Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier Page B

robots will be utterly dependent on cloud software that in turn will be dependent on observing millions of situations and outcomes. When a nurse who is particularly good at changing a bedpan feeds data to the clouds—such as a video that can be correlated to improved outcomes, even if the nurse never is told about the correlation—that data might be applied to drive a future generation of caregiving robots so that all patients everywhere can benefit. But will that nurse be compensated?
    If present online patterns continue, the answer will be no to the nurse, who will be expected to “share” her expertise and to forgo proper compensation for it.
A Pharma Fable That Might Unfold Later in This Century
    The examples given so far are part of a standard set of anticipations in Silicon Valley. The pattern can be applied to almost any industrythat isn’t yet fully software-mediated in the way that recorded music already is. Here I’ll tell a tale of how the pattern might be realized in the pharmaceutical industry:
    It was 2025. It all started in a Stanford dorm room. During a party someone knocked a bottle of vitamins to the floor and it shattered. “Dude! My vitamins.” No one had a car, and it was miles to the nearest drugstore.
    “Hey what about those reaction chips we use in chem?” Reaction chips were tiny chemistry experiment stations on a chip. Layers of gossamer shape-changing surfaces were puckered by charges from transistors in the top layer of an inch-squared chip, creating any desired architecture of chambers. Chambers could be manipulated to form tiny pumps, pressure chambers, or even itsy-bitsy centrifuges. The contents of a transient microchamber could be mixed, heated, cooled, or pressurized. Sensors of many kinds were also distributed on the chip’s surface. Every spot on the chip was monitored for temperature, color, conductivity, and many other properties.
    Tiny drops of antecedent chemicals were added to inlets at the surface of the chip by robotic eyedroppers within a desktop chip-filling station. Instead of spending hours to perform dozens of steps to synthesize a chemical at a bench, you could set up a chip to perform tens of thousands of steps while you went on with your life. More important, you could set up thousands of chips to perform variations on synthesis experiments in parallel. Chemistry finally merged with big data. A single typical senior project might test a million synthesis sequences to evolve a better one, or might test dozens of variations of an experimental material.
    The most fun thing was to watch a chip under a microscope while it was carrying out chemical synthesis. It looked like the world’s smallest Rube Goldberg device, squeezing, spinning, boiling, and squirting out tiny amounts of experimental substances. YouTube videos of chips in action drew a cult following. The ones where chips blew up were the most popular. T-shirts with the words CHIP FAIL became popular in chemistry departments everywhere.
    Anyway, back at the dorm room, one of the guys said, “Just get a chip to make your vitamins, dude. It’s stupid to go spend all that money at a store.”
    So a few chips went missing from the lab that night.
    It turned out to be a pain to keep chips in a dorm room drawer. The first one that made vitamins got lost in a bundle of underwear. But a roommate said, “Dude, you should visit the wearable computing lab. We should be wearing these chips.”
    Where to wear them? Chips started showing up in tattoos, like gold accents in a Klimt canvas.
    Amazingly, it took months for the administration to realize chips were being pilfered. First came the stern lecture, then, without even time to pee, a visit to Stanford’s intellectual property lawyers for the patent drafting.
    All the usual suspects in Silicon Valley put angel money into the startup, which was called VitaBop. The slide set at the first investors’ gathering showed skiers and a winner of a dance competition with