photo credit: Joseph Gordon Levitt
Web resources related toJaron Lanier
Jaron has no social media accounts at all and all purported ones are fake.
photo credit: Joseph Gordon Levitt
Web resources related to
Current Top Links
Jaron's Writings
"Inside a Fusion Startup's Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony"
- Wired, December 18, 2024
*here's a video of the performance referred to in the article
"How to Picture A.I."
- The New Yorker, March 1, 2024
"The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything"
- with Allison Stanger for Wired, February 13, 2024
"Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?"
- The New Yorker, February 2, 2024
"What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me"
- The New Yorker, July 22, 2023
*please explore the music section, to the left or below, to hear instruments described in this essay
"There is no A.I."
- The New Yorker, April 20, 2023
- (Responses to "There is no A.I." from Connie Loizos in Tech Crunch and Derek Robertson in Politico.)
"OY, A.I"
- Tablet Magazine, January 22, 2023
"Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned"
- an opinion piece in the New York Times on November 11, 2022
"How to Fix Twitter-And All of Social Media"
- The Atlantic, May 26, 2022
"The Invasion of Ukraine Dramatizes the Folly of 'The Sovereign Individual'"
- with E. Glen Weyl for The Information, February 24, 2022
"How to Fix Social Media: Topple the New Gods of Data"
- Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2021
"How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic"
- with E. Glen Weyl for Foreign Affairs, March 20, 2020
"AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology"
- Wired, March 15, 2020
"A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society"
- with E. Glen Weyl for Harvard Business Review, September 26, 2018
Video
1990s Jaron presenting the VPL Data Glove
Netflix's "The Social Dilemma"
TED Talk: "How We Need to Remake the Internet"
"Data Dignity"
- A series with the New York Times
"Intelligent Thinking About Artificial Intelligence"
- with Brian Greene for the World Science Festival, February 10, 2024
"Piers Morgan CENSORED By Facebook? Social Media Debate With Jaron Lanier and Seth Dillon"
- Piers Morgan Uncensored, February 2, 2024
"Circle of Empathy"
- Cirque du Soleil Podcast, Season 1 Episode 5
"Jaron Lanier Looks into AI's Future | AI IRL"
- Bloomberg Originals, Nov 15, 2023
"Data Dignity and the Inversion of AI"
- A talk on September 15, 2023 co-hosted with the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and the UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab
"How humanity can defeat AI"
- Jaron joins UnHerd, May 15, 2023
"AI... A visionary's unique take!"
- Jaron joins the "Really? no, Really?" podcast
"The way we think about A.I. is where the danger is"
- An interview for CNBC's Squawk on the Street
"Future of Text"
- Frode Hegland 2022 Keynote
"The Truth About Social Media"
- An interview with TRIGGERnometry
"Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI"
-The Lex Fridman Podcast
"Who is Civilization for?"
- Willy Brandt Lecture and Q&A
"Is Consciousness an Illusion?"
- Jaron joins the "Closer To Truth" PBS broadcast, March 21, 2023
"Can Dualism Explain Consciousness?"
- "Closer To Truth" on May 1, 2020
Audio and Text Interviews
"Watch Out for the Fake Tom Cruise"
- The New York Times, July 15, 2023
"The Cataclysm Sentence"
- Radiolab, June 30, 2023
"Artificial intelligence should be more like the Talmud"
- Calcalist Supplement, June 08, 2023
"Tech guru Jaron Lanier: 'The danger isn't that AI destroys us. It's that it drives us insane'"
- The Guardian, March 23, 2023
Jaron joins "Phil & Ted's SEXY BOOMER Show"
- January 10, 2023
"'Extinction is on the table': Jaron Lanier warns of tech's existential threat to humanity"
- The Guardian, November 27, 2022
"The Metaverse: Expectations vs. Reality"
- Jaron on the Wild West of the metaverse and why Facebook should be paying you
"Silicon Valley Sharknado"
- Maureen Dowd's opinion piece from July 8, 2014 culminating in an interview with Jaron
"City Arts & Lectures"
- In conversastion with Jennifer Egan on May 15, 2022
"Was the Internet a Horrible Mistake?"
- The Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss
Selected Recent Academic Papers
"Steps towards prompt-based creation of virtual worlds"
- showing that prompt-based methods can both accelerate in-VR level editing, as well as can become part of gameplay rather than just part of game development
"Real-time Animation Generation and Control on Rigged Models via Large Language Models"
- introducing a novel method for real-time animation control and generation on rigged models using natural language input
"Sunset and Renew: Section 230 Should Protect Human Speech, Not Algorithmic Virality"
- advocating for a "repeal and renew" approach to Section 230 in an effort to reform the current social media ecosystem
"Games as Ontology Engines: AI and LLMs Invoke Spatiotemporal and Metaphysical Realities in Virtual Worlds"
- exploring how virtual worlds supported by large language models (LLMs) and real-time object-transformation systems can serve as frameworks for examining both culturally situated and universally recognizable ontologies
"Social Conjuring: Multi-User Runtime Collaboration with AI in Building Virtual 3D Worlds"
- presenting a framework for the Human-AI co-creation of multi-user, collaborative and modifiable virtual worlds at runtime
"Real-time Animation Generation and Control on Rigged Models via Large Language Models"
- introducing a novel method for real-time animation control and generation on rigged models using natural language input
"LLMR: Real-time Prompting of Interactive Worlds using Large Language Models"
- presenting Large Language Model for Mixed Reality (LLMR), a framework for the real-time creation and modification of interactive Mixed Reality experiences using LLMs
"Beyond Audio: Towards a Design Space of Headphones as a Site for Interaction and Sensing"
- exploring the potential of headphones as a general-purpose input device for both foreground motion-gestures as well as background sensing of user activity
"Surreal VR Pong: LLM approach to Game Design"
- proposing that prompt-based creation can become part of gameplay rather than just part of game development
"Steps towards prompt-based creation of virtual worlds"
- showing that prompt-based methods can also accelerate in-VR level editing, as well as can become part of gameplay rather than just part of game development
"Non-local Field Theory from Matrix Models"
- showing that a class of matrix theories can be understood as an extension of quantum field theory which has non-local interactions
"A Cubic Matrix Action for the Standard Model and Beyond"
- proposing a new framework for matrix theories that are equivalent to field theories on a toroidal spacetime
"Model of Illusions and Virtual Reality"
- discussing the possibility to induce illusions in which users report and behave as if they have entered into altered situations and identities
"The Rocketbox Library and the Utility of Freely Available Rigged Avatars"
- discussing the importance of rigged avatars for the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) research community
"Autodidactic Universe"
- presenting an approach to cosmology in which the Universe learns its own physical laws
"AllTogether: Effect of Avatars in Mixed-Modality Conferencing Environments"
- discussing TogetherMode as a response to a perceived need for avatar-supported meeting attendance
"HoloARt: Painting with Holograms in Mixed Reality"
- a system that allows the user to turn their physical environment into a canvas where digital holograms and physical objects co-exist in the real and virtual world
Other Links
"The Decentralized Mystique"
- An opinion piece for CoinDesk discussing Jaron's research with Glen Weyl on how on Bitcoin's early years undermines its foundational myths of privacy through pseudonymity and decentralization
"So ... What If Aliens' Quantum Computers Explain Dark Energy?"
- A wild thought experiment with physicist Stephon Alexander
"The Conscience of Silicon Valley"
- GQ Profile
"Bringing Us Together"
- The story of Microsoft's Together Mode
Jaron Lanier's Music
photo courtesy of Winni Wintermeyer
From left to right: Jaron Lanier, Bill Frisell, John Zorn, Dave Lombardo and Laurie Anderson. August 31, 2023 in San Fransisco for John Zorn @ 70.
photo credit: John Taylor
You might have read my piece in The New Yorker about musical instrument obsession, and you might be curious what the music sounds like. The New Yorker's online presentation includes one tune, a trio called "Waves Only Get Real When They Break", with Colin Farish and Jhaffur Khan, in which I play a Taiwanese guzheng harp. (European scholars would classify it as a "zither", but that has diminutive, folk connotations, so I prefer "harp".)
Here are some more tracks you might like to hear, with various other people and with me on various other instruments. This isn't the only kind of music I make, but I might love this stuff the most.*
This music is offered under the usual legal protections and you are not given rights to do stuff with it other than listen. Most of these tracks are works in progress.
If you are curious: My "about the author" in The New Yorker reflects the need to keep my thoughts separate from Microsoft when I'm writing about tech, but comes off weirdly when I'm not writing about tech. The magazine insists on a single bio per author.
1. Waves Only Get Real When They Break
- here is the trio piece presented at the top of the New Yorker article, with Colin Farish on piano, Jhaffur Khan on flute, and me on guzheng.
2. Tongues in Flight in LA
- just me overdubbing different instruments. The flute I play in this is a Japanese shakuhachi, which is described in the piece, but the style I play on it gradually shifts to Cuban charanga by the end. The other instruments are, well, varied.
3. Piano Seance
- here's me on solo piano (lockdown remote performance)
Video: "Screened Out: an evening with Jaron Lanier" (courtesy of Rhizome DC)
4. Live Performance
- in concert with Will Calhoun. Here I'm playing some of the instruments mentioned in the New Yorker piece, like a khaen. The bowed instrument (a baryton) went badly out of tune because we were at a venue by the ocean in Big Sur, so just pretend to not hear that one.
Video: Philip Glass' Days and Nights festival (courtesy of Glass Center/OL)
5. Escape Velocity
- me on piano in concert with Will Calhoun on drums at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz.
6. Glass Void
- Mark Deutsch has spent decades developing a new instrument called the Bazantar, here paired with me on glass 'armonica.
7. Air Flows Over Blocks
- with Haruka Fujii - Haruka on vibes and marimba at the same time, Jaron on Turkish clarinet
8. Contintrio
- with Zach Moses and Will Calhoun. In this piece I'm playing an electronic instrument called a continuum.
9. Boundary Bound
- vocalist Sussan Deyhim with me on tarhu
10. The Water Blues
- with James Gordon Williams - James on piano, Jaron on the same guzheng heard in the trio on the New Yorker site, , but in this case playing the blues.
11. Brooding Blues Gets Pierced by Sunlight
- the Free Waves Trio: with Tim Jackson and Zack Olsen. Tim is better known for running jazz festivals (Monterey!) and a club (Kuumbwa!) but he's also a wonderful flute player who has worked with everybody; Zach is here forced to play on an experimental kit, but makes it sound great.
12. Puzzle Pieces in Flight
- the Free Waves Trio (with Tim Jackson and Zack Olsen), here Jaron is playing a new kind of electromechanical keyboard from Brazil called a Valente
13. Midnight Rainbow
- another piece by the Free Waves Trio
14. Three Visionary Mice
- duet with Zack Olsen
15. Frantic Metallic
- also with Zack Olsen
16. Sweet Quiche Lorraine Hat
- duet with Zach Moses, and Jaron on the Valente
17. Wiggle Warrior
- also with Zach Moses
18. Live Performance
- with Barbara Higbie. A touch of comedy.
Video: at Berkeley, CA's The Freight & Salvage March 19, 2021 (courtesy of Irene Young)
19. Live Performance
- with David Rothenberg
Video: at London's October Gallery on January 28, 2012 (courtesy of John Whiting)
* If you are curious why this music isn't on the usual streaming services, it's because I don't like them. I don't like how they put the download numbers up front so everything becomes a numerical battle, how algorithms decide how to lump musicians together, and how people often listen without knowing who the musicians are. It's not so much that I'm in denial about change, but that I helped bring about the change and must remember what a terrible job my generation of computer scientists did. I don't want to forgive myself so easily.
Jaron Lanier Music Links
+ Drawing by Jaron when he was 17.
photo by Natasha Lyonne
God Particle Quartet: Dr. Stephon Alexander, Melvin Gibbs, Jaron Lanier, and Will Calhoun
+ Performing at Chapman University on April 1, 2023
+ Info and images from the MOCA performance on April 10, 2022
"'Hip Hop Science Project' w/ Kwame Holland X Jaron Lanier"
"Fireside Chat with Grimes and Jaron Lanier"
- Jaron in conversation with musician Grimes and Professor Sean M. O'Connor
Jaron Lanier and Friends Live at Shapeshifter October 2015
- with David Rothenberg, Colin Jacobsen, Robert Dick, and Keita Ogawa
In You Are Not a Gadget I do my best at using ideas to show that consciousness exists, but "Proof of Consciousness" makes the case better. Duets with Mark Deutsch on Warm and Genuine records.
LISTEN TO A SO-SO RECORDING (from a seat in the audience) OF SYMPHONY FOR AMELIA a symphony/choral work setting the poetry of Amelia Lanier. Premiered at Winter Park Bach Festival.
+ Mario Grigorov and I co-wrote the soundtrack for the documentary "The Third Wave"
Here's a live recording from the Triple Door in Seattle of Jami Sieber, Barbara Higbie, and me playing Jami's song "Hidden Sky" (I'm on shakuhachi flute.)
Sussan Deyhim discusses the LA premier of Whispers From The Underworld, including scenes from our performance.
