Podcasts, Virtual Reality and Jaron Lanier
I am a big fan of podcasts. They allow me to hear whatever I want whenever I want and I can organize my favorite channels, usually tech, science, some politics, culture.
Recently I tried https://serialpodcast.org/ which is great stuff, as well as https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/trumpinc, still astonished the delinquent is still in office.
Today on my 2 hours weekend run I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Jaron Lanier, the computer philosopher and celebrated father of virtual reality.
After our recent San Francisco hackathon on Mixed Reality together with Microsoft I was a bit unsure if there are so many opportunities for a science publisher in areas such as augmented reality and virtual reality. The interview with Jaron Lanier convinced me otherwise:
https://art19.com/shows/the-ezra-klein-show/episodes/2e3aac9c-83a7-410c-94de-d4e449aae385/
I am really fascinated about how Jaron connects virtual reality with individual experience and consciousness:
“One of my favorite things about virtual reality is that it highlights the existence of experience.” Continue listen at minute 47:30 which is just staggering.
Also:
“The sweetest way to explain virtual reality is to recognize that you are a center of experience that your consciousness really exists.”
Jaron is very much a Silicon Valley guy, lives in the Bay Area, but is also very critical about social media and the way addictive mechanisms form the basic business model for Facebook, Google and other tech players. Interestingly there is quite some hypocrisy if you dig deeper into local education patterns:
“One of the things – that’s a really interesting social phenomena – is that the higher up somebody is in a tech company in Silicon Valley the more restrictive they are generally about their kids’ access to internet technology.”
I believe scientific understanding can indeed make a big step forward if we understand how to control a multitude of limps or what experience it is to be a jellyfish, just to name a couple of examples Jaron mentioned in the interview.