The book
You Are Not a Gadget by
Jaron Lanier is a fascinating counterpoint to some earlier posts on this blog.
Jaron Lanier is a technologist, one of the pioneers of virtual reality, who has come to question where our current technology is taking us. He asks the following basic, related, philosophical questions:
1. Are humans special?
2. What is the proper relationship between the individual and the group?
Jaron Lanier argues that humans
are special, and that our current technology is problematic because it emphasizes the group to the exclusion of the individual.
This is the opposite of
Stephen Wolfram: "...there is nothing fundamentally special about us [humans]." (
A New Kind of Science, p. 844) It is the opposite of Ray Kurzweil's
The Singularity is Near (movie due out Sept. 1, 2010). I think Jaron Lanier's position is the opposite of most technologists. For a few examples, see any of my earlier blog posts with the label "reality" (and follow the links). I briefly mentioned Jaron Lanier in
my first post on the reality question.
Jaron Lanier argues that our current path of technological design (e.g.,
Web 2.0) is leading us into a "new religion" (p. 32) that he calls cybernetic totalism where humans are slaves of technology instead of the other way around. He believes "that cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business." (p. 119) And especially bad for human creativity.
In contrast to cybernetic totalism, Mr. Lanier posits humanism and "an idea of progress that is centered on enriching the depth of communication instead of the acquisition of powers." (p. 179)
This book is not just about computers. Here are a few of the other interesting topics woven into this book:
- music
- advertising
- economics and money
- evolutionary biology
- language
- how the sense of smell is different from vision and hearing
- cephalopods
In the case of cephalopods (octopuses, squids and cuttlefishes), he is fascinated with how they communicate by morphing, something that humans can't do.
For more information about
You Are Not a Gadget, see:
Jaron Lanier's web site about the book
Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World, a talk by Jaron Lanier at Zócalo Public Square at about the time the book was published in January 2010 (the talk is 54 minutes, followed by 18 minutes of questions and answers)
You Are Not a Gadget was published in 2010. Reviews:
Wall Street Journal 1/12/10 (Instapundit)
New York Times 1/14/10
Washington Post 1/14/10
UPDATE 6/04/10: In the Acknowledgements, Jaron Lanier writes "Superspecial thanks to early readers of the manuscript," one of whom was Neal Stephenson. I write about Neal Stephenson in this post:
Snow Crash.
Emily graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in biology and a minor in religion. Congratulations, Emily! Well done!
Emily and some of her friends:
Each graduate was given a replica of Gamaliel Painter's cane. Mr. Painter helped found Middlebury College and he left his estate and his cane to the college when he died in 1819. Painter Hall is named after him.
