Jaron Lanier on the Future of Our Digital Lives

thank you thank you very much Robert welcome down to London we are really here which is important thing to say at the outset Jaron really is the father of virtual reality and reading his new book the dawn of the new everything it's been a very interesting journey for me a bit of a VR virgin if we're honest and Jaron was slightly upset by that notion in the green room before today's Halloran sorry before this as of something of a VR virgin myself and only seeing this via my children walking around with weird masks on it's very interesting to hear Jaron who is not only a pioneer of VR but also has maintained a voice against the mainstream of Silicon Valley or at least part of the mainstream of Silicon Valley which makes huge Ahrens such an interesting thinker and also the notion that VR is not simply an extension of web 2.0 and of social media and that those companies that may wish it were or will be should maybe think a little bit harder about what they're actually trying to produce so down welcome to London thank you so much for coming thank you you head up just to explain to the audience who maybe haven't met you before or seen you speak before you head up Microsoft Research Lab for virtual reality and a mixed reality and also Jaron will touch on the differences between those things and how those will help you be named as times top 100 most influential and his books of course things like I'm not a gadget have been incredibly influential in the debate we are all having whether it's in the media in society about the role of Technology in the life we're going to live Jan I know you've often spoken of this but it is absolutely fascinating about you could we start off with your your childhood and your young life and your entry into this this world so early on before really anyone had had had Reif thought about where we are tell us a little bit about your family life and how that how about developed into an interest in VR and all those things that's a small question it is a question but these are all very small pocus oh gosh how do I start well I grew up in a little town in near the border of the United States and Mexico near El Paso Texas my parents were both european jews my mother was a survivor of a concentration camp and my father had lost most of his family in pogroms in ukraine and i think they just wanted to get as far away from this scary world as possible so i grew up as a really weird kid out of place i went to school on the mexican side so i actually attended a mexican elementary school he's just take a bus across everyday before there was that big beautiful wall and it was a charming place my mother then died when i was small in a car accident and I was very profoundly traumatized and I was um I felt so lonely I felt like just a kind of deep black loneliness and part of how I found my way out of it was with these fantasies of ways to reach across to other people's hidden minds that were hidden inside these funny sacks of skin these heads you know and I I was particularly moved by surreal art I used to stare at Hieronymus Bosch and I thought you know what an astonishing thing that somebody can create this artifact of something that's not real but indicates something that is real mentally something internal and I was just utterly fascinated by that as a path towards recovering lost connection you know and how did that lead on John to a sense of technology could allow you to bridge it's fascinating you talk about loneliness but I know she's getting into almost that surreal world what happened was when I was about I was in college early I was kind of a precocious kid and when I was oh I don't know a young teenager I ran across some of the reports of a researcher named Ivan Sutherland and just has anybody heard of Ivan Sutherland here okay well he's somebody should know about he invented computer graphics he invented interactivity on a screen so that that little thing in your pocket is essentially a descendant of his PhD thesis which which was in 1962 and so Ivan in the late 60s had made the first what we would call today overt reality headset he use different terminology but but similar he said that he was building a bridge to a virtual world which is a term that actually came from art criticism believe it or not from Suzanne Langer and art theorists from earlier in the in the 20th century and so I read this and I was so excited because I thought wow if you can just make an arbitrary world that's this thing that's this thing I've wanted and there wasn't an internet then so I used to just run to strangers on the street and show them this journal article and there's just like this really awkward fifteen-year-old kid and I just like stop you have to look at this we're all gonna share our dreams through this computer thing so I just a little while later it's actually only a few years later in my early 20s actually started the first what I called the virtual reality company and I thought virtual reality would be the term that made it social or like consensus reality and if it was social then people would see each other they could turn - fantastic birds and other creatures and then they would have this shared experience that might be a new frontier of connection so that's that's what it was for me but of course we have to pretend it actually was this industrial operation which it also was yeah that was always the core for me tell me those early days that you say I started in this but of course it wasn't like Silicon Valley looks like it does now what was Silicon Valley like in those early years and where you say you started wow I mean this is as you say an era when we were still grappling with the notion of the first Internet and just simply being able to look at information that leap into virtual reality was still a long way off yeah well when I showed up in Silicon Valley which was right at the start of the 80s it was already there it was already called Silicon Valley Apple and Microsoft were both 2 or 3 years old they were known there was already a sense of excitement a sense of the future and I fell in with what we called the hacker crowd the the the kids who were good with computers who were creating this new society and I have to say the feeling was very different back then there was a kind of a sweetness to it that I think is lacking now and in fact there was a disdain for money people who were seeking money were held in contempt I mean I remember one of my first conversations I had run into Steve Jobs and some people who work for him and then I was talking to a bunch of hackers there's a odd jobs you know he tried to work at Atari on this chip he didn't get anywhere so he decided to do stupid money stuff instead and to them it was this incredible fall from grace being a successful entrepreneur was like this lesser thing that somebody who couldn't hack would do just to be close to the real stuff the real hacking you know and so it's a very different it was it was a different culture it was very hippie ish which I guess I still retain it was it was very experimental it was very optimistic it was very silly it was very young yeah I mean I'm the way I ended up starting a company was not with any vision of oh I'm going to be an entrepreneur it was more Oh God it'll I'm afraid you'll get the wrong impression if I tell you these stories could you have to get you know get a balanced impression for meeting the whole book but when there was one all-night 24-hour sort of horrible greasy spoon eatery where we'd all gather and it had electrical outlets and so you know how today you go and you work in a in a in a place with your laptop well in those days the computers were huge they were like if you look at some of these speakers on this array here the computer monitors we're as big as two of those together and we'd actually haul these giant things in and then take over a whole table just to set up one computer and then work through the night and so there was this the guy who ran this place would be behind his counter with the spear trying to spear the routes he would shriek and we started rooting for the routes and they got named so they were never caught and so we were talking about all this fort reality stuff and I was ready building I had made a successful video game said royalties from evading him so all the money went into building where true reality prototypes but without any business or anything it was just this garage project and so one day one of my friends said you know if any of us put half the effort that this guy puts into spearing the rats we could like build these companies like why are we just sitting here and so it was actually this Raths peering thing that inspired us yeah - yeah yeah of course I think these days this fearing of the rats is trapping you all and behavior modification loops through social media so in a sense the the metaphor persists we didn't get there what but when did you when did you get it as a sense John that that was changing that actually it was the money men or the money makers or the people who could work out the business model for the work you were doing when did that mood that that that that notion of Silicon Valley start changing you know I think sometime around Google sometime around when Google started up because we up until that time we'd never had this feeling of it was always kind of a generous thing we're gonna give you these great tools we're gonna give you these things that you can use and then Google see this is so Google was saying no actually we're gonna keep your data and we're gonna organize society we know how to improve and optimize the world I should say I'm not speaking ill of Google on a personal level my friends and I sold them a company a part of me is there they're my friends actually really like Google but there was a very strange thing that happened around the time that Google started which is uh there was this very thick very intense absolutely inviolable feeling in the hacker community that things should be free free music free email and if anyone suggested well if there was even the most miniscule postage I would discourage spam if there was even you know maybe we should give people a way to make a living since some day they might lose out to our automations and all that why don't we do that any notion of that kind was just viciously shut down people really wanted this free thing but the problem is that that project to make this kind of free service would still be embedded in this commercial world where people have to pay their rent and people were making companies and it was it was a month it was a capitalist context so by default the business plans that are left if you make everything free are pretty indirect and strange and so you can say advertising but then here's the thing if your Google started out placing outs but if you're constantly measuring somebody and then changing the feedback they get you've you crossed this threshold where you're no longer doing advertising and now you're in the world of behaviorist manipulation you're doing direct behavior modification incrementally and to call that advertising completely misses the point but the problem is that companies like Google were given no choice that was the option available to them so I think what was the funding they offered and the returns they needed to make and then fact that deep you know done did you not need to build businesses that were profit if you're gonna build a business it has to be profitable I mean that's the deal you know that why else would you do it I mean why would so so the thing is we were saying yes build profitable businesses but no don't sell anything it all has to be free so what you get then is is behaviorist manipulation I mean we we meaning the idealistic kind of left the hippie class of people gave them little choice so I mean I want I want that to be clear this is not like some evil scheme where they came we're gonna take over the world and manipulate everybody we you know it was actually more a very well-intentioned kind of sweet ideology that just backfired terribly that's my view of it and you were very critical then as we moved on on to the whole notion which is connected to to this item you've just made about web 2.0 and the notion of sharing data and this idea that this was somehow connecting the world and was a super good thing and social media you've talked about digital Maoism well what was it you meant by that and you've touched a couple of times already on this idea that they are modifying our behavior and that they they are sort of manipulating what people think they want so I started writing cautionary essays around 92 I was the timeline is I built this the first reality company in the 80s and then I left it in 1992 and that's where this this memoir cuts off and then shortly after that I started writing cautionary essays and if I may say so I wish they were bad essays I wish I was wrong I wish I had not been prescient because unfortunately some of these things which seemed rather dark and paranoid have come true almost you know very closely to what I what I wrote and I hate that I want to be wrong when I'm dark you know but the the what the the notion that concerned me was well first of all if you have little programs that are giving feedback to people and manipulating them those programs well as a matter of course cluster people into groups that oppose each other and this is just a natural optimization this is like this is just a thing that will happen it's it's not it doesn't have to be planned and so then you start organizing people into these opposing groups and then they become annoyed with each other they become more and more addicted more and more involved but then there's this other thing so I have I had a hypothesis called the PAC switch and so the notion is that people are similar to say coyotes or some other animals that can either function as loners or as members of packs and when that switch is turned inside of inside us and we feel we're a member of a pack our whole sense of perception our ethics our morality our personality changes and it becomes all about the pack and and what we must do is avoid setting that switch we must remain individuals in order to be decent to each other when we turn into a mob and this is what I meant by digital maoism what was interesting to me about some experiments on the left as well as on the right is there were occasions when people started with good intentions but they ended up with this horrible violence and these atrocities and I I suspect what's happening as they under appreciated this this switch that's inside all of us so the question I asked is if we start manipulating with these digital loops why won't we create social catastrophes of people turning on each other turning tribal why won't this destabilize society completely and this is what I fear is happening this is some of the outcome maybe we are seeing now do you think well ultimately of what you were writing in the 90s yeah it certainly appears to me to be a description of what's going on in the u.s. now yeah what was it in the is it the business model is the advertising model is the algorithms they use are they like betting company so they they have these heart-stopping moments so they are addictive you talked about they did you talk about the addiction yeah what is it that they are using a funny thing happened last week there was an interview of me published in the New York Times about this addiction thing and the next day one of the Facebook founder Sean Parker came out and said yeah actually we intentionally did that which was an open secret everybody has known that but now the record so if you wish to addicted creature you give them feedback in exchange for the actions you wish them to perform but slightly inconsistent feedback so that it's not too mechanical so they have to keep on grasping it how to get there to make the feedback more more consistent so if you have a rat in a behaviorist experiment and the rat is supposed to hit a button to get a treat sometimes it works sometimes it does and sometimes it's a little delayed and you have to vary it a little bit to get the rat super obsessed with how to really get this thing going and people find it hard to resist that and so if you set up a feedback loop with that quality you redic to people and this is something casinos know all about this is something Kahneman know all about and we formalized it into code or well you know Facebook did and some of the other social media companies and it it's a it's a legacy of behaviorist research in manipulating behavior and and this is something that can be done but should not be done we can't have a decent society we can't have people with their own volition we can't have a society that progresses we can't have a society based on empathy or kindness if people are constantly being manipulated from some central source no matter what type of source that is do you think it was a cynical act was it a cynical act to build a business cuz you said Google are your friends they bought one of your businesses they are you know they are people that have brought also abroad of course great wealth and to not just to themselves but to let people know I mean it's the most spectacular and quick wealth creation in history I mean if you look at the list of the world's wealthiest individuals now most of them especially the new ones are close to some digital hub of some kind you know that that's where the wealth is now I can't speak to whether it was cynical because I was not there I it's I suspect it was more sort of like kids goofing around and being sort of bad boys I'm not taking it too seriously and then it kind of took off a nice little stuff that what yeah I mean I think what happens is if you have a spectacular level of success especially when you're young you take it as some kind of message from the universe and maybe you lose your standards a little bit I'm not sure though I that in that I real I wasn't there so that one I don't really know about I can't speak to it and what about some solutions to that and what we could now do as users of these sites what is it that needs to to happen to break this relationship well I mean I think there's a few things that everyone is obligated to do and its work honestly it's not like it's not super easy okay I should make clear I'm speaking only for myself I mentioned that I have a connection with Microsoft when I'm out doing my books I have a very strict boundary and I say things that are definitely not Microsoft approved Microsoft owns a social network called LinkedIn and yet I'm about to tell you delete all your social media accounts just stop don't do it it's stupid stop doing it you think that you're just having fun watching your favorite whatever football team or keeping up with with relatives you're being watched you're being manipulated just stop doing it get off it figure out some other way to do those things you're smart but it is you don't have to do it but it's there a way is there a way though is it right where I've never been on one I don't face I just seem to be able to sell books I mean I don't I think this this whole notion that if you don't do it you'll be left out in the cold and you'll die it's wrong I think you all you have to do is simply stop and life is fine do you think that with [Music] but surely these social media companies or let's Facebook or weather orb or other technology companies have also brought great advantages to the world surely and and maybe from the West and maybe are slightly comfortable audience here maybe we can delete it but if you're a you're a campaigner in Syria and Facebook can actually link you to the world that was a very good thing well see what happens is there's a pattern to how this works and this is actually in a way we're getting into what I'm writing about in a follow-on book that isn't announced this isn't really in the present book but the pattern is that initially people who are trying to do good works and there are spectacular good works that occur over social media and I could talk about the me2 movement right now which i think is doing a lot of good but that one hasn't played out yet so let me talk about black lives matter from an earlier time okay so with black lives matter you had a social media campaign that really did raise awareness about a horrible phenomenon in the US were unarmed young black men typically or other other people of color would be end up dead after what seemed like a routine traffic stop and it just kept on happening and happening in various variations and so initially there was this extraordinary success of the social media aspect of black lives matter people got together they organized but the thing is while they were doing that and there's and I'm not in any sense questioning the validity of it and in fact I'll even go further and I'll say in the u.s. black Twitter as a social phenomenon itself as a sort of form of literature spectacular and beautiful and an amazing thing all of that is true the problem is that simultaneously with that the algorithms are classifying all these people who are participating in it as well as other people who are reacting and then gradually it turns those two groups against each other because if we can use them to annoy each other it increases engagement which is its prime directive so then a little later on suddenly black lives matter is turned into this thing that's used to annoy and engage this other group meanwhile other groups are used to annoy and engage black lives matter that all just happens as a matter of course the functioning of the algorithms whose job is to maximize engagement but then when people come along who are saboteurs who and there were this whole business of sort of bad actors is a really interesting thing there all kinds of bad actors the ones we're talking about now quite a bit are Russian intelligence services that wish to intervene in the US but they're also sometimes just nasty people weirdo rich people who want to prove they can change the world sometimes they're organized-crime interests that get involved in one way or another the metaphor I like for understanding the role of all of these bad actors is they're the gut bacteria of social media they're this other force that co-evolved with social media that provides a lot of energy and motion and momentum that wouldn't be there otherwise and so there's a codependence anyway when these bad actors come in they see that the algorithms are starting to divide people to increase engagement and then all they have to do is latch on that and they can make it worse and worse so suddenly black lives matter became a fulcrum for for harming the society for tearing it apart for making people crazy and paranoid for making no one trust anything no one know what's no one could tell it's true anymore everything became more and more crazy so despite the the validity and the beauty of the initial wave which is always there it's then followed up by something that's completely degrading and disruptive and ridiculous and disconnected from reality so the question is will this happen to the me2 movement now and the answer is yeah probably because that's how this works so there's a powder is a natural polarization a deliberate polarization well what is it okay let me ask you what engages you so if I if I come to you and I say oh what a pretty flower you might say oh that is a lovely flower and if I say hey that guy over there saying he wants to kick you engage you more like the potential for adversity the potential for social opposition is terribly engaging to this social species that we are it just gets us immediately so it just by the mere fact that it's the more engaged response it's the one that the algorithms end up choosing so turn off your social media let's say that doesn't influence the billions of people on social media immediately what are the solutions well maybe in here that's it that's a couple of thousands of kicks off it but but what about now you've talked about that they should actually as well things like you need to undermine the business model where we with micro payments with different systems for influencing how these algorithms and business models work so right now the first inclination of a lot of people is to take a regulatory approach and there there's probably a role for that but it seems to me the more intelligent initial approach would be to change the perverse incentives of the business model so if the current business model is you don't sell anything you don't pay anybody all of your business happens with unseen third parties we're paying to manipulate the people who are engaged with you if there's some alternative to that business model it should be pursued and the one I've been interested in is just you know pay people and expect to be paid like turn it into a business since that's what it is so one could imagine a future version of something like Facebook where you pay a very small fee because it really would be very small or if you're impoverished you could fall into a class where you pay no fee or something so how that's worked out but then you also have a chance to earn money so if you get a lot of traction you get followers or for whatever the measure is you can start earning back I think a fairly substantial number of people would end up with a nice income from that not everybody obviously it has to be a minority but so but the thing is if every service did that there'd be this distribution of different clusters of people who could make a living and I think that could create a society where a lot of people did very well for their authentic contributions and I think that's a more dignified and balanced and creative and future looking society than some sort of crazy thing where we say we pretend you're all useless even though you aren't and then give you all a basic income so you're Ward's of the state and then just tell you to shut up which is the fantasy and I think it's a horrible vision and you've taught as well about in your early career in virtuality this sort of this sort of hippie notion this may be left notion but then interestingly you have been very critical of what may be some slightly more ignorant of the systems that are used things like Wikipedia and also open source how how does that fit into this picture you know you know cuz Wikipedia was was meant to be this really nice thing you know Jimmy Wells is a nice guy he tried his best he was kind of just you know being able to go to build a system that allow people to share expertise um I have to say that at this late date when we're seeing the democracies of the world slowly succumbed to tribalism and turned into autocracies and as we're seeing that my old criticisms of the Wikipedia and open source seem quaint don't they I mean I at the time what I was concerned with Wikipedia was the promotion of a it's it's the ratio of the personal point of view like instead of having an author you say no this is the official article describing this topic so there's a thing called the Encyclopedia Britannica and an encyclopedia Americana they might have different articles for the same topic but they announced their perspective and since this notion of a global perspective is a fiction and dangerous in many fields it the Wikipedia also had the effect of shutting down creative communication in some fields where there could be objectivity for instance the practically the day that Wikipedia took off a whole bunch of people who were doing really creative presentations of math online suddenly lost traffic and then we ended up with this very nerdy sort of standard math resource that I think excludes people so I thought it was a well-intentioned experiment with some good qualities but also something of a failure I should say that shortly after my criticisms were published both of the founders of the Wikipedia endorsed them so it's not like I was some sort of weird critic off on the side if they Wade lijjat had a tendency towards monopoly so Wikipedia starts sucking out other org and Google and Facebook this tendency to monopoly which is was oddly contradictory to the world you started off in when there's this notion of let a thousand ideas flourish you know people can pick them yeah so um digital network effects do create these very intense monopolistic outcomes and it's totally avoidable but you know and and this is actually where the economics comes in so if if your only business model is to manipulate people then what you your your you must engage engage engage if your business model is selling them something then you might find some niche where you engage only some of them in a very special way that's highly profitable you don't have to be monopoly anymore so this sort of strange thing is that if we deny people access to a normal marketplace of goods and services and demand that they function within the behavior modification loop Empire you naturally will create monopolies because that's that's the only Avenue available to them sometimes feel a little bit of a lonely voice if you look at Amazon Google Facebook and their power and their ability to constantly be telling us what it is we need and then to predict what it is we might need in the future or do you still feel optimistic well let me be clear about something this this business model that I'm decrying is actually a rather rare one so if you believe that there's a top five big tech companies to be concerned with only two of them engage in this so an Amazon Apple and Microsoft do a little bit of it but they primarily sell goods and services and they're all somewhat diversified it's really Google and Facebook and face Facebook primarily who do this and and the result of that is they've had very little success diversifying so they're they're massively addicted themselves to their own addiction engine so you know when you have a company that's like 90% making their money from this one thing it's a little troublesome for them in the long term I would think there are other companies that do this like Twitter snap but I have to say like Twitter is wobbly it's not even a great business plan I mean it's really a very localized it's I mean Facebook is a big company with a lot of profit but it's it's a very singular thing there are plenty of reasons to be interested like you could be upset for legitimate reasons with all the other companies but that's it but they're not for this reason this is you know like there's a little bit of this that happens in the Amazon sales machine the way it runs its reviews it's doing a little bit of that to sell stuff but it's so much it's not such people isn't it two wards it's starting to nudge people towards making different choices if you like that you would like this yeah it's using them to buy a different model of TV or something this is not going to tear civilization apart right you know so I so as far as this discussion is going you can there are I'm sure legitimate criticisms of the other ones but this is really very specific to just a handful of companies tell us a little bit about virtual reality and mixed reality and virtuality and give us some views about the way this is going to develop because that is the optimistic message that you have a sense of where VR can kind of challenges which I must admit I didn't understand until reading your books and some of your interviews that that you believe that VR can be a solution somebody's what rather than just the exacerbation of somebody's issue I can't believe you've never had occasion to try it no I know that's terrible and I mean I wrestle I'm gonna get the BBC BBC as this big VR afraid II haven't yep get with it man - I'm too boring doing economic spreadsheets all I need - yeah I'll do it baby yeah okay actually how many people in here I've done VR pretty regular not just once but pretty regularly that's a small number but you're in EM Britain know we're still horse and carts outside yeah yeah well the thing is I mean but the audiences are literate and so in the US all the hands would be up and I would I don't know I mention the EM Forster and I mention iam forced her by the way because in something like 110 years ago he wrote a novella called the machine stops that essentially just described the the dilemma we're in the one I just described with remarkable clarity so long ago so if you want to prescient warning go to your own writers but anyway but today's the ultimate battle so let me let me do the optimistic thing maybe I'll start with a very simple question is there such a thing as making a virtual reality system that's good enough for all time you make goggles that are so good that they outpace the retina for a number of detectable points you make very high quality sensors and I won't go into the details since you haven't even tried it but but basically they're all these components so so some people say if you make all this stuff good enough then you're done you have a VR system that will fool people but see I think that's wrong because I think what happens is with each stage of development in VR people get used to it and then their powers of perception increase and stay ahead so the thing is that the big mistake we make for better or for worse and it goes both ways is to think of ourselves as fixed quantities the optimism we need to have in ourselves and the remarkable thing about people is our elasticity that we can grow and change we can learn to perceive in new ways we can become smarter with experience so as you start to use the latest VR you start to you get it you know I have an 11-year old daughter who's done a lot of VR and she's really not impressed anymore and I think that's great you know she does she end up doing it no she still enjoys it but she's not impressed right like there has to be some really beautiful or good design the the thing itself is really old to her and I see this a lot with with VR use and I think that's actually a very positive quality so what I think we have in order for our in order to overcome the illusions of Technology we have to engage in it in such a way that we learn and grow and see through the illusions let's say I'll compare it to magic which reality is kind of like a silicon version of stage magic if you like so one thing to say is that the difference between a charlatan and a magician is that the magician announces the trick and social media has failed to announce its tricks they had the shamans yeah one of the things I love about vert reality is that there are these ugly awkward headsets they announce the trick so this this this big thing on your head is the announcement it makes it ethical I really worry about it becoming some little thing where you might not realize it's there I think that might be unethical so Google Glasses is not you know started by my friend who I sold the company with yeah yeah I don't like the Google glass design I think trying to make it disappear is ridiculous it also doesn't work because like the more you're trying to hide it the more it stands out like a pimple or something it's like oh yeah you're trying to hide that thing but there's this thing on your face it's ridiculous like just wear the big awkward thing look ugly it's okay and then but but so the trick should be announced but the other thing is if you know how a trick works you can still enjoy a magician right because there's an art to it it's not so much that that knowing the trick is everything it's it's the presentation and VR should be the same way like people have to become educated and also there could be something very similar to social media that doesn't have the perverse manipulation incentive at the core of it that could achieve all the good social media does without this horrible backlash that always comes afterwards this is all very doable but it can't be done from a central planning station you can say oh Silicon Valley fix this for us I mean the way this can work it's just like with democracy people have to take responsibility to become literate in a new way if they're going to use the technology at all so for God's sakes if you just can't find it in yourselves to delete all your social media accounts then you must take it upon yourself to really learn how it works learn how the addiction cycle works learn how their manipulation works become more aware of it if you can't make one of those two choices you're becoming a drone and you're not fully functioning as a citizen in the new world and and I mean I have to be very blunt about that those are the choices available to you there are no others do you worry down there that do you worry that VR itself is also isolating and can also when I see my two children with their headsets on we wonder well guess what headsets and you've never tried yes I know this is embarrassing anyway oh but I'm you know we could we can take this outside join later but when I see my children and I wonder why are they outside playing with you know wooden train sets I mean they are 17 and 30 and so Asli that's not that interesting but you know I used to play with Lego with my mates and they're sitting there playing whatever it is with their friends but no friend I appeal to your kids you give your dad a demo already well show you here let's move on from my complete failure onto my case but you know what I mean it's this notion that you have great artistry in explaining how VR can touch us again with the notion of our artistry and you touched on surrealism at the beginning of our talk but it's not VR itself and also mixed reality essentially isolating because you you closed that the goggles that you can see close yourself off so I want to address that in the book I describe how I early on had this completely electrifying luminous realization that this could be this path to shared dreaming that I dreamed of when I was in my early teens and it was it kept me going for a few years and then I had exactly the opposite revelation so how many of you have heard of Norbert Wiener okay that's pretty good so Norbert Wiener is one of the first generation of computer scientists possibly the first person to write well about computer science even though it's it from the present perspective it's a little dense and hard to get into in his vocabulary and framework er a little difficult but writing starting in the 40s he was concerned with exactly the problem we have here of creating control loops with computers that would manipulate people one of his books is called the human use of human beings which foresees this problem at the end of it he has this very comforting note that in order for the thing he's describing to actually be problematic we'd have to have devices with us all the time that we'd interact with frequent frequently that would provide us with some kind of feedback and they'd all have to attach to some kind of global information system even without cables and that that was unfeasible so this is purely a thought experiment and you read this from 1948 and it's it's it's terrifying and tragic so what I realized is that if if what we're concerned about is that you could use technology to put somebody inside a skinner box or inside a behavior modification device that would involve measuring the person and providing them with feedback and what by definition is the technology that does the most precise measurements of what's going on with a person and provides the most comprehensive feedback why it's exactly virtual reality so what I realized is that this thing I look forward to that I viewed as a kind of almost like an existential solution to my crisis something I've just profound beauty and importance to me could also be the evilest invention of all time like it actually has both identities and it continues to and unfortunately the fiction of vert reality has a bit been bit a bit more attuned to this very valid negative possibility and I'm thinking of say the Matrix movies as an example but there are many other examples we might also mention the feeley's if you remember this this whole this whole notion that people will people will choose to live in this vr world rather than to live and to tackle the real world around them with may they not well I mean what I hope is that so this gets back to this this issue if people are able to change and grow in response then they'll stay ahead of the technology and they won't but if they're if they're addicted and they're put in a loop based on central control from somewhere else and then yes we could have a very negative scenario so what it all boils down to is where's the locus of control are you in charge of your own life or is there some central planner who's in charge of what you see what you do and right now we've sort of tended to say well it's some Silicon Valley company it's not a government so that must make it okay but the the general structure is simply not acceptable it's not survivable so I virtuality can go either way the way I've been thinking about it lately is in a way we're quite lucky that we're facing these issues during a period of kind of really crude digital technology because right now I mean what you get with social media or really anything you can get on your phone for the most part is really pretty crude it's like as messages and pictures and videos and an occasional little VR thing on your phone that's very minimal because you can't really interact through it so this is a super low tech crude version of digital interaction and so it's not very intense yet and it still is bad enough to disrupt the world's democracies so what we should we need to figure this out before it gets more intense and if I may I'd like to foresee a thought that I bet some people have which is if there's so much peril why don't we turn away from it why are we going down this path and here there's a very good answer which is we're compelled to from the earliest state that we started to make technology from when we started making fires and the you know in planting seeds every new technology has been absolutely essential in order for compassionate reasons so that there would be fewer infant deaths let's say and and yet each one created its own new problems and so once we go down this path we're compelled to continue to improve there's no way to just get to some static level of Technology and say we're done it just doesn't work that way there's this constant of sort of back and forth the sort of a dialectic of technological investment advancement that you simply cannot withdraw from and survive and and this business of having better digital communications better way of visualizing complexity better way of better ways of interacting is is compulsory it's not it's not an option so we have to figure out a way and this this is an interesting question that might not seem so to you but if anyone wants to argue about it we can do in a question time yeah so so we must go down this path but we have to get ourselves in we have to remove the perverse incentives and try to come up with some structure that's survivable before it gets really intense kind of saucy a final question before well there's gonna be one little interlude who's gonna be an unusual one but before we get to questions as well do you think that the Facebook's of this world the Google's of the world will get what you would suggest is their social responsibility to actually change or is it up to us to enforce that change on them Mark Zuckerberg or do you think he's many people say it's not a bad person well you know I I know some of the other early Facebook people like Sean Parker and Peter Thiel but I've never met Zuckerberg so but all my sense of him from my my indirect sense is that he's a perfectly nice person so I would expect him the only way for this sort of transition to happen is in concert everybody has to work together so if if Facebook just tells everybody oh from now on you're gonna pay for your subscription won't work out some way you get paid I think a lot of people say you know I think that would be but if if people want it at the same time that Facebook does it there's a way to nudge the whole world together I think that's feasible and if you say oh no that's that's too hard such a things never happened I just want to remind you that very recently this hall would have been filled with cigarette smoke very recently the speed outside would have been covered with litter very recently the world was different and we all just decided to change it and we did this is something people can do we've done it before we can do it now that's an optimistic note to finish off so before I come to questions now it's not often I can I can I can say this you're not only a tech an amazing tech thinker and also doer but also you have been a goatherd at state your service true yes and a midwife midwife's assistant oh ok not quite as good as this not bad crucial distinction believe me and also you are a great player of ancient instruments and I believe if I'm polite enough to you you might be encouraged to play the lower Asian mouth organ before this fabulous audience yes that is correct and you have indeed been sufficiently wide I just Segway it into that so yeah there's this instrument I sometimes like I like to play music when I'm the public events and this one is generally a pretty effective one and I can get it on carrion which is important these days so okay this is someone I don't know this is the size of a bustle the size of a small I haven't played this either just like VR I'm done that there's another thing I'm done where does this thing come from Laos no I mean on the stage not necessary which country there it is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] questions gentlemen here we'll start with sorry I'm shouting with others it could have been ever excited with the old mouth woman there is there is a microphone coming down could we get some microphones down here it better be great oh it's not me through water start we'll start up this negative you've got someone at number three yeah let's go yeah hi Jaron and it's really interesting I suppose my my question is given some of the I won't say paranoia dozen teachers some of the practicalities around what you're talking around in terms of social media how far down the rabbit hole do you think we're gonna end up going with the introduction of quantum computing and how far away do you think that is oh god quantum computing question I feel this might exclude some people in the audience but well we're taught does everybody know what we're talking about so there's a kind of computer that was formalized by touring once again local reference and it's it that that abstraction describes every computer you've used your phone and everything else but there's this other sort of a computer that could exist that uses the principles of quantum effects and the the way this is the way this works let's say you have a bunch of particles and each of them might be one way or another way they have different properties like spin and stuff there's only a probability that some combination of those properties will be true provided they're connected together and a certain particles are connected in a certain way and what but the number of probabilities is very large because there's one probability for each possible combination and so if you're very very tricky you can actually use that extended set of probabilities as a new kind of computer memory but you have to be very tricky indeed but hypothetically we might be able to build these things so that we can perform much more elaborate computations because there's all this extra memory from this range of probabilities it's a very strange idea there are a lot of different ideas about how to do it Google's doing this one where they put a bunch of quantum bits together and they all kind of find their way to a balance together which is called a never mind I won't go into that and we're doing this other one where we get them to type Microsoft we're doing this one where we get them to tie little knots together so it's in logically it so anyway they're all these different ways to do it it might be able to do crazy stuff like solve problems that are currently inaccessible break codes that you know all kinds of stuff wait a few years to see if this thing is really working I mean like I it's kind of exciting right now a lot of the basics are starting to work does it have anything to do with virtual reality yeah sure I mean sure he could make really interesting virtual worlds with it I'm sure we can make all kinds of fantastic things it's it's just a bit early I you know what I found with technology is that there's some visions you can have far in advance and then there's other ways that the particulars present themselves as you get closer and I think with quantum stuff we've all been talking about it for decades there's all these fantastic predictions we're getting so close to getting some sense of the particulars that I think we should just shut up now and find out what it's actually like to the degree we can get it to work we're very close to having some answers but it basically just boosts computer power hugely if it could be made to work I mean I interviewed Satya Nadella here and he said the quantum mechanic imputing was one of the big things that Microsoft would be pushing on because it could end that kind of Moore's law all they've been living with us so long and actually changed substantially the power of computing in terms of creating right but it'll be very quirky it won't make every kind of computation faster it'll be very quirky particular ones and so there so it'll have a very particular quality or deaths I think that's the most likely outcome okay question Donna hi so assuming that staggering level of incompetence continues and that we're not able to correct the systems currently in play what does the decline look like and what is the safest sort of route for an individual to take to try and navigate it yeah that's a that's a rather dark question I will point out that many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Silicon Valley routinely like if we're just meeting they'll say some horrible things one of them is so have you got that back-up plan in New Zealand together and I'm like no we can't cut a New Zealand like our responsibility is to stay here and make this work like New Zealand is a fine place but that's that we can't treat it as some kind of escape hatch so I we must make this work I don't know how difficult or horrible the path towards it will be for the moment the trolls are winning for the moment the trolls have destabilized my country terribly but I want to point out that we have faced much more difficult problems in the past and come through you know like for all the problems we face now at least so far I mean I don't know where this will go it could get worse of course I would imagine that Mike just because the way things go it's likely to get worse before it gets better but would it get as bad as I don't know world war two I don't I don't think so and we made it through that right so I'm not optimistic in the sense that problems will be easy and that no one will be heard and that it will be a breeze and all we have to do is just suddenly have the right idea and the problem I don't think it's like that I think we're actually facing a real difficulty my sense is that they're a handful of techie problems this century that will be very hard to solve that we simply must solve so climate change carbon footprint is one of them nuclear proliferation is another one dangerous of biotech is another one and this is another one of those so we have multi which makes it harder to deal with each one individually and yet we must we simply must I mean I I simply won't entertain the thought that we won't we will period that's it we'll do it but I think it'll be difficult someone the back there did you say is there someone there oh sorry I have oh yeah sorry Mike hi and how do you think virtual reality should regulate acts in real life that would be illegal such as rape or snarf or pedophilia yeah I this is a really this is a really tricky one a friend of mine in in the States just put out a movie where at the end all these characters eat a baby you probably know what I'm talking about and I was like you made a movie where people you ate a baby what are you doing and and so you know it's a metaphor for how we're mistreating the earth okay so the it's the difficulty with media is that context is everything and although it might be hard to construct I'm a little concerned about creating specific prohibitions on things because we don't know how to describe what we're really talking about that should be prohibited and yet at the same time Oh God in this but I have to say something which is that our particular tech culture has been kind of overrun largely I think because of the phenomenon I was discovered I was discussing just now I think it's been quite overrun with a kind of this sort of crude and [Music] reductionist and sort of insecure version of masculinity that I really reject that we see in things like the well gamergate if you know what that is and I think it's turned into the alt right and it's a I think what it is is it's what happens to masculinity when it's being manipulated by real modification live you become like really nervous and kind of paranoid and kind of like jittery and it's also known sometimes as the snowflake persona and there's I think we see it in our president in America we see it in college students and kids sometimes it's it's the personality outcome but anyway since that's become so powerful I am very strongly tempted just to reject my impulse to not try to regulate and say no actually right now maybe just in this circumstance we should because playing with the stuff is too dangerous and I have to tell you you've asked a hard question that I struggle with every day I think it is a really tricky one I've seen some things invert reality that I don't think should have been there one of them was sprung on my daughter once in a way that was truly offensive and damaging and and and and just on some service that somebody had done in a sort of a sadistic way and I feel very upset about it [Music] so you know it's this is a really tricky thing I do believe quite strongly that [Music] the first duty is to fix the incentives rather than regulate so if you ask why are all the why are there all these horrible like terrorism videos and whatnot on YouTube why is there all this all the false that the fake news which I prefer to call [ __ ] posting which is the term of art used by the people who pay for it is can I say that here your a lot said yeah yeah okay so sorry but it is actually the term of art that's what it's called and and the thing is it's because the underlying incentive structure is for so-called engagement and evil engages you know it just does if you're scared if you're offended if you're worried about your kids if you're worried about your partner these things really engage you so therefore they're selected for so I do believe that if the incentive was changed that would at least be a first line of defense to reduce the the occurrences of these things I have I not a researcher in this particular field but I have friends who've studied this question of whether violent video games or pornography etc tend to have an what effect they have on behavior subsequently and what's really interesting is that it's not a simple answer with people who seem to have certain pre-existing situations it can it can lead to worse and worse behavior and we've unfortunately since we also have a gun culture in the u.s. we've seen horrible horrible outcomes from that in other cases it seems to be just a sort of a strange aesthetic thing for a person that doesn't really correspond to behavioral changes just like people who like horror movies or you know and and so the process so anyway you've asked a very difficult question I'm question officer came from quite a lot what's your thought on on how the technology the social media technology world deals with some of those issues not not very well but I want to use VR a couple of times so but my hunches and the research I've seen in relation to I don't think it was the NSPCC but other related companies that look at pedophilia entities that look at pedophilia have shown it does it isn't a way for pedophiles to let out what they need to let out it encourages it by normalizing it so I suspect that l-cut tech culture and governments will respond too late to this and that it will be a problem yeah because it is a very difficult thing to regulate yeah this is a this is a big issue I mean I thank you because there is this issue of masculinity in Silicon Valley yeah and that the place is run or lots large parts of Silicon Valley are run by a certain type of masculine character bullying misogynistic sometimes and it has led to a development of of certain types of contact yeah that's absolutely correct and it's one of the worst things I mean I really do you put it down to that it has that Silicon Valley is such a male dominate well I think it has a little bit to do with the technology being so closely aligned with a certain kind of obsessive cognitive and an insecure cognitive style I I I hate to say it this way because I don't want it to reflect poorly on people on the spectrum but it does have like a little toe in the spectrum and there's a there's a kind of a oversimplification of the world and Yanks it's hard stuff yeah hello yes sorry I just wanted to kind of follow up from that question because I feel like really what it's tapping into is this bigger idea of I guess censorship and technology and the responsibility that tech brands really have because I was reading the article the other day which is talking about how Twitter's regulations had gone from protecting free speech to protecting users from emotional harm and that transition and I wonder where you see that going next and how you think tech brands can because you know emotional safety of users of really important things so how do you what's next for so they can finally how can they protect their users while at the same time protecting free speech so I think the answer looks approximately like this I I don't like the feeling that we keep on going to a very small number of big tech companies on the west coast of the United States and saying oh great tech companies protect us from this and that like you need to protect us from the bullies you need to protect us from the pedophiles need to protect us from the terrorists need to protect us from from the Russian manipulators need to protect us from the fake news people because at a certain point we're asking them to run our culture and I think there is a better way and and and I'm sorry to sound like a broken record on this but if instead of having free services controlled by these central authorities whether they be you know that are companies like Facebook or Twitter if instead there was a monitor monetized system then there would be a role for intermediaries to survive within that system so instead of just going to the big wide world of the whole internet you would have a multitude of intermediary some of whom would become trusted and so the metaphor I'd make to this is that right now somebody can print a hard flyer saying horrible things and throw it on the street or paste it up but it won't get much distribution because most people so you know read legitimate newspapers on paper even though paper can be used to distribute all the most awful things and so what's happened is there's been an itch for people newspapers magazines whatever to generate reputations to become trusted and to become curators right instead of one central authority like the government being asked to do that which i think is a horrible idea so if we had a monetized Internet then I think there would be a niche for more of these intermediate curators a variety of them would be able to build reputations instead of one centralized all-powerful source that we petitioned and asked to run our culture for us I'm really quite concerned about this tendency of demanding that the tech companies enforce things because as well intentioned as each case is and as important as each one is every time we give them this Duty we're also giving them more power we're telling them we think you Facebook should decide what you know how to run the culture and even if in each case what we're saying is absolutely defensible and and and you know absolutely beyond dispute in that case cumulatively we're asking them to take more and more power over the culture now remember facebook is owned and controlled by one person even though it's a public company so who knows who's gonna inherit it what if Vladimir Putin inherits it then we've given it all this power and and this is what I mean to use Russia as another example whenever there's super centralized power it tends to get worse over time Bolsheviks were cuter than Stalinists let's say okay there's there's this path where power corrupts that it gets worse and worse so as we as we're trying to fix these problems by petitioning the big Silicon Valley companies we're also concentrating their authority implicitly and I think we're setting ourselves up for even worse problems in the future so I'm really uncomfortable with this pattern now and so you say well the Silicon Valley company should be more responsible but should they I mean what should actually happen is they're shipping niches for other people there should be a a world of intermediaries to build reputations and this notion that we're depending on these centralized sources is is crazy I mean would you like it becomes similar to a state media at that point and jaren I've got a question for my children it's about Google and the search and the commercialization search where do you think the solution is in the future because I know that when my kids look on Google they just get commercialized search they're not really finding out half the world that they should and how do we change that this is so crazy yeah so basically on Google what you do is you get one Wikipedia entry and Wikipedia doesn't make enough money from that they're struggling so that's that's an injustice and then you get a zillion stores a tenth of a penny per search would you be willing to pay that but if you got it like a five dollar bill at the end of the month given the volume that Google makes a very small billing cycle for for their services would completely overwhelm what they call the advertising market so it'd be better for them better for they're shareholders and then all you do is you say I'm paying you I demand actual results and not a bunch of commercial nonsense and it that seems like just a more intelligent solution let me see that yeah hi I wonder what you thought of the similarities and differences with the Chinese tech companies oh yeah that's really interesting you know what happened as China was looking at what's happening in Silicon Valley and they were like yeah this is great this is what we want and so the the Chinese tech companies look a lot like Silicon Valley companies I mean if you go to visit I don't know 10 cent or something these these companies feel like Google and Facebook they are closer to the state than the American versions but they have a similar amount of power they have they do enforce content they do they do you know and the way they enforce it is possibly something we would like sometimes and often something that I think is unconscionable they're terrible on the history of TM on men they're terrible on Tibet and many other issues and I think it's a injustice to the people of China but that's what they have and I have to say we gave them the model it's not like somebody was reading Marx and saying oh yeah we should build this information system it was it was really they were they were copying us you know so I I don't know where that goes in China I'm really interested in that hi first of all thanks for the talk is very informative you talked a lot about manipulation of behavior and you share your anxieties about centralization of content or idea whether the authority is state or cooperate but I feel like I do commit correct me if I'm wrong but I feel like there's a sense of individualization of a problem that is fundamentally systemic because the solutions you propose which are I'm in knowing thing in no way am I saying back is like individuals should be aware about these things we should maybe turn off or like hey like it's been less time on social media and you know take the initiative to change to change our behavior but how much of these is possible without challenging fundamentally the logic of say the economy because I've I think the most systemic of solutions that you have proposed is sort of in a way extending the market model through the whole internet monetizing it as you say but that doesn't challenge the logic fundamentally that you need to make profit and what say Facebook do they the algorithm is designed in a way to like for ad revenues or whatever like they need these ways to generate profit that sustains their business and without challenging how businesses work just broadening it and having more actors can can is that strong enough to like prevent the wave of monopolization from happening and is there really a sustainable solution well you know what happened I feel that our period now is somewhat similar to the gilded ages of the late 19th century in early 20th century that unfortunately preceded world wars where there was an untenable concentration of Monopoly wealth and influence in that case around things like railroads and resource natural resources and so transportation resources and in our case it's around information services and eventually after these horrible wars we ended up with the regime that created this comfortable period of improved circumstances for vast number of people and it included a regulatory part which was antitrust and other things and it included social programs that included us just societal change and widespread education all kinds of things some kind of you know some kind of multivalent program of that kind ought to be able to come to pass beyond this that's much better so I don't believe that monetizing the internet by itself would be some sort of panacea that would solve everything I just think that if you have such if you have a monopoly of perverse intentions at the core no amount of regulation or correction is gonna undo that that's just the first step that you have to take so I viewed as a first step not a last step and I I really believe it actually be better for everybody this isn't an attack on the companies I think it's I think we need big tech companies actually really like big tech companies but I think this would make them better I think this would make them more sustainable and it would be more positive for everybody involved you may have answered this but we regulate addictive drugs we regulate addictive services like gambling do you think we should regulate addictive algorithms yeah and you know the good thing in this case is that we can define them more clearly basically if there is a feedback route from measurement of you that affects the so called customized or whatever feed and if anybody can pay to influence that that is precisely the thing to outlaw so I think we can we can detect it we and I think it should be outlawed I mean we can't do it instantly because we need to give everybody a chance to come up with other ways of doing things but I think it I think that's where we should end up I think that that's a that's the government to do well I think by whatever means presumably government it might vary in different parts of the world but but that should be considered an immoral and unethical configuration that should not exist I would see hi there thank you so much for the presentation was fantastic my first question I think it's mainly touched on before but you mentioned how you would have Internet services being monetized so that the ad revenue wouldn't be the driving force behind the algorithms that spy on us anymore but wouldn't the algorithms still remain there only a fundamental part of many of these systems for example Facebook you know suggesting you friends only knows that by looking at the people you your friends were currently and then looking at who their friends would and so on how would these algorithms be changed even if the systems have become monetized they would I mean the broad question is that they should cease to exist I think there are unethical algorithms but I think something very similar to them could be ethical I mean this is the thing is that you could have a version of all this stuff that's just like three percent different that could be much better so if if there's an algorithm that's so this thing about finding your friends my algorithm is that it then starts to do little experiments on so like let's say it's it's found a closed peer community for you and then it'll observe small differences where one member in that peer community sees something that's in bright green and has a certain kind of reference or something and then it'll notice that that got that got somebody upset then they'll start trying it on more of you and then I'm similar so in the very act of doing the suggestion you're entering into this cycle that then leads to more manipulation later even though and I want to emphasize I this might sound like these are dastardly effective algorithms they're actually terrible the truth is that this is all really crude and crappy and barely works it only works to the tiniest degree it's like but it's like compound interest like if it can have the slightest effect like it's a 1/10 of a percent difference but then it kind of accumulates over time it gradually starts to change society so we're not talking about some dastardly perfect mind control we're talking about a really clunky gradual system that's often absurd ridiculous but it works just barely enough to start to have an impact right at the back there yep not sure if this is exactly related but what do you think will be the effect if any of blockchain technology does everybody know what blockchain is really so you haven't you haven't heard of Nurit wiener you haven't heard of ivan sutherland and we don't battle we know they don't know about quantum Queen but they know about blockchain Oh god it's so strange so for those of you who don't know it's a scheme whereby you use encryption to keep track of a series of transactions in a way that no one person can falsify anything so it becomes like this public but still none centralized and yet sort of reliable way of keeping track of transactions and so it's used at the basis of these new crypto currencies like famously Bitcoin so I want to address blockchain and cryptocurrencies separately blockchain are more broadly using cryptography techniques as a way of sort of enforcing laws or principles without a central authority is potentially useful and there might be great use cases for it if the hope the method by which blockchain works is deliberately inefficient it spends a lot of computation to do things which is why it's hard to violate but given that we're facing a carbon footprint problem doing that level of increased computation on a global scale would be unacceptable so if we're gonna do it we'd have to find some sustainable way to do it and I've often imagined blockchain servers on the moon or something like that in all seriousness they like we just have to do it in a way that doesn't screw up the climate further so that's blockchain blockchain is simply a technique that has certain advantages and certain problems certain applications but it's well known now because it's just it's the thing that ties together the various cryptocurrencies and people want to be able to talk about them without being necessarily focused on just one of them like Bitcoin or aetherium or something and the problem here's this is actually a bit of a mystery to me every cryptocurrency that's been started to my knowledge and there might be some I don't know about because it's been exploding lately so I might be I might not have a comprehensive view but they're all Ponzi schemes they're all scams what happens is the people who start it create a bunch of fake wealth for themselves and other people turn into real wealth by speculating and the earlier you are in the better your chances of coming out but there's always that little chance you'll do well so later speculators once them all do well and this is called a Ponzi scheme but the thing is because it's cool it doesn't pop right away so it can go for a really really long time but it's terribly dangerous and terribly unfair to most people and it creates the spectacular wealth concentration in the early people in particular the founders and then we have a bunch of these things they're based on their they're based on this redic in my view ridiculous sort of see the libertarian ideology of trying to emulate the gold standard so there's a fixed number of these of these bitcoins or other ones I can that come into existence and so that means instead of having a currency that can grow as capability grows to reflect to reflect an increased economy that comes from greater technological capability you just have this fixed thing where you have this fixed block with the founders and everybody else is dividing up their bitcoins and trading them it's a it's a feudal model it's so it's incredibly regressive and yet it's like this really hip popular thing I don't know look at it it's terrible oK we've just a very talk we get two more questions gotta go what up there and the one over there just very quick hi there um you talked briefly about your your sort of childhood and stuff what I wanted to know was some how did you first get into computing and what was the technology you first working with yeah I wanted to ask you about take the conversation back to virtual reality as experience through the goggles and this sort of the magician's trick being announced how do you see that evolving in the future because at present all virtual reality is kind of authored it's finite in its duration you kind of have a sort of short or however long experience of it and it's sort of limited by people's ability to program and the perceptual reality kind of varies depending on how sophisticated that is so where does this go in the future how does this become your solution okay early computers first and then me okay what did you put what are you what do you learn on the first computer I used they built which was a really simple thing when I was a kid as it happens where I grew up was close to White Sands Missile Range where the atomic bomb was first tested and so there was an incredible early computer science department at the University nearby which was really unusual and extraordinary stroke of luck I described all this in the book if you want to get it and I my early my early programming experience was punching these cards you'd feed these punched cards to the computer and then in the desert winds you would try to hold onto your cards but instead they fly everywhere and your program would be dissipated never to be seen again and then the computers were actually pretty slow so you could fake it and pretend that the computer had run in order to fake your result and so we'd have to do that so that was my first experience with competing and then on on the VR thing yeah this is you know I kind of regret that we didn't do more on VR specifically but it just seems that these that all of these other issues are so urgent and our times that they demand immediate discussion so in terms of VR everything you said is correct I can give you a few models of it you might want to look at have you seen something called second life so this is an online this was a big deal before the iPhone I didn't transfer to the small screen so it kind of lost its currency but this was a sort of an online virtual world that thousands of people could be in and they all designed their own virtual places and they bought and sold stuff so had an economy as I discuss full disclosure I was involved in it so I'm probably biased wasn't perfect sometimes people behave badly but not as badly as in some other forms like we never had an Isis like place there we never had we never had like a I don't know I mean like it wasn't as bad as what happens and and if you if you look at that sort of a model I think the crucial crucial thing is to get away from thinking of rich reality is this thing you download that then it says packaged experience it's a live thing one of my disappointments in the current batch of stores for vert reality content is they're based on sort of video or game content where you download this thing and then you run it it should be more like a cross between like Skype and a costume ball like what should happen is there should be a live real-time thing with people who are skilled performer we're sort of like the dungeon masters or puppeteers who are good at making things happen they should be able to make a living by the way and it's really all about person-to-person it's live it's real-time I think it can do virtual realities experience is almost never even slightly interesting I really think they because they all kind of get the same after all and I think we've seen the consequences of that I will go this is a whole big thing but I think there's a misunderstanding in the industry of what makes vert reality magical and the way it's being done now isn't human centric enough it's a little bit too much of like canned content and that's just you to the habits of the tech industry what your bad habits can they be can we break out of that yeah yeah as a final we're up to time sadly but give us a final notion of where VR can go in in that optimistic sense you've talked a lot about you've been asked a lot about the darker sides and the possibilities but where can it go to connect with human but it turns out that humans are capable of taking on different bodies because our brain remembers all the different bodies that used to control over hundreds of millions of years in evolution so it's really quite flexible it's quite plastic so you could turn into some fast some fantastic alien spider but more than that you can turn into some crazy alien spider that's actually two people at once so you can oh I don't know you could join with a lover say and jointly control this alien spider and then you have to coordinate your bodies to become like one creature for the first time which is a form of connection that's quite profound and has never been available before and you get better and better at it it doesn't get old it's not like just a little novelty it's like a thing that just cries out for practice and for achieving virtuosity and you can do that and it's really an extraordinary treat and it's all yours it's not served at you from some stupid Russian hacker paying some company so I think this this kind of beauty this kind of profundity is available and I hope you all get to experience it you especially jaron lanier thank you very much thank you very much to intelligence squared thank you to you the audience Darren's new book the dawn of the new everything is available outside do go and buy and be inspired and the story of the rat stabbing is also in there Thank You Jo

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 132,665

Rating: 4.8752136 out of 5

Keywords: AI, Apple, biology, Data, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Jaron Lanier, Kamal Ahmed, tech, technology, virtual reality, VR, web 2.0, Steve Jobs, Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg

Id: FwbmlBzLXDk

Length: 86min 43sec (5203 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017