‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity
The American computer scientist, who coined the term ‘virtual reality,’ cautions against online ‘psychological operatives’



And he’s been brutally clear about what he sees as the consequences of over-dependence on social media: in essence, you’ll get both popular cat videos and civil war.

“People survive by passing information between themselves,” Lanier, 61, told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re putting that fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation. The fundamental drama of this period is whether we can figure out how to survive properly with those elements or not.”

The exaggerated focus on Twitter in recent months after its chaotic take over by billionaire Elon Musk follows longstanding concerns about Facebook and others, including state actors. He mentions “psychological operatives” working for Vladimir Putin and the Chinese communist state apparatus. All of them are filtering or promoting information for their own gains. In short, the web is not a free market of information as originally envisioned. It is a gamed system being rampantly abused
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/27/jaron-lanier-tech-threat-humanity-twitter-social-media