Move over, Soylent Green. The real twist ending of the century comes courtesy of Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked tech philosopher who has been poking the tech industry in the eye with a very expensive stick for decades.
On a recent episode of StarTalk — hosted by everyone’s favorite astrophysics hype man Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad — Lanier made an argument so elegant and so obvious that you’ll want to slap your forehead for not thinking of it first: there’s no mysterious alien intelligence lurking inside your AI chatbot. It’s just… people. Mountains and mountains of people. Their words, their ideas, their bad takes, their poetry, their grocery lists, their 3am forum rants — all of it compressed into a very large math equation wearing a robot costume.
Lanier, who originally laid out this argument in his 2023 New Yorker piece provocatively titled “There Is No AI,” takes particular issue with the industry’s favorite euphemism: the “black box.” Tech enthusiasts love to throw up their hands and say, “Golly, nobody really knows what’s inside these models!” as if the whole thing were some kind of supernatural phenomenon requiring a priest rather than a programmer.
Lanier’s response to that theatrical helplessness is essentially: oh, come off it. The box isn’t black. The box is stuffed to the gills with human-generated data — your data, their data, everybody’s data — just in a form that’s conveniently difficult to attribute or compensate.
In other words, calling AI a mysterious oracle isn’t humility. It’s a magic trick designed to distract you from asking inconvenient questions like, “Wait, did anyone ask those millions of writers, artists, and thinkers before using their life’s work as training material?”
It’s a fascinating reframe: less “behold the machine mind” and more “behold the world’s most elaborate and poorly-cited anthology.”
Somehow, we built the future out of humanity’s collective brain — and then acted surprised that it sounds exactly like us.
*Source: Boing Boing / StarTalk (YouTube)*
Original story via Boing Boing
