The End of Human Specialness

Jaron Lanier is one of those people who always make me ask "What exactly does this guy do for a living" while also making me think, "Man, this guy really knows what he's talking about!" So I was delighted to see his response at the top of the list in the "What's the Big Idea?" piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review. In a nutshell: Lanier sees through all the hype surrounding "transformative" technologies like Facebook and Twitter, and he shows the overall negative effect they have on the quality of our lives as human beings.