[[!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.