Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier Page A

it’s done well. It’s very hard for even the best facility to make absolutely sure that every member of the staff is always doing the best possible job. The elderly make easy victims, like children. Petty thefts and taunts are not uncommon.
    The economics of elder care reflects the destruction of middle-class levees and the rise of Siren Servers just like any other sector. There’s a tremendous drive to hire staff without benefits, since paying for someone else’s health care is an unbounded liability in anera when insurance is run by Siren Servers (this will be discussed in an upcoming section).
    There’s also fear of litigation. In the network age, lawsuits can be organized with network effects. Litigants can be gathered online into swarms. This creates an unfortunate paranoia. I have run into problems trying to get Internet connectivity into elder-care facilities, and the problem is often fear that a webcam will capture a small infraction that turns into an insanely amplified liability. Maybe someone will slip on a wet floor, and then there will be hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal bills to pay.
    If you go to a tolerably decent elder-care facility, almost every resident will be the beneficiary of some form of levee. Almost none will have simply saved cash for old age. There is almost always a pension, or government programs like Medicaid. In every case, the institution that is providing these benefits is being crushed by the obligation.
    Go visit places where residents don’t benefit from levees. It’s not pleasant. The facilities for those left hanging are more smelly and wretched than you’d expect things to be in a rich country. Seriously, go visit the public elder-care facility of last resort where you live. That would be better than me describing them.
    It’s not that the robots will necessarily be cheaper in an immediate sense. There might be significant expenses associated with the goops needed to print them, if they’re printed, or with manufacturing and maintaining them if they are not. But the expenses will be more predictable, and that will make all the difference.
    Hiring a human nurse will mean paying for that person’s health insurance, and taking on unpredictable legal liabilities for the mistakes that person might make, like leaving a floor wet. Both of these drags on the ledger will be amplified by network effects, just as has happened with mortgage risks.
    Insurance companies will use computers to weasel out of liability and to extract ever-larger payments. The whole world’s lawyers will be circling online. The liability side of having an employee will be copied and amplified over a network, just like a pirated music file or a securitized mortgage. It will eventually become less risky to choose a robot. When you turn action into software, then no one gets blamed for what happens.
    Humans will always do those jobs that a robot can’t do, but the tasks might be conceived as being low skilled. It might turn out that robots can give massages, but can’t answer the door. Maybe robots will be good at catching patients who fake the ingestion of medicines, but ineffective at soothing patients so that they’ll take them voluntarily.
    The key reason to avoid acknowledging that there’s real skill in doing what robots can’t do—and hiring people for real jobs—will not be to keep the immediate expenses low, but to reduce the amplified liabilities of the network age. So there will be plenty of dead-end jobs without security or benefits. * This will be despite the fact that the humans in the caregiving loop might be absolutely essential to the well-being of those being cared for.
* This is being written in America, in advance of the 2012 election. It is possible that “Obamacare” will stand or fall, but in either case, the larger pattern described here will persist unless it is addressed more fundamentally than by health-care finance reform.
    Meanwhile, the programming of caregiving