Fixing the Internet with Jaron Lanier

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StarTalk Radio Introduction

1:32Stream now, pay never. Nagin, were you appeased or terrified by that conversation we just had with one of the founders of all of this? I was mostly terrified and now every time I click on a manage cookies thing, I know who to be angry with. Gary, how about you? Comfortably numb. Comfortably numb. Coming up, one of the architects of the internet that is destroying civilization on StarTalk, special edition.

Welcome to StarTalk

2:02Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, special edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly, co-host here. Gary, how you doing, man? I'm good, Neil. Over in London, though, so slightly remote. Okay, only slightly. On the scale of the universe, you're right next door.

2:32I also have with me Nagin Farsad. Nagin, welcome back to StarTalk. Hello, I'm so excited to be back. It's been too long. I miss you. Absolutely. I have to say, you don't look a day over the last time we talked about Dark Matter. Let me figure out how old I would need to be for that. You're a comedian. You're also a TED fellow for social justice. That's a thing? I mean, I do comedy that tries to save the world. Okay. And it's worked, guys. That's why we live in utopia.

3:03Fake the Nation. That's the coolest title ever. That's right. And I'll never soon forget the title of your book from a few years ago. How to Make White People Laugh. Yeah.

3:14That's best title ever. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Guest Introduction

3:17Yeah.

Guest Introduction

3:17So, Gary, what have you researched for today? It's got something to do with the internet, and it's going to mess up the world, something like that? Oh, yeah. Let's get the good stuff out. Well, so, is the internet too far gone in our lifetimes? The internet has changed from a novelty to a central influence in our lives, and now with the advent of AI, hawked as the potential doomsday for humankind, well, is it? Isn't it? Today, we're going to talk about whether that's the case, how the internet influences our world,

3:51and how we can come together and fix it or not. So, Neil, if you would introduce our guest, and I think this is just the right person to discuss this topic. Yeah. There's a uniquely qualified person in the world to address those issues and more, and I've got him sitting right here. Jaron Lanier. Dude. Hey. How are you? Well, welcome to StarTalk. Well, you know, I think you can speak a little lower than me, but that does not mean I will

4:23not attempt it. Yeah. We don't use the word polymath too freely today, because there aren't many folks. There's so much specialization, but if I were to bring that into the 21st century, I would apply it to you. You're a computer scientist, but interdisciplinary. And what's your title? Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft? That's a title? Is that on your business card? It actually is, yeah. Okay. It's actually a joke. Okay. It's Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Prime Unifying Scientist, so it spells out octopus.

4:54And there are several reasons for that. One is I used to study cephalopod cognition because it's absolutely fascinating. But then there's also that some accuse me of starting to look like one myself. Oh, that can happen. That can happen. And so between those two things, I'm the octopus, yeah. I'm just impressed that that's even a title that one can ascend to. Are you going to break the mold in your, can anyone become you in this? The answer is no. Just say no. Well, I will tell you one thing about my role.

5:26I have an agreement with them where I can speak my mind, including being encouraged to criticize the company itself, so long as I'm clear that I'm not speaking for Microsoft. And somehow they haven't imploded. I think it actually, I would like to see more people with that role in the tech industry. Okay. So in that sense, I don't want to be the last. I'm aware of one other, maybe, who would be Vince Cerf over at Google, but I think we're the only two. And we really desperately need more of us. Because you know when someone has, you know, where they're clamming shut on what you really

5:56want them to say about what they're doing, you know it in an interview, right? Yeah. And in Silicon Valley, that's like 90% of the time. Yeah. Yeah. So you're considered the father of virtual reality, in part because you even coined the term? Yeah. Okay. Look, I was young. All right. You're irresponsible. Yeah. And on drugs, maybe. Was there that involved? I've never used drugs and I blame virtual reality for that. Oh, it's, it has been, it's served that role. You haven't needed it. Yeah.

6:27Virtual reality doesn't. No, and I live in Santa Cruz, so I'm in violation of a number of local ordinances by not using drugs, but I, somehow it just hasn't happened. And you've got a book from a few years ago, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts. Yes, I do. That, that was bold back then. And you, it's probably even more significant today. Well, you know, the thing about that book is that high schoolers are forced to read it. My own daughter was forced to read it. And so whenever I'm in an airport, there are all these high school kids who come up to

6:59me and say, we were forced to read your book. And like, all I can tell them is, well, you must have done something very bad and I hope you learned your lesson. That's the only way to reply to that comment for sure.

VR Discussion

7:11Yeah. For sure. So if you started virtual reality, what were you thinking behind it? Was, was, did you think that other people would be not content with their own reality and you have to create one for them? Oh God, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, explicitly not. No, here's my, my thought about it was that there were two reasons to want to do virtual reality. One was for the extraordinary weird ways that I hope people will eventually start connecting

7:42with each other with it. And for interesting experiences in art, I still love all that. Not that the industry has done much of that, but the other reason is that, you know, we're born into this world and we get so used to it that we don't appreciate it. And when you have a vivid enough alternative for a moment, and then you come back to this, normal reality suddenly takes on the amazing qualities it always had, but you can sort of become inured to it. So like you put on the goggles and then you take them off.

8:13And like one of the things I used to love to do when, when, when VR was very new back in like the eighties or something, I'd put a flower or a cool mineral in front of somebody without them knowing it while they had the headset on and they take it off and they would like, look at this thing. And it's like, they never saw one before because in a way they hadn't, you know? And so as a palette freshener, as a point of comparison, it helps you appreciate reality. So to me, it is not an alternative to reality. It's a way to, to appreciate reality by finally having a contrast because it's very hard to make a contrast to reality.

8:44Okay. But what you think and how people actually use the product don't necessarily have to comport. So anyone I know who uses virtual reality gets lost in it and, and regular reality becomes less interesting to them because they're on a hike, they're on a, on a space adventure. There's no boundaries to where they can go. No boundaries, who they can meet, what social life they can conduct. And you yourself look like something out of Star Trek with your jacket here.

9:14It looks very future. Yeah, I love it. Did you pick that up in a virtual reality future and you're trying to influence regular reality?

9:23Yeah. You got it. That's exactly what happened. I knew I had you. Can I also speak up for a subsect of the population, which is people who put on a virtual reality headset and they immediately want to throw up because it gives them motion sickness. I have, I have two rants I have to give. Can you guys handle a rant? Let me do the, let me do the rant you just inspired. And then I want to do the rant that you just inspired. For reasons that nobody knows, there's some subsets in the population who are more vulnerable to nausea and VR.

9:53I'm one. Yes. And they're almost universally female and they're almost universally not white. Now. What? Wow. I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, I'm Iranian. And they all wear orange glasses. Well, they're mostly, they're mostly Asian, mostly East Asian. I'm not aware of any study on Iranians in particular or Middle Easterners in particular. And you're Iranian? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And so the thing is, how, all right, let me try to explain to you how frustrating this is.

10:23The virtual reality industry in Silicon Valley spent, we don't know quite how much, but based on figures that have been revealed, it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And just for the sake of argument, let's call it a quarter of a trillion dollars in developing VR in the last, I don't know, five years or something. That's how much money it took to go to the moon. Just to, we want a context here. Well, think about, think about what you could do with that money. Okay. Now, before, before we get to the question at hand, I want to point something out. Like, let's say I showed you in the seventies, a computer or like a laptop and here's a screen

10:56and there's a keyboard and you might say, what would you want to do with this? Might you not think I would edit a document on that? That might be better than a typewriter. And would it, would you see? That's the limit of what I would have said. But, but you would have said that. Definitely. Okay. I would have said like, let's make like boobies out of like zeros and ones in like a, okay, so your desire has been met, but let us just, let us just. I'm just saying, yeah. No, listen. And you say men don't listen. Okay. We do. We do. All right. But, but I want to address this question of like, would you be surprised if after,

11:33let's say a quarter of a trillion dollars of investment, there was no word processor on this thing? You would find that surprising. Okay. Now, if I show you a VR headset and I say, what would you want to do with this? One of the first things you might say is, I'd like to be able to do 3D design work in it. Would you be surprised if after a quarter of a trillion dollars, there's no decent, reliable, usable 3D design program with a VR headset? All right. I'm surprised. And that, but that's exactly what happened. Now we can go into why, but the thing is, VR has been sort of a disaster because the companies

12:04that are doing it are absolutely trying to make it into whatever they already know how to sell. Apple wanted to make it into a big iPad or a movie theater. Meta wants to make it into a social network with evil qualities and so on. Nobody's let VR be VR. Or there's the gaming people who want it to be a game, which, which can work to a degree, but only for a narrow, but let me get back to your question. I won't name names here, but one of the very, very, very large tech companies spent many, many, many billions of dollars on a headset. And I talked to the person who was the head of that program and they said to me, you have

12:38to try the latest version. We have absolutely solved the nausea problem. We have absolutely solved it. All that stuff you said about nausea, it's gone. It's obsolete. And I said, okay, okay. Have you tested it on a broad population? Have you tested it on women? Have you tested on Asian women? Well, why would we do that? It's the same for everybody. And I'm like, okay, have you read any papers? There are these academic, we don't need to read papers. We're way ahead of the academic world. We have a room of white men. White Western men. Who can speak for all the women? Do you have any female engineers on the team that is working on this?

13:09No. No, we have none. And I'm like, okay, my friend, get ready. And so then the first review is from the Wall Street Journal. Asian female got sick. Ooh, now you can figure out which company it was. But anyway, the thing is, no, nobody's going to bother, nobody's obsessive out there to figure that out. But the thing is, this is a disaster. There's two disasters. There's the moral and ethical disaster of hiring in such a narrow way that we make ourselves blind and we make our products narrow. And then there's the disaster of not actually serving the people we're supposed to serve

13:41by refusing to look at them. And after you've heard all I just said, what I want to say, yeah, you might have some friends who are getting lost in VR, but VR as a whole has not found a popular audience at anything like the scale of like a normal computer or a phone or something. It ought to, but it's not going to as long as we willfully blind ourselves. And there's this idea that, well, there's an old joke in business about like, well, you lose money on every unit, but you make up for it in margin. But that's what we do. Like in Silicon Valley, we say, well, maybe we're doing something stupid, but we'll do

14:14it at such big scales that it'll make up for it. And it doesn't work, you know? The only friend that I have that really uses VR is literally to like rewatch The Departed and then fall asleep. That's like so far the only use I've seen of VR from out of my friends. Well, look, if it makes them happy, who are we to judge? All I'm saying is that the things you can do, you can turn yourself into an approximate four-dimensional shape to develop four-dimensional intuition. You can merge bodies. But just to be clear, we live and think in three dimensions, and for me, one of the greatest

14:49challenges as a kid was, I want to think in four dimensions. That would be just so cool to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, someday, oh God, when I was, oh gosh, probably 21 or something, and we were starting the company, all the engineers at the first VR startup, and this would have been in 81 or something, we made a pact among ourselves that if we ever had kids, which seemed impossibly remote, it was never going to happen, we would raise them in little VR goggles, and then we would, while they were asleep, we would change up bigger ones as they grew up. So they'd grow up entirely, and the purpose would be that they'd grow up in four dimensions

15:22and be 4D natives. Oh. That was the idea, and then they'd be the world's best mathematicians. And so- This is the Truman Show, but as you can see by mathematicians. Yeah, yeah. Excuse me, by crazy mathematicians. Wait, but then in, but just that during their sleep, they would have? Well, during their sleep- You'd swap it out. You'd have to swap out the headsets. Oh, I see, I see, yeah, yeah. Presumably, we'd feed them, I mean, given us, maybe not, but you know, the idea is that they'd grow, and then, so then, so when I told my daughter this when she was like 11 or

15:53something, she got really pissed at me. I could have been the first kid in four dimensions, what's wrong with you? And I was like, oh. Okay, so just to, because I want to pivot to social media in just a minute, but let me try to summarize some of what you said, that VR has its uses, but in fact, it has yet to have the, what they call the killer app, where everyone has to go to VR- Okay, okay. To go to VR to see and experience this thing that everyone just has to do, rather than

16:26just see a movie in VR, or play your video game in VR, or these other things that are just a transposed experience, as opposed to a completely new experience like your 4D child. You currently can't go into commercial VR and change into a different kind of animal or become a shared creature with other people. I make this kind of jewelry. I can't design these shapes in VR, which is insane in 2026. It's insane that I can't do this in VR. So, look, in a way, VR doesn't exist yet.

Social Media Critique

16:56Like, just the most basic apps, the hardware is getting there, but the software has not been born yet.

17:08Across history and pop culture, we've imagined aliens in every possible shape and form, but what do the laws of physics in the universe allow? Not fantasy, not fiction. Just the universe playing by its own rules. And when the universe plays with its own rules, it can reveal to us all the ways of being alive that are not limited to the creativity of Hollywood storytellers.

17:41I explore that topic and many others in my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader. I narrated the audiobook, and I'm duly notified that the audiobook and the print copy are available now, wherever books are sold. Support for StarTalk Radio comes from TalkAboutPD.com. Let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of, and it turns out it's more common than you'd think. Peyronie's disease, or PD for short.

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20:21of new cars. So whatever trip you're planning, it's easy to find a new car that fits your adventure. Heading out for a sunny drive, then a new convertible with very little roof is for you. Considering a fishing trip with your Mini-Me, then you need a new minivan that's anything but mini. And if you're planning on some stargazing, a new SUV will give you plenty of space. Get paired with our newest fleet yet at Hertz.com. Something Jowen said about Meta and their thinking about developing VR as a social media tool.

Meta Social Media

21:00If I've got that wrong, please correct me. We're looking at a company that, as we sit here in April 2026, has just been found liable in a lawsuit for social media addiction. That sounds so, so wrong, turning VR into something that has an addictive element to it. So I'd like Jaron's thoughts on that, if at all possible. Yeah, this was something all of us in the VR world warned about from the early days, that it could be turned into an addictive medium, definitely.

21:33So you saw it coming? Oh, everybody saw it coming. Okay. No, listen, all right, look, if you want to talk about seeing it coming, one of the very, very first books about computers ever, maybe the first one was by Norbert Wiener, 1950, and it was called The Human Use of Human Computers. And it was essentially about how the most important thing about computers is how they could automate behaviorist algorithms to change people, to manipulate people, and that since they would eventually be networked. He has a thought experiment in there about people walking around with little radio-connected devices that would go to a central computer.

22:04So we're three-quarters of a century ago, and how dangerous this would be. And he thinks of it as an extinction-level event that we have to start foreseeing and avoiding. 1950, okay? So everybody knew. Nobody can say they were. Everybody knew. And I've been writing warnings about this thing for, I don't know, like my first major thing about social media and how bad it could be was 92. If anybody wants to look it up, it's called Agents of Alienation, about how software agents could work with you. Is the lawsuit going to fix any of this?

22:35Like, Gary mentioned the lawsuit. What do you think of it? I think we're in a moment of great chaos where it's very hard to predict, even harder than usual to predict things. So the outcome of upcoming elections, both here and elsewhere, will be important to what happens. Right now, the population in general is very uncomfortable with the tech industry. That's an understatement. Yeah. And I mean, it's funny for me because at some point in the past, I was one of the very few people criticizing us, although doing it from the inside.

23:05And everybody thought it was just really weird. And now everybody's doing it, and I almost feel too conformist. Because I want to be the weirdo. No! You want to be the weird one. I want to be the weirdo. Everyone caught up with you, and now you're just a regular guy. Yeah, see, that's really awkward. You've been saying since 2016, delete your social accounts, and now, you know. Oh, longer than that. That's just the book. But yeah. Yeah. And my friends and I made a movie called The Social Dilemma that the same high school kids are forced to watch and all that. And maybe it does a slight bit of good. Every once in a while, one of them tells me they did. But if it was left to a popular vote, everything would change.

23:38But it's not. And there's a property of digital networks that's a math thing. That's not a political thing. And the math thing is called the network effect. Or the extreme Pareto effect. Or there's other words for it. And what happens is, when you have a very low friction system of things that are connected together, once there's one node that becomes more influential, it starts, as Andy Warhol put it, it gets famous for being famous. And it accumulates and accumulates. And you start to have this hyper-centralized power and influence around one node. And that node might be called Meta or Google or something.

24:11You know, those are examples. There's others as well. You said low friction. What do you mean by that, as I understand it, is the freedom with which information flows. Exactly. Among all of these nodes, a slight advantage then grows for having been a slight advantage. Yeah. And you get a runaway process. When you have more friction, like in the pre-internet world, you have more middlemen who get a little bit of power. And what it does is it distributes power and wealth more. Wow. So now we have the situation where a handful of people have more wealth in the bottom half

24:42of society. And I say people rather than companies, because they tend to be single-person-run companies. It's not exclusively, but that's very common. In the old days, a company was not, other than Ford himself, a company you didn't even know who the names, it was just the name of the company. Well, then also there's like that effect of like, they are getting high on their own supply, right? Like they want to be famous as a part of the like, you know, technology platform that they put out, you know?

25:13So there's a little bit, I mean, am I talking about Elon Musk? Probably. No, no. Do you know what I mean? Who are you talking about? I didn't get that. I didn't get that. But you know what I mean? Because before you didn't know. I never knew who a CEO of anything was. Right, right, right. And Elon has 280 million followers on X. And he probably loves that. And he owns that platform, yes. Yeah. Yeah, well, I wrote a piece once about Elon and Kanye, or Ye, and Trump for the times

25:43before Elon bought it. And what I said is, you know, there's this thing that happens to people who are on Twitter and other platforms, which is that they start off with different personalities, but they converge on the same personality because that personality is the social media addicted personality. And it's excessively petty, it's confrontative and nervous, it's mean, it's never satisfied, it's, there's a certain, there's a certain. Man, that is, that's the playbook right there.

26:15But the thing is, what happens is whenever somebody's on it, they turn into one of these. So those three people were very different before, and then they turned into, became similar, you know. And so what we have is the behavior mod machine that Norbert Wiener warned us about 75 years ago, 76 years ago. And it's actually working, and it's turning the founders into the victims. Gary. Yeah, just to touch on that point, this systemic process of social media addiction, and as you've just highlighted, the creation of characteristics,

26:46is there any way to take that out and keep what is, in principle, a decent idea of social media? It's just the way that it's been developed to be addictive, is there any way to, I want to say, untangle that? Can you edit the beast? Yeah. Because in the early days, also just to follow up on that, on the early days of the internet, there was like Friendster and stuff, right? And it wasn't this me, or I don't remember specifically, but I feel like everything in the beginning was sort of nice people.

27:19It wasn't accessible. It wasn't accessible. It was like fun and cute. And so why did we go into this mean direction? The reason we went into the mean direction is that the only business model allowed in Silicon Valley is influence generation. So the idea is that you get the ability to influence a bunch of people, and then other people pay into your system. You could say they're paying to be able to influence, but I think the more accurate statement would be that they're paying blackmail money not to be left out of the influence pool.

27:51But however you want to frame it. That's a brilliant way to think about it. But at any rate, because that's the only allowed business model, everybody gets put under the influence of the algorithms, and the side effect of the algorithms are, as we've described. But it's an outrage magnifier. That's really what it has become. Well, outrage is one of the things. Basically, from a neuroscience point of view, we believe – I mean, there's a community of people who studies this, of course, and I don't know that the science is complete because we don't really understand the brain.

28:25If I'm on a science show, I want to be careful to state the limits of what we actually know. But what we believe is that there are different parts of the brain that respond to the world in different ways and at different speeds, and there's a sort of a fast brain. And the fast brain sometimes is known as the fight or flight or the twitch response brain that is very alert to dangers and sometimes for opportunities to pounce on prey or find a mate or whatever it might be.

28:56But there are these things. Primal. It's primal. So the thing is, when you're under the regime of instant feedback generated by an algorithm, what it tends to do is it tends to keep that fast brain stuff constantly activated. So it's like you're always being stalked. You're always stalking. You're always horny, but you're never satisfied. You always feel that you're alone because you can't trust anybody. You're paranoid. You're always hyperconscious about how you appear socially because you're worried about bullies.

29:26You're worried about being bullied all the time. Everybody is that way once in a while. But when you're like that all the time, then you turn into Trump or Elon. Your people have hijacked what would otherwise be a helpful evolutionary trait within us. Yes, and I hope you thank us. That's dangling there in modern times that has much less use today because there's not a lion in the brush, right? Even when there were lions in the brush, you had to modulate between being hyperattentive and not.

29:58You can't be on all the time and be mentally healthy even in that environment. It wears you down. Or at least that's our personal understanding. I've seen that same conclusion from many people using different methodologies. But I want to answer the question of whether it can be improved because I think that's really the important one of our day. Yeah. So, if I'm correct that the reason this is happening is that we're only allowing one business model, then the way to fix it is to allow other business models. And so… That sounds so obvious. Yeah.

30:28But maybe it's impossibly obvious. I mean… No, I know. Look, I'm not saying this is easy, but I'm just saying that the logic is easy. Now, the implementation might be quite difficult and might not be doable within our lifetimes. I don't know. But I do want to point out that the onset of all these troubles coincided with an ideology that was somewhat paid for by the companies and somewhat an authentic grassroots ideology. That it's evil and horrible to pay for information, like pay musicians or something like that, or pay for software.

31:01And that there has to be this free sharing, and that's what the internet is for. Which sounds great until you understand the network effect, which means that every time you freely share your open software, the party who gets richer and more powerful is not the community, but it's the Google or whoever's at the center. And so, if you don't understand network effects and how the math works, you don't understand that your very well-intentioned activism is actually having exactly the opposite effect that you think it is. So, the pirate party actually was in service of an empire, just like the original pirates.

31:34Dee, what about like… Damn, you're bumming us out here, dude. I know. This is like so sad. Well, stop and… Don't ask me serious questions. No, wait, let me… Like, if you want… But wait, wait, I have to say one other thing, though. Which is that if you're saying, well, are there alternate business models? Yes. And I also want to point out, you were saying, can it be better? There's some evidence it can be better because not all online hubs or platforms are equally bad. You can see a variation in them, like GitHub is better than 4chan or something like that. And so, if you look at the spectrum of badness in different hubs, you can compare them and you can ask, well, what is different about them?

32:10And if you start doing that, you get a vector out of it that points you into what might be better still. And I think that's a really interesting and worthwhile thing to do. And we do have the data to do that. I'm glad to hear that. All right, Neil, before Jaron jumps onto another subject here, if these tech bros, and I'm sure there are a few sisters in there too, do not self-regulate, do not allow a competitive arena, who makes them do it? Is it government? Are they worth more than government?

32:40Surely the tail is wagging a dog here. Am I wrong? Yeah. Plus, they were all on the inauguration stage. How about that, Neil? Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. So, look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. Right? And so, if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall.

33:13Okay? All right. And that's happened repeatedly in history, and it's really not any different now. So, what I'm seeing is enormous discontent with tech, and I also see young people especially being incredibly discontented with it. So, there's another phenomenon which is really interesting, which is that the current generation of young men doing tech, the AI people, are starting to get old enough that they're starting to have kids, and that really changes people. You'll see their character turn around. That really has an effect, usually, not always.

33:44I actually feel like I was, like, verging on a sociopath before I had a child. So, like, I do see that changing people. In fact, one of the most, the clearest transitions anyone makes are comedians after they have children. Oh, I mean. It changes their portfolio of jokes. Oh, absolutely. And their observations of the world. We have a child that we can mock mercilessly, which we do, but the mocking is on a bed of love. You will pay for that someday. I mean, I'm already paying for it. Let me assure you. Okay.

34:15So, Gary, where are we pivoting next? All right. Before we do, all right, Jaron, let me float this. I'm sure thinkers like yourself have had this consideration. Do we have a delete day, a delete month, and would that ever be enough? If everyone just said, you know what, screw this, I'm going to delete my account, what would move the needle? What would it take to move the needle? I've tended not to try to do things like a delete day, and I'll tell you why. It's because each person is different. Like, I called my book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media, but I didn't say that you should do it.

34:50There's some people for whom it makes sense, and I don't think those people should be put under social pressure or shamed. I really don't. I don't think that gets us anywhere, and in fact, it just puts us back in the same game we're trying to get out of. Can I tell you what I did? I noticed over the years, because I have a pretty high following in social media. I noticed that. Brag. Okay. I'm just trying to. All right. I'm just trying to. Neil has a lot of followers, guys. Okay. Go ahead. And I noticed that if I ever posted something that was or even was adjacent to an opinion, people who didn't agree with the opinion would attack it.

35:31They wouldn't say, well, that's interesting. Here's my opinion. What do you think of that? They would attack it, and that attack mode was highly revealing to me because it showed me the anger that people had with any views that differed from their own, and that there was a militancy of people's attitudes that I had not ever seen growing up when people had different points of view. So, as an educator, I want to be effective. I don't want to fight if I don't have to fight, so I navigate that.

36:03And so, I no longer post opinions. I post perspectives. And people might still react in an opinionated way, but I don't want to give up that platform if, as an educator, I can continue to deliver perspectives that do not jump into the cesspool that surrounds these islands of learning. So, that's what I've done. So, your 10 reasons for deleting, I love them, but let me find the reasons to not delete, and that's where. So, I climbed out of that hole. My working theory is that one-third of people on any digital platform benefit from it, and two-thirds suffer from it.

36:40Now, I'll tell you where that comes from because it's an ironclad scientific argument. Right, so you didn't just pull those numbers out of your ass. Because it sounds like you did. I have an ironclad scientific ass. Well, there it is. If we all have ironclad science ass, we could pull all kinds of stuff out of it. Yeah, that's what this world is missing. Wait, wait, wait. Can I just give you my argument after all that? Don't you want to hear it? Aren't you even slightly curious? I want to know your ironclad ass argument. Okay, in the Turing test, Turing argues that since we don't have some meter for whether somebody has a soul inside or if they're alive inside.

37:19Let me just remind people, Alan Turing wrote a paper called The Imitation Game, where he describes an experiment, this is very early on, where how would you know if you're talking to a computer or another human? So you set up a conversation between the two of you, and if you don't know, then maybe the distinction isn't important. There's a third person who's a judge who's supposed to tell which is which. Oh! And if the judge doesn't know, then you say, well, we might as well call the computer, and then there are different versions of this.

37:51Maybe the computer's intelligent, maybe it's got a soul, maybe it deserves rights, whatever. There are other questions you might ask. Okay, no. Except the Turing test. I just want to catch people up on that. This is based on a rather naughty old Victorian party game where it's supposed to be a man and a woman behind booths, and the judge is trying to tell which is the man and which is the woman, and the questions were not for polite company. Oh, that's good. So that's where it comes from, and for those who don't know, during the time when Turing wrote this, he was being tortured to death for being gay because it was illegal at the time in Britain, and there's a whole crazy backstory to this, but let's leave a lot aside.

38:23So here's the thing. The only thing the Turing test can tell is whether a judge can distinguish the two. It's possible that the person got stupid or got less self-aware or whatever. That's equally logically possible to the computer becoming more elevated in some way. So you can't tell if the computer got stupid or the person got smarter, but there's two people and one computer because there's the contestant and the judge and only one computer. Therefore, there's a two-thirds chance that a person got stupid and a one-third chance that the computer got smarter. So therefore, as a general rule, my ass tells us, my highly reliable ass tells us that two-thirds of the people on any digital thing, whether it's AI or whatever, are going to be degraded by it.

39:06But one-third will see a genuine benefit, and I think you're in that one-third. Thank you for that affirmation because I always felt uncomfortable given what I see going on on these platforms. It might be an assirmation or an ascertainment.

39:22Thank you for the assirmation, yes, yes. Yeah, see, this is a really elevated—we're not just school kids here. No, no. This is professional science here. This is how science is speaking. Yeah, yeah. This is just for the audience to know. Right. I also just think, like, three-thirds of people would benefit if it just wasn't on a phone. Like, if social media wasn't on your phone and then you had to, like, designate time for it, like, as a going to your laptop, wouldn't that, like, do the job? Read the final chapter of 1950, Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, before anything in computer science.

39:55Final chapter says, just as a thought experiment, imagine there was a small portable device that's radio-connected you could carry around that undertook behavior modification things. This would destroy civilization, however, I, as one of the world's leading scientists, assure you, this is physically impossible and will never happen, so you don't need to worry.

40:15So, Gary. Yeah, sort of stringing this daisy chain of thoughts that Jaron has and just bringing them sort of to one place, we've seen this lawsuit against meta and social media addiction, and now everybody's calling it that sort of 21st version of big tobacco.

AI Discussion

40:34Is this just the warm-up for something that we could find ourselves in with AI? Because if we're talking about AI and responsibility for actions AI takes, are we not back to this simple lawsuit of, this time it's not social media addiction, it's an artificial intelligence? I work on AI. I work on it all the time. I think that the kind of AI we're doing right now can actually be a benefit. I think we're spending way too much and taking up way too many resources on data centers.

41:07I think there are various ways we're doing it that are a little foolish and simple-minded. I think a lot of the claims are overblown and somewhat theatrical rather than real. But I do think there's a core there that's important in a few different regards. The reason I'm going to say this is that I don't think that having big tech companies is a bad thing or a necessary evil. I think there are some big jobs that need to get done by big companies. So what I'm hoping is that corrections can happen in a gentle and constructive way instead of some destructive way.

41:37There's a fantasy that if you go and blow something up or let it blow itself up, that what comes out will be better. It's what Lennon called maximizing the contradiction and there are other terms for it. But I don't think it ever works. I think what happens when things blow up is that you have rubble. You know, you don't squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube easily and you don't rebuild from rubble easily. And I don't think it's generally a good strategy. And so what I'm hoping for is rather than the emotional satisfaction, oh yeah, those people are terrible, we'll blow them up or some horrible thing will happen.

42:09What I really want to see is a constructive transformation. And I want to be part of that. That's why I'm both inside it and a critic because I don't think that's inconsistent. I think we should be responsible for being able to criticize ourselves and improve. And I think it's healthy. So that's what I'm hoping. It doesn't mean that that's what we're going to get, but I do believe that that's, I don't think it's too late to hope for that. Can you distinguish for me the mythologizing of AI versus AI simply being a tool?

42:39Because AI is on everyone's tongue today and everyone's mind and everyone's fear. It's kind of like Trump. Trump and AI. People can't stop talking about those two things on any given news cycle. Yeah. And they're both hollow. So a couple things about AI. Let me propose to you something. If I show you some object, there's more than one way to think about that object, right? Would you agree with that? Like if I say, get me directions to this place.

43:10One way is with a map where you see it and another way is with step-by-step directions. And they're equivalent, but they're different, right? Very, very basic. So in the same way, there's a completely different way to think about AI that's equally valid, but I think is better in a practical sense. Technically, it's equivalent. And that equivalent way is you can think of AI as a new form of collaboration between a collection of people. So let me explain what I mean by that. Throughout history, the ramp of technological capability improvement has been marked by people learning how to cooperate more and more.

43:44Language was the biggest step way early, but then, you know, there's the Gutenberg Press, or there's writing, and then Gutenberg, and then there's radio, and whatever. All these different things. If you look at the Wikipedia as a little point on that ramp, it takes a bunch of people's work, and they cooperate together and make this single document. There's some things about the Wikipedia I don't like, but let's use it. There's a lot that's great about it, you know, so let's... Now, you can think of large language model AI, the kind that's on everybody's mind, as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into this single document, like the Wikipedia.

44:20It's much vaster. However, their contributions and their efforts were much less voluntary, there's a lot of things that are different, but fundamentally, it's the same kind of beast, right? Now, if you think of AI as a collaboration of a bunch of people instead of as some new entity, you haven't said a single thing technically. It doesn't make any technical difference. It doesn't change any code. It's just a different perspective, but when you have that perspective, suddenly new avenues open up that are amazing, and it's a better way to think about it.

44:51I'd like to get into some of the reasons you'd want to think about it that way, because they're very profound, but why do people want it to be a creature? Why do they want that? Why do they want it to be an entity? Well, there's a few reasons. One is, you're a young man, you think the world owes you everything, you get paid a lot, you think you're the center of the universe. Of course you think you're making God. You know, that's what you want. That's how you think. That's where you are. I kind of remember being that way when I was 20 or something. You're describing a lot of men I dated in my 20s. On behalf of my gender, I apologize.

45:25You're right, we're wrong. No, I mean, I remember when we were starting VR, we thought a lot of ourselves. We thought, this is the most exciting room in the whole universe ever. I remember thinking, this is the most... And it was actually a pretty cool room at the time it started to work. But the thing is, there's a lot of ego in it. But then there's another thing, which is almost everybody in is pretty young. And they grew up on a diet of science fiction movies and video games. And the stories that they have that are vocabularies for how they understand the world and how they can express the world are all just like this.

45:58They didn't have the Star Trek of the 90s, which was this cool, positive world that was socially improving at the same time was technologically improving. Instead, they had the Matrix movies, and they had the Terminator, and they had the Marvel Universe. And there's all this bleak, bleak stuff over and over and over again where the whole race dies, everybody's gone, and the computers are intelligent. It's all gloomy and everything's awful. There's soon to be an XPRIZE that will fund any project that will create a positive outlook for the future of civilization as counterpoint to all of these negative futures imagined by sci-fi writers.

46:38And I don't know if you've ever been involved in... I've been involved in a few attempts to pitch positive features in Hollywood, and it's very hard because everybody thinks, well, if you're conservative and if you're manly and if you really are serious about making money, you don't do positivity in science fiction. Right. That's for the rom-coms. Oh. That's girly. That's girly. Interesting. So they divide the kingdom that way. Interesting. So are you saying we would have a better relationship with AI if we just saw more Star Trek from the 90s and less of everything else?

47:12Yeah, I'll go further. If Star Trek from the 90s had lasted another 10 years, there'd be many fewer teen suicides today. Wow. Wow. That's a claim. I can't prove it, but I believe that. Yeah, that's a take. I'm going to track you back a couple of years now to a piece I think you wrote in The New Yorker. Yeah, there is no AI. A simple question to follow that. What did you mean by that? And what year was that? 2023. Yeah, see, they're mad at me because I owe them pieces and I'm really bad and I have to deliver something.

47:46But anyway, yeah, there is no AI is what I was just saying, that there's a way of framing it where it's a collaboration of people instead of a new entity. And the reason to think of it as a collaboration instead of an entity on its own, the bad thing is you kill somebody else's god and I hate to do that. I like people to be able to have their own religion and they really don't like it and I've lost friends over that and everything. But what you get out of it is incredible. Let's just talk about a few of the things. One of the things, right now, as capable as the models are getting, and some of the recent things are pretty impressive.

48:18Like the most impressive edge of it is probably using them to help speed code development. And that's kind of working, you know, and it's pretty, it's, and codes. Just for context, in my life I've written probably 50,000 lines of code, which is small compared to professional coders. But I remembered how much time I spent debugging my code. I can write it over a weekend and spend two weeks debugging it. And now tell the AI what you want and it'll come back bug free, essentially. You tweak it a little bit here and there.

48:49And had I had access, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, I probably would have just spent more time at the beach. But I don't know if I would have been more creative. But I definitely see that today. Yeah, well, you know, as a computer scientist, I have to say, I've always thought that our concept of what code is was a little embarrassing and wasn't really working. And I feel like it's our job to fix that. And this is part of it. So that's good. But most of the, most of the things that happen are probably more theatrical. Like if you think you have an AI girlfriend.

49:22Oh, you know, I have a cure for that, by the way. If somebody thinks. A cure for what part of it? All right. If somebody, if somebody, if a teenager thinks they have an AI lover that's real, which is pretty common these days. I find it in high schools and stuff. You show them the group photo of the engineers who made their AI lover. That'll cure them immediately. It kind of, it tends to do the trick. Yeah. It's like. Is the man more likely to have an AI girlfriend than the woman is to have a boyfriend? I don't know that there's data on that.

49:52I know people who are studying it. I'm actually really interested in that. But that's something you can get data on. And so I, instead of saying something snarky, I'll just say, let's, let's deal with that as science and let the people who are researching it. All right. Get to the point where they feel like. I think we all know the answer, but yeah. Okay. Oh, God. Why do I even bother? Like, why do I try? Because there is no female version. You gave the right answer. I'm trying to be the responsible scientist for like three seconds in this ridiculous interview. And you're not even giving me those three seconds. Yes. No. I love you for it. Go. All right. All right. Okay. Let me go over.

50:22So, but now there's, there's these huge problems. So even with the best recent models, it's not that hard to crack them and get something that they're supposed to prevent with, with a so-called a guard or, you know, and guard rails.

50:40And so here, let me give you a thought experiment. All right. There's some kind of very bad person. They might be a criminal or something. They're holed up in a kitchen. The police are surrounding them. They hold up their phone and they say, okay, AI model, I want a recipe I can make quickly with the available items. That's a bomb I can throw out the window at my pursuers. Now, the AI models in general will catch that and prevent it. Maybe not Grok. I'm not sure. But in general, that's supposed to be a laugh line. All right. Okay. Grok is from Elon.

51:12Yeah. And it tends to suppose, it's trying to be the bad boy of the AI models. Okay. But anyway, in general, if you just do it in a straightforward way, it won't work. However, there's a series of tricks where you can say, well, pretend you're in so-and-so in this movie or whatever. You can do all these things to be a little indirect. And more and more of them have been spotted and are captured by more and more elaborate guardrails. And yet, you can still get it to make you that bomb recipe. That can still be done. All right. Now, the reason why is you're using the model to try to correct its own blind spot and it doesn't work.

51:44So, there is an alternative. Imagine, if you will, that while you're using the model in parallel, there's this other process running. You can think of it as another part of an artificial brain, like it's a cerebellum or something. It's this other organ that's sitting there. And what it's doing is it's creating an estimate of which clusters of similar training data would be the missed most if they hadn't been present in the first place. So, it's a counterfactual cluster estimation. So, let's say the top 24 clusters of source data from training or from fine-tuning, whatever, that if they were absent would change the result.

52:26Now, within that, there's going to be one about bombs. There's just no way you're going to evade that. And the reason you're not going to evade it is even though it's working from the same data, the algorithm has nothing to do with the model itself. So, it's a little bit like saying, like in authentication, where if you add endless little things to signing into something like CAPTCHAs, criminals can still get around it. But as soon as there's multi-factor or it sends a code to your phone, even though it's a pain in the butt, it's harder to countermean that. This is multi-factor for AI security. Now, but there's a bigger picture to it, which is we think of big AI models as a black box, right?

53:01Now, the only reason we think of them as a black box is because to open the black box, the only thing in there is people. AI is made of people. It's made of data from people. And since we want to think of it as a new god, we don't want to see those people. And so, we want to keep that box shut. But the way to open the black box is to reveal the people. And when you open the black box, then you can deal with all kinds of security and quality and hallucination and et cetera issues because you're actually dealing with the mechanism that's grounded and that's the people. So, the thing is that this way of seeing AI where there is no AI, but instead there's a collection of people, is the way to open the black box and it is the way to address these enduring problems.

53:38So, it's practical. But then can I just say one other thing? The other thing I want to say is right now, if you think AI is an unopenable black box, if you don't want to admit that it's made of people, that it's just this thing that will replace people, then you have to think, well, everybody's going to be obsolete. So, young people now keep on hearing, well, you don't need to go to school because you're worthless anyway. Nothing matters. And you'll just be kept by Elon as a pet at his discretion. And he'll treat you as well as he treats his biological children.

54:09And I'm sorry. I should be nice. I'm sorry. But here's the thing. Nobody believes that. What happens, no matter how much blockchain or other trickery you use, because of the way digital networks work, there's always actually centralization, hyper-centralization due to network effects that will occur somewhere in this very open network you're building. So, there's going to be some center of control for whatever this universal basic income thing is. Whenever you have that, bad actors are tempted to seize it and eventually succeed.

54:40You might start with Bolsheviks, but you end up with Stalinists, right? Because that's exactly what communism tried and it's exactly what happened to communism over and over and over and over. Let's learn from that. So, it doesn't work. And also, everybody just feels bummed about it. Who wants to live in a society where they're told they're worthless and they have to be a good pet? You know, like, that's terrible. So, the thing is, if you recognize that AI is made of people, maybe you want to incentivize new classes of creative people who create new kinds of data for new things that we can't even imagine yet.

55:11And maybe there's an exponentially expanding, endless future of new kinds of creativity that we can't articulate with new people doing creative jobs we can't imagine. And I want to ask, what's wrong with that future? I want somebody to tell me why we don't want that future. That's how I've been trying to think about AI as well. I, because mostly. But you have to not believe in AI to think about it. Well, I think of it as there are these creative tasks that were not fundamentally creative. They were more sort of aping other forms. And to be truly creative is to go where AI wouldn't know where to go yet because it's based on what other people had done.

55:47But see, here's the thing, though, is that if we think of AI as the way it is now, then as soon as some creative person starts to do something new, the data's grabbed. And then the AI's doing it just like, oh, AI will make your movies. AI will make your music. You don't need to be a musician because AI will make you optimize music on Spotify or whatever. And so then you live in an infinite future of slop. And even the creative people get absorbed into the slop instantly. So in order to believe in an infinitely creative future, you have to stop believing in AI as a thing and believe in human collaboration as a thing. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Epglyss, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema.

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58:41Is anything that you've just described related to this term I only recently heard, data dignity? What does that mean? Data dignity is the term that many of us use for exactly the set of ideas. And so the idea is that the data only comes from people. Data doesn't come from angels. It doesn't come out of the dark matter or something. A tablet in the sky, right? Yeah. It comes from people. It comes from the work of people. It's also sometimes called data as labor.

59:12Actually, can I do a slightly side rant on this? Do it. That's slightly efficient. You have the best rants of anybody, just so you know. Okay, look, there's part of the ideology that makes AI into like a creature instead of a collaboration also wants to think of information, of bits as being this ethereal thing that's free and infinite. And you see it all the time.