#virtual-reality

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.

On StarTalk, computer scientist and VR pioneer Jaron Lanier argues large language models are best understood as a collaboration of people's combined work rather than an autonomous entity, and traces how network effects centralize power online, why VR never found its killer app, and his case for "data dignity" — compensating people for the data that trains AI — as an alternative to behavior-prediction-driven business models.