[msrpotus]

But he doesn't seem to have an appreciation that these trends aren't new or any idea for how to solve it.

We've faced these problems before. Cars made horses obsolete and left many (horse) drivers, stablehands, and others without jobs. Mechanization got rid of most jobs in agriculture. Just because something eliminates jobs doesn't mean it's a bad thing (in fact, because we no longer need to spend all day in the fields, we can do things like sit in offices and develop new innovations) but if you listen to Jaron Lanier, that's what you'd think.

[josh2600]

Jaron's argument is that you should get paid for your job even if it doesn't suck. We've kind of forgotten about this idea and now we only pay people for things we think of as work. In reality, social networks would have no value without curation, and thus all of the wealth that's created on Facebook should actually belong to the individuals who created this massive information store. It is ironic that Big Data is impossible without humans, and yet, Big Data is almost invariably wielded as a weapon against humanity (particularly in the case of the ridiculous insurance positions which Jaron compares to a risk-focused version of Maxwell's demon).

Jaron says that if we're all going into a new socialist utopia, that's awesome, but if only some of us are entering a new socialist utopia, on the backs of others, that's bad.

That's a sentiment that is, at the very least, worth considering. The argument Jaron is making is definitely a long term argument, but I'm happy someone is still thinking about the future.

Again, I don't necessarily agree with him, but I think he has a lot to say of considerable value.