TEDxSF - Jaron Lanier - You Are Not a Gadget

Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. His book You Are Not a Gadget was released in early 2010 by Knopf in the USA and Penguin in the UK. He writes and speaks on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technological practices, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Discover (where he has been a columnist), The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, The Sciences, Wired Magazine (where he was a founding contributing editor), and Scientific American. He has edited special "future" issues of SPIN and Civilization magazines. He is one of the 100 "remarkable people" of the Global Business Network. In 2005 Lanier was selected as one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.

Jaron begins this talk by playing an 8000 year old Laotian instrument called a Can (sp), and asserts that is it the first binary code technology: an orderly row of objects that are either on or off. He moves into his first hand account of his lab's invention of avatars, and where they might be going. He stands by his 30 year prediction that virtual reality will mature in 2020 or 2025. Jaron's wide ranging talk goes into the potential of leveraging the human motor cortex, avatars and virtual reality to explore new equations, and as a great educational platform (predicts that it will succeed because having a kid virtually "be a molecule" "leverages narcissism" and that suddenly makes molecule study self study). He closes his talk with a profound rebuttal to Kevin Kelly's recent work What Technology Wants- says he respects Kevin's work tremendously but that his own thesis stands in opposition to Kelly's. Shares concerns about algorithms disconnecting us from each others, about our models of working with each other online, the rewrite of social rules. Beautiful.

event video by: http://repertoireproductions.com/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Jaron Lanier
• What Technology Wants
• Virtual Reality
• Kevin Kelly
• Jim Bauer
• Avatars
• Avatar
• Microsoft Labs
• Preadaptive
• Humuncular Flexibility
• Humunculus
• Neurobiology of Avatars
• Human Potential

[96lizzie69]

thumbs up if tegan brought you here :)

[Margatroid]

Why is the intro narrated by a synthesized voice instead of just having a real person do it? That's totally unnecessary and extremely ironic considering the kind of stuff that Lanier is criticizing.

[utologydotnet]

Exploring different ways of being...

[hydroshocksunwell]

This is awesome. The potential and vision hes got is amazing. We are turning into Wall=E. Watch that movie and you can see what we are heading into.

[SyracusePhotography]

@Margatroid

Did you even listen to the lecture? He not only supports technology, but is a major contributor to advances in technology.

[aplumb]

I just heard him perform here at the Ottawa Writers Festival; sounds the same. :-) The instrument is called a khene; there's a wikipedia page dedicated to the instrument that I can't link to.

[bledges]

The whole thing is worth watching, especially if you aren't familiar with Jaron Lanier.

But 16:40-20:00 of this clip is just fantastic--a little dense maybe, but food for thought for anyone these days that has become mixed up in all of this.

[indiesixtynine]

I've always found it very valuable to find someone you have great respect for that disagrees with you profoundly. Kudos to Mr Lanier for pointing it out and for making intelligent arguments against ideas I believe in strongly.

[nitalittle]

Really interesting. Thanks for sharing it. I was creeped out by his laughing without moving his face, but his message of concern that we are allowing algorythms to shape the values in our lives is worth listening to.

[screendrem]

Way cool. I love how Jaron's mouth doesn't move when he laughs. Kinda creepy