Jaron Lanier in NYT: agents are 'rituals of belief,' Valley self-sabotage
lrettig · x · 2026-11-10
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier published a New York Times essay arguing Silicon Valley keeps ruining great products with absurd narratives — as when extreme VR visions from Zuckerberg and Andreessen killed public adoption for a generation. AI is repeating this at larger scale: Anthropic's trillion-dollar-plus IPO filing warned of "catastrophic or existential risks." His take: "Agents are often more rituals of belief than technological necessities." The problem isn't AI itself but how it's packaged and communicated.
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