Two great videos -- the first -- hat-tip to Reuben Steiger.
This talk by Jaron Lanier was at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. He talks about his music, his Jewish roots, and the concept of personhood and how it has eroded with networked computing and the Internet. These concepts are all linked -- it's fascinating. He says:
From my perspective, these ideas that I abhor -- they've been around since the origin of computing -- and in the book I describe the precise origin of them, which is Alan Turing, just before his death -- but the dominance of these ideas is incredibly recent. There is no reason to believe that that these couldn't be reversed. There's no reason to believe that we couldn't have a humanistic computing culture. Now, to add insult to injury or injury to insult -- the particular designs that devalue people don't just do so symbolically, they also make people poor. I'm personally convince that a lot of economic trouble and the general decline in outlook around the world has a lot to do with humanity's decision to regiment itself according to computer network designs instead of according to reality -- and human designs.
I couldn't agree more. Of course I've been writing along these lines and spelling it out even more, based on the experiences gained from Second Life and watching the rise of social media -- the Internet kills human livelihoods. Lanier talks very emotionally, and therefore compellingly, yet he has done the research as well, about how this claim that "musicians make money while giving their music away" is really fake. He said there are a very few exceptions, as I've been saying, also quoting Keen, and that when he would track them down, they would turn out to be trust-fund babies. Fred Wilson is the latest in influencers to make this fake claim, again, based on a few use cases that don't extrapolate for a lot of people.
I didn't quite get what he was saying about Turing in the first talk, and apparently he talked about this in You Are Not a Gadget, but I don't recall it -- so I started looking on Youtube and I saw he had part of a a talk just about Turing.
Of course we all know about Turing, and I know the absolute reverence with which Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden) that other Lindens and various geeks and fanboyz regard him (that he was also a victim of anti-gay prosecution and torment for which the British government finally apologized of course adds to his lustre.)
I remember once I tried to make a joke of the famous "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog."
"On Second Life, everyone knows you are a dog."
I meant this to be a sort of layered satirical comment. That on SL, you could be in a dog avatar, and everyone would perceive you as a dog and would know you perhaps *only* as a dog; but of course, you'd be a human; and of course, your dog-behaviour (in the other sense) would also become known in this connected world.
But Philip didn't laugh or perceive it as funny -- it was one of those moments when I saw how...literal and flat...this great inventor's thinking was at times.
"That's the Turing test," he said, reverently.
But it wasn't. Because, gosh, on Second Life, everybody knows you're a dog, it surely does manifest, but of course everybody knows you aren't really a dog. And no fair saying you have a bot -- bots are run by humans.
So Lanier takes apart what Turing's thinking was before his death -- and he calls it a "truly spiritual idea," i.e. as in epic, in the changing of one era to the next.
He talks about the Turing test, which was a thought experiment, which were highly prestigious at the time.
He would have both a man and a woman speak, and if a listener couldn't tell apart their genders later, i.e. determine which was the man and which the woman, was gender then an artificial construct of no meaning (and Lanier adds that this would have had particular meaning for Turing, because at the time as he put it, he was being tortured by being forced to take hormones. What happened was that he was given the choice of serving a prison sentence for homosexual acts, then criminalized, of something like 7 years, or being given a "castration hormone" -- the female hormone which was supposed to then have "the opposition effect" and "make him right". Ghastly stuff -- and only 50 years ago -- he died in 1954). So Lanier says that perhaps his thinking was affected by these awful experiences -- he even grew breasts -- although he seemed to write letters with a caustic sense of humour as well at the time.
So pushing it further, Turing then tried to have people tell whether statements came from people or from machines. And then comes the moment breaking through the membrane:
"If you won't grant human quality to the machine," says Turing. "Then, aren't you like the Nazis?" That is, it wasn't just enough for him to see that people might confuse, at least for a time, at least in a structured test setting, a machine with a human, he pushed it immorally further: *if* you do that, *then* you must concede that machines are human, or equal to humans, or morally the same.
Lanier traces the entire geek religion from that formative moment -- it leads to the Singularity, and it also leads to nerdy culture where people lack empathy online -- a touch of autism, as he describes it, and says it mainly affects males. Where they feel no empathy for people (and, by extension, he seems to be saying that they take computers as more real than they should, and grants them personhood instead.)
Lanier calls this "a new form of death denial," i.e. then man may live forever in this form a la the Singularity, and he calls it "a fundamental component of building a new religion" -- the Turing test and the Turing ideas evolved into an elaborate form of religion.
And it came about because Turing saw programming as a "pristine form of life" -- and Lanier attributes that error in thinking as a function of working with small systems and not seeing what large systems are today.
"If a person could be a computer, a computer can be like a person," is what Turing saying -- and Lanier's thesis is that this contains the seeds of what has been particularly bad and destructive about the Internet in the last 10 years. It's funny -- and one questioner in the audience presses him on this -- he seems to imply there was this more idyllic period of the Internet where there was sharing without the twin evils of commodification into bytes and loss of privacy as well as destruction of value and collectivism. When was that? During the era of the Well and usenet? I'm finding that hard to believe, myself.
A lot of the statements Lanier makes in a speech like this seem brusque and intuitive or even religious in nature themselves, of course, and that's what drives binary geeks wild -- and if they're like some of the binary goons that stalk me on G+ like Jeff Brown, they would demand proof, linky-looes, evidence, blah blah.
Lanier speaks so convincingly because he has really done the thinking and the research and the testing and worked on these things. So in that regard, he's more persuasive than the usual TED speaker-snakeoiler.
Lanier's basic insight that we are all contorting ourselves to machines and that's the basis of a lot of modern problems seems perfectly fine to me. He even qualifies it by saying sure, there are still great things in collaboration on the Internet, but before sharing, first you must become a person in your own right.
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