tele-I
Lanier first noticed the dangers inherent in the mass marketing of half-baked artificial intelligence concepts while using Microsoft Word.
All he wanted to do was abbreviate a name he had cooked up -- "tele-immersion." "It's a cross between virtual reality and a transporter booth," he says, a strategy for employing the Internet to bring people together in a computer-generated, 3-D space. Lanier simply wanted to write the word "tele-immersion" as "tele-i." And when Word wouldn't let him do it, capitalizing the "i" repeatedly, Lanier found himself frustrated, even angry.
Though he knows how to turn it off, he claims most users don't. And he's still none too pleased. "This crazy artificial intelligence philosophy which I used to think of as a quirky eccentricity has taken over the way people can use English," he says. "We've lost something."
And it's not just Word that spun Lanier into a tizzy. It's the sheer prevalence of these "thinking" features: the fact that PowerPoint shrinks the font when you add too many words, that browsers add complete URLs after the user puts in three letters, and that there's little that most people can do about it.
"[Programmers] are sacrificing the user in order to have this fantasy that the computers are turning into creatures," he says. "These features found their way in not because developers think people want them, but because this idea of making autonomous computers has gotten into their heads."*
* underlined ours.
All he wanted to do was abbreviate a name he had cooked up -- "tele-immersion." "It's a cross between virtual reality and a transporter booth," he says, a strategy for employing the Internet to bring people together in a computer-generated, 3-D space. Lanier simply wanted to write the word "tele-immersion" as "tele-i." And when Word wouldn't let him do it, capitalizing the "i" repeatedly, Lanier found himself frustrated, even angry.
Though he knows how to turn it off, he claims most users don't. And he's still none too pleased. "This crazy artificial intelligence philosophy which I used to think of as a quirky eccentricity has taken over the way people can use English," he says. "We've lost something."
And it's not just Word that spun Lanier into a tizzy. It's the sheer prevalence of these "thinking" features: the fact that PowerPoint shrinks the font when you add too many words, that browsers add complete URLs after the user puts in three letters, and that there's little that most people can do about it.
"[Programmers] are sacrificing the user in order to have this fantasy that the computers are turning into creatures," he says. "These features found their way in not because developers think people want them, but because this idea of making autonomous computers has gotten into their heads."*
* underlined ours.
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