Free will in a networking age

 "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." (p. 168)

from Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?"

A grainer response/explanation of automation and its obsoleting effects

 "'People are and will always be needed. The question is whether we'll engage in complete enough accounting so that people are honestly valued. If there's ever an illusion that humans are becoming obsolete, it will in reality be a case of massive accounting fraud. What we're doing now is initiating that fraud. Let's stop.'" (p. 135)

from Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?"

Networking and its effects

"Cheap networking facilitates exaggerated and rapid network effects. These engender failures of the classical economic models, which had been based on competitions between multitudes of players with distinct and limited information positions." (p. 153)

from Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?"

Computation

"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." (p. 143)

from Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?"

Some days

Some days you feel like you're buried under the universe, buried somewhere beyond recognition, understanding, merit, mutual feeling. 

These are transient feelings, most likely the result of some neurotransmitter saturation point and a cascading loop of neurons firing in a well-worn network giving expression to the thoughts and feelings that provide some kind of meaning for that neurochemical slurry. 

And I do this a lot. I feel the need to get didactic, teachy, preachy, a bore. Any time I face an adverse event I do what I armed myself to provide--an explanation. 

I've done a lot of boring explanation. More than anything it steps out of a conversation in ways that puts off others who just want me to react to an address, not give some encyclopedia entry for some tangential point in their current concern. My cross to bear is a specific kind of table or a matrix with 2 categories matched according to their axis to create different pairs. I know there's a word for that and for the life of me I cannot find a satisfactory one. And here I am, bearing that cross, futzing with vocab, in every pregnant moment, dying for significance. 

Evolution from violence and misfortune

 "At the same time, it's important to remember that nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on fake memories. This is as true in the small scale of centuries as it is in the vast scale of life. Every little genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions of years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. Your would-be ancestors in their many species, reaching back into the phylogenetic tree, were eaten, often by disease, or sexually rejected before they could contribute genes to your legacy. The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of billions of years of extreme violence and poverty. Modernity is precisely the way individuals arose out of the ravages of evolutionary selection." (p. 131)

from Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?"

Creative Auctioning