Jaron has an amazing publicist. I challenge anyone to read Wikipedia’s history of VR (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History) and assess him to fairly be called a founder. There was serious work being done for over a decade before he even started his firm; VPL never came close to being a standard and the VR tech today has hardly any relation to his “post symbolic” language.

He’s certainly a very smart and interesting guy but my alarm bells go off when his supposed achievements are used as justification for the piece being valid rather than… well, any of the arguments he made.

His thinking seems much clearer than most of the discourse around this technology.

But I think that a better way of thinking about these systems is an imperfect world model analogy. Not a made-of-people analogy.

These models are not made of people. People helped gathering data about the world around us. And that data allowed to build a world model. Which includes models of people, along with everything else.

And it’s a world model, not a human civilization model. Data goes through the funnel of The Pile and the likes, but ultimately the predictive model is of the universe, not that of humans.

he hasn’t given up on VPL, though, only few years back Vi Hart’s eleVR team was working on “sculptural” programming languages within VR, at Microsoft Research under Jaron. (…but I think that team disbanded a couple years back)

He did have a team that produced an early VR system. It took two expensive Silicon Graphics machine to run the headgear. I got to try it, with him present. There was a second person wired up, driving a model of a lobster or octopus or something, and I could sort of interact with them. All the right parts were there. But it didn't work very well. Too slow, and too low-rez. Turn head, wait for tracker and rendering to catch up. 80s VR was pretty marginal.

VPL Research did do real work and everyone I've interacted with from that era was impressed with what they achieved given their limited resources. That said, it is pretty clear from looking at modern VR systems how little they relate to the future he predicted. Not discounting his accomplishments at all - I actually think a lot his output was pretty incredible!

I certainly think Palmer Lucky could in many ways have at least a legitimate claim to being a founder of modern VR; his Oculus not only completely revived the industry but also showed other companies that there was indeed a market for this tech.

It's absolutely ludicrous nonsense. It's like saying someone invented the idea of 'wondering what would happen if the sun blew up'.

VR is a trivial idea that pretty much everyone has thought about at some point. It's implementation is hard to do, and if I had to point to anyone there, it'd be Carmack who's probably done the most.

> VR is a trivial idea that pretty much everyone has thought about at some point.

I agree, but to be fair, grandiose misattributions are just how the field of philosophy works. Plato is commonly credited with the idea that humans have an immortal soul. I'm 100% sure that idea is tens of thousands of years old, and when I hear academics attribute it to him, I immediately discard everything else that comes out of their mouths because such claims just demonstrate a complete lack of critical thinking.

> the philosopher who first conceived the idea of virtual reality

What does that even mean?

Descartes "evil demon" from 1641 says Wikipedia is the philosophical idea in all it's forms short of "but with a computer"

Anyone got anything earlier? Wouldn't surprise me.

https://iep.utm.edu/evil-new/

pretty sure first person that had a dream figured out VR.

Or peyote.

yeah maybe kinda? Lack of control of the dream there that makes a difference for mine. YMMV. Dunno when lucid dreaming was discovered.

Was there something written down about it by one of the ancient greeks or similar vintage?

Descartes explicitly wrote about automatons and telling them apart from people using language and reasoning as sign posts (“the Turing test” three hundred years before Turing).

> As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT

Is that like Shingy, the AOL digital prophet?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3

Exactly. Very hard to pin down any real inventions but very good at getting paid for the mystique

"who first conceived the idea of virtual reality"

And a roommate of Richard Stallman at one point, AFAIR.

  the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it

Indeed.

His idea of attaching provenance to source of information used in models is a good one, and one that already has rumblings of legal weight behind it (see the various articles about copyright claims in response to GPT/Copilot).

I worry a bit that his argument is too centred on digital information creation. Though I suppose that's the novelty of the most recent pieces of technology called AI - they affect information workers, people who already use a computer interface for some large percentage of their work. Still, the topic of /physical work/ : fieldwork, factorywork, servicework, seems one or more steps removed from LLMs. The management of that work may be affected, but the work itself has already (it seems to me) gone through its first computer-revolution shock.

Edit: I'll add that the whole article has a 90s-Wired feel to it, which is refreshing to see. There's been something of a slowdown in tech-revolutions for the past decade, and it's not original to say that we may be at the start of a new one.

It should have been obvious to all of us at AlphaZero that Intelligence in a general sense is emergent from large networks of feedback loops. But our monkey brains tell us that we are special so we look for data to confirm that bias. No one is more guilty of that than "Experts".

He is uniquely qualified to be wrong about this in a specific way.

I don't see anything there that uniquely qualifies him to be an expert on this matter.

- He popularized the term 'virtual reality' in the late 80s,

- Did a bunch of stuff with music

- Spent a whole lot of time warning against social media

- Spent a whole lot of time warning against what I consider to be the best parts of the internet like Wikipedia

I’ve seen many of the very best AI scientists (Hinton, Hasabis, Lecun, etc) say that we need philosophers and ethicists deeply involved on this topic urgently. I think a guy like Lanier, who knows CS fundamentals but has been talking about the ethics and impact of different digital creations for decades, is a pretty good guy to have on team humanity, no?