Episode · Lex Fridman Podcast · 2021-09-06
Books mentioned on #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, author, and founder of the field of virtual reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Skiff – Novo: https://banknovo.
Jaron Lanier discussed The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Dr Sax by Jack Kerouac, and Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and others. Lex Fridman discussed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning philosophical and psychological study that argues human behavior is fundamentally driven by an unconscious terror of mortality and the subsequent cultural mechanisms created to deny it.
Discussed“even there there's opportunity to discover beauty now. and so it's that's that's the interesting thing about humans is the capacity to discover uh beautiful in the darkest of moments but there's always the dark parts too well i mean it's our situation is structurally difficult we are um actually no it is it's true we perceive socially we depend”
Where to get it
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Dr Sax
Discussed“there's a passage in kerouac's book dr sachs where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality and people in like a paragraph”
Where to get it
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a celebrated comedic science fiction series that follows the absurd interstellar adventures of the sole surviving human, Arthur Dent.
Discussed“hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy right of what this uh mostly harmless mostly harmless”
Where to get it
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Nightfall
Discussed“i thought that was a curious kind of thought that reminds me of that uh old isaac asimov story where the cl you know there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (4) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“i wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens and maybe even it was actually the title of the book was just the arguments to delete your account”
“i wrote a book about an earlier version of it called who owns the future”
“so there's this thing called data dignity that i've been studying for a long time i wrote a book about an earlier version of it called who owns the future”
“uh hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy right of what this uh mostly harmless mostly harmless yeah”