jaron lanier

Jaron Lanier helped to create virtual reality, so he’s no technophobe. Yet today he wants to spread the word that social media in its current form is harming all of us – from individual mental health all the way up to plurality in politics and healthy competition in business. In an interview following his virtual Novathon appearance, Lanier discusses his ideas for a positive future in social media, arguing that it all starts with changing the business model. 

Each of us at some point in our lives will face traumatizing hardship — abuse or injury, lack or loss. And all of us must weather the planetwide effects of this pandemic, economic instability, systemic inequality, and social unrest…and find a way to live on with their consequences. Trauma isn’t evenly distributed. But it IS ubiquitous, and learning how to get on with our lives is one of our main tasks as human beings. 

From this hardship grows the best of us: our wisdom, compassion, creativity, and service. By understanding the psychology and neuroscience of the body-mind’s response to trauma, we gain potent insight into how to “live with living without” — how to be both incomplete and whole. 

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week’s guest is best-selling author and journalist Laurence Gonzales, a four-time SFI Miller Scholar whose writing has won widespread recognition, including the Montaigne Medal, two National Magazine Awards, two Eric Hoffer Awards, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. In this episode we talk about his book, Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience — and the lessons therein for those living in the wake of trauma.

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For more, visit Laurence’s Website & Bibliography.

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Since the term was coined in 1956, artificial intelligence has been a kind of mirror that tells us more about our theories of intelligence, and our hopes and fears about technology, than about whether we can make computers think. AI requires us to formulate and specify: what do we mean by computation and cognition, intelligence and thought? It is a topic rife with hype and strong opinions, driven more by funding and commercial goals than almost any other field of science...with the curious effect of making massive, world-changing technological advancements even as we lack a unifying theoretical framework to explain and guide the change. So-called machine intelligences are more and more a part of everyday human life, but we still don’t know if it is possible to make computers think, because we have no universal, satisfying definition of what thinking is. Meanwhile, we deploy technologies that we don’t fully understand to make decisions for us, sometimes with tragic consequences. To build machines with common sense, we have to answer fundamental questions such as, “How do humans learn?” “What is innate and what is taught?” “How much do sociality and evolution play a part in our intelligence, and are they necessary for AI?”

This week’s guest is computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor of Complexity at SFI, Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, founder of ComplexityExplorer.org, and author or editor of six books, including the acclaimed Complexity: A Guided Tour and her latest, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. In this episode, we discuss how much left there is to learn about artificial intelligence, and how research in evolution, neuroscience, childhood development, and other disciplines might help shed light on what AI still lacks: the ability to truly think.

Visit Melanie Mitchell’s Website for research papers and to buy her book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. 

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Watch Melanie's SFI Community Lecture on AI.

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Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.

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More discussions with Melanie:

Lex Fridman

EconTalk

Jim Rutt

WBUR On Point

Melanie's AMA on The Next Web

Our guest on today’s show is Andy Maggio of D6VR. That’s VR as in virtual reality. The D6 stands for 6 dimensions, and Andy will explain what that means. We’ve all heard the term virtual reality for years, but usually in science fiction, or more recently for serious gamers who want immersive experiences. But VR is maturing and is now being used for serious commercial purposes too. D6VR’s product is actually intended for data analysis, a far cry from the world flying or dinosaur fighting or roller-coaster riding you may otherwise associate with VR. Andy explains why and how VR can be powerful for business applications and collaborations. Moreover, D6VR the company is also part of a novel startup venture called the Glimpse Group, and you’ll hear a little about that today – it’s a clever way to spread investment bets within one sector, but also kind of an incubator. As you can imagine, Andy’s pretty bullish on where VR is going and what it means for the future of work, he talks about how quickly the tech has advanced in recent years, and where he thinks it’s going, and he talks about the confluence of different technologies that are involved. And Marco does NOT talk about Star Trek’s holodeck.

Here's a video that gives a small taste of the D6VR experience, and here's another. Andy also provided us a video of D6VR used to analyze the US inflation rate, which is of course right in the sweet spot for M4Edge.

Some other links:
https://futurism.com/vr-app-replace-offices

https://www.barrons.com/articles/tradings-future-arrives-with-a-pair-of-goofy-virtual-reality-goggles-51544837643

https://medium.com/@GlimpseGroup/the-workspace-of-the-future-1e8dbc29ffd6

Jaron Lanier is a virtual reality pioneer and the inventor of the EYE Phone, the first commercially available head-mounted display. He talks about the early days of VR.

Hosts: Leo Laporte and Adam Fisher

Guest: Jaron Lanier

Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/valley-of-genius.

Get a copy of Adam Fisher's Valley of Genius book at a bookstore near you.

Should you shut down your social media accounts right now? Jaron Lanier thinks so, and he knows the tech world. He helped build the Internet and was one of the creators of virtual reality. But now, he believes something has gone very wrong with our new digital world. In this episode, Jaron joins Alan Alda to discuss social media addiction, the crisis at Facebook, how our behavior is being subtly manipulated, and how the means of communication that we hoped would bring us closer together - is doing exactly the opposite.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid