Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier was born in New York City on May 3, 1960.⁠[1]

He was the only child of Jewish parents; his Viennese mother had talked her way out of a concentration camp and later worked in the US as a pianist and stock trader, and his father worked as an architect, a science editor of science-fiction magazines and an elementary-school teacher.⁠[2]

By his account, his mother was killed in a car crash when he was nine, after which his father moved with him to southern New Mexico, where they first lived in a tent; at 14 he began attending New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.⁠[3]

He never completed a degree; in his early twenties he was a researcher for Atari in California, then turned to virtual reality and co-founded VPL Research to commercialize it.⁠[2]

He recalled that in 1984, when the Macintosh was introduced, several members of the Mac team left Apple to join VPL and help create the first generation of commercial VR products; he also cited the company’s early simulated gallbladder for Stanford Medicine as the start of VR use in designing surgical procedures and training surgeons.⁠[4]

Microsoft Research’s profile says he probably coined the terms “Virtual Reality” and “Mixed Reality,” and that he founded the early VR company VPL Research in the early 1980s.⁠[5]

The Computer History Museum holds a prototype EyePhone headset built by VPL Research in 1987 and notes that VPL’s products eventually included the DataGlove controller, EyePhone goggles and the full-body DataSuit.⁠[6]

On March 5, 1999, he spoke at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry as lead scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced Internet2 applications that aimed to let users in different places collaborate in a shared simulated environment as if in the same room.⁠[7]

Edge’s member biography lists a Watson Award from Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry in 2001, his selection as a finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005 and an honorary doctorate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2006.⁠[8]

In 2006 he published an essay on “digital Maoism,” arguing that Web 2.0 enthusiasm for the “wisdom of the crowd” had gone too far: design by committee often produced weaker results, collectivist culture undervalued individual voices and crowd behavior could become mob rule. The essay drew strong reactions.⁠[9]

He joined Microsoft in 2006 as its scholar at large and, after three years, took up his role as an interdisciplinary scientist at Microsoft Research in 2009.⁠[10]

In 2009 he received the IEEE Lifetime Career Award for his contributions to virtual reality.⁠[8]

His first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, was published on January 12, 2010; it criticizes social networks, cloud storage and Web 2.0 designs that favor the “wisdom” of crowds and algorithms over individual intelligence.⁠[11]

In 2010 he was named to Time magazine’s list of the people who most affect the world. He then lived in the Berkeley Hills in California and was married with a daughter.⁠[3]

His book Who Owns the Future? argues that large-scale data collection and free information sharing weakened personal privacy and eroded the middle class, and proposes an information economy that pays ordinary people for the content and data they create and share online; it won the 2014 Goldsmith Book Prize in the trade category.⁠[12]

On June 5, 2014, he was named that year’s winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, presented on October 12 in Frankfurt am Main during the Frankfurt Book Fair. The jury said he “has consistently and effectively spotlighted the threats our open society faces.”⁠[10]

In 2017 he published Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, which recounts his childhood in New Mexico, the loss of his mother and the origins of virtual reality.⁠[13][14]

In 2018 Holt published his Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which mainly targets platform business models in which advertisers and other third parties pay to influence users’ behavior through personalized stimuli. Publishers Weekly’s review found the main points familiar and the political commentary shallow, and said the book gave little analysis to social media’s role in movements such as #MeToo and the Arab Spring.⁠[15]

In July 2020 Microsoft launched Together Mode for Teams, which uses AI to cut out each participant’s video image and place it in a fixed seat in a virtual setting such as an auditorium. He said: “I think Together Mode gives people the tools to do better, but it doesn't guarantee people will be better.”⁠[16]

On September 6, 2021, he appeared on episode 218 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, which introduced him as a computer scientist, composer, artist, author and founder of the field of virtual reality; the episode covered virtual reality, social media and the future of humans and AI.⁠[17]

In a November 2022 interview he drew on the behavioral-psychology concept of “operant conditioning” to criticize social media’s engagement mechanisms, and said: “I still think extinction is on the table as an outcome.”⁠[18]

On April 20, 2023, he published “There Is No A.I.” in The New Yorker, arguing that large models such as GPT-4 should be thought of as tools rather than creatures and that the most accurate way to understand what is being built today is as “an innovative form of social collaboration.”⁠[19]

On September 15, 2023, at a talk co-hosted by UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and the BAIR Lab, he applied “data dignity” ideas to AI, treating large models as a social collaboration among the people whose data trained them and proposing provenance calculations to measure how specific inputs influence results.⁠[20]

As of October 2026, Microsoft Research lists him in the Office of the Chief Technical Officer as “Prime Unifying Scientist” (“Octopus”) and says he co-founded or led four startups now owned by Oracle, AdobeAdobeAdobe (Adobe Inc.) is a software company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Known for PostScript, PDF and creative software such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, it moved its main creative products to Creative Cloud subscriptions from 2013 and expanded into digital marketing and generative AI; it is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ADBE.Open the full entry, Google and Pfizer.⁠[5]

His personal website states that he has no social media accounts and that all purported ones are fake.⁠[14]

His official biography also describes him as a composer and pianist with one of the largest collections of actively played rare instruments, who has performed or recorded with musicians including Philip Glass, Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman, and says Wired named him in 2018 one of the 25 most influential people in the previous 25 years of tech history.⁠[21]

The website of the documentary The Social Dilemma lists him among its featured interviewees, describing him as a “founding father of virtual reality.”⁠[22]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.jaronlanier.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Microsoft: Official website: https://www.microsoft.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]