A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

There is something enjoyable about listening to polymaths talk around issues. There were many interesting ideas hit in this interview and I cannot help smiling when hearing Jaron laugh. I'm going to have to listen to this again and keep a notepad within reach to jot some of this down.

I also liked the multiple camera shots and editing with this.

-Josh

  Great discussion.  I imagine 3D printers printing programs, in geometrically appealling configurations which act as the hardware and the user interface.  The programs being purely functional, do not change, however, projecting an image of the execution unto and within a transparent 3D object, and allowing a user to touch, drag, interact with the "light cursor" inside the model, executing the functions where touch is applied, or sound interacts, like a musical instrument but not like we've seen before.  Being a purely functional language, execution may occur in any order.  The infinite within the finite.  3D models can be sold, traded, etc..., and joined with other 3D models.  To represent 4D concepts and for mathematics, this would be great, for example, model the unit circle to perform trig or calculus.  Some models may allow you to reconfigure the 3D shape to rewrite the program, but first it would be immutable, based on current technology.

This blows my mind dude.  

This guy must be teetotal because he seems to have all his braincells intact plus some extra ones to boot.

Pure awesome. Many thanks Charles et al for making this happen!

Wow - what a pleasure. It's so hard to find topics and interviews of this caliber - thanks a lot, everyone.

Great stuff!  Phenotropic programming and post symbolic communication deserve an episode each, and try to get Meijer and Beckman to join the discussion.

Needs to be watched twice. A great interview.

now that was a great interview!!

From my understanding of post symbolic communication, it seems that it would only be applicable to a limited static domain. Where everything that can be expressed has been. Even in this domain, one cannot escape the very real and still symbolic results of Kolmogorov complexity. That is, in order to describe something completely without depending on external assumptions as to what constitutes what, you need to be very verbose, by symbolic communication era standards.

Plus, you still need a machine to instantiate whatever it is that you are trying to express.

Nice interview, I like the new suttle camera angles to, just don't overdo them if you decide to do more  

btw Charles, can't someone please fix the silverlight player in Chrome, I just upgraded silverligt to 4 where it's supposed to be supported, but the seek still don't work well in Chrome, the new player used elsewhere on ms sites works great, but not on C9. Also, it would be great if you could redesign the media download and rating buttons, they are too hard to see and many people don't realise they are there.

Finally got round to watching this one. Of course I've heard of Jaron Lanier in the context of VR - had no idea he was working for Microsoft now, and the reason behind it. That's pretty damn cool.

And I'm happy to hear someone else who's so exasperated by people continuing to re-invent the wheel with Unix and other things. I can't blame people for building something that's useful to a well understood recipie, but if you've got the free time on your hands to build something from scratch as an open-source project, how about doing something that hasn't been done before?! If you're going to build an OS, how about a truely object oriented one for example? Lets get away from the simplistic ideas of flat files and heirarchies and processes. Anyway, that's my rant on the subject

Nice conversation, really inspirational. I've included this talk in the list of few talks, I often hear.

Thank you.

Thanks, I am really impressed by the openness of MS of which C9 plays a huge part. As Jaron says, that's the reason he joined, stay honest and keep it up.

I've been thinking about how badly imperative programming tends to scale. But we can't forget about the added machine efficiency of going imperative. Perhaps once it becomes necessary to program to multiple cores in the general case, abstracting over the physical machine with lambda programming will become more viable in my domain (embedded development). Maybe then my partners won't yell at me for using functional programming and immutability idioms in our C++ code base.

That will be the day.

As a side note, it looks like MSN picked Jaron as one of the smartest people.

Couldn't bite much. But whatever did, had to be bitten still harder to really enjoy the byte.

Jaron... I just dropped the hat.

Please visit

http://jaronlanier.com

And bite and chew and digest a few things. And help me bite some.