Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

The core ideal of the Internet is that one trusts people, and that given an opportunity, people will find their way to be reasonably decent. I happily restate my loyalty to that ideal. It’s all we have.

the demonstrated capability of Facebook to effortlessly engage in mass social engineering proves that the Internet as it exists today is not a purists’ emergent system, as is so often claimed, but largely a top-down, directed one.

the extreme good of the precedent says nothing about the desirabilit...

We pretend that an emergent meta-human being is appearing in the computing clouds—an artificial intelligence—but actually it is humans, the operat...

This constant stream of stories suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should think of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools.

such conclusions aren’t just changing how we think about computers—they are reshaping the basic assumptions of our lives in misguided and ultimately damaging ways.

The nuts and bolts of artificial-intelligence research can often be more usefully interpreted with...

Suppose IBM had dispensed with the theatrics, and declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine.

it would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

AI technologies typically operate on a variation of the process described earlier that accomplishes translations between languages.

The supposedly artificially intelligent result can be understood as a mash-up of what real people did before.

This in no way denigrates it or proposes it isn’t useful. It is not, however, supernatural.

The real people from whom the initial answers were gathered deserve to be paid for each new answer given by the machine.

George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We ar...

a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than ...

the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, thei...

Needless to say, this approach would hide its tracks so that it would be hard to send a nanopayment to an ...

the very idea of artificial intelligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take on ...

hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately.

These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.

while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the same automated...

In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double-check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the signal has been given to walk.

When we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on—with the machines and with ourselves.

why, aside from the theatrical appeal to consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be pres...

computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human cond...

seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to de...

One day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a superintelligent AI, infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books,

these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people. All thoughts about consciousness, souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith,

we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an en...

a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between ...

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions.

if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would make people less uncomfortable?

Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world.

We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing, and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold, and starving.

But civility, human improvement, these are still choices. That’s why scientists and engineers should present technology in way...

We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas...

We must not allow technological change to be driven by a philosophy in which people aren’t held to be special. But what is special about people?

a prospectus for what I’m calling “humanistic information economics.”

Dualism means there isn’t just one plane of reality. To some people it might mean that there’s a separate spiritual realm, or an afterlife, but to me it just means that neither physical reality nor logic explains everything.

tightrope. Fall to the left and you acquiesce to superstitions. To the right lies the tr...

suggests a difference between people and even very a...

When children learn to translate between languages or answer questions, they also nurture assets such as context, taste, and moral feeling that our machine in...

clinging to a sentimental and arbitrar...

My reasons are both based on a commitment to the truth and to pragmatism (the surviva...

Belief in the specialness of people is a minority position in the tech world, and I w...

The way we experience life—call it “consciousness”—doesn’t fit in a materialistic or...

Lately I prefer to call it “e...

the opposing philosophical team has colonized the term consciousness. That term might be used these days to refer to the self-models t...