"Who Owns the Future?" by Jaron Lanier

[Stahlmann]

this gonna be discussed in near future in local hackerspace.

ur take?

[steveo73]

I struggled through one of this guys books. It was terrible. I do though agree with his general point about not engaging too much in various forms of social media.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I love Lanier. "You Are Not a Gadget" is one of my favorite titles he wrote. I will admit he has a tendency to go off the rails, but if you just ignore that part, he a has a lot of good stuff to say.

His points about humans and machines being fundamentally different is critical. I do wish he framed it in more academic language though. It's easy enough to say computers will never be like humans because they are Turing machines and human consciousness probably isn't a computable function because it's a chemical/distributed process. Instead he goes off on some metaphysical tangent. Still, I think he's a great writer because he's one of the lone Silicon Valley-types who hasn't gone completely off into loony town or pure evil territory.

[bostonimproper]

Big fan of the author, though I've never read the book. Heard him talk about its thesis though on the Ezra Klein show and I was blown away. It's hard to understate the amount of value users add to social networks and the like with their free labor, but he's one of the first to suggest they actually get paid for it.