Jaron Lanier
Jaron Zepel Lanier (/ˈdʒeɪrɪn lɪˈnɪər/, born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist,[1] visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality,[2] Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. In the late 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.[3]
Jaron Lanier
Lanier has composed contemporary classical music and is a collector of rare instruments (of which he owns one to two thousand[4]); his acoustic album, Instruments of Change (1994) features Asian wind and string instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the sitar-like esraj. Lanier teamed with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film The Third Wave (2007).
In 2005, Foreign Policy named Lanier as one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals.[5] In 2010, Lanier was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people.[6] In 2014, Prospect named Lanier one of the top 50 World Thinkers.[7] In 2018, Wired named Lanier one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history.[8]
Early life and education[edit]
Born Jaron Zepel Lanier[9] in New York City, Lanier was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico.[10][11] Lanier's mother and father were Jewish;[12] his mother was a Nazi concentration camp survivor from Vienna, and his father's family had emigrated from Ukraine to escape the pogroms.[13] When he was nine years old, his mother was killed in a car accident. He lived in tents for an extended period with his father before embarking on a seven-year project to build a geodesic dome home that he helped design.[14][15]
At the age of 13, Lanier convinced New Mexico State University to let him enroll. At NMSU, he took graduate-level courses; he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical notation, which led him to learn computer programming.[16]
From 1979 to 1980, Lanier's NSF-funded project at NMSU focused on "digital graphical simulations for learning". Lanier also attended art school in New York during this time, but returned to New Mexico and worked as an assistant to a midwife.[17] The father of a baby he helped deliver gave him a car as a gift, which Lanier later drove to Santa Cruz.[18]
Atari Labs, VPL Research (1983–1990)[edit]
In California, Lanier worked for Atari Inc., where he met Thomas Zimmerman, inventor of the data glove. After Atari was split into two companies in 1984, Lanier became unemployed. The free time enabled him to concentrate on his own projects, including VPL, a "post-symbolic" visual programming language. Along with Zimmerman, Lanier founded VPL Research, focusing on commercializing virtual reality technologies; the company prospered for a while, but filed for bankruptcy in 1990.[11] In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought VPL's virtual reality and graphics-related patents.[19]
Internet2, visiting scholar (1997–2001)[edit]
From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the 'National Tele-immersion Initiative', a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004, he was visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion. He was also visiting scholar with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University (1997–2001), a visiting artist with New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and a founding member of the International Institute for Evolution and the Brain.[20]
Selected list of works in prose[edit]
"One-Half of a Manifesto" (2000)[edit]
In "One-Half a Manifesto", Lanier criticizes the claims made by writers such as Ray Kurzweil, and opposes the prospect of so-called "cybernetic totalism", which is "a cataclysm brought on when computers become ultra-intelligent masters of matter and life."[22][23] Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered to be biological computers, i.e., they may not be compared to digital computers in any proper sense, and it is very unlikely that humans could be generally replaced by computers easily in a few decades, even economically. While transistor count increases according to Moore's law, overall performance rises only very slowly. According to Lanier, this is because human productivity in developing software increases only slightly, and software becomes more bloated and remains as error-prone as it ever was. "Simply put, software just won't allow it. Code can't keep up with processing power now, and it never will."[24] At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory (esp. ideology) is not that it is false, "but when it claims to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality." The impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm and causes the self-fulfilling destiny which spoils people.
Post-symbolic communication (2006)[edit]
Some of Lanier's speculation involves what he calls "post-symbolic communication". In his April 2006 Discover magazine column, he writes about cephalopods (i.e., the various species of octopus, squid, and related molluscs), many of which are able to morph their bodies, including changing the pigmentation and texture of their skin, as well as forming complex shape imitations with their limbs. Lanier sees this behavior, especially as exchanged between two octopodes, as a direct behavioral expression of thought.[25]
Wikipedia and the omniscience of collective wisdom (2006)[edit]
In his online essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about him, which he said recurrently exaggerates his film directing work), describing it as "digital Maoism".[26] He writes "If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots."[26]
His criticism aims at several targets that concern him and are at different levels of abstraction:
Memberships[edit]
Lanier has served on numerous advisory boards, including the Board of Councilors of the University of Southern California, Medical Media Systems (a medical visualization spin-off company associated with Dartmouth College), for the Microdisplay Corporation, and for NY3D (developers of auto stereo displays).[46]
In 1997, he was a founding member of the 'National Tele-Immersion Initiative',[47] an effort devoted to using computer technology to give people who are separated by great distances the illusion that they are physically together. Lanier is a member of the Global Business Network,[48] part of the Monitor Group.
In the media[edit]
He has appeared in several documentaries, including the 1990 documentary Cyberpunk,[49] 1992 Danish television documentary Computerbilleder – udfordring til virkeligheden (in English: Computer Pictures - A Challenge to Reality),[50] the 1995 documentary Synthetic Pleasures,[50] the 2004 television documentary Rage Against the Machines,[50] and the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.[51] Lanier was credited as one of the miscellaneous crew for the 2002 film Minority Report.[50] Lanier stated that his role was to help make up the gadgets and scenarios.[6][52] Lanier has appeared on The Colbert Report,[53] Charlie Rose,[54] and The Tavis Smiley Show.[55] He appeared on ABC's The View during the final seven minutes of the show on 19 June 2018, promoting his book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. He was a guest on the Radiolab podcast episode "The Cataclysm Sentence", released on 18 April 2020.[56] Lanier was interviewed by Andrew Yang in the "Yang Speaks" podcast, episode entitled "Who owns your data? Jaron Lanier has the answer" on May 28, 2020.[57] Lanier appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast on September 6, 2021 to talk about his views on AI, social media, VR and the future of humanity.[58] He has had speaking engagements and presentations at Concordia University Wisconsin and University Temple United Methodist Church.[59][60]
