# Jaron Lanier: there is no AI, just people > The father of VR on why a quarter trillion dollars bought headsets nobody needs, and why social media turns its own founders into victims. - Title: Jaron Lanier: there is no AI, just people · The Singju Post - Summary: The father of VR on why a quarter trillion dollars bought headsets nobody needs, and why social media turns its own founders into victims. The meanness of… - Keywords: virtual reality, social media, tech criticism, business models, technology, startups, Jaron, Lanier, there, just, people, The Singju Post - Source: The Singju Post — https://singjupost.com/startalk-there-is-no-ai-really-its-just-people-w-jaron-lanier-transcript - Published: 2026-05-25T00:52:42+00:00 - Read time: 4 min - Topics: ai, virtual reality, social media, tech criticism, business models, technology, startups ## The critic inside the building Lanier's Microsoft title spells OCTOPUS, and his deal lets him criticize the company by name as long as he does not speak for it. He knows of one other person in tech with that arrangement. > And we really desperately need more of us. ## VR as palette freshener He built VR to make ordinary reality feel strange again. In the 80s he would hand people a flower after they removed the headset, and they looked at it like they had never seen one. > It's a way to appreciate reality by finally having a contrast. ## Who gets sick in VR Nausea in headsets hits some groups far harder than others. The vulnerable ones are almost all female and mostly East Asian, and nobody in the industry is obsessive enough to figure out why. ## No women on the team A major company told him nausea was solved. Had they tested Asian women? Read the papers? No and no, they were ahead of academia. The first Wall Street Journal reviewer, an Asian woman, got sick. > We don't need to read papers. We're way ahead of the academic world. ## A quarter trillion, no word processor Imagine spending moon-landing money on laptops and shipping no way to edit a document. That is VR today: no reliable 3D design tool exists after roughly $250 billion. > It's insane that I can't do this in VR. ## Nobody let VR be VR Apple made it a giant iPad, Meta made it a social network, gaming made it a console. Each company bent the medium into whatever it already knew how to sell. > In a way, VR doesn't exist yet. ## The 4D children plan In 1981 the young engineers at his VR startup swore that any kids they had would be raised in goggles, swapped for bigger ones during sleep, growing up as four-dimensional natives and the world's best mathematicians. > I could have been the first kid in 4 dimensions. What's wrong with you? ## Warned in 1950 Norbert Wiener wrote that computers would automate behaviorist algorithms to manipulate people, and imagined radio-linked devices we would carry. He called it an extinction-level risk, then declared it physically impossible. > This would destroy civilization. However, I, as one of the world's leading scientists, assure you this is physically impossible. ## The math that centralizes power In a low-friction network, one node that gets slightly ahead accumulates influence for being ahead. Old middlemen created friction that spread power around. Now a handful of individuals outweigh the bottom half of society. > It gets famous for being famous. ## One personality, three men He argued in the Times that heavy platform users converge on a single character: petty, vain, confrontational, mean, never satisfied. People who started out different end up the same. > It's turning the founders into the victims. ## Only one business model Silicon Valley permits influence generation and nothing else. Advertisers are not really buying influence, they are paying not to be left out of the pool. Everything mean follows from that single allowed model. > They're paying blackmail money not to be left out of the influence pool. ## Your fast brain, always on Instant algorithmic feedback keeps the fight-or-flight system lit. You feel stalked, paranoid, watched by bullies, never satisfied. Even with real lions around, humans could not stay alert all the time and stay sane. > You're always horny, but you're never satisfied. ## Free sharing served the empire The ideology that paying for music or software is evil sounds noble until you add network effects. Every free contribution enriches the hub at the center, not the community. > So the Pirate Party actually was in service of an empire, just like the original pirates. ## Fix it by adding models If one business model caused this, the repair is letting other models exist. The logic is simple. The implementation may take longer than a lifetime. ## Platforms are not equally bad GitHub behaves better than 4chan. Compare the spectrum of online hubs, find what differs, and you get a direction pointing toward something better. The data to do it already exists. ## Legitimacy is the real ceiling However central they are, rich founders depend on a public that accepts the system defining their wealth. Lose enough popular support and you fall, as has happened repeatedly in history. > No matter how central they are, they fall. ## Why he skips delete day He wrote ten arguments for quitting but never said you should. Shaming people into it recreates the same pressure game the platforms run. > I don't think those people should be put under social pressure or shamed. ## Perspectives, not opinions Tyson noticed that anything resembling an opinion drew attacks rather than counterarguments. So he stopped posting opinions and posts perspectives instead, keeping the reach without the fight. > Islands of learning. ## The one-third rule In a Turing test there are two humans and one machine. If the judge cannot tell, it is twice as likely a person got dumber as that the computer got smarter. > I have an ironclad scientific ass. ## Two-thirds get degraded He extends that ratio to any digital system: roughly one person in three genuinely benefits, the other two are diminished by it. Tyson, he decided, is in the lucky third. ## Key takeaway The meanness of social media is not a bug in human nature, it comes from allowing exactly one business model: influence generation. Allow others and the behavior changes.