Jaron Lanier in NYT: Silicon Valley is sabotaging AI with doom narratives
databoydg · x · 2026-11-12
Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who coined "virtual reality," argues in a New York Times guest essay that Silicon Valley has a special talent for building amazing products and then ruining them with ridiculous narratives about how they should be used. VR went mainstream around 2013 yet Americans rejected it for a generation — thanks to leaders like Zuckerberg proclaiming we'd live in headsets and Marc Andreessen suggesting only elites would keep the privilege of physical life.
AI is repeating this pattern at larger scale: Anthropic's trillion-plus-dollar IPO filing warns its models could present "catastrophic or existential risks." Lanier stresses he builds, uses and likes AI, and the latest large models are genuinely powerful — the problem is the narrative.
The poster distills his stance as "tools not creatures": we aren't rushing to build an "artificial cat" — not because cats aren't smart, but because cats are useless as a workforce.
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