Archive

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

So here’s what hap­pened. If you tell peo­ple you’re going to have this super-open, absolute­ly non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to sur­vive in this envi­ron­ment that’s based on mon­ey, where it has to make mon­ey, how does any­body square that cir­cle? How does any­body do any­thing? And so com­pa­nies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a cor­ner. There was exact­ly one busi­ness plan avail­able to them, which was advertising.

Making an Ethical Machine

The idea of putting a robot sim­u­la­tor inside a robot, well, it’s not a new idea but it’s tricky and very few peo­ple have pulled it off. In fact, it takes a bit of get­ting your head round. The robot needs to have, inside itself, a sim­u­la­tion of itself and its envi­ron­ment, and oth­ers in its envi­ron­ment. And run­ning in real-time as well.