Jaron Lanier

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Jaron Lanier (2006)

Jaron Lanier (English: ˈdʒɛərɨn lɨˈnɪər ; born May 3, 1960 in New York ) is an American computer scientist , artist , musician , composer , author and entrepreneur . From 1984 to 1990 he ran VPL Research, a company for the development and marketing of virtual reality applications. His positions against Wikipedia and the open source movement have been widely discussed in public. In 2010 Jaron Lanier was among the nominees for the TIME 100 list of most influential people . In October 2014 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade .

Life

Jaron Lanier was born in New York City. His Jewish parents come from Vienna and the Ukraine . Both belonged to an artistic circle in Greenwich Village . Her mother, Lilly, emigrated to the United States at the age of 15 after surviving a concentration camp . Ellery's father was the child of Ukrainian Jews who had to flee from pogroms . He worked in New York as an architect, painter, writer, elementary school teacher and radio host, she as a pianist, painter and dancer. The couple had the surname Zepel . When Jaron was born, they changed him to Lanier . They wanted to protect their child from anti-Semitic prejudice. Shortly after the birth, the family left the east coast and moved to the border with Mexico. Jaron grew up in Mesilla and went to a private elementary school in the Mexican city of Juarez . Lilly Lanier died in a traffic accident when Jaron was nine years old. After their house burned down, the penniless father moved with his son from the city to the New Mexico desert .

Jaron Lanier dropped out of high school at the age of 15 but showed enough talent to later be admitted to math classes at New Mexico State University .

In the early 1980s he worked in the Atari research laboratory, where in 1983 he developed the musical space action game Moondust and the data glove , a device that can be pulled over the hand and thus triggered actions in the computer virtual objects. In 1984 he founded VPL Research to develop and market other applications in this direction. In 1992 he left the company and began to compose music professionally and develop musical instruments. He has performed with artists such as Philip Glass , Ornette Coleman , Terry Riley and Yoko Ono .

Lanier has taught computer science at several universities including Columbia University in New York, Dartmouth College in Hanover , New Hampshire, and Yale University in New Haven , Connecticut . He led the National Tele-Immersion Initiative (NTII) project , which deals with the development of immersion applications. On May 18, 2006, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey .

Since 2004 he has been a Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in Berkeley , California , and from 2006 to 2009 he was also an Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (CET) at UC Berkeley . Lanier has been a partner architect for Microsoft Research since 2009 .

Philosophical-technical ideas

Jaron Lanier was once considered the father of the term virtual reality , although the first mention is ascribed to the 1982 novel Judas Mandala by Damien Broderick . However, Lanier demonstrated the technical feasibility relatively early on. The New York Times first mentioned him in 1989 as the founder of VPL Research :

"Jaron Lanier sees the days coming when the new [virtual reality] systems are far more important than mere computers or television."

Lanier was in charge of the National Tele-immersion Initiative , a short-term university project that explored applications for the Internet2 . He developed the idea of ​​the avatar , the virtual camera for television and 3D graphics for the cinema. In 1983 he introduced an innovative video game called Moondust .

Lanier criticizes certain aspects of artificial intelligence and nuanced ramifications of " extropianism ".

One of his speculations deals with what he calls post-symbolic communication . This, he explained the example of the octopus and cuttlefish ( cephalopod ) in the science magazine Discover (April 2006) of squid or octopus. These can change the color and texture of their skin in remarkable ways and imitate other shapes with their eight tentacles. Lanier sees the behavior as expressions of her thoughts.

Lanier also criticizes an overestimation of so-called swarm intelligence . This is useful for predicting statistics, market prices or election results, but hardly for displaying knowledge. Systems like Wikipedia , which he sees as a manifestation of swarm intelligence, neither serve the formation of theory, nor do they find truths - at best average opinions of an anonymous crowd. However, the presentation of knowledge requires personal competence and responsibility.
Lanier believes that the Internet promotes the belief that a collective produces intelligence and ideas that are superior to those of the individual. This belief leads to the collective being seen as important and real, not the individual. In 2006 he called this “digital Maoism ” a wrong path.
In 2015, he relativized this provocative view: I once called it digital Maoism. I don't want to claim too much of the metaphor, however, because millions perished as a result of the Cultural Revolution, and of course not because of the digital one.
But there is one interesting commonality. This desire to identify with an organization so that this identification becomes an emblem of youthfulness and rebellion. But in truth it is an emblem of conformism. This confusion between rebellion and conformism shaped China for the Cultural Revolution. And in Germany there was that too in dark times.
In the 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget , Lanier expands this criticism to the open source movement. This reduces the possibilities for the middle class to finance the production of content.

In the 2013 book The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity, Lanier warns that in financial markets, "the one with the largest computer can analyze all other participants to his advantage and thus concentrate capital and power". The result is a reduction in the economy's balance sheet . He sees a parallel here to file sharing , which would reduce added value.

With his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? he advocates an end to the free mentality , which ultimately only benefits corporations, and demands that every user should get money for their data.

He sees his development as a critic of the role of the masses in the digital world based on family experiences. His mother's family members were murdered in a concentration camp in Austria during the National Socialist era , and she herself survived her imprisonment. His father's family fell victim to pogroms in Russia . He attributes both criminal regimes to masses in the sense of mob rule ; he fears a "digital barbarism" through the activity of the masses in the online world.

He is one of the supporters of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union , which was published at the end of November 2016.

Awards

Awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

In October 2014, Lanier was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade . The award ceremony took place during the Frankfurt Book Fair on Sunday, October 12, 2014, in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt . The then President of the European Parliament , Martin Schulz , gave the laudation.

The reasoning states that Lanier has recognized the risks that digitization poses for people's free life. His latest book is an appeal to "be vigilant about bondage, abuse and surveillance".

The jury's decision met with a varied response. It was positively recognized that for the first time a representative of the digital age had received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. It was emphasized that with Lanier it was not so much an Internet pioneer as a "figure of the fallen and disappointed Internet optimist" that the prize was being honored. Other voices called Lanier's supposed "change from Silicon Valley Saul to skeptical Paul" a "journalist's fantasy"; the American was "always part of the computer industry", even today.

In his peace award speech entitled "High-tech peace needs a new kind of humanism ", Jaron Lanier emphasized that people are something special, that they are more than machines and algorithms. “Without people, computers are room heaters that generate patterns.” Jaron Lanier ended his speech with the appeal “Let's love creation.”

Further honors

Lanier received the CMU's Watson Award in 2001 and the IEEE Lifetime Career Award in 2009. For his book "Who is the future?" He received the Goldsmith Book Prize of the 2014 Harvard University awarded.

Private

Lanier lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and daughter.

Publications

Lanier at the Garden of Memory Solstice Concert, 2009

Books

  • Information Is an Alienated Expense. Basic Books, New York NY 2006, ISBN 0-465-03282-6 .
  • You are not a gadget. A manifesto. Knopf, New York NY 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-26964-5 . - German edition: Gadget. Why the future still needs us. Translated from the English by Michael Bischoff . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-42206-9 .
  • Who owns the future? Simon and Schuster, New York NY 2013, ISBN 978-1-4516-5496-7 . - German edition: Who does the future belong to? You are not the internet company’s customer. You are their product. From the American by Dagmar Mallett and Heike Schlatterer. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-455-50318-0 .
  • When dreams grow up A look at the digital age . Essays and interviews 1984–2014. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-455-50359-3
  • Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Henry Holt, New York 2018, ISBN 978-1-250-19668-2 . - German edition: Ten reasons why you have to delete your social media accounts immediately. From the English by Karsten Petersen and Martin Bayer, Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-455-00491-5 .
  • Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality , Henry Holt, New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-62779-409-1 . - German edition: Dawn of a new era. How virtual reality is changing our lives and our society. From the American English by Heike Schlatterer and Sigrid Schmid, Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-455-00399-4 .

Video

Classical music

  • Instruments of Change
  • Symphony for Amelia

Web links

Commons : Jaron Lanier  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Jaron Lanier  - Quotes

Interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ content.time.com
  2. ^ The 2014 Prize Winner. Jaron Lanier . Press release of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels from June 5, 2014. Retrieved June 6, 2014.
  3. ↑ Jennifer Kahn: The Visionary . In: The New Yorker, July 11, 2011, [1] , accessed June 11, 2014
  4. ↑ SPIEGEL conversation with Jaron Lanier: Somebody always pays , 27/2014 (pp. 120–123)
  5. ↑ www.jaronlanier.com
  6. ^ Winnie Forster : Lexicon of Computer and Video Game Makers, p. 181f
  7. ↑ www.jaronlanier.com
  8. ↑ Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2012: Jaron Lanier (accessed July 15, 2014)
  9. ^ Andrew Pollack: For Artificial Reality, Wear A Computer . New York Times of April 10, 1989, translated from the American
  10. ↑ Jaron Lanier: Whoever has the data determines our fate. In: FAZ.net . April 24, 2014, accessed December 16, 2014 .
  11. ↑ The so-called Web 2.0 - Digital Maoism. In: sueddeutsche.de. May 10, 2010, accessed December 16, 2014 .
  12. ↑ Why do you want our nonsense? In: faz.de. July 2, 2015, accessed July 2, 2015 .
  13. ↑ a b Ron Rosenbaum: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web? , Smithsonian Magazine , January 2013
  14. ↑ www.hoffmann-und-campe.de ( Memento from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Jaron Lanier receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2014 , June 5, 2014
  16. ↑ Jaron Lanier: We are handing over responsibility. The dream of the digital future makes people disappear. The computer scientist and author Jaoron Lanier accepted the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt yesterday. Tages-Anzeiger , Tamedia Zurich, October 13, 2014 (with a shortened speech)
  17. ↑ Jordan Mejias: The Technologist as Artist and Humanist. In: FAZ.net . June 5, 2014, accessed December 16, 2014 .
  18. ↑ Internet thinker Jaron Lanier: The Peace Prize as a declaration of war. In: Spiegel Online . June 6, 2014, accessed December 16, 2014 .
  19. ↑ Florian Cramer: Virtual Reality. The Peace Prize for Jaron Lanier - and the misunderstandings on which it is based . In: Mercury . Blog. June 9, 2014. Retrieved June 10, 2014.
  20. ↑ Speeches on the award of the Peace Prize to Jaron Lanier in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt on October 12, 2014
  21. ^ Heinrich Wefing : Masse und Netz - Portrait in: Die Zeit No. 42/2010, p. 57.
personal data
SURNAME Lanier, Jaron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City