Jaron Zepel Lanier (, born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, futurist, and composer. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006, he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.
Lanier has composed contemporary classical music and is a collector of rare instruments (of which he owns one to two thousand); his acoustic album, Instruments of Change (1994) features Asian wind and string instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the sitar-like esraj. Lanier worked with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film The Third Wave (2007).
In 2005, Foreign Policy named Lanier as one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals. In 2010, Lanier was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people. In 2018, Wired named Lanier one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history.
Early life and education
Born Jaron Zepel Lanier in New York City, Lanier was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. Lanier's mother and father were Jewish; his mother was a Nazi concentration camp survivor from Vienna, and his father's family had emigrated from Ukraine to escape the pogroms. When he was nine years old, his mother was killed in a car accident. He lived in tents for an extended period with his father before embarking on a seven-year project to build a geodesic dome home that he helped design.
At the age of 13, Lanier convinced New Mexico State University to let him enroll. At NMSU, he took graduate-level courses; he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical notation, which led him to learn computer programming.
From 1979 to 1980, Lanier's NSF-funded project at NMSU focused on "digital graphical simulations for learning". Lanier also attended art school in New York during this time, but returned to New Mexico and worked as an assistant to a midwife. The father of a baby he helped deliver gave him a car as a gift, which Lanier later drove to Santa Cruz.
Atari Labs, VPL Research (1983–1990)
He made a game called Moon Dust for the Commodore which led to a job at Atari. In California, while working for Atari Inc., he met Thomas Zimmerman, inventor of the data glove. After Atari was split into two companies in 1984, Lanier became unemployed. The free time enabled him to concentrate on his own projects, including VPL, a "post-symbolic" visual programming language. Along with Zimmerman, Lanier founded VPL Research, focusing on commercializing virtual reality technologies; the company prospered for a while, but filed for bankruptcy in 1990.
Internet2, visiting scholar (1997–2001)
From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the 'National Tele-immersion Initiative', a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004, he was visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion. He was also visiting scholar with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University (1997–2001), a visiting artist with New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and a founding member of the International Institute for Evolution and the Brain.
Personal life
Jaron Lanier and his wife, Lena, have one child, a daughter.
Selected list of works in prose
"One-Half of a Manifesto" (2000)
In "One-Half a Manifesto", Lanier criticizes the claims made by writers such as Ray Kurzweil, and opposes the prospect of so-called "cybernetic totalism", which is "a cataclysm brought on when computers become ultra-intelligent masters of matter and life." Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered to be biological computers, i.e., they may not be compared to digital computers in any proper sense, and it is very unlikely that humans could be generally replaced by computers easily in a few decades, even economically. While transistor count increases according to Moore's law, overall performance rises only very slowly. According to Lanier, this is because human productivity in developing software increases only slightly, and software becomes more bloated and remains as error-prone as it ever was. "Simply put, software just won't allow it. Code can't keep up with processing power now, and it never will."
Post-symbolic communication (2006)
Some of Lanier's speculation involves what he calls "post-symbolic communication". In his April 2006 Discover magazine column, he writes about cephalopods (i.e., the various species of octopus, squid, and related molluscs), many of which are able to morph their bodies, including changing the pigmentation and texture of their skin, as well as forming complex shape imitations with their limbs. Lanier sees this behavior, especially as exchanged between two octopodes, as a direct behavioral expression of thought.
Wikipedia and the omniscience of collective wisdom (2006)
In his online essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about him, which he said recurrently exaggerates his film-directing work), describing it as "digital Maoism". He writes "If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots."
In December 2006 Lanier followed up his critique of the collective wisdom with an article in Edge entitled "Beware the Online Collective".
Lanier writes:
<blockquote>I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob... What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.</blockquote>
Lanier argues that the search for deeper information in any area sooner or later requires finding information that has been produced by a single person, or a few devoted individuals: "You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning." Lanier accuses Web 2.0 developments of devaluing progress and innovation, as well as glorifying the collective at the expense of the individual. He criticizes Wikipedia and Linux as examples of this problem; Wikipedia for what he sees as: its "mob rule" by anonymous editors, the weakness of its non-scientific content, and its bullying of experts.
Lanier also argues that there are limitations to certain aspects of the open source and content movement in that they lack the ability to create anything truly new and innovative. For example, Lanier argues that the open source movement did not create the iPhone. In another example, Lanier further accuses Web 2.0 of making search engines lazy, destroying the potential of innovative websites such as Thinkquest, and hampering the communication of ideas such as mathematics to a wider audience.
Lanier further argues that the open source approach has destroyed opportunities for the middle class to finance content creation, and results in the concentration of wealth in a few individuals—"the lords of the clouds"—people who, more by virtue of luck rather than true innovation, manage to insert themselves as content concentrators at strategic times and locations in the cloud. In the book, Lanier also criticizes the MIDI Standard for musical instrument commonality.
Who Owns the Future? (2013)
In his book Who Owns the Future? (2013), Lanier posits that the middle class is increasingly disenfranchised from online economies. By convincing users to give away valuable information about themselves in exchange for free services, firms can accrue large amounts of data at virtually no cost. Lanier calls these firms "Siren Servers", alluding to the Sirens of Ulysses. Instead of paying each individual for their contribution to the data pool, the Siren Servers concentrate wealth in the hands of the few who control the data centers.
For example, he points to Google's translation algorithm, which amalgamates previous translations uploaded by people online, giving the user its best guess. The people behind the source translations receive no payment for their work, while Google profits from increased ad visibility as a powerful Siren Server. In another example, Lanier points out that in 1988, Kodak employed 140,000 people when it led the digital imaging industry. By 2012, Kodak had filed for bankruptcy due to free photo-sharing sites such as Instagram that employed only 13 people at the time.
As a solution to these problems, Lanier puts forth an alternative structure to the web based on Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. He proposes a two-way linking system that would point to the source of any piece of information, creating an economy of micropayments that compensates people for original material they post to the web.
Dawn of the New Everything (2017)
In his book Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017), Lanier reflects on his upbringing in 1960s New Mexico, his lifelong relationship with technology, and his path to Silicon Valley. Part personal memoir and part rumination on virtual reality, Lanier highlights VR's versatility both in historical context and projects its functions into the future.
Lanier writes of VR's capacity to engage and inspire more than any other kind of technology ("TV and video games draw people into a zombielike trance ... while VR is active and makes you tired after a while"). He writes that the older, poorer VR equipment might have done an even better job at exposing one's own process of perception, since "the best enjoyment of VR includes not really being convinced. Like when you go to a magic show." And he underscores how VR inherently helps the user focus on reality, rather than the virtual world, explaining that the best magic of VR happens in the moments right after the demo ends (his lab would often present flowers to visitors coming out of the headset, as the visitor would experience them as though for the first time).
Lanier cites modern VR's rich résumé beyond gaming and entertainment: it has been used to treat war veterans overcoming PTSD; by doctors to perform intricate surgeries; by paraplegics wanting to feel the sense of flight; and as a mechanism to prototype almost every vehicle fabricated in the last two decades. Throughout the book Lanier intersperses fifty-one definitions of VR, illuminating its many uses, gifts, and pitfalls.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)
Lanier is concerned about the influence of social media, arguing that platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have made their users cruder, less empathetic, and more tribal. Lanier worries that reliance on social media platforms is reducing people's capacity for spirituality, and that social media users are in essence turning into automated extensions of the platforms.
There Is No A.I. (2023)
In April 2023, Lanier published an alternative view of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in The New Yorker as less intelligent than the name, and popular culture, may suggest. Lanier concludes his essay as follows: "Think of people. People are the answer to the problems of bits."
Assessment of the Internet
Lanier asserted in 1998 that the Internet mirrors the contemporary culture accurately,
<blockquote>The Internet has created the most precise mirror of people as a whole that we've yet had. It is not a summary prepared by a social scientist or an elite think tank. It is not the hagiography of an era, condensed by a romantic idealist or a sneering cynic. It is the real us, available for direct inspection for the first time. Our collective window shades are now open. We see the mundanity, the avarice, the ugliness, the perversity, the loneliness, the love, the inspiration, the serendipity, and the tenderness that manifest in humanity. Seen in proportion, we can breathe a sigh of relief. We are basically OK.</blockquote>
Views about Wikipedia
While talking to Simon Hattenstone, Lanier said: