Jaron Lanier at Bloomberg’s Techonomy14 on “Who Owns the Future?”

8 responses to “Jaron Lanier at Bloomberg’s Techonomy14 on “Who Owns the Future?””

1. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 12, 2014 at 4:45 am

   At the end, I asked him to elaborate on "the fantasy of AI"

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2. 

   In Memoriam: jerryfi_99

   Nov 12, 2014 at 6:33 am

   Not what I was expecting. Brilliant! Thanks for the link. I’ll look forward to your interview with him next year. 😉

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3. 

   gsikich1

   Nov 12, 2014 at 12:14 pm

   Pretty interesting – enough so, that I purchased his book.

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4. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 15, 2014 at 6:10 pm

   EDGE.org (one of my favorite sites) just posted a fascinating video interview of Jaron on the Myth of AI with responses from Elon Musk, George Church, Peter Diamandis, Lee Smolin, and Rodney Brooks. Awesome ensemble for this topic!

   A juicy quote from Jaron:

   "In the history of organized religion, it’s often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.

   That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy to me, where you have (natural language) translators and everybody else who contributes to the corpora that allow the data schemes to operate, contributing mostly to the fortunes of whoever runs the top computers. The new elite might say, "Well, but they’re helping the AI, it’s not us, they’re helping the AI." It reminds me of somebody saying, "Oh, build these pyramids, it’s in the service of this deity," but, on the ground, it’s in the service of an elite. It’s an economic effect of the new idea. The effect of the new religious idea of AI is a lot like the economic effect of the old idea, religion.

   There is an incredibly retrograde quality to the mythology of AI."

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5. 

   Cynthia E. Wood

   Nov 17, 2014 at 5:43 am

   I agree — his was a totally fascinating talk! I need to listen to it again when I can be more focused.

   (I was one of the event photographers hired by TE14 to cover the conference. I have lots of photos of you, both onstage and in the audience…) 🙂

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6. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 17, 2014 at 4:10 pm

   Oh cool… I had a peripheral sense that some interesting photo perspectives were going on… Can you share some of your favorites?

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7. 

   Cynthia E. Wood

   Nov 17, 2014 at 4:30 pm

   @Steve Jurvetson Sure, I could do that. I should probably double check with Simone at TE first, but I can’t imagine she would object. Feel free to send me a note via Flickr with your email address (for eventual Dropbox or WeTransfer delivery) — that, or I think my email address is also visible on my profile page here on Flickr.

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8. 

   laughtonb

   Nov 17, 2014 at 6:53 pm

   @Steve Jurvetson That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy
   Thank goodness we don’t get flogged for not keeping our Facebook pages up-to-date 🙂

   Reply