    exploited certain classic middle-class levees; the mob famously infiltrated
+    unions and repurposed music royalties as a money-laundering scheme.
+
+    Levees are a rejection of unbridled algorithm and an insertion of human will
+    into the flow of capital. Inevitably, human oversight brings with it all the
+    flaws of humans. And yet despite their rough and troubled nature, antenimbosian
+    levees worked well enough to preserve middle classes despite the floods,
+    storms, twisters, and droughts of a world contoured by finance. Without our
+    system of levees, rising like a glimmering bell-curved mountain of rice
+    paddies, capitalism would probably have decayed into Marx’s “attractor
+    nightmare” in which markets decay into plutocracy.
+
+## A First Pass at a Definition
+
+    A Siren Server, as I will refer to such a thing, is an elite computer,
+    or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is
+    characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme
+    information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest,
+    and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact
+    with it.
+
+    Siren Servers gather data from the network, often without having to pay
+    for it. The data is analyzed using the most powerful available
+    computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results
+    of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of
+    the world to advantage.
+
+    That plan will always eventually backfire, because the rest of the world
+    cannot indefinitely absorb the increased risk, cost, and waste dispersed
+    by a Siren Server. Homer sternly warned sailors to not succumb to the
+    call of the sirens, and yet was entirely complacent about Hephaestus’s
+    golden female robots. But Sirens might be even more dangerous in
+    inorganic form, because it is then that we are really most looking at
+    ourselves in disguise. It is not the siren who harms the sailor, but the
+    sailor’s inability to think straight. So it is with us and our machines.
+
+    Siren Servers are fated by their nature to sow illusions. They are
+    cousins to another seductive literary creature, star of the famous
+    thought experiment known as Maxwell’s Demon, after the great 19th
+    century physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The demon is an imaginary
+    creature that, if it could only exist, would be able to implement a
+    perpetual motion machine and perform other supernatural tricks.
+
+    Maxwell’s Demon might be stationed at a tiny door separating two
+    chambers filled with water or air. It would only allow hot molecules to
+    pass one way, and cold molecules to pass in the opposite direction.
+    After a while, one side would be hot and the other cold, and you could
+    let them mix again, rushing together so quickly that the stream could
+    run a generator. In that way, the tiny act of discriminating between hot
+    and cold would produce infinite energy, because you could repeat the
+    process forever.
+
+    The reason Maxwell’s Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources
+    to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but
+    it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot
+    itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle
+    is also known as “no free lunch.”
+
+    We do our best to implement Maxwell’s Demon whenever we manipulate
+    reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we
+    certainly can’t get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All
+    the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter
+    overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell’s Demon if
+    you don’t look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always
+    lose more than you gain.
+
+    Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell’s Demon, separating the
+    state of “one” from the state of “zero” for a while, at a cost. A
+    computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to
+    sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some
+    imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved. For
+    instance, a Siren Server might allow only those who would be cheap to
+    insure through a doorway (to become insured) in order to make a
+    supernaturally ideal, low-risk insurance company. Such a scheme would
+    let high-risk people pass one way, and low-risk ones pass the other way,
+    in order to implement a phony perpetual motion machine out of a human
+    society. However, the uninsured would not cease to exist; rather, they
+    would instead add to the cost of the whole system, which includes the
+    people who run the Siren Server. A short-term illusion of risk reduction
+    would actually lead to increased risk in the longer term.
+
+## Candy
+
+    The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of
+    ultrasecret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this
+    information to concentrate money and power. It doesn’t matter whether the
+    concentration is called a social network, an insurance company, a derivatives
+    fund, a search engine, or an online store. It’s all fundamentally the same.
+    Whatever the intent might have been, the result is a wielding of digital
+    technology against the future of the middle class.
+
+    [...]
+
+    We loved the crazy cheap easy mortgages, motivated by crazed overleveraging. We
+    love the free music, enabled by crazed copying. We love cheap online prices,
+    offered by what would have once seemed like national intelligence agencies.
+    These newer spy services do not struggle on behalf of our security, but instead
+    figure out just how little payment everyone in the chain can be made to accept.
+    We are not benefiting from the benevolence of some artificial intelligence
+    superbeing. We are exploiting each other off the books while those
+    concentrating our information remain on the books. We love our treats but will
+    eventually discover we are depleting our own value.
+
+    That’s how we can have economic troubles despite there being so much wealth in
+    the system, and during a period of increasing efficiencies. Great fortunes are
+    being made on shrinking the economy instead of growing it. It’s not a result of
+    some evil scheme, but a side effect of an idiotic elevation of the fantasy that
+    technology is getting smart and standing on its own, without people.
+
+## From Autocollate to Autocollude
+
+    It seems as though online services are bringing bargains to everyone, and yet
+    wealth disparity is increasing while social mobility is decreasing. If everyone
+    were getting better options, wouldn’t everyone be doing better as well?
+
+## From the Customer’s Point of View
+
+    Wal-Mart confronted the ordinary shopper with two interesting pieces of news.
+    One was that stuff they wanted to buy got cheaper, which of course was great.
+    This news was delivered first, and caused cheering.
+
+    But there was another piece of news that emerged more gradually. It has often
+    been claimed that Wal-Mart plays a role in the reduction of employment
+    prospects for the very people who tend to be its customers.1 Wal-Mart has
+    certainly made the world more efficient in a certain sense. It moved
+    manufacturing to any spot in the world that could accomplish it at the very
+    lowest cost; it rewarded vendors willing to cut corners to the maximum degree.
+
+    [...]
+
+    All Siren Servers deliver dual messages similar to the pair pioneered by
+    Wal-Mart. On the one hand, “Good news! Treats await! Information systems have
+    made the world more efficient for you.”
+
+    On the other hand, a little later: “It turns out you, your needs, and your
+    expectations are not maximally efficient from the lofty point of view of our
+    server. Therefore, we are reshaping the world so that in the long term, your
+    prospects are being reduced.”
+
+    The initial benefits don’t remotely balance the long-term degradations.
+    Initially you made some money day trading or getting an insanely easy loan, or
+    saved some money couch-surfing or by using coupons from an Internet site, but
+    then came the pink slip, the eviction notice, and the halving of your savings
+    when the market drooped. Or you loved getting music for free, but then realized
+    that you couldn’t pursue a music career yourself because there were hardly any
+    middle-class, secure jobs left in what was once the music industry. Maybe you
+    loved the supercheap prices at your favorite store, but then noticed that the
+    factory you might have worked for closed up for good.
+
+## Financial Siren Servers
+
+    The schemes were remarkably similar to Silicon Valley designs. A few of them
+    took as input everything they possibly could scrape from the Internet as well
+    as other, proprietary networks. As in Google’s data centers, stupendous
+    correlative algorithms would crunch on the whole ’net’s data overnight, looking
+    for correlations. Maybe a sudden increase in comments about mosquito bites
+    would cause an automatic, instant investment in a company that sold lotions.
+    Actually, that’s an artificially sensible example. The real examples made no
+    sense to humans. But money was made, and fairly reliably.
+
+    Note: It should be pointed out that if only one Siren Server is milking a
+    particular fluctuation in this way, a reasonable argument could be made that a
+    service is being performed, in that the fluctuation reveals inefficiency, and
+    the Siren is canceling it out. However, when many Sirens milk the same
+    fluctuation, they lock into a feedback system with each other and inadvertently
+    conspire to milk the rest of the world to no purpose.
+
+    [...]
+
+    What is absolutely essential to a financial Siren Server, however, is a
+    superior information position. If everyone else knew what you were doing, they
+    could securitize you. If anyone could buy stock in a mathematical “sure thing”
+    scheme, then the benefits of it would be copied like a shared music file, and
+    spread out until it was nullified. So, in today’s world your mortgage can be
+    securitized in someone else’s secretive bunker, but you can’t know about the
+    bunker and securitize it. If it weren’t for that differential, the new kind of
+    sure thing wouldn’t exist.
+
+## If Life Gives You EULAs, Make Lemonade
+
+    The information economy that we are currently building doesn’t really embrace
+    capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism.
+
+## Your Lack of Privacy Is Someone Else’s Wealth
+
+    Occasionally the rich embrace a new token and drive up its value. The fine art
+    market is a great example. Expensive art is essentially a private form of
+    currency traded among the very rich. The better an artist is at making art that
+    can function this way, the more valuable the art will become. Andy Warhol is
+    often associated with this trick, though Pablo Picasso and others were
+    certainly playing the same game earlier. The art has to be stylistically
+    distinct and available in suitable small runs. It becomes a private form of
+    money, as instantly recognizable as a hundred-dollar bill.
+
+    A related trend of our times is that troves of dossiers on the private lives
+    and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are
+    packaged into a new private form of elite money. The actual data in these
+    troves need not be valid. In fact, it might be better that it is not valid, for
+    actual knowledge brings liabilities.
+
+## The Nature of Our Confusion
+
+    Our core illusion is that we imagine big data as a substance, like a natural
+    resource waiting to be mined. We use terms like data-mining routinely to
+    reinforce that illusion. Indeed some data is like that. Scientific big data,
+    like data about galaxy formation, weather, or flu outbreaks, can be gathered
+    and mined, just like gold, provided you put in the hard work.
+
+    But big data about people is different. It doesn’t sit there; it plays against
+    you. It isn’t like a view through a microscope, but more like a view of a
+    chessboard.
+
+## The Most Elite Naïveté
+
+    As technology advances, Siren Servers will be ever more the objects of the
+    struggle for wealth and power, because they are the only links in the chain
+    that will not be commoditized. If present trends continue, you’ll always be
+    able to seek information supremacy, just as old-fashioned barons could struggle
+    for supremacy over land or natural resources. A new energy cycle will someday
+    make oil much less central to geopolitics, but the information system that
+    manages that new kind of energy could easily become an impregnable castle. The
+    illusory golden vase becomes more and more valuable.
+
+### Mapping out where the conversation can go
+
+    An endgame for civilization has been foreseen since Aristotle. As technology
+    reaches heights of efficiency, civilization will have to find a way to resolve
+    a peculiar puzzle: What should the role of “extra” humans be if not everyone is
+    still strictly needed? Do the extra people—the ones whose roles have
+    withered—starve? Or get easy lives? Who decides? How?
+
+    The same core questions, stated in a multitude of ways, have elicited only a
+    small number of answers, because only a few are possible.
+
+    What will people be when technology becomes much more advanced? With each
+    passing year our abilities to act on our ideas are increased by technological
+    progress. Ideas matter more and more. The ancient conversations about where
+    human purpose is headed continue today, with rising implications.
+
+    Suppose that machines eventually gain sufficient functionality that one will be
+    able to say that a lot of people have become extraneous. This might take place
+    in nursing, pharmaceuticals, transportation, manufacturing, or in any other
+    imaginable field of employment.
+
+    The right question to then ask isn’t really about what should be done with the
+    people who used to perform the tasks now colonized by machines. By the time one
+    gets to that question, a conceptual mistake has already been made.
+
+    Instead, it has to be pointed out that outside of the spell of bad philosophy
+    human obsolescence wouldn’t in fact happen. The data that drives “automation”
+    has to ultimately come from people, in the form of “big data.” Automation can
+    always be understood as elaborate puppetry.
+
+    The most crucial quality of our response to very high-functioning machines,
+    artificial intelligences and the like, is how we conceive of the things that
+    the machines can’t do, and whether those tasks are considered real jobs for
+    people or not. We used to imagine that elite engineers would be automation’s
+    only puppeteers. It turns out instead that big data coming from vast numbers of
+    people is needed to make machines appear to be “automated.” Do the puppeteers
+    still get paid once the whole audience has joined their ranks?
+
+## The Technology of Ambient Cheating
+
+    Siren Servers do what comes naturally due to the very idea of computation.
+    Computation is the demarcation of a little part of the universe, called a
+    computer, which is engineered to be very well understood and controllable, so
+    that it closely approximates a deterministic, non-entropic process. But in
+    order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on
+    the waste heat, the randomness. You can create a local shield against entropy,
+    but your neighbors will always pay for it.
+
+    Note: A rare experimental machine called a “reversible” computer never forgets,
+    so that any computation can be run backward as well as forward. Such devices
+    run cool! This is an example of how thermodynamics and computation interact.
+    Reversible computers don’t radiate as much heat; forgetting radiates
+    randomness, which is the same thing as heating up the neighborhood.
+
+## The Insanity of the Local/Global Flip
+
+    A Siren Server can become so successful—sometimes in the blink of an eye—that
+    it optimizes its environment—changes it—instead of changing in order to adapt
+    to the environment. A successful Siren Server no longer acts only as a player
+    within a larger system. Instead it becomes a central planner. This makes it
+    stupid, like a central planner in a communist regime.
+
+## The Conservation of Free Will
+
+    A story must have actors, not automatons. Different people become more or less
+    like automatons in our Sirenic era.
+
+    Sirenic entrepreneurs intuitively cast free will—so long as it is their own—as
+    an ever more magical, elite, and “meta” quality of personhood. The entrepreneur
+    hopes to “dent the universe”* or achieve some other heroic, Nietzschean
+    validation. Ordinary people, however, who will be attached to the nodes of the
+    network created by the hero, will become more effectively mechanical.
+
+    [...]
+
+    We’re setting up barriers between cases where we choose to give over some
+    judgment to cloud software, as if we were predictable machines, and those where
+    we elevate our judgments to pious, absolute standards.
+
+    Making choices of where to place the barrier between ego and algorithm is
+    unavoidable in the age of cloud software. Drawing the line between what we
+    forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the
+    story of our time.
+
+## Rewarding and Punishing Network Effects
+
+    To understand how Siren Servers work, it’s useful to divide network effects
+    into those that are “rewarding” and those that are “punishing.” Siren Servers
+    gain dominance through rewarding network effects, but keep dominance through
+    punishing network effects.
+
+## The Closing Act
+
+    Competition becomes mostly about who can out-meta who, and only secondarily
+    about specialization.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server pattern perseveres,
+    and it is that pattern that is the real problem. The systematic decoupling of
+    risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any
+    particular server.
+
+## The limits of emergence as an explanation
+
+    But the problem with freestanding concentrations of power is that you never
+    know who will inherit them. If social networking has the power to synchronize
+    great crowds to dethrone a pharaoh, why might it not also coordinate lynchings
+    or pogroms?
+
+    [...]
+
+    The core ideal of the Internet is that one trusts people, and that given an
+    opportunity, people will find their way to be reasonably decent. I happily
+    restate my loyalty to that ideal. It’s all we have.
+
+    But the demonstrated capability of Facebook to effortlessly engage in mass
+    social engineering proves that the Internet as it exists today is not a
+    purists’ emergent system, as is so often claimed, but largely a top-down,
+    directed one.
+
+    [...]
+
+    We pretend that an emergent meta-human being is appearing in the computing
+    clouds—an artificial intelligence—but actually it is humans, the operators of
+    Siren Servers, pulling the levers.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The nuts and bolts of artificial-intelligence research can often be more
+    usefully interpreted without the concept of AI at all. For example, in 2011,
+    IBM scientists unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play
+    the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Suppose IBM had dispensed with the theatrics, and
+    declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based
+    search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained
+    IBM’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial
+    intelligence, but it would also have educated the public about how such a
+    technology might actually be used most effectively.
+
+    AI technologies typically operate on a variation of the process described
+    earlier that accomplishes translations between languages. While innovation in
+    algorithms is vital, it is just as vital to feed algorithms with “big data”
+    gathered from ordinary people. The supposedly artificially intelligent result
+    can be understood as a mash-up of what real people did before. People have
+    answered a lot of questions before, and a multitude of these answers are
+    gathered up by the algorithms and regurgitated by the program. This in no way
+    denigrates it or proposes it isn’t useful. It is not, however, supernatural.
+    The real people from whom the initial answers were gathered deserve to be paid
+    for each new answer given by the machine.
+
+    [...]
+
+    What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence
+    gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take
+    on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don’t even
+    think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations made by Netflix
+    and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms
+    is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of
+    those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be
+    hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes
+    accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only
+    statistics and correlations.
+
+    What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell
+    artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the
+    same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in
+    a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t
+    seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up
+    against Apple’s late chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a
+    real design sensibility.
+
+    But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent AIs, are
+    expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a
+    student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only
+    end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own
+    capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every
+    task undertaken by a machine and double-check every conclusion offered by an
+    algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even
+    though the signal has been given to walk.
+
+    When we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are
+    rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on—with the
+    machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal to
+    consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented in
+    Frankensteinian light?
+
+    The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified
+    by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way
+    of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain
+    the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon
+    Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: One day in the
+    not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a
+    superintelligent AI, infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of
+    us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the
+    world before humans even realize what’s happening.
+
+    Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others
+    think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old
+    books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes,
+    this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty
+    when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon
+    Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most
+    influential technologists.
+
+    It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a
+    soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been
+    virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today
+    to confirm metaphysical ideas about people. All thoughts about consciousness,
+    souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something
+    remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an
+    engineering culture.