Jaron Lanier on dystopia, empathy, and the future of the internet | Hacker News Reader

Jaron Lanier on dystopia, empathy, and the future of the internet

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96 pointsuptown22 comments

Lanier has the bias that he thinks musicians should be important. For most of history, musicians were nobodies, outranked by bartenders. For part of the 20th century, some musicians were a big deal because of the mass economics of radio and record distribution. Now that everyone can record, mix, and distribute music easily, musicians are mostly nobodies again. At peak, there were several million Myspace bands.

(I met him back when he had the first VR rig on a pair of SGI machines. I've worn his gloves and goggles. Kind of neat, but at the time, lag was about a full second. Turn head, wait for head tracking to catch up. Early magnetic head tracking was awful.)

Yeah the irony is that most people are attracted to music because they are narcissists. The professionals I've met are very humble and grateful to have had a chance to get paid to have fun even if it's a lot of work the successful ones I know are grateful people. But the majority if would be musicians pine for the era when you didn't need to be the very best of the best to carve out a small niche. Technology has moved on, today you get fame and fortune not by emulating Jimi Hendrix but by emulating Don Buchla and Bob Moog and George Lewis. If you're not making interactive music software and or hardware then you're stuck in the 1980s.

Great insight. I don’t believe I have quite made it to this realization before. Thanks for sharing.

I do appreciate Lanier’s insignts on the value of musical instrument design.

I've been reading interviews with Lanier since the 90s and i have come to the conclusion that one of us is really dumb, but i'm still not sure which of us it is.

I think he is a good example on why attempting to put people on simple "dumb-smart" axis might not be such a good idea.

Could you elaborate on that?

This guy is fascinating to listen to. I think the facade of techno-utopianism has really started to crumble in recent years and this sort of critical eye is what the world needs right now. Anyone know which books of his are the best reads?

I would say his earlier ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#You_Are_Not_a_Gad... IMO 'you are not a gadget' was good at predicting how web 2.0 would become distopean.

https://www.evgenymorozov.com is good on 'the facade of techno-utopianism' crumbling, especially 'to save everything, click here'

I am not familiar with his books (hopefully others can help), but I wanted to say that to me the issue with techno utopias is their connection with capitalism. Specifically the notion that we will work for money to pay for everything we need.

Admittedly Jaron Lanier is wiser than me in this area, but I still think technology has a huge role to play in making a better world. I feel though that as long as we expect to exploit the position of those beneath us (with respect to social class and wealth) then technology will be used to that aim to create a stratified dystopia where everyone is trapped in a ladder holding down those beneath them while those above them hold them down.

"Who Owns the Future?" is IMHO very much worth a read, as it points out some of the issues we face as a society dealing with the the big social-data-silos in terms of 'us' being the product for sale, what that means, and maybe how to combat it.

When I read "Who owns the future" three years ago I thought his diagnosis of the Internet's issues was spot on but his solution of compensating online creators with micropayments was outlandish and technically impossible. However, the rise of cryptocurrency (e.g. Basic Attention Token) made me feel short-sighted and I put a lot more stock in his ideas nowadays.

He did an interesting interview on the Tavis Smiley show last week (actually the interview went into 2 shows). You can also read the transcript.

I found the interview interesting because he clearly loves technology/internet/ai and is optimistic, but that doesn't stop him from looking with a critical eye on things and pointing out what is going wrong/ mistakes that were made.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/computer-scie...

He gave an interview on Nightline, I believe, back in the late 90s or early 00s where he was contrasting biotech and digital tech. He concluded that digital would lead almost entirely to good things and biotech would lead exclusively to bad things. It's been a long time, but I distinctly remember how glib and categorical he was. I lost all respect for him.

Would you say that, so far, his predictions have been less than accurate?

EDIT: Why is this inquiry getting downvoted? Does anybody have an idea?

For instance, he didn't consider loss of privacy, the ability for governments and companies to surveil people, or the effect of information bubbles, for instance. Those seem like objectively bad consequences, or at least things that he'd agree are bad.

Condemning the genomics revolution as "entirely bad" is really laughable, though. The genomics era filled the drug development pipeline with thousands of new targets, and was the necessary precursor to the coming era of precision medicine and precision health.

(Also - HN has downvotes?)

Those sound like good points to me. Thanks for sharing. I am not enough educated on biotech to draw a conclusive opinion myself. What I understand about Monsanto’s exploits into corn production seems devastating, though.

Once you have a certain amount of karma, you can downvote comments. I don’t know what the necessary amount is.

Its ironic that I've chosen not to buy his new book on VR yet, because its only available in hard and softcover, not audible.

That being said Leron's work is phenomenal and I'd recommend "who owns the future" to everyone.

It is available in audiobook format ... I just listened to it via audible :)

Always good to hear from Mr. Lanier.

It was also vindicating to know that I'm not the only one who believes the gamergate => alt-right connection:

"When women got together to try and improve their lot in the gaming world, it turned into Gamergate, which turned into the alt-right."

It is nice to know that whatever you believe, someone on the internet agrees with you.

Not just someone. Jaron f-ing Lanier. If I'm going to be crazy, at least I can do it with good company.

Vr as an empathy machine is not a concept I buy.

The military uses vr to reduce empathy to out groups and increase tribalism.

Plus I see no reason VR gained empathy will last the moment someone gets into a resource conflict in the real world. Somethings are zerosum.

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