Two Q & A sessions on the world’s largest computer owners and skin-in-the-game policy makers

Computer scientist Jaron Lanier being interviewed by The Spectator about his new book, Who Owns The Future?:

Q: “What will the future economy look like if technology keeps advancing the way it does and we do nothing?

A: Well, identify almost any human role in our current society, and imagine that being aggregated into a software scheme in the future where the people don’t get directly paid anymore.  We can already say that there are virtual editors of newspapers. In the future nearly every existing job will be gradually weakened because of cloud software. The only one left standing at some future date is the owner of the largest computer on the network. Whoever has the biggest computer wins in our current system.

Q: Is this true for politics as well?

A: Yes. If you have the biggest computer and the biggest data, you can calculate how to target people with a political message, and have almost a guaranteed deterministic level of success. Politics then becomes about who has the biggest computer instead of what the agenda is. The way Obama won the last US election was by having the best computer strategy. That method of winning an election works, but if that is to be the future of politics, it will no longer have meaning. The path we are on is not compatible with democracy.”

Q&A at Reddit with Black Swan and Antifragile author Nassim Nicholas Taleb on how to establish “Skin-In-The-Game” among policy makers, and the challenges of doing so…