Event Summary

For our August monthly online discussion, friend of the Austin Forum and Professor Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin, J. Craig Wheeler, will lead us in a conversation about the power of our personal data within this new age of the information economy.

Through his book, Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier, Silicon Valley veteran and the father of virtual reality, presses readers to question the intangible data contract inflicted upon them by the world’s elite. At the cost of clicking around on the internet all day for free, hedge funds, industry powerhouses such as Google and Amazon, and the top 1% exploit our data. Lanier argues that this trade quite literally disintegrates the middle class and threatens our economy to the degree that it reaches your mortgage, insurance, and healthcare. Join us as we dive into the concepts of this book on a broader scale and consider potential solutions (our own and Lanier’s) that will give ownership and power back to data owners while strengthening the economy at all levels. This book has renewed relevance in the age of Large Language Models like ChatGPT that scrape copyrighted material from the Web with no recompense. Paying creators could be a version of Lanier’s micropayment scheme.

Moderator

J. Craig Wheeler, Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, The University of Texas at Austin

​J. Craig Wheeler is the Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, and Distinguished Teaching Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Texas at Austin and was past Chair of the Department. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. He has published nearly 400 refereed scientific papers, as many meeting proceedings, a professional-level book on supernovae (Supernova Explosions), a popular book on supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and related topics (Cosmic Catastrophes), and two novels (The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending). Wheeler has received many awards for his teaching, including the Regents Award of the University of Texas System. He was a visiting fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory, and a Fulbright Fellow in Italy. He has served on many advisory committees, including those for the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Research Council. He has held many positions in the American Astronomical Society and was President of the Society from 2006 to 2008. His research interests include supernovae, black holes, astrobiology, and the technological future of humanity. He is writing a book currently entitled Wild Ride Ahead: A Primer on our Technological Future.