Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218

the following is a conversation with jaron lanier a computer scientist visual artist philosopher writer futurist musician and the founder of the field of virtual reality to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description as a side note you may know that jiren is a staunch critic of social media platforms him and i agree on many aspects of this except perhaps i am more optimistic about it being possible to build better platforms and better artificial intelligence systems that put long-term interests and happiness of human beings first let me also say a general comment about these conversations i try to make sure i prepare well remove my ego from the picture and focus on making the other person shine as we try to explore the most beautiful and insightful ideas in their mind this can be challenging when the ideas that are close to my heart are being criticized in those cases i do offer a little pushback but respectfully and then move on trying to have the other person come out looking wiser in the exchange i think there's no such thing as winning in conversations nor in life my goal is to learn and to have fun i ask that you don't see my approach to these conversations as weakness it is not it is my attempt at showing respect and love for the other person that said i also often just do a bad job of talking but you probably already knew that so please give me a pass on that as well this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with jaron lanier you're considered the founding father of virtual reality do you think we will one day spend most or all of our lives in uh virtual reality worlds i have always found the very most valuable moment in virtuality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality uh afresh you know as if you were a newborn baby but with a little more experience so you can really notice just how incredibly strange and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is um so the magic is and perhaps forever will be in the physical world well that's my take on it that's just me i mean i think i don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtuality and at this point there have been multiple generations of younger people who've come along and liberated me from having to worry about these things uh but i i should say also even in what some well i called it mixed reality back in the day and these days it's called augmented reality uh but with something like a hololens even then like one of my favorite things is to augment a forest not because i think the forest needs augmentation but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree the real tree just pops out as being astounding you know it's it's interactive it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention and it's hard to pay attention to that but when you compare it to virtual reality all of a sudden you do and even in practical applications uh my my favorite early application of virtuality which we prototyped going back to the 80s when i was working with dr joe rosen at stanford med near near where we are now we made the first surgical simulator and to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation which is incredibly valuable for many things for designing procedures for training for all kinds of things then to go to the real person boy it's really something like uh surgeons really get woken up by that transition it's very cool so i think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation that's fascinating i never really thought about that it's almost it's like traveling elsewhere in the physical space can help you appreciate how much you value your home once you return well that's how i take it i mean once again people have different attitudes towards it all are welcome what do you think is the difference between the virtual world and the physical meat space world that that you are still drawn for you personally still drawn to the physical world like there clearly then is a distinction is there some fundamental distinction or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology in terms of the kind of virtuality that we have now uh it's made of software and software is terrible stuff yeah software is always the slave of its own history its own legacy it's always um infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary working with it brings out a certain kind of nerdy personality in people or at least in me which um i'm not that fond of and there are all kinds of things about software i don't like and so that's different from the physical world it's not something we understand as you just pointed out on the other hand you know i'm a little mystified when people ask me well do you think the universe is a computer and i have to say well i mean what on earth could you possibly mean if you say it isn't a computer if it isn't a computer it wouldn't follow principles consistently and it wouldn't be intelligible because what else is a computer ultimately you know i mean and we have physics we have technology you know so we can do technology so we can program it so i mean of course it's some kind of computer but i think trying to understand it as a turing machine is probably a foolish approach right that's the question whether it performs this computer we call the universe performs the kind of computation that can be modeled as a universal touring machine or is it something much more fancy so fancy in fact that we it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand turing machines are kind of um i'd call them teases in a way because like if you have an infinitely smart programmer with an infinite amount of time an infinite amount of memory and an infinite clock speed then they're universal but yeah that cannot exist so they're not universal in practice and they they actually are in practice a very particular sort of machine within you know the constraints within the conservation principles of any reality that's worth being in probably and so so i i uh i think the universality of a particular model is probably a deceptive way to think even though at some sort of limit of course it's can it something like that's got to be true at some sort of high enough limit but it's just not accessible to us so what's the point well to me the question of like whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation is interesting in the following way there's a technical question is here how difficult is it to build a machine not that simulates the universe but that makes it sufficiently realistic that we wouldn't know the difference or better yet sufficiently realistic that we would kind of know the difference but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway i want to give you a few different answers i want to give you the one that i think has the most practical importance to human beings right now which is that there's a kind of an assertion sort of built into the way the questions usually ask that i think is false which which is a suggestion that people have a fixed level of ability to perceive reality in in a given way and actually people are always learning evolving forming themselves we're fluid too we're also programmable self-programmable changing adapting and so uh my favorite way to get at this is to talk about the history of other media so for instance there was a peer review paper that showed that an early wire recorder playing back an opera singer behind a curtain was indistinguishable from a real opera singer and so now of course to us it would not only be distinguishable but it would be very blatant because the the recording would be horrible but to the people at the time without the experience of it it seemed plausible there was an early demonstration of extremely crude video teleconferencing between new york and dc in the 30s i think so that people viewed as being absolutely realistic and indistinguishable which to us would be horrible uh and there are many other examples another one one of my favorite ones is in the civil war era there were itinerant photographers who collected photographs of people who just looked kind of like a few archetypes so you could buy a photo of somebody who looked kind of like your loved one to remind you of that person because actually photographing them was inconceivable and hiring a painter was too expensive and you didn't have any way for the painter to represent them remotely anyway how would they even know what they looked like so these are all great examples of how in the early days of different media we perceived the media as being really great but then we evolved through the experience of the media this gets back to what i was saying maybe the greatest gift of photography is that we can see the flaws in a photograph and appreciate reality more maybe the greatest gift of audio recording is that we can distinguish that opera thing on our singer now from that recording of the opera singer on the horrible wire recorder so so we're we we shouldn't limit ourselves by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect so that's the first thing that's my first answer which is i think the most important one now of course somebody might come back and say oh but you know technology can go so far there must be some point at which would surpass that's a different question i i think that's also an interesting question but i think the answer i just gave you is actually the more important answer to the more important question that's profound yeah but can you can you the second question which you're now making me realize is way different is it possible to create worlds in which people would want to stay instead of the real world well like um i unmask like large numbers of numbers of people uh what i hope is you know as i said before i hope that the experience of virtual worlds helps people appreciate this this physical world we have and feel tender towards it and and uh keep it from getting too fucked up that's my hope um do you see all technology in that way so basically technology helps us appreciate the more sort of technology-free aspect of life well media technology you know i mean i i you can stretch that i mean you can let me say i could definitely play mcluhan and turn this into a general theory it's totally doable the program you just described is totally doable um in fact i will psychically predict that if you did the research you could find 20 phd theses that do that already yeah i don't i don't know but they might exist but i i don't know how much value there is in pushing a particular idea that far claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense seems incoherent to me because we have we can program it we have technology it has it seems to obey physical laws what more do you want from it to be a computer i mean it's a computer of some kind we don't know exactly what kind we might not know how to think about it we're working on it but uh sorry to interrupt but you're absolutely right like that's my fascination with the ai as well is it uh helps in the case of ai i see it as a set of techniques that help us understand ourselves understand us humans in the same way virtual reality and you're putting it brilliantly which it's a it's a way to help us understand reality sure appreciate and open our eyes more richly to reality that's that's certainly how i see it and i i wish people who become incredibly fascinated who go down the rabbit hole of uh the different fascinations with whether we're in a simulation or not or you know that there's a whole world of variations on that um i wish they'd step back and think about their own motivations and exactly what they mean you know what and and i think the danger with these things is um so if you say is the universe some kind of computer broadly it has to be because it's not coherent to say that the uh that it isn't on the other hand to say that that means you know anything about what kind of computer that's something very different and the same thing is true for the brain the same thing is true for anything where you might use computational metaphors like we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand and the problem i have with these framings of computation as these ultimate cosmic questions is that it has a way of getting people to pretend they know more than they do can you maybe um this is a therapy session psychoanalyze me for a second i really like the elder scrolls series it's a role-playing game uh skyrim for example why do i enjoy so deeply just walking around that world and then there's people you could talk to and you can just like it's an escape but you know my my life is awesome i'm truly happy but i also am happy with the with the music that's playing and the and the mountains and uh carrying around a sword and just that i don't know what that is it's very pleasant though to go there and i miss it sometimes i think it's wonderful to love artistic creations it's wonderful to love contact with other people it's wonderful to love play and ongoing evolving meaning and patterns with other people i think it's uh it's a good thing you know i'm not i'm not like anti-tech and i'm certainly not anti digital tech i'm anti as everybody knows by now i think the you know manipulative economy of social media is making everybody nuts and all that so i'm anti that stuff but the core of it of course i worked for many many years on trying to make that stuff happen because i think it can be beautiful like i um i don't like why not you know and and by the way um there's a thing about humans which is um uh we're problematic any any kind of social interaction with other people is gonna have its problems people are political and tricky and like i love classical music but when you actually go to a classical music thing and it turns out oh actually this is like a backroom power deal kind of place and a big status ritual as well and that's kind of not as fun that's part of the package and the thing is it's always going to be there's always going to be a mix of things um i i don't uh i don't think the search for purity is going to get you anywhere so i'm not worried about that i worry about the the really bad cases where we're becoming where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough that we might not survive and i think you know the social media criticism rises to that level but i'm glad you enjoyed it i think it's great and i like that you basically say that every experience has both beauty and darkness as in with classical music i also play classical piano so i appreciate it very much but it's interesting i mean every and even the darkness a man's search for meaning with victor franco and uh in concentration camps even there there's opportunity to discover beauty now and so it's that's that's the interesting thing about humans is the capacity to discover uh beautiful in the darkest of moments but there's always the dark parts too well i mean it's our situation is structurally difficult we are um actually no it is it's true we perceive socially we depend on each other for our sense of place and and perception of the world i mean we're dependent on each other and yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably um we never really let each other down uh we are set up to be competitive as well as supportive i mean it's a it's just our fundamental situation is complicated and challenging and i wouldn't have it any other way okay let's talk about one of the most challenging things one of the things i unfortunately am very afraid of being human allegedly you wrote an essay on death and consciousness in which you write a note certainly the fear of death has been one of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought and in the formation of the character of civilization and yet it is under acknowledged the great book on the subject the denial of death by ernest becker deserves a reconsideration i'm russian so i have to ask you about this what's the role of death and life see you would have enjoyed coming to our house because uh my wife is russian and we also have we have a piano of such spectacular qualities you wouldn't you would have freaked out but anyway we'll let all that go so the context in which i remember that essay uh sort of this was from maybe the 90s or something and um i used to publish in a journal called the journal of consciousness studies because i was i was interested in these endless debates about consciousness and science which certainly continued today and i was interested in how the fear of death and the denial of death played into different philosophical approaches to consciousness because i uh i think on the one hand uh this sort of sentimental school of dualism meaning the feeling that there's something apart from the physical brain some kind of soul or something else is obviously motivated in a sense by a hope that that whatever whatever that is will survive death and continue and that's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions not all of them not not really but you know uh most of them um the thing i noticed is that the the opposite of those which might be the sort of hardcore no the brain's a computer and that's it in a sense we're motivated in the same way with a remarkably similar chain of of uh of arguments which is no i the brain's a computer and i'm going to figure it out in my lifetime and upload it upload myself and i'll live forever that's interesting yeah that's that's like the implied thought right yeah and so it's kind of this in a funny way it's it's the same thing it's uh um it's peculiar that you to notice that these people who would appear to be opposites in character and cultural references and uh uh and in their ideas actually are remarkably similar and and to to to an incredible degree this sort of hardcore uh computationalist idea about uh the brain has turned into medieval christianity with together like there's a they're the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong thought you'll piss off the super ais of the future who will come back and zap you and and all that stuff yeah it's like it's really it's really turned into medieval christianity all over again uh this is so the ernest becker's idea that death the fear of death is the warm at the core which is like that's the that's the core motivator of everything we see humans have created the question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core it's like a prerequisite so what you just you just moved across this vast cultural chasm uh that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way and i can't answer what you just said on the level without this huge deconstruction yes should i do it yes what's the chasm okay let us travel across this vessel okay i don't believe in ai i don't think there's any ai there's just algorithms we make them we control them now they're tools they're not creatures now this is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way and don't i know it when i was young my main mentor was marvin minsky who's the principal author of the computer as creature rhetoric that we still use uh he was the first person to have the idea at all but he certainly populated the ai culture with most of its tropes i would say because a lot of stuff people will say oh did you hear this new idea about ai and i'm like yeah i heard it in 1978 sure yeah i remember that so marvin was really the person and uh marvin and i used to argue all the time about the stuff because i always rejected it and of all of his um of all of his uh i wasn't formally his student but i worked for him as a researcher but of of all of his students and student-like people of his young adoptees um i think i was the one who argued with him about this stuff in particular and he loved it because yeah i would have loved to hear that conversation it was fun did you ever converse to a place oh no no so the very last time i saw him he was quite frail and and uh i was in uh in boston and i was going to the old house in brookline his amazing house and one of our mutual friends said hey listen marvin's so frail don't do the argument with him don't argue about ai you know and so i said but marvin loves that and so i showed up and he's like he was frail he looked up and he said are you ready to argue he's such an amazing person so um it's hard to summarize this because it's decades of stuff the first thing to say is that nobody can claim absolute knowledge about whether somebody or something else is conscious or not this is all a matter of faith and in fact um i think the whole idea of faith needs to be updated so it's not about god but it's just about stuff in the universe we we have faith in each other being conscious and then um i used to frame this as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers and then um it turned into a thing for the animal rights movement so i noticed peter singer using it i don't know if it was coincident or but anyway we there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself and the stuff inside is more like you might be conscious might be deserving of your empathy of your consideration and the stuff outside the circle isn't and um outside the circle might be a rock or i don't know uh so uh and that circle is fundamentally based on faith well your faith and what is and what isn't the thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith it also has it's also a pragmatic decision and this is where things get complicated if you try to make it too big you suffer from incompetence if you say i don't want to kill a bacteria i will not brush my teeth i don't know like what do you do yeah like you know like there's a there's a competence question where you do have to draw the line people who make it too small become cruel people are so clanished and political and so worried about themselves ending up on the bottom of society that they are always ready to gang up on some designated group and so there's always these people who are being tried we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle and so aren't you shoving ai outside the circle well give me a second all right so so there's a pragmatic consideration here yeah and so uh and and uh the the biggest questions are probably fetuses and animals lately but ai is getting there now with ai i think uh and i've had this discussion so many times people say but aren't you afraid if you exclude ai you'd be cruel to some consciousness and then i would say well if you include ai you make yourself you you exclude yourself from being able to be a good engineer or designer and so you're facing incompetence immediately so like i really think we need to subordinate algorithms and be much more skeptical of them your intuition you speak about this brilliantly with social media how things can go wrong isn't it possible uh to design systems that that show compassion not to manipulate you but give you control and make your life better if you so choose to like grow together with systems and the way we grow with dogs and cats with pets with significant others in that way they grow to become better people i i don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible you're saying oftentimes you get into trouble by thinking you know what's good for people look there's this question of what framework we're speaking in um do you know who alan watts was so alan watts once said morality is like gravity that in some absolute cosmic sense there can't be morality because at some point it all becomes relative and who are we anyway like morality is relative to us tiny creatures but here on earth we're with each other this is our frame and morality is a very real thing same thing with gravity at some point you know you get you get into interstellar space and you might not feel much of it but here we are on earth and and i think in the same sense um i think this this identification with a frame that's quite remote cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel sort of separate separate from and superior to other people or something like that there's there's an impulse behind it that i really have to reject and we're just not competent yet to talk about these kinds of absolutes okay so i agree with you that a lot of technologists sort of lack this basic respect uh understanding and love for humanity there's a separation there the thing i'd like to push back against it's not that you disagree but i believe you can create technologies and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer that does build systems that respect humanity not just respect but admire humanity that have empathy for common humans have compassion i mean no no no i i think yeah i mean i think musical instruments are a great example of that musical instruments are technologies that help people connect in fantastic ways and that's uh a great example um my uh my invention or design during the pandemic period was this thing called together mode where people see themselves seated sort of in a a classroom or a theater instead of in squares and it allows them to semi-consciously perform to each other as if they're as if they have proper eye contact as if they're paying attention to each other non-verbally and weirdly that turns out to work and so it promotes empathy so far as i can tell i hope i hope it is of some use to somebody uh the ai idea isn't really new um i would say it was born with adam smith's invisible hand with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing and it gets a bit beyond us and then we think it must be smarter than us and the thing about the invisible hand is absolutely everybody has some line they draw where they say no no no we're going to take control of this thing they might have different lines they might care about different things but everybody ultimately became a keynesian because it just didn't work it really wasn't that smart it was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed you know and and and so if you really you know people who really really really want to believe in the invisible hand is infinitely smart screw up their economies terribly you have to you know you have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool everybody does when it's to their advantage they might not when it's not to their advantage that's kind of an interesting game that happens but the thing is it's just like that with our algorithms you know like uh you you can uh you can have a sort of a chicago you cannot you know economic philosophy about your computer say no no no my things come alive it's smarter than anything i think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us this is what we seek we seek love from each other i think ai can help us connect deeper like this this is what you criticize social media for i think there's much better ways of doing social media that doesn't lead to manipulation but instead released a deeper connection between humans leads to you becoming a better human being and what that requires is some agency on the part of ai to to be almost like a therapist i mean a companion it's not telling you what's right it's not guiding you as if it's an all-knowing thing it's just another companion that you can leave at any time you you have complete transparency control over there's a lot of mechanisms that you can have that that are counter to how current social media uh operates that i think is subservient to humans or no deeply respects human beings and it's empathetic to their experience and all those kinds of things i think it's possible to create ai systems like that and i think they i mean that's a technical discussion of whether they need to have something that looks like more like ai versus algorithms something that has a identity something that has a personality all those kinds of things ai systems and you've spoken extensively how ai systems manipulate you within social networks and that's the biggest the biggest problem isn't necessarily that um there's advertisement that uh you know social networks present you with advertisements that then get you to buy stuff that's not the biggest problem the biggest problem is they then manipulate you your they alter like your human nature to get you to buy stuff or or to get you to um do whatever the advertiser wants or maybe you can correct yeah i i don't see it quite that way but we can work with that as an approximation sure so my i think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous and stupider than that but that's that's okay let's let's so my question is let's not use the word ai uh but how do we fix it oh fixing social media um that diverts us into this whole other field in my view which is economics which i always thought was really boring but we have no choice but to turn into economists if we want to fix this problem because it's all about incentives but um i've been around this thing since it started and and uh i've been in the meetings where the social media companies sell themselves to the people who put the most money into them which are usually the big advertising holding companies and whatnot and there's this there's this idea that i think is kind of a fiction and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody that the the algorithm will get really good at getting people to buy something because i think people have looked at their returns and looked at what happens and everybody recognizes that's not exactly right it's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment at this point like you just to be connected you're paying the money it's not so much that the persuasion algorithms that so stanford renamed its program but it used to be called engage persuade the engaged part works the persuade part is iffy but the thing is that once people are engaged in order for you to exist as a business in order for you to be known at all you have to put money in it's a giant it's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme at this point so um because the science behind the persuade part it's not entirely it's not entirely uh a failure but it's it's not what the there's we play make believe that it it works more than it does um the damage doesn't come honestly as i've i've said in my books i'm not anti-advertising i actually think advertising can be demeaning and annoying and banal and ridiculous and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff like there's a lot of ways to criticize that um advertising that's accurate and it can also lie and all kinds of things however if i look at the biggest picture i think advertising at least as it was understood before social media helped bring people into modernity in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall and you might say am i contradicting myself because i was saying you should manipulate people yeah i am probably here i mean i'm not i'm not pretending to have this perfect airtight world view without some contradictions i think there's a bit of a contradiction there so you know well looking at the long arc of history advertisement has as in some parts benefited society yeah because it funded some efforts that perhaps yeah i mean i think like there's a there's a thing where uh sometimes i think it's actually been of some use now let's where the damage comes is a different thing though social media um algorithms on social media have to work on feedback loops where they present you with stimulus they have to see if you respond to the stimulus now the the problem is that the the measurement mechanism for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop is very very crude it's things like whether you click more or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more if there's a forward-facing camera that's activated but typically there isn't so you have this incredibly crude back channel of information and so it's crude enough that it only catches sort of the more dramatic responses from you and those are the fight-or-flight responses those are the things where you get scared or pissed off or aggressive or horny you know these are these ancient the sort of what are sometimes called the lizard brain circuits or whatever you know these these fast response old old old evolutionary business circuits that we have that are helpful in survival once in a while but are not us at our best they're not who we want to be they're not how we relate to each other they're this old business but it's so then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically totally aside from whatever the topic is you start to get incrementally just a little bit more paranoid xenophobic aggressive you know you get a little stupid and like a you become a jerk and it happens slowly it happens it's not it's not like everybody's like instantly transformed but it does kind of happen progressively where people who get hooked kind of get drawn more and more into this pattern of being at their worst would you say that people are able to when they get hooked in this way look back at themselves from 30 days ago and say i am less happy with who i am now or i'm not happy with who i am now versus who i was 30 days ago are they able to self-reflect when you take yourself outside of the lizard brain sometimes um i wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens and maybe even it was actually the title of the book was just the arguments to delete your account yeah and 10 arguments 10 arguments although i always said i don't know that you should i can give you the arguments it's up to you i'm always very clear about that but you know i get like i don't have a social media account obviously and it's not that easy for people to reach me they have to search out an old-fashioned email address on a super crappy antiquated website like it's it's actually a bit i don't make it easy and even with that i get this huge flood of mail from people who say oh i quit my social media i'm doing so much better i can't believe how bad it was but the thing is what's for me a huge flood of mail would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective of facebook right and so uh i think it's rare for somebody to look at themselves and say oh boy i sure screwed myself over well it's a really hard thing to ask of somebody none of us find that easy right well the reason that's hard the reason i ask this is is it possible to design social media systems that optimize for some longer term metrics of you huge being happy with yourself personal i don't think you should try to engineer personal growth or happiness i think what you should do is design a system that's just respectful of the people and subordinates itself to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives and then at least there's a chance of something decent happening you have to recommend stuff right so but so you're saying like be respect what does that actually mean engineering-wise like people yeah curation people have to people have to be responsible algorithms shouldn't be recommending algorithms don't understand enough to recommend algorithms are crap in this era i mean i'm sorry they are like i and i'm not saying this as somebody as a critic from the outside i'm in the middle of it i know what they can do i know the math i know what the corpora are i'm you know i know the best ones our office is funding gpt3 and all these things that are that are you know at the at the edge of what's possible and they do not have yet i mean it still is statistical emergent pseudosemantics it doesn't actually have deep representation emerging of anything it's just not like i mean that i'm speaking the truth here and you know it well let me push back on this this uh there's several truths here so one you're speaking to the way certain companies operate currently i don't think it's outside the realm of what's technically uh feasible to do they're just not incentive like companies are not why fix this thing i am aware that for example the youtube search and discovery has been very helpful to me and there's a huge number of there's so many videos that it's nice to have a little bit of help have you done but i'm still in control let me ask you something have you done the experiment of letting youtube recommend videos to you either starting from a absolutely anonymous random place where it doesn't know who you are or from knowing who you or somebody else is and then going 15 or 20 hops have you ever done that and just let it go top video recommend and then just go 20 hops no i know i've done that many times now i have because of how large youtube is and how widely it's used it's very hard to get to enough scale to get a statistically solid result on this i've done it with high school kids with dozens of kids doing it at a time every time i've done an experiment the majority of times after about 17 or 18 hops you end up in really weird paranoid bizarre territory because ultimately that is the stuff the algorithm rewards the most because of the feedback crudeness i was just talking about so uh i'm not saying that the video never recommends something cool i'm saying that it's fundamental core is one that promotes a paranoid style that promotes increasing irritability that promotes xenophobia promotes fear anger promotes selfishness promotes separation between people uh and i would encoura the thing is it's very hard to do this work solidly many have repeated this experiment and yet it still is kind of anecdotal i'd like to do like a large you know citizen science thing sometime and do it but then i think the problem with that is youtube would detect it and then change it yes i definitely say i love that kind of stuff on twit so jack dorsey has spoken about uh doing healthy conversations on twitter or optimizing for healthy conversations what that requires within twitter are most likely citizen experiments of what does how the conversation actually look like and what how do you incentivize those healthy conversations you're describing what often happens and what is currently happening what i'd like to argue is it's possible to strive for healthy conversations not in a dogmatic way of saying uh i know what healthy conversations are and i will tell you i think one way to do this is to try to look around at social maybe not things that are officially social media but things where people are together online and see which ones have more healthy conversations even if it's hard to be completely objective in that measurement you can kind of at least cruelly you could do subjective annotation of this like having so here crowdsourced yeah one that i've been really interested in is github because um uh it could change i'm not saying it'll always be but for the most part github has had a relatively quite low poison quotient and i think there's a few things about github that are interesting one thing about it is that people have a stake in it it's not just empty status games there's actual code or there's actual stuff being done and i think as soon as you have a real world stake in something you have a motivation to not screw up that thing and i think that that's often missing that there's a there's no incentive for the person to really preserve something if they if they get a little bit of attention from um dumping on somebody's tick tock or something that there's they don't pay any price for it but on you have to kind of get decent with people when you have a shared stake you know a little secret so get so github does a bit of that um github was wonderful yes but i yeah i'm tempted to play uh the gerund back at you which is that so github is currently is amazing but the thing is if you have a stake then if it's a social media platform they can use the fact that you have a steak to manipulate you because you want to preserve the steak so like right well this is why this all right this gets us into the economics so there's this thing called data dignity that i've been studying for a long time i wrote a book about an earlier version of it called who owns the future um and the the basic idea of it is that once again this is the third year conversation the fascinating topic let me do the fastest version of this i can do the fastest way i know how to do this is to compare two features all right so future one is then the normative one the one we're building right now and future two is going to be data dignity okay and um and i'm gonna use a particular population i live on the hill and berkeley and one of the features about the hill is that as the climate changes we might burn down and i'll lose our houses or die or something like it's it's dangerous you know and it didn't used to be and so um who keeps us alive well the city does the city does some things the electric company kind of sort of maybe hopefully better individual people who own property take care of their property that's all nice but there's this other middle layer which is fascinating to me which is that the groundskeepers who work up and down that hill many of whom are not legally here many of whom don't speak english cooperate with each other to make sure trees don't touch to transfer fire easily from la to lot they have this whole little web that's keeping us safe i didn't know about this at first i just started talking to them because they were out there during the pandemic and so i try to just see who are these people who are these people who are keeping us alive now i want to talk about the two different faiths for those people under future one and future two future one um some weird like kindergarten paint job van with all these like cameras and where things drives up observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing a few years later some amazing robots that can shimmy up trees and all this show up all those people are out of work and there are these robots doing the thing and the robots are good and they can scale to more land and they're actually good but then they're all these people out of work and these people have lost dignity they don't know what they're going to do and and then somebody say well they go on basic income whatever they become wards of the state my problem with that solution is every time in history that you've had some centralized thing that's stoling out the benefits that things get seized by people because it's too centralized and it gets seized that's happened to every communist experiment i can find um so i think that turns into a poor future that will be unstable i don't think people will feel good in it i think it'll be a political disaster with the sequence of people seizing this central source of the the basic income and you'll say oh no an algorithm can do it then people will seize the algorithm they'll see they'll seize control unless the algorithm is decentralized and it's impossible to cease to control yeah but but uh 60 something people own a quarter of all the bitcoin like like the things that we think are decentralized are not decentralized so let's go to future two future two the gardeners see that that van with all the cameras and the kindergarten paint job and they say with the groundskeepers and they say hey the robots are coming we're gonna form a data union and amazingly california has a little baby data union law emerging in the books yes and so there's and so they'll um and and what they say they say we're gonna form we're gonna form a data union and we're gonna not only are we gonna sell our data to this place but we're going to make it better than it would have been if they were just grabbing it without our cooperation and we're going to improve it we're going to make the robots more effective we're going to make them better and we're going to be proud of it we're going to become a new class of experts that are respected and then here's the interesting there's two things that are different about that world from future one one thing of course the people have more pride they have more sense of of ownership of uh of of of agency but what the robots do changes uh instead of just like this functional like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood from burning down uh you have this whole creative community that wasn't there before thinking well how can we make these robots better so we can keep on earning money there'll be waves of creative uh groundskeeping with spiral pumping pumpkin patches and waves of cultural things there'll be new ideas like wow i wonder if we could do something about climate change mitigation with how we do this what about what about fresh water can we what about can we make the food healthier what about what about all of a sudden there'll be this whole creative community on the case and isn't it nicer to have a high-tech future with more creative classes than one with more dependent classes isn't that a better future but but but future one and future two have the same robots and the same algorithms there's no technological difference there's only a human difference yeah and that second future too that's state of dignity the economy that you're i mean the game theory here is on the humans and then the technology is just the tools that enable yeah you know i mean i think you can believe in ai and be in future too i just think it's a little harder you have to do you have to do more um contortions it's possible so in the case of social media what is uh idea dignity look like is it people getting paid for their data yeah i think um what should happen is in the future there should be uh massive data unions uh for people putting content into the system and the state unions smooth out the results a little bit so it's not winner take all but at the same time and people have to pay for it too they have to pay for facebook the way they pay for netflix with with an allowance for the poor there has to be a there has to be a way out too but the thing is people do pay for netflix it's a going concern people pay for xbox and playstation like people there's enough people to pay for stuff they want this could happen too it's just that this precedence started that moved in the wrong direction and then what has to happen the economy is a measuring device if it's an honest measuring device the outcomes for people form a normal distribution a bell curve and then so there should be a few people who do really well a lot of people who do okay and then we should have an expanding economy reflecting more and more creativity and expertise flowing through the network and that expanding economy moves the result just a bit forward so more people are getting money out of it than are putting money into it so it gradually expands the economy and lifts all boats and the in the society has to support the the the lower wing of the bell curve too but not universal basic income it has to be for the you know because if it's an honest if it's an honest economy there will be uh that lower wing and we we have to support those people there has to be a safety net um but um see what i believe i'm not going to talk about ai but i will say that i think there'll be more and more algorithms that are useful and so i don't think everybody's going to be supplying data to grounds keeping robots nor do i think everybody's going to make their living with tick-tock videos i think in both cases there'll be a rather small contingent that do well enough at either of those things but i think there might be many many many many of those niches that start to evolve as they're more and more algorithms more and more robots and it's that large number that will create the economic potential for a very large part of society to become members of new creative classes do you think it's possible to um to create a social network that competes with twitter and facebook that's large and centralized in this way not centralized or large large how do we get all right so i gotta tell you how to get from what i'm talking how to get from where we are to anything kind of in the zone of what i'm talking about is challenging um i know some of the people who run like i know jack dorsey and i view jack as somebody who's actually i think he's really striving and searching and finding and trying to find a way to make it better uh but is kind of like it's very hard to do it while in flight and he's under enormous business pressure too um so jack dorsey to me is a fascinating study because i think his mind is in a lot of good places because he's a good human being but there's a big titanic ship that's already moving in one direction it's hard to know what to do with that i think that's the story of twitter i think that's the story of twitter um one of the things that i observe is that if you just want to look at the human side meaning like how are people being changed how do they feel what does the culture like almost all of the social media platforms that get big have an initial sort of honeymoon period where they're actually kind of sweet and cute yeah like if you look at the early years of twitter it was really sweet and cute but also look at snap tik tok and then what happens is as they scale and the algorithms become more influential instead of just the early people when it gets when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style and then they start to get dark and we've seen that shift in tik-tok rather recently but i feel like that scaling reveals the flaws within the incentives i feel like i'm torturing you i'm still no no it's not torture no because i i have hope uh for the world with with humans and have hope for a lot of things that humans create including technology and i just uh i feel it is possible to create uh social media platforms that incentivize different things than the current i think the current incentivization is around like the dumbest possible thing that was invented like 20 years ago or however long and it just works and so nobody's changing it i just think that there could be a lot of innovation for more see you kind of push back this idea that we can't know what long-term growth or happiness is i i if you give control to people to define what their long-term happiness and goals are then you that optimization can happen for each of those individual people you know well i mean imagine a future where probably a lot of people would love to make their living doing tick-tock dance videos but people recognize generally that's kind of hard to get into nonetheless dance crews have an experience that's very similar to programmers working together on github so the future is like a cross between tick tock and github and they get together and they have their negotia they have rights they're negotiating they're negotiating for returns they join different artists societies in order to soften the blow of the randomness of who gets the network effect benefit because nobody can know that and they uh and i think an individual person might join a thousand different data unions in the course of their lives or maybe even ten thousand i don't know but the point is that we'll have like these very hedge distributed portfolios of different data unions we're part of and some of them might just trickle in a little money for nonsense stuff where we're contributing to health studies or something and but i think people will find their way they'll find their way to the right github-like community in which they find their value in the context of supplying inputs and data and taste and correctives and all of this into the algorithms and the robots of the future and that is a way to resist the uh the lizard brain based funding assist mechanisms it's an alternate economic system that rewards productivity creativity uh value as perceived by others it's a genuine market it's not doled out from a center there's not some communist person deciding who's valuable it's actual market and the the money is made by supporting that instead of just grabbing people's attention in the cheapest possible way which is definitely how you get the lizard brain yeah okay so we're finally at the agreement [Laughter] but i i just think that so yeah i'll tell you what how i think uh fake social media there's a few things there's a few things so one i think people should have complete control over their data and transparency of uh what that data is and how it's being used if they do hand over the control another thing they should be able to delete walk away with their data at any moment easy like with a single click of a button maybe two buttons i don't know just easily walk away with their data uh the other is control of the algorithm individualized control of the algorithm for them so each one has their own algorithm each person has their own algorithm they get to be the decider of uh what they see in this world and to me that i mean that's i guess fundamentally decentralized terms of the key decisions being made but if that's made transparent i feel like people will choose that system over twitter of today over facebook of today when they have the ability to walk away to control their data and to control the kinds of things they see now let's walk away from the term ai you're right in this case you you have full control of the algorithms that help you if you want to use their help but you can also say fu to those algorithms and just uh consume the raw beautiful waterfall of the internet i think that to me that's not only fixes social media but i think it will make a lot more money so i would like to challenge the idea i know you're not presenting that but that the only way to make a ton of money is to operate like facebook is i think you can make more money by giving people control yeah i mean i certainly believe that we're definitely in the territory of uh wholehearted agreement here um i i do want to caution against one thing which is making a future that benefits programmers versus p like this idea that people are in control of their data so um years ago i co-founded an advisory board for the eu with a guy named giovanni but torelli who passed away it's one of the reasons i wanted to mention it a remarkable guy who'd been he was originally a prosecutor who was throwing mafioso in jail in in sicily so he was like this intense guy who was like i've been i've dealt with death stress mark zuckerberg doesn't scare me or whatever so we worked we worked on this path of saying let's make it all about transparency and consent and it was one of the feeders that led to this huge uh data data privacy and and uh protection framework in europe called the gdpr and uh so therefore we've been able to have uh empirical feedback on how that goes and the problem is that most people actually get stymied by the complexity of that kind of management they have trouble and reasonably so i don't i'm like a techie you know i can i can go in and i can figure out what's going on but uh i most people really do and why and so there's the problem that it it it it differentially it differentially benefits those who kind of have a technical mindset and can go in and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works i kind of still want to come back to incentives and so if the incentive for whoever is if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people of the future make more money because you get a cut of it that's how you grow an economy not the programmers well some of them will be programmers it's not anti-programmer i'm just saying that um it's not only programmers you know so uh i mean so yeah yeah you have to make sure the incentives are right i mean i like control is an interface problem to where you have to create something that's that's uh compelling to everybody to the creatives to the public i mean there's uh i don't know creative commons like the licensing uh this you know there's a bunch of legal speak just in general the whole legal profession it's nice when it could be simplified in the way that you can truly you know simply understand everybody can simply understand um the the basics in the same way it should be very simple to understand how the data is being used and what data is being used for people but then you're arguing that in order for that to happen you have to have the incentives the like i mean a lot of the reason that money works is actually information hiding and information loss like one of the things about money is a particular dollar you get might have passed through your enemy's hands and you don't know it but also this is i mean this is what adam smith if you want to give the most charitable interpretation possible to the invisible hand is what he was saying is that like there's this whole complicated thing and not only do you not need to know about it the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried and just like let the economic incentives solve for this whole thing and and and that um in a sense every transaction is like a neuron and a neural net if if he'd had that metaphor he would have used it and uh let the whole thing settle to a solution and don't worry about it um i i think this idea of having incentives that reduce complexity for people can be made to work and and that's an example of an algorithm that could be manipulative or not going back to your question before about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative and i would say um a github like if you just have this vision github plus tick tock combine is it possible i think it is i'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea of creatives on tick tock collaborating in the same way that people on github collaborate i like that kind of version why not i like it i love it i just like right now when people use by the way father of teenage daughters all about tic-tac right so you know when people use tick-tock there's a lot of uh it's kind of funny i was gonna say cattiness but i was just using the cat as this exemplar of overcoming i contradict myself but anyway there's all this cattiness where people are like hey this person and and i i just um uh what about people getting together in conjunction saying okay we're gonna work on this move we're gonna get a bit of can we get a better musician like and they they do that but that's the part that's kind of off the books right now you know that should be like right there that should be the center that's where the that's the really best part well that's that's where the invention of get period the versioning is brilliant and so some of the some of the things you're talking about technology algorithms tools can empower and that's that's the thing for humans to to connect to collaborate and so on can we uh can we upset more people a little bit you already i thought maybe we'd have to try no no can we uh can i ask you to elaborate because i my intuition was that you would be a supporter of something like cryptocurrency and bitcoin because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization what do you so can you elaborate yeah okay look your thoughts on bitcoin i um it's kind of funny um i i wrote i've been advocating some kind of digital currency for a long time and when the the uh when th when bitcoin came out and the original paper on on blockchain um my heart kind of sank because i thought oh my god we're applying all of this fancy thought and all these very careful distributed security measures to recreate the gold standard like it's just so retro it's so dysfunctional it's so useless from an economic point of view so it's always and then the other thing is using computational inefficiency at a boundless scale as your form of security is a crime against the atmosphere obviously a lot of people know that now but we knew that at the start like the thing is when the first paper came out i remember a lot of people saying oh my god i think this thing scales it's a carbon disaster you know and and um i i just like i'm just mystified but that that's a different question than when you asked can you have um a cryptographic currency or at least some kind of digital currency that's of a benefit and absolutely like i'm and there are people who are trying to be thoughtful about this you should uh if you haven't you should interview vitalik buter in some time yeah interviewed him twice okay so like there are people in the community who are trying to be thoughtful and trying to figure out how to do this better it has nice properties though right so the one of the nice problems is that like government centralized it's hard to control uh and then the other one to fix some of the issues that you're referring to i'm sort of playing devil's advocate here is you know there's lightning network there's ideas how to how you uh build stuff on top of bitcoin similar with gold that allow you to have this kind of vibrant economy that operates not on the blockchain but outside the blockchain and uses uh bitcoin for uh for like checking the security of those transactions so bitcoin's not new it's been around for a while i've been watching it closely i've not seen one example of it creating economic growth there was this obsession with the idea that government was the problem that idea that government's the problem let's say government earned that wrath honestly because if you look at some of the things that governments have done in recent decades it's not a pretty story like after after a very small number of people in the u.s government decided to bomb and land mine southeast asia it's hard to come back and say oh government's this great thing but uh then the problem is that this resistance to government is basically resistance to politics it's a way of saying if i can get rich nobody should bother me it's a way of not of not having obligations to others and that ultimately is a very suspect motivation but does that mean that the impulse that the government um should not overreach its power is flawed well i mean what i want to ask you to do is to replace the word government with politics like our politics is people having to deal with each other my theory about freedom is that the only authentic form of freedom is perpetual annoyance that all right so annoyance means you're actually dealing with people because people are annoying perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable so it doesn't destroy us all so if you have perpetual annoyance then you have freedom and that's politics that's politics if you don't have perpetual annoyance something's gone very wrong and you suppress those people it's only temporary it's going to come back and be horrible you should seek perpetual annoyance i'll invite you to a berkeley city council meeting so you can know what that feels like what perfection feels like but anyway so freedom is being the the test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people if you're not you're not free if you're not you're trapped in some temporary illusion that's going to fall apart now um the this quest to avoid government is really a quest to avoid that political feeling but you have to have it you have to deal with it um and it sucks but that's the human situation that's the human condition and this idea that we're going to have this abstract thing that protects us from having to deal with each other is always an illusion the idea and i apologize i uh overstretched the use of the word government the idea is there should be some punishment from the people when a group when a bureaucracy when a set of one instead of people or a particular leader like in an authoritarian regime which more than half the world currently lives under if you [Music] like if they become they start stop representing the people it stops being like a berkeley uh meeting and starts being more like uh like a dictatorial kind of uh situation and so the point is it it's nice to give people uh the populist in decentralized way power to um resist that kind of uh government becoming over yeah but people see this idea that the problem is always the government being powerful is false the problem can also be criminal gangs the problem can also be weird cults the problem can be abusive um abusive clergy the problem can be uh fault infrastructure that fails the problem can be poisoned water the problem can be failed electric grids the problem can be a crappy education system that makes this the whole society uh less and less able to to create value there are all these other problems that are different from an overbearing government like you have to keep some sense of perspective and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem because then the others will pop up but empirically speaking some problems are bigger than others so like some uh like groups of people like governments or gangs or companies leaders are you are you a u.s citizen yes has the government ever really been a problem for you well okay so first of all i grew up in the soviet union used to east well and actually yeah my wife did too yeah so i i have i have seen you know um sure uh and has the government bothered me i would say that uh that's that's a really complicated question especially because the united states is such it's a special place in like like like a lot of other countries my wife's family were refused next and so we have like a very and uh her dad was sent to the gulag uh for what it's worth uh on my father's side all but a few were killed by a pogrom in in uh a post-soviet program in ukraine so i i i would think because because you did a little trick of uh eloquent trick of language that you switch to the united states to talk about government so i am i'm i believe unlike my friend michael malus who's an anarchist i believe government can do a lot of good in the world that's exactly what you're saying which is it's it's politics the thing that bitcoin folks and cryptocurrency folks argue is that one of the big ways that governments can control the populace is centralized bank like control the the the money that was the case in the soviet union too there's you know uh inflation is can really make poor people suffer and so what they argue is this is one way to go around that power that government has of controlling the monetary system so that's a way to resist that's not actually saying government bad that's saying some of the ways that central banks get into trouble can be resisted through defense so let me ask you on balance today in the real world in terms of actual facts do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more to prop up corrupt murderous horrible regimes or to resist those regimes where do you think the balance is right now i i know exactly uh having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks what they would tell me right i it's hard it's i don't know no no no no i'm asking it as a real question there's no way to know the answer there's no way it can enhance it perfectly however i gotta say uh if you look at people who've been able to decode uh blockchains and they they do leak a lot of data they're not as secure as this widely thought there are a lot of unknown uh bitcoin whales from pretty early and they're huge and if you ask who are these people um there's evidence that a lot of them are quite on not the people you'd want to support let's say and i i just don't like i think empirically this idea that there's some intrinsic way that bad governments will be will will be disempowered and people will be able to resist them more then new villains or even villainous governments will be empowered there's no basis for that assertion it just is kind of circumstantial and i think in general bitcoin ownership is one thing but bitcoin transactions have tended to support criminality more than productivity of course they would argue that was that was the story of its early days that now more and more bitcoin is being used for uh legitimate transactions but that's the difference i didn't say for legitimate transactions i said for economic growth for for creativity like um i uh i think what's happening is people are using it a little bit for for buying i don't know maybe somebody's companies make it available for this and that you buy a tesla with it or something yeah um investing in a startup hard it might have happened a little bit but it's it's not an engine of productivity creativity and economic growth whereas old-fashioned currency still is and uh anyway i'm look i think something i'm i'm pro the idea of digital currencies yeah i am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics as a result i think they have to exist in some balance to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each in some ways there's parallels to our discussion of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea but it can be used uh to manipulate you can use be used poorly by aforementioned humans well i think that you can make better designs and worse designs and i think and you know the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs because we're all so hooked on that horatio alger story on like i'm gonna be the one who gets the viral benefit you know way back when all this stuff was starting i remember it would have been in the 80s somebody had the idea of using viral as a metaphor for network effect and the whole point was to talk about how bad network effect was that it always created distortions that ruined the the usefulness of economic incentives that that created dangerous distortions like but then somehow even after the pandemic we think of viral as this good thing because we imagine ourselves as the virus right we want to be on the on the beneficiary side of it but of course you're not likely to be there is a sense because money is involved people are not reasoning uh clearly always because they want to be they want to be part of that first viral wave that makes them rich and that blinds people from their basic morality i had an interesting conversation i don't i sort of feel like i should respect some people's privacy but some of the initial people who started uh bitcoin i i remember having an argument about like it's intrinsically a ponzi scheme like you know the early people have more than the later people and the further down the chain you get the more you're subject to gambling like dynamics where it's more and more random and more and more subject to weird network effects and whatnot unless you're a very small player uh perhaps and you're just buying something but even then you'll be subject to fluctuations because the whole thing is just kind of it like that as it fluctuates it's gonna wave around the little people more and they i remember the conversation turned to gambling because gambling's a pretty large economic sector and it's always struck me as being non-productive like somebody goes to las vegas and loses money and so one argument is well they got entertainment they paid for entertainment as they lost money so that's fine and the in las vegas does up the losing of money in an entertaining way so why not it's like going to a show so that's one argument the argument that was made to me was different from that it's that no what they're doing is they're getting a chance to experience hope and a lot of people don't get that chance and so that's really worth it even if they're going to lose they have that moment of hope and they need to be able to experience that and this is a very interesting argument um that's so heartbreaking because uh well i've seen it but i've seen that like that i have that a little bit of a sense i've talked to some young people who invest in cryptocurrency and it what i see is this hope this is the first thing that gave him hope and that's so heartbreaking to me that you've gotten hope from the so much is invested it's like hope from somehow becoming rich as opposed to something to me i apologize but money is in the long term not going to be a source of that deep meaning it's good to have enough money but it should not be the source of hope and it's heartbreaking to me how many people is the source of hope yeah um you've just described the psychology of virality or the psychology of of trying to base a civilization on semi-random occurrences of network effect peaks yeah and it doesn't really work i mean i think we need to get away from that we need to soften those peaks um and accept microsoft which deserves every penny but in every other case well you mentioned github i think what microsoft did with github was brilliant i i was very okay uh if i can give a uh not a critical but sure on microsoft because they recently purchased bethesda so elder scrolls is in their hands i'm watching you microsoft did not screw up my favorite game so um yeah look i'm i'm not speaking for microsoft i haven't i have an explicit arrangement with them where i don't speak for them obviously like that should be very clear i do not speak for them um i i am not saying um i like them i think such is amazing um the term data dignity was coined by sacha like so you know we have uh it's it's kind of extraordinary but you know microsoft's this giant thing it's going to screw up this or that you know it's not it's not i don't know it's kind of interesting i've had a few occasions in my life to see how things work from the inside of some big thing and you know it's always just people kind of it it's i don't know there's always like coordination problems and there's also there's always there's human problems oh there's some good people there's some bad people it's always i hope microsoft doesn't screw up and i hope they bring cliffy back you should never kill clippy bring clippy back oh clippy but clippy pronounced the myth of a.i well that's why this how about i think you're wrong how about if we all right could we bring back bob instead of clippy which one was bob oh bob was another thing like bob was this other screen character who was supposed to be the voice of ai cortana cortana with cortana dude for you cortana is too corporate i like it there's a there's a woman in seattle who's like the model for cortana did cortana's voice and was it there was like no the way this is great we had a vis we had her as a she used to walk around and if you were wearing hololens for a bit i don't think that's happening anymore i think i don't think you should turn a software software into a creature i think well you you and i yeah just get a camera tonight you and i well get go get a dog get a dog yeah yeah you're a hedgehog yeah hedgehog yeah i you co-authored a paper you mentioned lee smolin uh titled the autodidactic universe which describes our universe as one that learns its own physical laws that's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea what are what would you say are the key ideas in this paper ah okay well i should say uh that paper reflected work from last year and the project the program has moved quite a lot so it's a little there's a lot of stuff that's not published that i'm quite excited about so i have to kind of keep my frame in that in that uh last year's thing so i have to try to be a little careful about that we can think about it in a few different ways um the core of the paper the the technical core of it is a triple correspondence one part of it was already established and then another part is in the process the part that was established was of course understanding different theories of physics as matrix models the part that was uh fresher is understanding those as a machining machine learning system so that we could move fluidly between these different ways of describing systems and the reason to want to do that is to just have more tools and more options because uh well theoretical physics is really hard and a lot of programs have kind of um run into a state where they feel a little stalled i guess i can i i want to be delicate about this because i'm not a physicist i'm the computer scientist collaborating so um i don't mean to diss anybody's so this is almost like gives a framework for generating new ideas in physics as you as we start to publish more about where it's gone i think you'll start to see there's there's tools and ways of thinking about theories that i think open up some new paths uh that that will be of interest um there's the technical core of it which is this idea this idea of a correspondence to give you more facility but then there's also the storytelling part of it and this is something um lee loves stories and i do and the idea here is that a typical way of thinking about physics is that there's some kind of starting condition and then there's some principle by which the starting condition evolves uh and the question is like why the starting condition like how how oh the starting condition has to get kind of per this has to be fine-tuned and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect and so we were thinking well look what if we could push the storytelling about where the universe comes from much further back by starting with really simple things that evolve and then through that evolution explain how things got to be how they are through very simple principles right and so we've been um exploring a variety of ways to push the the start of the storytelling further and further back which um and it's an interesting it's really kind of interesting because like uh um for all of his lee is uh sometimes considered to be uh to have a radical quality in the physics world but um uh he still is like no this is gonna be like the kind of time we're talking about in which evolution happens is the same time we're now and we're talking about something that starts and continues and i'm like well what if there's some other kind of time that's time-like and well that sounds like metaphysics but there's an ambiguity you know like it has to start from something and uh it's kind of an interesting so there's this uh a lot of the math can be thought of either way which is kind of interesting so it pushes so far back that basically all the things we take for granted and physics start becoming and emerge i really want to emphasize it's all super baby steps i don't want to over claim it's like it's i i think a lot of the things we're doing we're approaching some old problems in a in a pretty fresh way informed there's been a zillion papers about how you can think of the universe as a big neural net or how you can think of different ideas in physics as being quite similar to or even equivalent to some of the ideas in machine learning and uh that actually works out crazy well like i mean it that is actually kind of eerie when you look at it like uh there's probably two or three dozen papers that have this quality and some of them are just crazy good and it's very it's very interesting what we're trying to do is is take those kinds of observations and turn them into an actionable framework where you can then start to do things with landscapes or theories that you couldn't do before and that sort of thing so in that context or maybe beyond uh how do you explain us humans how unlikely are we this intelligent civilization or is there a lot of others or are we alone in this universe yeah you seem to appreciate humans very much i've grown fond of us um whatever there are nice qualities um and like i like that i mean we're kind of weird we sprout this hair on our heads and then i don't know we're sort of weird animals that's the feature not a bug i think the weirdness i hope so i hope so um i i think if i'm just going to answer you in terms of um truth the first thing i'd say is we're not we're not in a privileged enough position at least as yet to really know much about who we are how we are what we're really like in the context of something larger what that context is like all that stuff we might learn more in the future our descendants might learn more but we don't really know very much yeah which you can either view as frustrating or charming like that first year of tick tock or something um but all roads lead back to tig talk i like it well lately uh but but in terms of there's another level at which i can think about it where i sometimes think that if you are just quiet and you do something that gets you in touch with the way reality happens and for me it's playing music sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is and it feels like there's a lot more going on in it and there is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening and a lot more stuff flowing through i don't know i'm not speaking as a scientist now this is kind of a more my artist's side talking and it's uh uh so i feel like i'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you but well uh kerouac jack kerouac said that uh music is the only truth what do you uh it sounds like you might be at least in part there's a there's a passage in kerouac's book dr sachs where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality and people in like a paragraph and i i couldn't reproduce it for you here but it's like yeah like there are these bulbous things that walk around and they make these sounds you can sort of understand them but only kind of and then there's like this it's just like this amazing like just really quick like if if some spirit being or something was gonna show up in our reality and hadn't knew nothing about it it's like a little basic intro like okay here's what's going on here an incredible passage yeah yeah it's like a one or two sentence summary uh hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy right of what this uh mostly harmless mostly harmless yeah do you think there's truth to that that uh music somehow connects something that words cannot yeah music is something that just towers above me i don't i don't i don't feel like i have an overview of it it's just the reverse i don't i don't fully understand it because on one level it's simple like you can say oh it's it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains on a pattern level or or something like that there's all these things you can say about music which you know some of that's probably true it's also there's kind of like this this is the mystery of meaning like there's a way that just instead of just being pure abstraction music can have like this kind of substantiality to it that is philosophically impossible i don't know what to do with it yeah the amount of understanding i feel i have when i hear the right song at the right time is not comparable to anything i can read on wikipedia anything i can understand read through in language there's the music does connect us to something there's this thing there yeah there's there's there's some kind of a thing in it and i've never ever i i've run across a lot of explanations from all kinds of interesting people uh like that it's some kind of uh a flow language between people or between people and how they perceive and and that kind of thing there's and and that sort of explanation is fine but it's not it's not quite it either yeah there's a there's something about music that makes me uh believe that pan psychism could possibly be true which is uh that everything in the universe is conscious it makes me think makes me be humble in how much or how little i understand about the functions of our universe that everything might be conscious most people um interested in theoretical physics eventually land in pan psychism um but i i'm not one of them i uh i still think there's this um pragmatic imperative to uh treat people is special so i will proudly be a dualist sure uh without people on cats people and cats yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the line's there or anything like that but i don't think i should be required to all the same questions are equally mysterious for no line so i don't i'm not i don't feel disadvantaged by that so i shall remain a duelist but if you listen to anyone trying to explain where consciousness is in a dualistic sense either believing in souls or some special thing in the brain or something you pretty much say screw this i'm going to be advanced fair enough is there moments in your life that happen that we're defining in the way that you hope others your daughter well listen i gotta say the moments that defined me were not the good ones the moments that defined me were often horrible um i um i've had successes you know but if you ask what defined me my mother's death um being under the world trade center in the attack the things that the things that have had an effect on me were the most were sort of real world terrible things which i don't wish on young people at all um and this is this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to young people that they have to learn their own lessons and lessons don't come easily and a world which avoids hard lessons is will be a stupid world you know and i i don't know what to do with it that's a that's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it but i don't i don't this is like what i'm saying that you know freedom equals eternal annoyance like you can't like um there's a degree to which honest advice is not that pleasant to give and i i don't want young people to have to know about everything i think you don't want to wish hardship on them yeah i think they they deserve to have a little grace period of naivete that's pleasant i i mean i i do you know if it's possible if it's ah these things are this is like this is tricky stuff i mean um if you if you okay so let me let me try a little bit on this advice thing i think one thing any serious broad advice will have been given a thousand times before for a thousand years so this i'm not gonna i'm not going to claim originality but i think trying to find a way to really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally what your sense of the world is what your intuition is if you feel like an intuitive person what you're um like like to try to escape the constant sway of social perception or manipulation whatever you wish not to escape it entirely that would be horrible but to to find to find cover from it once in a while to find a sense of being anchored in that to believe and experience as a real thing believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic that goes in that goes with my philosophy of dualism i believe there's something magical and i instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs i think experience is something real and something apart something mystical and your own personal internal experience that you just have and then you're saying yeah silence the rest of the world enough to hear that like whatever that magic just yeah and that experience find with with what is there and um i think uh that's one that's one thing another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius that it's actually really hard that facile kindness is not kindness and that it'll take you a while to have the skills to have kind impulses to want to be kind you can have right away to be effectively kind is hard to be effectively kind it takes it takes skill it takes it takes hard lessons um it's it's uh you'll never be perfect at it to the degree you get anywhere with it it's the most rewarding thing ever um uh let's see what else would i say i would say um when you're young you can be very overwhelmed by social and interpersonal emotions you'll have broken hearts and jealousies you'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the ladder it feels horrible when that happens all of these things and you have to remember what a fragile crust all that stuff is and it's hard because right when it's happening it's just so intense and if i was actually giving this advice to my daughter she'd already be out of the room so i'm just this is for some like hypothetical yeah teenager that doesn't really exist that really wants to sit and and listen to my wife or your daughter ten years from now maybe a difficult question yeah sure you uh you talked about losing your mom yeah uh do you do you miss her yeah i mean i still connected her through music she was a she was a young prodigy piano player in vienna and uh she survived the concentration camp and then died in a car accident here in the us what music makes you think of her is there is there a song well she you know she was in vienna so she's she had the whole viennese music thing going um which is this you know incredible school of uh absolute skill and romance bundled together and uh wonderful on the piano especially i learned to play the some of the beethoven sonatas for her and i played them in this exaggerated drippy way i remember when i was a kid and uh exaggerating meaning uh too full of emotion yeah like just like it's just it's not the only way to play beethoven i mean i would i didn't know there's anything that's a reasonable question i mean the fashion these days is to be slightly apollonian with even with beethoven but one imagines that actual beethoven playing might have been different i don't know i um i've gotten to play a few instruments he played and tried to see if i could feel anything about how it might have been for him i don't know really i was always against the clinical precision of classical music i thought a great piano player should be um like um in in pain like you know like emote emotion emotionally like truly feel the music and and make it messy sort of sure um maybe play classical music the way i don't know blues pianist plays blues like it seems like they actually got happier and i'm not sure if beethoven got happier i think it's a different i think it's a different kind of concept of the place of music i think the uh the blues the whole african-american tradition was initially surviving awful awful circumstances so you could say you know there was some of that in the concentration camps and all that too um and it's it's not that beethoven's circumstances were brilliant but he kind of also i don't know this is hard like i mean it would seem to be his misery was somewhat self-imposed maybe through i don't i don't know it's kind of interesting like um i've known some people who loathed beethoven like uh the composer uh late composer pauline oliveros this wonderful modernist composer i played in a in her band for a while and she was like oh beethoven like that's the worst music ever it's like all ego it completely it turns um it turns information and i mean it turns emotion into your enemy and it's uh it's ultimately um all about your own self-importance which is all which has to be at the expense of others could what else what else could it be and uh blah blah blah so she had i shouldn't say i don't mean to be dismissed but i'm just saying like her position on beethoven was very negative and very unimpressed which is really interesting for the man or the music i think uh i don't know i mean he's not here to speak for herself so it's a little hard for me to answer that question i'm um but it was interesting because i'd always thought it paid homes like oh you know this is like you know it is like really the the the dude you know and she's like yeah you know beethoven schmidt oven you know it's like not really happening yeah i still even though it's cliche i like playing uh personally just for myself mulan sonata i mean i just um moonlight's amazing you know um i you know you're talking about comparing the blues and that sensibility from europe it's so diff so different in so many ways i one of the musicians i play with is uh john bautiste who has the band on on colbert show and uh he'll he'll sit there playing jazz and suddenly go into moonlight he loves moonlight and what's kind of interesting is he's found a way to do beethoven and he by the way he can really do beethoven like he uh he went through juilliard and one time you know what what time he's at my house he's saying hey do you have the book of beethoven's house to say yeah i want to find one i haven't played any sight read through the whole damn thing perfectly and i'm like oh god i just yeah get out of here i don't i can't even deal with this but anyway yeah but anyway the thing is he he has this way of with the same persona and the same philosophy moving from the blues and to beethoven that's really really fascinating to me it's like um i don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz but he kind of does yeah it's kind of really and he talks he'll well he was sight reasoning he talks like beethoven's talking to him like he's like oh yeah i hear he's doing this he's i can't do john but you know it's like it's really it's really interesting like it's very different like for me i was introduced to beethoven as like almost like this god-like figure figure and i presume pauline was too that was really kind of oppressed and hard to deal with and for him it's just like it's a conversation he's playing uh james p johnson or something it's like another musician who did something and they're talking and it's it's very cool to be around it's very uh kind of uh freeing to see someone have that that abil that that relationship i would love to hear him play bad horn that sounds that sounds amazing he's great we talked about ernest becker and uh the the how much value he puts on our mortality and our denial of our mortality do you think about your mortality do you think about your own death you know what's funny is i used to not be able to but as you get older you just know people who die and there's all these things it just becomes familiar and and more of a more ordinary which is what it is but are you afraid um sure although less so um and it's not like i didn't have some kind of insight or revelation to become less afraid i think i just like i say it's kind of familiarity it's just knowing people who who have died and i really believe in the future i have this optimism that people or this whole thing of life on earth this whole thing we're part of i don't know where to draw that circle but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of value and you can't both believe in the future and want to live forever you have to make room for it you know like you have to that optimism has to also come with its own like humility you have to make yourself small to believe in the future and so it actually in a funny way comforts me wow that's powerful and optimism requires you to kind of step down after time yeah i mean and that said life seems kind of short but you know whatever do you think there i've tried to find i can't find the complaint department you know i really want to i want to bring this up but the customer service number never answers and like the email bounces one way uh do you think there's meaning to it to life ah well see um meaning's a funny word like we say all these things as if we know what they mean but meaning we don't know what we mean when we say meaning like we obviously do not and uh it's a it's it's a funny little mystical thing i think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience that dualists uh tend to believe in um because there are why like if you look up to the stars and you experience that awe inspiring like joy whatever when you look up to the stars i i don't know like for me this kind of makes me feel uh joyful maybe a little bit melancholy just some weird soup of feelings and ultimately the question is like why are we here in this vast universe that question why have you been able in some way maybe through music answer it for yourself my impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask but i feel like going then that down that path is just too tedious for the moment and i don't want to do it but the wrong question well just because you know um i don't know what meaning is and i i think um i do know that sense of awe i grew up in southern new mexico and the stars were so vivid um i had i've had some weird misfortunes but i've had some weird luck also one of our near neighbors uh was the head of optics research at white sands and when he was young he discovered pluto his name was clyde tombaugh and uh he taught me how to make telescopes grinding mirrors and stuff and my dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid but uh clyde had like backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot of like i mean he really he did his telescopes you know and so i remember he'd let me go and play with him and just like looking at a globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons and with a good telescope it's really like this object like you can really tell this isn't coming through some intervening information structure this is like the actual photons and it's really a three-dimensional object and you have even a feeling for the vastness of it and um it's it's it's i don't know so i definitely i was very very fortunate to have a connection to this guy that way when i was a kid um to have had that experience again the emphasis yeah experience i um it's kind of funny like i i feel like sometimes like i've taken um when she was younger i took my daughter and her friends to to like a telescope there are a few around here that are kids can go and use and they would like look at jupiter's moons or something i think like galilean moons and i i don't know if they quite had that because it's like too it's been just too normalized and i think maybe when i was growing up screens weren't that common yet and maybe it's like too confusable with the screen i don't know you know somebody uh uh brought up in conversation to me somewhere i don't remember who but they they kind of posited this idea that if humans early humans weren't able to see the stars like if earth atmosphere was such there was cloudy that we would not develop human civilization there's something about being able to look up and see a vast universe is like that's fundamental to the development of human civilization i thought that was a curious kind of thought that reminds me of that uh old isaac asimov story where the cl you know there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while and it turns out they're in the middle of a globular cluster and they're always starting i forget what happens exactly god that's that's from when i was the same age as a kid i don't really remember yeah uh but um yeah i don't know it's uh it might be right i'm just thinking of all the civilizations that grew up under clouds i mean like the the vikings needed a special uh diffracting piece of mica to navigate because they could never see the sun they had this thing called a sunstone that they found from this this one cave do you know about that so they were in this like uh they were trying to navigate boats you know in the north atlantic with without being able to see the sun because it was cloudy and so they they used uh a uh uh chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really was because they couldn't tell my eye and navigate so i'm just saying there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive that have to deal with a lot of clouds uh the amazonians invented our agriculture and they they were probably under clouds a lot i don't know i don't know to me personally the the question of the meaning of life becomes most um vibrant most apparent when you look up at the stars because it makes me feel very small that we're not small but then you ask it it still feels that we're special and then the natural question is like well if we are special as i think we are why the heck are we here in this vast universe that ultimately is the question of um right well the meaning of life i mean look there's a confusion sometimes in trying to use uh to set up a question or a thought experiment or something that's defined in terms of a context to explain something where there is no larger context and that's a category error if we want to do it in physics or well right in computer science it's hard to talk about the universe as a turing machine because a turing machine has an external clock and an observer and uh input and output there's a larger context implied in order for it to be defined at all and so if you're talking about the universe you can't talk about it coherently as a turing machine quantum mechanics like that quantum mechanics has an external clock and has some kind of external context depending on your interpretation um that's either you know the observer or whatever and there's a they're they're similar that way so maybe maybe turing machines and quantum mechanics can be better friends or something because they have a similar setup but the thing is if you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context you can't talk about ultimates with it because obviously it doesn't it's not suited for that so there's some ideas that are their own context general relativity is its own context it's different that's why it's hard to unify and i think the same thing is true when we talk about these types of questions like uh meaning is in a context and to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category or it's not it's not a um it's not a resolvable way of thinking it might be a way of thinking that is experientially um or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of you know awe-inspiring um but to try to treat it analytically is not sensible maybe that's what music and poetry are for yeah maybe i think so i think music actually does escape any particular context that's how it feels to me but i'm not sure about that that's once again crazy artists talking not scientists well you did uh you do both masterfully uh jaren and like i said i'm a big fan of everything you've done of you as a human being um i appreciate the the fun argument we had today that will i'm sure continue for 30 years as it did with mark minsky um honestly i i deeply appreciate that you spend your really valuable time with me today it was a really great conversation thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with jaren lanier to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from jaron lanier himself a real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other thank you for listening and hope to see you next time