While COBOL has not gone away at the banks, more and more of the technical staff spend their time programming new features and interfaces in modern languages and web application frameworks that provide highly applicable and transferable skills to startups only too happy to hire them for their technical training and domain experience.
Jaron Lanier has been known for decades as one of the pioneers of virtual reality, and it's very hard to argue his importance in much of the early development of computers, interfaces, and the World Wide Web.