The Wright Show

Jaron Lanier, “father of virtual reality” and author (ironically) of the techno-skeptic manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, thinks you’re getting a raw deal. You give content to Facebook—and to Slate, if you leave a comment below—and you don’t get paid for it. Lanier says that a better system is possible and could change the world:  

You can watch the whole conversation here. And here is an excerpt from the conversation that appeared on Slate earlier this week.

Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” more than a quarter of a century ago and is often called “the father of virtual reality” for his pioneering research in simulation technologies. But now that we’re living increasingly virtual lives, he’s not so happy with the way it’s all playing out, for reasons he explains in his book You Are Not a Gadget. In this excerpt from my interview with him, he talks about how something called “cybernetic totalism” has become a kind of religion of Silicon Valley, as exemplified by the ideas of futurist Ray Kurzweil:

You can watch the whole conversation here.

Wouldn’t it be easier to get Syria's Bashar al-Assad to step down, and thus end the bloodshed, if we could guarantee him immunity from prosecution for the bloodshed? I posed this question to Matthew Lee, who runs Inner City Press and is the world’s most dogged United Nations correspondent. He pointed out that, actually, we just did something kind of like that with another Arab dictator:

And don't miss Matthew's righteous rant about a truly scandalous UN appointment that has yet to get mainstream media attention:

You can watch the whole conversation here.

In part two of my conversation with The Mormon Girl (Joanna Brooks, author of The Book of Mormon Girl), a question about Jon Huntsman leads to surprising (to me) news about the sense in which Mormons are like Jews. It has to do with the role of religious belief in defining the tribe.

Here is yesterday's installment of the Brooks conversation. You can watch the whole conversation here.

Do Mormons have a stronger sense of divine presence than mainstream Christians? It’s something I had never thought about until I brought up the subject of angels while talking to Joanna Brooks, a Mormon who writes the Ask Mormon Girl column and is the author of The Book of Mormon Girl.

You can watch the whole conversation here.

According to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics—which some serious physicists take seriously—there is more than one version of you. In fact, there’s a growing number of you. Here physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing, tries to help me wrap my mind around this prospect.

You can watch the whole conversation here.

Cullen Murphy’s new book on the Inquisition, God’s Jury, argues that we’re not as great as we think we are. Yes, Murphy says, the Inquisition is behind us, but more of its elements live on than we realize, and sometimes we seem less enlightened than the Inquisitors. Consider, as Murphy does here, the Bush administration’s view of torture:

Murphy sees some Gitmo-Inquisition parallels in the way people were selected for torture in the first place:

Physicist Lawrence Krauss’ new book, A Universe From Nothing, raises a question: What do we mean by nothing? Certainly you’d have to get clear on that before moving on to the book’s subtitle: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. So Krauss and I did our best to get to the bottom of nothing, notwithstanding our disagreement about where that is: