Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rod Brooks, Henry Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart Brand, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Daniel C. Reality Club - Part I: George Dyson, Freeman Dyson. JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL. Let us hope that the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in the sun arrives." There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Cybernetic eschatology shares with some of history's worst ideologies a doctrine of historical predestination. "The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false, but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. "There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. There IS a compelling simple logic behind their thinking and elegance in thought is infectious." In his "Half a Manifesto" he takes on those he terms the "cybernetic totalists" who do not seem "to not have been educated in the tradition of scientific skepticism. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, musician, and currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, worries about the future of human culture more than the gadgets. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before." "For the last twenty years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma.
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