Dawn of the New Everything

Jaron Lanier, the interdisciplinary scientist credited with the term virtual reality, mixes memoir, science writing and philosophy to tell the story of his life in technology. He starts with a childhood in the UFO country of New Mexico and the loss of his mother, then moves through a start-up he founded and his later standing as a technology figure. Along the way he explains what virtual reality reveals about how the brain and body relate to the world around them, and treats it as a cultural project as much as a scientific one. Unlike his earlier, more critical books on social media, he argues here that VR can make human lives fuller.

Satya Nadella had it on his summer reading, according to a roundup of books CEOs planned to read that season, which judged from his picks that virtual reality seemed to be among his interests.