Words by Karen O'Leary.

An increasingly common New Year’s Resolution is to change how we interact with technology. In You are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier presents a few ideas for rethinking this relationship – both with technology and ourselves.

This goes beyond using your phone less, or posting more mindfully. Lanier believes that change needs to happen on a bigger scale, while there’s still time.

The challenge is ‘lock-in’ – a process that occurs when digital architecture (software, design, and so on) has been cemented so thoroughly that it becomes increasingly tricky to uproot, and almost impossible to conceive of alternatives. This isn’t just a matter of imagining the internet without Google or Meta - although, yes, that too - but more a case of trying to wrap your head around the existence of a computer without files.

Files – what we think of as the very building blocks of technology, of modern work – weren’t always there. They are not naturally occurring. Now, Lanier isn’t actually arguing against files, but merely reminding us that things could have been different.

Throughout the book, he critiques not just technologies, but ideas that have become increasingly locked-in. One of these is the belief that people - human consciousness, culture and creativity – are merely complex information systems that can be accurately represented by computers. This belief has driven Web 2.0 forward – making social media a dominant form of human expression and interaction.

However, more dangerously, this ideology also intertwines with the Singularity: the apocalyptic belief that computers, being more advanced information systems than humans are, will eventually replace us.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test to determine a machine’s ability to pass as a human in conversation with a real person. Something vital that Lanier points out is that the Turing Test goes both ways. It evaluates the person just as much as the machine. If you have low expectations for what counts as a human, they will be easily met. This means that a passing result may speak less to the robot’s power, and more to your degraded sense of personhood.

Today, these conversations surround AI. For example, a lot of people think AI can design, create, even innovate. This belief might be fairly easy to dismantle when it comes to something as brick-and-mortar as architecture. It’s harder to delineate in the two-dimensional space, and even more so when it comes to the written word, given that the most popular AIs are text generators.

What we have to remember is that, like the Turing Test, our evaluation of AI will always say more about us than it does about any machine. If we believe that AI can do everything a person can, just how far have we lowered our standards of what we’re capable of?

Though written over fifteen years ago - lifetimes in tech years - You are Not a Gadget feels highly relevant, even prescient. There are a handful of quick fixes Lanier suggests for acting more like a person, and less like a machine, online – to not post anonymously, to create your own website rather than conforming to a platform, to seek out unique perspectives over hivemind summaries.

However you choose to go about it, the key is to centre our relationship with ourselves over that of technology, and to not compromise on the value of individual expression, or any of the infinite, intangible things that make us human.