You Are Not a Gadget Jaron Lanier Chapter 1 Missing Persons We tinker with your philosophy by direction manipulation

n of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed !" #oncept of $ock%In& When many software programs are designed to work with an existing one, so change in the software of the original program is difficult to change, e.g. 'idi, (nix. #omputer software can be difficult to assess empirically because there is no control group, because of it)s ubi*uity, entrenched software philosophies become almost invisible because they are so pervasive + for example, the idea of the file seems natural, where%as, it is *uite artificial, and it could)ve been different the first iteration of the 'ac had no files". $ock%in makes us forget the lost freedoms we had in the digital past. This can make it harder to see the freedoms we have in the digital present. Where does Web ,.-./pen 0ource culture go wrong1 The central 'istake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. 2ou then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. /nly the people were ever meaningful. The new designs on the verge of being locked in, the web ,.- designs, actively demand that people define themselves downward. It)s one thing to launch a limited conception of music or time into the contest for what philosophical idea will be locked in. It is another to do that with the very idea of what it is to be a person. $anier views himself as part of the humanistic tradition. 3e sees mystery 4 essence of the individual person being reduced to an abstraction, a digital user + 5ust one node in a virtual network. 6mphasi7ing the crowd means deemphasi7ing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad mob%like behaviors. 89" The deep meaning of person%hood is being reduced by illusions of bits. If you love a medium made of software, there)s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else)s recent careless thoughts. 0truggle against that: ,," $anier wants to set himself as against the orthodoxy of digital culture, views himself as a contrarian to what he views as anti%humanism of open%source digital culture. Chapter 2- An apocalypse of elf-A!dication What does $anier want to argue against1 #ybernetic Totalism + which tells us that all of reality is

one giant information system %%% this includes people. ,;". The meaning of life, in this view is making the digital system we call reality function at higher levels of description. 0oon the )net will act at a higher level than the human brain. 6specially dangerous idea because the ideas can spread in the design of software... that the computer is evolving into a life form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves. ,<". =ace to be the most meta + an aggregation that aggregates other aggregators % making individual people even more abstract and the illusion of high level metaness more celebrated ,<". What does $anier mean when he says information doesn)t deserve to be free1 3e takes those who say information wants to be free as speaking literally, replies that information of the kind that wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own ,9" 3e views information as only important because it lets people connect over shared experiences + information by itself, $anier thinks, is an alienated experience + experience is the only process that can de%alienate the information. Why does $anier think it)s dangerous to treat computers as intelligent1 It obfuscates the role of people in the development of >.I... Whenever a computer is intelligent, what is really happening is that humans have abandoned aspects of the sub5ect at hand in order to remove from consideration what the computer is blind to. ?@" $anier seems to use examples of Turing test.#hess 'atch with Aeep Blue as examples to illustrate his belief that calling a computer that s successfully passes either test either conversing with a human in the Turing test, or beating a human at chess" conscious or intelligent limits our idea of what it means to be conscious 4 intelligent. We lose part of our humanity, what it means to be human when we ascribe these *ualities to machines we designed. We are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process. ?9" Why does $ainer bring 0iner)s empathy circle up1 3e says that everyone has a right to draw their own ethical circle + i.e. decide who or what has moral status, deserves not to be killed" + and that very influential people believing they are hearing the voices of algorithms and crowds and internet% supported nonhuman entities speak for themselves... and those who do are fooling themselves.