Data Dignity | Jaron Lanier Interviewed by Avital Balwit

Data Dignity is a realignment of the economics of the internet that will improve the outlook for people as algorithms and robots get better, while at the same time making those technologies work better. The basic idea is paying people more often for the value they create in the online world. Right now consumers typically barter their efforts and data online in exchange for services, but the advertising model which finances this arrangement has motivated poor quality results and has not been robust during an economic downturn. Instead, we propose to pay people in more situations, in order to expand the economy and make users aware, able, and motivated to make the online world better. Data Dignity is the ultimate win/win design for computation.

SPEAKERS

Jaron Lanier coined the terms Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality – and had the first VR startup, manufacturing VR headsets and gloves for the first time, and creating the first surgical simulators, vehicle prototyping, and other apps – all in his youth back in the 1980s. In the 1990s he was chief scientist for Internet2 (the academic consortium charged with making sure the internet would scale) and then of the first company to do AI processing of faces, such as changing identities or adding ornaments; that company went to Google, alas. He’s also known as a constructive critic of technology. He was concerned about how the internet was turning out from way back before it was popular to do that; has written a number of bestselling books on the topic. Plenty of awards and accolades, including an IEEE Lifetime Achievement Award, the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the highest literary honors, and multiple honorary PhDs. In 2018, Wired named Jaron one of the 25 most influential figures in tech from the previous 25 years. Jaron’s also a musician specializing in unusual and obscure instruments; in the last year, he played with Sara Bareilles and T Bone Burnett on a #1 single, appeared on Colbert playing with Jon Batiste, and collaborated with Philip Glass. Officially, Jaron is Microsoft’s “Octopus”, which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist.

Avital Balwit studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She wrote her capstone thesis on regulatory questions concerning the Big Five technology companies (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) in the areas of privacy, antitrust, and taxation. She also writes short stories, personal essays, and poetry. She has work published in Kanstellation, and New Reader Magazine, and forthcoming in World Weaver Press. She won the Atlantic's 2020 poetry contest.