We’ve already been through several situations where new technologies come along. The Industrial Revolution removed a large number of jobs that had been done by hand, replaced them with machines. But the machines had to be built, the machines had to be operated, the machines had to be maintained. And the same is true in this online environment.
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In an environment where everybody can pick up everybody’s tools, we’re all weirdly empowered now. And I mean kind of weird in an almost fey sense like, our powers are weird, they make us weird, and they make our our conflicts weird. It’s again that idea that our tools are interacting with our human flaws in really really interesting ways.
I have a few examples of things that are starting to happen. And you can see that AI normally stands for artificial intelligence, but I’ve often concluded it stands for “artificial idiot.” And the reason is very simple. It turns out that these systems are good, but they’re good in kind of narrow ways.
I wrote a memo saying, “We should have a global hypertext system to fix this.” The memo, I distributed it to a few people but there’s nowhere really to distribute it to at CERN because CERN is a physics lab. It didn’t have committees for building programs and hypertext systems.
So what happened was basically nothing for eighteen months.
Just as this country did a hundred years ago, it’s time to rethink the basic bargain between workers and companies. As greater wealth is generated by new technology, how can we ensure that the workers who support the economy can actually share in the wealth?
When you think about the Internet is, the Internet is really a giant sharing machine. It’s a machine for making copies, for making derivative works, for making remixes and making mashups. For distributing those around the world instantaneously. And so there’s a very profound tension between what copyright enables legally, and what the Internet enables technically.
The people who experience broader and more pervasive forms of social inequality related to housing, education, language proficiency, occupational opportunity and so forth, are also the ones who are most likely to be under-connected to the Internet.
The worst-case scenario for Detroit would be that the architecture of the Internet as it is now continues, and Detroiters’ stories, voices, lives, are absent. And the New York Times story about the creative class saving Detroit, or the documentary about the abandonment and wholesale destruction of Detroit that portrays it as a wasteland and a blank canvas ready for entrepreneurial exploitation, that those stories are defining the national, the global imagination of what Detroit is. And that those stories, they don’t use influence people’s desire to come here and do those things and live that life, though that’s part of it, but it also shapes the perception of people inside the city.