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Digital Dignity: VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier at WIRED25
At WIRED25, Jaron Lanier, Microsoft's chief technology officer prime unifying scientist, musician, VR pioneer and author or "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now" and "Dawn of the New Everything" talked to Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson about 25 years of technology.
Released on 10/15/2018
Transcript
00:00
(soft music)
00:02
I'm Nicholas Thompson I'm the editor of Wired.
00:06
Thanks, we're having a really good weekend here.
00:09
It is my great pleasure to get to interview one of
00:11
the smartest most interesting people in Silicon Valley,
00:14
Jaron fa he is one of the inventors of virtual reality.
00:18
He is the author of many many books,
00:19
two of which are downstairs,
00:21
after this he will head downstairs and sign them.
00:22
They are Dawn Of The New Everything and
00:24
Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Account Right Now.
00:28
If you don't follow that advice, please tweet this event
00:31
with hashtag fa (audience laughing)
00:34
but I love I love interviewing Jaron.
00:37
So this should be a very interesting conversation.
00:39
Please welcome to the stage Jaron Lanier.
00:41
(audience clapping)
00:49
Hey nick Good to see you again.
00:50
Hey audience.
00:54
Alright Jaron, so in preparation for this conversation,
00:57
I read all the things that Wired has written about you
00:59
over the years, which is many.
01:02
Wired has been around for 25 years,
01:03
it has been 24 years and 11 months
01:05
since we wrote our first profile of Jaron.
01:08
And I wanna quote from that profile
01:10
it's right after your VR our company
01:14
had transferred to some other people.
01:18
It was an interesting period in your life
01:19
and this is one of the things we wrote
01:20
that really stuck with me.
01:22
Though he has walked through the valley of Silicon,
01:23
he fears no evil.
01:25
His music and his software comfort him
01:27
and having survived reasonably intact,
01:30
he can only revel in the exquisite wonder of it all.
01:33
And what I like about that,
01:34
(laughing)
01:35
it's good right?
01:36
Probably Kevin edited that.
01:39
What I love about that is that, when you ever you read
01:41
an interview with Jaron and he's been
01:43
a fierce critic of Silicon Valley,
01:44
he's been a fierce critic of where technology has gone,
01:48
it always comes to music and spirituality.
01:51
Every interview abig part of it,
01:53
everything turns in that direction.
01:55
It's not about product, it's not about efficiency,
01:57
it's never about money.
01:59
It's always, always ends up with music and spirituality.
02:03
And so Jaron, reading some of your recent writings
02:05
and your recent interviews, it seems like you're actually
02:06
a little worried about what technology has done
02:09
to our spiritual well-being as humans,
02:11
and to our ability to make peace with music.
02:14
So why don't we start with your critique of social media
02:17
and what it has done to spirituality and music.
02:20
'Cause I just wanna, I don't,
02:21
I don't wanna start with like the base level of
02:23
your critique I want to go like six levels deep
02:25
'cause we got 30 minutes so, go.
02:27
Okay, first of all, you describe me as worried
02:32
which I suppose is accurate but I want
02:33
I wanna say before anything else
02:36
that to me criticism and optimism are the same thing.
02:39
Mm-hmm.
02:40
That when you criticize things it's because
02:42
you think they can be improved.
02:43
So it's the complacent person or the fanatic
02:47
who's the true pessimist, because they feel
02:49
they already have the answer all that can be known is known
02:52
and the universe is done,
02:53
and the singularity is coming,
02:55
there are no mysteries, science is complete,
02:58
all of those cut.
02:59
Those are the people who are the pessimists, all right.
03:01
It's the people who think that things are open-ended
03:03
that things can still be changed,
03:06
through thought, through creativity.
03:10
Those are the true optimists, and so worried sure,
03:14
but it's optimistic worried.
03:16
Okay, that's the first thing I'ma say.
03:18
The second thing I want to say is...
03:24
to me, a sense of open-ended mystery in reality and in life
03:30
is absolutely core to being a good scientist
03:33
or a good technologist, or for that matter a good writer,
03:36
good artist or just a good human being.
03:39
We don't have any consistent scientific description
03:42
of the world. Mm-hmm.
03:44
We are still groping.
03:45
We're still in this little island of discovery
03:50
that we've created wonderfully that we can grow
03:52
but we're surrounded by a sea of mystery.
03:54
And I think that that sensibility,
03:56
that there's more to be invented and created than we know
03:59
or can imagine is just absolutely core
04:02
to any sense of meaning.
04:05
So having said that, you want to get to the deepest stuff.
04:10
So there's this question of like,
04:14
what are we doing here in this life, in this reality?
04:17
And to me, like at the cutting edge of reality,
04:19
at the cutting edge of the next moment where we invent
04:22
what the universe will be,
04:24
where we're creating what will be the legacy for the future,
04:28
there's creativity and this sort of genius required
04:32
to figure out how to be kind, at any given moment.
04:34
So we're at the moment right now
04:36
where we are inventing that.
04:37
Yeah right the second.
04:38
Okay, and we have been in that moment
04:40
creating it for the last million years
04:43
for the last two years.
04:45
Like, has something changed that it's put us in a moment
04:47
where we are creating.
04:49
I don't know.
04:50
Mm-hmm.
04:50
I tend to, I'm not sure if it's useful to come up with
04:54
these grand theories that overreach, where we say that...
04:57
It's Wired 25th anniversary conference,
04:58
let's get some grand theories that overreach man.
05:01
If you think you could make some money from that
05:03
I'm not for it , like go for it.
05:05
No I mean,
05:06
I You know...
05:09
there's a the funny thing about this is
05:15
if what you think the core meaning is,
05:18
is a mystery, if that, if the acknowledgement
05:21
is some kind of mystery is central to meaning at all,
05:24
then, you kind of have to walk a fine line.
05:28
Yeah.
05:29
I used to I don't know if this is
05:30
in any of the old wired things you read
05:32
but I used to imagine this tightrope, that you have to walk
05:35
and on one side, maybe to the right let's say,
05:38
you fall into some kind of
05:40
excessive nerd supremacy reductionism sort of a thing
05:44
where you say,
05:45
Oh there's this grand system
05:47
and we're just on this on this curve
05:49
and the curve started at the Big Bang and it has
05:52
an inevitable conclusion or something like that.
05:54
And then, everything becomes kind of meaningless
05:56
because you've made yourself blind with this abstraction
05:59
that you think explains everything.
06:05
And so that's kind of the the nerdism fallacy
06:07
or whatever dataism, and then on the other side,
06:10
is superstition.
06:12
Yeah.
06:13
Where you start to say,
06:13
Well just because we don't really understand
06:15
how quantum field theory and general relativity can connect
06:18
it must mean that my mind can talk to plants or something.
06:21
And so, that's the other that's a fallacy on the other side
06:26
it's not that unrelated, but finding this point in between
06:30
where you say, there is mystery,
06:32
and the way to address that mystery is with rigor,
06:35
it's with self-doubt, it's with modesty,
06:38
it's with intellectual modesty,
06:39
where you don't assume narratives that are
06:43
really beyond your reach but at the same time,
06:45
you believe in a destination and a quest for meaning
06:49
that's but, totally beyond your reach
06:51
and you quest for it incrementally,
06:52
that that tightrope I think, is where technology can improve
06:56
it's where beauty can happen,
06:59
it's where relationships can be real.
07:01
Well let's, let's talk about the technology part
07:03
of walking on a tight rope and let's talk particularly about
07:05
the social media platform.
07:06
So, you've just written a book about them.
07:08
What is the role that they should play in keeping society
07:11
at the right point as we progress on that tightrope.
07:14
That's an interesting way to phrase it,
07:16
so kind of a top-down assumption that they have this role
07:18
in keeping society a certain way.
07:20
Well they have they have some role
07:21
in influencing where we are.
07:24
Well, alright if we want to talk about
07:27
what social media could be broadly.
07:29
We're really kind of talking about the idea of
07:31
the Internet itself, some way that people can connect
07:34
using information technology in a broad way.
07:37
And I've always believed that that can
07:41
and should be beautiful and even essential.
07:43
Mm-hmm.
07:45
I mean totally aside from anything else
07:46
it's a matter of survival because we couldn't even
07:49
understand what the climates doing without connected devices
07:52
on an Internet, so it's not,
07:53
it's not even a question that the Internet
07:56
is something we need and we need we need to be able to
07:59
collaborate with each other over it.
08:01
So that's, but the thing that's...
08:03
When we use the term social media,
08:05
what we tend to mean these days, is these giant platforms
08:09
that have effectively taken over the Internet
08:11
for almost everybody, almost all the time,
08:14
that do so using this weird business model where there,
08:18
anytime two people connect, it's financed by a third person.
08:21
Yeah.
08:22
Whose only motivation is to manipulate
08:24
those two in a sneaky way.
08:25
And so, it's it's created
08:26
this whole architecture that on every level, recursively
08:30
is based on sneakiness and manipulation often using
08:34
weird behaviorist, hypnotic, unacknowledged techniques
08:40
to get people more and more engaged or addicted
08:43
and persuaded in one way or another or get them
08:46
into compulsive behavior patterns that aren't necessarily
08:49
in their own interest,
08:50
that aren't even necessarily coherent to anybody's interest,
08:55
that are practically an open invitation to the worst actors
09:00
to jump in to use the thing for their own purposes
09:02
which are often terrible.
09:04
And, and that thing that is horrible and not survivable
09:07
that's the thing I criticize.
09:08
So you don't defined social media as that thing.
09:11
Well, the thing is, right now there's basically
09:15
no social media account you can sign on to
09:18
that isn't part of that, because it's taken over so much
09:20
because of network effect.
09:22
And do you think that it was inevitable
09:24
that once we started creating social media systems
09:26
they would end up the way they have ended up?
09:29
No, in fact the earliest ones were different.
09:34
They weren't necessarily perfect
09:35
but they were certainly better.
09:39
I think we made a series of mistakes, and the funny thing
09:44
is that all of the mistakes weren't driven through
09:47
a lack of consideration, but rather by a firm ideology
09:51
that happens to have backfired.
09:53
Okay, so for instance, there was this very strong culture
09:57
in the 80s of night and 90s,
09:59
demanding that everything be free, and...
10:02
That wired when we put that on our cover.
10:04
Yeah, Yeah you guys didn't necessarily help.
10:07
(audience laughing)
10:10
But the problem with that, is that there was also,
10:12
in Wired and everywhere else,
10:14
this practical worship of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship
10:18
that like as Steve Jobs put it,
10:19
You're denting the universe.
10:21
It's this michi in contact with the future
10:23
where you're these magical, special, elevated people
10:26
can change the course of events through their brilliance.
10:30
And so, if you want to have hero entrepreneurs
10:33
and everything's supposed to be free,
10:34
there aren't too many ways to reconcile those,
10:36
so you land in this finance through third parties
10:41
who are sneaky.
10:41
I mean it's, there's really no other solution.
10:44
So, it was two ideologies that each by themselves made sense
10:48
but combined, created this third outcome that was horrible.
10:52
But then there were other mistakes too,
10:53
there were architectural mistakes,
10:54
Let's stay on that one because I think
10:57
it's a critique I've, a lot of people have made
10:59
and you've made particular articularly which is that
11:02
had say Facebook developed with a business model
11:06
based on subscriptions, or sales, or commerce,
11:08
or individual payments, it would be completely different
11:10
and much harder to hack by the Russians then the fact that
11:13
it's add support of them.
11:14
I believe that.
11:16
Do you think though that had Facebook changed
11:19
and had it a different business model,
11:21
it would truly have evolved in a different way?
11:24
Would Twitter have evolved in different way?
11:25
If you if you start with a different business model
11:27
at the beginning,
11:29
are we in a totally different place right now?
11:30
Yeah. Totally, absolutely.
11:32
Economic incentives are ultimately
11:34
the most powerful elements in a, in any system
11:37
that has a market.
11:38
Okay, so then, what if today Sheryl Sandberg
11:42
were to wake up, you say you know what, Ads, enough Ads,
11:45
let's make it payments and subscriptions.
11:48
What happens?
11:49
Sheryl doesn't have the power,
11:50
so someone else has to wake up.
11:52
Okay,well Sheryl created that business,
11:54
Sheryl and Mark they both could wake up this morning
11:56
they're watching the live stream.
11:58
Okay, now we're talking...
12:00
Cheryl and everybody at Facebook
12:01
the whole executive management team wakes up, and they say
12:03
you know what...
12:05
Some of them have by the way,
12:07
often, often leaving as a result, so it's happening.
12:11
It's not a hypothetical.
12:12
But say if you cheat...
12:13
So okay, but you're asking like what,
12:14
with what should they do, what's the path from here today?
12:17
Are the curves so, like so hardened right now
12:20
that you can't change the direction,
12:21
this was many companies that are to going in,
12:23
or can you change it by reversing that decision
12:25
that was made eight years ago.
12:27
I think you can change it and in fact
12:29
because I'm an optimist I'm convinced we will.
12:31
Okay.
12:32
I don't know exactly how soon,
12:34
and there are a lot of open questions about how to do it,
12:36
and I don't think it'll be totally smooth,
12:38
but I think once it's done, shareholders will be happy,
12:42
everybody will be happier.
12:43
I think it's a multiple win thing,
12:45
Vladimir Putin might not be happy, that's okay.
12:49
But I think most almost everybody in the loop
12:51
who has any stake in this thing will be happy.
12:54
And the way to do it, of course, is the question like that,
12:58
to imagine a better destination is vastly easier,
13:01
that's not to say it's easy but it's vastly easier
13:04
than a path to that destination that won't make things worse
13:06
that's the hard part.
13:08
And so, from the Facebook perspective,
13:14
I would look to a few examples that can serve as inspiration
13:18
that might show us how things can be better.
13:21
An example I'd like to bring up is Netflix,
13:23
and the reason I bring it up is
13:25
when Netflix was first starting to push a streaming business
13:28
when it was more of a will send you discs by mail business.
13:32
A very common worry about that idea
13:35
was that, well you can get all the streaming content
13:37
you want for free.
13:39
Which is, which was true it remains true
13:42
and the response to that is,
13:43
well, A, We can make an overall experience
13:48
that's still worth the money because it'll just be easier,
13:50
less hassle, less risk, less whatever,
13:52
and B, we can expand our value proposition
13:56
so it's actually saving you money versus cable or whatever,
14:00
so that it doesn't feel like this new imposition
14:02
but rather like a savings.
14:03
So if you look at Netflix ability
14:06
to start a subscription business successfully,
14:08
I think it gives you hope that business models can change
14:12
and if people are used to free things
14:13
they actually can be persuaded that a paid model
14:15
makes the world better.
14:18
I think the really revolutionary transition
14:22
that has to happen might,
14:25
and I mean Facebook is about to announce moves
14:28
in this direction, so we don't know.
14:29
But I think people who are on Facebook need
14:32
to be able to earn money directly through it.
14:34
And, so it can't just be give us money
14:36
it has to be also you can earn money
14:38
you can grow the whole economy, this is a two-way street
14:41
and the community that's really been putting energy
14:45
into that class of solution is the blockchain community.
14:48
Which has been around on a theoretical level
14:52
for a while, but in terms of a cultural force
14:54
it's pretty recent.
14:55
And so, given all those factors,
14:57
I'm actually pretty optimistic
15:00
ultimately it's up to Facebook to find their own path,
15:02
but I think all the ingredients are there.
15:04
That's super interesting right 'cause
15:04
I have heard the argument that,
15:06
what blockchain does,
15:08
is it gives you a chance to sort of break up the monopolies.
15:11
It will do to the current centralized database monopolies,
15:15
what the Internet did to Brick and Mortar stores right
15:18
and it'll decentralize , create a new efficient system
15:20
and you can actually create
15:21
a new Facebook through blockchain.
15:23
I've heard that argument it's a plausible argument.
15:27
I have not heard the secondary argument that you just made
15:29
which is that blockchain companies will push Facebook in
15:33
a direction of payments.
15:34
Explain how that works and what's happening right now.
15:37
Well, I don't fully know. Mmmmhhh.
15:39
So there's a...
15:43
everyday there's more sort of radiation
15:46
from Facebook that they're about to announce
15:48
some sort of a thing in the space,
15:50
so let's wait and see what they say.
15:51
I think it sounds like it'll be soon.
15:53
I hope it's creative and bold.
15:55
Okay, well let's go back to another thing
15:57
that Facebook is genuinely implementing.
15:59
So Facebook payments maybe maybe not.
16:02
What Facebook is doing, is they're genuinely trying to study
16:07
their impact on people.
16:08
They're starting to spend more time recommending
16:11
that people leave Facebook and go meet people offline.
16:15
They've changed their algorithm
16:16
to focus on meaningful interactions,
16:19
they've changed it to focus on trustworthiness.
16:22
They may not have changed it enough,
16:24
but if Facebook only were to make changes
16:26
in those directions, if they were to push time well-spent
16:29
to keep changing their algorithm
16:30
but they weren't to change their business model,
16:32
can they change their core effect in society
16:34
or is that just never gonna work?
16:35
No, I think all the changes you mentioned are positive
16:39
and they're evidence of goodwill in the community of people
16:43
who work at Facebook.
16:43
So I view them optimistically, however,
16:47
the core business model has to change because
16:49
the incentives have to change
16:51
if the results are gonna change.
16:52
I mean you can have all the good intentions in the world
16:55
and all the initiatives and all of the regulations
16:58
if your government, you can do all kinds of things
17:00
but if the core incentives
17:02
are pulling in one direction, they'll fail.
17:04
There has to be some kind of coherence between
17:07
what you hope to do in the incentives you're creating.
17:09
So you have to change the core business model.
17:11
Alright, so you're happy with the stuff they've done
17:13
but it's just not enough.
17:14
So I want to go back five minutes in our conversation,
17:18
where I said the core mistake was payment source advertising
17:22
and you said well there were other choices made in
17:24
the architecture that put it in the wrong direction
17:25
what were those choices?
17:27
Yeah, and perhaps I bear a little bit of responsibility
17:29
for some of that too 'cause I was in the community
17:31
that was complacent about this.
17:33
So from the 80s into the 90s, there was this...
17:39
culture of this sort of pre-Internet
17:41
and then the early Internet.
17:42
Yeah
17:43
And for those who don't remember,
17:44
I mean the the packet-switched idea
17:46
that's at the core of the Internet had predated
17:48
what we call the Internet
17:49
but it was a bunch of incompatible
17:51
different packet switch networks,
17:54
who were persuaded in part through government bribery
17:58
basically that was put together by a senator named Al Gore
18:01
to become interoperable and out of that we got the Internet.
18:04
And the original idea was to make
18:06
the Internet super super barebones
18:08
and to leave it all to private industry initiative.
18:13
So the initial Internet had no representation of people,
18:18
there was no membership concept,
18:19
there's no identity concept,
18:21
there wasn't even the tiniest bit of personal storage
18:24
therefore, there was no sense of provenance
18:27
or keeping track of where bits had come from,
18:29
there was no sense of authentication,
18:31
there was certainly no implementation
18:33
of commerce solutions, there was nothing.
18:36
It was just very very raw
18:38
and that spirit of keeping everything
18:40
as minimal as possible was kind of replicated
18:42
by Tim Berners-Lee in the web protocol,
18:46
which in my opinion committed
18:48
a primal sin of not having backlinks.
18:50
It only had, it would something could point
18:52
at something else to get at that things data
18:54
but they the thing that was pointed at didn't know
18:56
it was being pointed at.
18:57
And that created this web,
18:59
where there was no provenance for data,
19:01
no way of knowing what was real,
19:03
no way of knowing where it had come from
19:05
and therefore no way for people to build up
19:09
a sort of an accumulation of personal achievement.
19:13
Well, that's interesting.
19:14
Yeah, and so the thing is, if you look
19:16
so I was part of this early community,
19:19
I was a chief scientist of Internet to for a while
19:21
which was the academic insertion that figured out
19:24
how to scale this thing in the 90s,
19:27
and what we knew and we talked about this,
19:28
is that we're making gifts
19:30
of hundreds of billions of dollars to persons unknown
19:33
to fill these missing gaps, right?
19:35
So the backlinks who's gonna fill them,
19:37
it turned out Google did.
19:39
That's essentially Google's core function
19:41
or it was at the start. Right.
19:43
Who's gonna create these accounts.
19:44
Well, initially firms like Myspace but ultimately Facebook
19:47
and that these things naturally become monopolies.
19:50
So all the things we left out deliberately turned into
19:54
these giant monopolistic or behemoth companies
20:00
to fill in the gaps.
20:02
So okay let's just Yeah
20:04
There's so many interesting things you said.
20:05
Yeah yeah yeah
20:06
let's focus on one.
20:07
So I agree one of the great problems of
20:09
the Internet today is that, you don't own your data
20:11
your data is owned by whatever company.
20:13
Facebook has a lot of my data,
20:15
my data stays in a Facebook server
20:17
and I can access it as I travel around the web
20:18
but that should actually stay with me
20:20
as I travel around the web instead of
20:21
being pinged in the Facebook servers.
20:23
How do you architect an Internet from the beginning,
20:26
so the data stays with the person not in
20:28
the servers of the companies?
20:30
And then relatedly at this moment,
20:33
where we built the current architecture,
20:35
how do we build a new architecture?
20:36
Is it possible?
20:37
Yeah, well the architectural problem of letting
20:41
of keeping your own data,
20:45
is a solved problem
20:48
and probably the current proposal
20:51
that's making the rounds that's possibly
20:55
the model that'll catch on is Tim Berners-Lee's new thing
20:57
which is called Solid which just which does that
21:00
we should have done it before,
21:02
but anyway, it's not a mystery.
21:07
The technology is not a mystery for how to do that.
21:10
The part that it's not exactly
21:12
I wouldn't call it scary or a mystery
21:14
but where there's further adventure invention required
21:17
is the economics of it .
21:19
Exactly how you work out, and the economics
21:23
can I say something about the economics?
21:24
Please.
21:25
Alright, (audience laughs)
21:29
to understand this thing you have to kind of come at it
21:31
from different angles and the economics is one of them.
21:34
So there's this example I use all the time.
21:37
So those have you've heard it a million times,
21:39
sorry for repeating it, but it's the language translators.
21:41
Yep.
21:42
So for years and years my mentor Marvin Minsky
21:46
had tried to figure out a way to translate
21:48
between natural languages like English and Spanish
21:51
and it never worked until the 90s,
21:53
when some researchers at IBM figured out
21:55
you could do it with big data.
21:57
And then by having massive statistical correlations
22:00
with preexisting corpora that had been translated
22:03
you could get results that are readable.
22:05
So then companies like Google and Microsoft primarily
22:09
these days started offering free services
22:11
and that's had the effect of reducing
22:13
the employment prospects for professional translators
22:15
to a tenth of what they were very much has happened
22:18
for recording musicians or investigative journalists bla bla
22:21
Okay, but here's the thing.
22:23
If you look at this on the surface you might say,
22:26
well too bad they're buggy whips like
22:29
their economic niche has been made obsolete by automation
22:33
they have to find new work,
22:34
we'll train them for something else or whatever.
22:35
Except if you look a little deeper you discover
22:39
that language changes every day.
22:41
Every day there are new public events, new pop culture,
22:44
new memes, new slang and so we have to scrape or steal from
22:50
these people tens of millions
22:51
of new phrase translations every day
22:53
just to keep the translator current enough
22:55
to be usable every day.
22:57
So through one side of her mouth we're telling them
22:59
you're obsolete you don't get paid,
23:00
the robots doing your job,
23:02
through the other side of our mouths are saying
23:04
oh but we sure better be able to steal data from you
23:06
in order to create that illusion.
23:08
And it's just fundamentally dishonest and twisted
23:11
and this becomes crucial because another of
23:13
the big questions of tech is
23:14
where the robots will put people out of work
23:17
and whether we need to all go on
23:18
some you know universal basic income or something.
23:21
And so in this case if we could just be more honest
23:24
about the provenance of data and the way things work,
23:28
we could transition people to new jobs in the data space
23:32
instead of telling them they're obsolete.
23:34
So you believe that there are jobs
23:37
that we are getting rid off because of
23:40
our religious devotion to data that
23:42
would actually make the data better if we kept them.
23:45
Hey, you have a Twitter handle for me?
23:48
I have no Twitter account.
23:49
[Man] Yeah I just took care of that.
23:50
oh for God's sakes.
23:53
What is wrong with you people?
23:56
You really just believe in this stuff like your religion
23:57
like you just, like be skeptical, think, think oh my God.
24:02
Anyway sorry what were you saying?
24:03
(audience laughing)
24:07
I was saying, how do you get to the point then
24:10
it seems like the argument you're making
24:12
is there jobs that are being wiped away
24:14
because of a devotion to data
24:16
that would actually be beneficial to the world
24:18
having more data and not just to the world but even
24:20
to have an efficient language translators.
24:23
How can you make the market accept that
24:25
if that premise is true?
24:28
Well it's like a phase transition,
24:30
like right, now the paradigm or paradigm shift or something
24:35
the current situation is what might be called
24:37
a paradigm shaft, where we're where we have
24:41
this kind of fake situation.
24:42
So right now, we can't tell the people
24:44
that we need their data.
24:45
So therefore we have to to trick them into giving us
24:48
the data we want, but what would make much more sense
24:49
than just to tell them hey this is the data we need,
24:52
we love you we'd like you to thrive
24:55
we could create a whole new global population
24:58
of middle class translators and make our translators better
25:01
It would be like win-win for everybody.
25:03
The economy would grow, like that's what markets
25:05
are supposed to do, but if you're not allowed to talk
25:08
to anybody in a market and it's all anonymous
25:10
and tricky then the market breaks.
25:11
So the thing is right now, within this stealthy tricky world
25:16
that we've accepted, it feels like nothing can be different
25:19
but that's precisely because we've put hoods on our heads
25:22
and we're refusing to look at what's really going on.
25:24
If we could actually be honest about what data we need
25:27
and how data is used where it comes from,
25:29
we could actually offer people more dignity
25:31
and have an expanded economy and better working technology.
25:34
I mean this to me, is kind of obvious.
25:38
It's just the transitions hard because
25:40
we're so ingrained in this sort of fallacy.
25:44
So that leads to another question
25:45
which is you know the point of this conference is
25:49
what were the most important choices made in
25:51
the last 25 years that helped shape things?
25:52
What are the ideas that will help shape the next 25 years?
25:55
You've just laid out a couple of very important ideas
25:57
they can help shape last 25 years.
25:59
Earlier you said one of the biggest errors
26:01
of the previous 25 years was free.
26:04
In the devotion everything should be free
26:05
which leads to the advertising-supported model,
26:07
which leads to everything, it leads to.
26:09
Are there other things that we got wrong in Silicon Valley?
26:15
Are there other big ideas of the last 25 years
26:17
that everybody believed and turned out now
26:20
from this vantage point we're correct or harmful.
26:22
And just to be clear,
26:23
I'm not saying that free
26:25
is necessarily an impossible destination.
26:27
It's just the incompatibility of free
26:29
and hero' entrepreneurs.
26:31
It's done all kinds of great.
26:32
We have to choose one or the other.
26:34
Like if we were really going to say from now on
26:36
I would choose free.
26:37
We want socialist society and we don't want Apple
26:40
to charge for iPhones.
26:41
We want that to become something that's free.
26:43
We don't want you know we like if you're really willing
26:48
to demonetize the world
26:49
and make it some kind of free information space,
26:51
then you have to criticize companies
26:53
like Apple that charge for things.
26:54
I'm not quite willing to do that.
26:56
I think in general for all the flaws of market economy
27:00
they've been less likely to degenerate
27:02
into horrible dictatorships
27:03
and attempts at socialism or communism.
27:05
So totally agree
27:06
Empirically, I think nothing's perfect
27:09
in large system ideas.
27:11
Systems are always a little confusing and beyond us
27:14
and that's true in economics and in politics
27:17
as much as in anything else,
27:18
but, just empirically so far
27:21
I distrust attempts at some kind of
27:25
I don't know how to put this
27:27
totally socialistic experiment.
27:30
They just seem to degenerate
27:31
because there's always some power hub
27:34
at the center that gets claimed by the worst people.
27:36
You start out with Bolsheviks and you end up with Stalinist.
27:39
That's what always happens,
27:40
and so that's why you know given the choice,
27:44
but the one thing that's the worst,
27:46
we're getting the worst of both worlds right now.
27:47
We're getting the worst of free
27:48
and the worst of paid at the same time.
27:51
If you're trying to do this bizarre incompatible combination
27:54
But are there other ideas besides other equivalent ideas
27:57
like the notion that open-source is a good thing?
28:03
If open source means transparent source,
28:06
I think it's a totally worthy idea.
28:12
Whether it's always the right thing I'm not
28:13
Let me explain why it might not always be the right thing.
28:15
I think there's this notion that people need to be able
28:18
to insulate themselves until they're ready to share,
28:22
like for instance you don't want scientists
28:25
to show everything they're doing before they're ready
28:27
to publish, because then they you would just see
28:30
a bunch of stuff that might turn out to be wrong.
28:32
People need to be able to have some privacy
28:35
in order to be distinct from everyone else
28:37
and in order to be able to craft what they're doing.
28:38
And so in that sense I think
28:40
having temporary secrets benefits society.
28:43
It certainly has benefited science and many other things.
28:47
And that has to do with more the importance
28:50
of having cells and species and sort of structure
28:52
instead of just a giant mush. Mmmhmm.
28:55
I think that's really important to creativity into society
28:59
but the part of the open source movement
29:01
that bothers me more,
29:06
this idea that the people you know
29:10
what we basically did is by making code free,
29:13
we made data into the superpower center.
29:16
So right now we have this bizarre situation where companies
29:19
Oh that's interesting like Facebook or Google
29:21
have Apache stacks of open-source code
29:23
but it's hidden away in secret data centers
29:25
you can't visit with all your data running algorithms
29:28
that run the world that are hyper secret,
29:30
and so it's exactly backfired.
29:32
And then if you look at the open source community,
29:36
it's a what tends to happen when you make everything free
29:39
is not that you impoverished everyone,
29:40
but you take what had been a bell curve
29:42
and make it into a zip curve. Mm-hmm.
29:44
That's a subtle thing but it's extremely important
29:47
That was the effect I was describing in Who Owns The Future
29:50
a book from a long time ago.
29:51
So if you have an open market society,
29:55
you should see results that are kind of like a bell curve
29:57
where people for most people
29:59
kind of end up with middle results
30:01
and there are a few people who's super high performers
30:02
and a few people who aren't.
30:04
When you have control from a central,
30:06
a central hub that seized control in the way
30:09
that a Facebook or Google has,
30:11
when they have an Apache stack in a hidden server firm
30:13
with everybody's data on it,
30:16
you end up with a zip curve.
30:17
So a few open-source developers end up doing pretty well
30:20
through consulting contracts whatever
30:21
and then if you look at the what might be called
30:24
the long tail, and old wiredism...
30:28
you see a lot of kind of impoverished people
30:31
who contributed fundamental code
30:33
that keeps the Internet running every day,
30:34
and it's just bizarre.
30:36
So it's created this an absolutely untenable
30:40
extreme of reward and lack of reward in society
30:44
that I mean totally aside from whether it's fair,
30:47
it's just not sustainable you know.
30:50
Well I am a central hub who's about to seize control
30:52
'cause the clock says zero
30:53
but I want to ask you one quick last thing.
30:56
You did a marvelous interview with
30:57
my colleague Peter Rubin a couple issues ago on Wired,
31:00
and at the end that you said the thing you wanted to see
31:03
is for people to be able to improvise in virtual reality.
31:06
And so very quickly explain what that means
31:08
'cause that seems like an amazing concept
31:10
and I want to end on something
31:11
since we've talked about stalinís and Bolshevism
31:13
all the problems with data,
31:14
I want to end on something beautiful.
31:15
So what does it mean to improvise in virtual reality
31:18
and then let's all head off to the rest of our days.
31:20
(laughs)
31:22
Well, I was just a complete
31:25
on fire idealist lunatic
31:28
in the 80s about virtual reality that some people in
31:31
this room will remember, Kevin will remember.
31:34
And one of my thoughts about it,
31:37
is that someday there would be this way
31:38
we can share through virtual reality
31:40
that transcends communication as we know it,
31:42
that's no longer about sharing symbols
31:44
as we do with words and language,
31:46
but is about directly co-improvising a shared world.
31:49
Directly making stuff that's experienced
31:51
without necessarily predefining
31:53
a symbolic contracts for those things
31:56
And so then the question is well
31:57
how do you improvise reality?
31:58
What does it look like?
31:59
Does it look like, it certainly doesn't look
32:01
like coding as we know it cause it takes too long
32:03
and it's too nerdy and after.
32:06
Maybe it looks like some kind of virtual musical instrument
32:08
you can play within VR that spins reality
32:10
and I did a lot of work trying to make those
32:12
and this also relates to this idea that
32:17
you can think of the cortex of the brain
32:20
as being like a planet with undiscovered continents
32:22
and this huge part which is the motor cortex
32:25
which is kind of runs along the middle
32:27
from front to back where a mohawk would go.
32:29
This thing and there's a thing called the homunculus
32:31
which is a mapping of the body to it.
32:33
We know that if people explore abstract computation
32:39
through that they have powers of speed
32:42
that they don't have through other modalities
32:44
such as when a jazz pianist is is figuring out
32:47
what note to play and solving remarkably
32:49
difficult harmonic problems and voice leading problems
32:54
just spontaneously much faster than they can any other way.
32:57
And so part of the idea was to try to leverage
33:01
this underused part of the brain
33:04
for creative purposes by creating musical instruments
33:07
within virtual reality within
33:08
which you could improvise both code and data and create
33:10
this sort of shared world.
33:13
It's not a dream I've given up on,
33:15
I still make a stab at trying to chip away towards
33:19
it every couple years and still to this day
33:22
I'm chasing it.
33:23
Alright, well having talked with Jaron Lanier,
33:24
I'm convinced he uses the entirety of his brain.
33:26
Thank you very much for coming, enjoy the rest of the day.
33:29
(audience clapping)
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