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A contrarian view

Jaron Lanier 1

My views are different from those of the other people commonly associated with the collective intelligence movement and its varied threads. I observe that meta-human or crowd wisdom processes can be effective, and often essential, but they are also “evil” in the sense that they destroy individual people, cultures, species, or other things that for whatever reason are outside of the boundaries of whatever the crowd process is optimizing for at the moment.

A crowd is a blunt instrument, not a delicate one. For example, the free market is effective, essential, the only proven means to wealth and continuous innovation; All that is true, and yet it also produces victims. It is sometimes cruel, generally impersonal and cold, and often dehumanizing, even to the winners in the system. The good it does is greater than the harm it causes, however, and therefore I am, overall, committed to capitalism.

An even more severe example is natural evolution, the ultimate group process. It is pure evil. Every little genetic feature of every living being is what's left over after failed, would-be ancestors were killed. Evolution is the aftermath of continuous genocide. Civilization's whole purpose is to stop it, and that is the very heart of kindness.

Yet, there is a certain romanticism among some smart, idealistic people, a desire to see nature as the good guy and civilization as the bad guy. As with capitalism, the truth is more complicated. The new romanticism for crowd wisdom seems similarly ill-informed to me. We should be honest about the inherent cruelty in some of the existing processes that we depend on in order to find little ways to improve things, and that should lead us to be cautious about new meta-human schemes that are supposed to be purely good.

I think the balance of good versus harm is different for different collective action schemes. Some of the political ones-more direct democracy, for instance-seem to empower extremists and bring out mob behavior. In general I think they're failures.

Meanwhile, some of the intellectual ones like the Wikipedia tend to be overly conservative in terms of content and to reduce innovative thought while being all too frequently bogged down in editing wars and some active online vandalism.2

I hope there are going to be new structures or instances of crowd wisdom that share with capitalism the quality that the benefits outweigh the harm, but I expect them to be rare.

I am concerned that the movement of idealistic people seeking more crowd effects is misguided. It reminds me of some of the Leftist movements of the past in which people were sure the right system would lead to a kind of automatic improvement in the human condition. That's not how reality works.

Additional Biographic Information

Lanier's name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research. He coined the term 'Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he lead the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first “avatars,” or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. Sun Microsystems acquired VPL's seminal portfolio of patents related to Virtual Reality and networked 3D graphics in 1999.

From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. From 1998 to 2002 he was the Chief Scientist of Eyematic Interfaces, a machine vision company later acquired by Google. From 2007 to the present he has been the Scholar at Large for Microsoft's Live Labs. He is also the science advisor to Linden Lab, maker of Second Life. Lanier received an honorary doctorate from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2006, was the recipient of CMU's Watson award in 2001, and was a finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005 in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. The nation of Palau has issued a postage stamp in his honor. He helped make up the gadgets and scenarios for the 2002 science fiction movie Minority Report by Steven Spielberg. Various television documentaries have been produced about him, such as “Dreadlocks and Digital Dreamworlds” by Tech TV in 2002. The 1992 movie Lawnmower Man was in part based on him and his early laboratory. He was played by Piers Brosnan. He has appeared on national television many times, on shows such as "The News Hour," "Nightline," and "Charlie Rose," and has been profiled multiple times on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

His home page is  http://www.jaronlanier.com. Also on Wikipedia.

1 Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. His current positions include Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, CET, UC Berkeley, and columnist for Discover Magazine. Lanier's interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics. A biographic summary is provided on the third page, in part because we wish to emphasize the depth of accomplishments to the lone contrarian.

2 As everyone knows, I'm appalled that people are being primarily directed by search engines to bland Wikipedia articles instead of websites by individuals that express individual points of view.

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