emerging “Internet of DNA”, massive collections of treatment histories, or linked databases of medical histories will be overseen by machine intelligences able to out- diagnose him.1°! Constant, automatic links between body-borne sensors we'll wear (or swallow) and data centers will sharpen the edge these systems have on my dad further still in coming years. They will notice things he could never hope to see - small but portentous changes in your heartbeat, chemical chimeras from new medications, how you're feeling in each moment until your last.
It is the nature of networks that they create both massive concentration and distribution. And in the process they simply rip apart many of our existing structures. Look at our worrisome global economics at the moment. Extreme concentration of wealth on one end and massive distribution of work tools to ever- cheaper sources of labor runs on this exact same logic: it is a sort of jawing network effect that is tearing up the middle class, producing an ever-richer elite. Those who have information in financial markets, for instance, possess a secret and vital and ever sharper edge over those who don’t. Which makes them richer still. Which sharpens their cutting edge still finer. If we ask ourselves why the world now feels on the edge of a deflationary shock - a moment where there is more supply than there is demand, where the world waits to buy because “tomorrow it will be cheaper” and sends economies spiraling as a result - one reason is this way in which networks are pulling on our economics. On the one hand, wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands by the leverage of knowledge and a head start and connection — a phenomenon knowyn, in fact, as a “rich club” distribution by network theorists. The middle class is locked out of this group. Their wealth and power and influence declines, as a result. This slashes overall demand, since a billionaire consumes less of each additional dollar than, say, a school teacher. At the same time, massive distribution of technology and connection is reducing demand for labor while flooding the world with commodities, workers, newly linked-supply of items like bedrooms and car seats.
The network effect works its usual jawing destruction here: Connection decreases demand and increases supply. It concentrates capital in a few hands, even as it distributes tools of work to cheaper and more distributed people and machines. The middle is class torn inexorably apart from both ends. It’s not wrong to wonder, as some economists have, if capitalism is a system best yoked to older, slower puritanical values that encouraged saving, not consumption - and to ask if wiring markets to instant networks is not, in the end like trying to warp speed a carriage. Anyhow placing an economy on a network surface produces new, ripping pressures as apparent in middle-income nations as they are in middle class households. “We are being destroyed,” a South Korean friend said to me about the hollowing out of his national economy. Korean computer and television and compute manufacturers had hoped they could develop their own essential software, that their hardware manufacturing technology would be unmatchable. In fact, software triumph was
101 Meanwhile, his ideas about your case: |. Akyildiz, Pierobon, M. Balasubramaniam, S. Koucheryavy, Y., "The internet of Bio-Nano things," Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.53, no.3, pp.32-40, March 2015
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