Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is one of the best-known people in Silicon Valley, both as a researcher and sometimes critic. He serves as Microsoft’s “Prime Scientist”, working especially on AI. 

Lanier is often associated with humanism, critiques of the “advertising business model”, and with his proposals for an alternate approach to digital economics. He has critiqued technical modernity in best-selling books like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and You Are Not a Gadget, and in movies like The Social Dilemma.

Lanier has received multiple honorary doctorates and awards, including a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE and the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the world’s highest literary honors. In 2018 Wired Magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people in technology of the previous 25 years; Time Magazine has named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Lanier’s name is also often associated with Virtual Reality. He coined the terms ‘Virtual Reality’ and ‘Mixed Reality’ and founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, in the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, as well as the first “avatars,” or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications such as surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, skill training, and virtual sets for television production.

Lanier was a founder or principal of four startups presently owned by Oracle, Adobe, Google, and Pfizer.

He is also a musician and composer who maintains one of the largest actively played instrument collections in the world, and has recently performed or recorded with Les Claypool, Sean Lennon, Sara Bareilles, T Bone Burnett, Jon Batiste, Philip Glass, and many others.