Some responses to Expensive Free Data
In response to this post on the transformation of work and the economy:
adialogue:
Operating within a vibrant free market, there's problems... what if we weren't though, and can we conceive of another system?
musicalvegan:
It has its benefits, but when industry moves away from NEEDING human labour, the economy suffers.
It does seem paradoxical that needing less labour could be a bad thing... turns out all the world's work can now be done by a hundredth of the world's people... great, right?
Not so great when we're managed by Capitalism it turns out. Only rewarding/supporting those that serve a need doesn't work when the need is so much smaller! (Not bashing Capitalism... I don't know about the alternatives, and I'm fully aware of how far it has gotten us up to this point).
wordsaresecondary:
I can see that a lot of people might suffer in the medium term as they can't retrain, but the job marketplace isn't static. There is room for new business models and new technologies that may result in jobs doing things we haven't even conceived of yet.
Society went through a similar period during the Industrial Revolution, and that ultimately worked out as jobs were created in other fields. I guess for me the question would be, can technology move fast enough to replace lost jobs with ones in new areas?
This is the opinion I grew up with... my personal orthodoxy that I'm beginning to question. Is this just a rough patch, transitioning from "old jobs" to "new jobs", or is it something different?
Lanier gives an applicable example in many interviews... the switch from "Horses" as the core of transportation to "Automobiles". He points out that driving a car or truck is a much easier job than caring for a team of horses. Despite this, when Transportation converted from one core to the other, the conditions and recompense for the jobs involved was kept on the level.
This would have been due to various levers... unions and the labour movement, etc. But it was made sure that the people didn't suffer for the ease brought about by the technology.
This isn't really happening now... the rewards we are reaping from our new tech these days are fun... networking, lots of free audio/visual goodies, etc. But you can't feed a family with that stuff, and it doesn't replace all the jobs that the technology is making obsolete.
Lanier's axe that he grinds is that Human Data is something that we provide, without which the technology cannot operate (Data like anything from clicks on Google results, to samples of language we're always putting online, etc). Even robots designed to do physical work will likely need to use lots and lots of human-generated data as far as evaluating their performance during training, etc. Lanier says that providing this data is just about the major new role of people in the modern technological society.
The problem then, is that we provide it for free!
We could stay within Capitalism, he argues, if we treat "Providing Data" as a new job. Much easier, yet, but still vital.