Life After Google

The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

George Gilder

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781621576136
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie informatique

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: " Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel... Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade." "Google's algorithms assume the world's future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it's wrong: the future depends on human action." — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it's coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns. Google's astonishing ability to "search and sort" attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of "aggregate and advertise" works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads. The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable. The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the "cryptocosm"—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google. Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a "great unbundling, " which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet. Life after Google is almost here. For fans of "Wealth and Poverty, " "Knowledge and Power, " and "The Scandal of Money."

CHAPTER 1

Don’t Steal This Book

“The economy has arrived at a point where it produces enough in principle for everyone. . . . So this new period we are entering is not so much about production anymore—how much is produced; it is about distribution—how people get a share in what is produced.”

—W. Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute, 2017¹

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You also might wish to read a number of other books that our algorithm has selected on the basis of the online choices of people like you. These works explain how “software is eating the world,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has observed, and how Google’s search and other software constitute an “artificial intelligence” (AI) that is nothing less than “the biggest event in human history.” Google AI offers uncanny “deep machine learning” algorithms that startled even its then chairman, Eric Schmidt, by outperforming him and other human beings in identifying cats in videos. Such feats of “deep mind” recounted in these books emancipate computers from their dependence on human intelligence and soon will “know you better than you know yourself.”

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According to many prestigious voices, the industry is rapidly approaching a moment of “singularity.” Its supercomputers in the “cloud” are becoming so much more intelligent than you and command such a complete sensorium of multidimensional data streams from your brain and body that you will want these machines to take over most of the decisions in your life. Advanced artificial intelligence and breakthroughs in biological codes are persuading many researchers that organisms such as human beings are simply the product of an algorithm. Inscribed in DNA and neural network logic, this algorithm can be interpreted and controlled through machine learning.

The cloud computing and big data of companies such as Google, with its “Deep Mind” AI, can excel individual human brains in making key life decisions from marriage choices and medical care to the management of the private key for your bitcoin wallet and the use and storage of the passwords for your Macintosh drive. This self-learning software will also be capable of performing most of your jobs. The new digital world may not need you anymore.

Don’t take offense. In all likelihood, you can retire on an income which we regard as satisfactory for you. Leading Silicon Valley employers, such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, deem most human beings unemployable because they are intellectually inferior to AI algorithms. Did you know that Google AI defeated the world Go champion in five straight contests? You do not even know what “Go” is? Go is an Asian game of strategy that AI researchers have long regarded as an intellectual challenge far exceeding chess in subtlety, degrees of freedom, and complexity. You do not possess the mental capability to compete with computers in such demanding applications.

Don’t worry, though. For every obsolescent homo sapiens, the leading Silicon Valley magnates recommend a federally guaranteed annual income. That’s right, “free money” every year! In addition, you, a sophisticated cyber-savvy reader, may well be among the exceptional elites who, according to such certifiable geniuses as Larry Page and Aubrey de Grey, might incrementally live unemployed forever.

You may even count yourselves among the big data demiurges who ascend to become near-divinities. How about that?

As Google Search becomes virtually omniscient, commanding powers that previous human tribes ascribed to the gods, you may become a homo deus. A favored speaker on the Google campus, Yuval Noah Harari, used that as the title for his latest book.²

In the past, this kind of talk of human gods, omniscience, and elite supremacy over hoi polloi may have been mostly confined to late-night bibulous blather or to mental institutions. As Silicon Valley passed through the late years of the 2010s with most of its profits devolving to Google, Apple, and Facebook, however, it appeared to be undergoing a nervous breakdown, manifested on one level by delusions of omnipotence and transcendence and on another by twitchy sieges of “security” instructions on consumers’ devices. In what seemed to be arbitrary patterns, programs asked for new passwords, user names, PINs, log-ins, crypto-keys, and registration requirements. With every webpage demanding your special attention, as if it were the Apple of your i, you increasingly found yourself in checkmate as the requirements of different programs and machines conflicted, and as scantily-identified boxes popped up on your screen asking for “your password,” as if you had only one.

Meanwhile, it was obvious that security on the Internet had collapsed. Google dispatched “swat teams” of nerds to react to security breakdowns, which were taken for granted. And as Greylock Ventures’ security guru Asheem Chandna confided to Fortune, it is ultimately all your fault. Human beings readily fall for malware messages. So, says Fortune, the “fight against hacking promises to be a never-ending battle.”³

In the dystopian sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica, the key rule shielding civilization from cyborg invaders is “never link the computers.” Back in our galaxy, how many more breaches and false promises of repair will it take before the very idea of the network will become suspect? Many industries, such as finance and insurance, have already essentially moved off-line. Healthcare is deep in this digital morass. Corporate assurances of safety behind firewalls and 256-bit security codes have given way to a single commandment: nothing critical goes on the Net.

Except for the video game virtuosi on industry swat teams and hacker squads, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up. Time to hire another vice president of diversity and calculate carbon footprints.

The security system has broken down just as the computer elite have begun indulging the most fevered fantasies about the capabilities of their machines and issuing arrogant inanities about the comparative limits of their human customers. Meanwhile, these delusions of omnipotence have not prevented the eclipse of its initial public offering market, the antitrust tribulations of its champion companies led by Google, and the profitless prosperity of its hungry herds of “unicorns,” as they call private companies worth more than one billion dollars. Capping these setbacks is Silicon Valley’s loss of entrepreneurial edge in IPOs and increasingly in venture capital to nominal communists in China.

In defense, Silicon Valley seems to have adopted what can best be described as a neo-Marxist political ideology and technological vision. You may wonder how I can depict as “neo-Marxists” those who on the surface seem to be the most avid and successful capitalists on the planet.

Marxism is much discussed as a vessel of revolutionary grievances, workers’ uprisings, divestiture of chains, critiques of capital, catalogs of classes, and usurpation of the means of production. At its heart, however, the first Marxism espoused a belief that the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century solved for all time the fundamental problem of production.

The first industrial revolution, comprising steam engines, railways, electric grids, and turbines—all those “dark satanic mills”—was, according to Marx, the climactic industrial breakthrough of all time. Marx’s essential tenet was that in the future, the key problem of economics would become not production amid scarcity but redistribution of abundance.

In The German Ideology (1845), Marx fantasized that communism would open to all the dilettante life of a country squire: “Society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”⁴

Marx was typical of intellectuals in imagining that his own epoch was the final stage of human history. William F. Buckley used to call it an immanentized eschaton, a belief the “last things” were taking place in one’s own time.⁵ The neo-Marxism of today’s Silicon Valley titans repeats the error of the old Marxists in its belief that today’s technology—not steam and electricity, but silicon microchips, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, algorithmic biology, and robotics—is the definitive human achievement. The algorithmic eschaton renders obsolete not only human labor but the human mind as well.

All this is temporal provincialism and myopia, exaggerating the significance of the attainments of their own era, of their own companies, of their own special philosophies and chimeras—of themselves, really. Assuming that in some way their “Go” machine and climate theories are the consummation of history, they imagine that it’s “winner take all for all time.” Strangely enough, this delusion is shared by Silicon Valley’s critics. The dystopians join the utopians in imagining a supremely competent and visionary Silicon Valley, led by Google with its monopoly of information and intelligence.

AI is believed to be redefining what it means to be human, much as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did in its time. While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines.

Life after Google makes the opposing case that what the hyperventilating haruspices Yuval Harari, Nick Bostrom, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tim Urban, and Elon Musk see as a world-changing AI juggernaut is in fact an industrial regime at the end of its rope. The crisis of the current order in security, privacy, intellectual property, business strategy, and technology is fundamental and cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture.

Security is not a benefit or upgrade that can be supplied by adding new layers of passwords, pony-tailed “swat teams,” intrusion detection schemes, anti-virus patches, malware prophylactics, and software retro-fixes. Security is the foundation of all other services and crucial to all financial transactions. It is the most basic and indispensable component of any information technology.

In business, the ability to conduct transactions is not optional. It is the way all economic learning and growth occur. If your product is “free,” it is not a product, and you are not in business, even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it.

If you do not charge for your software services—if they are “open source”—you can avoid liability for buggy “betas.” You can happily evade the overreach of the Patent Office’s ridiculous seventeen-year protection for minor software advances or “business processes,” like one-click shopping. But don’t pretend that you have customers.

Security is the most crucial part of any system. It enables the machine to possess an initial “state” or ground position and gain economic traction. If security is not integral to an information technology architecture, that architecture must be replaced.

The original distributed Internet architecture sufficed when everything was “free,” as the Internet was not a vehicle for transactions. When all it was doing was displaying Web pages, transmitting emails, running discussion forums and news groups, and hyperlinking academic sites, the Net did not absolutely need a foundation of security. But when the Internet became a forum for monetary transactions, new security regimes became indispensable. EBay led the way by purchasing PayPal, which was not actually an Internet service but an outside party that increased the efficiency of online transactions. Outside parties require customer information to be transmitted across the Web to consummate transactions. Credit card numbers, security codes, expiration dates, and passwords began to flood the Net.

With the ascendancy of Amazon, Apple, and other online emporia early in the twenty-first century, much of the Internet was occupied with transactions, and the industry retreated to the “cloud.” Abandoning the distributed Internet architecture, the leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs replaced it with centralized and segmented subscription systems, such as Paypal, Amazon, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, and Google cloud. Uber, Airbnb, and other sequestered “unicorns” followed.

These so-called “walled gardens” might have sufficed if they could have actually been walled off from the rest of the Internet. At Apple, Steve Jobs originally attempted to accomplish such a separation by barring third-party software applications (or “apps”). Amazon has largely succeeded in isolating its own domains and linking to outside third parties such as credit card companies. But these centralized fortr...