I find his views far more compelling than Kurzweil's. I do not know how accurate his description of Google Translate is, but if accurate it is depressing.
How does he know that's how it works?
What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#32I don't know if Jaron is right or not about the web, information freedom, and its effects on musicians, translators, and other content creators. It will take a few more years to find out what happens to a society with true freedom of information once the dust has settled, assuming we actually manage to build one. One thing from the article that did really hit me is the quote, “This is the thing that continues to scar…
I recommend Rene Girard insight into that.
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#33I can't comprehend how this individual is considered to be influencial when, looking at his achievements, he has not really contributed anything of substance. I don't mean to be a killjoy, I just honestly don't see why he is considered to be an authority on, well, anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Works
He wrote a couple of books and gave a few speeches? Perhaps I'm missing the point - if anyone would care to enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below f…
"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each." So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used o…
>So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using?
Why do you think they haven't done that? Or rather they paid the entity that owns the rights who at some point in the past paid those translators. Generally speaking the translators gave up their rights in exchange for money long ago.
Specifically google uses, for example, UN documents which translators were paid to translate and which are publicly usable.
If I write some code for a company, get paid for that code and then the company sells that code why should I get paid again?
Or do you think google is the first automated translation service? This has been done successfully for 30+ years commercially and academically. Nothing different just because it's on the web and not on some guys PC.
>How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea?
Actually, I'm sure there were all sort of quack solutions to infections and whole industries making them which went out of business as a result of doctor's realizing washing hands did the trick.
Edit: Not to mention the loss of jobs for morticians (in the short term), makers of amputation implements (and other tools to deal with all those infections), nurses specializing in dealing with infections, traditional healers (as doctors were now an even better choice) and so on. Lowering infections would have impacted every single person and industry that was built around the previous high-infection status quo.
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#35I wasn't aware that Jaron Lanier was ever really for the Web. The things he's known for -- art games for the Commodore 64, early work on virtual reality, consulting on Second Life and Kinect, etc. -- are not really Web things. They're rooted more in the older William Gibson-style vision of completely immersive digital environments, rather than in hypertext. Which makes it a bit unconvincing to call him "the double ag…
From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. ==Looks like his first "contra" essay was in 2000. (Per Wikipedia).
Internet2 is not "of the Web" either; it's focused more on developing out the IP network itself than on any particular application that runs over IP (of which the Web is one).
I'm not familiar with the work of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, but from the name it certainly sounds like it's more interested in the type of full-sensory environments Lanier has usually been associated with than with hypertext applications.
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#36From reading in the popular press about Jaron Lanier he strikes me as more of an artiste than technologist. Which is fine by me. His comments in this article hint at something that nags at me as a musician and lover of music, which is the rise of the concept of "content" to describe creative works. The ubiquity of digital networks has led to an unprecedented level of commodification of music (for example). Various la…
Self-Promotion alert: You might enjoy my iOS game. Adding more features and "content" soon.
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below f…
"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each." So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used o…
[deleted]
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below f…
"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each." So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used o…
Also, what you seem to not get is that this isn't a zero sum game.
Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and so on. And it has done more than that.
It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone. This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve. The costs and latency were just too high to use them.
That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.
Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#39Re: What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each." So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used o…
Also, what you seem to not get is that this isn't a zero sum game. Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on f…
"That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses."
You can't put technology in a nutshell. Also, you just said stuff nobody wanted to translate can now be crappily translated -- am I understand that this was previously an elite privilege? Why is the one-sentence explanation of what all technology is about, always, different in each post? And what does any of this have to do with me correcting the horrible misrepresentation of the article? That, which I consider my main point stands, the rest I happily concedem because I don't care enough, and you do have a point. But what you said would also be true also for a collaborative, public domain effort, so Google and their middleman dreams can gtfo either way as far as I'm concerned.