The Inevitable Read online

  Because it lives on the cloud, Google could easily apply cloud-based AI to our letter in the future. Besides automatically correcting the spelling and critical grammar, Google might also fact-check the statements in the letter with its new truth-checker called Knowledge-Based Trust. It could add hyperlinks to appropriate terms, and add (with my assent) smart additions that improve it significantly so that it further erodes my sense of possession. More and more of our work and play will leave the isolated realm of individual ownership and migrate to the shared world of the cloud in order to take full advantage of AI and other cloud-based powers.

  I already google the cloud for answers instead of trying to remember a URL, or even the spelling of a difficult word. If I re-google my own email (stored in a cloud) to find out what I said (which I do) or rely on the cloud for my memory, where does my “I” end and the cloud start? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of my interests, and all my notes, and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes—if all this is sitting somewhere, but nowhere in particular, it changes how I think of myself. I am larger than before, but thinner too. I am faster, but at times shallower. I think more like a cloud with fewer boundaries, open to change and full of contradiction. I contain multitudes! This whole mix will be further enhanced with the intelligence of machines and AIs. I will be not just Me Plus, but We Plus.

  But what happens if it were to go away? A very diffused me would go away. Friends of mine had to ground their teenager for a serious infraction. They confiscated her cell phone. They were horrified when she became physically ill, vomiting. It was almost as if she’d had an amputation. And in one sense she had. If a cloud company restricts or censors our actions, we’ll feel pain. Separation from the comfort and new identity afforded by the cloud will be horrendous and unbearable. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves—a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye—then the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self. In one sense, it is not an extended self we own, but one we have access to.

  Clouds are mostly commercial so far. There is the Oracle Cloud, IBM’s SmartCloud, and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Google and Facebook run huge clouds internally. We keep coming back to clouds because they are more reliable than we are. They are certainly more reliable than other kinds of machines. My very stable Mac freezes or needs to be rebooted once a month. But Google’s cloud platform was down only 14 minutes in 2014, a near insignificant outage for the immense amount of traffic served. The cloud is the Backup. Our life’s backup.

  All business and much of society today run on computers. Clouds offer computation with astounding reliability, fast speed, expandable depth, and no burdens of maintenance for users. Anyone who owns a computer recognizes those burdens: They take up space, need constant expert attention, and go obsolete instantly. Who would want to own their computer? The answer increasingly is no one. No more than you want to own an electric station, rather than buy electricity from the grid. Clouds enable organizations to access the benefits of computers without the hassle of possession. Expandable cloud computing at discount prices has made it a hundred times easier for a young technology company to start up. Instead of building their own complex computing infrastructure, they subscribe to a cloud’s infrastructure. In industry terms, this is infrastructure as service. Computers as service instead of computers as product: access instead of ownership. Gaining cheap access to the best infrastructure by operating on the cloud is a chief reason so many young companies have exploded out of Silicon Valley in the last decade. As they grow fast, they access more of what they don’t own. Scaling up with success is easy. The cloud companies welcome this growth and dependence, because the more that people use the cloud and share in accessing their services, the smarter and more powerful their service becomes.

  There are practical limits to how gigantic one company’s cloud can get, so the next step in the rise of clouds over the coming decades will be toward merging the clouds into one intercloud. Just as the internet is the network of networks, the intercloud is the cloud of clouds. Slowly but surely Amazon’s cloud and Google’s cloud and Facebook’s cloud and all the other enterprise clouds are intertwining into one massive cloud that acts as a single cloud—The Cloud—to the average user or company. A counterforce resisting this merger is that an intercloud requires commercial clouds to share their data (a cloud is a network of linked data), and right now data tends to be hoarded like gold. Data hoards are seen as a competitive advantage, and sharing data freely is hampered by laws, so it will be many years (decades?) before companies learn how to share their data creatively, productively, and responsibly.

  There is one final step in the inexorable march toward decentralized access. At the same time we are moving to an intercloud we will also move toward one that is fully decentralized and peer to peer. While the enormous clouds of Amazon, Facebook, and Google are distributed, they are not decentralized. The machines are run by enormous companies, not by a funky network of computers run by your funky peers. But there are ways to make clouds that run on decentralized hardware. We know a decentralized cloud can work, because one did during the student protests in Hong Kong in 2014. To escape the obsessive surveillance the Chinese government pours on its citizens’ communications, the Hong Kong students devised a way to communicate without sending their messages to a central cell phone tower or through the company servers of Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) or WeChat (their Facebook) or email. Instead they loaded a tiny app onto their phones called FireChat. Two FireChat-enabled phones could speak to each other directly, via wifi radio, without jumping up to a cell tower. More important, either of the two phones could forward a message to a third FireChat-enabled phone. Keep adding FireChat’d phones and you soon have a full network of phones without towers. Messages that are not meant for one phone are relayed to another phone until they reach their intended recipient. This intensely peer-to-peer variety of network (called a mesh) is not efficient, but it works. That cumbersome forwarding is exactly how the internet operates at one level, and why it is so robust. The result of the FireChat mesh was that the students created a radio cloud that no one owned (and was therefore hard to squelch). Relying entirely on a mesh of their own personal devices, they ran a communications system that held back the Chinese government for months. The same architecture could be scaled up to run any kind of cloud.

  There are very good nonrevolutionary reasons to have a decentralized communication system like this. In a large-scale emergency when electrical power is out, a peer-to-peer phone mesh might be the only system working. Each individual phone could be recharged by solar, so a communication system could work without the electrical grid. A phone’s range is limited, but you could place small cell phone “repeaters” on building rooftops, also potentially recharged by solar. The repeaters just repeat and forward a message for a longer distance than a phone; they are like nanotowers, but they are not owned by a company. A network of rooftop repeaters and millions of phones would create an ownerless network. More than one startup has been founded to offer this type of mesh service.

  An ownerless network upsets many of the regulatory and legal frameworks now in place for our communication infrastructure. Clouds don’t have a lot of geography. Whose laws will prevail? The laws of your domicile, the laws of your server’s domicile, or the laws of international exchange? Who gets your taxes if all the work is being done in the cloud? Who owns the data, you or the cloud? If all your email and voice calls go through the cloud, who is responsible for what it says? In the new intimacy of the cloud, when you have half-baked thoughts, weird daydreams, should they not be treated differently than what you really believe? Do you own your own thoughts, or are you merely accessing them? All these questions apply not only to clouds and meshes but to all decentralized systems.

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  In the coming 30 yea
rs the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated. As long as the costs of communications and computation drop due to advances in technology, these trends are inevitable. They are the result of networks of communication expanding till they are global and ubiquitous, and as the networks deepen they gradually displace matter with intelligence. This grand shift will be true no matter where in the world (whether the United States, China, or Timbuktu) they take place. The underlying mathematics and physics remain. As we increase dematerialization, decentralization, simultaneity, platforms, and the cloud—as we increase all those at once, access will continue to displace ownership. For most things in daily life, accessing will trump owning.

  Yet only in a science fiction world would a person own nothing at all. Most people will own some things while accessing others; the mix will differ by person. Yet the extreme scenario of a person who accesses all without any ownership is worth exploring because it reveals the stark direction technology is headed. Here is how it will work soon.

  I live in a complex. Like a lot of my friends, I choose to live in the complex because of the round-the-clock services I can get. The box in my apartment is refreshed four times a day. That means I can leave my refreshables (like clothes) there and have them replenished in a few hours. The complex also has its own Node where hourly packages come in via drones, robo vans, and robo bikes from the local processing center. I tell my device what I need and then it’s in my box (at home or at work) within two hours, often sooner. The Node in the lobby also has an awesome 3-D printing fab that can print just about anything in metal, composite, and tissue. There’s also a pretty good storage room full of appliances and tools. The other day I wanted a turkey fryer; there was one in my box from the Node’s library in a hour. Of course, I don’t need to clean it after I’m done; it just goes back into the box. When my friend was visiting, he decided he wanted to cut his own hair. There were hair clippers in the box in 30 minutes. I also subscribe to a camping gear outfit. Camping gear improves so fast each year, and I use it for only a few weeks or weekends, that I much prefer to get the latest, best, pristine gear in my box. Cameras and computers are the same way. They go obsolete so fast, I prefer to subscribe to the latest, greatest ones. Like a lot of my friends, I subscribe to most of my clothes too. It’s a good deal. I can wear something different each day of the year if I want, and I just toss the clothes into the box at the end of the day. They are cleaned and redistributed, and often altered a bit to keep people guessing. They even have a great selection of vintage T-shirts that most other companies don’t have. The few special smartshirts I own are chipped-tagged so they come back to me the next day cleaned and pressed.

  I subscribe to several food lines. I get fresh produce directly from a farmer nearby, and a line of hot ready-to-eat meals at the door. The Node knows my schedule, my location on my commute, my preferences, so it’s really accurate in timing the delivery. When I want to cook myself, I can get any ingredient or special dish I need. My complex has an arrangement so all the ongoing food and cleaning replenishables appear a day before they are needed in the refrig or cupboard. If I was flush with cash, I’d rent a premium flat, but I got a great deal on my place in the complex because they rent it out anytime I am not there. It’s fine with me since when I return it’s cleaner than I leave it.

  I have never owned any music, movies, games, books, art, or realie worlds. I just subscribe to Universal Stuff. The arty pictures on my wall keep changing so I don’t take them for granted. I use a special online service that prepares my walls from my collection on Pinterest. My parents subscribe to a museum service that lends them actual historical works of art in rotation, but that is out of my range. These days I am trying out 3-D sculptures that reconfigure themselves each month so you keep noticing them. Even the toys I had as a kid growing up were from Universal. My mom used to say, “You only play with them for a few months—why own them?” So every couple of months they would go into the box and new toys would show up.

  Universal is so smart I usually don’t have to wait more than 30 seconds for my ride, even during surges. The car just appears because it knows my schedule and can deduce my plans from my texts, calendar, and calls. I’m trying to save money, so sometimes I’ll double or triple up with others on the way to work. There is plenty of bandwidth so we can all screen. For exercise, I subscribe to several gyms and a bicycle service. I get an up-to-date bike, tuned and cleaned and ready at my departure point. For long-haul travel I like these new personal hover drones. They are hard to get when you need them right now since they are so new, but so much more convenient than commercial jets. As long as I travel to complexes in other cities that have reciprocal services, I don’t need to pack very much since I can get everything—the same things I normally use—from the local Nodes.

  My father sometimes asks me if I feel untethered and irresponsible not owning anything. I tell him I feel the opposite: I feel a deep connection to the primeval. I feel like an ancient hunter-gatherer who owns nothing as he wends his way through the complexities of nature, conjuring up a tool just in time for its use and then leaving it behind as he moves on. It is the farmer who needs a barn for his accumulation. The digital native is free to race ahead and explore the unknown. Accessing rather than owning keeps me agile and fresh, ready for whatever is next.

  6

  SHARING

  Bill Gates once derided advocates for free software with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks demanding that software should be free, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong on several points: For one, free and open source software zealots are more likely to be political libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone all the time is quietly giving rise to a revised technological version of socialism.

  Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one notable example of an emerging collectivism. Indeed, not just Wikipedia but wikis of all sorts. Wikis are a set of documents that are collaboratively produced; their text can easily be created, added, edited, or altered by anyone, and by everyone. Different wiki engines operate on different platforms and OSs with various formatting abilities. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly copyright license known as Creative Commons encourages people to legally allow their own images, text, or music to be used and improved by others without the need for additional permission. In other words, sharing and sampling content is the new default.

  There were more than one billion instances of Creative Commons permissions in use in 2015. The rise of ubiquitous file sharing sites such as BitTorrent, where one can find a copy of almost anything that can be copied, is another step toward collaboration since it makes it very easy to begin your creation with something already created. Collaborative commenting sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Pinterest, and Tumblr enable hundreds of millions of ordinary folks to find photos, images, news items, and ideas drawn from professional and friends’ sources, and then collectively rank them, rate them, share them, forward them, annotate them, and curate them into streams or collections. These sites act as collaborative filters, promoting the best stuff at the moment. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of digital “social-ism” uniquely tuned for a networked world.

  We’re not talking about your grandfather’s political socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school political socialism was an arm
of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

  The type of old-school communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of shared software, such as Linux or Apache, was born in an era of centralized communications, top-heavy industrial processes, and enforced borders. Those constraints from early last century gave rise to a type of collective ownership that tried to replace the chaos and failures of a free market with well-thought-out scientific five-year plans devised by a politburo of all-powerful experts. This type of government operating system failed, to put it mildly. The top-down socialism of the industrial era could not keep up with the rapid adaptions, constant innovations, and self-generating energy that democratic free markets offered. Socialistic command economies and centralized communistic regimes were left behind. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, this new digital socialism runs over a borderless internet, via network communications, generating intangible services throughout a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.