Monday, March 07, 2016

My resistance to VR

I just finished up with Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget.  I hadn't read a book like that for a long time, sort of wacky and wildly interdisciplinary yet very cogent and, which is perhaps more important, very humane.

Lanier is one of the inventors of Virtual Reality, which is one of those concepts which, though cool, has never really held much attraction for me. I tend to view VR as too much like doing drugs, as if it would be consciousness out of control and therefore scary.

Tech geniuses like Lanier are a bit like that in toto-- "scary smart" with a polymathic ability to range across domains which can be intimidating. Admittedly, if I had enough financial freedom and confidence to just talk to whomever and write freely, I might do OK.

For the time being, maybe personal finance attracts me in its relative finiteness. Though it can be god-awful boring at times.

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