Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

and throw ourselves into the waiting arms of utopia.
    I imagine that the academics from top technical schools will do fine. Honestly, there’s no way Silicon Valley would stand to see MITfall. That wouldn’t be a danger anyway because the top technical schools make money from technology. Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies.
    What about liberal arts professors at a state college? Some academics will hang on, but the prospects are grim if education is seduced by the Siren song. A decade or two from now, if nothing changes, the outlook will recall the present state of recorded music. In the case of that industry, making a pre-digital system efficient through the use of a digital network shrank it economically to about a quarter of its size fairly quickly. It will shrink perhaps to about a tenth once people with old habits die off. This is not because of obsolescence. Music is not fading away like buggy whips, any more than the need for education will. Instead wealth is becoming concentrated around Siren Servers, since most of the real value, which still occurs out in the real world, on the ground, is reconceived to be off the books.
    The lure of “free” will beckon. Get educated for free now! But don’t plan on a job as an educator.
The Robotic Bedpan
    One of the bright spots in the future of middle-class employment is usually taken to be health care. Surely we’ll need millions of new nurses to care for the aging baby boomers. Caregivers will become a huge new middle-class population. If you want to think in terms of social mobility, this would also mean a huge transfer of wealth between generations that isn’t necessarily kept within families. It should be an example of the great wheel of middle-class aspiration turning anew in the United States.
    The undoing of this prospect is already observable in Japan, however. The country faces one of the world’s most severe depopulation spirals in this century. Around 2025 or 2030, Japan can expect a profound shortage of working-age people and a gigantic population of elderly people. Japan has traditionally not welcomed waves of non-Japanese immigrants. And it is at the cutting edge in robotics research.
    Therefore there is talk that robots will become advanced enough in time to take care of the elderly. This is plausible, from a technical point of view. Robots are already able to handle delicate tasks, like certain surgical subroutines, and are getting to be reliable enough to be a less risky choice than humans in some situations, like driving vehicles.
    Would a robot nurse be emotionally acceptable? Japanese culture seems to have anticipated the coming demographic crunch. Robots have been cute in Japan for decades. Trustworthy fictional robots, like Transformers and Tamagotchis, are a primary national cultural export. As with all waves of technological change, it is hard to predict when the inevitable glitches and gotchas will be smoothed out. In this case, though, the motivation is so intense that I expect robots in Japanese nursing homes by 2020, and in widespread use by 2025.
    Sans robots, one would expect waves of immigrants to go to American nursing schools in the next decade to prepare to take care of America’s own age wave. Their children would be raised by parents who practiced a profession, and would tend to become professional themselves. Thus a whole new generation of customers for colleges and a new wave of middle-class families would make their way, continuing the American pattern.
    But those imported robots will be awfully tempting. If you spend any time in elder-care facilities like nursing homes, a few things become apparent. First, there is no way for even the most professional and attentive staffs to help everyone as fast as would be ideal. It’s inconceivable to have twenty-four-hour-a-day, immediately available help for every discomfort that comes up.
    Second, elder care is unbelievably hard and uncomfortable work, if