You are not a gadget
A computer-age visionary argues that the Internet has failed to live up to its early promises, sharing cautionary perspectives on the Web 2.0 design concept while optimistically evaluating the Internet as a positive cultural vehicle.
Stats for nerds
27recommend
60mentions
54people
2010–2026years
47% recommend47% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A great book tangential to this subject matter is Jaron Lanier's "you are not a gadget" which spends a substantial amount of time on the development of music in parallel to computers. My recollection is that midi basically became the dominant format because it was first, and it was first because it was more or less the most obvious way to represent music in a simple programmable format. Other formats that allow for more flexibility didn't crack through due to the critical mass of adoption of midi, so it persisted until today.
- > If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
> This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.
From https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
Be careful not to [give up your own voice][1] to the [machine][2].
[1]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/you-are-not-a-gadget-jaron-lani...
- I really strongly recommend his book You Are Not A Gadget. He wrote it like fifteen years ago and it feels like he is describing last year. Like he's telling you about a lot of the problems of social media today, writing before Facebook had ads.
Why it is worth reading is his thinking about the causes and outcomes is so clear. Its still useful today.
- For anyone who takes Effective Altruism or Rationalism seriously I strongly recommend reading "You Are Not a Gadget" It was written more than ten years ago and was so prescient about the issues of social media and also contained one of the most devastating problems with EA, the idea of a circle of empathy.
You don't have to agree with any of this. I am not defending every idea the author has. But I recommend that book.
- Jaron Lanier's 2010 book "You are not a gadget" basically foreshadows the hype around chat-gpt and how we (technologists) want to make people obsolete so that computers seem more advanced. He argues that we adjust ourselves and reduce our expectations in the Turing test.
- You Are Not a Gadget is a great book by Jaron Lanier.
