Is technology changing humanity? Jaron Lanier interviewed by Vikas Shah MBE

okay hold on there we go cool well first of all jaron thanks again um for your time today it's it's a real pleasure and honor speaking with you and i i guess the starting point for me was in terms of our our own identity as humans how much do you think technology has actually shaped who we are now as a species because it seems in some ways is difficult for us to separate now from our technology well it always has been um humans haven't been able to survive in any of the environments in which we've lived uh in the raw as it were ever uh we uh in order to survive we make fire we uh make shoes we make uh hunting tools and so on we we just haven't uh ever experienced even what our our near cousins are in the great apes families have experienced of just being adapted to an environment as it is so it it it doesn't there's no sensible definition of people without technology but then the the relationship is is uh complex and it has a helical quality to it because what happens is technology changes over time which means that people change over time um and so we have a situation where we have one kind of technology and it begs for new technologies to solve its side effects and so we end up in this helix of constantly having entered into a game where we need to keep on furthering technology because technology is never sustainable in any instant state it's always in the process of requiring uh addition revision improvement which um is kind of terrifying of course um i i didn't sleep last night because we're under evacuation watch where i live in california which is driven by climate change which you know was driven by the perfectly reasonable desires to have things like refrigeration on demand and so on you know the massive use of fossil fuels which changed our climate um but then there's another side to it that i think is also worth mentioning in this helical process which is whenever we have one of these revisions of technology it tends to create new options for people where we can do things that we couldn't do before we can live places we couldn't live yeah we can live longer we can create objects we couldn't create before tools and things and what that does is it makes it it makes us a danger to ourselves and others obviously but it also creates a kind of a a wiggle room to prove ourselves ethically and morally um and that's deeply interesting to me uh what what we hope for the future and of course the future isn't is not knowable but we hope for the future is that as this process of con of technological re-self-definition continues will take advantage of the opportunities to become more more decent more meaningful um and uh i i hope that that's what happens that's that's why i'm in here anyway and and it's it's really interesting because it seems right now we have a moment around ethics with technology well not with technology in its broader sense but with a particular pillar within technology which is kind of you know the social media world you know in how can we start to think about understanding ethics in technology when as you've said you know we are experiencing climate change in a very real sense caused by actually quite a initially benign need in technology and in the same way the ostensibly noble virtue of why social media was created has created a very un due and unexpected consequence for society how can we actually start to think about technology in a more healthy ethical way um well okay so this is um a hard question to answer briefly um but uh one thing i have to correct you a little bit um social media unfortunately was kind of created to destroy humanity and and i mean that in a kind of literal sense the first implementation of a network computer experience was created by bf skinner who thought people were too free and too uh too creative and too too uncontrolled and that occurred before even the earliest technology of what we call the internet in an earlier version of digital networking in the early 60s in an experiment between midwestern universities the first portrayal of what social media might be like was from e.m forster 1907 in the the short story uh the machine stops which was a reasonably accurate portrayal of what we've created so um that said there's always been this other idea so uh what idealists had hoped for from the internet from networking all these devices all the computers and networking media together the hope was to create what we might call technologies of deep truth as opposed to the deep fakes that have taken over so technology and there are some technologies of deep truth available for instance um as i mentioned i didn't sleep because i'm under uh potential effect my family is potentially under evacuation orders because of uh yeah the weather event going on here and so uh but what's interesting is between computer modeling and satellite data and some other things we can actually have incredible real-time views of what's going on with the weather uh which didn't exist quite recently and that's extraordinary i mean it's it's really so provided that the social structure that supports it is motivated to make it truthful it's a new kind of truth it's a deep truth and if the internet can function that way creating these new kinds of deep truths and sympathy flies it can be the thing that saves us and i think it can also be beautiful um yeah i the a summary of my position is often well social media is bad but that's not exactly right um i actually think social media can be fine and in fact if you look at the first year or two of any particular social media platform they often start out uh i would say kind of charming yeah that's not always true but it's usually true and they become corrupted by the stupid business model in which the companies can only make money by having third parties inject money into the system so that it becomes more manipulative to the benefit of those third parties if that incentive structure wasn't there i think i don't think social media in itself would be a bad thing it might be a very good thing so um uh this is this is the thing about technology is that uh it's a mistake to think of technology as a thing like a freestanding black box um what technology ultimately is is it's a social structure and that people act upon the universe through and the social structure uh the incentives in it the rules in it the governance in it is what determines the uh meaning and the effect of what we call technology not the particular engineering ability but does this also require a new economic model therefore because you know it to my mind as you were speaking there i was thinking okay on on one hand we now have this huge concentration of economic power in the entities which you know have the maximum exertion of control over the internet but we don't seem to have an economic model that would prevent that from from inevitably becoming the case yeah so um i i think that at least the glimmers of a plausible economic model exist and uh this is sometimes called data dignity um i i wrote a book trying to sketch it about a decade ago called who owns the future and i um the easiest way to explain it um is a parable i've been using for the last few weeks that i might turn into a new book or something and it's the parable of the gardening robots and uh here's how it goes um imagine in the future uh there are some people who work as gardeners and i've been thinking about them because the gardeners who are often very low paid and undocumented people are the people keeping us alive right now in california as much as the front line workers dealing with the covet epidemic because they're the ones who are creating some semblance of fire safety in our in our neighborhoods and and so i've been thinking about these people a lot um and talking to them trying to get to know them now imagine in a few years uh there's a van that pulls up alongside where gardeners are working and it's painted like a preschool classroom the way silicon valley things often are and it's got it's got this source of cameras and sensors and one of the gardeners looks up at it and says whoa um i guess our data is being gathered and there's going to be robots that replace us in a few years and sure enough one of the big tech companies had been running those colorful vans and introduces a gardening robot that's um cheaper than paying an undocumented gardener and all of a sudden all those people are out of work and there are these gardening robots so that's scenario a so that's a plausible scenario i think that could happen um all right let's go to scenario b scenario b is the same van drives up and these gardeners look at it and they say oh finally god we've been waiting for this and they unionize and they go to the company and they say okay we're going to collectively bargain for the use of our data because we own it and we're going to license it to you you're never going to be able to buy it totally from us because we have a moral right to it but we're going to make some arrangement then what happens is the gardening robots um function as they would have but they're better but there's another really interesting thing that happens which is there's this new creative class of the people who are the example providers the data providers the designers um almost the guardians and the the quality control community for these gardening robots and and and also these people who were making living marginally before are starting to become acclaimed some of them are getting famous and and gardening changes wow it changes from a static thing into a dynamic thing because suddenly there are waves of culture that overtake gardening there might be 20 years when there's this whole thing about spiral-shaped vegetable patches furthermore there's a a way to tune gardening on a massive scale that's coordinated to fight climate change to fight erosion to uh to you know to to achieve things and and all right and so and then this this creative class is not temporary you don't just program the the the robots once it's perpetual it becomes like music literature it continues it's open-ended it becomes a new and of course gardening has been a form of human expression but only to a limited degree now it becomes a massive pop form of expression alongside it's like music and film all right now here's the interesting thing about these two scenarios scenario a and scenario b there's no difference in the software and there's no difference in the hardware there's no technological difference between these two scenarios they're the same robots running on the same code put out by the same companies the same engineers the the only difference in the two scenarios is the philosophy of how people think about people wow so it's almost so it's almost not that we need a new economic model but we need a new philosophy of power in society that's the same thing in economic i mean economics economics is like artificial intelligence it's not really there it's it's just the invisible hand is not really a creature um yeah this is how people treat people and and we we compete systems to do it nothing wrong with that in fact there's everything right about that but we but it's a it's a it's a it's a social order it's an ethic it's um a a a principle of governance and uh and it's uh and it's some accounting practices yeah wow and is there also on the on the ethics front do you think we're also at a stage where we have to think about the ethics of content and you know one of the things i was sort of putting into my question notes was around you know social cohesion and and and those kind of areas that we're seeing impacting democracy impacting marginalized groups impacting narratives all over the world and you know on this side of the pond and your side of the pond we're feeling it acutely but some of this is also because the content that's being produced is often so good that us mere mortals find it very hard to distinguish that as being an objective truth or or not you know how can we build that kind of resilience into society well this is an ancient problem and it has an ancient solution that's proven um so the thing is um if you if every individual is just shouting in the agora and and seeking attention what will happen is the most obnoxious ones will get the most attention and you'll have you'll have a really crappy agora and and that's occurred repeatedly and the solution to it the the first impulse is to say well some authoritarian's gonna come in and and fix all this speech from all these people okay we're gonna just fix this and so that's that that was true for bf skinner and it's true for the uh like a facebook the things that can moderate so-called all of its uh discussions and um it's been true for all varieties of uh communist and uh theocratic regimes uh on and on and on but there's this other way there's this other way that actually works and the other way um doesn't have a sufficiently catchy name and this is problematic but it's usually called societal institutions and so the idea is um instead of just everybody as an individual yapping in the agora people form through free association confederacies that build brands together and they become somewhat responsible for each other to support their brand so a brand might be um a newspaper or a university or even like a sports club or uh a a brock band or uh etc just all these what what happens is when people band together and they make a brand for their band they the incentives turn away from being awful to get attention and turn to building um persistent reputation and all of a sudden you start getting quality out of that that you don't get in a mashup of individuals and so it's a course screening and and um i want to i want to just say a couple things about that um if i want to just nerd out from a mathematical perspective you can't have complex systems that um well the the current parlance is to say they learn i don't like that terminology they can't adapt unless they have coarse screen structures inside that can accumulate results from complicated experiments and so uh in in evolution the we call that a species you can't just have a bunch of genes floating around banging into each other i mean you can in the earliest stages but they need to form um they need to form boundaries around themselves and then and have more selective uh essentially sex is invented and then all of a sudden you start to have things like us show up um and uh in in mathematics in fact when we when we make a thing called the neural network and once again i hate the terminology we use i hate i hate this whole myth making that we're creating life and we're turning into gods i don't think it serves us well but at any rate yeah the thing we call a neural network which i prefer to call um a sound i don't know i they're they're different uh there are other terms but yeah the thing we call a neural network doesn't function unless it has hidden layers and the hidden layers are analogous to the species and they're analogous to the societal institutions you need to have these kind of coarse grained things for anything of quality to appear um and uh oh god there's there's so much more to say about this there's another metaphor i'd like to make which is uh you might be familiar with somebody named mohammad yunus and the grameen bank in microsoft yeah yeah okay so um muhammad came up with this idea decades ago now and it's it hasn't worked perfectly but it's fundamentally worked and it's a new tool in in in the world of development um maybe not enough but the the the interesting idea is that if you believe in market economies at all then you have to have some form of credit for people to be able to do anything and if you have a large population of people who are impoverished and have no credit histories it becomes infinitely expensive and essentially hopeless for a bank to evaluate all those people so that it can issue credit and so therefore everything is stuck so mohammed said okay let these people form into confederations through free association and take mutual responsibility for each other so and then all of a sudden these these little collections of people do repay their loans and actually at a better rate than is typical in the banking industry and so uh what it did essentially is it distributed the the task of quality promotion to all of these societal institutions instead of trying to centralize it so the grameen bank is another example that is similar to hidden layers in a neural network or to having species in evolution and uh this idea of having societal institutions has come up in essentially every observer of decent societies since ancient times but i would say the most articulate ones might be hana iran and de tocqueville wow and it was it's interesting when you mentioned before about this narrative that we're becoming gods because one of the hypotheses that i've noted through so many interviews on thought economics is this no is this sense that we as a species are still so much in our cultural infinity in our relationship with network technologies that the pace of growth technology effectively is us as this kind of infinite this new toy to play with and we haven't yet figured out the safety the relationship between that and our lives you know i mean is do you feel that that we are too far down the track now to make a meaningful course correction and have a healthier relationship with technology as a society or do you feel that we actually still have a chance to make a meaningful difference yeah so um my impression of our time and it's it's very hard to get certainty of what's really going on because you can't really peer into other people's souls and mass you can get the illusion of it over over social media but it's not true so my impression is that there's less hope now than there's been at least during my lifetime and it appears for centuries um when i look at the expressions from younger people i don't see any articulate sense of a future i don't see people saying uh well this is what we're looking forward to this is how we want the world to be affirmative instead i only see a sense of correctives that need to take place we have to fix climate change we have to have less racist policing uh we have to um i don't know how it's all it's all it's all uh it's all correctives and it leads to a kind of um phone nostalgia and i i'm i'm deeply concerned about that i i uh uh i i i think in one of my books i put it is i miss the future and i'm i'm i so this question about um i mean the future isn't written yet whether it's too late or not is not a uh something fixed in stone at this point i mean it can seem like it's too late on many days um it's felt that way this year pointed out on quite a number of days but in the big picture people have made it through some pretty rough times in the past uh most most of our um ancestors lived through worse than we've lived through lately and faced greater threats and indeed the lives of our ancestors are filled with massive plagues and famines and and um massacres and uh on it you know on and on and uh so i i don't think there's any objective reason for exceptional pessimism right now that's not to say that we know how to solve all the puzzles we've created for ourselves but um it just seems you know optimism certainly seems more functional pessimism serves nothing yes you know there's there's um one of the things about as technology rises it becomes harder and harder to define a distinction between pessimism and nihilism right uh because we're more and more responsible for ourselves so so i i just uh i i just i just think there's an in um an ingrown preposterousness to pessimism and and so i'm not gonna indulge in it yeah and um do you have time for a quick round-up question as well jaron um i don't know what time it is sometime it's it should be 9 29. let me let me check my calendar for a second and see what yeah what the deal is sorry about that i just uh oh no please i was just interested we have a little more time yeah sure yeah so because i i wanted to make sure we finish on um a kind of positive or at least semi-semi-optimistic there and i agree because i i had a technology business back in the 90s and i missed that optimism that we had then with technology i missed that sort of slightly naive optimism we had actually but you know my question to you would be you know what is it that gives you hope for the future with technology or indeed what is it that you're most excited about instead of the technologies that are coming downstream oh gosh um i mean i'll tell you i um as far as things that are in the works that i know about um a lot of them aren't necessarily that exciting but um i think some small safe version of fusion power might start to work in the next uh period and turn out to be uh extremely helpful um i'm uh i'm really um i've i've done some work adjacent to uh it's a funny thing if you talk about biotechnology particularly as it relates to food there's a kind of a um [Music] a natural and understandable revulsion from a lot of folks who are who remember how we made so much of our world sick from um overly refined foods very recently and there's a skepticism about that and i think that that's well founded and yet and yet and yet um if you look at where the peak population is going and what's happening with arable land and they available to fresh water we definitely need technology as part of the mix and in the rest of the century i'm really excited about some of the things i've seen coming up and i'm i'm interested oh i don't know like uh vegan cultured meats and things like that are getting better and that kind of stuff i think could really make a difference in the world and i i um and then but then as far as fun stuff um oh god i'm always designing things in my head i i i've dreamed a lot lately about some new safe form of giant original that could be get around the world faster than old irritables but be safer and much safer and much much greener and i think there's like all this room for things like that that could be really a benefit but just in terms of pure fun which is actually what a lot of people want from technology these days i i kind of feel like it'd be too cliche and opportunities for me to talk about the future of virtual reality because i've certainly done that enough for many lifetimes already but uh but even so you know i still i'm so excited about this idea of a technology not virtuality for gaming or or something but rather for expression if you could have a virtual world where people could be co-inventing the world while they're inside as a new form of communication that that that vision still excites me and i think could still be quite wonderful and oh god there's there's a lot more um [Music] i'm really um [Music] oh i don't even know where to go with it i mean you know i live i live in the in the tech community in northern california and so i have friends working on all kinds of crazy things one of my friends i mean i used to work with iran but one of my friends is working on a a non-invasive way to read and write neuron states with light and sound and there's another i have other people trying to do uh translations of pet communication and all these crazy things i don't know which of this which of this stuff makes sense or might work out but i i think in principle this idea of a future world in which the new possibilities that are really kind of delightful to explore yeah and are and are not cruel and are not self-destructive and they're not stupid i i think i think that it's we should hope for that world we should expect it do you know there's almost no science fiction now that isn't terribly dark yeah there's certainly nothing there's certainly no science fiction movie with a budget that isn't terribly dark wow we have to we have to get away from yeah wow never even yet you're so true and i no i'm just i'm just really glad we got to connect around because i'm doing a series i'm interviewing i interviewed sir nigel shadbolt um on data and i'm also interviewing tristan harris in a couple of days as well and i'm just really pleased you got to connect because i'm and i'm such a big fan of your work and i just love the way that you bring philosophy into this discussion in such a meaningful way because i think that actually helps to anchor it in you know what is important about civilization and what actually binds us together as humans so you know i really appreciate your time and i'll send you the video and everything so if you do ever want to use it feel free and i'll i'll drop you and cheryl cheryl isn't it yes an email as soon as the piece is ready to go live and also i really hope you you and your family stay safe i've had a few of my friends actually impacted by the fires as well yeah um it's uh the thing is it's every year now this is what's extraordinary it's uh it's really becoming this annual season of terror um one of my friends moved to napa from um and his entire home in a state which is destroyed and it was you know it's but like you said it's becoming it's becoming an annual action i know um i know many people who've lost their homes and and uh uh and people who died you know i i it's really this is really not good and and it's um it's not entirely preventable there's no way to make our world entirely safe for us but there's some layers of of um of negligence here on a grand scale uh especially regarding the climate and a little bit regard regarding development and various things in california um anyway i say hi to chris tristan and uh uh all the best to you thank you and and thank you again for your time and uh hopefully and look forward hopefully to speak again at some point as well all right thank you have a great day thank you bye-bye

Channel: Thought Economics

Views: 3,689

Rating: 4.9642859 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft, Social dilemma, Social media, psychology, Human behaviour, Humanity, Technology

Id: UfJjtbI7KOI

Length: 30min 47sec (1847 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021