Father of Virtual Reality. Tech Utopist. Computer Scientist. Writer. Whistleblower. Futurist. Composer. Visual artist. Philosopher. Visionary. Dissenter. Heretic. Maverick. Silicon Valley savant. Collector of 1,000 musical instruments. Insider. Outsider.
The fact that a thimble-bio of Jaron Lanier could legitimately hold all of that and more points to the prodigious nature of the man.
Born to Holocaust survivors who met in New York, Lanier was barely 10 when his mother died tragically in a car crash and his father was severely injured. Around this time, their home in El Paso burned down as well. Devastated, grieving, penniless, father and son moved to an uninhabited patch in the New Mexican desert and lived in army surplus tents, where his father allowed his son to design their new house, a geodesic dome (which took two years to build and collapsed soon after.)
An encounter with an astronomer who let him play with telescopes and grind lenses sparked Lanier’s mind. Precociously gifted at maths, he paid his way through college, partly by selling goat cheese from a herd of goats he had bred.
The extreme childhood may have played some role in his predilection for alternate realities. But Lanier followed his unique early years with any equally unique adulthood. In the 1980s, as co-founder of VPL Research, the first “virtual reality” company in the world, he didn’t just coin the phrase, he adapted the tech for the masses. Some computers, goggles, and wired gloves – and bam, immersive realities were suddenly no longer only the preserve of NASA and high-end flight simulations. From gaming avatars to complex surgeries via simulations, his pioneering work has continued to expand human possibilities.
Lanier, in fact, was among the founding magi who shaped Silicon Valley culture and the ethos of the Internet. Since though, disillusioned with its trajectory, he’s backed away to articulate some of the most piercing critiques of it.
You Are Not a Gadget – his 2010 manifesto, for instance -- is a fierce takedown of the destructive impacts of the “hive mind”, the misplaced faith in the “wisdom of the crowd”, and an internet where we upload information for free, like “digital serfs” to “computing cloud overlords”.
In 2018, he followed this up with another book --10 Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a war cry against what he aptly terms BUMMER technologies – Behaviour of Users Modified and Made into Empires of Rent. Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter and others, he said, were kidnapping and manipulating our minds, driving everything including politics “not just left or right, but downwards”.
What makes Lanier triply unique is that he articulates all of this while retaining his high seat within Big Tech. Since 2006, Lanier has been the ‘Prime Unifying Scientist’ at Microsoft but has not forfeited the right to speak his mind at the frontiers of tech-evolution.
Which is what makes his voice so crucial as the next Silicon Valley wave hits the world: Generative AI, and its attendant promise and peril. While the technology has split Silicon Valley down the middle, between tech gurus who see it as Armageddon, and those who scoff it as a red herring, "hardly more intelligent than a rat", Lanier has taken a third path altogether.
He doesn’t want to put the genie back in the bottle, but destroy the notion of the genie within, by making the bottle as transparent as can be.
In a revelatory New Yorker piece, ‘There is no AI’, he posits that we look at AI, not as a creature “out there”, but as a tool. This will demystify it, he says, make it simpler. Remind us that it is humans who created it, and therefore humans who are responsible for shaping it.
He has refused to join his peers in signing the recent high-profile "open letter" calling for a moratorium on AI training because of its potential to take over the human race. If there’s anything to be feared, he believes it’s the slow death of our collective sanity.
So how should we rebalance the equation between humans and machines?
At a time when countries across the world are grappling with the implications of generative AI and the lab race within Big Tech, in an unmissable session at SYNAPSE, one of the most respected minds in the Valley will decode the psyche that has led Silicon Valley down dangerous rabbit holes and lay a possible path back.