I Am a Silicon Valley Veteran. We Are Sabotaging Ourselves.
Mr. Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality.
Silicon Valley has a special talent for offering amazing products and then screwing them up with ridiculous ideas about how those products should be used.
Few appreciate virtual reality more than I do. I came up with the term. There are simple pleasures in occasionally visiting alternate sensory worlds. It was only when virtual reality went mainstream around 2013 that I realized Americans would not embrace the technology for a generation. The reason: the awful ways key tech leaders talked about it. Recall the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg proclaiming that we would primarily live our lives through virtual reality headsets. Or the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen suggesting that most people were doomed to live virtually, with only elites retaining the privilege of living in the physical world. Predictably, the public did not embrace this vision.
We in Silicon Valley are doing it again with artificial intelligence, except worse — and at a larger scale. In its filing for its upcoming trillion-plus-dollar initial public offering, the leading A.I. lab Anthropic warned that its models could present “catastrophic or existential risks.”
I work on A.I. and use it and like it. The latest large models are genuinely useful. But rather than focusing on how these tools could improve lives, many leaders at the biggest A.I. companies are instead asking Americans to embrace the belief that this technology may kill us and our children, or at the very least drain us of all potential for livelihood and meaning. It should not be surprising then that based on the results of this last election, many Americans have come to disapprove of A.I. more than almost anything.
