Jaron Lanier: Silicon Valley is sabotaging AI's promise

Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and virtual-reality pioneer, used a New York Times opinion piece to argue that Silicon Valley is sabotaging artificial intelligence the same way it has sabotaged earlier technologies: by piling exaggerated theories on top of a useful product until the public turns on both.

"Silicon Valley has a special talent for offering amazing products and then screwing them up with ridiculous ideas about how those products should be used," Lanier writes.

He rejects the idea that the current pushback is a rejection of the technology itself. "Americans are not rejecting A.I.," he writes. "They are rejecting the way Silicon Valley is defining it for them." Per Techmeme's summary of the essay, part of what he is objecting to is the industry's pitch of AI as a possibly conscious new form of life and its willingness to treat prospective data-center sites as sacrifice zones.

His sharpest line turns the AI-consciousness debate into a critique of belief rather than engineering: "There is nothing wrong with a new religion, but there is everything wrong with an imposed new religion." Four researchers we track in our Who's Who directory shared the piece the day it ran, a sign the essay is moving through the safety-adjacent circles it is partly aimed at.