Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

the Teamsters that nothing like their services will ever be needed again.
    Both cabbies and truckers have managed to build up levees with some legal heft over the years. They’ll be able to delay the change, but not for long. Whenever an innocent person is killed in an accident involving a cab or a truck, there will be public outrage that human error is still allowed to intrude in its murderous ways to destroy life and love once automated cars become familiar in some guise. For a while, there might be a compromise in which a Teamster or a cabbie sits there passively, along for the ride, perhaps to man a failsafe button. But young people won’t expect that to last and won’t seek it as a way of life. The world of work behind the wheel will drain away in a generation.
    You can’t make cars quite 100 percent autonomous. If people are going to be people at all, somebody has to tell the car where to go and something about how to do it, and there has to be some failsafe. There has to be some human responsibility, if not on the part of the people who are passengers in the car, then at least somewhere over the network.
    Will this remaining human role turn into a benefit for the middle classes or only for a Siren Server? If it’s to only benefit a Siren Server, you can imagine that in, say, ten years, when you want to get to the airport, a robot taxi shows up. However, the chosen route mightbe peculiar. Maybe the taxi lingers in front of billboards along the way, or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something, or whatever scam would come about in a Siren Server–driven car.
    But one thing we can guess even at this early date is that self-driving cars will depend on cloud data about streets, pedestrians, and everything else that can affect a trip. That information will be renewed constantly, with every single ride. Will the rider be compensated beyond a free ride for helping to generate this information? To do otherwise would be considered accounting fraud in a humanistic information economy.
Flattening the City on a Hill
    The middle classes that have already lost their levees and economic dignity to Siren Servers are sometimes called the “creative classes.” They include recording musicians, journalists, and photographers. There were also a significantly larger number of people who supported these types of creators, like studio musicians and editors, who enjoyed “good jobs” (meaning with security and benefits). Those who have grown up in the networked era might have trouble understanding opportunity lost.
    There is a familiar chorus of reasons why we should find the lousy fates of creative classes to be acceptable. I addressed that controversy in my earlier book. While it’s an important debate, it’s even more urgent to determine if the felling of creative-class careers was an anomaly or an early warning of what is to happen to immeasurably more middle-class jobs later in this century.
    A pattern has emerged in which holders of academic posts related to Internet studies tend to join in the acceptance or even the celebration of the decline of the creative classes’ levees. This strikes me as an irony, or an anxious burst of denial.
    Higher education could be Napsterized and vaporized in a matter of a few short years. In the world of the new kind of network wealth, towering student debt has become yet another destroyer of the middle classes.
    Why are we still bothering with higher education in the network age? We have Wikipedia and a world of other tools. You can educate yourself without paying a university. All it takes is discipline. Tuition pays for making discipline a little more structured, getting some extended years of parental support in a place with a quad and beer, and certification. You also meet elite friends. There’s prestige in getting into a top school, whether you finish or not.
    All these benefits might be had less expensively in other ways, and that is becoming truer