Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’

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The godfather of virtual reality has worked beside the web’s visionaries and power-brokers – but likes nothing more than to show the flaws of technology. He discusses how we can make AI work for us, how the internet takes away choice – and why he would ban TikTok

For Lanier, the classic example of restricted choice is Wikipedia, which has effectively become the world’s encyclopedia. “Wikipedia is run by super-nice people who are my friends. But the thing is it’s likeencyclopedia. Some of us might remember when on paper there was both an Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana and they provided different perspectives. The notion of having the perfect encyclopedia is just weird.

That’s all well and good, but what about AI replacing us in the workplace? We already have the prospect of chatbots writing articles like this one. Again, he says it’s not the technology that replaces us, it’s how we use it. “There are two ways this could go. One is that we pretend the bot is a real thing, a real entity like a person, then in order to keep that fantasy going we’re careful to forget whatever source texts were used to have the bot function. Journalism would be harmed by that.

In You Are Not a Gadget, he wrote that the point of digital technology was to make the world more “creative, expressive, empathic and interesting”. Has it achieved that? “It has in some cases. There’s a lot of cool stuff on the internet. I think TikTok is dangerous and should be banned yet I love dance culture on TikTok and it should be cherished.

But he has also seen the very worst of AI. “I know people whose kids have committed suicide with a very strong online algorithm contribution. So in those cases life was taken. It might not be possible from this one human perspective to say for sure what the giant accounting ledger would tell us now, but whatever that answer would be I’m certain we could have done better, and I’m sure we can and must do better in the future.

 

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Oh right. I see.

Oh right. I see.

Na, I reckon there’s still a fair chance AI destroys us. Totally.

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