10 Reasons to Get Off Social Media - Jaron Lanier

okay so I don't know if we can cut the instrument Mike well alright so let me introduce the musicians these are all in musicians from the amazing Brooklyn Orchestra the Knights right one of my favorite ensembles on the planet Shawn Connelly he's uh playing the mainframe over there and then Mike Michael caressed unknown percussion and Eric Jacobson on the mini-computer which is actually what cello meant once upon a time anyway so I'm gonna ask my esteemed musical partners to wait off to the side I will give you a book talk and then we will proceed as I described maybe I'll sit on this too I don't know where the stool came from but I like the idea oh wait all right I like the sitting thing because it feels more like I'm on your level instead of like the professor you know dictating okay as you must have noticed by now I have this new book called ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now why would I ask you to do that those of you who have them are probably addicted and it's about as useful to tell you to do that as it is to say stop that gambling it's bad for you I mean like if you're addicted you're addicted and even if you're not addicted companies like Facebook have what we call a network effect block where everybody's on them cuz everybody else is on them and there's no way to know where else to go and there's no way we could all coordinate to leave at once so we're kind of stuck there that's true too so why the hell am I asking you to do something that very few of you will do the reason why is if even a few of you do it I think that would be so important that it might make the difference about whether our species survives or not that's why all right does that sound like an exaggerated or alarmist idea it shouldn't it's it's real so let me go over a little bit why I think this is so important now a good place to start since this is a science related venue I'm going to take a bit of a science lecture approach to it but only light I'm not going to go into deep here there's this stream of scientific work called behaviorism right behaviorism goes back to the 19th century it is a sub-discipline in which you attempt to change the behavior patterns of a creature might be an animal might be a person and you do it methodically you do it algorithmically you observe what the creature does you give the creature fine-tuned experiences and what in response to what the creature does and thereby you get the creature to change this is distinct from the way animals and little children were trained before although we always used reward and Punishment with babies from the earliest days I'm sure but we used to whisper in the ear of the horse we used to cuddle the baby there used to be this other level of intuitive connection behaviorism said no we want to cut that stuff off reduce the variables a famous behaviors named BF Skinner proposed a formal way of doing that's called the Skinner box everybody's heard of this right it's a the idea is that you create a controlled experimental environment where you can stick the rat or the person in whatever the prisoner whoever it is and they have they don't have a lot of random stimuli they are they are in this environment where you can control what happens to them the stimuli in the science of behaviorism was typically divided into reward and Punishment or positive and negative feedback typical examples from the 20th century would be can be as reward and an electric shock for punishment there was a very strange sociological phenomenon that overtook the pioneers of behaviorism they became celebrities through their creepiness it's really peculiar like you had famous behaviorists doing things like proving they could take a young human child and make him fear animals forever by making them you know just conditioning them to fear animals can you imagine such a thing but that was like a celebrated public experiment BF Skinner of the Box was one of the first people ever to experiment with user experiences over a digital network and he wanted to use digital networks to condition society to transcend idiosyncrasy to transcend weird fallacious ideas about freedom and whatever he was really creepy and he was there before almost anyone and networks now it's a funny thing about behaviorism the first time it crossed paths with the idea of computing was really early in the history of computing and it was through a figure named Norbert Wiener how many people here know about Norbert Wiener yeah he deserves a round of applause for sure so Norbert Wiener was one of the very earliest computer scientists he was in that first generation when the ideas that had been formalized by Alan Turing and then shortly thereafter with Turing and von Neumann working together when these were still fresh when the only working computers were these giant noisy things that were fantastically expensive he was there and he did a few really interesting things one thing he did is he became interested in turning around the way Turing thought about computers the way Turing initially described computers was as like this three-stage process there'd be the starting stage where you put punch holes in a paper tape or something like that in the in the imagination of the day you'd have this these bits that you set you put them through the machine then the MS Sheen does whatever it does and it either stops or not and if it stops at the end you have another set another tape with holes in it you have another set of bits so there's start state run this thing and if you're lucky and you get an answer you get an answer and that's it when when Norbert Wiener look at this he said you know there's this completely different way you can think about the same ideas which is that the computer would be on all the time it would be sensing the world and then it would be responding to the world kind of like a thermostat a thermostat has a thermometer but then it can also control a heater or in some lucky cases an air conditioner and said what if what if we instead thought of a computer as a really complicated thermometer with a bunch of memory and and algorithms and and so this is he came up with a term for this conception and it's cybernetics so cyber comes from the Greek and it's to navigate its navigating a boat and so the idea is that in this concept the computer's navigating reality it's seeing where reality has drifted and then it gets reality back to where it wants reality to go so that's cybernetics and there's an amazing book that Waring wrote I mean no no not Turing this is Norbert Wiener wrote in probably starting in the late 40s oh it's published a little later but it's still way predates anything about networking it's like super early one of the very earliest descriptions of the idea of networking computers that ever existed and he says what if you have a computer that's watching a human being it's measuring how the human being moves it measures the sounds that come out of the human being it measures where the human being looks whatever can be measured and then it provides some kind of stimulus maybe images maybe sounds couldn't a computer that's able to measure a person and give feedback gradually start to control a person just like one of the dogs or rats in mr. Skinner's boxes couldn't the computer become an automated behaviorist and he's and then he says if it's not clear to you why I think this is a terrifying idea I want to give you a thought experiment and here's his thought experiment and this is right at the end of a book called the human use of human beings and right at the end of it he says imagine that someday everybody in the world could carry a little computer I know I know it's impossible but just imagine someday they could do that and imagine furthermore that these little computers that are attached to people can measure a lot of things about the people they measure who they talk to where they look they measure all kinds of stuff about them and they can also give them feedback they can show them images they can show them text they can play them sounds now imagine something even more incredible and fantastic imagine they're connected by little radios to a central really big computer and over the radio signal the really big computer is doing calculations that are simulating what a behaviors does to modify the people and then there's somebody somewhere who is able to then gradually modify people now the interesting thing about being the subject of behavior modification loops is that you don't know it's happening to you it used to happen in a lot of very isolated circumstances it happened in the psychology experiments of the behaviorists of course some of you might have been lured into the basement of the psych building on a campus with the promise of a free slice of pizza or something and you might have been subject to some behaviorist experiments to help some undergraduates or something like that sometimes it's used by interrogators so if you're on the wrong side of the desk in an interrogation room it's used by cult leaders it's used by members of the pickup artists movement although that's probably oh sorry I'm on sorry c-span I apologize for that we get we're on TV if you didn't this is I really apologize what our president doesn't you know what am I supposed to do I really hate to sound presidential these days and I'm afraid I did for a moment anyway so it happened in abusive relationships even though they the people the abuser didn't realize that that's what was going on but it was very isolated and what what Norbert Weiner says is if the whole world could be put under this kind of regime of behavior modification at once through the central computer he concludes it would be mass insanity he says this would be the end of the species but then he has this very comforting conclusion he says as one of the most prominent scientists of the era I just want to comfort you and assure you that this thought experiment could never be realized it's infeasible that there could be such a giant central computer it's infeasible that there could be all those radio connections it's infeasible that there could be some small device that would do this and so need I say in this particular case he was a little optimistic or pessimistic depending on your point of view of course it's exactly what we've done we all are caring around these devices they all attach my radios to central computer but here's the craziest thing the craziest thing in the world is we've set up this bizarre system where anytime two people use this wonderful thing that so many of us worked so hard to bring about which we call the Internet any time peak - people connect up by it that connection is almost universally financed because there's a third party who believes they can use behaviors techniques to manipulate the first two people without them understanding what's going on we've created this society based on universal trickery and deception and it's an astonishing hole we've dug ourselves into we've created a site a society where we can't trust election results we've created a society where we kind of routinely expect to be bullied and harassed and made to feel terrible we've created a society in which most people kind of don't believe in truth anymore which and I mean this is nuts this is a form of mass suicide and we're in the middle of doing it right now now I want to tell you a little bit more about how it works I want to tell you a little bit more about how it came to be and I want to tell you a little bit more about how you can get out of it and why you must or at least those few of you who I hope to reach today because I know I won't reach most of you maybe I'll proceed with a bit of the story of how we got to this in the first place because it's just so bizarre what happened was back in the 80s and 90s there was this really strong movement in the culture of digital technology to make everything free and open this was the open software movement free software this was let's make music free let's make culture open design like the Wikipedia is an expression of that time it was a movement based on the most beautiful ideas and it was promoted by beautiful people with tremendous sincerity at the same time that that was happening there was this other countervailing idea that was also becoming more and more powerful and that was this idea that there were certain special people and these people might have been the super hackers or they might have been the super tech entrepreneurs the Steve Jobs as let's say and these people because they could hack so well because they were so good at computer stuff they could change the course of history they could the way jobs put it he said you could dent the universe so it's like this Nietzschean magic we are the magic people we're the superheroes and everybody really believed that people really love their hacker heroes they love the figures like Steve Jobs and so here you have this problem you're saying we have these super people and a lot of them are entrepreneurs but then you want everything to be free super entrepreneur free how you get those two things to reconcile on it's sort of like this extreme socialism with this extreme libertarianism where's the meeting point so they meet at one point nobody's ever articulated another point where they meet and that one point is what we call the advertising model so the idea is that services like Google and Facebook were born where the surface experience for the people using them was like the Wikipedia it's all about connecting it's about community it's free you share you do these things and it's beautiful and yet there was also this giant business and indeed these companies became the fastest-growing ones for the biggest fortunes and right now you know the biggest companies in the world are all these types of data-driven cyber behemoths and before I go any further I should make it clear that my perspective here is not oh these horrible big corporations I actually kind of love them I'm part of them sold a company to Google very early on and know a lot of people there have friends at Facebook's I don't think vilification of the people at these companies or of the companies is the right way to proceed I think the right way to proceed is to get them to change but I'll get to that a little later so we had this bizarre solution to this conflict between the profoundly felt desire for kind of an open everything is somewhere between socialism and anarchy and then this other sort of hyper libertarian thing we wanted them to coexist so as I say for the users it's this open open share share share but then behind the scenes is something else again so behind the scenes what's going on is it's truly perverse and infuriating but because it's behind the scenes you don't see it a lot I've had occasion to be present when the big companies court big what are called advertising accounts I hate the term advertising for this because if you're constantly measuring the person and adjusting to fine-tune to find a way to manipulate the without the person knowing that's not advertising that's behavior modification that's manipulation we can't use the language of advertising but anyway we do I so I'll just call I'll call the advertisers from here on the manipulators and I'll call I'm gonna call the companies behavior modification empires is that okay with you all right because I just think it's more descriptive and instead of the term engagement I'm going to use the term addiction and and I'm not saying some radical out-there thing and saying this a whole series of the earliest top executives of Facebook have come out and regrettably said yes we use addictive techniques deliberately I mean this is out in the open there's not I'm not making some radical hypothesis here all right anyway when the companies are selling themselves to their customers the manipulators they are really kind of creepy they'll say oh yeah yeah yeah we can target a group of people and change how they think and change what they do and it's important to understand the power of the system it can't target you and then with a high degree of accuracy say I'm going to change you it's this broad statistical thing what it can do is it can target 2 million people and say I'll get 3% of them to change by 5% it's it's small the changes that are reliable are small because they're very distributed they're very statistical and you might say oh who cares we're getting free services for just these tiny shades of difference but the thing is reliable tiny shades of difference carefully applied consistently have a compounding effect it's like compound interest you can only do a little bit at a time but over time you can accumulate quite a significant effect you can turn elections you can disrupt the society you can make things pretty ugly now here we get to a very interesting question which is I'm talking about the effect of these slight changes and oh I just know the reason I was talking about when they pitch is when the company's pitch they're incredibly arrogant about how they can reliably change of you and yet out in public they'll say oh no we can't really do very much it's very very slight and the thing is both points both both the sort of meek and modest portrayal and then the arrack and portrayal are kind of true because it is cumulative it just depends on on the frame you're looking at so here's an interesting thing let's say at this point you might be thinking well if these systems can be used to modify people why is it that they seem to be making the world sadder crankier more divisive they seem to be destroying people's ability to perceive truth they seem to be destroying people's ability to act in their own self-interest they're disruptive of societies they're igniting ethnic hatred they're throwing elections they're maybe they're making people distrust their democracies now everything I just said you might say prove it prove it is that true you know it's a thing it's very similar to the problem of climate change it's very hard to prove a particular storm or a particular flood is climate change related but you can look at the overall rate of them and you can say well that corresponds to climate change just as with this there's a large body of research tracking things like likelihood of teen suicide tracking social media use and a zillion in the book it's filled with footnotes of all kinds of different studies there's a broad pattern is it absolutely definitive just as with climate change for the true skeptic it can never be it's a correlative argument I think we're at the point where we have to we have no reasonable choice other than to accept that what at the list of accusations I just gave are supported but I'll leave that to the book and you can chase down the footnotes if you're skeptical but let me get back to you a question which is that I suspect some of you have in your head and that question is okay let's say I buy this let's say I buy that this behind-the-scenes machine is churning manipulating people and it's doing all this damage in the world why should it be doing damage and good and here I want to give you a little bit of insight into how we've screwed ourselves over with the system and this is something that I'm absolutely certain nobody foresaw I'm absolutely certain that this is an innocent mistake even though it's a rather grave and large-scale mistake I mean there's a thing like some of the early Facebook people like Sean Parker are kind of recalling themselves as being more like Bond villains and I think they really were like he's saying oh yeah we knowingly did all this addictive stuff I kind of knew him at the time and I I think they actually fell into it more innocently and maybe there's a certain glamour and imagine yourself as a Bond villain but anyway this stuff I'm sure I'm sure they were not Bond villains I'm sure this was innocent so here's how their algorithms remember behaviorism is based on a feedback loop your behaviors measured such as did you actually buy this thing that you saw an ad for or did you click through or did you just spend more time on the system and be more engaged which is a prime driver that the algorithms are trying to optimize for did you do all that stuff or not and then it might give you a treat or punishment now so far we don't have little drones floating over us that drop actually can a candy or shocked us with electric shocks right so instead the positivity and the negativity that formed the addictive cycle and the behavior modification loop our social experiences which are incredibly deep and powerful for people so the positive ones are more rare than the negative ones and this is always true in addictive cycles when the gambler is addicted it's not to winning but it's to the whole cycle where they lose more often people with chemical addictions are addicted to a cycle in which they're more often in pain or down than they are having a high this is a universal character of addiction so every once in a while the terminology preferred in Silicon Valley is oversimplified but it's like oh we'll give you your dopamine hit and the dopamine hit is when you get retweeted or something something that validates you happens but then in between that is a longer an unpredictable period in which you either ignored or overshadowed or harassed or ridicule or whatever the hell it is there's always some kind of negativity in between the dopamine hits now this the the algorithms are measuring you at a fast frequency they're there every single time you do anything and these days because even motion is counted and facial expressions if you're looking at the camera this might be a very fast sampling indeed because your behavior can change right quite rapidly so with this fast sampling it'll capture those emotional responses which rise the fastest in you now here's an interesting thing if you ask what kind of responses rise fast it's true that there are a few sort of pleasant ones and that's the dopamine hit but there's a far larger number of negative ones that rise faster and these include startle responses and becoming scared becoming angry and these things happen they rise fast and then they decay slowly kind of like a strain on an instrument they go up fast and then they take a long time to die down this is a good sound do you hear the siren of the police car I love how New York police cars kind of talk there's no other city in the world it's like you know there might be a problem here there might be a problem here there might be a problem here pay attention it's like it's like it has like intent it's amazing there's like this language so alright so but that sound that that siren it's not like this instant on and then it decays it's like it goes up now the interesting thing is that most positive reactions such as like gaining admiration gaining understanding gaining appreciation gaining trust these things build more slowly but they can be killed very quickly and so if you have a system it's measuring you on a very rapid basis and then giving you feedback which bundle of emotions is it going to pick up on in order to try to engage you more why the negative ones because more of them are fast rising and so there's a weird thing where if you look at people if there's a huge body of published work where experimenters have tried to determine if positive or negative or reward or punishment feedback is more influential and the results are a fascinating patchwork that depends on the circumstance and the nature of the subject and all kinds of things overall there's a parody overall there about a balance but if you measure in this way quickly you highlight more negative ones and so therefore there's this totally unintended result that if there's somebody who wants to either be a paying customer of a service like Facebook or just manipulate their way through it with the way they post on it either way they get more bang for their buck when they're negative so it's naturally a negativity machine because of the timing of the feedback loop it's a little bit like the problems that sometimes come up with high frequency trading where those things can be more prone to certain kinds of illusions and markets and I don't want to get into a big technical thing about that but it is true that for instance I'll give you a couple of examples Donald Trump's social media director for the presidential campaign reported and Facebook disputes this but this is what he says he's the customer customers are always right remember and he says that when they put up a negative ad that was particularly aimed at sort of crankiness well these are my words not his but you know these sort of cranky paranoia of ads and racist and whatever that they would get a giant multiple maybe hundreds of times more exposure to people than when Hillary spent the same amount of money for an ad that was tamer because the algorithms reward and amplify things that cause engagement addiction so negativity just happens to work it happens to get amplified nobody designed that way but as long as that's the system we have and that's this thing that connects us all the way most people get Muse the way most people know their own family and friends the way most people search for work so many things like this it's this giant invitation this giant red carpet for the society to be nippy be manipulated by bad actors like the Russian intelligence warfare units that through our last election I didn't say this until recently I used to say that might have but since James clapper a retired head of national security is saying it begs credulity not to say they threw the election I think our okay finally let's just say it they threw the election and the thing is if let's suppose hypothetically that the Tooth Fairy visited Vladimir Putin and he suddenly got this vision oh I want to make the world harmonious and good and I don't care about my own power and a healthy world is good for Russia and I'm not going to be creepy anymore I repent and then he then he calls up his people and he says can you help the United States heal instead of disrupting it more and they'll say well Adam you I mean we could we could do this thing but it would cost ten tough you know ten thousand times more it's like we're getting this multiplier for disruption and he would say oh my god it would be that expensive okay stay creepy you know because creepiness is the bargain way to use this stuff and so this there many effects of this which are heartbreaking an example is the Arab Spring was so celebrated and celebrated in such an arrogant way in Silicon Valley we called it the Facebook revolution the Twitter revolution even though of course we weren't there was somebody else's revolution but we claimed it and the thing is though that even though as with so many other things about social media the initial benefits that you perceive are authentic they're not unreal at all behind the scenes the manipulation machine is running and what it does is it finds the people who are the most engaged the most emotionally aroused by whatever is going on and of course those are the people with the negative emotions they're introduced to each other the cycle that gets them excited is more and more emphasized and more and more refined and then the result down the road is that an organization like Isis gets even more power from the same tools than the Arab Spring did or an example close to home black lives matter starts off in my opinion as a beautiful movement articulate generous forgiving but the algorithms are searching out those people who are upset by it because upset impulse is what is captured more than consideration and those impulsive people are the negative ones for the most part once again this is all statistically it's not perfect it's just percentages these negative people are introduced to each other their cycle of negativity is amplified amplified amplified because the algorithms are trying to drive engagement engagement engagement and then you have a resurgent KKK and neo-nazi movement that we haven't seen in generations so what starts off as a positive ID is turned into something I can't say on c-span like clockwork over and over again and then people still say well we'll use social media to try to fight all the madness that's come about in the social media era but you can't you can't so in order for us to not drive ourselves to into extinction and I say extinction because we have real problems we as a species have to find a way to be sane right now we have to face up to climate change we have to face up to how we're going to support a growing population which is still not peaked we have to face up to how we're going to deal with weapons of mass destruction we're gonna have to deal with a the need for advanced medicine because we're not controlling all of the disease vectors that exist that could explode I mean this is real stuff this is our future survival and on all counts we're going nuts instead I sometimes joke do you know what toxoplasmosis is it's this parasite if you've ever been pregnant or known somebody who is I'll say oh don't get around cat poop because cat poop might have this parasite and so the cats have this parasite they poop it and then it gets into the diet of rodents and then the parasite enters the rodent brain and modifies it so that it's less afraid of cats so the cats have more to eat and then they have more to poop right so that's the life cycle of the talk and to me Facebook is toxoplasmosis the internet's the cat you're the mouse all right so what happens is as a matter of course this this machine this manipulative machine kind of undoes those who would criticize it as a matter of course somehow rather it disrupts the us it's bringing incredible challenges to the EU with nationalist movements and brexit all being influenced by it and it's brought about astonishing carnage in the developing world I won't go into all of the instances there's a lot in the book about that but it's almost as if it's going out there and undoing the regulator's who might otherwise address it so to me the only way to have a societal conversation about this is for there to be at least a minority of people who aren't in the middle of it who can talk about the world without seeing it through the lens of the daily hit of paranoia and craziness on Twitter and Facebook and the rest there just has to be some number of people who have outgrown the the remote control hypnosis now I there's this is a huge topic and there's a lot to talk about in the book I go into a couple of other dimensions I won't go into too much here one is what should the companies do I think they've got to either choose socialism or capitalism this this unholy combination we have is the worst of both worlds if they want to choose social lism we could say the Internet should be like the public library and that could work if they want to choose capitalism we should say social media and search should be like Netflix you pay for them but they should also be kind of like Etsy or patreon or something where you can make your living from them instead of being put out of work by the AI robots that are supposedly going to do that but that's a whole other topic the AI robots need your data they can't work without your data and yet they're gonna make you obsolete that's not honest you should be paid for your data so that we can all be motivated to make better data for better robots and that could be a dignified Society actually but let's leave that aside there's also what I call a spiritual problem which is that when you use social media you inherently buy into a whole philosophy of life and death that is probably not what you want to believe you start to believe that virality is truth you start to believe that we already know how to quantify the value of communication and truth when we don't in many cases you start to believe that certain kinds of activities are real and certain kinds aren't if you can if you can get people excited and document things in a certain way that adds validity and all of these things are gradually building towards a new religion that places the big computers at places like Facebook in the center of kind of your existence Facebook has said its new goal is to create meaning for every person in the world like that's the most arrogant thing you could say Google used to come up with the creepiest stuff like what we have a new project and death well that's kind of a creepy thing for a corporation to say Facebook's actually surpassed them and so if you have these algorithms creating your meaning it means you're buying into a philosophy that we already know what meaning is in life and that we can write an algorithm for it and that idea that we already live in a world that's been totally known that the where there aren't edges of infinity and unknowingness to me is terribly sad it feels to me like I can't breathe every time I even start to think that way and yet everybody is kind of forcibly thinking that way even in order to use these tools although only a little once again it's statistical you're being changed gradually you're being gradually changed into a religious adherent to this new religion that maybe you'll live forever if you can be uploaded into a Google server or something like that you don't quite believe that yet but you're like being dragged there gradually a little more a little more a little more whether you're a traditional religious person or some kind of wild Buddhist crazy person or if you're like a hardcore atheist no matter what belief you have you're being dragged gradually into a much cruder and less valuable belief system by this all of those are much better okay so so some of you I don't know how many it'll take five percent if five percent of the society can have a conversation outside the manipulation machine outside the addiction machine you want to know if you're addicted there's a personality effect you start to get kind of weirdly irritable and a little paranoid you start to kind of pick fights with people it used to be called the poor little snowflake syndrome you know that that's what conservatives call college students who have it but you know the best example is trunk Trump is addicted to Twitter and it makes him weirdly I talked to the guy over the years over decades and he's always been a con man he's always been a show man he's always seemed a little mobbed up you know but he never used to be so weirdly insecure and so in need of picking a fight and so bizarrely irritable and sort of paranoid that's new and that's his addiction talking and if you see anything like that in yourself or a friend for God's sakes delete your accounts right there when you don't even have to tell anybody you don't have to admit it just do it for your own sake all right this isn't anybody else's business if you're young and you've grown up with this stuff at least get away from it for a while it's the modern equivalent of trekking in Nepal or something you have to you have to take some risks endure a little bit of discomfort just in order to know yourself you have to know yourself before you can even have an opinion about the stuff get off it for six months and after that you can go back on it if that's your choice but then it's really your choice it's not my choice I don't know you but until you at least test the waters of being free of the system you don't know yourself I love the Silicon Valley companies I love Silicon Valley it's my home if I'm part of it I want it to thrive I'm absolutely convinced that we must and can and will make this transition a future version of Facebook might be like what's happened with Netflix people used to say we won't pay for TV we'll make TV like the Wikipedia makes articles it'll all be volunteer there was an honest test between that and just paying for the stuff you want and while I'm not saying Netflix is perfect or any of the other companies they all deserve criticism in various ways and should be criticized in various ways every single one of them but Netflix did create this thing that a lot of people call peak TV someday will have peak social media someday will have peak search this will be a form of search in social media that isn't completely stuffed to the gills with fake people and fake garbage and manipulative rankings and all this stuff it'll the motivation the incentives have to be changed so that that kind of stuff isn't put at the absolute center of everything so please at least consider it okay free yourself to free us all that is the talk [Music] okay so we're gonna do a little more music and then we'll do questions if there's some danger that I've absolutely covered everything to infinity and there are no questions and we'll just do more music after that I don't expect that to be so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so here's how this is gonna work I'm gonna take questions and if a questions incredibly good we'll celebrate by playing some music after I answer it if it's too hard for me to answer I'll evade it by playing music if it's incredibly bad we'll play music to cover it but in most cases I'll answer it and go to the next question alright and then at some point we'll have completed the question so I'm gonna play a little final piece and that'll be bad alright so there's a light in my face it's hard for me to see people so I'm gonna ask someone else maybe Janna can are you around can you choose people Jenna are you here oh she's coming she's coming and then there's somebody with a mic right mic runners alright so um raise your hands in such a manner as to appeal to Janna hello hello okay sorry so I've been in the internet since it the beginning of it being commercial and there were lots of BBS's and disease groups and all kinds of places for people to get together and I hear people now saying if it weren't for Facebook I wouldn't find my people and they'd find them you know kind of one in the same and so how do you or somebody get the word out that those kinds of subcultures can thrive without these monoliths yeah and actually you mentioned diseased groups this is one of the things that really motivated me so she's doing great now but my wife's been battling multiple cancers for a few years and the astonishing thing is you think this should be like a time when it's easy to get useful information about cancer because there's so much the point is that you know what a denial-of-service attack is it's when hackers put a bunch of malware in a ton of computers millions and millions and then whenever they want they can get them all to address the same website it wants to shut it down because there's no room for anybody else to get in right that's the main thing that's done with these in fact these infestations this is cultural denial of service there's so many manipulators so many scammers so many cooks so many creeps so many angry people so much crap that you cannot dig through it to get to good stuff in peak social media you would be able to and as you point out it used to be better back in the old days I'm sorry I'm kind of old at this but I've been doing this for a long time let's say in the 80s the prototypical networks it really was possible to find information more easily it's actually gotten worse for the important stuff I'm absolutely convinced that if we just remove the incentives for horribleness that people are mostly pretty decent and intelligent and the good stuff will rise up to replace it right now all of the incentives bring out the worst in people not always statistically they tend to and so there is some good stuff online I'm you might say there's this good thing in that good thing and I'm not going to fight with you about any of it I really believe in the good stuff too it's just that it's overwhelmed by the crap I have a question about this asymmetry of slow and fast time you talked about that to build trust love it slow it takes time to do harm it's very quick right and there is a more fundamental deeper asymmetry of slow and fast in some of your presentation you talked about this dream to build wonderful culture about this new technology right but the problem is culture that's low time but technology is fast time and so my question is how do you manage this asymmetry this conflict tension which is growing and we see it everywhere now so technology is not necessarily fast our mythology of technology is that it's fast and speeding up but in many ways it's also slow I mean the truth is that there's very slow progress on making many kinds of software better and making things really connect together well I I think there's this rapid investment cycle that requires a constant sort of absurdist exciting of investors in technology where every year this is the revolution this is the revolution and it and yet it never gets old they still buy it year after year for some reason but I actually think that if we look more honestly there's a lot that goes on that's slow some of the best stuff like usability security these things are actually slow the systemic stuff is slow when things get fast and speed up it's when you can draw a precise box around them so that you can perfectly bound the learning curve so that's why Moore's Law is so effective for chips when you have something that's a more open system it doesn't tend to follow that kind of speedy thing but I feel like I'm only answering one little sliver of your question because you asked a sophisticated question that has many dimensions to it therefore the the the desire to evade is occurring in me and I mean if I've been I'm going to play another little bit of music [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] anybody curious with this word so in parts of Eastern Europe there are these things called overtone flutes that a single one of those would be an example of the most famous ones are probably played by the left people north of the Arctic Circle it up in the north of Finland but there's also examples in Hungary and other places this business of doing two of them together as a trick like walrus tusks I saw some kids in the Vienna train station doing this and one kid was doing this mesmerizing people while the other was running around picking pockets and I how do you like I just want to see it and so it's not documented it's not many of the musicology thing that I know I don't think this has ever been captured and this is a copper set that somebody made for me usually they're made of wood and since I've been talking about a form of criminality I thought I'd bring them alright another question Jenna you're you're the decider okay if somebody has a month there might be two Mike so if you start to speak oh yeah go go go hi so thanks so much I've I read your who owns the future book a few years ago and for the last three or four years I've worked in the and the blockchain space and I found myself really thinking every couple months I don't know if this is sort of this sort of primitives are there for the type of sort of data marketplaces and stuff you advocate for or is this just kind of the most apocalyptic post truth agreement reality kind of libertarian dystopia or is it somewhere in between or or sort of what your feelings are mmm so there's an immutable law of nature which is if I give a talk someone will ask about blockchain it has it has it has surpassed Einstein as the most well proven principle and so this is another one that's a whole long story but blockchain in principle the idea of some sort of distributed record of people's affairs that might be able to create at least one layer of law enforcement without a government might be helpful and if it can help I'm all for it blockchain specifically holds two dangers which you should be aware of one is whenever you try to say we're gonna create trust we're gonna create reliability by making this ironclad digital solution what you really do is you force all of the problems all the chicanery all the scammers all of the mistakes to the periphery of whatever that system is you can have your perfect quantum encrypted thing and then on the other side of it will be somebody who leaks your information or whatever like ultimately you cannot have trust without building a society of human trust so you can have this Bitcoin exchanges fall apart and are written with fraud and with weird schemes doesn't mean that the Bitcoin core is technically unsound it just means that people rely on the technical phase of it too much and forget about building a society of trust around it the purpose of locks on doors is not to prevent thieves from going in in my culture of hackers there's really these locks don't do anything okay everybody can like you have to be able to pick locks to be taken seriously but the thing is they remind you the lock is a reminder saying hey actually the person put the lock there just don't do it be decent and so you you have to remember that no matter how secure your system is that's all it can be as a reminder of what's inherently a social contract based on trust if you try to do without that you'll just yourself sorry you'll screw yourself up c-span alright and then and the other danger is just environmental using computational efficiency as the basis of your scheme is unethical until we can put the servers on the moon or something which maybe we can but until that time we should look for efficiency in our computation all right so that's is that enough about blockchain for now all right cool all right next person with a microphone please hi where are you right right here thank you for the great book talk so I was curious to hear your thoughts of the prospects of a new type of internet like a decentralized Internet the beta for a substratum just launched recently so like a crowdfunded crowd-sourced Internet yep curious about it well the Internet is fine the core internet thing is not the problem I think the mistake we saw I was around when the thing was created and for anybody who makes fun of the idea that elver Al Gore invented it he kind of did not technically but there was a government bribe to get all these people with incompatible packet switch networks to talk to each other and that was the gore bill and he kind of just kind of got everybody to work together and that poor thing is fine the problem with it is that at the time was created the sentiment was to make it absolutely as minimal as possible so it didn't have any way for people to store information on it it didn't have any representation of people only of machines it didn't have any persistence of any record-keeping any memory that was built in it was just this very raw thing and the problem with that is that it spawned natural network monopolies because of network effects and it also rewarded the people who could do this thing that would spread the fastest instead of the thing and so love Tim berners-lee respect him but he put out this web protocol that only had one way links so there would be no context or attribution which is kind of the core sin that led to this other stuff happening that's a whole long discussion but what we need to do is not replace the core Internet but to have the next layer above it have backlinks and have persistence and identity and all that and right now all of that's been privatized to giant monopolies like Google and Facebook they they're the ones that calculate the backlinks and give you identity and everything like essentially Google exists because there weren't backlinks you know that's what that's what the thing does and so that could be done by industry working on a different business model or if you really hate the idea of it being industry you could expand the public portion of the internet to do it it's just crucial that we have a network that includes all those functions in a way that isn't monopolized by behavior manipulation business plan right that's a very quick answer to a very deep and big subject all right so I'm not choosing people whoever has the microphone is choosing people hello hi where are you okay hi so my question is coming from the point of view of addiction if when we want to have conversations with our loved ones do you think we should handle it from the point of view of someone who would say have like a drug or alcohol addiction or a cigarette addiction and like basically what advice can you give to someone who maybe isn't as well-informed as you but wants to have those conversations so I don't have all the answers for that when it gets to individual advice I feel less well equipped to help honestly so I will say a couple things if the parent is addicted and the parents going to bother the kid about the kid's addiction forget about that that's not going anywhere alright so if you have a kid and you're saying oh wow I worry about what you're doing look at your own habits first set an example don't don't try to fix the kid until you can fix yourself I think that should be obvious but it needs to be said because I see a lot I've seen parenting oh my kid is like on social media all the time we'll hold on and they're staring okay wait a second here like first order of business is you not the kid there are some resources out there center Institute for Humane Technology common sense these are well known places you can go to for specific advice I don't think it's easy I'm a father myself and I don't want to pretend that there's an easy answer to this stuff I think in some cases it might be quite difficult and it might not always be easy to address in some cases people have a mild addiction that you can live with too you know I mean there was an astonishing study which just so this was about correlations between rises in social media use in an individual and the likelihood of suicide and teenage girls and in the study population in the likelihood with heavy social media use onset was a 30 percent rise in teen suicide not attempts but actual suicide this is just astounding you know so it is it can be very serious it isn't always at that level of course but I wish you luck I find it hard as a parent I I'm here I can't really give you oh I think I'm feeling evasive [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] check it tell me if this is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right there's a microphone hi hi where are you are you okay so my question is about behavioral economics and whether or not you think that I couldn't hear you sorry what about behavioral economics oh yes and whether or not you think this idea of behavior modification for a social good can actually be done or if the negative feedback loops are so overpowering that there's no point okay so I believe that that question should be studied empirically and in order to study it empirically the first experiment would be to lengthen the time between measurements in the feedback loops of some of these systems so for instance let's say that if an advertiser wanted to have very up-to-date information they have to pay you like ten thousand dollars per day time or some ridiculous thing but it but if they got out to a year then it would become really affordable so that they would be forced to look at your considered response instead of your impulse response according to my hypothesis which hasn't been properly tested that should result in a parity between positive and negative results and it should be it should create less of an invitation for bad actors to disrupt society because they won't get this multiplier boost that they get now does that mean that you could use the thing to improve society I get a little skeptical because I think the idea of improving society should be more emergent and shouldn't come from any central server I like markets and democracy because they do that central servers that are sending our messages to people if there's some way that that could be opened up I mean another interesting problem is that everybody doing open software said well if you have open software you can't be snookered because you can see what it does but right now all those open software stacks those Apache stocks are running in the middle of super guarded remote servers and places you can't ever access owned by sir Facebook Google so you don't get to see the algorithms because you don't own the computer you can't look so there'd have to be some real change in how we do things but I think it's conceivable all right another question from another microphone if you were speaking to a candidate going up against someone who exploits people's negative impulses and your candidate refuses to do the same how would you given the systems we have so what advice would I give to a decent candidate I worked on the Hillary campaign so yeah I think it's really hard I mean so there was an interesting thing recently where this so the people who work at companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter are for the most part very decent well and well-intentioned people who want to help the world and they're not bad people there are a few creepy ones but they're in the minority and so we saw this interesting attempt to block political ads on the social networks in the period before the Irish vote unlegal I was in abortion and that one came out sort of more liberal and but not like they voted to legalize abortion in Ireland but the interesting thing to me wasn't the result of the vote it said overall it wasn't quite as a and horrible as everything's been like whether you think that Briggs that should have happened or not compare the brexit vote to The Velvet divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia which is kind of a similar issue like just the the the way things get so ugly so in this particular case by by shutting down political ads for period an election was made more dignified you might or might not like the result personally I think it was the correct result but the point is that society the nature of the discourse about the vote wasn't in itself something that degraded into our society apart what whatever you think of the result okay so the problem is that because the underlying incentive structure is still incentivizing all the creeps to figure out a way around now we're going to breed more and more sophisticated creeps so every time Google changes its policy then try to make its search results better there's this giant industry called search engine optimization that's all the people trying to get around whatever that is every time Facebook tries to do something we're breeding smarter and smarter criminals this is what we did in prohibition of alcohol we created a smarter and smarter mob it's what we did with other drugs and so we're doing it now when the companies take it upon themselves to try to police particular behavior particular uses of their network instead of changing the incentives so this is a long way of saying for the moment I don't have good advice for candidates I'm terrified it's possible than what was done in Ireland maybe you could talk them into doing it again and maybe the criminals wouldn't have learned how to be sophisticated enough to defeat that but I say the midterms but by the next presidential surely they will live because they're smart they're sitting there trying to figure out countermeasures so I think it really sucks right now check hi how are you jerem straight 12 o'clock hey how you doing I'm a huge fan and I'm a musician and an educator and I've read all your books and I just really respect the way that you are able to integrate music into both your books and your talk I appreciate it I have never heard you play and it's really awesome to that I wanted to ask you about stuff I'm not going to mention the B word blockchain but sorry I'm sorry no I don't think of a blockchain well I'll use your term then you phrased it as micropayments in in who owns the future i I want to know what to be able to tell my students about getting paid as an artist and and it's something you've touched on in other books but you've no I don't know if you've squared on it things like the music Modernization Act the idea of a centralized database via ASCAP and BMI and and getting the Performing rights organizations together and how we can make artists get paid music creators at all types hmm so yet another big question let me I'll try to address that in a few different ways I barely delved into the economics in this talk sigh it's hard for me to do a whole intro it's just part of a an answer to a question I do have a book that's been mentioned a couple of times called who owns the future that tries to imagine a future economics of the internet that would have a different incentive structure that book is not new I wrote that something like eight years ago or something I don't remember and so it was pre blockchain and a lot of stuff so it reflects a slightly different range of ideas that were around but I think it still probably holds up more recently there's a body of economic research that follows this and if you want to know the keywords to search on look for data as labor data as labor and then you'll find various club patience and there's a book called radical markets that's just out that covers this and then as far as what musicians can do right now for the moment musicians are just screwed I'm sorry like if you're young enough to sing for your supper for every single single meal you can use social media to promote your touring but if you want to have kids or be able to get sick and you don't have anything to fall back on you're screwed so it's this casino economy where you take the risks and the central server gets richer and richer if you can afford to take the risks which means you're young or you have rich parents or something like that great otherwise it's harder than I was a recording musician in the 90s and on a label and it was infinite I'm I know people say oh it's great now and Spotify is happening all that it was so much better than I'm sorry it was like a different world but people who are too young to have known it don't realize that it was really a better world on many levels okay should we give the Trekker question no all right I'm gonna do one more question and then the final piece of music I was gonna come and whisper in jaren's ear one more question and the last piece of music and then we'll do the book signing outside it's gonna have a bonfire it's gonna be really beautiful okay okay good okay you got it you got it under control okay cool thank you okay so one more question and one more piece of music who will ask the question hello where are you wearing your 10 o'clock okay the very tall person so you said that you don't think that this problem is the product of people behaving intentionally unethically which I agree with and that's actually what kind of terrifies me more is that we're essentially living in a world in which people with the best intentions are creating things that can possibly destroy the world and there's a researcher in 2009 who found that when we're primed to think of ourselves as members of a collective social norms tend to be what dictate our behavior whereas when we're made to think of ourselves as individuals then we use our core values to make decisions and organizations are really real great and making people think of themselves as a member of a collective instead of an individual and so my question is what makes you think that this is this is it and that this isn't actually a deeper problem and that the way we innovate is fundamentally unsustainable and that in every area where we infuse technology there's tremendous risk for destroying the world like GrubHub even is destroying the local restaurant industry and and basically wherever we put technology it seems that we might be able to generate these unsustainable horrible outcomes don't turn against technology that would be a great shame technology's beautiful technology has increased our powers and with that our wiggle room to be ethical over history and for the most part people have taken advantage of that expanded ability to be ethical to in fact choose to be ethical it's gone up and down but overall we've gotten better over time and it's through a lot of hard work through a lot of critics criticizing the way things are and through a lot of science and scientists and technologists creating new options what you said about the individual versus the collective is a theory a very much subscribe to you might wonder why there's a cap on the cover it's a real cat by the way it's my daughter's cat he's named potato he was a rescue kitten from an Oakland parking lot where he'd been an extra in the Black Panther movie and the reason there's a cat on the cover is that cats are the only so-called domesticated animal that can still survive in the wild they appear to have domesticated themselves so they haven't lost themselves and to integrate themselves into the modern world and I think the reason cats are so popular online the reason they're all those cat videos and cat memes is that they represent the independence that we fear losing so with with that one final piece of music devoted to all of you in the audience who can be cats [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] Sean Michael Eric from the Knights [Music]

Channel: The Artificial Intelligence Channel

Views: 152,188

Rating: 4.87251 out of 5

Keywords: singularity, ai, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, deepmind, robots, robotics, self-driving cars, driverless cars, Jaron Lanier, virtual reality

Id: BCTlcj5vImk

Length: 80min 57sec (4857 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018