Born in the RSR  - 2017-06-11
Isn't this the guy who was eating his own toenails through his sandal on stage?
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Old_Zircon - 2017-06-11 I don't know about that, but I hope so.
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Monkey Napoleon - 2017-06-11 Richard Stallman did that. He's also a fat, dirty looking computer guy with pretty extreme philosophies.
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Old_Zircon - 2017-06-11 Jaron Lanier isn't particularly extreme these days.
Fat, nerdy and gross yes, but I've read all of his books and it pretty much amounts to taking an ethical, humanistic approach to technology and trying to ensure robust workers' rights in the information economy. The stuff he DOESN'T believe in, like strong AI and the Singularity and the premise of the question he's being asked here, all that sort of business, is far more extreme even though it's also all quite popular in the tech sector leadership..
Back in the 80s and 90s he was probably more extreme and weird, though, for sure.
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Jeriko-1 - 2017-06-11 A lot of these tech guys seem to want there to be some kind of 'apotheosis'. Not for -you- but for them. To create artificial bodies powerful enough to house their giant sized egos so they can rule for millions of years. (Frank Herbert eat your heart out.) Nothing changes really. First Emperor of China wanted the exact same thing.
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Old_Zircon - 2017-06-13 Exactly, Jeriko. That's the kind of stuff Jaron has been advocating against for decades.
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Old_Zircon - 2017-06-13 Because those ideologies are firmly held by a lot of the people at the top of the tech industry, and they lead to some pretty shitty, destructive assumptions about the world that inform the business and design choices made in a lot of our technology, and that technology is the primary medium through which our societies operate today. Newagey transhumanist bullshit at the top in Silicon Valley has very real, far reaching, long term consequences for all of us and has a lot to do with why things are so fucked up today, from the 2008 crash to the 2016 elections to the erosion of any kind of protection for labor to models of human interaction as economics and the whole "attention economy" to hyperindividualism to the rise of the neoliberals in the 90s. Not that it was the sole motivator of most of these but it had a hand in all of them.
Jaron Lanier is pretty cool, you should read his books.
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Space Odin - 2017-06-11
In my old job, I used to deal with Jaron Lanier remotely for like hours on end, and had to build him a bunch of VR rigs to his exacting specifications.
He seemed like a pain in the ass at first but he's actually a really nice guy (You can learn a lot about someone by how they treat people who do work for them).
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