Jaron Lanier

Mathematician & Computer Science Pioneer

Lanier's quarrel is not with the man but with what the imitation game did to the field's standard of evidence. Turing, unable to build a personhood meter and unsure what intelligence was, settled for the one thing that could be observed: whether a person is fooled. Lanier's charge is that the test never became antiquated at all — 'the Turing test is still the paradigm for AI products, for AI culture, for everything' — and that a discipline built to stop people fooling themselves reorganized around fooling them: 'science became theater, science became stage magic.' He traces the truth crisis to that inversion.

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Cyber Ambassador-at-large, Taiwan

In 2024 Lanier, Allison Stanger, and Tang co-wrote a proposal to sunset Section 230's liability shield for algorithmic amplification while protecting citizens' direct speech — 'algorithmic amplification is a product, not a public service.' Lanier's blurb for Plurality calls it 'a peek at the humanistic high tech future we suspected was possible,' and elsewhere he names Tang and Glen Weyl as the idea's finest exponents while adding that they do not all agree and should not. The pairing is data dignity meeting plurality: a man who wants people paid for what the models learned from them, beside a woman who put ten years of her own meetings in the public domain so the models could learn her outright.

ash.harvard.edu · dl.acm.org · plurality.net · youtube.com

Filmmaker & Director

A Berggruen Institute evening, on this site, closing a science-fiction writing retreat. Kwan opened by collapsing the distance in the title himself: what is a story but a version of an algorithm, 'compressing information into a thing that allows the human brain to understand it,' a rulebook for moving through life, so that an Aesop fable is already behavioral engineering — the change now being one of scale and of kind. Lanier, who has spent two decades arguing that recommendation systems are behavior modification with a business model, had the harder job of saying what the difference is. A filmmaker and a computer scientist meeting on the suspicion that narrative and algorithm were never separate crafts.

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