Insights · May 14th, 2022
We’ve been following the thinking of Jaron Lanier since the early 1990s. In this interview Jaron Lanier speaks on Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI with Lex Fridman.
In this lengthy interview he discusses a number of area including reality, Turing machines, simulating our universe, video games and other immersive experiences, death and consciousness, designing human-centric AI, empathy with robots, social media incentives, data dignity (something Nikolas Badminton speaks about at great length with clients), Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, government overreach and freedom, the autodidactic universe, humans and the mystery of music, mortality, and the meaning of life.
Let’s dive in
Jaron is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. He is considered a founder of the field of virtual reality (VR) and with Thomas G. Zimmerman (ex-Atari) founded VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. Throughout the 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.
In 2005, Foreign Policy named Lanier as one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals. In 2010, Lanier was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people. In 2014, Prospect named Lanier one of the top 50 World Thinkers. In 2018, Wired named Lanier one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history.
Note: the article image came from wikipedia, and you can read his full entry here.
