You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Lanier Jaron

Author:Lanier, Jaron [Lanier, Jaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2010-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The Lords of the Clouds Renounce Free Will in Order to Become Infinitely Lucky

OUT-OF-CONTROL financial instruments are linked to the fates of musicians and the fallacies of cybernetic totalism.

Regional Fates

China’s precipitous climb into wealth has been largely based on cheap, high-quality labor. But the real possibility exists that sometime in the next two decades a vast number of jobs in China and elsewhere will be made obsolete by advances in cheap robotics so quickly that it will be a cruel shock to hundreds of millions of people.

If waves of technological change bring new kinds of employment with them, what will it be like? Thus far, all computer-related technologies built by humans are endlessly confusing, buggy, tangled, fussy, and error-ridden. As a result, the icon of employment in the age of information has been the help desk.

For many years I’ve proposed that the “help desk,” defined nobly and broadly to include such things as knowledge management, data forensics, software consulting, and so on, can provide us with a way to imagine a world in which capitalism and advanced technology can coexist with a fully employed population of human beings. This is a scenario I call “Planet of the Help Desks.”

This brings us to India. India’s economy has been soaring at the same time as China’s, much to the amazement of observers everywhere, but on a model that is significantly different from China’s. As Esther Dyson has pointed out, the Indian economy excels in “nonroutine” services.

India, thanks to its citizens’ facility with English, hosts a huge chunk of the world’s call centers, as well as a significant amount of software development, creative production like computer animation, outsourced administrative services, and, increasingly, health care.

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