Jaron Lanier is a paradigmatic exemplar of the Silicon Valley rise-and-fall narrative described in this article. A hippie kid (raised in a geodesic dome!), his faith in the liberatory power of the imagination drove him to become the "Father of VR". Today he rails against the tech establishment he helped found, with books like "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now".
Lanier's diagnosis is, of course, different from Poulos'. He doesn't blame his own "spiritual but not religious" ethos for Silicon Valley's long descent from utopian youth to exploitative maturity. In his telling, the digital pioneers recoiled at the sordid mercantile prospect of charging fees for service. Essentially communists, they wanted to make information free for the masses...but they were capitalist enough that they wanted to be compensated well for their work. Hence they made a Faustian bargain with advertising, not realizing that advertising under digital conditions would evolve into a form of mind control.
Without digging into this mess, I want to add only a few things. The first question to ask is: Is there something non-physical about humans? I say yes, but that doesn't necessarily lead to a religious worldview. I'm surprised the talk about "the singularity" is still going in. It's the 21st century version of the vampire's desire for immortality. There's law for thing and law for man, to paraphrase Emerson. Look at how computer gamers use the term "AI". If it's a racing game, and the computer controls the other cars, then AI is how the other cars react to you. That's not thinking. It's calculation that was programmed into the game. People think. Computers calculate. Calculation is one mental skill of humans, but only one. Chess players calculate and recognize patterns. One kind of thinking. Tech people seem to think this is the only kind of thinking that matters because it is a superior kind of thinking—it is the kind of thinking they are best at. But I disagree with both those beliefs. It's one kind of thinking. Seek moderation in all things. Avoid extremes and imbalances of all kinds.
Jaron Lanier is a paradigmatic exemplar of the Silicon Valley rise-and-fall narrative described in this article. A hippie kid (raised in a geodesic dome!), his faith in the liberatory power of the imagination drove him to become the "Father of VR". Today he rails against the tech establishment he helped found, with books like "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now".
Lanier's diagnosis is, of course, different from Poulos'. He doesn't blame his own "spiritual but not religious" ethos for Silicon Valley's long descent from utopian youth to exploitative maturity. In his telling, the digital pioneers recoiled at the sordid mercantile prospect of charging fees for service. Essentially communists, they wanted to make information free for the masses...but they were capitalist enough that they wanted to be compensated well for their work. Hence they made a Faustian bargain with advertising, not realizing that advertising under digital conditions would evolve into a form of mind control.
Without digging into this mess, I want to add only a few things. The first question to ask is: Is there something non-physical about humans? I say yes, but that doesn't necessarily lead to a religious worldview. I'm surprised the talk about "the singularity" is still going in. It's the 21st century version of the vampire's desire for immortality. There's law for thing and law for man, to paraphrase Emerson. Look at how computer gamers use the term "AI". If it's a racing game, and the computer controls the other cars, then AI is how the other cars react to you. That's not thinking. It's calculation that was programmed into the game. People think. Computers calculate. Calculation is one mental skill of humans, but only one. Chess players calculate and recognize patterns. One kind of thinking. Tech people seem to think this is the only kind of thinking that matters because it is a superior kind of thinking—it is the kind of thinking they are best at. But I disagree with both those beliefs. It's one kind of thinking. Seek moderation in all things. Avoid extremes and imbalances of all kinds.