Jaron Lanier

The godfather of virtual reality has worked beside the web's visionaries and power-brokers – but likes nothing more than to show the flaws of technology.

“We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?” It turns you into a little kid in a schoolyard who is both desperate for attention and afraid of being the one who gets beat up. One is that we pretend the bot is a real thing, a real entity like a person, then in order to keep that fantasy going we’re careful to forget whatever source texts were used to have the bot function. It means there is a bit more choice and discernment and humanity back with the person who’s interacting with the thing.” Lanier says the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more damage we can do with it, and the more we have a “responsibility to sanity”. “All of a sudden this idea of trying to make the computer seem humanlike has gone far enough in this iteration that we might have naturally outgrown this illusion of the monolithic truth of the internet or AI. If you go to a chatbot and say: ‘Please can you summarise the state of the London tube?’ you’ll get different answers each time. This is another area where we have a responsibility to sanity, he says – not to narrow our options or get trapped in echo chambers, slaves to the algorithm. “From my perspective,” he says, “the danger isn’t that a new alien entity will speak through our technology and take over and destroy us. Often he has used music to explain the genius and limitations of tech. Lanier doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence, objecting to the idea that it is actually intelligent, and that we could be in competition with it. it’s unreal.” This is the stuff of sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and Terminator, he says.