Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI
音乐与艺术技术与编程AI 与机器学习哲学与宗教心理与人性
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dongoingsocialmediastufffuturedatahardsayingmusicinterestinghopemoneygovernmentcontrolrealitycomputerbetterexperiencewhole
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🎙️ 完整对话（2382 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Jaron Lanier,
以下是与 Jaron Lanier 的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:03.080)
a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher,
计算机科学家、视觉艺术家、哲学家、
Lex Fridman (00:06.200)
writer, futurist, musician,
作家、未来学家、音乐家、
Lex Fridman (00:08.080)
and the founder of the field of virtual reality.
虚拟现实领域的创始人。
Lex Fridman (00:11.680)
To support this podcast,
为了支持这个播客，
Jaron Lanier (00:12.800)
please check out our sponsors in the description.
请在说明中查看我们的赞助商。
Lex Fridman (00:15.880)
As a side note,
作为旁注，
Jaron Lanier (00:16.840)
you may know that Jaron is a staunch critic
你可能知道杰伦是一位坚定的批评家
Lex Fridman (00:19.040)
of social media platforms.
社交媒体平台。
Jaron Lanier (00:20.720)
Him and I agree on many aspects of this,
他和我在很多方面都达成了共识，
Lex Fridman (00:23.780)
except perhaps I am more optimistic
只是也许我更乐观
Jaron Lanier (00:26.340)
about it being possible to build better platforms.
关于有可能建立更好的平台。
Lex Fridman (00:29.700)
And better artificial intelligence systems
以及更好的人工智能系统
Jaron Lanier (00:32.200)
that put longterm interests
放长远利益
Lex Fridman (00:33.900)
and happiness of human beings first.
并把人类的幸福放在第一位。
Jaron Lanier (00:36.660)
Let me also say a general comment about these conversations.
让我也对这些对话发表一般性评论。
Lex Fridman (00:40.240)
I try to make sure I prepare well,
我尽力确保我做好充分准备，
Jaron Lanier (00:42.520)
remove my ego from the picture,
从照片中消除我的自我，
Lex Fridman (00:44.400)
and focus on making the other person shine
并专注于让对方闪闪发光
Jaron Lanier (00:47.200)
as we try to explore the most beautiful
当我们试图探索最美的
Lex Fridman (00:49.140)
and insightful ideas in their mind.
Jaron Lanier (00:51.800)
This can be challenging
Lex Fridman (00:53.320)
when the ideas that are close to my heart
Jaron Lanier (00:55.280)
are being criticized.
Lex Fridman (00:57.180)
In those cases, I do offer a little pushback,
Lex Fridman (00:59.940)
but respectfully, and then move on,
Lex Fridman (01:02.680)
trying to have the other person come out
Jaron Lanier (01:04.280)
looking wiser in the exchange.
Lex Fridman (01:06.620)
I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations,
Jaron Lanier (01:09.960)
nor in life.
Lex Fridman (01:11.560)
My goal is to learn and to have fun.
Jaron Lanier (01:14.000)
I ask that you don't see my approach
Lex Fridman (01:15.840)
to these conversations as weakness.
Jaron Lanier (01:17.980)
It is not.
Lex Fridman (01:19.200)
It is my attempt at showing respect
Lex Fridman (01:21.520)
and love for the other person.
Lex Fridman (01:24.120)
That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking,
Lex Fridman (01:28.520)
but you probably already knew that.
Lex Fridman (01:30.820)
So please give me a pass on that as well.
Jaron Lanier (01:33.440)
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
Lex Fridman (01:35.560)
and here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier.
Jaron Lanier (01:39.520)
You're considered the founding father of virtual reality.
Lex Fridman (01:44.600)
Do you think we will one day spend most
Lex Fridman (01:47.320)
or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds?
Lex Fridman (01:51.540)
I have always found the very most valuable moment
Jaron Lanier (01:56.420)
in virtual reality to be the moment
Lex Fridman (01:58.360)
when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed
Lex Fridman (02:01.260)
and you perceive physicality afresh,
Lex Fridman (02:05.180)
as if you were a newborn baby,
Lex Fridman (02:07.020)
but with a little more experience.
Lex Fridman (02:09.020)
So you can really notice just how incredibly strange
Lex Fridman (02:13.740)
and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is.
Lex Fridman (02:18.740)
So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be
Jaron Lanier (02:22.220)
in the physical world.
Lex Fridman (02:23.540)
Well, that's my take on it.
Jaron Lanier (02:25.100)
That's just me.
Lex Fridman (02:25.940)
I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else
Lex Fridman (02:29.380)
how to think or how to experience virtual reality.
Lex Fridman (02:31.980)
And at this point, there have been multiple generations
Jaron Lanier (02:35.020)
of younger people who've come along and liberated me
Lex Fridman (02:39.460)
from having to worry about these things.
Lex Fridman (02:42.620)
But I should say also even in what some,
Lex Fridman (02:45.780)
well, I called it mixed reality,
Jaron Lanier (02:47.340)
back in the day, and these days it's called
Lex Fridman (02:49.220)
augmented reality, but with something like a HoloLens,
Jaron Lanier (02:53.180)
even then, like one of my favorite things
Lex Fridman (02:56.060)
is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest
Jaron Lanier (02:58.900)
needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation
Lex Fridman (03:02.340)
next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out
Jaron Lanier (03:05.460)
as being astounding, it's interactive,
Lex Fridman (03:09.940)
it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention,
Lex Fridman (03:12.780)
and it's hard to pay attention to that,
Lex Fridman (03:14.580)
but when you compare it to virtual reality,
Jaron Lanier (03:16.340)
all of a sudden you do.
Lex Fridman (03:18.140)
And even in practical applications,
Jaron Lanier (03:20.580)
my favorite early application of virtual reality,
Lex Fridman (03:24.380)
which we prototyped going back to the 80s
Jaron Lanier (03:27.020)
when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med
Lex Fridman (03:30.460)
near where we are now, we made the first surgical simulator.
Lex Fridman (03:34.500)
And to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation,
Lex Fridman (03:39.820)
which is incredibly valuable for many things,
Jaron Lanier (03:42.220)
for designing procedures, for training,
Lex Fridman (03:43.820)
for all kinds of things, then to go to the real world
Jaron Lanier (03:45.580)
is then to go to the real person,
Lex Fridman (03:47.700)
boy, it's really something like surgeons
Jaron Lanier (03:51.260)
really get woken up by that transition, it's very cool.
Lex Fridman (03:54.060)
So I think the transition is actually more valuable
Jaron Lanier (03:56.220)
than the simulation.
Lex Fridman (03:58.500)
That's fascinating, I never really thought about that.
Jaron Lanier (04:01.700)
It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere
Lex Fridman (04:05.620)
in the physical space can help you appreciate
Lex Fridman (04:08.260)
how much you value your home once you return.
Lex Fridman (04:11.940)
Well, that's how I take it.
Jaron Lanier (04:13.620)
I mean, once again, people have different attitudes
Lex Fridman (04:16.540)
towards it, all are welcome.
Lex Fridman (04:18.740)
What do you think is the difference
Lex Fridman (04:20.380)
between the virtual world and the physical meat space world
Jaron Lanier (04:23.820)
that you are still drawn, for you personally,
Lex Fridman (04:26.780)
still drawn to the physical world?
Jaron Lanier (04:28.940)
Like there clearly then is a distinction.
Lex Fridman (04:31.620)
Is there some fundamental distinction
Lex Fridman (04:33.260)
or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology?
Lex Fridman (04:37.580)
In terms of the kind of virtual reality that we have now,
Jaron Lanier (04:41.480)
it's made of software and software is terrible stuff.
Lex Fridman (04:46.000)
Software is always the slave of its own history,
Jaron Lanier (04:50.360)
its own legacy.
Lex Fridman (04:52.040)
It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary.
Jaron Lanier (04:57.560)
Working with it brings out a certain kind
Lex Fridman (05:00.260)
of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me,
Jaron Lanier (05:03.480)
which I'm not that fond of.
Lex Fridman (05:05.920)
And there are all kinds of things about software
Jaron Lanier (05:07.760)
I don't like.
Lex Fridman (05:09.160)
And so that's different from the physical world.
Jaron Lanier (05:11.600)
It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out.
Lex Fridman (05:15.000)
On the other hand, I'm a little mystified
Jaron Lanier (05:17.340)
when people ask me, well,
Lex Fridman (05:18.680)
do you think the universe is a computer?
Lex Fridman (05:21.540)
And I have to say, well, I mean,
Lex Fridman (05:24.520)
what on earth could you possibly mean
Lex Fridman (05:26.260)
if you say it isn't a computer?
Lex Fridman (05:27.960)
If it isn't a computer,
Jaron Lanier (05:30.080)
it wouldn't follow principles consistently
Lex Fridman (05:33.960)
and it wouldn't be intelligible
Lex Fridman (05:35.680)
because what else is a computer ultimately?
Lex Fridman (05:38.520)
I mean, and we have physics, we have technology,
Lex Fridman (05:41.260)
so we can do technology so we can program it.
Lex Fridman (05:43.720)
So, I mean, of course it's some kind of computer,
Lex Fridman (05:45.720)
but I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine
Lex Fridman (05:49.000)
is probably a foolish approach.
Jaron Lanier (05:52.840)
Right, that's the question, whether it performs,
Lex Fridman (05:56.840)
this computer we call the universe,
Jaron Lanier (05:58.840)
performs the kind of computation that can be modeled
Lex Fridman (06:01.160)
as a universal Turing machine,
Jaron Lanier (06:03.960)
or is it something much more fancy,
Lex Fridman (06:07.280)
so fancy, in fact, that it may be
Lex Fridman (06:09.440)
beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand?
Lex Fridman (06:12.640)
Turing machines are kind of,
Jaron Lanier (06:16.380)
I call them teases in a way,
Lex Fridman (06:18.680)
because if you have an infinitely smart programmer
Jaron Lanier (06:23.160)
with an infinite amount of time,
Lex Fridman (06:24.660)
an infinite amount of memory,
Lex Fridman (06:25.900)
and an infinite clock speed, then they're universal,
Lex Fridman (06:29.900)
but that cannot exist.
Lex Fridman (06:31.400)
So they're not universal in practice.
Lex Fridman (06:33.120)
And they actually are, in practice,
Jaron Lanier (06:36.260)
a very particular sort of machine within the constraints,
Lex Fridman (06:40.640)
within the conservation principles of any reality
Jaron Lanier (06:44.020)
that's worth being in, probably.
Lex Fridman (06:46.440)
And so I think universality of a particular model
Jaron Lanier (06:55.640)
is probably a deceptive way to think,
Lex Fridman (06:58.560)
even though at some sort of limit,
Jaron Lanier (07:00.760)
of course something like that's gotta be true
Lex Fridman (07:05.080)
at some sort of high enough limit,
Lex Fridman (07:07.400)
but it's just not accessible to us, so what's the point?
Lex Fridman (07:10.440)
Well, to me, the question of whether we're living
Jaron Lanier (07:12.960)
inside a computer or a simulation
Lex Fridman (07:15.480)
is interesting in the following way.
Jaron Lanier (07:18.520)
There's a technical question that's here.
Lex Fridman (07:20.920)
How difficult is it to build a machine,
Jaron Lanier (07:25.840)
not that simulates the universe,
Lex Fridman (07:28.360)
but that makes it sufficiently realistic
Jaron Lanier (07:31.480)
that we wouldn't know the difference,
Lex Fridman (07:33.440)
or better yet, sufficiently realistic
Jaron Lanier (07:36.240)
that we would kinda know the difference,
Lex Fridman (07:37.860)
but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway?
Jaron Lanier (07:41.000)
I wanna give you a few different answers.
Lex Fridman (07:42.440)
I wanna give you the one that I think
Jaron Lanier (07:43.960)
has the most practical importance
Lex Fridman (07:45.860)
to human beings right now,
Jaron Lanier (07:47.480)
which is that there's a kind of an assertion
Lex Fridman (07:51.560)
sort of built into the way the questions usually asked
Jaron Lanier (07:54.240)
that I think is false, which is a suggestion
Lex Fridman (07:57.300)
that people have a fixed level of ability
Jaron Lanier (08:00.220)
to perceive reality in a given way.
Lex Fridman (08:03.120)
And actually, people are always learning,
Jaron Lanier (08:07.560)
evolving, forming themselves.
Lex Fridman (08:09.160)
We're fluid, too.
Jaron Lanier (08:10.440)
We're also programmable, self programmable,
Lex Fridman (08:13.760)
changing, adapting.
Lex Fridman (08:15.360)
And so my favorite way to get at this
Lex Fridman (08:18.800)
is to talk about the history of other media.
Lex Fridman (08:21.040)
So for instance, there was a peer review paper
Lex Fridman (08:23.640)
that showed that an early wire recorder
Jaron Lanier (08:26.480)
playing back an opera singer behind a curtain
Lex Fridman (08:28.640)
was indistinguishable from a real opera singer.
Lex Fridman (08:31.340)
And so now, of course, to us,
Lex Fridman (08:32.440)
it would not only be distinguishable,
Lex Fridman (08:34.220)
but it would be very blatant
Lex Fridman (08:35.560)
because the recording would be horrible.
Lex Fridman (08:37.680)
But to the people at the time,
Lex Fridman (08:39.240)
without the experience of it, it seemed plausible.
Jaron Lanier (08:43.800)
There was an early demonstration
Lex Fridman (08:46.360)
of extremely crude video teleconferencing
Jaron Lanier (08:49.640)
between New York and DC in the 30s, I think so,
Lex Fridman (08:54.360)
that people viewed as being absolutely realistic
Lex Fridman (08:56.480)
and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible.
Lex Fridman (08:59.880)
And there are many other examples.
Jaron Lanier (09:01.000)
Another one, one of my favorite ones,
Lex Fridman (09:02.280)
is in the Civil War era,
Jaron Lanier (09:04.200)
there were itinerant photographers
Lex Fridman (09:06.160)
who collected photographs of people
Jaron Lanier (09:07.820)
who just looked kind of like a few archetypes.
Lex Fridman (09:10.720)
So you could buy a photo of somebody
Jaron Lanier (09:12.480)
who looked kind of like your loved one
Lex Fridman (09:14.320)
to remind you of that person
Jaron Lanier (09:17.120)
because actually photographing them was inconceivable
Lex Fridman (09:20.560)
and hiring a painter was too expensive
Lex Fridman (09:22.400)
and you didn't have any way for the painter
Lex Fridman (09:23.960)
to represent them remotely anyway.
Lex Fridman (09:25.480)
How would they even know what they looked like?
Lex Fridman (09:27.680)
So these are all great examples
Jaron Lanier (09:29.640)
of how in the early days of different media,
Lex Fridman (09:32.320)
we perceived the media as being really great,
Lex Fridman (09:34.320)
but then we evolved through the experience of the media.
Lex Fridman (09:37.800)
This gets back to what I was saying.
Jaron Lanier (09:38.840)
Maybe the greatest gift of photography
Lex Fridman (09:40.800)
is that we can see the flaws in a photograph
Lex Fridman (09:42.680)
and appreciate reality more.
Lex Fridman (09:44.520)
Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording
Jaron Lanier (09:46.760)
is that we can distinguish that opera singer now
Lex Fridman (09:49.980)
from that recording of the opera singer
Jaron Lanier (09:52.020)
on the horrible wire recorder.
Lex Fridman (09:53.800)
So we shouldn't limit ourselves
Jaron Lanier (09:57.500)
by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect.
Lex Fridman (10:01.280)
So that's the first thing, that's my first answer,
Jaron Lanier (10:03.840)
which is I think the most important one.
Lex Fridman (10:05.300)
Now, of course, somebody might come back and say,
Jaron Lanier (10:07.340)
oh, but you know, technology can go so far.
Lex Fridman (10:09.400)
There must be some point at which it would surpass.
Jaron Lanier (10:11.560)
That's a different question.
Lex Fridman (10:12.640)
I think that's also an interesting question,
Lex Fridman (10:14.760)
but I think the answer I just gave you
Lex Fridman (10:16.080)
is actually the more important answer
Jaron Lanier (10:17.600)
to the more important question.
Lex Fridman (10:18.960)
That's profound, yeah.
Lex Fridman (10:20.280)
But can you, the second question,
Lex Fridman (10:23.160)
which you're now making me realize is way different.
Jaron Lanier (10:26.840)
Is it possible to create worlds
Lex Fridman (10:28.520)
in which people would want to stay
Lex Fridman (10:31.600)
instead of the real world?
Lex Fridman (10:32.920)
Well.
Jaron Lanier (10:33.900)
Like, en masse, like large numbers of people.
Lex Fridman (10:38.260)
What I hope is, you know, as I said before,
Jaron Lanier (10:41.360)
I hope that the experience of virtual worlds
Lex Fridman (10:44.320)
helps people appreciate this physical world we have
Lex Fridman (10:49.320)
and feel tender towards it
Lex Fridman (10:51.760)
and keep it from getting too fucked up.
Jaron Lanier (10:54.580)
That's my hope.
Lex Fridman (10:57.040)
Do you see all technology in that way?
Lex Fridman (10:58.760)
So basically technology helps us appreciate
Lex Fridman (11:02.840)
the more sort of technology free aspect of life.
Jaron Lanier (11:08.240)
Well, media technology.
Lex Fridman (11:10.760)
You know, I mean, you can stretch that.
Jaron Lanier (11:13.480)
I mean, you can, let me say,
Lex Fridman (11:15.280)
I could definitely play McLuhan
Lex Fridman (11:17.400)
and turn this into a general theory.
Lex Fridman (11:19.080)
It's totally doable.
Jaron Lanier (11:20.120)
The program you just described is totally doable.
Lex Fridman (11:23.200)
In fact, I will psychically predict
Jaron Lanier (11:25.120)
that if you did the research,
Lex Fridman (11:26.120)
you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already.
Jaron Lanier (11:29.280)
I don't know, but they might exist.
Lex Fridman (11:31.320)
But I don't know how much value there is
Jaron Lanier (11:34.920)
in pushing a particular idea that far.
Lex Fridman (11:38.780)
Claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense
Jaron Lanier (11:41.640)
seems incoherent to me because we can program it.
Lex Fridman (11:44.880)
We have technology.
Jaron Lanier (11:46.200)
It seems to obey physical laws.
Lex Fridman (11:48.800)
What more do you want from it to be a computer?
Jaron Lanier (11:50.680)
I mean, it's a computer of some kind.
Lex Fridman (11:52.200)
We don't know exactly what kind.
Jaron Lanier (11:53.520)
We might not know how to think about it.
Lex Fridman (11:54.880)
We're working on it, but.
Jaron Lanier (11:57.440)
Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right.
Lex Fridman (11:59.200)
Like, that's my fascination with the AI as well,
Jaron Lanier (12:01.940)
is it helps, in the case of AI,
Lex Fridman (12:05.240)
I see it as a set of techniques
Jaron Lanier (12:07.320)
that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans.
Lex Fridman (12:10.200)
In the same way, virtual reality,
Lex Fridman (12:12.440)
and you're putting it brilliantly,
Lex Fridman (12:14.400)
which it's a way to help us understand reality,
Jaron Lanier (12:17.980)
appreciate and open our eyes more richly to reality.
Lex Fridman (12:23.700)
That's certainly how I see it.
Lex Fridman (12:26.060)
And I wish people who become incredibly fascinated,
Lex Fridman (12:29.840)
who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations
Jaron Lanier (12:33.900)
with whether we're in a simulation or not,
Lex Fridman (12:35.860)
or, you know, there's a whole world of variations on that.
Jaron Lanier (12:40.460)
I wish they'd step back
Lex Fridman (12:41.380)
and think about their own motivations
Lex Fridman (12:42.860)
and exactly what they mean, you know?
Lex Fridman (12:45.740)
And I think the danger with these things is,
Lex Fridman (12:52.820)
so if you say, is the universe
Lex Fridman (12:54.340)
some kind of computer broadly,
Jaron Lanier (12:56.300)
it has to be because it's not coherent to say that it isn't.
Lex Fridman (12:59.780)
On the other hand, to say that that means
Jaron Lanier (13:02.200)
you know anything about what kind of computer,
Lex Fridman (13:05.100)
that's something very different.
Lex Fridman (13:06.300)
And the same thing is true for the brain.
Lex Fridman (13:07.880)
The same thing is true for anything
Jaron Lanier (13:10.420)
where you might use computational metaphors.
Lex Fridman (13:12.020)
Like, we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand.
Lex Fridman (13:14.940)
And the problem I have with these framings of computation
Lex Fridman (13:19.340)
is these ultimate cosmic questions
Jaron Lanier (13:21.060)
is that it has a way of getting people
Lex Fridman (13:23.320)
to pretend they know more than they do.
Lex Fridman (13:25.340)
Can you maybe, this is a therapy session,
Lex Fridman (13:28.180)
psychoanalyze me for a second.
Jaron Lanier (13:30.380)
I really liked the Elder Scrolls series.
Lex Fridman (13:32.260)
It's a role playing game, Skyrim, for example.
Lex Fridman (13:36.780)
Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world?
Lex Fridman (13:41.780)
And then there's people and you could talk to
Lex Fridman (13:45.140)
and you can just like, it's an escape.
Lex Fridman (13:48.060)
But you know, my life is awesome.
Jaron Lanier (13:49.820)
I'm truly happy, but I also am happy
Lex Fridman (13:52.760)
with the music that's playing in the mountains
Lex Fridman (13:56.500)
and carrying around a sword and just that.
Lex Fridman (14:00.860)
I don't know what that is.
Jaron Lanier (14:02.380)
It's very pleasant though to go there.
Lex Fridman (14:04.620)
And I miss it sometimes.
Jaron Lanier (14:06.540)
I think it's wonderful to love artistic creations.
Lex Fridman (14:12.380)
It's wonderful to love contact with other people.
Jaron Lanier (14:15.980)
It's wonderful to love play and ongoing evolving
Lex Fridman (14:21.660)
meaning and patterns with other people.
Jaron Lanier (14:24.180)
I think it's a good thing.
Lex Fridman (14:30.380)
I'm not like anti tech
Lex Fridman (14:31.860)
and I'm certainly not anti digital tech.
Lex Fridman (14:34.420)
I'm anti, as everybody knows by now,
Jaron Lanier (14:37.260)
I think the manipulative economy of social media
Lex Fridman (14:41.220)
is making everybody nuts and all that.
Lex Fridman (14:42.420)
So I'm anti that stuff.
Lex Fridman (14:43.980)
But the core of it, of course, I worked for many, many years
Jaron Lanier (14:47.620)
on trying to make that stuff happen
Lex Fridman (14:49.180)
because I think it can be beautiful.
Lex Fridman (14:51.040)
Like I don't like, why not?
Lex Fridman (14:55.040)
And by the way, there's a thing about humans,
Jaron Lanier (14:59.160)
which is we're problematic.
Lex Fridman (15:03.880)
Any kind of social interaction with other people
Jaron Lanier (15:07.900)
is gonna have its problems.
Lex Fridman (15:10.180)
People are political and tricky.
Lex Fridman (15:14.060)
And like, I love classical music,
Lex Fridman (15:16.260)
but when you actually go to a classical music thing
Lex Fridman (15:18.580)
and it turns out, oh, actually,
Lex Fridman (15:19.740)
this is like a backroom power deal kind of place
Lex Fridman (15:22.020)
and a big status ritual as well.
Lex Fridman (15:24.180)
And that's kind of not as fun.
Jaron Lanier (15:27.900)
That's part of the package.
Lex Fridman (15:29.020)
And the thing is, it's always going to be,
Jaron Lanier (15:30.700)
there's always gonna be a mix of things.
Lex Fridman (15:34.160)
I don't think the search for purity
Jaron Lanier (15:38.820)
is gonna get you anywhere.
Lex Fridman (15:40.420)
So I'm not worried about that.
Jaron Lanier (15:42.320)
I worry about the really bad cases
Lex Fridman (15:44.540)
where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough
Jaron Lanier (15:48.260)
that we might not survive.
Lex Fridman (15:49.280)
And I think the social media criticism rises to that level,
Lex Fridman (15:53.500)
but I'm glad you enjoy it.
Lex Fridman (15:54.940)
I think it's great.
Lex Fridman (15:57.380)
And I like that you basically say
Lex Fridman (15:59.100)
that every experience has both beauty and darkness,
Jaron Lanier (16:02.220)
as in with classical music.
Lex Fridman (16:03.660)
I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much.
Lex Fridman (16:07.220)
But it's interesting.
Lex Fridman (16:08.100)
I mean, every, and even the darkness,
Jaron Lanier (16:10.220)
it's a man's search for meaning
Lex Fridman (16:11.900)
with Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps.
Jaron Lanier (16:15.820)
Even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty.
Lex Fridman (16:20.940)
And so that's the interesting thing about humans,
Jaron Lanier (16:25.140)
is the capacity to discover beautiful
Lex Fridman (16:27.940)
in the darkest of moments,
Lex Fridman (16:29.140)
but there's always the dark parts too.
Lex Fridman (16:31.660)
Well, I mean, it's our situation is structurally difficult.
Jaron Lanier (16:37.060)
We are, no, it is, it's true.
Lex Fridman (16:42.220)
We perceive socially, we depend on each other
Jaron Lanier (16:44.860)
for our sense of place and perception of the world.
Lex Fridman (16:50.800)
I mean, we're dependent on each other.
Lex Fridman (16:52.380)
And yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably,
Lex Fridman (16:58.300)
we never really let each other down.
Jaron Lanier (17:01.060)
We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive.
Lex Fridman (17:05.180)
I mean, it's just our fundamental situation
Jaron Lanier (17:08.340)
is complicated and challenging,
Lex Fridman (17:10.660)
and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Jaron Lanier (17:13.580)
Okay, let's talk about one of the most challenging things.
Lex Fridman (17:17.060)
One of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of
Jaron Lanier (17:20.860)
being human, allegedly.
Lex Fridman (17:23.420)
You wrote an essay on death and consciousness
Jaron Lanier (17:26.320)
in which you write a note.
Lex Fridman (17:28.380)
Certainly the fear of death
Jaron Lanier (17:29.980)
has been one of the greatest driving forces
Lex Fridman (17:31.980)
in the history of thought
Lex Fridman (17:33.460)
and in the formation of the character of civilization.
Lex Fridman (17:37.340)
And yet it is under acknowledged.
Jaron Lanier (17:39.800)
The great book on the subject,
Lex Fridman (17:41.300)
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Jaron Lanier (17:43.260)
deserves a reconsideration.
Lex Fridman (17:47.940)
I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this.
Lex Fridman (17:49.820)
What's the role of death in life?
Lex Fridman (17:51.740)
See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house
Jaron Lanier (17:54.660)
because my wife is Russian and we also have,
Lex Fridman (17:58.620)
we have a piano of such spectacular qualities,
Jaron Lanier (18:01.380)
you wouldn't, you would have freaked out.
Lex Fridman (18:04.660)
But anyway, we'll let all that go.
Lex Fridman (18:07.260)
So the context in which,
Lex Fridman (18:09.460)
I remember that essay sort of,
Jaron Lanier (18:12.660)
this was from maybe the 90s or something.
Lex Fridman (18:15.060)
And I used to publish in a journal
Jaron Lanier (18:18.940)
called the Journal of Consciousness Studies
Lex Fridman (18:20.620)
because I was interested in these endless debates
Jaron Lanier (18:24.220)
about consciousness and science,
Lex Fridman (18:27.820)
which certainly continue today.
Lex Fridman (18:31.700)
And I was interested in how the fear of death
Lex Fridman (18:38.580)
and the denial of death played into
Jaron Lanier (18:41.740)
different philosophical approaches to consciousness.
Lex Fridman (18:44.820)
Because I think on the one hand,
Jaron Lanier (18:53.540)
the sort of sentimental school of dualism,
Lex Fridman (18:58.780)
meaning the feeling that there's something
Jaron Lanier (19:00.300)
apart from the physical brain,
Lex Fridman (19:02.180)
some kind of soul or something else,
Jaron Lanier (19:05.040)
is obviously motivated in a sense
Lex Fridman (19:07.100)
by a hope that whatever that is
Jaron Lanier (19:09.460)
will survive death and continue.
Lex Fridman (19:11.580)
And that's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions,
Jaron Lanier (19:15.420)
not all of them, not really, but most of them.
Lex Fridman (19:21.220)
The thing I noticed is that the opposite of those,
Jaron Lanier (19:26.900)
which might be the sort of hardcore,
Lex Fridman (19:28.960)
no, the brain's a computer and that's it.
Jaron Lanier (19:31.340)
In a sense, we're motivated in the same way
Lex Fridman (19:36.300)
with a remarkably similar chain of arguments,
Jaron Lanier (19:40.700)
which is no, the brain's a computer
Lex Fridman (19:43.720)
and I'm gonna figure it out in my lifetime
Lex Fridman (19:45.580)
and upload myself and I'll live forever.
Lex Fridman (19:48.220)
That's interesting.
Lex Fridman (19:50.540)
Yeah, that's like the implied thought, right?
Lex Fridman (19:53.540)
Yeah, and so it's kind of this,
Jaron Lanier (19:55.900)
in a funny way, it's the same thing.
Lex Fridman (1:00:00.160)
It's nice when it can be simplified
Jaron Lanier (1:00:01.680)
in the way that you can truly simply understand.
Lex Fridman (1:00:03.920)
Everybody can simply understand the basics.
Jaron Lanier (1:00:07.680)
In the same way, it should be very simple to understand
Lex Fridman (1:00:12.560)
how the data is being used
Lex Fridman (1:00:14.800)
and what data is being used for people.
Lex Fridman (1:00:17.440)
But then you're arguing that in order for that to happen,
Jaron Lanier (1:00:20.400)
you have to have the incentives alike.
Lex Fridman (1:00:22.400)
I mean, a lot of the reason that money works
Jaron Lanier (1:00:26.560)
is actually information hiding and information loss.
Lex Fridman (1:00:30.160)
Like one of the things about money
Jaron Lanier (1:00:32.160)
is a particular dollar you get
Lex Fridman (1:00:34.240)
might have passed through your enemy's hands
Lex Fridman (1:00:36.320)
and you don't know it.
Lex Fridman (1:00:37.600)
But also, I mean, this is what Adam Smith,
Jaron Lanier (1:00:40.320)
if you wanna give the most charitable interpretation possible
Lex Fridman (1:00:43.440)
to the invisible hand is what he was saying,
Jaron Lanier (1:00:45.920)
is that like there's this whole complicated thing
Lex Fridman (1:00:48.480)
and not only do you not need to know about it,
Jaron Lanier (1:00:50.480)
the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried
Lex Fridman (1:00:52.720)
and just like let the economic incentives
Jaron Lanier (1:00:55.840)
solve for this whole thing.
Lex Fridman (1:00:58.160)
And that in a sense, every transaction
Jaron Lanier (1:01:00.880)
is like a neuron and a neural net.
Lex Fridman (1:01:02.960)
If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it
Lex Fridman (1:01:05.600)
and let the whole thing settle to a solution
Lex Fridman (1:01:07.920)
and don't worry about it.
Jaron Lanier (1:01:10.080)
I think this idea of having incentives
Lex Fridman (1:01:13.520)
that reduce complexity for people
Jaron Lanier (1:01:15.760)
can be made to work.
Lex Fridman (1:01:17.200)
And that's an example of an algorithm
Jaron Lanier (1:01:19.040)
that could be manipulative or not,
Lex Fridman (1:01:20.480)
going back to your question before
Lex Fridman (1:01:21.600)
about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative?
Lex Fridman (1:01:24.320)
And I would say a GitHub like,
Jaron Lanier (1:01:28.000)
if you just have this vision,
Lex Fridman (1:01:29.120)
GitHub plus TikTok combined, is it possible?
Jaron Lanier (1:01:33.200)
I think it is.
Lex Fridman (1:01:34.160)
I really think it is.
Jaron Lanier (1:01:34.640)
I'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea
Lex Fridman (1:01:38.560)
of creatives on TikTok collaborating
Jaron Lanier (1:01:40.320)
in the same way that people on GitHub collaborate.
Lex Fridman (1:01:42.400)
Why not?
Jaron Lanier (1:01:42.880)
I like that kind of version.
Lex Fridman (1:01:44.480)
Why not?
Jaron Lanier (1:01:45.440)
I like it, I love it.
Lex Fridman (1:01:46.320)
I just like, right now when people use,
Jaron Lanier (1:01:48.640)
by the way, father of teenage daughter.
Lex Fridman (1:01:50.240)
It's all about TikTok, right?
Jaron Lanier (1:01:53.440)
So, when people use TikTok,
Lex Fridman (1:01:55.440)
there's a lot of, it's kind of funny,
Jaron Lanier (1:01:58.960)
I was gonna say cattiness,
Lex Fridman (1:01:59.920)
but I was just using the cat
Jaron Lanier (1:02:01.440)
as this exemplar of what we're talking about.
Lex Fridman (1:02:04.480)
I contradict myself.
Lex Fridman (1:02:05.440)
But anyway, there's all this cattiness
Lex Fridman (1:02:07.120)
where people are like,
Jaron Lanier (1:02:07.760)
ee, this person's ee.
Lex Fridman (1:02:09.600)
And I just, what about people getting together
Lex Fridman (1:02:13.440)
and kind of saying,
Lex Fridman (1:02:14.640)
okay, we're gonna work on this move.
Jaron Lanier (1:02:16.320)
We're gonna get a better,
Lex Fridman (1:02:17.120)
can we get a better musician?
Jaron Lanier (1:02:18.320)
Like, and they do that,
Lex Fridman (1:02:20.160)
but that's the part
Jaron Lanier (1:02:21.920)
that's kind of off the books right now.
Lex Fridman (1:02:25.120)
That should be like right there.
Jaron Lanier (1:02:26.160)
That should be the center.
Lex Fridman (1:02:27.040)
That's where the, that's the really best part.
Jaron Lanier (1:02:29.280)
Well, that's where the invention of Git period,
Lex Fridman (1:02:31.840)
the versioning is brilliant.
Lex Fridman (1:02:33.280)
And so some of the things
Lex Fridman (1:02:35.440)
you're talking about,
Jaron Lanier (1:02:36.720)
technology, algorithms, tools can empower.
Lex Fridman (1:02:40.240)
And that's the thing for humans to connect,
Jaron Lanier (1:02:43.600)
to collaborate and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:02:44.880)
Can we upset more people a little bit?
Jaron Lanier (1:02:49.200)
Maybe we'd have to try.
Lex Fridman (1:02:50.640)
No, no.
Lex Fridman (1:02:51.040)
Can we, can I ask you to elaborate?
Lex Fridman (1:02:53.680)
Cause I, my intuition was that
Jaron Lanier (1:02:55.760)
you would be a supporter of something
Lex Fridman (1:02:57.120)
like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin
Jaron Lanier (1:02:59.200)
because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization.
Lex Fridman (1:03:02.880)
What do you, so can you elaborate?
Jaron Lanier (1:03:05.520)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:03:06.240)
Okay, look.
Jaron Lanier (1:03:06.720)
Your thoughts on Bitcoin.
Lex Fridman (1:03:07.920)
I, it's kind of funny.
Jaron Lanier (1:03:10.560)
Um, I, I wrote, I, I've been advocating
Lex Fridman (1:03:14.960)
some kind of digital currency for a long time.
Lex Fridman (1:03:17.520)
And when the, the, uh, when, when Bitcoin came out
Lex Fridman (1:03:22.800)
and the original paper on, on blockchain,
Jaron Lanier (1:03:26.160)
um, my heart kind of sank because I thought,
Lex Fridman (1:03:29.200)
Oh my God, we're applying all of this fancy thought
Lex Fridman (1:03:32.560)
and all these very careful distributed security
Lex Fridman (1:03:35.280)
measures to recreate the gold standard.
Jaron Lanier (1:03:38.400)
Like it's just so retro.
Lex Fridman (1:03:40.320)
It's so dysfunctional.
Jaron Lanier (1:03:42.000)
It's so useless from an economic point of view.
Lex Fridman (1:03:44.000)
So it's always, and then the other thing
Jaron Lanier (1:03:46.320)
is using computational inefficiency
Lex Fridman (1:03:48.880)
at a boundless scale as your form of security
Jaron Lanier (1:03:51.680)
is a crime against this atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (1:03:53.920)
Obviously a lot of people know that now,
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.360)
but we knew that at the start.
Lex Fridman (1:03:57.440)
Like the thing is when the first paper came out,
Jaron Lanier (1:03:59.600)
I remember a lot of people saying,
Lex Fridman (1:04:00.560)
Oh my God, I think this thing scales.
Lex Fridman (1:04:02.400)
It's a carbon disaster, you know?
Lex Fridman (1:04:04.400)
And, and, um, I, I just like, I'm just mystified,
Lex Fridman (1:04:09.120)
but that's a different question than when you asked,
Lex Fridman (1:04:11.440)
can you have, um, a cryptographic currency
Jaron Lanier (1:04:15.040)
or at least some kind of digital currency
Lex Fridman (1:04:17.280)
that's of a benefit?
Lex Fridman (1:04:18.240)
And absolutely.
Lex Fridman (1:04:19.440)
Like I'm, and there are people who are trying
Jaron Lanier (1:04:21.360)
to be thoughtful about this.
Lex Fridman (1:04:22.560)
You should, uh, if you haven't,
Jaron Lanier (1:04:23.680)
you should interview, uh, Vitalik Buterin sometime.
Lex Fridman (1:04:25.760)
Yeah, I've interviewed him twice.
Jaron Lanier (1:04:27.600)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:04:28.080)
So like there are people in the community
Jaron Lanier (1:04:29.920)
who are trying to be thoughtful
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.880)
and trying to figure out how to do this better.
Lex Fridman (1:04:32.800)
It has nice properties though, right?
Lex Fridman (1:04:34.240)
So the, one of the nice properties is that
Jaron Lanier (1:04:36.000)
like government centralized, it's hard to control.
Lex Fridman (1:04:38.240)
Uh, and then the other one to fix some of the issues
Jaron Lanier (1:04:40.720)
that you're referring to,
Lex Fridman (1:04:41.600)
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here is,
Jaron Lanier (1:04:43.600)
you know, there's lightning network.
Lex Fridman (1:04:44.880)
There's ideas how to, how you, uh, build stuff
Jaron Lanier (1:04:48.400)
on top of Bitcoin, similar with gold
Lex Fridman (1:04:50.400)
that allow you to have this kind of vibrant economy
Jaron Lanier (1:04:53.760)
that operates not on the blockchain,
Lex Fridman (1:04:55.600)
but outside the blockchain.
Lex Fridman (1:04:56.720)
And you use this, uh, Bitcoin for, uh, for like
Lex Fridman (1:05:00.800)
checking the security of those transactions.
Lex Fridman (1:05:02.640)
So Bitcoin's not new.
Lex Fridman (1:05:03.760)
It's been around for a while.
Jaron Lanier (1:05:05.280)
I've been watching it closely.
Lex Fridman (1:05:07.440)
I've not, I've not seen one example of it
Jaron Lanier (1:05:11.040)
creating economic growth.
Lex Fridman (1:05:12.880)
There was this obsession with the idea
Jaron Lanier (1:05:14.320)
that government was the problem,
Lex Fridman (1:05:16.080)
that idea that government's the problem.
Jaron Lanier (1:05:18.400)
Let's say government earned that wrath, honestly,
Lex Fridman (1:05:22.720)
because if you look at some of the things
Jaron Lanier (1:05:25.040)
that governments have done in recent decades,
Lex Fridman (1:05:27.040)
it's not a pretty story.
Jaron Lanier (1:05:28.960)
Like, uh, after, uh, after a very small number
Lex Fridman (1:05:32.960)
of people in the US government decided to bomb
Jaron Lanier (1:05:35.920)
in landmine Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back
Lex Fridman (1:05:40.080)
and say, oh, government's this great thing.
Jaron Lanier (1:05:41.760)
But, uh, then the problem is that this resistance
Lex Fridman (1:05:47.120)
to government is basically resistance to politics.
Jaron Lanier (1:05:50.880)
It's a way of saying, if I can get rich,
Lex Fridman (1:05:53.120)
nobody should bother me.
Jaron Lanier (1:05:54.240)
It's a way of not, of not having obligations to others.
Lex Fridman (1:05:56.880)
And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation.
Lex Fridman (1:06:00.400)
But does that mean that the impulse that the government, um,
Lex Fridman (1:06:06.560)
should not overreach its power is flawed?
Jaron Lanier (1:06:09.280)
Well, I mean, what I want to ask you to do
Lex Fridman (1:06:12.080)
is to replace the word government with politics.
Jaron Lanier (1:06:15.520)
Like our politics is people having to deal with each other.
Lex Fridman (1:06:20.000)
My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form
Jaron Lanier (1:06:23.760)
of freedom is perpetual annoyance.
Lex Fridman (1:06:26.400)
All right.
Lex Fridman (1:06:27.120)
So annoyance means you're actually dealing with people
Lex Fridman (1:06:30.560)
because people are annoying.
Jaron Lanier (1:06:31.760)
Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable
Lex Fridman (1:06:34.480)
so it doesn't destroy us all.
Lex Fridman (1:06:36.080)
So if you have perpetual annoyance,
Lex Fridman (1:06:37.600)
then you have freedom.
Lex Fridman (1:06:38.400)
And that's politics.
Lex Fridman (1:06:39.680)
That's politics.
Jaron Lanier (1:06:40.560)
If you don't have perpetual annoyance,
Lex Fridman (1:06:42.800)
something's gone very wrong and you've suppressed those people
Jaron Lanier (1:06:45.440)
that it's only temporary.
Lex Fridman (1:06:46.400)
It's going to come back and be horrible.
Jaron Lanier (1:06:48.400)
You should seek perpetual annoyance.
Lex Fridman (1:06:50.880)
I'll invite you to a Berkeley city council meeting
Lex Fridman (1:06:52.800)
so you can know what that feels like.
Lex Fridman (1:06:53.920)
What perpetual annoyance feels like.
Lex Fridman (1:06:57.280)
But anyway, so freedom is being...
Lex Fridman (1:06:59.840)
The test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people.
Jaron Lanier (1:07:02.080)
If you're not, you're not free.
Lex Fridman (1:07:03.440)
If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion
Jaron Lanier (1:07:06.000)
that's going to fall apart.
Lex Fridman (1:07:07.680)
Now, this quest to avoid government
Jaron Lanier (1:07:10.400)
is really a quest to avoid that political feeling,
Lex Fridman (1:07:12.880)
but you have to have it.
Jaron Lanier (1:07:14.080)
You have to deal with it.
Lex Fridman (1:07:16.480)
And it sucks, but that's the human situation.
Jaron Lanier (1:07:19.200)
That's the human condition.
Lex Fridman (1:07:20.560)
And this idea that we're going to have this abstract thing
Jaron Lanier (1:07:22.800)
that protects us from having to deal with each other
Lex Fridman (1:07:25.200)
is always an illusion.
Jaron Lanier (1:07:26.640)
The idea, and I apologize,
Lex Fridman (1:07:28.560)
I overstretched the use of the word government.
Jaron Lanier (1:07:32.320)
The idea is there should be some punishment from the people
Lex Fridman (1:07:37.200)
when a bureaucracy, when a set of people
Jaron Lanier (1:07:40.960)
or a particular leader, like in an authoritarian regime,
Lex Fridman (1:07:44.400)
which more than half the world currently lives under,
Jaron Lanier (1:07:47.040)
if they become, they stop representing the people,
Lex Fridman (1:07:53.680)
it stops being like a Berkeley meeting
Lex Fridman (1:07:56.560)
and starts being more like a dictatorial kind of situation.
Lex Fridman (1:08:01.520)
And so the point is, it's nice to give people,
Jaron Lanier (1:08:05.920)
the populace in a decentralized way,
Lex Fridman (1:08:08.880)
power to resist that kind of government becoming over authoritarian.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:15.360)
Yeah, but people see this idea that the problem
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.160)
is always the government being powerful is false.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:21.360)
The problem can also be criminal gangs.
Lex Fridman (1:08:23.440)
The problem can also be weird cults.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:25.440)
The problem can be abusive clergy.
Lex Fridman (1:08:30.320)
The problem can be infrastructure that fails.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:35.040)
The problem can be poisoned water.
Lex Fridman (1:08:37.440)
The problem can be failed electric grids.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:39.760)
The problem can be a crappy education system
Lex Fridman (1:08:45.440)
that makes the whole society less and less able to create value.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:51.120)
There are all these other problems
Lex Fridman (1:08:52.640)
that are different from an overbearing government.
Jaron Lanier (1:08:54.480)
Like you have to keep some sense of perspective
Lex Fridman (1:08:56.800)
and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem
Jaron Lanier (1:08:59.120)
because then the others will pop up.
Lex Fridman (1:09:01.040)
But empirically speaking, some problems are bigger than others.
Lex Fridman (1:09:05.120)
So like some groups of people,
Lex Fridman (1:09:08.720)
like governments or gangs or companies lead to problems.
Lex Fridman (1:09:12.080)
Are you a US citizen?
Lex Fridman (1:09:13.520)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:09:14.080)
Has the government ever really been a problem for you?
Lex Fridman (1:09:16.480)
Well, okay.
Lex Fridman (1:09:17.200)
So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman (1:09:20.480)
Yeah, my wife did too.
Lex Fridman (1:09:22.240)
So I have seen, and has the government bothered me?
Lex Fridman (1:09:28.800)
I would say that that's a really complicated question,
Jaron Lanier (1:09:32.720)
especially because the United States is such,
Lex Fridman (1:09:34.720)
it's a special place like a lot of other countries.
Jaron Lanier (1:09:39.440)
My wife's family were refused NICs.
Lex Fridman (1:09:41.680)
And so we have like a very,
Lex Fridman (1:09:43.040)
and her dad was sent to the Gulag.
Lex Fridman (1:09:46.080)
For what it's worth on my father's side,
Jaron Lanier (1:09:49.120)
all but a few were killed by a pogrom
Lex Fridman (1:09:51.360)
in a post Soviet pogrom in Ukraine.
Lex Fridman (1:09:57.040)
So I would say because you did a little trick
Lex Fridman (1:10:00.000)
of eloquent trick of language
Jaron Lanier (1:10:02.720)
that you switched to the United States
Lex Fridman (1:10:04.640)
to talk about government.
Lex Fridman (1:10:06.160)
So I believe unlike my friend,
Lex Fridman (1:10:09.840)
Michael Malus, who's an anarchist,
Jaron Lanier (1:10:11.920)
I believe government can do a lot of good in the world.
Lex Fridman (1:10:15.600)
That is exactly what you're saying,
Jaron Lanier (1:10:16.960)
which is it's politics.
Lex Fridman (1:10:19.680)
The thing that Bitcoin folks and cryptocurrency folks argue
Jaron Lanier (1:10:22.800)
is that one of the big ways that government
Lex Fridman (1:10:25.520)
can control the populace is centralized bank,
Jaron Lanier (1:10:27.600)
like control the money.
Lex Fridman (1:10:29.920)
That was the case in the Soviet Union too.
Jaron Lanier (1:10:32.160)
There's inflation can really make poor people suffer.
Lex Fridman (1:10:38.480)
And so what they argue is this is one way to go around
Jaron Lanier (1:10:43.600)
that power that government has
Lex Fridman (1:10:46.160)
of controlling the monetary system.
Lex Fridman (1:10:48.400)
So that's a way to resist.
Lex Fridman (1:10:50.080)
That's not actually saying government bad.
Jaron Lanier (1:10:53.280)
That's saying some of the ways
Lex Fridman (1:10:55.520)
that central banks get into trouble
Jaron Lanier (1:10:59.600)
can be resisted through centralized.
Lex Fridman (1:11:01.120)
So let me ask you on balance today in the real world
Jaron Lanier (1:11:04.960)
in terms of actual facts,
Lex Fridman (1:11:07.520)
do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more
Jaron Lanier (1:11:10.000)
to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes
Lex Fridman (1:11:13.840)
or to resist those regimes?
Lex Fridman (1:11:15.600)
Where do you think the balance is right now?
Lex Fridman (1:11:17.440)
I know exactly having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks
Lex Fridman (1:11:21.360)
what they would tell me, right?
Lex Fridman (1:11:22.720)
I, it's hard, it's, I don't, no, no.
Jaron Lanier (1:11:27.440)
I'm asking it as a real question.
Lex Fridman (1:11:29.200)
There's no way to know the answer perfectly.
Jaron Lanier (1:11:30.720)
There's no way to know the answer perfectly.
Lex Fridman (1:11:32.640)
However, I gotta say, if you look at people
Jaron Lanier (1:11:36.400)
who've been able to decode blockchains
Lex Fridman (1:11:39.680)
and they do leak a lot of data.
Jaron Lanier (1:11:41.040)
They're not as secure as this widely thought.
Lex Fridman (1:11:43.520)
There are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales
Jaron Lanier (1:11:47.200)
from pretty early and they're huge.
Lex Fridman (1:11:49.760)
And if you ask, who are these people?
Jaron Lanier (1:11:54.880)
There's evidence that a lot of them are quite
Lex Fridman (1:11:57.600)
not the people you'd wanna support, let's say.
Lex Fridman (1:12:00.240)
And I just don't, like, I think empirically
Lex Fridman (1:12:03.760)
this idea that there's some intrinsic way
Jaron Lanier (1:12:07.200)
that bad governments will be disempowered
Lex Fridman (1:12:13.520)
and people will be able to resist them more
Jaron Lanier (1:12:16.000)
than new villains or even villainous governments
Lex Fridman (1:12:18.800)
will be empowered.
Jaron Lanier (1:12:19.600)
There's no basis for that assertion.
Lex Fridman (1:12:21.840)
It just is kind of circumstantial.
Lex Fridman (1:12:23.840)
And I think in general, Bitcoin ownership is one thing,
Lex Fridman (1:12:30.560)
but Bitcoin transactions have tended
Jaron Lanier (1:12:32.960)
to support criminality more than productivity.
Lex Fridman (1:12:36.640)
Of course, they would argue that was the story
Jaron Lanier (1:12:38.960)
of its early days, that now more and more Bitcoin
Lex Fridman (1:12:42.480)
is being used for legitimate transactions, but...
Jaron Lanier (1:12:46.240)
That's the difference.
Lex Fridman (1:12:47.040)
I didn't say for legitimate transactions.
Jaron Lanier (1:12:48.560)
I said for economic growth, for creativity.
Lex Fridman (1:12:51.440)
Like, I think what's happening is people are using it
Jaron Lanier (1:12:56.400)
a little bit for buying, I don't know,
Lex Fridman (1:12:58.720)
maybe some of these companies make it available
Jaron Lanier (1:13:02.160)
for this and that, they buy a Tesla with it or something.
Lex Fridman (1:13:04.480)
Investing in a startup hard, it might've happened
Jaron Lanier (1:13:10.480)
a little bit, but it's not an engine of productivity,
Lex Fridman (1:13:13.360)
creativity, and economic growth,
Jaron Lanier (1:13:15.600)
whereas old fashioned currency still is.
Lex Fridman (1:13:17.840)
And anyway, look, I think something...
Jaron Lanier (1:13:24.080)
I'm pro the idea of digital currencies.
Lex Fridman (1:13:28.000)
I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics
Jaron Lanier (1:13:36.160)
as a result.
Lex Fridman (1:13:37.520)
I think they have to exist in some balance
Jaron Lanier (1:13:39.840)
to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each.
Lex Fridman (1:13:42.320)
In some ways, there's parallels to our discussion
Jaron Lanier (1:13:44.640)
of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea,
Lex Fridman (1:13:50.720)
but it can be used to manipulate,
Jaron Lanier (1:13:54.240)
you can be used poorly by aforementioned humans.
Lex Fridman (1:13:59.200)
Well, I think that you can make better designs
Lex Fridman (1:14:02.000)
and worse designs.
Lex Fridman (1:14:04.400)
And the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting
Jaron Lanier (1:14:07.680)
is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs
Lex Fridman (1:14:12.560)
because we're all so hooked on that Horatio Alger story
Jaron Lanier (1:14:16.720)
on like, I'm gonna be the one who gets the viral benefit.
Lex Fridman (1:14:20.720)
Way back when all this stuff was starting,
Jaron Lanier (1:14:22.720)
I remember it would have been in the 80s,
Lex Fridman (1:14:24.720)
somebody had the idea of using viral
Jaron Lanier (1:14:26.640)
as a metaphor for network effect.
Lex Fridman (1:14:29.600)
And the whole point was to talk about
Lex Fridman (1:14:32.160)
how bad network effect was,
Lex Fridman (1:14:33.520)
that it always created distortions
Jaron Lanier (1:14:35.760)
that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives
Lex Fridman (1:14:39.200)
that created dangerous distortions.
Jaron Lanier (1:14:42.400)
Like, but then somehow, even after the pandemic,
Lex Fridman (1:14:45.440)
we think of viral as this good thing
Lex Fridman (1:14:46.960)
because we imagine ourselves as the virus, right?
Lex Fridman (1:14:49.200)
We wanna be on the beneficiary side of it.
Lex Fridman (1:14:52.000)
But of course, you're not likely to be.
Lex Fridman (1:14:54.480)
There is a sense because money is involved,
Jaron Lanier (1:14:56.880)
people are not reasoning clearly always
Lex Fridman (1:15:01.440)
because they want to be part of that first viral wave
Jaron Lanier (1:15:06.400)
that makes them rich.
Lex Fridman (1:15:07.520)
And that blinds people from their basic morality.
Jaron Lanier (1:15:11.200)
I had an interesting conversation.
Lex Fridman (1:15:14.000)
I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy,
Lex Fridman (1:15:16.400)
but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin,
Lex Fridman (1:15:20.720)
I remember having an argument about like,
Jaron Lanier (1:15:24.320)
it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme,
Lex Fridman (1:15:26.400)
like the early people have more than the later people.
Lex Fridman (1:15:29.520)
And the further down the chain you get,
Lex Fridman (1:15:31.680)
the more you're subject to gambling like dynamics
Jaron Lanier (1:15:34.800)
where it's more and more random
Lex Fridman (1:15:36.000)
and more and more subject to weird network effects
Lex Fridman (1:15:37.760)
and whatnot unless you're a very small player perhaps
Lex Fridman (1:15:41.280)
and you're just buying something,
Lex Fridman (1:15:42.880)
but even then you'll be subject to fluctuations
Lex Fridman (1:15:45.120)
because the whole thing is just kind of,
Jaron Lanier (1:15:48.080)
as it fluctuates,
Lex Fridman (1:15:48.960)
it's gonna wave around the little people more.
Lex Fridman (1:15:51.680)
And I remember the conversation turned to gambling
Lex Fridman (1:15:55.200)
because gambling is a pretty large economic sector.
Lex Fridman (1:15:58.080)
And it's always struck me as being nonproductive.
Lex Fridman (1:16:01.440)
Like somebody goes to Las Vegas and they lose money.
Lex Fridman (1:16:03.680)
And so one argument is, well, they got entertainment.
Lex Fridman (1:16:06.880)
They paid for entertainment as they lost money.
Lex Fridman (1:16:08.960)
So that's fine.
Lex Fridman (1:16:10.320)
And Las Vegas does up the losing of money
Jaron Lanier (1:16:13.360)
in an entertaining way.
Lex Fridman (1:16:14.160)
So why not?
Jaron Lanier (1:16:14.720)
It's like going to a show.
Lex Fridman (1:16:15.920)
So that's one argument.
Jaron Lanier (1:16:17.520)
The argument that was made to me was different from that.
Lex Fridman (1:16:19.680)
It's that, no, what they're doing
Jaron Lanier (1:16:21.200)
is they're getting a chance to experience hope.
Lex Fridman (1:16:23.680)
And a lot of people don't get that chance.
Lex Fridman (1:16:25.360)
And so that's really worth it.
Lex Fridman (1:16:26.560)
Even if they're gonna lose,
Jaron Lanier (1:16:27.440)
they have that moment of hope
Lex Fridman (1:16:28.960)
and they need to be able to experience that.
Lex Fridman (1:16:31.120)
And it was a very interesting argument.
Lex Fridman (1:16:33.600)
That's so heartbreaking, but I've seen that.
Jaron Lanier (1:16:39.920)
I have that a little bit of a sense.
Lex Fridman (1:16:41.600)
I've talked to some young people
Jaron Lanier (1:16:43.040)
who invest in cryptocurrency.
Lex Fridman (1:16:45.840)
And what I see is this hope.
Jaron Lanier (1:16:48.320)
This is the first thing that gave them hope.
Lex Fridman (1:16:50.240)
And that's so heartbreaking to me
Jaron Lanier (1:16:52.800)
that you've gotten hope from that.
Lex Fridman (1:16:55.440)
So much is invested.
Jaron Lanier (1:16:56.720)
It's like hope from somehow becoming rich
Lex Fridman (1:16:59.840)
as opposed to something to me.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:01.520)
I apologize, but money is in the longterm
Lex Fridman (1:17:04.960)
not going to be a source of that deep meaning.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:07.760)
It's good to have enough money,
Lex Fridman (1:17:09.600)
but it should not be the source of hope.
Lex Fridman (1:17:11.920)
And it's heartbreaking to me
Lex Fridman (1:17:13.040)
how many people is the source of hope.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:16.160)
Yeah, you've just described the psychology of virality
Lex Fridman (1:17:21.200)
or the psychology of trying to base a civilization
Jaron Lanier (1:17:25.600)
on semi random occurrences of network effect peaks.
Lex Fridman (1:17:28.640)
Yeah, and it doesn't really work.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:31.680)
I mean, I think we need to get away from that.
Lex Fridman (1:17:33.600)
We need to soften those peaks
Lex Fridman (1:17:37.440)
and accept Microsoft, which deserves every penny,
Lex Fridman (1:17:39.840)
but in every other case.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:41.280)
Well, you mentioned GitHub.
Lex Fridman (1:17:43.360)
I think what Microsoft did with GitHub was brilliant.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:45.600)
I was very happy.
Lex Fridman (1:17:47.120)
Okay, if I can give a, not a critical,
Lex Fridman (1:17:50.560)
but on Microsoft because they recently purchased Bethesda.
Lex Fridman (1:17:56.480)
So Elder Scrolls is in their hands.
Jaron Lanier (1:17:58.400)
I'm watching you, Microsoft,
Lex Fridman (1:18:01.200)
do not screw up my favorite game.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:03.840)
Yeah, well, look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft.
Lex Fridman (1:18:06.880)
I have an explicit arrangement with them
Jaron Lanier (1:18:08.960)
where I don't speak for them, obviously,
Lex Fridman (1:18:11.120)
like that should be very clear.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:12.080)
I do not speak for them.
Lex Fridman (1:18:14.880)
I am not saying I like them.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:17.280)
I think such is amazing.
Lex Fridman (1:18:20.560)
The term data dignity was coined by Sacha.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:23.520)
Like, so, you know, we have, it's kind of extraordinary,
Lex Fridman (1:18:27.040)
but, you know, Microsoft's this giant thing.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:29.280)
It's going to screw up this or that.
Lex Fridman (1:18:30.560)
You know, it's not, I don't know.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:33.440)
It's kind of interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:18:34.880)
I've had a few occasions in my life
Jaron Lanier (1:18:36.720)
to see how things work from the inside of some big thing.
Lex Fridman (1:18:39.760)
And, you know, it's always just people kind of,
Jaron Lanier (1:18:44.000)
I don't know, there's always like coordination problems.
Lex Fridman (1:18:48.720)
There's always human problems.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:50.480)
Oh God, there's some good people.
Lex Fridman (1:18:51.600)
There's some bad people.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:52.560)
It's always, I hope Microsoft doesn't screw up your game.
Lex Fridman (1:18:55.120)
And I hope they bring Clippy back.
Jaron Lanier (1:18:57.760)
You should never kill Clippy.
Lex Fridman (1:18:59.360)
Bring Clippy back.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:00.080)
Oh, Clippy.
Lex Fridman (1:19:01.120)
But Clippy promotes the myth of AI.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:03.840)
Well, that's why, this is why I think you're wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:19:06.240)
How about if we, all right.
Lex Fridman (1:19:07.840)
Could we bring back Bob instead of Clippy?
Lex Fridman (1:19:10.000)
Which one was Bob?
Jaron Lanier (1:19:11.040)
Oh, Bob was another thing.
Lex Fridman (1:19:13.040)
Bob was this other screen character
Jaron Lanier (1:19:15.040)
who was supposed to be the voice of AI.
Lex Fridman (1:19:16.720)
Cortana?
Lex Fridman (1:19:17.440)
Cortana?
Lex Fridman (1:19:17.920)
Would Cortana do it for you?
Jaron Lanier (1:19:19.200)
Cortana is too corporate.
Lex Fridman (1:19:20.640)
I like it, Cortana's fine.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:23.680)
There's a woman in Seattle who's like the model for Cortana,
Lex Fridman (1:19:27.440)
did Cortana's voice.
Lex Fridman (1:19:28.400)
The voice?
Lex Fridman (1:19:29.120)
There was like,
Jaron Lanier (1:19:29.760)
No, the voice is great.
Lex Fridman (1:19:31.680)
We had her as a, she used to walk around
Jaron Lanier (1:19:34.560)
if you were wearing Hollands for a bit.
Lex Fridman (1:19:36.160)
I don't think that's happening anymore.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:38.000)
I think, I don't think you should turn a software
Lex Fridman (1:19:40.160)
into a creature.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:41.040)
Well, you and I,
Lex Fridman (1:19:42.080)
Get a cat, just get a cat.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:43.280)
You and I, you and I.
Lex Fridman (1:19:44.320)
Well, get a dog.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:45.840)
Get a dog.
Lex Fridman (1:19:46.320)
Or a dog, yeah.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:47.840)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:19:48.240)
Or a hedgehog.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:49.680)
A hedgehog.
Lex Fridman (1:19:50.640)
Yeah.
Jaron Lanier (1:19:51.760)
You coauthored a paper, you mentioned Lee Smolin,
Lex Fridman (1:19:56.320)
titled The Autodidactic Universe,
Jaron Lanier (1:20:00.000)
which describes our universe as one that learns its own physical laws.
Lex Fridman (1:20:06.240)
That's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea.
Lex Fridman (1:20:09.520)
What are, what would you say are the key ideas in this paper?
Lex Fridman (1:20:12.560)
Ah, okay.
Jaron Lanier (1:20:13.680)
Well, I should say that paper reflected work from last year
Lex Fridman (1:20:18.640)
and the project, the program has moved quite a lot.
Lex Fridman (1:20:21.440)
So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff that's not published
Lex Fridman (1:20:24.080)
that I'm quite excited about.
Lex Fridman (1:20:25.200)
So I have to kind of keep my frame in that,
Lex Fridman (1:20:28.560)
in that last year's thing.
Lex Fridman (1:20:30.160)
So I have to try to be a little careful about that.
Lex Fridman (1:20:33.760)
We can think about it in a few different ways.
Jaron Lanier (1:20:37.200)
The core of the paper, the technical core of it
Lex Fridman (1:20:40.640)
is a triple correspondence.
Jaron Lanier (1:20:43.760)
One part of it was already established
Lex Fridman (1:20:46.960)
and then another part is in the process.
Jaron Lanier (1:20:49.600)
The part that was established was, of course,
Lex Fridman (1:20:53.040)
understanding different theories of physics as matrix models.
Jaron Lanier (1:20:57.040)
The part that was fresher is understanding those
Lex Fridman (1:21:01.600)
as machine learning systems so that we could move fluidly
Jaron Lanier (1:21:04.800)
between these different ways of describing systems.
Lex Fridman (1:21:07.440)
And the reason to want to do that is to just have more tools
Lex Fridman (1:21:11.680)
and more options because, well,
Lex Fridman (1:21:15.920)
theoretical physics is really hard
Lex Fridman (1:21:17.520)
and a lot of programs have kind of run into a state
Lex Fridman (1:21:23.360)
where they feel a little stalled, I guess.
Jaron Lanier (1:21:25.680)
I want to be delicate about this
Lex Fridman (1:21:26.720)
because I'm not a physicist,
Jaron Lanier (1:21:27.680)
I'm the computer scientist collaborating.
Lex Fridman (1:21:29.600)
So I don't mean to diss anybody's.
Lex Fridman (1:21:32.080)
So this is almost like gives a framework
Lex Fridman (1:21:34.560)
for generating new ideas in physics.
Jaron Lanier (1:21:37.280)
As we start to publish more about where it's gone,
Lex Fridman (1:21:40.000)
I think you'll start to see there's tools
Lex Fridman (1:21:42.800)
and ways of thinking about theories
Lex Fridman (1:21:45.840)
that I think open up some new paths
Jaron Lanier (1:21:49.520)
that will be of interest.
Lex Fridman (1:21:52.800)
There's the technical core of it,
Jaron Lanier (1:21:54.320)
which is this idea of a correspondence
Lex Fridman (1:21:56.720)
to give you more facility.
Lex Fridman (1:21:58.080)
But then there's also the storytelling part of it.
Lex Fridman (1:22:00.720)
And this is something Lee loves stories and I do.
Lex Fridman (1:22:05.920)
And the idea here is that a typical way
Lex Fridman (1:22:13.760)
of thinking about physics is that there's some kind
Jaron Lanier (1:22:17.040)
of starting condition and then there's some principle
Lex Fridman (1:22:19.360)
by which the starting condition evolves.
Lex Fridman (1:22:23.920)
And the question is like, why the starting condition?
Lex Fridman (1:22:28.640)
The starting condition has to be fine tuned
Lex Fridman (1:22:32.400)
and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect.
Lex Fridman (1:22:35.760)
And so we were thinking, well, look,
Lex Fridman (1:22:37.360)
what if we could push the storytelling
Lex Fridman (1:22:40.720)
about where the universe comes from much further back
Jaron Lanier (1:22:42.960)
by starting with really simple things that evolve
Lex Fridman (1:22:46.080)
and then through that evolution,
Jaron Lanier (1:22:47.280)
explain how things got to be how they are
Lex Fridman (1:22:48.880)
through very simple principles, right?
Lex Fridman (1:22:51.200)
And so we've been exploring a variety of ways
Lex Fridman (1:22:55.120)
to push the start of the storytelling
Jaron Lanier (1:22:57.680)
further and further back,
Lex Fridman (1:23:00.400)
and it's really kind of interesting
Jaron Lanier (1:23:03.600)
because like for all of his,
Lex Fridman (1:23:07.040)
Lee is sometimes considered to be,
Jaron Lanier (1:23:11.360)
to have a radical quality in the physics world.
Lex Fridman (1:23:13.840)
But he still is like, no, this is gonna be like,
Jaron Lanier (1:23:18.240)
the kind of time we're talking about
Lex Fridman (1:23:19.760)
in which evolution happens is the same time we're now
Lex Fridman (1:23:22.320)
and we're talking about something that starts and continues.
Lex Fridman (1:23:25.680)
And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind
Jaron Lanier (1:23:27.760)
of time that's time like, and it sounds like metaphysics,
Lex Fridman (1:23:31.040)
but there's an ambiguity, you know, like,
Jaron Lanier (1:23:34.560)
it has to start from something
Lex Fridman (1:23:36.160)
and it's kind of interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:23:37.920)
So there's this, a lot of the math
Lex Fridman (1:23:41.440)
can be thought of either way, which is kind of interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:23:44.000)
So push this so far back that basically
Lex Fridman (1:23:46.000)
all the things that we take for granted in physics
Jaron Lanier (1:23:47.920)
start becoming emergent, it's emergent.
Lex Fridman (1:23:50.960)
I really wanna emphasize this is all super baby steps.
Jaron Lanier (1:23:53.440)
I don't wanna over claim.
Lex Fridman (1:23:54.480)
It's like, I think a lot of the things we're doing,
Jaron Lanier (1:23:57.440)
we're approaching some old problems
Lex Fridman (1:23:59.040)
in a pretty fresh way, informed.
Jaron Lanier (1:24:02.240)
There's been a zillion papers about how you can think
Lex Fridman (1:24:04.640)
of the universe as a big neural net
Jaron Lanier (1:24:06.160)
or how you can think of different ideas in physics
Lex Fridman (1:24:09.120)
as being quite similar to, or even equivalent
Jaron Lanier (1:24:11.680)
to some of the ideas in machine learning.
Lex Fridman (1:24:15.360)
And that actually works out crazy well.
Jaron Lanier (1:24:18.720)
Like, I mean, that is actually kind of eerie
Lex Fridman (1:24:21.040)
when you look at it, like there's probably
Jaron Lanier (1:24:24.800)
two or three dozen papers that have this quality
Lex Fridman (1:24:26.800)
and some of them are just crazy good.
Lex Fridman (1:24:28.480)
And it's very interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:24:30.480)
What we're trying to do is take those kinds
Jaron Lanier (1:24:33.200)
of observations and turn them into an actionable framework
Lex Fridman (1:24:35.760)
where you can then start to do things
Jaron Lanier (1:24:38.640)
with landscapes or theories that you couldn't do before
Lex Fridman (1:24:40.480)
and that sort of thing.
Lex Fridman (1:24:42.480)
So in that context, or maybe beyond,
Lex Fridman (1:24:46.000)
how do you explain us humans?
Lex Fridman (1:24:47.920)
How unlikely are we, this intelligent civilization
Lex Fridman (1:24:50.960)
or is there a lot of others or are we alone in this universe?
Jaron Lanier (1:24:54.800)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:24:57.520)
You seem to appreciate humans very much.
Jaron Lanier (1:25:03.280)
I've grown fond of us.
Lex Fridman (1:25:06.240)
We're okay.
Jaron Lanier (1:25:09.200)
We have our nice qualities.
Lex Fridman (1:25:12.960)
I like that.
Jaron Lanier (1:25:14.560)
I mean, we're kind of weird.
Lex Fridman (1:25:16.240)
We sprout this hair on our heads and then we're,
Jaron Lanier (1:25:18.160)
I don't know, we're sort of weird animals.
Lex Fridman (1:25:20.240)
That's the feature, not a bug, I think.
Jaron Lanier (1:25:22.400)
The weirdness.
Lex Fridman (1:25:23.120)
I hope so.
Jaron Lanier (1:25:24.320)
I hope so.
Lex Fridman (1:25:30.160)
I think if I'm just going to answer you in terms of truth,
Jaron Lanier (1:25:35.360)
the first thing I'd say is we're not in a privileged enough
Lex Fridman (1:25:39.040)
position, at least as yet, to really know much about who we
Jaron Lanier (1:25:44.720)
are, how we are, what we're really like in the context
Lex Fridman (1:25:48.320)
of something larger, what that context is,
Jaron Lanier (1:25:50.640)
like all that stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:25:51.440)
We might learn more in the future.
Jaron Lanier (1:25:52.880)
Our descendants might learn more, but we don't really know
Lex Fridman (1:25:55.200)
very much, which you can either view as frustrating or charming
Jaron Lanier (1:25:59.440)
like that first year of TikTok or something.
Lex Fridman (1:26:03.200)
All roads lead back to TikTok.
Jaron Lanier (1:26:04.960)
I like it.
Lex Fridman (1:26:05.520)
Well, lately.
Lex Fridman (1:26:07.120)
But in terms of, there's another level at which I can think
Lex Fridman (1:26:10.240)
about it where I sometimes think that if you are just quiet
Lex Fridman (1:26:19.840)
and you do something that gets you in touch with the way
Lex Fridman (1:26:22.640)
reality happens, and for me it's playing music, sometimes it
Jaron Lanier (1:26:27.440)
seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is.
Lex Fridman (1:26:30.880)
And it feels like there's a lot more going on in it and there
Jaron Lanier (1:26:34.240)
is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening and a lot
Lex Fridman (1:26:38.000)
more stuff flowing through it.
Jaron Lanier (1:26:39.120)
I'm not speaking as a scientist now.
Lex Fridman (1:26:40.800)
This is kind of a more my artist side talking and I feel like
Jaron Lanier (1:26:46.560)
I'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you.
Lex Fridman (1:26:50.960)
Jack Kerouac said that music is the only truth.
Jaron Lanier (1:26:57.520)
It sounds like you might be at least in part.
Lex Fridman (1:27:01.360)
There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr.
Jaron Lanier (1:27:04.560)
Sacks, where somebody tries to just explain the whole
Lex Fridman (1:27:07.360)
situation with reality and people in like a paragraph.
Lex Fridman (1:27:10.000)
And I couldn't reproduce it for you here, but it's like, yeah,
Lex Fridman (1:27:13.200)
like there are these bulbous things that walk around and
Jaron Lanier (1:27:15.520)
they make these sounds, you can sort of understand them, but
Lex Fridman (1:27:17.680)
only kind of, and then there's like this, and it's just like
Jaron Lanier (1:27:19.600)
this amazing, like just really quick, like if some spirit
Lex Fridman (1:27:24.240)
being or something was going to show up in our reality and
Jaron Lanier (1:27:26.400)
hadn't knew nothing about it, it's like a little basic intro
Lex Fridman (1:27:29.120)
of like, okay, here's what's going on here.
Jaron Lanier (1:27:30.400)
It's an incredible passage.
Lex Fridman (1:27:32.400)
Yeah.
Jaron Lanier (1:27:32.720)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:27:33.760)
It's like a one or two sentence summary in H.
Lex Fridman (1:27:36.800)
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right?
Lex Fridman (1:27:38.880)
Of what this...
Jaron Lanier (1:27:40.160)
Mostly harmless.
Lex Fridman (1:27:41.280)
Mostly harmless.
Lex Fridman (1:27:42.880)
Do you think there's truth to that, that music somehow
Lex Fridman (1:27:45.760)
connects to something that words cannot?
Jaron Lanier (1:27:48.880)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:27:49.200)
Music is something that just towers above me.
Jaron Lanier (1:27:52.560)
I don't feel like I have an overview of it.
Lex Fridman (1:27:57.680)
It's just the reverse.
Jaron Lanier (1:27:58.640)
I don't fully understand it because on one level it's simple.
Lex Fridman (1:28:02.080)
Like you can say, oh, it's a thing people evolved to
Jaron Lanier (1:28:06.160)
coordinate our brains on a pattern level or something like that.
Lex Fridman (1:28:11.760)
There's all these things you can say about music, which are,
Jaron Lanier (1:28:14.240)
you know, some of that's probably true.
Lex Fridman (1:28:16.800)
It's also, there's kind of like this, this is the mystery of
Jaron Lanier (1:28:25.520)
meaning.
Lex Fridman (1:28:26.000)
Like there's a way that just instead of just being pure
Jaron Lanier (1:28:30.400)
abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.160)
to it that is philosophically impossible.
Jaron Lanier (1:28:39.760)
I don't know what to do with it.
Lex Fridman (1:28:41.120)
Yeah.
Jaron Lanier (1:28:41.760)
The amount of understanding I feel I have when I hear the
Lex Fridman (1:28:45.520)
right song at the right time is not comparable to anything I
Jaron Lanier (1:28:51.120)
can read on Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman (1:28:53.520)
Anything I can understand, read through in language.
Jaron Lanier (1:28:57.200)
The music does connect us to something.
Lex Fridman (1:28:59.520)
There's this thing there.
Jaron Lanier (1:29:00.720)
Yeah, there's some kind of a thing in it.
Lex Fridman (1:29:04.800)
And I've never ever, I've read across a lot of explanations
Jaron Lanier (1:29:09.760)
from all kinds of interesting people like that it's some kind
Lex Fridman (1:29:13.440)
of a flow language between people or between people and how
Jaron Lanier (1:29:18.160)
they perceive and that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman (1:29:20.880)
And that sort of explanation is fine, but it's not quite it
Jaron Lanier (1:29:26.000)
either.
Lex Fridman (1:29:26.400)
Yeah.
Jaron Lanier (1:29:27.040)
There's something about music that makes me believe that
Lex Fridman (1:29:31.360)
panpsychism could possibly be true, which is that everything
Jaron Lanier (1:29:35.520)
in the universe is conscious.
Lex Fridman (1:29:36.720)
It makes me think, makes me be humble in how much or how
Jaron Lanier (1:29:43.520)
little I understand about the functions of our universe that
Lex Fridman (1:29:48.480)
everything might be conscious.
Jaron Lanier (1:29:50.560)
Most people interested in theoretical physics eventually
Lex Fridman (1:29:54.640)
land in panpsychism, but I'm not one of them.
Jaron Lanier (1:30:00.080)
I still think there's this pragmatic imperative to treat
Lex Fridman (1:30:08.080)
people as special.
Lex Fridman (1:30:09.120)
So I will proudly be a dualist without people and cats.
Lex Fridman (1:30:14.880)
Yeah, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the
Jaron Lanier (1:30:19.600)
line's there or anything like that.
Lex Fridman (1:30:21.120)
But I don't think I should be required to all the same
Jaron Lanier (1:30:23.600)
questions are equally mysterious for no line.
Lex Fridman (1:30:25.920)
So I don't feel disadvantaged by that.
Lex Fridman (1:30:28.480)
So I shall remain a dualist.
Lex Fridman (1:30:30.320)
But if you listen to anyone trying to explain where
Jaron Lanier (1:30:36.640)
consciousness is in a dualistic sense, either believing in
Lex Fridman (1:30:39.520)
souls or some special thing in the brain or something, you
Jaron Lanier (1:30:42.400)
pretty much say, screw this.
Lex Fridman (1:30:44.080)
I'm going to be a panpsychist.
Jaron Lanier (1:30:51.200)
Fair enough.
Lex Fridman (1:30:52.000)
Well put.
Jaron Lanier (1:30:53.280)
Is there moments in your life that happened that we're
Lex Fridman (1:30:56.320)
defining in the way that you hope others your daughter?
Jaron Lanier (1:31:00.160)
Well, listen, I got to say the moments that defined me were
Lex Fridman (1:31:04.400)
not the good ones.
Jaron Lanier (1:31:06.240)
The moments that defined me were often horrible.
Lex Fridman (1:31:12.320)
I've had successes, you know, but if you ask what defined
Jaron Lanier (1:31:16.720)
me, my mother's death, being under the World Trade Center
Lex Fridman (1:31:24.640)
and the attack, the things that have had an effect on me
Jaron Lanier (1:31:30.720)
were the most were sort of real world, terrible things,
Lex Fridman (1:31:35.120)
which I don't wish on young people at all.
Lex Fridman (1:31:38.640)
And this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to
Lex Fridman (1:31:42.080)
young people that they have to learn their own lessons.
Lex Fridman (1:31:48.320)
And lessons don't come easily.
Lex Fridman (1:31:52.000)
And a world which avoids hard lessons will be a stupid
Jaron Lanier (1:31:56.560)
world, you know, and I don't know what to do with it.
Lex Fridman (1:31:59.200)
That's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic
Jaron Lanier (1:32:03.440)
quality to it, but I don't—this is like when I'm saying
Lex Fridman (1:32:07.040)
that, you know, freedom equals eternal annoyance.
Jaron Lanier (1:32:08.960)
Like, you can't—like, there's a degree to which honest
Lex Fridman (1:32:14.560)
advice is not that pleasant to give.
Lex Fridman (1:32:19.280)
And I don't want young people to have to know about
Lex Fridman (1:32:24.960)
everything.
Jaron Lanier (1:32:25.600)
You don't want to wish hardship on them.
Lex Fridman (1:32:27.920)
Yeah, I think they deserve to have a little grace period
Jaron Lanier (1:32:33.040)
of naiveté that's pleasant.
Lex Fridman (1:32:34.640)
I mean, I do, you know, if it's possible, if it's—these
Jaron Lanier (1:32:40.240)
things are—this is like—this is tricky stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:32:42.400)
I mean, if you—okay, so let me try a little bit on this
Jaron Lanier (1:32:50.000)
advice thing.
Lex Fridman (1:32:50.880)
I think one thing—and any serious, broad advice will
Jaron Lanier (1:32:55.680)
have been given a thousand times before for a thousand
Lex Fridman (1:32:57.920)
years, so I'm not going to claim originality, but I think
Jaron Lanier (1:33:04.480)
trying to find a way to really pay attention to what you're
Lex Fridman (1:33:11.600)
feeling fundamentally, what your sense of the world is, what
Jaron Lanier (1:33:14.720)
your intuition is, if you feel like an intuitive person, what
Lex Fridman (1:33:17.920)
you're—like, to try to escape the constant sway of social
Jaron Lanier (1:33:27.120)
perception or manipulation, whatever you wish—not to
Lex Fridman (1:33:30.400)
escape it entirely, that would be horrible, but to find cover
Jaron Lanier (1:33:35.120)
from it once in a while, to find a sense of being anchored
Lex Fridman (1:33:39.760)
in that, to believe in experience as a real thing.
Jaron Lanier (1:33:44.000)
Believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic.
Lex Fridman (1:33:47.040)
That goes with my philosophy of dualism.
Jaron Lanier (1:33:50.640)
I believe there's something magical, and instead of squirting
Lex Fridman (1:33:53.840)
the magic dust on the programs, I think experience is something
Jaron Lanier (1:33:57.840)
real and something apart, something mystical and something—
Lex Fridman (1:34:00.240)
Your own personal experience that you just have, and then
Jaron Lanier (1:34:04.800)
you're saying silence the rest of the world enough to hear
Lex Fridman (1:34:07.760)
that—like, whatever that magic dust is in that experience.
Jaron Lanier (1:34:11.280)
Find what is there, and I think that's one thing.
Lex Fridman (1:34:18.080)
Another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius,
Jaron Lanier (1:34:24.720)
that it's actually really hard, that facile kindness is not
Lex Fridman (1:34:29.120)
kindness, and that it'll take you a while to have the skills
Jaron Lanier (1:34:33.280)
to have kind impulses to want to be kind you can have right
Lex Fridman (1:34:36.240)
away. To be effectively kind is hard.
Jaron Lanier (1:34:39.280)
To be effectively kind, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:34:41.760)
It takes skill. It takes hard lessons.
Jaron Lanier (1:34:50.880)
You'll never be perfect at it. To the degree you get anywhere
Lex Fridman (1:34:55.120)
with it, it's the most rewarding thing ever.
Lex Fridman (1:35:01.040)
Let's see, what else would I say?
Lex Fridman (1:35:02.480)
I would say when you're young, you can be very overwhelmed
Jaron Lanier (1:35:12.640)
by social and interpersonal emotions. You'll have broken hearts and
Lex Fridman (1:35:19.920)
jealousies. You'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the
Jaron Lanier (1:35:24.880)
ladder. It feels horrible when that happens. All of these things.
Lex Fridman (1:35:28.720)
And you have to remember what a fragile crust all that stuff is,
Lex Fridman (1:35:35.440)
and it's hard because right when it's happening, it's just so intense.
Lex Fridman (1:35:46.000)
If I was actually giving this advice to my daughter, she'd already
Jaron Lanier (1:35:48.880)
be out of the room. This is for some hypothetical teenager that
Lex Fridman (1:35:55.760)
doesn't really exist that really wants to sit and listen to my
Jaron Lanier (1:35:58.880)
voice for your daughter 10 years from now. Maybe.
Lex Fridman (1:36:03.120)
Can I ask you a difficult question?
Jaron Lanier (1:36:06.480)
Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman (1:36:07.280)
You talked about losing your mom.
Jaron Lanier (1:36:10.640)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:36:11.840)
Do you miss her?
Jaron Lanier (1:36:14.960)
Yeah, I mean, I still connected her through music. She was a
Lex Fridman (1:36:18.160)
a young prodigy piano player in Vienna, and she survived the
Jaron Lanier (1:36:26.640)
concentration camp and then died in a car accident here in the US.
Lex Fridman (1:36:32.960)
What music makes you think of her? Is there a song that connects?
Jaron Lanier (1:36:38.160)
Well, she was in Vienna, so she had the whole Viennese music thing
Lex Fridman (1:36:46.080)
going, which is this incredible school of absolute skill and
Jaron Lanier (1:36:54.640)
romance bundled together and wonderful on the piano, especially.
Lex Fridman (1:36:58.640)
I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her, and I
Jaron Lanier (1:37:01.920)
played them in this exaggerated, drippy way I remember when I was
Lex Fridman (1:37:05.440)
a kid.
Lex Fridman (1:37:06.800)
Exaggerated meaning too full of emotion?
Lex Fridman (1:37:09.440)
Yeah, just like...
Jaron Lanier (1:37:11.360)
Isn't that the only way to play Beethoven? I mean, I didn't know
Lex Fridman (1:37:14.000)
there's any other way.
Jaron Lanier (1:37:14.800)
That's a reasonable question. I mean, the fashion these days is to
Lex Fridman (1:37:17.920)
be slightly Apollonian even with Beethoven, but one imagines that
Jaron Lanier (1:37:23.440)
actual Beethoven playing might have been different. I don't
Lex Fridman (1:37:26.160)
know. I've gotten to play a few instruments he played and tried
Jaron Lanier (1:37:31.040)
to see if I could feel anything about how it might have been for
Lex Fridman (1:37:33.280)
him. I don't know, really.
Jaron Lanier (1:37:34.880)
I was always against the clinical precision of classical music.
Lex Fridman (1:37:38.400)
I thought a great piano player should be, like, in pain, like,
Jaron Lanier (1:37:47.040)
you know, emotionally, like, truly feel the music and make it
Lex Fridman (1:37:55.280)
messy, sort of maybe play classical music the way, I don't
Jaron Lanier (1:38:00.080)
know, blues pianist plays blues.
Lex Fridman (1:38:02.640)
It seems like they actually got happier, and I'm not sure if
Jaron Lanier (1:38:05.920)
Beethoven got happier. I think it's a different kind of concept
Lex Fridman (1:38:10.720)
of the place of music. I think the blues, the whole African
Jaron Lanier (1:38:17.840)
American tradition was initially surviving awful, awful
Lex Fridman (1:38:21.840)
circumstances. So you could say, you know, there was some of
Jaron Lanier (1:38:23.840)
that in the concentration camps and all that too. And it's not
Lex Fridman (1:38:29.280)
that Beethoven's circumstances were brilliant, but he kind of
Jaron Lanier (1:38:32.400)
also, I don't know, this is hard. Like, I mean, it would
Lex Fridman (1:38:38.080)
seem to be his misery was somewhat self imposed, maybe
Jaron Lanier (1:38:41.280)
through, I don't know. It's kind of interesting, like, I've
Lex Fridman (1:38:44.240)
known some people who loathed Beethoven, like the composer,
Jaron Lanier (1:38:47.840)
late composer, Pauline Oliveros, this wonderful modernist
Lex Fridman (1:38:50.640)
composer. I played in her band for a while, and she was like,
Jaron Lanier (1:38:54.160)
oh, Beethoven, like, that's the worst music ever. It's like,
Lex Fridman (1:38:56.560)
all ego. It completely, it turns information, I mean, it
Jaron Lanier (1:39:02.400)
turns emotion into your enemy. And it's ultimately all about
Lex Fridman (1:39:08.240)
your own self importance, which has to be at the expense of
Jaron Lanier (1:39:11.200)
others. What else could it be? And blah, blah, blah. So she
Lex Fridman (1:39:15.200)
had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean to be dismissive, but I'm
Jaron Lanier (1:39:17.200)
just saying, like, her position on Beethoven was very negative
Lex Fridman (1:39:21.680)
and very unimpressed, which is really interesting because
Jaron Lanier (1:39:24.160)
the manner of the music. I think, I don't know. I mean,
Lex Fridman (1:39:27.440)
she's not here to speak for herself. So it's a little hard
Jaron Lanier (1:39:29.360)
for me to answer that question. But it was interesting because
Lex Fridman (1:39:32.560)
I'd always thought of Beethoven as like, whoa, you know, this
Jaron Lanier (1:39:34.400)
is like Beethoven is like really the dude, you know, and it's
Lex Fridman (1:39:38.320)
just like, Beethoven, Schmadovan, you know, it's like
Jaron Lanier (1:39:42.000)
not really happening. Yeah, I still, even though it's cliche,
Lex Fridman (1:39:44.240)
I like playing personally, just for myself, Moonlight Sonata.
Jaron Lanier (1:39:47.440)
I mean, I just, Moonlight's amazing. I mean, it's like,
Lex Fridman (1:39:52.560)
Moonlight's amazing. You know, I, you know, you're talking
Jaron Lanier (1:39:59.200)
about comparing the blues and that sensibility from Europe
Lex Fridman (1:40:02.640)
is so different in so many ways. One of the musicians I
Jaron Lanier (1:40:06.240)
play with is John Batiste, who has the band on Colbert Show,
Lex Fridman (1:40:09.600)
and he'll sit there playing jazz and suddenly go into
Jaron Lanier (1:40:12.880)
Moonlight. He loves Moonlight. And what's kind of interesting
Lex Fridman (1:40:16.240)
is he's found a way to do Beethoven. And he, by the way,
Jaron Lanier (1:40:22.000)
he can really do Beethoven. Like, he went through Juilliard
Lex Fridman (1:40:25.680)
and one time he was at my house, he's saying, hey, do you
Jaron Lanier (1:40:28.800)
have the book of Beethoven's Sonatas? I say, yeah, I want to
Lex Fridman (1:40:30.720)
find one I haven't played. And then he sight read through the
Jaron Lanier (1:40:32.320)
whole damn thing perfectly. And I'm like, oh, God, I just
Lex Fridman (1:40:35.760)
get out of here. I can't even deal with this. But anyway,
Lex Fridman (1:40:41.200)
but anyway, the thing is he has this way of with the same
Lex Fridman (1:40:45.360)
persona and the same philosophy moving from the blues into
Jaron Lanier (1:40:48.640)
Beethoven that's really, really fascinating to me. It's like,
Lex Fridman (1:40:53.680)
I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz, but he
Jaron Lanier (1:40:56.560)
kind of does. It's kind of really, and he talks, well, he
Lex Fridman (1:41:00.640)
was sight reading, he talks like Beethoven's talking to him.
Jaron Lanier (1:41:03.200)
Like he's like, oh yeah, here, he's doing this. I can't do
Lex Fridman (1:41:05.840)
John, but you know, it's like, it's really interesting. Like
Jaron Lanier (1:41:09.040)
it's very different. Like for me, I was introduced to
Lex Fridman (1:41:11.920)
Beethoven as like almost like this godlike figure, and I
Jaron Lanier (1:41:14.960)
presume Pauline was too, that was really kind of a press
Lex Fridman (1:41:17.680)
for an art to deal with. And for him, it's just like the
Jaron Lanier (1:41:20.160)
conversation. He's playing James P. Johnson or something. It's
Lex Fridman (1:41:23.680)
like another musician who did something and they're talking
Lex Fridman (1:41:25.920)
and it's very cool to be around. It's very kind of freeing
Lex Fridman (1:41:30.800)
to see someone have that relationship. I would love to
Jaron Lanier (1:41:35.040)
hear him play Beethoven. That sounds amazing. He's great. We
Lex Fridman (1:41:39.760)
talked about Ernest Becker and how much value he puts on our
Jaron Lanier (1:41:45.840)
mortality and our denial of our mortality. Do you think about
Lex Fridman (1:41:50.720)
your mortality? Do you think about your own death? You know
Jaron Lanier (1:41:53.760)
what's funny is I used to not be able to, but as you get older,
Lex Fridman (1:41:57.120)
you just know people who die and there's all these things
Jaron Lanier (1:41:59.040)
that just becomes familiar and and more of a more ordinary,
Lex Fridman (1:42:04.960)
which is what it is. But are you afraid? Sure, although less
Jaron Lanier (1:42:11.600)
so. And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or
Lex Fridman (1:42:18.880)
revelation to become less afraid. I think I just, like I
Jaron Lanier (1:42:22.880)
say, it's kind of familiarity. It's just knowing people who've
Lex Fridman (1:42:27.440)
died and I really believe in the future. I have this optimism
Jaron Lanier (1:42:34.240)
that people or this whole thing of life on Earth, this whole
Lex Fridman (1:42:37.920)
thing we're part of, I don't know where to draw that circle,
Lex Fridman (1:42:39.920)
but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of
Lex Fridman (1:42:47.280)
value and you can't both believe in the future and want
Jaron Lanier (1:42:51.600)
to live forever. You have to make room for it. You know, like
Lex Fridman (1:42:54.000)
you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own like
Jaron Lanier (1:42:58.000)
humility. You have to make yourself small to believe in
Lex Fridman (1:43:01.280)
the future and so it actually in a funny way comforts me.
Jaron Lanier (1:43:06.960)
Wow, that's powerful. And optimism requires you to kind
Lex Fridman (1:43:13.520)
of step down after a time. Yeah, I mean, that said, life
Jaron Lanier (1:43:18.720)
seems kind of short, but you know, whatever. Do you think
Lex Fridman (1:43:22.000)
there's I've tried to find I can't find the complaint
Jaron Lanier (1:43:24.080)
department. You know, I really want to I want to bring this
Lex Fridman (1:43:26.720)
up, but the customer service number never answers and like
Jaron Lanier (1:43:29.440)
the email bounces one way. So yeah, do you think there's
Lex Fridman (1:43:32.480)
meaning to it to life? We'll see. Meaning is a funny word
Jaron Lanier (1:43:38.080)
like we say all these things as if we know what they mean, but
Lex Fridman (1:43:40.480)
meaning we don't know what we mean when we say meaning like
Jaron Lanier (1:43:43.200)
we obviously do not and it's a it's it's a funny little
Lex Fridman (1:43:47.600)
mystical thing. I think it ultimately connects to that
Jaron Lanier (1:43:50.080)
sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in.
Lex Fridman (1:43:56.160)
I guess there are why like if you look up to the stars and
Jaron Lanier (1:43:58.960)
you experience that awe inspiring like joy at whatever
Lex Fridman (1:44:04.960)
when you look up to the stars that I don't know why for me
Jaron Lanier (1:44:07.440)
that's kind of makes me feel joyful, maybe a little bit
Lex Fridman (1:44:11.280)
melancholy, just some weird soup of feelings and ultimately
Lex Fridman (1:44:15.680)
the question is like why are we here in this vast universe?
Lex Fridman (1:44:22.080)
That question why?
Jaron Lanier (1:44:25.120)
Have you been able in some way maybe through music answer it
Lex Fridman (1:44:30.080)
for yourself?
Jaron Lanier (1:44:37.520)
My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question
Lex Fridman (1:44:42.480)
to ask, but I feel like going down that path is just too
Jaron Lanier (1:44:46.800)
tedious for the moment and I don't want to do it, but
Lex Fridman (1:44:51.840)
the wrong question. Well, just because you know, I don't know
Lex Fridman (1:44:56.640)
what meaning is and I think I do know that sense of awe. I
Lex Fridman (1:45:01.680)
grew up in southern New Mexico and the stars were so vivid.
Jaron Lanier (1:45:08.560)
I've had some weird misfortunes, but I've had some
Lex Fridman (1:45:13.200)
weird luck also. One of our near neighbors was the head of
Jaron Lanier (1:45:19.360)
optics research at White Sands and when he was young he
Lex Fridman (1:45:22.000)
discovered Pluto. His name was Clyde Tombaugh and he taught me
Lex Fridman (1:45:26.000)
how to make telescopes, grinding mirrors and stuff. My dad
Lex Fridman (1:45:29.200)
had also made telescopes when he was a kid, but Clyde had like
Jaron Lanier (1:45:33.840)
backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot of like
Lex Fridman (1:45:37.120)
I mean he really he did his telescopes you know and so
Jaron Lanier (1:45:40.480)
I remember he'd let me go and play with him and just like looking at a
Lex Fridman (1:45:45.040)
globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons and with a good
Jaron Lanier (1:45:48.080)
telescope it's really like this object like you can really tell
Lex Fridman (1:45:51.760)
this isn't coming through some intervening information structure this
Jaron Lanier (1:45:55.360)
is like the actual photons and it's really a three dimensional object
Lex Fridman (1:45:59.520)
and you have even a feeling for the vastness of it
Lex Fridman (1:46:02.560)
and it's it's it's I don't know I so I definitely I was
Lex Fridman (1:46:08.000)
very very fortunate to have a connection to the sky that way
Jaron Lanier (1:46:13.440)
when I was a kid. To have had that experience
Lex Fridman (1:46:17.200)
again the emphasis on experience.
Jaron Lanier (1:46:22.560)
It's kind of funny like I feel like sometimes
Lex Fridman (1:46:25.920)
like I've taken when she was younger I took my daughter and her friends to
Jaron Lanier (1:46:30.000)
to like a telescope there are a few around here that are
Lex Fridman (1:46:33.440)
kids can go and use and they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something
Jaron Lanier (1:46:37.120)
I think like Galilean moons and I don't know if they quite
Lex Fridman (1:46:41.440)
had that because it's like too
Jaron Lanier (1:46:44.960)
it's been just too normalized and I think maybe
Lex Fridman (1:46:49.760)
when I was growing up screens weren't that common yet and maybe it's like too
Jaron Lanier (1:46:53.440)
confusable with the screen I don't know you know somebody uh
Lex Fridman (1:46:57.920)
brought up in conversation to me somewhere I don't remember who
Lex Fridman (1:47:02.080)
but they they kind of posited this idea that
Lex Fridman (1:47:05.200)
if humans early humans weren't able to see the stars like if
Jaron Lanier (1:47:09.120)
earth atmosphere was such there was cloudy
Lex Fridman (1:47:12.080)
that we would not develop human civilization there's something about
Jaron Lanier (1:47:15.600)
being able to look up and see a vast universe is like
Lex Fridman (1:47:20.480)
that's fundamental to the development of human civilization
Jaron Lanier (1:47:23.920)
I thought that was a curious kind of thought that reminds me of that
Lex Fridman (1:47:28.800)
old Isaac Asimov story where the you know there's this planet where they
Jaron Lanier (1:47:32.720)
finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while and it turns out they're in
Lex Fridman (1:47:35.680)
the middle of a globular cluster and they're all these stars and
Jaron Lanier (1:47:38.320)
I forget what happens exactly god that's that's from when I was the same age as a
Lex Fridman (1:47:41.680)
kid I don't really remember yeah uh but um yeah I don't know it's uh
Jaron Lanier (1:47:46.720)
it's it might be right I'm just thinking of all the
Lex Fridman (1:47:49.200)
civilizations that grew up under clouds I mean like
Jaron Lanier (1:47:52.240)
the the vikings needed a special uh diffracting piece of mica to navigate
Lex Fridman (1:47:58.640)
because they could never see the sun they had this thing called a sunstone
Jaron Lanier (1:48:01.200)
that they found from this this one cave you know about that
Lex Fridman (1:48:03.920)
so they were in this like uh they were trying to navigate
Jaron Lanier (1:48:07.840)
boats you know in the north atlantic with without being able to see the sun
Lex Fridman (1:48:11.680)
because it was cloudy and so they they used uh of a uh
Jaron Lanier (1:48:17.520)
a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really
Lex Fridman (1:48:22.240)
was because they couldn't tell by eye and navigate so
Jaron Lanier (1:48:25.040)
I'm just saying there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive
Lex Fridman (1:48:27.680)
that had to deal with a lot of clouds uh
Jaron Lanier (1:48:31.520)
the amazonians invented our agriculture and they they were probably under
Lex Fridman (1:48:35.600)
clouds a lot I don't know I don't know to me personally the the question of the
Jaron Lanier (1:48:39.840)
meaning of life becomes most um
Lex Fridman (1:48:44.080)
vibrant most apparent when you look up at the stars
Jaron Lanier (1:48:47.680)
because it makes me feel very small uh that we're not small
Lex Fridman (1:48:54.560)
but then you ask it it still feels that we're special and then the natural
Jaron Lanier (1:49:00.720)
question is like well if we are special as I think we
Lex Fridman (1:49:04.240)
are why the heck are we here in this vast
Jaron Lanier (1:49:08.000)
universe that ultimately is the question of um
Lex Fridman (1:49:12.560)
right well the meaning of life I mean look
Jaron Lanier (1:49:15.920)
there's a confusion sometimes in trying to use uh
Lex Fridman (1:49:22.800)
to set up a question or a thought experiment or something
Jaron Lanier (1:49:26.720)
that's defined in terms of a context to explain something
Lex Fridman (1:49:30.960)
where there is no larger context and that's a category error
Jaron Lanier (1:49:34.480)
um if we want to do it in physics um or well or in computer science um
Lex Fridman (1:49:41.360)
it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine because a Turing
Jaron Lanier (1:49:44.560)
machine has an external clock and an observer and a
Lex Fridman (1:49:47.920)
input and output there's a larger context implied in order for it to be
Jaron Lanier (1:49:51.280)
defined at all and so if you're talking about the
Lex Fridman (1:49:53.600)
universe you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine uh
Jaron Lanier (1:49:57.200)
quantum mechanics is like that quantum mechanics has an external clock and has
Lex Fridman (1:50:01.040)
some kind of external context depending on your interpretation
Jaron Lanier (1:50:04.800)
um that's either you know the observer or whatever
Lex Fridman (1:50:08.480)
uh and there's a they're they're similar that way so maybe
Jaron Lanier (1:50:12.000)
maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be
Jaron Lanier (1:50:16.000)
better friends or something because they have a similar setup but the thing is if
Jaron Lanier (1:50:19.040)
you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context you can't
Lex Fridman (1:50:24.240)
talk about ultimates with it because obviously it doesn't
Jaron Lanier (1:50:27.600)
it's not suited for that so there's some ideas that
Lex Fridman (1:50:30.960)
are their own context general relativity is its own context
Jaron Lanier (1:50:34.400)
it's different that's why it's hard to unify and
Lex Fridman (1:50:37.840)
um i think the same thing is true when we talk about
Jaron Lanier (1:50:42.320)
these types of questions like uh meaning is in a context and
Lex Fridman (1:50:49.920)
to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category error it's not
Jaron Lanier (1:50:53.440)
it's not a um it's not a resolvable way of thinking
Lex Fridman (1:50:59.120)
it might be a way of thinking that is experientially
Jaron Lanier (1:51:06.320)
um or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of
Lex Fridman (1:51:13.280)
you know awe inspiring um but to try to treat it analytically is not
Jaron Lanier (1:51:18.960)
sensible maybe that's what music can poetry for
Lex Fridman (1:51:22.320)
yeah maybe i think so i think music actually does
Jaron Lanier (1:51:25.680)
escape any particular context that's how it feels to me but i'm not sure about
Lex Fridman (1:51:28.800)
that that's once again crazy artist talking not scientist
Jaron Lanier (1:51:33.360)
well you did uh you do both masterfully uh jaron i'm like i said i'm a big fan
Lex Fridman (1:51:38.960)
of everything you've done of you as a human being
Jaron Lanier (1:51:41.280)
um i appreciate the the fun argument we had today that will i'm sure
Lex Fridman (1:51:47.360)
continue for 30 years as it did with mark mitski um honestly
Jaron Lanier (1:51:52.160)
i i deeply appreciate that you spend your really valuable time with me today
Lex Fridman (1:51:55.520)
it was a really great conversation thank you so much
Jaron Lanier (1:51:58.400)
thanks for listening to this conversation with jaron lanier
Lex Fridman (1:52:01.600)
to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description
Lex Fridman (1:52:06.080)
and now let me leave you with some words from jaron lanier himself
Lex Fridman (1:52:10.800)
a real friendship ought to introduce each person
Jaron Lanier (1:52:13.840)
to unexpected weirdness in the other thank you for listening i hope to see
Lex Fridman (1:52:19.120)
you next time
Jaron Lanier (20:02.500)
It's peculiar to notice that these people
Lex Fridman (20:06.460)
who would appear to be opposites in character
Lex Fridman (20:09.580)
and cultural references and in their ideas
Lex Fridman (20:14.360)
actually are remarkably similar.
Lex Fridman (20:16.640)
And to an incredible degree,
Lex Fridman (20:20.340)
this sort of hardcore computationalist idea
Jaron Lanier (20:24.400)
about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity
Lex Fridman (20:28.900)
with together, like there's the people who are afraid
Jaron Lanier (20:31.440)
that if you have the wrong thought,
Lex Fridman (20:32.500)
you'll piss off the super AIs of the future
Jaron Lanier (20:34.700)
who will come back and zap you and all that stuff.
Lex Fridman (20:38.420)
It's really turned into medieval Christianity
Jaron Lanier (20:41.740)
all over again.
Lex Fridman (20:43.100)
This is so the Ernest Becker's idea that death,
Jaron Lanier (20:46.900)
the fear of death is the warm at the core,
Lex Fridman (20:49.620)
which is like, that's the core motivator
Jaron Lanier (20:53.740)
of everything we see humans have created.
Lex Fridman (20:56.900)
The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core,
Jaron Lanier (21:00.740)
is like a prerequisite to consciousness.
Lex Fridman (21:03.740)
You just moved across this vast cultural chasm
Jaron Lanier (21:10.380)
that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way.
Lex Fridman (21:13.260)
And I can't answer what you just said on the level
Jaron Lanier (21:15.540)
without this huge deconstruction.
Lex Fridman (21:18.220)
Should I do it?
Lex Fridman (21:19.060)
Yes, what's the chasm?
Lex Fridman (21:20.280)
Okay.
Jaron Lanier (21:21.380)
Let us travel across this vast chasm.
Lex Fridman (21:23.220)
Okay, I don't believe in AI.
Jaron Lanier (21:25.040)
I don't think there's any AI.
Lex Fridman (21:26.220)
There's just algorithms, we make them, we control them.
Jaron Lanier (21:28.460)
Now, they're tools, they're not creatures.
Lex Fridman (21:30.780)
Now, this is something that robs a lot of people,
Jaron Lanier (21:33.340)
the wrong way, and don't I know it.
Lex Fridman (21:36.180)
When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky,
Jaron Lanier (21:39.500)
who's the principal author of the computer
Lex Fridman (21:43.420)
as creature rhetoric that we still use.
Jaron Lanier (21:47.060)
He was the first person to have the idea at all,
Lex Fridman (21:48.860)
but he certainly populated AI culture
Jaron Lanier (21:52.980)
with most of its tropes, I would say,
Lex Fridman (21:55.420)
because a lot of the people will say,
Lex Fridman (21:57.020)
oh, did you hear this new idea about AI?
Lex Fridman (21:58.660)
And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978.
Jaron Lanier (22:00.420)
Sure, yeah, I remember that.
Lex Fridman (22:01.980)
So Marvin was really the person.
Lex Fridman (22:03.660)
And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about this stuff
Lex Fridman (22:08.540)
because I always rejected it.
Lex Fridman (22:10.340)
And of all of his,
Lex Fridman (22:14.740)
of all of his, I wasn't formally his student,
Lex Fridman (22:17.820)
but I worked for him as a researcher,
Lex Fridman (22:19.820)
but of all of his students and student like people
Jaron Lanier (22:23.740)
of his young adoptees,
Lex Fridman (22:26.660)
I think I was the one who argued with him
Jaron Lanier (22:28.500)
about this stuff in particular, and he loved it.
Lex Fridman (22:31.460)
Yeah, I would have loved to hear that conversation.
Jaron Lanier (22:33.260)
It was fun.
Lex Fridman (22:34.180)
Did you ever converse to a place?
Jaron Lanier (22:36.780)
Oh, no, no.
Lex Fridman (22:37.620)
So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail.
Lex Fridman (22:40.320)
And I was in Boston, and I was going to the old house
Lex Fridman (22:45.260)
in Brookline, his amazing house.
Lex Fridman (22:47.460)
And one of our mutual friends said,
Lex Fridman (22:49.100)
hey, listen, Marvin's so frail.
Jaron Lanier (22:52.100)
Don't do the argument with him.
Lex Fridman (22:54.140)
Don't argue about AI, you know?
Lex Fridman (22:56.500)
And so I said, but Marvin loves that.
Lex Fridman (22:58.940)
And so I showed up, and he's like, he was frail.
Lex Fridman (23:01.580)
He looked up and he said, are you ready to argue?
Lex Fridman (23:04.500)
He's such an amazing person for that.
Lex Fridman (23:10.300)
So it's hard to summarize this
Lex Fridman (23:13.940)
because it's decades of stuff.
Jaron Lanier (23:16.240)
The first thing to say is that nobody can claim
Lex Fridman (23:19.700)
absolute knowledge about whether somebody
Jaron Lanier (23:23.140)
or something else is conscious or not.
Lex Fridman (23:25.820)
This is all a matter of faith.
Lex Fridman (23:27.740)
And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith
Lex Fridman (23:31.780)
needs to be updated.
Lex Fridman (23:32.900)
So it's not about God,
Lex Fridman (23:34.060)
but it's just about stuff in the universe.
Jaron Lanier (23:36.180)
We have faith in each other, being conscious.
Lex Fridman (23:39.380)
And then I used to frame this
Jaron Lanier (23:42.180)
as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers.
Lex Fridman (23:45.300)
And then it turned into a thing
Jaron Lanier (23:47.960)
for the animal rights movement too.
Lex Fridman (23:49.100)
I noticed Peter Singer using it.
Jaron Lanier (23:50.440)
I don't know if it was coincident or,
Lex Fridman (23:52.500)
but anyway, there's this idea
Jaron Lanier (23:54.460)
that you draw a circle around yourself
Lex Fridman (23:56.120)
and the stuff inside is more like you,
Jaron Lanier (23:58.220)
might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy,
Lex Fridman (24:00.660)
of your consideration,
Lex Fridman (24:02.140)
and the stuff outside the circle isn't.
Lex Fridman (24:04.260)
And outside the circle might be a rock or,
Jaron Lanier (24:10.380)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (24:12.660)
And that circle is fundamentally based on faith.
Jaron Lanier (24:15.460)
Well, if you don't know it.
Lex Fridman (24:16.300)
Your faith in what is and what isn't.
Jaron Lanier (24:17.960)
The thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith.
Lex Fridman (24:21.380)
It's also a pragmatic decision
Lex Fridman (24:23.820)
and this is where things get complicated.
Lex Fridman (24:26.000)
If you try to make it too big,
Jaron Lanier (24:27.880)
you suffer from incompetence.
Lex Fridman (24:29.880)
If you say, I don't wanna kill a bacteria,
Jaron Lanier (24:33.300)
I will not brush my teeth.
Lex Fridman (24:34.540)
I don't know, like, what do you do?
Jaron Lanier (24:35.980)
Like, there's a competence question
Lex Fridman (24:39.120)
where you do have to draw the line.
Jaron Lanier (24:41.000)
People who make it too small become cruel.
Lex Fridman (24:44.400)
People are so clannish and political
Lex Fridman (24:46.400)
and so worried about themselves ending up
Lex Fridman (24:48.620)
on the bottom of society
Jaron Lanier (24:51.220)
that they are always ready to gang up
Lex Fridman (24:52.880)
on some designated group.
Lex Fridman (24:54.200)
And so there's always these people who are being,
Lex Fridman (24:56.240)
we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.
Lex Fridman (24:58.820)
And so.
Lex Fridman (24:59.660)
So aren't you shoving AI outside the circle?
Jaron Lanier (25:01.540)
Well, give me a second.
Lex Fridman (25:02.380)
All right.
Lex Fridman (25:03.200)
So there's a pragmatic consideration here.
Lex Fridman (25:05.800)
And so, and the biggest questions
Jaron Lanier (25:09.260)
are probably fetuses and animals lately,
Lex Fridman (25:11.660)
but AI is getting there.
Jaron Lanier (25:13.400)
Now with AI, I think,
Lex Fridman (25:19.180)
and I've had this discussion so many times.
Jaron Lanier (25:21.580)
People say, but aren't you afraid if you exclude AI,
Lex Fridman (25:23.760)
you'd be cruel to some consciousness?
Lex Fridman (25:26.320)
And then I would say, well, if you include AI,
Lex Fridman (25:29.520)
you make yourself, you exclude yourself
Jaron Lanier (25:32.840)
from being able to be a good engineer or designer.
Lex Fridman (25:35.880)
And so you're facing incompetence immediately.
Lex Fridman (25:38.760)
So like, I really think we need to subordinate algorithms
Lex Fridman (25:41.460)
and be much more skeptical of them.
Jaron Lanier (25:43.580)
Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly
Lex Fridman (25:45.920)
with social media, how things can go wrong.
Jaron Lanier (25:48.980)
Isn't it possible to design systems
Lex Fridman (25:54.820)
that show compassion, not to manipulate you,
Lex Fridman (25:57.760)
but give you control and make your life better
Lex Fridman (26:01.260)
if you so choose to, like grow together with systems.
Lex Fridman (26:04.060)
And the way we grow with dogs and cats, with pets,
Lex Fridman (26:07.080)
with significant others in that way,
Jaron Lanier (26:09.440)
they grow to become better people.
Lex Fridman (26:11.520)
I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible.
Jaron Lanier (26:14.440)
You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble
Lex Fridman (26:18.100)
by thinking you know what's good for people.
Jaron Lanier (26:20.200)
Well, look, there's this question
Lex Fridman (26:23.000)
of what framework we're speaking in.
Lex Fridman (26:25.600)
Do you know who Alan Watts was?
Lex Fridman (26:27.680)
So Alan Watts once said, morality is like gravity
Jaron Lanier (26:32.120)
that in some absolute cosmic sense, there can't be morality
Lex Fridman (26:35.600)
because at some point it all becomes relative
Lex Fridman (26:37.720)
and who are we anyway?
Lex Fridman (26:39.120)
Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures.
Lex Fridman (26:42.120)
But here on earth, we're with each other,
Lex Fridman (26:45.560)
this is our frame and morality is a very real thing.
Jaron Lanier (26:47.920)
Same thing with gravity.
Lex Fridman (26:48.800)
At some point, you get into interstellar space
Lex Fridman (26:52.160)
and you might not feel much of it, but here we are on earth.
Lex Fridman (26:55.200)
And I think in the same sense,
Jaron Lanier (26:58.120)
I think this identification with a frame that's quite remote
Lex Fridman (27:04.440)
cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel
Jaron Lanier (27:08.680)
sort of separate from and superior to other people
Lex Fridman (27:11.960)
or something like that.
Jaron Lanier (27:12.920)
There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject.
Lex Fridman (27:16.120)
And we're just not competent yet
Jaron Lanier (27:18.480)
to talk about these kinds of absolutes.
Lex Fridman (27:21.000)
Okay, so I agree with you that a lot of technologists
Jaron Lanier (27:24.400)
sort of lack this basic respect, understanding
Lex Fridman (27:27.720)
and love for humanity.
Jaron Lanier (27:29.200)
There's a separation there.
Lex Fridman (27:30.680)
The thing I'd like to push back against,
Jaron Lanier (27:32.440)
it's not that you disagree,
Lex Fridman (27:33.640)
but I believe you can create technologies
Lex Fridman (27:36.240)
and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer
Lex Fridman (27:41.160)
that does build systems that respect humanity,
Jaron Lanier (27:44.560)
not just respect, but admire humanity,
Lex Fridman (27:46.920)
that have empathy for common humans, have compassion.
Jaron Lanier (27:51.920)
I mean, no, no, no.
Lex Fridman (27:52.760)
I think, yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments
Jaron Lanier (27:57.320)
are a great example of that.
Lex Fridman (27:58.840)
Musical instruments are technologies
Jaron Lanier (28:00.280)
that help people connect in fantastic ways.
Lex Fridman (28:02.280)
And that's a great example.
Jaron Lanier (28:08.800)
My invention or design during the pandemic period
Lex Fridman (28:11.320)
was this thing called together mode
Jaron Lanier (28:12.520)
where people see themselves seated sort of
Lex Fridman (28:14.520)
in a classroom or a theater instead of in squares.
Lex Fridman (28:20.320)
And it allows them to semi consciously perform to each other
Lex Fridman (28:26.080)
as if they have proper eye contact,
Jaron Lanier (28:29.480)
as if they're paying attention to each other nonverbally
Lex Fridman (28:31.600)
and weirdly that turns out to work.
Lex Fridman (28:34.000)
And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell.
Lex Fridman (28:36.960)
I hope it is of some use to somebody.
Jaron Lanier (28:39.320)
The AI idea isn't really new.
Lex Fridman (28:41.800)
I would say it was born with Adam Smith's invisible hand
Jaron Lanier (28:45.880)
with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing
Lex Fridman (28:48.520)
and it gets a bit beyond us
Lex Fridman (28:50.720)
and then we think it must be smarter than us.
Lex Fridman (28:52.720)
And the thing about the invisible hand
Jaron Lanier (28:54.480)
is absolutely everybody has some line they draw
Lex Fridman (28:57.880)
where they say, no, no, no,
Jaron Lanier (28:58.720)
we're gonna take control of this thing.
Lex Fridman (29:00.480)
They might have different lines,
Jaron Lanier (29:01.920)
they might care about different things,
Lex Fridman (29:03.120)
but everybody ultimately became a Keynesian
Jaron Lanier (29:05.640)
because it just didn't work.
Lex Fridman (29:06.800)
It really wasn't that smart.
Lex Fridman (29:08.000)
It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed, you know?
Lex Fridman (29:10.680)
And so if you really, you know,
Jaron Lanier (29:13.680)
people who really, really, really wanna believe
Lex Fridman (29:16.760)
in the invisible hand is infinitely smart,
Jaron Lanier (29:19.800)
screw up their economies terribly.
Lex Fridman (29:21.680)
You have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool.
Jaron Lanier (29:26.360)
Everybody does when it's to their advantage.
Lex Fridman (29:28.840)
They might not when it's not to their advantage.
Jaron Lanier (29:30.720)
That's kind of an interesting game that happens.
Lex Fridman (29:33.240)
But the thing is, it's just like that with our algorithms,
Jaron Lanier (29:35.720)
you know, like, you can have a sort of a Chicago,
Lex Fridman (29:42.120)
you know, economic philosophy about your computer.
Jaron Lanier (29:44.800)
Say, no, no, no, my things come alive,
Lex Fridman (29:46.360)
it's smarter than anything.
Jaron Lanier (29:48.080)
I think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us.
Lex Fridman (29:51.840)
This is what we seek, we seek love from each other.
Jaron Lanier (29:55.360)
I think AI can help us connect deeper.
Lex Fridman (29:58.600)
Like this is what you criticize social media for.
Jaron Lanier (30:01.240)
I think there's much better ways of doing social media
Lex Fridman (30:03.880)
than doing social media that doesn't lead to manipulation,
Lex Fridman (30:06.720)
but instead leads to deeper connection between humans,
Lex Fridman (30:09.680)
leads to you becoming a better human being.
Lex Fridman (30:12.040)
And what that requires is some agency on the part of AI
Lex Fridman (30:15.240)
to be almost like a therapist, I mean, a companion.
Jaron Lanier (30:18.760)
It's not telling you what's right.
Lex Fridman (30:22.160)
It's not guiding you as if it's an all knowing thing.
Jaron Lanier (30:25.480)
It's just another companion that you can leave at any time.
Lex Fridman (30:28.920)
You have complete transparency control over.
Jaron Lanier (30:32.000)
There's a lot of mechanisms that you can have
Lex Fridman (30:34.760)
that are counter to how current social media operates
Jaron Lanier (30:38.960)
that I think is subservient to humans,
Lex Fridman (30:41.600)
or no, deeply respects human beings
Lex Fridman (30:46.160)
and is empathetic to their experience
Lex Fridman (30:47.880)
and all those kinds of things.
Jaron Lanier (30:48.960)
I think it's possible to create AI systems like that.
Lex Fridman (30:51.720)
And I think they, I mean, that's a technical discussion
Jaron Lanier (30:54.720)
of whether they need to have something that looks like more,
Lex Fridman (30:58.720)
something that looks like more like AI versus algorithms,
Jaron Lanier (31:03.640)
something that has a identity,
Lex Fridman (31:05.640)
something that has a personality, all those kinds of things.
Jaron Lanier (31:09.120)
AI systems, and you've spoken extensively
Lex Fridman (31:11.520)
how AI systems manipulate you within social networks.
Lex Fridman (31:17.240)
And that's the biggest problem,
Lex Fridman (31:19.640)
isn't necessarily that there's advertisement
Jaron Lanier (31:24.640)
that social networks present you with advertisements
Lex Fridman (31:29.320)
that then get you to buy stuff.
Jaron Lanier (31:31.120)
That's not the biggest problem.
Lex Fridman (31:32.280)
The biggest problem is they then manipulate you.
Jaron Lanier (31:36.240)
They alter your human nature to get you to buy stuff
Lex Fridman (31:41.400)
or to get you to do whatever the advertiser wants.
Jaron Lanier (31:46.320)
Or maybe you can correct me.
Lex Fridman (31:47.480)
Yeah, I don't see it quite that way,
Lex Fridman (31:49.800)
but we can work with that as an approximation.
Lex Fridman (31:52.040)
Sure, so my...
Jaron Lanier (31:53.120)
I think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous
Lex Fridman (31:55.880)
and stupider than that, but that's okay, let's...
Lex Fridman (31:58.160)
So my question is, let's not use the word AI,
Lex Fridman (32:02.440)
but how do we fix it?
Jaron Lanier (32:05.320)
Oh, fixing social media,
Lex Fridman (32:07.880)
that diverts us into this whole other field in my view,
Jaron Lanier (32:11.040)
which is economics,
Lex Fridman (32:12.560)
which I always thought was really boring,
Lex Fridman (32:14.200)
but we have no choice but to turn into economists
Lex Fridman (32:16.360)
if we wanna fix this problem,
Jaron Lanier (32:17.920)
because it's all about incentives.
Lex Fridman (32:19.840)
But I've been around this thing since it started,
Lex Fridman (32:24.240)
and I've been in the meetings
Lex Fridman (32:27.200)
where the social media companies sell themselves
Jaron Lanier (32:31.560)
to the people who put the most money into them,
Lex Fridman (32:33.840)
which are usually the big advertising holding companies
Lex Fridman (32:36.240)
and whatnot.
Lex Fridman (32:37.080)
And there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction,
Lex Fridman (32:41.360)
and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody,
Lex Fridman (32:45.080)
that the algorithm will get really good
Jaron Lanier (32:48.320)
at getting people to buy something.
Lex Fridman (32:49.720)
Because I think people have looked at their returns
Lex Fridman (32:52.080)
and looked at what happens,
Lex Fridman (32:53.160)
and everybody recognizes it's not exactly right.
Jaron Lanier (32:56.280)
It's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment
Lex Fridman (33:02.000)
at this point.
Jaron Lanier (33:03.520)
Like just to be connected, you're paying the money.
Lex Fridman (33:06.000)
It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms...
Lex Fridman (33:08.600)
So Stanford renamed its program,
Lex Fridman (33:10.400)
but it used to be called Engage Persuade.
Jaron Lanier (33:12.240)
The engage part works, the persuade part is iffy,
Lex Fridman (33:15.800)
but the thing is that once people are engaged,
Jaron Lanier (33:18.880)
in order for you to exist as a business,
Lex Fridman (33:20.680)
in order for you to be known at all,
Jaron Lanier (33:21.920)
you have to put money into the...
Lex Fridman (33:23.080)
Oh, that's dark.
Jaron Lanier (33:24.440)
Oh, no, that's not...
Lex Fridman (33:25.280)
It doesn't work, but they have to...
Lex Fridman (33:27.040)
But they're still...
Lex Fridman (33:28.240)
It's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme
Jaron Lanier (33:31.480)
at this point.
Lex Fridman (33:32.520)
So because the science behind the persuade part,
Jaron Lanier (33:35.240)
it's not entirely a failure,
Lex Fridman (33:39.600)
but it's not what...
Jaron Lanier (33:42.760)
We play make believe that it works more than it does.
Lex Fridman (33:46.920)
The damage doesn't come...
Jaron Lanier (33:48.760)
Honestly, as I've said in my books,
Lex Fridman (33:51.240)
I'm not anti advertising.
Jaron Lanier (33:53.360)
I actually think advertising can be demeaning
Lex Fridman (33:57.240)
and annoying and banal and ridiculous
Lex Fridman (34:01.320)
and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff.
Lex Fridman (34:04.240)
Like there's a lot of ways to criticize advertising
Jaron Lanier (34:06.960)
that's accurate and it can also lie and all kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (34:11.440)
However, if I look at the biggest picture,
Jaron Lanier (34:13.960)
I think advertising, at least as it was understood
Lex Fridman (34:17.080)
before social media, helped bring people into modernity
Jaron Lanier (34:20.280)
in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall.
Lex Fridman (34:24.520)
And you might say, am I contradicting myself
Lex Fridman (34:27.520)
because I was saying you shouldn't manipulate people?
Lex Fridman (34:29.080)
Yeah, I am, probably here.
Jaron Lanier (34:30.440)
I mean, I'm not pretending to have
Lex Fridman (34:31.960)
this perfect airtight worldview without some contradictions.
Jaron Lanier (34:35.440)
I think there's a bit of a contradiction there, so.
Lex Fridman (34:37.880)
Well, looking at the long arc of history,
Jaron Lanier (34:39.320)
advertisement has, in some parts, benefited society
Lex Fridman (34:43.840)
because it funded some efforts that perhaps...
Jaron Lanier (34:46.600)
Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a thing
Lex Fridman (34:50.000)
where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use.
Jaron Lanier (34:53.920)
Now, where the damage comes is a different thing though.
Lex Fridman (34:59.000)
Social media, algorithms on social media
Jaron Lanier (35:03.360)
have to work on feedback loops
Lex Fridman (35:04.800)
where they present you with stimulus
Lex Fridman (35:06.840)
and they have to see if you respond to the stimulus.
Lex Fridman (35:09.040)
Now, the problem is that the measurement mechanism
Jaron Lanier (35:12.520)
for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop
Lex Fridman (35:16.480)
is very, very crude.
Jaron Lanier (35:17.680)
It's things like whether you click more
Lex Fridman (35:19.560)
or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more
Jaron Lanier (35:21.640)
if there's a forward facing camera that's activated,
Lex Fridman (35:23.920)
but typically there isn't.
Lex Fridman (35:25.560)
So you have this incredibly crude back channel of information
Lex Fridman (35:29.000)
and so it's crude enough that it only catches
Jaron Lanier (35:32.640)
sort of the more dramatic responses from you
Lex Fridman (35:35.760)
and those are the fight or flight responses.
Jaron Lanier (35:37.760)
Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off
Lex Fridman (35:40.160)
or aggressive or horny.
Jaron Lanier (35:43.480)
These are these ancient,
Lex Fridman (35:44.880)
the sort of what are sometimes called the lizard brain
Jaron Lanier (35:46.920)
circuits or whatever, these fast response,
Lex Fridman (35:51.200)
old, old, old evolutionary business circuits that we have
Jaron Lanier (35:55.760)
that are helpful in survival once in a while
Lex Fridman (35:58.800)
but are not us at our best.
Jaron Lanier (36:00.560)
They're not who we wanna be.
Lex Fridman (36:01.640)
They're not how we relate to each other.
Jaron Lanier (36:03.480)
They're this old business.
Lex Fridman (36:05.080)
So then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically
Jaron Lanier (36:08.200)
totally aside from whatever the topic is,
Lex Fridman (36:11.080)
you start to get incrementally just a little bit
Jaron Lanier (36:13.920)
more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive.
Lex Fridman (36:17.200)
You get a little stupid and you become a jerk
Lex Fridman (36:20.960)
and it happens slowly.
Lex Fridman (36:22.400)
It's not like everybody's instantly transformed,
Lex Fridman (36:26.080)
but it does kind of happen progressively
Lex Fridman (36:28.000)
where people who get hooked kind of get drawn
Jaron Lanier (36:30.280)
more and more into this pattern of being at their worst.
Lex Fridman (36:33.640)
Would you say that people are able to,
Jaron Lanier (36:35.760)
when they get hooked in this way,
Lex Fridman (36:37.480)
look back at themselves from 30 days ago
Lex Fridman (36:40.320)
and say, I am less happy with who I am now
Lex Fridman (36:45.120)
or I'm not happy with who I am now
Jaron Lanier (36:47.120)
versus who I was 30 days ago.
Lex Fridman (36:48.800)
Are they able to self reflect
Lex Fridman (36:50.560)
when you take yourself outside of the lizard brain?
Lex Fridman (36:52.600)
Sometimes.
Jaron Lanier (36:54.120)
I wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break
Lex Fridman (36:57.200)
from their social media to see what happens
Lex Fridman (36:58.880)
and maybe even, actually the title of the book
Lex Fridman (37:01.760)
was just the arguments to delete your account.
Jaron Lanier (37:04.160)
Yeah, 10 arguments.
Lex Fridman (37:05.880)
10 arguments.
Jaron Lanier (37:06.720)
Although I always said, I don't know that you should.
Lex Fridman (37:08.480)
I can give you the arguments.
Jaron Lanier (37:09.600)
It's up to you.
Lex Fridman (37:10.440)
I'm always very clear about that.
Lex Fridman (37:11.760)
But you know, I get like,
Lex Fridman (37:13.320)
I don't have a social media account obviously
Lex Fridman (37:15.560)
and it's not that easy for people to reach me.
Lex Fridman (37:18.880)
They have to search out an old fashioned email address
Jaron Lanier (37:21.280)
on a super crappy antiquated website.
Lex Fridman (37:23.560)
Like it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy.
Lex Fridman (37:26.120)
And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail
Lex Fridman (37:28.680)
from people who say, oh, I quit my social media.
Jaron Lanier (37:30.560)
I'm doing so much better.
Lex Fridman (37:31.400)
I can't believe how bad it was.
Lex Fridman (37:33.240)
But the thing is, what's for me a huge flood of mail
Lex Fridman (37:36.040)
would be an imperceptible trickle
Lex Fridman (37:37.720)
from the perspective of Facebook, right?
Lex Fridman (37:39.920)
And so I think it's rare for somebody
Jaron Lanier (37:43.600)
to look at themselves and say,
Lex Fridman (37:44.840)
oh boy, I sure screwed myself over.
Jaron Lanier (37:46.520)
It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody.
Lex Fridman (37:49.600)
None of us find that easy, right?
Jaron Lanier (37:51.280)
It's just hard.
Lex Fridman (37:52.600)
The reason I asked this is,
Jaron Lanier (37:54.320)
is it possible to design social media systems
Lex Fridman (37:58.160)
that optimize for some longer term metrics
Lex Fridman (38:01.200)
of you being happy with yourself?
Lex Fridman (38:04.520)
Well see, I don't think you should try
Jaron Lanier (38:06.440)
to engineer personal growth or happiness.
Lex Fridman (38:08.320)
I think what you should do is design a system
Jaron Lanier (38:10.720)
that's just respectful of the people
Lex Fridman (38:12.640)
and subordinates itself to the people
Lex Fridman (38:14.680)
and doesn't have perverse incentives.
Lex Fridman (38:16.760)
And then at least there's a chance
Jaron Lanier (38:18.200)
of something decent happening.
Lex Fridman (38:19.800)
You have to recommend stuff, right?
Lex Fridman (38:22.080)
So you're saying like, be respectful.
Lex Fridman (38:24.400)
What does that actually mean engineering wise?
Jaron Lanier (38:26.880)
Yeah, curation.
Lex Fridman (38:27.720)
People have to be responsible.
Jaron Lanier (38:30.240)
Algorithms shouldn't be recommending.
Lex Fridman (38:31.680)
Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend.
Jaron Lanier (38:33.440)
Algorithms are crap in this era.
Lex Fridman (38:35.280)
I mean, I'm sorry, they are.
Lex Fridman (38:37.000)
And I'm not saying this as somebody
Lex Fridman (38:38.360)
as a critic from the outside.
Jaron Lanier (38:39.360)
I'm in the middle of it.
Lex Fridman (38:40.200)
I know what they can do.
Jaron Lanier (38:41.120)
I know the math.
Lex Fridman (38:41.960)
I know what the corpora are.
Jaron Lanier (38:45.240)
I know the best ones.
Lex Fridman (38:46.920)
Our office is funding GPT3 and all these things
Jaron Lanier (38:49.800)
that are at the edge of what's possible.
Lex Fridman (38:53.440)
And they do not have yet.
Jaron Lanier (38:57.400)
I mean, it still is statistical emergent pseudo semantics.
Lex Fridman (39:02.120)
It doesn't actually have deep representation
Jaron Lanier (39:04.120)
emerging of anything.
Lex Fridman (39:05.120)
It's just not like, I mean that I'm speaking the truth here
Lex Fridman (39:07.720)
and you know it.
Lex Fridman (39:08.600)
Well, let me push back on this.
Jaron Lanier (39:11.000)
This, there's several truths here.
Lex Fridman (39:13.080)
So one, you're speaking to the way
Jaron Lanier (39:15.080)
certain companies operate currently.
Lex Fridman (39:17.040)
I don't think it's outside the realm
Jaron Lanier (39:18.880)
of what's technically feasible to do.
Lex Fridman (39:21.760)
There's just not incentive,
Lex Fridman (39:22.760)
like companies are not, why fix this thing?
Lex Fridman (39:26.120)
I am aware that, for example, the YouTube search
Lex Fridman (39:29.840)
and discovery has been very helpful to me.
Lex Fridman (39:32.520)
And there's a huge number of, there's so many videos
Jaron Lanier (39:36.960)
that it's nice to have a little bit of help.
Lex Fridman (39:39.160)
But I'm still in control.
Jaron Lanier (39:40.800)
Let me ask you something.
Lex Fridman (39:41.640)
Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube
Jaron Lanier (39:44.400)
recommend videos to you either starting
Lex Fridman (39:46.640)
from a absolutely anonymous random place
Jaron Lanier (39:49.760)
where it doesn't know who you are
Lex Fridman (39:50.840)
or from knowing who you or somebody else is
Lex Fridman (39:52.840)
and then going 15 or 20 hops?
Lex Fridman (39:54.640)
Have you ever done that and just let it go
Lex Fridman (39:56.840)
top video recommend and then just go 20 hops?
Lex Fridman (39:59.640)
No, I've not.
Jaron Lanier (40:00.480)
I've done that many times now.
Lex Fridman (40:02.080)
I have, because of how large YouTube is
Lex Fridman (40:05.400)
and how widely it's used,
Lex Fridman (40:06.960)
it's very hard to get to enough scale
Jaron Lanier (40:10.120)
to get a statistically solid result on this.
Lex Fridman (40:13.720)
I've done it with high school kids,
Jaron Lanier (40:15.280)
with dozens of kids doing it at a time.
Lex Fridman (40:17.800)
Every time I've done an experiment,
Jaron Lanier (40:19.640)
the majority of times after about 17 or 18 hops,
Lex Fridman (40:22.920)
you end up in really weird, paranoid, bizarre territory.
Jaron Lanier (40:26.640)
Because ultimately, that is the stuff
Lex Fridman (40:28.920)
the algorithm rewards the most
Jaron Lanier (40:30.360)
because of the feedback crudeness I was just talking about.
Lex Fridman (40:33.480)
So I'm not saying that the video
Jaron Lanier (40:36.320)
never recommends something cool.
Lex Fridman (40:37.840)
I'm saying that its fundamental core
Jaron Lanier (40:40.000)
is one that promotes a paranoid style
Lex Fridman (40:43.240)
that promotes increasing irritability,
Jaron Lanier (40:45.880)
that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger,
Lex Fridman (40:49.640)
promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people.
Lex Fridman (40:53.800)
And the thing is, it's very hard to do this work solidly.
Lex Fridman (40:57.720)
Many have repeated this experiment
Lex Fridman (40:59.480)
and yet it still is kind of anecdotal.
Lex Fridman (41:01.720)
I'd like to do a large citizen science thing sometime
Lex Fridman (41:05.080)
and do it, but then I think the problem with that
Lex Fridman (41:06.840)
is YouTube would detect it and then change it.
Jaron Lanier (41:09.080)
Yes, I love that kind of stuff on Twitter.
Lex Fridman (41:11.640)
So Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy conversations
Jaron Lanier (41:15.920)
on Twitter or optimizing for healthy conversations.
Lex Fridman (41:18.600)
What that requires within Twitter
Jaron Lanier (41:20.160)
are most likely citizen experiments
Lex Fridman (41:23.520)
of what does healthy conversation actually look like
Lex Fridman (41:26.520)
and how do you incentivize those healthy conversations
Lex Fridman (41:29.160)
you're describing what often happens
Lex Fridman (41:32.160)
and what is currently happening.
Lex Fridman (41:33.960)
What I'd like to argue is it's possible
Jaron Lanier (41:36.040)
to strive for healthy conversations,
Lex Fridman (41:39.040)
not in a dogmatic way of saying,
Jaron Lanier (41:42.040)
I know what healthy conversations are and I will tell you.
Lex Fridman (41:44.800)
I think one way to do this is to try to look around
Jaron Lanier (41:47.760)
at social, maybe not things that are officially social media,
Lex Fridman (41:51.200)
but things where people are together online
Lex Fridman (41:53.360)
and see which ones have more healthy conversations,
Lex Fridman (41:56.120)
even if it's hard to be completely objective
Jaron Lanier (42:00.000)
in that measurement, you can kind of, at least crudely.
Lex Fridman (42:02.520)
You could do subjective annotation
Jaron Lanier (42:05.240)
like have a large crowd source annotation.
Lex Fridman (42:07.640)
One that I've been really interested in is GitHub
Jaron Lanier (42:10.960)
because it could change.
Lex Fridman (42:14.360)
I'm not saying it'll always be, but for the most part,
Jaron Lanier (42:17.280)
GitHub has had a relatively quite low poison quotient.
Lex Fridman (42:21.640)
And I think there's a few things about GitHub
Jaron Lanier (42:24.680)
that are interesting.
Lex Fridman (42:26.480)
One thing about it is that people have a stake in it.
Jaron Lanier (42:29.400)
It's not just empty status games.
Lex Fridman (42:31.720)
There's actual code or there's actual stuff being done.
Lex Fridman (42:35.040)
And I think as soon as you have a real world stake
Lex Fridman (42:37.360)
in something, you have a motivation
Jaron Lanier (42:40.760)
to not screw up that thing.
Lex Fridman (42:42.520)
And I think that that's often missing
Jaron Lanier (42:45.360)
that there's no incentive for the person
Lex Fridman (42:48.080)
to really preserve something.
Jaron Lanier (42:49.480)
If they get a little bit of attention
Lex Fridman (42:51.440)
from dumping on somebody's TikTok or something,
Jaron Lanier (42:55.840)
they don't pay any price for it.
Lex Fridman (42:56.840)
But you have to kind of get decent with people
Jaron Lanier (43:00.640)
when you have a shared stake, a little secret.
Lex Fridman (43:03.040)
So GitHub does a bit of that.
Jaron Lanier (43:06.720)
GitHub is wonderful, yes.
Lex Fridman (43:08.520)
But I'm tempted to play the Jaren Becker at you,
Jaron Lanier (43:13.200)
which is that, so GitHub is currently is amazing.
Lex Fridman (43:16.320)
But the thing is, if you have a stake,
Jaron Lanier (43:18.280)
then if it's a social media platform,
Lex Fridman (43:20.360)
they can use the fact that you have a stake
Jaron Lanier (43:22.440)
to manipulate you because you want to preserve the stake.
Lex Fridman (43:25.200)
So like, so like.
Jaron Lanier (43:26.120)
Right, well, this is why,
Lex Fridman (43:27.680)
all right, this gets us into the economics.
Lex Fridman (43:29.160)
So there's this thing called data dignity
Lex Fridman (43:30.800)
that I've been studying for a long time.
Jaron Lanier (43:32.920)
I wrote a book about an earlier version of it
Lex Fridman (43:34.840)
called Who Owns the Future?
Lex Fridman (43:36.960)
And the basic idea of it is that,
Lex Fridman (43:41.680)
once again, this is a 30 year conversation.
Jaron Lanier (43:43.360)
It's a fascinating topic.
Lex Fridman (43:44.200)
Let me do the fastest version of this I can do.
Jaron Lanier (43:46.720)
The fastest way I know how to do this
Lex Fridman (43:48.720)
is to compare two futures, all right?
Lex Fridman (43:51.880)
So future one is then the normative one,
Lex Fridman (43:55.520)
the one we're building right now.
Lex Fridman (43:56.960)
And future two is gonna be data dignity, okay?
Lex Fridman (44:00.160)
And I'm gonna use a particular population.
Jaron Lanier (44:03.000)
I live on the hill in Berkeley.
Lex Fridman (44:05.200)
And one of the features about the hill
Jaron Lanier (44:06.880)
is that as the climate changes,
Lex Fridman (44:08.080)
we might burn down and I'll lose our houses
Jaron Lanier (44:10.720)
or die or something.
Lex Fridman (44:11.560)
Like it's dangerous, you know, and it didn't used to be.
Lex Fridman (44:14.160)
And so who keeps us alive?
Lex Fridman (44:16.920)
Well, the city does.
Jaron Lanier (44:18.280)
The city does some things.
Lex Fridman (44:19.440)
The electric company kind of sort of,
Jaron Lanier (44:21.360)
maybe hopefully better.
Lex Fridman (44:23.360)
Individual people who own property
Jaron Lanier (44:25.920)
take care of their property.
Lex Fridman (44:26.880)
That's all nice.
Lex Fridman (44:27.720)
But there's this other middle layer,
Lex Fridman (44:29.160)
which is fascinating to me,
Jaron Lanier (44:30.880)
which is that the groundskeepers
Lex Fridman (44:33.480)
who work up and down that hill,
Jaron Lanier (44:35.240)
many of whom are not legally here,
Lex Fridman (44:38.600)
many of whom don't speak English,
Jaron Lanier (44:40.440)
cooperate with each other
Lex Fridman (44:42.480)
to make sure trees don't touch
Jaron Lanier (44:44.240)
to transfer fire easily from lot to lot.
Lex Fridman (44:46.560)
They have this whole little web
Jaron Lanier (44:48.040)
that's keeping us safe.
Lex Fridman (44:49.080)
I didn't know about this at first.
Jaron Lanier (44:50.400)
I just started talking to them
Lex Fridman (44:52.400)
because they were out there during the pandemic.
Lex Fridman (44:54.240)
And so I try to just see who are these people?
Lex Fridman (44:56.720)
Who are these people who are keeping us alive?
Jaron Lanier (44:59.240)
Now, I want to talk about the two different phases
Lex Fridman (45:01.400)
for those people in your future one and future two.
Jaron Lanier (45:04.800)
Future one, some weird like kindergarten paint job van
Lex Fridman (45:10.320)
with all these like cameras and weird things,
Jaron Lanier (45:11.880)
drives up, observes what the gardeners
Lex Fridman (45:13.680)
and groundskeepers are doing.
Jaron Lanier (45:15.520)
A few years later, some amazing robots
Lex Fridman (45:18.120)
that can shimmy up trees and all this show up.
Jaron Lanier (45:20.400)
All those people are out of work
Lex Fridman (45:21.520)
and there are these robots doing the thing
Lex Fridman (45:23.040)
and the robots are good.
Lex Fridman (45:23.960)
And they can scale to more land
Lex Fridman (45:26.280)
and they're actually good.
Lex Fridman (45:28.360)
But then there are all these people out of work
Lex Fridman (45:29.920)
and these people have lost dignity.
Lex Fridman (45:31.240)
They don't know what they're going to do.
Lex Fridman (45:32.840)
And then somebody will say,
Lex Fridman (45:34.240)
well, they go on basic income, whatever.
Jaron Lanier (45:35.680)
They become wards of the state.
Lex Fridman (45:38.960)
My problem with that solution is every time in history
Jaron Lanier (45:42.520)
that you've had some centralized thing
Lex Fridman (45:44.280)
that's doling out the benefits,
Jaron Lanier (45:45.560)
that things get seized by people
Lex Fridman (45:47.200)
because it's too centralized and it gets seized.
Jaron Lanier (45:49.480)
This happened to every communist experiment I can find.
Lex Fridman (45:53.160)
So I think that turns into a poor future
Jaron Lanier (45:55.960)
that will be unstable.
Lex Fridman (45:57.640)
I don't think people will feel good in it.
Jaron Lanier (45:59.160)
I think it'll be a political disaster
Lex Fridman (46:01.400)
with a sequence of people seizing this central source
Jaron Lanier (46:04.440)
of the basic income.
Lex Fridman (46:06.720)
And you'll say, oh no, an algorithm can do it.
Jaron Lanier (46:08.320)
Then people will seize the algorithm.
Lex Fridman (46:09.680)
They'll seize control.
Jaron Lanier (46:11.160)
Unless the algorithm is decentralized
Lex Fridman (46:13.480)
and it's impossible to seize the control.
Jaron Lanier (46:15.520)
Yeah, but 60 something people
Lex Fridman (46:20.000)
own a quarter of all the Bitcoin.
Jaron Lanier (46:21.880)
Like the things that we think are decentralized
Lex Fridman (46:24.040)
are not decentralized.
Lex Fridman (46:25.840)
So let's go to future two.
Lex Fridman (46:27.720)
Future two, the gardeners see that van with all the cameras
Lex Fridman (46:32.360)
and the kindergarten paint job,
Lex Fridman (46:33.560)
and they say, the groundskeepers,
Lex Fridman (46:35.320)
and they say, hey, the robots are coming.
Lex Fridman (46:37.560)
We're going to form a data union.
Lex Fridman (46:38.880)
And amazingly, California has a little baby data union law
Lex Fridman (46:43.240)
emerging in the books.
Jaron Lanier (46:44.080)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (46:45.560)
And so they say, we're going to form a data union
Lex Fridman (46:52.520)
and we're going to,
Lex Fridman (46:53.600)
not only are we going to sell our data to this place,
Lex Fridman (46:56.280)
but we're going to make it better than it would have been
Lex Fridman (46:57.880)
if they were just grabbing it without our cooperation.
Lex Fridman (47:00.040)
And we're going to improve it.
Lex Fridman (47:01.720)
We're going to make the robots more effective.
Jaron Lanier (47:03.320)
We're going to make them better
Lex Fridman (47:04.160)
and we're going to be proud of it.
Jaron Lanier (47:05.280)
We're going to become a new class of experts
Lex Fridman (47:08.400)
that are respected.
Lex Fridman (47:09.760)
And then here's the interesting,
Lex Fridman (47:11.680)
there's two things that are different about that world
Jaron Lanier (47:14.480)
from future one.
Lex Fridman (47:15.600)
One thing, of course, the people have more pride.
Jaron Lanier (47:17.600)
They have more sense of ownership, of agency,
Lex Fridman (47:23.800)
but what the robots do changes.
Jaron Lanier (47:27.200)
Instead of just like this functional,
Lex Fridman (47:29.960)
like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood
Jaron Lanier (47:31.560)
from burning down,
Lex Fridman (47:33.520)
you have this whole creative community
Jaron Lanier (47:35.320)
that wasn't there before thinking,
Lex Fridman (47:36.480)
well, how can we make these robots better
Lex Fridman (47:38.000)
so we can keep on earning money?
Lex Fridman (47:39.680)
There'll be waves of creative groundskeeping
Jaron Lanier (47:44.240)
with spiral pumping, pumpkin patches
Lex Fridman (47:46.320)
and waves of cultural things.
Jaron Lanier (47:47.920)
There'll be new ideas like,
Lex Fridman (47:49.440)
wow, I wonder if we could do something
Jaron Lanier (47:51.520)
about climate change mitigation with how we do this.
Lex Fridman (47:54.400)
What about, what about fresh water?
Lex Fridman (47:56.400)
Can we, what about, can we make the food healthier?
Lex Fridman (47:59.120)
What about, what about all of a sudden
Lex Fridman (48:00.400)
there'll be this whole creative community on the case?
Lex Fridman (48:03.280)
And isn't it nicer to have a high tech future
Jaron Lanier (48:06.080)
with more creative classes
Lex Fridman (48:07.520)
than one with more dependent classes?
Lex Fridman (48:09.200)
Isn't that a better future?
Lex Fridman (48:10.400)
But, but, but, but, future one and future two
Jaron Lanier (48:14.560)
have the same robots and the same algorithms.
Lex Fridman (48:17.440)
There's no technological difference.
Jaron Lanier (48:19.200)
There's only a human difference.
Lex Fridman (48:21.520)
And that second future two, that's data dignity.
Jaron Lanier (48:25.600)
The economy that you're, I mean,
Lex Fridman (48:27.120)
the game theory here is on the humans
Lex Fridman (48:29.120)
and then the technology is just the tools
Lex Fridman (48:31.600)
that enable both possibilities.
Jaron Lanier (48:33.360)
I mean, I think you can believe in AI
Lex Fridman (48:36.240)
and be in future two.
Jaron Lanier (48:37.440)
I just think it's a little harder.
Lex Fridman (48:38.560)
You have to do more contortions, it's possible.
Lex Fridman (48:43.280)
So in the case of social media,
Lex Fridman (48:46.080)
what does data dignity look like?
Lex Fridman (48:49.120)
Is it people getting paid for their data?
Lex Fridman (48:51.440)
Yeah, I think what should happen is in the future
Jaron Lanier (48:55.200)
there should be massive data unions
Lex Fridman (48:59.280)
for people putting content into the system
Lex Fridman (49:03.920)
and those data unions should smooth out
Lex Fridman (49:05.840)
the results a little bit.
Lex Fridman (49:06.800)
So it's not winner take all, but at the same time,
Lex Fridman (49:10.400)
and people have to pay for it too.
Jaron Lanier (49:11.600)
They have to pay for Facebook
Lex Fridman (49:13.520)
the way they pay for Netflix
Jaron Lanier (49:14.960)
with an allowance for the poor.
Lex Fridman (49:17.360)
There has to be a way out too.
Lex Fridman (49:20.160)
But the thing is people do pay for Netflix.
Lex Fridman (49:22.080)
It's a going concern.
Jaron Lanier (49:24.320)
People pay for Xbox and PlayStation.
Lex Fridman (49:26.160)
Like people, there's enough people
Jaron Lanier (49:27.760)
to pay for stuff they want.
Lex Fridman (49:28.880)
This could happen too.
Jaron Lanier (49:29.680)
It's just that this precedent started
Lex Fridman (49:31.280)
that moved it in the wrong direction.
Lex Fridman (49:33.040)
And then what has to happen,
Lex Fridman (49:34.640)
the economy is a measuring device.
Jaron Lanier (49:36.320)
If it's an honest measuring device,
Lex Fridman (49:39.280)
the outcomes for people form a normal distribution,
Jaron Lanier (49:42.560)
a bell curve.
Lex Fridman (49:43.600)
And then, so there should be a few people
Jaron Lanier (49:45.280)
who do really well, a lot of people who do okay.
Lex Fridman (49:47.680)
And then we should have an expanding economy
Jaron Lanier (49:49.840)
reflecting more and more creativity and expertise
Lex Fridman (49:52.960)
flowing through the network.
Lex Fridman (49:54.640)
And that expanding economy moves the result
Lex Fridman (49:57.040)
just a bit forward.
Lex Fridman (49:57.840)
So more people are getting money out of it
Lex Fridman (50:00.000)
than are putting money into it.
Lex Fridman (50:01.280)
So it gradually expands the economy
Lex Fridman (50:03.040)
and lifts all boats.
Lex Fridman (50:04.480)
And the society has to support the lower wing
Lex Fridman (50:08.000)
of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income.
Jaron Lanier (50:10.720)
It has to be for the,
Lex Fridman (50:12.800)
cause if it's an honest economy,
Jaron Lanier (50:15.280)
there will be that lower wing
Lex Fridman (50:17.760)
and we have to support those people.
Jaron Lanier (50:19.360)
There has to be a safety net.
Lex Fridman (50:21.600)
But see what I believe, I'm not gonna talk about AI,
Lex Fridman (50:24.720)
but I will say that I think there'll be more
Lex Fridman (50:27.680)
and more algorithms that are useful.
Lex Fridman (50:29.760)
And so I don't think everybody's gonna be supplying data
Lex Fridman (50:33.440)
to grounds keeping robots,
Jaron Lanier (50:34.800)
nor do I think everybody's gonna make their living
Lex Fridman (50:36.640)
with TikTok videos.
Jaron Lanier (50:37.440)
I think in both cases,
Lex Fridman (50:38.800)
there'll be a rather small contingent
Jaron Lanier (50:41.680)
that do well enough at either of those things.
Lex Fridman (50:43.920)
But I think there might be many, many, many,
Jaron Lanier (50:46.880)
many of those niches that start to evolve
Lex Fridman (50:48.640)
as there are more and more algorithms,
Jaron Lanier (50:49.920)
more and more robots.
Lex Fridman (50:50.880)
And it's that large number that will create
Jaron Lanier (50:54.160)
the economic potential for a very large part of society
Lex Fridman (50:57.280)
to become members of new creative classes.
Lex Fridman (51:00.080)
Do you think it's possible to create a social network
Lex Fridman (51:05.040)
that competes with Twitter and Facebook
Lex Fridman (51:06.640)
that's large and centralized in this way?
Lex Fridman (51:08.800)
Not centralized, sort of large, large.
Lex Fridman (51:10.880)
How to get, all right, so I gotta tell you
Lex Fridman (51:13.280)
how to get from where we are
Jaron Lanier (51:16.400)
to anything kind of in the zone
Lex Fridman (51:18.160)
of what I'm talking about is challenging.
Jaron Lanier (51:22.400)
I know some of the people who run,
Lex Fridman (51:24.640)
like I know Jack Dorsey at H1N1,
Lex Fridman (51:26.960)
and I view Jack as somebody who's actually,
Lex Fridman (51:34.720)
I think he's really striving and searching
Lex Fridman (51:36.800)
and trying to find a way to make it better,
Lex Fridman (51:40.000)
but is kind of like,
Jaron Lanier (51:42.240)
it's very hard to do it while in flight
Lex Fridman (51:44.080)
and he's under enormous business pressure too.
Lex Fridman (51:46.240)
So Jack Dorsey to me is a fascinating study
Lex Fridman (51:49.520)
because I think his mind is in a lot of good places.
Jaron Lanier (51:52.480)
He's a good human being,
Lex Fridman (51:54.400)
but there's a big Titanic ship
Jaron Lanier (51:56.320)
that's already moving in one direction.
Lex Fridman (51:57.760)
It's hard to know what to do with it.
Jaron Lanier (51:59.040)
I think that's the story of Twitter.
Lex Fridman (52:00.720)
I think that's the story of Twitter.
Jaron Lanier (52:02.560)
One of the things that I observed is that
Lex Fridman (52:04.480)
if you just wanna look at the human side,
Lex Fridman (52:06.400)
meaning like how are people being changed?
Lex Fridman (52:08.560)
How do they feel?
Lex Fridman (52:09.360)
What does the culture like?
Lex Fridman (52:11.360)
Almost all of the social media platforms that get big
Jaron Lanier (52:15.760)
have an initial sort of honeymoon period
Lex Fridman (52:17.840)
where they're actually kind of sweet and cute.
Jaron Lanier (52:19.680)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (52:20.080)
Like if you look at the early years of Twitter,
Jaron Lanier (52:22.160)
it was really sweet and cute,
Lex Fridman (52:23.520)
but also look at Snap, TikTok.
Lex Fridman (52:27.360)
And then what happens is as they scale
Lex Fridman (52:30.240)
and the algorithms become more influential
Jaron Lanier (52:32.560)
instead of just the early people,
Lex Fridman (52:33.920)
when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it,
Jaron Lanier (52:36.720)
then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style
Lex Fridman (52:39.440)
and then they start to get dark.
Lex Fridman (52:40.640)
And we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently.
Lex Fridman (52:43.600)
But I feel like that scaling reveals the flaws
Jaron Lanier (52:48.560)
within the incentives.
Lex Fridman (52:51.520)
I feel like I'm torturing you.
Jaron Lanier (52:52.720)
I'm sorry.
Lex Fridman (52:53.520)
It's not torture.
Jaron Lanier (52:54.320)
No, because I have hope for the world with humans
Lex Fridman (53:00.160)
and I have hope for a lot of things that humans create,
Jaron Lanier (53:02.640)
including technology.
Lex Fridman (53:04.160)
And I just, I feel it is possible to create
Jaron Lanier (53:07.520)
social media platforms that incentivize
Lex Fridman (53:11.760)
different things than the current.
Jaron Lanier (53:13.280)
I think the current incentivization is around
Lex Fridman (53:16.000)
like the dumbest possible thing that was invented
Jaron Lanier (53:19.040)
like 20 years ago, however long.
Lex Fridman (53:21.600)
And it just works and so nobody's changing it.
Jaron Lanier (53:24.000)
I just think that there could be a lot of innovation
Lex Fridman (53:26.560)
for more, see, you kind of push back this idea
Jaron Lanier (53:29.360)
that we can't know what longterm growth or happiness is.
Lex Fridman (53:33.600)
If you give control to people to define
Lex Fridman (53:36.160)
what their longterm happiness and goals are,
Lex Fridman (53:39.280)
then that optimization can happen
Jaron Lanier (53:42.320)
for each of those individual people.
Lex Fridman (53:43.840)
Well, I mean, imagine a future where
Jaron Lanier (53:53.040)
probably a lot of people would love to make their living
Lex Fridman (53:57.600)
doing TikTok dance videos, but people recognize generally
Jaron Lanier (54:01.920)
that's kind of hard to get into.
Lex Fridman (54:03.760)
Nonetheless, dance crews have an experience
Jaron Lanier (54:07.440)
that's very similar to programmers working together on GitHub.
Lex Fridman (54:10.800)
So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub
Lex Fridman (54:14.000)
and they get together and they have rights.
Lex Fridman (54:18.160)
They're negotiating for returns.
Jaron Lanier (54:21.280)
They join different artists societies
Lex Fridman (54:23.600)
in order to soften the blow of the randomness
Jaron Lanier (54:26.800)
of who gets the network effect benefit
Lex Fridman (54:29.120)
because nobody can know that.
Lex Fridman (54:31.040)
And I think an individual person
Lex Fridman (54:35.520)
might join a thousand different data unions
Jaron Lanier (54:37.680)
in the course of their lives, or maybe even 10,000.
Lex Fridman (54:40.160)
I don't know, but the point is that we'll have
Jaron Lanier (54:42.000)
like these very hedge distributed portfolios
Lex Fridman (54:45.520)
of different data unions we're part of.
Lex Fridman (54:47.760)
And some of them might just trickle in a little money
Lex Fridman (54:50.080)
for nonsense stuff where we're contributing
Jaron Lanier (54:52.720)
to health studies or something.
Lex Fridman (54:54.880)
But I think people will find their way.
Jaron Lanier (54:56.880)
They'll find their way to the right GitHub like community
Lex Fridman (55:00.320)
in which they find their value in the context
Jaron Lanier (55:03.680)
of supplying inputs and data and taste
Lex Fridman (55:07.200)
and correctives and all of this into the algorithms
Lex Fridman (55:11.200)
and the robots of the future.
Lex Fridman (55:14.640)
And that is a way to resist
Jaron Lanier (55:18.720)
the lizard brain based funding system mechanisms.
Lex Fridman (55:22.880)
It's an alternate economic system
Jaron Lanier (55:25.120)
that rewards productivity, creativity,
Lex Fridman (55:28.800)
value as perceived by others.
Jaron Lanier (55:30.240)
It's a genuine market.
Lex Fridman (55:31.360)
It's not doled out from a center.
Jaron Lanier (55:32.960)
There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable.
Lex Fridman (55:36.160)
It's actual market.
Lex Fridman (55:38.560)
And the money is made by supporting that
Lex Fridman (55:43.280)
instead of just grabbing people's attention
Jaron Lanier (55:46.320)
in the cheapest possible way,
Lex Fridman (55:47.520)
which is definitely how you get the lizard brain.
Jaron Lanier (55:49.760)
Yeah, okay.
Lex Fridman (55:51.040)
So we're finally at the agreement.
Lex Fridman (55:55.600)
But I just think that...
Lex Fridman (55:59.120)
So yeah, I'll tell you how I think to fix social media.
Jaron Lanier (56:03.120)
There's a few things.
Lex Fridman (56:05.360)
So one, I think people should have complete control
Jaron Lanier (56:07.840)
over their data and transparency of what that data is
Lex Fridman (56:11.600)
and how it's being used if they do hand over the control.
Jaron Lanier (56:14.640)
Another thing they should be able to delete,
Lex Fridman (56:16.400)
walk away with their data at any moment, easy.
Jaron Lanier (56:19.520)
Like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons,
Lex Fridman (56:22.000)
I don't know, just easily walk away with their data.
Jaron Lanier (56:26.240)
The other is control of the algorithm,
Lex Fridman (56:28.080)
individualized control of the algorithm for them.
Lex Fridman (56:31.120)
So each one has their own algorithm.
Lex Fridman (56:33.360)
Each person has their own algorithm.
Jaron Lanier (56:34.720)
They get to be the decider of what they see in this world.
Lex Fridman (56:38.960)
And to me, that's, I guess, fundamentally decentralized
Jaron Lanier (56:43.680)
in terms of the key decisions being made.
Lex Fridman (56:45.920)
But if that's made transparent,
Jaron Lanier (56:47.360)
I feel like people will choose that system
Lex Fridman (56:50.080)
over Twitter of today, over Facebook of today,
Jaron Lanier (56:53.360)
when they have the ability to walk away,
Lex Fridman (56:55.200)
to control their data
Lex Fridman (56:56.560)
and to control the kinds of things they see.
Lex Fridman (56:58.960)
Now, let's walk away from the term AI.
Jaron Lanier (57:01.520)
You're right.
Lex Fridman (57:02.320)
In this case, you have full control
Jaron Lanier (57:05.360)
of the algorithms that help you
Lex Fridman (57:07.360)
if you want to use their help.
Lex Fridman (57:09.760)
But you can also say a few to those algorithms
Lex Fridman (57:12.320)
and just consume the raw, beautiful waterfall
Jaron Lanier (57:17.680)
of the internet.
Lex Fridman (57:18.800)
I think that, to me, that's not only fixes social media,
Lex Fridman (57:22.960)
but I think it would make a lot more money.
Lex Fridman (57:24.800)
So I would like to challenge the idea.
Jaron Lanier (57:26.560)
I know you're not presenting that,
Lex Fridman (57:27.760)
but that the only way to make a ton of money
Jaron Lanier (57:30.400)
is to operate like Facebook is.
Lex Fridman (57:32.320)
I think you can make more money by giving people control.
Jaron Lanier (57:36.240)
Yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that.
Lex Fridman (57:38.320)
We're definitely in the territory
Jaron Lanier (57:40.160)
of a wholehearted agreement here.
Lex Fridman (57:44.880)
I do want to caution against one thing,
Jaron Lanier (57:47.040)
which is making a future that benefits programmers
Lex Fridman (57:50.880)
versus this idea that people are in control of their data.
Lex Fridman (57:53.680)
So years ago, I cofounded an advisory board for the EU
Lex Fridman (57:58.240)
with a guy named Jay.
Jaron Lanier (57:59.120)
Giovanni Bottarelli, who passed away.
Lex Fridman (58:00.960)
It's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it.
Jaron Lanier (58:02.320)
A remarkable guy who'd been,
Lex Fridman (58:04.960)
he was originally a prosecutor
Jaron Lanier (58:06.640)
who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily.
Lex Fridman (58:10.960)
So he was like this intense guy who was like,
Jaron Lanier (58:13.920)
I've dealt with death threats.
Lex Fridman (58:16.080)
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me or whatever.
Lex Fridman (58:17.840)
So we worked on this path of saying,
Lex Fridman (58:21.040)
let's make it all about transparency and consent.
Lex Fridman (58:23.120)
And it was one of the feeders that led to this huge data
Lex Fridman (58:26.960)
privacy and protection framework in Europe called the GDPR.
Lex Fridman (58:30.960)
And so therefore we've been able to have empirical feedback
Lex Fridman (58:35.520)
on how that goes.
Lex Fridman (58:36.320)
And the problem is that most people actually get stymied
Lex Fridman (58:41.280)
by the complexity of that kind of management.
Jaron Lanier (58:44.080)
They have trouble and reasonably so.
Lex Fridman (58:46.960)
I don't, I'm like a techie.
Jaron Lanier (58:48.720)
I can go in and I can figure out what's going on.
Lex Fridman (58:51.600)
But most people really do.
Lex Fridman (58:54.000)
And so there's a problem that it differentially benefits
Lex Fridman (59:00.000)
those who kind of have a technical mindset
Lex Fridman (59:02.240)
and can go in and sort of have a feeling
Lex Fridman (59:04.000)
for how this stuff works.
Jaron Lanier (59:05.840)
I kind of still want to come back to incentives.
Lex Fridman (59:08.320)
And so if the incentive for whoever is,
Jaron Lanier (59:11.840)
if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people
Lex Fridman (59:14.320)
of the future make more money,
Jaron Lanier (59:15.440)
because you get a cut of it,
Lex Fridman (59:17.440)
that's how you grow an economy.
Jaron Lanier (59:19.040)
Not the programmers.
Lex Fridman (59:20.080)
Well, some of them will be programmers.
Jaron Lanier (59:24.800)
It's not anti programmer.
Lex Fridman (59:26.560)
I'm just saying that it's not only programmers, you know?
Jaron Lanier (59:30.480)
So, yeah, you have to make sure the incentives are right.
Lex Fridman (59:35.520)
I mean, I like control is an interface problem
Jaron Lanier (59:40.320)
to where you have to create something that's compelling
Lex Fridman (59:43.920)
to everybody, to the creatives, to the public.
Jaron Lanier (59:47.920)
I mean, there's, I don't know, Creative Commons,
Lex Fridman (59:51.920)
like the licensing, there's a bunch of legal speak
Jaron Lanier (59:57.200)
just in general, the whole legal profession.
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