Tag: jaron lanier

Should We Be Paid to Train the AI Algorithms?

Category : Political Science & Economics
Posted on by

If it’s free, you’re the product. If it’s extremely subsidized, you’re probably the product, too. Facebook is free. You’re the product. Google and Gmail are free. You’re the product. Mechanical Turk is cheap, you’re the product. Uber is cheap, you’re the product. Tesla self driving cars are add on features. You’re the product. Snapchat is free. You’re helping them build the best facial recognition database out there. They’re “paying” you with access to use their service.

Tesla needs a few billion miles of driving data to train its computer program to react to all situations. How does Tesla get this data? By tracking all car trips and adding it to the database. Once they have enough data, cars can react to nearly all situations. They’ve used massive amounts of each persons’ data to train the program.

All of the companies I listed above are using free or highly subsidized products to train their algorthims to further automate away humans. Is this bargain fair?  That everyone who uses free and subsidized services are contributing to training the AI? The AI that will later run that market and create massive benefits for the company that captured all of this data that people freely gave it? (more…)

Lack Of Skin In The Game Is The Root Of Our Problems

Category : Entrepreneurship, Political Science & Economics
Posted on by

You can trace nearly all of the problems in the world back to one cause: lack of skin in the game. From the financial crisis, to our broken government, to most wars, corruption, pollution and famine, you’ll find a lack of skin in the game as the foundational cause of nearly every one.

What is skin in the game? According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “skin in the game is about being harmed by an error if it harms others.” In finance, it means having personal monetary risk associate with any deal you make. A simple example: If I create an investment fund and invest my own capital so that I own 10% of the fund, I have skin in the game. If the fund loses money, I lose money. My decisions not only affect my investors, they affect me. If I don’t invest any of my own money, but make high fees just for managing the fund, whether it goes up or down, I don’t have skin in the game. Taleb believes that skin in the game is “the most important marker of credibility.” Without it, he continues, people are “frauds.”

When people share in the costs and benefits of their decisions that affect others, they are more likely to make good decisions than if they just impose their decisions on others. Taleb believes skin in the game is “a moral imperative” that should serve as the base of a functioning society. I agree wholeheartedly.

The financial crisis was caused by bankers who made incredible amounts of money whether their investments made money or not. The Iraq war happened because the people authorizing the war didn’t have to fight. Neither did the vast majority of their children. The war was fought by a small sliver of the US: our volunteer army. If George Bush or his supporters would have had to send their sons and daughters to war, I bet we wouldn’t invaded Iraq.

Our government doesn’t work because bureaucrats who make laws aren’t affected by them. Lawmakers don’t have skin in the game because massive gerrymandering has rendered their seats safe, unless they’re caught, as the saying goes, “with a dead girl or a live boy.” Global warming is an incredibly hard problem to solve because we don’t have actionable skin in the game. The consequences will happen far off in the future, likely to our grandchildren.

Lack of skin in the game causes the rich to not participate in their own communities because they believe their outcomes are no longer connected to their local communities. A massive student loan bubble because universities don’t have skin in the game to actually help students to get a job after they graduate. Journalists and bloggers to pontificate endlessly without any consequences for being wrong. Large companies and the top 1% to go to extreme lengths to avoid paying taxes because they feel decoupled from their communities: they can operate from anywhere, recruit employees worldwide and be citizens of the world.

More controversially, Jaron Lanier argues that many internet companies that are worshiped as paragons of having skin in the game in fact don’t. He contends that they’re wrecking our economy and that internet companies, via siren servers, are killing, not creating jobs and pushing too much economic activity off the books. They use the world’s most powerful servers to create defacto monopolies that earn money via arbitrage, solely because they have access to the most powerful computer, not because they are taking risks and creating value. (Read my previous posts for background.)

Taleb and Lanier are two of the most important thinkers of our time. It’s interesting that they both find a lack of skin in the game as the core cause of the world’s problems even though they write about completely different subjects.

So how can we start to fix our broken institutions? Simple. Add more skin in the game. Some examples from Taleb: In Roman times, bridge builders, or members of their family, had to sleep underneath newly built bridges for a time. If it collapsed, the builder lost too. He continues:

I feel much safer on a plane because the pilot, and not a drone, is at the controls. Similarly, cooks should taste their own cooking; engineers should stand under the bridges they have designed when the bridges are tested; the captain should be the last to leave the ship. The Romans even figured out how to deter cowardice that causes the death of others with the technique called decimation: If a legion lost a battle and there was suspicion of cowardice, 10 percent of the soldiers and commanders — usually chosen at random — were put to death.

Now I wouldn’t advocate for the Roman Legion’s solution, but what if we started to design public policy, laws and societal norms that required some amount of skin in the game as a moral imperative, along the lines of “thou shall not steal?” What if we said that it’s immoral to force decisions on others when you don’t have skin in the game?

What if we required bankers to personally invest in any deal they proposed to their own investors? Or their bonuses were tied to long term performances? Or if we devolved more power to local institutions instead of concentrating power at the federal level? What if we forced siren servers to have skin in the game and not make money solely on arbitrage? Or pushed the 1% to once again have skin in the game in their local communities? What if we had a partial military draft? Or some sort of selective service? Or forced banks to keep at least 50% of any loan they originated?

I don’t have many specific proposals yet, but all we need to do is use skin in the game as our guiding heuristic. We should be extremely skeptical of anyone who doesn’t have real skin in the game. The likelihood that they are a fraud is exponentially higher.

What do you think? Is skin in the game as important as I believe it is? Do you have any proposals to push for more skin in the game? What do you think we can do to help push for more skin in the game?

How to Survive and Be Successful in a Siren Server World

Category : Political Science & Economics, Technology
Posted on by

My post Siren Servers: Why Are We OK With Giving Away Our Data? did not get a single comment. It got two likes on Facebook and no retweets. But it’s been the post that’s generated the most emails from people of any post I’ve written in the past year.

It seems that a small group of people are realizing the changes that are happening as a result of human choices in technology, but not many are willing to comment publicly. I’m not sure why, but I’d like to keep the conversation going.

To recap, Jaron Lanier shows that we’ve decided that our data does not need to be compensated monetarily. This decision has wide ranging implications, but the biggest is that large companies with powerful servers end up sucking up most of the wealth, leaving the rest of us with the scraps.

So if you want to be successful in this coming world, there are only three choices:

1. Try to operate within the system

If you want to be successful and make money, you can try to become a siren server. But that’s really just like buying a lottery ticket. There are only a handful of successful siren servers in the world and your chances of being one is very small. If you can’t be the siren server, then it’s best to work at a siren server, or provide services to a siren server. These jobs aren’t all that safe, as you’re still exposed to massive competition and disruption.

You could also “sing for your supper” as Lanier likes to put it. You can give lectures, consult, do legal work and anything that’s labor intensive. These jobs will likely pay well while you are working but if you get sick, get old, have a kid, get married or decide you don’t want to physically perform every day of your life, you’re done. There’s little to no security. And to really make big money, you have to become a star, which is probably only an order of magnitude easier than being a siren server.

Put bluntly, if you want to be successful in a Siren Server world working within the current system, you’d better have top notch skills, an incredible work ethic, a bunch of luck and the drive to succeed. I’m talking the top 10%. And that 10% will likely get smaller every single day. If not, you’ll be relegated to menial work or unemployment. This is exactly what’s happening today.

2. Try to change the system and rewrite our social compact

Our current economy is simply a social compact. We’ve decided that our data is monetarily worthless. We’ve decided that we’ll go along with the narratives that those who are winning in today’s society deserve it 100% based on merit. We’ve decided that we believe in extreme meritocracy and we’re using it to justify just about anything. So if you want to be successful, you can work to change our social compact and change the system. You can raise awareness about what’s happening and why, although you’ll likely end up singing for your supper. You could try to create a new solution via technology that compensated people for their data. Or at least gave companies incentives to pay for data.

3. Decouple from technology and find a niche

In the long term, nearly all, if not all, industries will be affected by siren servers, but in the near and medium term, there are many industries will be slow to change or where change will allow people to be successful in niches. For example, even though the vast majority of food is manufactured via big agriculture, there’s a profitable niche for organic, free range and heirloom varieties at a premium price. In the age of Ikea, there’s a niche for handmade furniture that’s one of a kind. In the age of Starbucks, there’s a niche for a small premium coffee shop. In the age of Amazon, there’s a niche for super secure web hosting and niche products. You must be in the top couple percent in whatever niche you choose.

Most of these potential jobs are variations of singing for our supper, but they at least provide jobs that are less dependent on technology and siren servers, at least for the time being.

Conclusion

Notice that I don’t mention programming, nursing, science and engineering. I think as siren servers continue to develop, we’ll certainly still need these professions, but whereas now we can use the top 50% of people who have these skills, we’ll see a smaller and smaller amount who have useful skills.

I’ll use programming as an example. In 2005 if you wanted to create a personal website, you had to hire at least one programmer and one designer to custom build it for you. You’d likely spend at least $5,000 for a decently done personal website or blog, sometimes even upwards of $10,000. Fast forward to today. You can setup WordPress with a myriad of top-notch designs in minutes for as little as $100. Or free if you’re willing to torrent. I’m not a technical programmer, but even I understand enough to launch my own website, with decent design.

This same phenomenon is going to continue so that lay people will be able to do today’s seemingly difficult programming, just as I’m able to do a time consuming programming task from 2005 with software as a service. We’ll always need the top 1%-5% of talented people to do the big, tough groundbreaking work. But what will the rest do? No jobs are safe from the siren servers.

Long term, we face a stark choice. Do we continue to go down our current path of siren servers that accrue the benefits of technology and radiate the risk back into the system, while sucking up most of the monetary benefits? Or do we decide to make a change?

I’d love to get more of your thoughts, so if you’re thinking about similar topics, please comment here or send me a private message.

Siren Servers: Why Are We Ok With Giving Away Our Data?

Category : Personal Thoughts
Posted on by

Note: Jaron Lanier is one of the most important thinkers in our world right now. Most of the ideas in this post are from Lanier’s book Who Owns The Future. Anything in quotes is directly from Lanier.

The most powerful entities in today’s word are those that have the most data and the most powerful computers to crunch this data in a meaningful way. They are the “gargantuan cloud computer services that are concentrating wealth and influence in our era.” Whether they are “national intelligence agencies, the famous silicon valley companies with nursery school names, the stealthy high finance schemes and others,”…”they use their gigantic corporate repositories of information about our lives for huge benefit by a super-rich few.” So says Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns The Future.

The siren server business model is to suck up as much data as possible and use powerful computers to create massive profits, while pushing the risk away from the company, back into the system.  The model currently works by getting people to freely give up their data for non-monetary compensation, or sucking up the data surreptitiously.

Lanier continues:

All these schemes are quite similar. The biggest computers can predictably calculate wealth and clout on a broad, statistical level. For instance, an insurance company might use massive amounts of data to only insure people who are unlikely to get sick. The problem is that the risk and loss that can be avoided by having the biggest computer still exist. Everyone else must pay for the risk and loss that the Siren Server can avoid.

Siren Servers suck all data and a vast majority of profits, putting traditional businesses out of business and concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a small, elite few. Instead of paying people in dollars for their data, siren servers pay them in candy or lower front end costs. They convert industries that used to have a bell curve distribution into industries that have winner take all, star systems.

compensation in siren server world

Some examples:

  • Instagram – Takes your data in exchange for taking photos, putting filters and sharing them.
  • Twitter – Takes your data in exchange for connecting with friends and reading the news.
  • Foursquare – Your location data in exchange for restaurant reviews and social networking
  • Facebook – Takes your data in exchange for being able to brag about yourself and stalk your friends.
  • Amazon – Give us your reviews for free and purchase data and we’ll give you lower upfront prices.
  • Huffington Post, Medium – Give us your content for free and we’ll give you “exposure.”
  • Google – Use gmail, google docs, search, browser, android, blogger, youtube, calendar, google plus for free, in exchange for using your data.

All of these services then take your data and use it to concentrate wealth and power for themselves.

Put another way, what is Facebook worth with zero users? Zero dollars. But Facebook has 1.1b users and is worth $110b. All 1.1b users create monetary value for Facebook whenever they add a friend, post an update, add a photo or like a page. But the vast majority never see a dime.

So who gets monetary compensation on Facebook? Zuckerberg, who controls the entire company. The small group of VCs who invested. The public shareholders. And maybe a few million people who have businesses that run on top of Facebook. So if Facebook is worth $0 with 0 users, why do only a tiny percentage of people actually get any monetary compensation from Facebook?

Short term, the model works. Brilliantly. The company makes huge profits and eliminates competition from the marketplace, and gives people a useful new service. But long term, as more and more industries go to the siren server model, and more compensation is pushed off the books, how do people have income? How do they survive? In the internet age, fewer people are getting financially compensated for their actions that have real monetary value to others. We’ve designed technology to push value off the books for more people. See the candy graph above.

Fine you say. Facebook is just entertainment. But what happens when Google perfects the driverless car? Or a software company is able to write an algorithm to perform surgeries? Or take care of people in nursing homes? Or clean city streets? Or even write most basic computer code? All these software companies are able to perfect these tasks by watching real humans perform the task hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times. Once they get the data for free or cheap, these future Siren Servers will be able to sell their software for money and take over the market, pushing monetary compensation to an elite few and eliminating the old industries.

There was always creative destruction and new industries have always replaced old ones. But the difference today is that we’ve decided to allow our inputs to be compensated with candy, rather than money and that these servers are now powerful enough to transform industries from what used to be a bell curve shaped distribution to a winner take all, star system.

Our decision to give our data away for candy instead of money to companies that push risk away from themselves and have little to no skin in the game is producing massive inequality and unemployment, eliminating the middle class. It paints a bleak picture of our future unless we change.

What do you think?

If you’re interested in reading more, pick up Jaron Lanier’s two books, You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, or list to one of his podcasts.