JARON LANIER’S INTERVIEW

Who’s Jaron Lanier?

An American musician and computing scientist. Jason Lanier’s scientific

interests include the use of virtual reality as a research tool in cognitive Science,
biomimetic architectures, experimental user interfaces, heterogeneous scinetific
simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational
approaches to thefundamentals of Physics. He collaborates with a wide range
of scientists in flieds realted to these interests.

TV HOST: Is there a principal reason why I should delete my social media? And
if so, what is it?

Jaron Lainer: Hmmm...there are 2. One of them is for your own good and the
other is for society’s good. For your own good it’s because you’re being subtly
manipulated by algorithms that are watching everything that you do constantly
and, then, sending you changes in your media feed, in your diet that are
calculated to adjust you slightly to the liking of some unseen advertiser and so, if
you get off that, you can have a chance to experience a clearer view of yourself
and your life. But the reason for society might be even more important. Society
has been gradually darkened by this scheme in which everyone is under
serveillance all the time and everyone is under the smile version of behavior
modification all the time, it’s made people jittery and cranky, it’s made teens
specially depressed what can be quite severe, but it’s made our politics kind of
unreal and strange where we’re not sure if elections are real anymore, we’re not
sure how much the Russians affected Brexit, we do know there was a crankier
affair that it might have been otherwise.

Suggestions:

A novel by José Saramago a film by Fernando Meirelles

Birdbox available on Netflix a Black Mirror movie