Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier (born 1960) is an American computer scientist, composer, and author who founded VPL Research in 1984 and did as much as anyone to invent — and name — virtual reality. Dreadlocked, klezmer-playing, and constitutionally contrarian, he became Silicon Valley’s in-house humanist with books like You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Who Owns the Future? (2013), and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018). He works at Microsoft as a research scientist in the Office of the CTO.

“There is no A.I.”

In an April 2023 New Yorker essay, Lanier argued the very concept of artificial intelligence mystifies what these systems are: “a way of mashing up” human-created text, images, and ideas — an innovative form of social collaboration, not a new mind. Treating the technology as a creature, he warned, makes us fatalistic and invites bad design; treating it as a tool keeps humans responsible for it.

His remedy is “data dignity”: when a model produces something valuable, the people whose work most shaped that output — painters, writers, voice actors, or their estates — should be traced, credited, and paid. It is a direct answer to the grievance driving artists like Karla Ortiz, but pursued through economics rather than prohibition. Lanier has long argued that the tech economy’s original sin was making people’s data free while concentrating the proceeds.

The nuance is real: Lanier is no abolitionist. He works inside Microsoft, finds the technology genuinely interesting, and rejects both extinction panic and denial of the systems’ usefulness. His opposition is to the framing and the business model — the mythology of machine minds, and an economy that erases the humans whose work makes the machines possible.