 Musicians have essentially been the canaries in the coal mine. What's happened to creative artists, to journalists, to photographers, to some other professions I'll talk about is an early sign of what could happen to the whole of society. Now the reason for this has to do with the onset of what we call automation. The idea that machines can do work that people used to do. Now, this is a fear with a very long precedent. The idea, one animating idea was that as technology progresses, people will be needed less and less. And so there's actually a funny, you know, if Marx had this idea that at some point in the future the machines would do a lot of the work and people would be freed in a communist utopia to lounge around. He had this image that you'd relax reading the classics in beautiful gardens, this sort of thing. He had a sort of an image of it. Now, this notion that machines would put people out of work was proven wrong again and again and again. What seemed to happen instead of the terror of the Luddites was that when there would be new machines and factories or elsewhere it would create new kinds of employment that required more and more skill. And so we started to accept this idea that actually rather than better and better machines putting people out of work, better and better machines instead create new kinds of roles for people that require more and more education and that everything's good. And I still think that's true in terms of fundamentals. There's still reason to believe that in terms of the basic foundational truth that is a reasonable way to understand the world that could continue far into the future. However, something changed. And what changed was this notion that software should be free, that intellectual property should be made free. If we pretend that people aren't needed and we don't pay them, then obviously we create a distortion in the economy and obviously we create an unsustainable pattern. So what's funny is that this thing that started off is like, well, we want free music. It's turning into a pattern that could potentially undermine the whole idea of a market economy at all. Now I want to say a little bit more about how this idea took hold. I have tremendous sympathy for people who say, I don't have to pay for music. I don't have to pay for movies. And the reason I have sympathy for them is that we've broken a social contract with them. If we go to the period before the internet, it's true we expected them to pay for these things. But on the other hand, the production of these things created so much employment. It created so much wealth in the society that went around that it was a two-way street. If you go back to the music business, at the turn of the century, there were hundreds of thousands of recording musicians in the United States alone who were making upper middle-class incomes, which is astounding. It's like a whole industry that's essentially vanished. It's almost entirely gone. And so what we're telling people is you will no longer receive any of the income, no benefits. Oh, but we still want you to pay for this. Like the point I want to make here is that if you want somebody to pay for something in a market economy, there has to be an underlying social contract in which they also have opportunities. It can't be a one-way street. And in order for the tech companies to grow as quickly as they did, as we did, if I'm counting myself as part of it, we had to offer all this free stuff. We had to have this incredible efficiency where we didn't negotiate with anybody. We just plowed ahead. That was our method. But the problem with that is it broke the social contract on both sides. The critical point that has to be understood is the method by which wealth is concentrated these days, because I'm making the argument to you that it is the concentration of wealth that is unsustainable. So how is the wealth concentrated? The wealth is not concentrated by people gaining monopolies about who gets to sell things. That's the old-fashioned way. That is not what we are doing. Instead, wealth is concentrating by forcing everybody who doesn't own one of the biggest computers to take all the risks in an economy and whoever owns the biggest computer takes no risk. So it's actually the risk distribution that causes the concentration of wealth. And so this is a process I must explain to you if it isn't immediately clear, because it's absolutely crucial for understanding modernity. Just beforehand, we were talking about Uber. And Uber defends itself from criticisms that it's destroying middle-class aspirations. And Uber will say, no, no, no, we're creating new options. We're creating more of a demand economy. We're creating efficiencies. All of those things are true. Just as with language translation, I think the fact that you can get a quick approximate translation is fantastic. I just want to pay the people who make it possible. I think the actual program and the actual service are fantastic. I don't think there's such a thing as an evil program. So it's not the software that's the problem. It's denying that the people exist whose value is being regurgitated by the program. In the case of the Uber driver, the problem is not with the nature of the service. I think it's nice to be able to have used a phone to call a car and to have the efficiencies of the network unite people who want to drive with people who need a ride. All of that's great. That's not the problem. The problem is that Uber never takes any risks. The driver takes a risk. The driver self-finances. The driver doesn't know where the career is going. Once the driver gets older, there's no more responsibility to that driver. So Uber and Facebook and a big hedge fund on Wall Street, all of these entities that use the biggest computers, what they do is they start to operate like casinos and all of the little people in the network take risks to do things with each other, but at the center there's no risk taken. And so it's that radiation of risk away from the biggest computers that is the problem. If we look at where we are and where we might go, we face broadly two choices. There's two roads. Now, this is oversimplified because actually there are many variations of each, but very broadly speaking, we either move towards some sort of a society in which people are no longer first class economic players, but instead they just are supported by the society. This could take the form of the basic income model, which has many proponents in Switzerland, of course. It could take the form of some sort of socialist or communist experiment. There are variations on that, but basically instead of people being entrepreneurs within a system, they become supported members. Now the alternative is to try to broaden the idea of intellectual property to become fine grained and distributed enough to apply to all kinds of areas where it hasn't before. To apply, for instance, to somebody who plays a go game that's grabbed into an algorithm that's then used to create a so-called automated go program. Why isn't that person compensated? That person provided data that was critical for the program to operate, and yet we think it's okay just to steal it. Now, when you talk about this idea of a universal data rights system, it brings up many interesting immediate questions, and I'm sure if anyone who encounters it for the first time, they might think, wow, this sounds incredibly complex and difficult. Let me address a couple of the questions that might be coming through your mind if you haven't thought about this before. One question you might ask is, wow, it sounds like an ambitious, complicated thing to do, and here I can speak with authority as a technologist. It's easy. I mean, compared to the stuff we do all the time, this would be relatively easy, compared to just an everyday project in Silicon Valley. We already track commerce to billions of a penny all the time for other reasons. We already track provenance of information for other reasons all the time. This would not be that hard. I think it's totally doable. So the way I would imagine it working would be approximately this. Any time any pattern of bits comes into existence, whether it's a game of go, an example of natural translation, music, a movie, whatever it is, whether it was put there on purpose by somebody or whether it was just measured off of somebody involuntarily, the provenance of that pattern of bits, its origin point, would be noted. And then downstream, as it's used in different algorithms, as it's used in any way at all, there's an estimate created of how valuable it was, relatively, in the function of that thing. And then a micropayment would flow backwards to the point of origin. Now, if this sounds exotic or strange, I have to point out that the original proposal for digital networking at all, the thing that started it all, which was Ted Nelson's idea for Xanadu before the ARPANET, before the Internet, the original model, which was also called Hypertext, which is where the HT and HTML comes from, included this. So I'm not talking about some radical addition. I'm talking about returning to the original idea that seemed obvious for how a digital network should work back when it was fresh. We've only become hypnotized into thinking it sounds strange because we've gone down this very weird road. I think in the future people will look back on this and think, why did they think this was weird? This is natural. We can imagine a future in which people are constantly getting billions of little tiny streams of income all the time. Right now, the way we think of our economic lives is we earn money in fairly big chunks. You get your salary check or you get your royalty check, and then you spend it in little ways or you buy a coffee here. So you have more fine-grained spending than earning. In the future, everybody will have fine-grained earning, where you'll constantly be getting little payments from all over the place from different algorithms. Now, why is this important? Algorithms are becoming the new societal control paradigm. Algorithms from Facebook can not only can causally get people to vote or not or to vote for certain candidates without those people being aware that it's happened. Facebook can demonstrably change people's moods without them being aware that it's happening. We have this, if you remember Skinner, we have a Skinnerian box that everybody's in now where whoever controls the central computer potentially has the power to simply control society. It's far transcending the power of money or the power of votes. It's a form of direct manipulation by measuring people and then changing the feedback to those people. Now, as it happens, we're very lucky in that the current generation of people who control Silicon Valley are, I think, unquestionably the nicest, best-intended, best-educated, most pleasant ruling class in history, which is great. But here's the problem I have. Whenever you have a tremendous concentration of power and influence, even if the initial people are attractive, that will tend to be inherited by people who are less attractive. So whatever you thought of the Bolsheviks, they were far more cute and attractive than the Stalinists, right? And so there's this tremendous danger that this concentration of power we've created will be inherited by people who are less and less attractive. And so I just don't think it's a tenable way to run human affairs. If we look at the history of societies in which there's some entity that doles out benefits to people, that tends to be associated with petro-states or weird dictatorships or communist experiments that become extremist and violent. Again and again, we see many, many experiments that really do not preserve individual liberty, even though they might seem to at first, even though they might be put in place through a popular movement at first. I'm deeply concerned about the long-term fate of a basic income model. And that's my motivation for looking at this alternative. So now we come back to some kind of vastly expanded version of intellectual property. If such a thing were to come into existence, it's crucial that it go both ways. People have to feel that they're part of a social contract in which they will benefit as well as spending money. We cannot expect people to only pay, pay, pay and never benefit from the Internet. Right now we're seeing in all of the developed societies a situation in which young people are experiencing, they're witnessing their own prospects narrow while they're looking at an incredible concentration of money around the biggest computers. A comment about optimism and pessimism. When I talk about this in Silicon Valley, I often, I see jaws drop. Like you said, what, what? Because I'm challenging our state religion, if you like. I really am. And the retort I always get is, you're such a pessimist and we're all optimists, how can you be so pessimistic? But I reject that categorically. To me, the person who's the optimist is the one who feels that problems can be addressed and are worth addressing. I feel that what I've just given you is the most optimistic possible speech about technology. The pessimists are the pan-Glossians. The pessimists are the ones who believe that everything is as good as it could possibly be. Now, we're facing a whole world of challenges right now. We have climate change, we have freshwater crises, we have immigration crises, we have political instability. They're all of these things that are all very, very hard. In that spectrum, I actually think this is an easier problem to solve. And it's absolutely crucial that we aggressively solve the problems that we've created ourselves because we need to reduce our problem load. This is going to be a hard century and we should not be compounding other problems with this thing that's really fixable. So, save intellectual property, broaden it, make it much more fine-grained, make it much more accessible to more people, make it apply to a million other things, including people whose work patterns help inform industrial robots and factories, anything like that. Broaden it, broaden it, broaden it. Save the middle class. That's my talk.