IN MY VIEW: Artificial intelligence for nerds and virtual reality for geeks

摘要

I have just finished reading the recently published diatribe You Are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto, by one Jaron Lanier (Alfred A. Knopf, NYC, 209 pp., 2010). You may have seen the polymath Lanier giving yet another obscure interview on YouTube or heard him at one of the many conferences where he is much admired as a learned guru and iconoclastic prognosticator. Lanier is the one with long, scruffy dreadlocks like the late reggae artist Bob Marley. Why Lanier favors dreadlocks, I have no idea. In fact, I have read this slim volume twice and I understood its content even less the second time around. In his brief and somewhat obscure preface, Lanier writes--if that is the correct description for this almost incomprehensible geek-speak or portentous inarticulation--that his "words will mostly be read by nonpersons--automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals." He goes on to claim that "[r]eactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies." Quite so.