Web resources related to
Jaron Lanier
Jaron has no social media accounts at all and all purported ones are fake.
To those who are curious, NO I do not have a gmail account. If you have received an email from me via a gmail account, you are being scammed. The scam emails start with flattery but then try to extract money from you. This is NOT coming from me. The emails appear to be AI-generated. Please be careful. If you work for google and have any ideas about how to stop this, please let me know at my real email.
"What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me"
- The New Yorker, July 22, 2023
*please explore the music section, to the left or below, to hear instruments described in this essay
"Data Dignity and the Inversion of AI"
- A talk on September 15, 2023 co-hosted with the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and the UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab
"Non-local Field Theory from Matrix Models"
- showing that a class of matrix theories can be understood as an extension of quantum field theory which has non-local interactions
"Model of Illusions and Virtual Reality"
- discussing the possibility to induce illusions in which users report and behave as if they have entered into altered situations and identities
"HoloARt: Painting with Holograms in Mixed Reality"
- a system that allows the user to turn their physical environment into a canvas where digital holograms and physical objects co-exist in the real and virtual world
"The Decentralized Mystique"
- An opinion piece for CoinDesk discussing Jaron's research with Glen Weyl on how on Bitcoin's early years undermines its foundational myths of privacy through pseudonymity and decentralization
From left to right: Jaron Lanier, Bill Frisell, John Zorn, Dave Lombardo and Laurie Anderson. August 31, 2023 in San Fransisco for John Zorn @ 70.
photo credit: John Taylor
You might have read my piece in The New Yorker about musical instrument obsession, and you might be curious what the music sounds like. The New Yorker's online presentation includes one tune, a trio called "Waves Only Get Real When They Break", with Colin Farish and Jhaffur Khan, in which I play a Taiwanese guzheng harp. (European scholars would classify it as a "zither", but that has diminutive, folk connotations, so I prefer "harp".)
Here are some more tracks you might like to hear, with various other people and with me on various other instruments. This isn't the only kind of music I make, but I might love this stuff the most.*
This music is offered under the usual legal protections and you are not given rights to do stuff with it other than listen. Most of these tracks are works in progress.
If you are curious: My "about the author" in The New Yorker reflects the need to keep my thoughts separate from Microsoft when I'm writing about tech, but comes off weirdly when I'm not writing about tech. The magazine insists on a single bio per author.
1. Waves Only Get Real When They Break
- here is the trio piece presented at the top of the New Yorker article, with Colin Farish on piano, Jhaffur Khan on flute, and me on guzheng.
2. Tongues in Flight in LA
- just me overdubbing different instruments. The flute I play in this is a Japanese shakuhachi, which is described in the piece, but the style I play on it gradually shifts to Cuban charanga by the end. The other instruments are, well, varied.
3. Piano Seance
- here's me on solo piano (lockdown remote performance)
- in concert with Will Calhoun. Here I'm playing some of the instruments mentioned in the New Yorker piece, like a khaen. The bowed instrument (a baryton) went badly out of tune because we were at a venue by the ocean in Big Sur, so just pretend to not hear that one.
- with James Gordon Williams - James on piano, Jaron on the same guzheng heard in the trio on the New Yorker site, , but in this case playing the blues.
11. Brooding Blues Gets Pierced by Sunlight
- the Free Waves Trio: with Tim Jackson and Zack Olsen. Tim is better known for running jazz festivals (Monterey!) and a club (Kuumbwa!) but he's also a wonderful flute player who has worked with everybody; Zach is here forced to play on an experimental kit, but makes it sound great.
12. Puzzle Pieces in Flight
- the Free Waves Trio (with Tim Jackson and Zack Olsen), here Jaron is playing a new kind of electromechanical keyboard from Brazil called a Valente
* If you are curious why this music isn't on the usual streaming services, it's because I don't like them. I don't like how they put the download numbers up front so everything becomes a numerical battle, how algorithms decide how to lump musicians together, and how people often listen without knowing who the musicians are. It's not so much that I'm in denial about change, but that I helped bring about the change and must remember what a terrible job my generation of computer scientists did. I don't want to forgive myself so easily.
In You Are Not a Gadget I do my best at using ideas to show
that consciousness exists, but "Proof of Consciousness" makes the case
better. Duets with Mark Deutsch
on Warm
and Genuine records.
