What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

==Looks like his first "contra" essay was in 2000.

(Per Wikipedia).

That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below for why this doesn't do any harm).

Having a million people translate "I like cats" into French doesn't give you a million translations. It gives you one translation repeated a million times. That's 999,999 redundant translations. Nothing novel or amazing about those 999,999 translations.

What is the difference between a machine doing those million translations and humans doing identical translations?

Of course, there are novel translations and those would require human input but that's a minority. If the machine can do 99% of translations but requires humans for the additional 1% why is it better to have humans translate 100% rather than just that 1%. You end up with the exact same quality and quantity of translations in both cases.

>You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less.

The machine is lowering the cost of translations and thus may increase the amount spent on translations. The people who made translations got paid already.

>And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that.

Except that's not the situation. The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each. You can have that exact same bun forever from the new seller.

Of course, one day you may want a new bun and, you'd argue, that there are no bakers left. But that's silly and utterly simplistic. Once there's not enough bakers with buns to copy that doesn't mean that new recipes will cease to exist but rather than an an alternative will be found. So the new seller will have simply hired some bakers to create a new recipes. Some bakers will continue to have jobs except that instead of wasting all their time on the repetitive tasks of baking they'll instead spend it on innovative tasks of making new recipes (or improving existing ones). You end up with the same diversity and quality of buns now and in the future but at a lower price.

Of course, many bakers will lose their jobs but that's the consequence of all technology and progress. Light bulbs meant that many candle makers lost their jobs. Frankly I prefer light bulbs to candles.

In their place many new jobs will have opened up via the money which people used to spend on buns or candles. That's in addition to all the jobs needed to keep the new bun or light bulb making infrastructure running.

edit: Actually, the "perfect" machine translation would be superior to the average human translation for that 99% since it'd be based on the best human translation for every single piece of text. Needless to say machines are far from there yet but that also means human translators have little to fear job wise for now.

Amusingly, the next hot thing in web translation probably isn't machines. It's humans. Using mechanical turk. So thanks to the web there may soon be more human translators employed than ever before. That's on top of the machines which, to be frank, rather suck at any translation that really matters.

His comments in this article hint at something that nags at me as a musician and lover of music, which is the rise of the concept of "content" to describe creative works.

The ubiquity of digital networks has led to an unprecedented level of commodification of music (for example). Various large entities like (Google, Apple, Facebook) and influential networks of transmission (bit torrent, Grooveshark, Spotify, Mega-Upload) seem to have not only captured more of the value of creative artists, they have also captured huge cultural mindshare. (The tech CEO as rock star).

Google in particular disturbs me as it seems like the search engine has become more important than what is searched for. This somehow feels hollow to me.

I'm interested in general about how meaning is created by and for people. Music is an old means of adding, or at least enhancing meaning.

Now figures like Steve Jobs take some of that role. But there is at least some irony that the gadget that broke Apple into the popular mainstream was a music player, completely un-interesting with out the content that it commodifies.