Jaron Lanier on Virtual Reality and Social Media

A large part of the middle section deals with social media and human interactions either mediated through synthetic systems or even with such a system. This is where Lanier mentions the need for economics and game theory, not so much to monetise every interaction but to discuss, and encode, the incentive models.

Jaron Lanier remains a unique character in the tech landscape; thoroughly immersed in the tech-world, he is, however, very sceptical of the road it is taking, yet cognizant of some of the good it has done.

I have always found the very most valuable moment in virtuality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality afresh. You know, as if you were a newborn baby but with a little more experience, so you can really notice just how incredibly strange and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is. So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be, in the physical world. Well, that's my take on it - that's just me!

Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218

So much human interaction has numerous incentives, some overt but many covert, even subconscious. Do we need to encode all such incentives into what will quickly become a very complex model, or should we aim for systems that just don't suck!?

The example of the Github community is interesting in that every genuine member has a vested interest in the platform itself. This does not mean there are no arguments, or friendships lost and found, but there is no obvious spillover that would turn the whole environment toxic. Lanier likes the idea of knowledge guilds, or competence guilds, that would somehow encode their collective wisdom into a form that can then be beneficial to both themselves and to others. On Github, this is obvious, as the whole platform exists precisely to construct algorithms. How can that be translated into less formal social media structures?