You Are Not a Gadget

Time Magazine named Jaron Lanier 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.

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