Larnier on Tech as People

There's still some interesting people out there worth listening to. Jaron Lanier is interesting, and he came out to give a talk to the graduating class at Brown. This is the same year a lot of tech bros got booed for their fellating ai onstage in front of a bunch of young people. Some might consider Lanier a tech bro, but that would be mostly wrong. He's tech for sure, but bro less. Maybe a bro whisperer. So when he gives talk about AI, you're likely to hear some out-there sh**.

Key Points from Jaron Lanier's "AI and Theory" at Brown University Graduation, April 2026:

• AI isn't a thing, it's a collaboration of people; if it's revolutionary, it's because it allows people to collaborate in a new way; he says the history of science is about new ways for people to collaborate (printing press, royal societies, peer review)
• Every piece of data in the training set is also a person; because a person made it. Actually he didn't explicitly say this, he glossed right past it, but I think it needs more emphasis to make his bigger point, and I think it's one of the more important ideas in general when talking about AI. 
• Information is not some intangible non-physical ethereal thing. Information is physical. It requires energy and dissipates heat.
• It sounds like the main technical idea he's offering is Counterfactual Cluster Generation (aka "data dignity"), and it's how another layer can monitor and evaluate output. He gives an example of a person looking for a bomb recipe, and how an LLM should be able to identify that providing bomb recipes isn't cool.
• Things I wish he said: Science is about predicting the future, but facts require a past; he was answering a question from the audience on the difference, and I wish he said this because it's the easiest way to say it.
• Tunes at 1:30 btw, he's a musician and plays rare and ancient instruments.

Image credit: The Memex by Vannevar Bush 1945 - via Tommaso Venturini talk on the Memeplex for Oxford Internet Institute - 2025

Larnier uses this image in his talk, during a passage about Norbert Wiener's Human Use of Human Beings 1950, and how it's a difficult but interesting read. He mentions that Weiner talks about how terrible it would be if we had a radio we carried with us everywhere we go that beeped and zapped us based on our behavior and how such a machine would destroy humanity, but how that mind-controlling machine sure sounds like social media to the early 21st century reader. I forget exactly why this image came up, but it must have been making its rounds, because I had just recently saw it in a different talk at the Oxford Internet Institute