video pub. May 3, 2026
On the This is The World podcast, Jaron Lanier argues AI is best understood as an ideology rather than a technology — treating it as an autonomous "intelligence" reduces human responsibility for the software's harms, and he prefers framing models as a new form of collaboration akin to Wikipedia. He also covers data dignity, his skepticism of the term "surveillance capitalism," OpenAI's and Musk's claims that money is becoming irrelevant, his case for regulatory experimentation over a single global tech monoculture, and a sharp critique of Meta's approach to VR.