Sydney Science Festival – Jaron Lanier – Gadgets, Dreams and Dilemmas

welcome everybody the powerhouse museum has been in existence with different names since 1880. it was formed after the success of the sydney international exhibition in 1879 to provide education particularly in the application of new science and technology to industry but also to promote an appreciation of applied arts the things we make embody ideas values and beliefs of the people who make and use them collections of related material track the development and acceptance or otherwise of those ideas in our society looking at those ideas values and beliefs allows us to reflect upon our own circumstances and see perhaps see familiar patterns emerging objects then are anchors for stories they can be understood as elements of cultural memory for the 2021 sydney science festival we have assembled a small collection to prompt conversation about digital technologies and their origins the ethical quandaries surrounding automation arts and social media and the cultural culture and ideology of silicon valley which still informs popular imaginings of a successful innovation economy today we have a guest who has been involved in the development of those technologies for the last 40 years or so and who has long thought long and hard about the culture that surrounds them jaron lanier is a pioneering american technologist best known as one of the founders of virtual reality he coined the turn he is a computer scientist musician composer an author who writes about the high-end technology business the social impact of technology and the future of humanism in 2018 he was named by wired magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in the last 25 years of technology history his books include who owns the future 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now and last year he appeared in the netflix documentary the social dilemma jaron lanier welcome hey how's it going um thank you for joining us today for the two 2021s sydney science festival um i have to say from reading your work and looking at your room there i can see we get the feeling that you share our belief in the power of artifacts um well i i have a particular um mental illness that requires me to always be learning a new musical instrument from some part of the world or from some period in history so i've ended up with literally thousands this is just a tiny portion and i i always think of musical instruments as being the most expressive machines and therefore in a way the most advanced machines so they they inspire me and remind me how far computers have to go well i'd like to start today's discussion if i may with an instrument that we don't have in our collection something we might have to remedy soon but uh something i know means a lot to you and that you have examples of in your collection i understand this is called a can can you tell us about the can well it's one example of a family of instruments that are usually called free read mouth organs they're found all over asia this particular one is found in northeast thailand and in laos even more so it's uh a fascinating instrument it well i'll play it a little later it sounds like a whole horn section or like a whole orchestra it can be incredibly fun to play and impressive um their versions in china japan korea vietnam all over the place uh i have many stories about it uh when i was a teenager i took one apart with a great physicist richard feynman trying to figure out exactly how they work because we know almost how they work but there are a few subtleties that are actually a little hard to understand and there have been there have been a few physics dissertations on the details i'm not convinced anybody completely understands it yet so it's a wonderful example of folk technology being a little ahead of our theory even to this day it's uh arguably the first digital number because these things are quite ancient and uh probably so this gets i'm not good i'm not a scholar so this can be a debate but probably the ancestors of this predate the abacus and you have a bunch of tubes and fixed positions in parallel each tube being on or off combinatorially thus a binary number uh millennia before leavenets so i think we have here the origin of uh digital numbers uh binary uh logic is part of our human makeup is that what you would be suggesting if it's that ancient this is a binary number like thing from a completely different part of the world from the artifact that you're zoomed in on now uh a card for jacquard loom uh and when you have something that universal yeah maybe that that does indicate something common in the human condition it is often said in my world that uh just prior to jacquard's invention of this programmable loon there was a popularity of sort of a craze for algorithmic music and there are a few famous examples probably the most famous one is mozart incorporating throws of dice into musical comp composition but there was another one which was a non-deterministic player piano which would play a role slightly differently each time so it had an element of chance built into the way it would play and it is said that the that jacquard was inspired by this player piano that included a tiny tiny foretelling of algorithms so uh once again i'm not making a truth claim i'm making a effective mythology claim but it might very well be true for mine i can let you know that jakar built his loom having seen other people's attempts at automatically including vokasana who had produced the the automata the famous autonomous oh yeah the accommodate were definitely another source and everybody did really want an automata that wasn't strictly repetitive and of course there was the fraud the the uh the mechanical turk that everyone knows about so that's that's definitely an origin point i'd love to get more information on this early non-deterministic player piano that would be a great thing to have but i've never been able to find much about it it didn't exist the the jakar loom of course uh was the earliest uh examples of very successful automation of a of a process which ultimately created a huge industry and changes to the economy not all of those changes were felt by everybody can you tell us what you understand about some of the negative sides of that well this is a huge topic of course um the notion of machines putting people out of work uh was one of the main motivations for most of the political turmoil actually in recent centuries it was one of the uh it was one of the emotional underpinnings of the impulse to marxism in the 19th century it uh it fueled uh of course directly the luddite riots uh which set the tone for i would say urban protest and resistance uh that still pulled sway today uh it's so it's it's an it's an enormous topic uh i believe there is an interesting reconciliation possible part of it is uh edward deming the uh the american scientist who came up with the notion of quality in business that you gather statistics about what you do to improve your business which is now considered obvious but at the time was not at all it was an entirely new application of uh statistics and and this is uh early 20th century but he had this other idea that the people who should receive these statistics were not just managers and engineers but line workers because they would have the wisdom for how to improve uh even mostly automatic procedures and the first companies to undertake uh uh the implementation of his ideas were the japanese manufacturers such as toyota and there the concept is known as kaizad and it was enormously successful and created more reliable cars and it's quite widely adopted not universally interestingly and so this notion that when you have a lot of machines you actually have more distributed options and opportunities for people to express creativity and wisdom than before is correct and if there's economic opportunity associated with that you actually can have the tide right the rising tide lift all boats and there is a way to do it what i might do is show you an image now of a a portrait of joseph marie jacques if he's there as an introduction to another character are you familiar with this portrait um it i gotta tell you but once again i'm not a scholar so i'm not absolutely certain that's fine and i'll take great delight in in asking you to look at it and imagine what it might be charles babbage kept a portrait like this on his wall in his study and and he would invite people when they came over to look at it and tell him how it had been formed uh frequently people thought of it as a etching or maybe a drawing a very fine drawing but in fact it's a silk weaving done with 24 000 jacquard cards and it was commissioned by the city of lyon in the 1930s and babbage it's just really marvelous you know i would put that together i feel like maybe i vaguely heard this before but uh at this moment anyway it's once again fresh to me so this is truly marvelous so wonderful i was going to say that babbage of course was very much inspired by what he saw when he traveled to europe and looked at various forms of manufacturing he he ordered one of these and he was transfixed by the digital cards the cards that the jacquard cards that controlled those looms and he brought that uh back with him now we have a machine in our collection that's here next to me uh it's a fragment of just difference engine number one it's made from original parts it was assembled by babbage's sun to demonstrate the basic carry in a carry mechanism uh it is it's a difference engine which was charles babbage's first engines did you want to talk about what you understand charles babbage's contribution was to sure oh my well okay so this is this is a whole fascinating story there's an element of crowded tragedy in it because one wishes charles babbage had finished more machine had finished things right it actually made a working out after this which would have been astonishing but at any rate it may affect that he had the vision for it and started is actually incredible um i i want to say something a little geeky about it if that's okay this notion of this machine incrementally approaching a goal actually is a stronger precedent for the type of computation that's running our world today than even even the abstraction of the turing machine and so i think uh when you look back if you look at it in that light i think it's even more remarkably uh prescient so it's a it's uh these are just extraordinary devices it's a remarkable moment in history that produce them i think um babbage produced this machine in order to improve the pr the problems that he saw with log tables the generation of uh you know generating tables which was done by hand and so the express purpose of this machine was to eliminate human error from this process of generating aids to calculation which were the mathematical tables but he also saw it as a an opportunity to free up people from the drudgery of boring calculations so that there would be more time spent philosophizing the the difference between a calculator and a computer is that a computer increases the opportunity calculator decreases them right just if you didn't know that that's the formal that's where you draw the line he one of the reasons he failed i think was because his mind started to drift before he finished his calculator and uh he was interested in this the calculator worked with polynomial functions and he started to think of other functions that he wanted to work with and designed a much more versatile machine and that machine was the analytical engine he had a um he had a companion work with him to a certain extent on that machine in our collection we have some letters in we have a lot of letters to charles babbage from various people but these are some of our favorites they're not about mathematics they're not about computation but they do represent child babbages or they speak to charles babbage's relationship with ada or augusta lovelace countess lovelace can you speak about her contributions yeah how old was she when these letters were written uh that's a good question these were 1840s where that's when he was doing his um so i think she was in her early 30s at this time well ada lovelace is celebrated as the first programmer and i think that's a justified designation even though everything was so tentative at that time that not there wasn't really programming happening in practice but it was almost almost and she she's remarkable on a couple levels one is she's the first person who seemed to have a feeling for what programming might be like she's the first person to speculate with any connection to reality at all about what an artificial intelligence program might be like um one person who did challenge ada and who also put a lot of time well he put a lot of time thinking about a mathematical problem that ended up through which he ended up producing a sort of fundamental foundation for computing machines but i feel like i'm at the television quiz show again oh i do know what that is you know what it is so the enigma machine alan turing can you tell us a bit about alan turing's original conception sure so um one of the things about this i i have had the good form to meet a few people who worked in bletchley park directly with turing in fact once i was giving a lecture in victoria canada in british columbia and a woman came up from the audience and said oh i i worked with turing and she turned out to have been one of the boffins one of the unacknowledged female mathematicians working on the team and so i was able to hear quite a few stories from her and you're going to ask what was her name and i don't remember because i wasn't prepared for this so i am so sorry but it's something one can find online i think even in my books i have a chapter about her and so having you know having a direct participant to talk to is so different than book knowledge you know it's so that was a particularly fortunate and wonderful thing um i asked her many many questions i asked her some specific questions about how they cracked it and she said you know some some of the details are still classified she wasn't going to talk to me because we know a lot about it we can certainly infer it but some of the little things are still kind of they're not ready to kind of so you know whatever but uh the i asked her if they knew uh if they knew that turing was gay and she looked at me like oh my darling do you think that we were stupid we were the best mathematicians from cambridge and oxford uh and um of course we knew if we could crack the nazi secret code we understood allen's private life i mean do you do you really even have to ask because i felt embarrassed you know because of course like they knew she also was adamant and i don't remember which way these were that i'm sort of embarrassed so she was adamant i think that the oxford girls were much much more effective and smarter than the cambridge ones uh that was like a really she repeated that over and over like after all these decades that was the important information which i thought was hilarious um and so anyway uh you know the overall story is that um world war ii was an absolutely horrific very high velocity very high carnage awful awful super high stakes battle to control the world it wasn't it wasn't limited to some simple goal like controlling some little area somewhere some oil field or something the idea was just to to control history in the world and it was um therefore terrifying and when i talk to people from the era i find that it's almost impossible for me to internalize what they must have gone through uh the nazis believed that so so encryption was absolutely vital because things were moving so quickly that being able to communicate about what was happening uh was uh central to any strategy because the whole point was that the technology was moving so fast that the other side really wouldn't know what to expect so if you're if you're uh if your secrecy was compromised you'd lose the benefits of these extraordinary uh technologies going on now as it happens to our knowledge i believe most secrets that were of strategic significance actually were cracked uh turing and if but wasn't really caring about it was a whole interesting group of people including the unacknowledged female buffins uh came up with a series of ideas and they had an uh early computing machine that definitely harked back to babbage in a sense it was a let's say it was a it was a like you selected from a large number of things it could do kind of explicitly and then it would do that it had that character i mean i guess you could say that of any computer but that's not really the effective way to think about larger computers um and they cracked it they did it and then of course i created one of the famous moral dilemmas where britain and the allies had to pretend it hadn't been cracked and allow a great deal of suffering and death to occur in order to maintain their advantage from that knowledge uh and then of course the other terrible terrible terrible thing is uh turin who had uh and i think everybody knows this now because there was a movie about it when and when i was a young computer scientist this was taboo and nobody knew about it but uh turing um was gay and at the time it was not a legal uh way of life and so in post-war britain on the one hand he was celebrated as one of the great war heroes on the other hand he was forced to undergrow undergo a sort of bizarre quack uh hormone therapy that was supposed to reverse his his homosexuality and it was it was it's so weird and twisted i won't even go into it now but uh in the course of that he did uh so far as we as anyone can tell commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple next to his computer you know at bletchley park which is uh something that is still um a shame and an embarrassment on our field in a way that you know nobody helped them really and uh so i've always felt that that was sort of almost like an er it's not the only one but it's one of the original sins of computer science that we've never we've never quite developed a culture or politics or courageousness of compassion that we need if we're going to have as much impact so it continues to bother me to this day if when i read turing what i think i am reading is someone absolutely tormented here i came up with the idea to defeat the nazis and he arguably i mean leslie park arguably did as much as los alamos you know i mean it was a very central it's a really really big deal and um training is saying here i'm defeating i'm i'm struggling against these fascists who want to kill people for who they are and yet my own society my own government wants to kill me for who i am um and this whole human world is so troubled maybe we do need to retreat into some sort of heaven of automata that would escape these human cruelties that that's what i think i'm i'm reading i think i think the turing test is a scream from somebody who's been tortured to death for who he is we might jump forward a few decades we have a machine here there it is yes so this is one of i think two apple ones that we know came to australia and we're delighted to have this one in our collection we're really thrilled that the owner uh apparently decided not to take the um case that was available from from apple at the time from from the steve's uh and mounted his uh apple one board there in a briefcase with a keyboard and uh and a cassette tape uh let's see what can i tell you um i knew both of them both the steve's uh the the steve jobs of in our youth uh i would have been in my late teens and early 20s the first go around was a very difficult person to be around kind of cruel kind of uh a social genius who um manipulated the people around him i'm not saying something that he would disagree with he's described himself as a from that era as being an i think he got better later but you know he was really tough i recognized some of these chips i remember oh my god anyway uh yeah so uh they um uh apple it's a funny thing about apple it was the first it was the first silicon valley company that had figured out this fusion there were hippie techie companies and hickey hippie techie groups before but to get to be totally maxed out capitalist and totally maxed out hippie at the same time countercultural at the same time was a new synthesis and apple was the first place that i think you know kind of got there and so it had an amazing energy and attracted all sorts of interesting people from all over um wow i mean um what can i say the other thing is the um this sort of device the apple one really couldn't do anything i mean like it would be it's arguable that this is not that more functional than one of babbage's parsley buildings because you can really make it you can really attach it to anything reliably and you couldn't the whole thing was built on this on people who could kind of see what it would turn into and the excitement of that so it's a it's a really interesting artifact of projection and hope and speculation rather than a purely functional artifact in its own right that also makes it quite fascinating so has silicon valley changed today is it the same does it believe its own yeah i mean silicon valley um silicon valley has suffered a crisis of moral and spiritual integrity from excessive success silicon valley has become such a center of power and wealth that people have allowed their narcissism to cloud their thinking and there's not everybody but you know it's it's it's a it's deeply troubling to me it's deeply troubling the effect it's had on the world it's deeply troubling the self-assuredness with which some of the people still think despite obvious apparent failures there's also a rise of a style of personality and cognition which some people think is similar to being on the spectrum i'm not sure if it's the same thing but this kind of nerdiness associated with power has become the the norm and it hasn't worked out well for a lot of people it's worked out well for a few though certainly um and uh it troubles me greatly uh i i believe it can be to the discussion about data dignity and so forth we were talking about before some sort of a more equitable and honest way of bringing computation into the world is still possible but right now unfortunately if you run the big computers on the network you can gather data from people and then use it to run behaviors algorithms to manipulate those people uh use it to concentrate wealth and power and make the whole world nutso as the price you pay until everything gets like just more and more weirdly paranoid and crazy there's a kind of a patheticness to what we're doing now uh that a kind of a pettiness that i find embarrassing but there we are can you tell us then looking at the apple one you you must have used a few computers in your day do you remember your early machines can you tell yeah so i mean um when i was starting on machines i was a young teenager and i i grew up in southern new mexico so i i happened to have access to uh computers in the basement of uh the university near white sands that had the earliest act really unbelievable good luck for me so i tended to i was using all kinds of early machines there was a thing called the pdp 11 i remember well but these were the machines from this other universe they weren't from the hippie computing uh put it in the suitcase world of apple these were sort of big computing like military machines they were very expensive they were very elite they were considered um something you control with guards that you you know that they were it was it wasn't it wasn't like in that the apple feeling was completely different uh and so i was working with those i remember programming and punched cards like the jacquard loom and then the new mexico winds having like tornadoes of punch cards flying in the air and people desperately running after their programs instead of randomization of programs um i remember all of these things very very early i remember probably when i was 13 or 14 seeing a picture of somebody who had been able to make a picture of a cube and a computer that person being ivan sutherland of course and just being so excited i could barely contain myself just the very very earliest things and then it wasn't that many years later of course for me at that age it felt like an eternity later but it wasn't uh that many years until things like the apple one started to happen because of of companies like intel and others putting out little early chips that you could really combine and to make making little computers there but there were even earlier ones from apple i mean there was a kit to make your own i think it was called the altair or something and we were all making little little computers it once again couldn't do anything but it still is remarkable that we could do it we do have an altair in the collection ah wonderful and uh i have mine probably in some closets oh my godness we have a lisa as well which i understand you may have used an appaloosa yeah i i have um i have all kinds of really apple stuff somewhere now people are going to try to find my surgery let's break into them i have a wire wrap pre-release macintosh meaning before they have settled on the on the circuit board uh somewhere um uh and i and i definitely have a lisa somewhere i think oh god where is that thing i don't know anyway i have all this crazy early stuff um there were a few other amazing things back then there was some pixar the company now known for um animated movies started off as a computer company and there was actually a pixar computer for a while it just was like an early computer that could proce could do photo editing and stuff is all these crazy things happen so um yeah perhaps we'll move on to can i can i get you to show us the footage of the museum's first foray into virtual reality so i don't know if you're familiar with this particular system and as you can see from the footage it's um extremely large polygons there the once you had your headset on it was nowhere near as clear as it suggests on the screen here the vision they're turning up to try um to try to get one of the 150 places that were available each day and we had to rattle opportunities to try the the vr game and no one said this is terrible everybody wanted to boast about the fact that they'd had a try at vr so it was a huge phenomenon when it when it hit the media and i was interviewed quite a few times regardless of what i was interviewed about i was it always became a story about electronic lsd or teledildonics it got its own momentum and you more than anyone has been credited with uh creating virtual reality even though you acknowledge your other pioneers who influenced you can you tell us about your first conceptions of the idea of vr there's been a kind of a craze for vr at different periods of time there was one i don't know sometime between five and ten years ago perhaps um or maybe even a bit earlier and a lot of young people think that that's when vr first appeared which is kind of funny um and now i feel like it almost has a bit of an older feeling because i don't think it was honestly i just don't think it was done well in the last iteration but um but you know that's just me it's true that the so this was 90s vr there had been vr that if i may say so probably looked a little better than this earlier but it was much more expensive uh this was one of the next wave of companies that was trying to kind of a little lower the cost a little bit although it's still crazy expensive by today's standards i mean create you probably spend tens of thousands of dollars on whatever it was i would imagine but not hundreds so it's a little better the early ones were like a million dollars a person um anyway so what was the early conception like this goes back uh for me to the late 70s means that people had for connecting with one another were somewhat limited i thought part of the problem was that this method of language of using words was just inadequate and i imagine that being able to create shared i used to call them shared waking state intentional dreams that this kind of using a shared workflow to create and would lead to something more than words that people could use to connect that's what it meant to me early on and i was i was um very taken by the surrealist art traditions from different periods and uh so that you know so for me it started off as that kind of idea not really a techie one and of course what happened rapidly is it became a very techy one and i spent the 80s on the early systems trying to prototype practical applications rather than anything about uh communications or entertainment so for instance uh a really big one in the late 80s was the first surgical simulators that was huge and then uh vehicle prototyping particularly for aviation and then for cars and then uh so anyway for all these things that that's really what i was i was i was working on at that time um you mentioned electronic lsd intellidyldonics i had i hadn't heard tell dildonics in many years it's a funny one this is kind of uh timothy tim had contracted to do a workshop on expanded consciousness and lsd or some some such and this would have been in the 80s and we were going to try to meet because he wanted to learn about virtuality and he said i'm stuck under contract to do this horrible thing and i just i hate this whole thing so there's this guy who makes a living and impersonates me in la i've hired him to come and replace me to finish my class and i said how's that going to work said all these people are high they're not going to know and so i said well okay he said so what i want you to do is i want you to sneak into sln and sneak me out in the back of your car and so i had you know we were talking about all these early like the wire wrap macintosh and early all these early computers they were just permanently in the back of my car which was this crazy uh i i paid for college with a goat herd i used to make my own goat cheese and milk and i had this car that i swapped with somebody for it it was like a very beat up car that had bullet holes and had no floor and it started with a screwdriver it was just this completely horrible car but the trunk was completely filled with historic uh computers that you would freak over as a curator now and so i had to make a timothy larry sized hole in it to put him in so i went with a friend to a dumpster on the stanford campus and we threw away all these priceless computers to make room for tim and then sure enough i snuck them out uh so that's how i met tim actually the first time he was he was snuck out in the back of a july a goat it had no back seats there was like hay and i'd move goats in it anyway he was snuck out in the back of this crazy car in an airspace that had once had computers that would not be priceless but so i liked him tim was it became kind of a close friend i wouldn't say a deeply close friend but somebody i knew pretty well for many years and he uh what do i guess what do i say about tim um uh i did not like his approach to things he was somebody who was yet another social genius like steve jobs or many others where he just had this compulsion to come up with things that would get attention and get people to be thinking about him no matter what and so he uh he'd made lsd into this notorious thing that was banned and he was thrown in jail over and all this stuff he like created a lot of trouble that maybe didn't need to happen maybe that whole thing was a mistake a sort of an attention-getting thing and then you want to do the same thing with with uh virtual reality and i was like no don't do it to us don't stop yeah familiar with this this is one that you uh have some involvement with yeah so what happened was um the early virtual reality systems um had gloves so you put on gloves to manipulate virtual objects it was absolutely inconceivable to track a hand with the camera in those days computers just weren't fast enough so that was the only way to do it so we had computer gloves for virtual data gloves oh by the way all right so this is something you probably wish you had this is the very first uh this is the very first virtual reality headset that was sold commercially and the way i came in the little company i have is called vpl so this was about 86 i don't know something this is an early one and um the company was founded in 84. so maybe it's 85 something like that this one went to stanford university initially and was used for prototyping surgical simulators which was the big project and then when they upgraded to newer ones it was donated to an arts collective called survival research lab that was a super notorious punk radical art collective that used it to make tele-robotic like automated monsters that would attack the audience with with that's just crazy stuff and and then when they finally went out of business somebody said oh hey do you want this back and i said um yes i do so that's half anyway the um i met um mattel toy company one of the big toy companies uh had a very wonderful designer engineer named rich gold and i'm mentioning him now because i i had fallen out of touch and i only recently learned that he passed away a decade ago which i had not been aware of rich was a musician first as are so many and uh he'd been part of something called the automated automatic musicians society or something or collective or something and he uh he and a bunch of other people uh worked on making our vr gloves into sort of a toy you couldn't do a lot but you could do a little with them and they're actually not too bad uh they they have a few problems but they actually sort of work which is kind of amazing and it became a hit i remember the day it came out mattel stop went up many percentage points i realized i created all these millionaires from people who owned mattel stock it was uh but it was a big deal it became like a media sensation for a while i forget when this was exactly was this like 89-ish is that about right 90ish i think so yes for about one year they produced them yeah yeah something like that it might have been a year earlier than i'm not sure but so something like that so it's kind of um the one it's probably the first mass market manufactured virtual reality thing depending on how you define it uh there's some others that weren't too far after but i think this was the first one you didn't um [Music] uh you didn't nominate yourself to be part of the ad that they well you have to understand in those days uh i was working like 18 hours a day on surgical simulation to me this kind of stuff was kind of not what where the action was from my perspective but it's it's nice it's nice that it happened but i wasn't really no i wasn't really that that uh in involved in the power of gloves life out in the world a little bit once all something would happen but not too much um we might move on to the next topic if we can bring up now this is a machine that was produced in 1912 here in australia and i have to say that the eating in australia owes as much to gambling as it does to anything else any scientific or military the usual drivers of this stuff this is a the tote machine a totalizer machine is a machine that was produced to help it was an alternative form of betting to using a bookmaker and it was extremely popular here in australia and in fact a very big industry was built on the back of the development of this tote machine which while it was simple computationally it was actually a multi-user real-time a real-time multi-user network system that allowed lots of uh lots of simultaneous bets being put on the same horse at the same time oh that's fascinating and it it has a sort of babbage-esque um quality to it but i'll go to the i'll just mention that you know gambling's been involved with our computing industry for some time can we go to the next picture i asked the company who produced it whether they had any others that were in the same league and why didn't they you know what was the formula to this and couldn't they reproduce it and they said they they they were trying and couldn't that it just had its own feel that um oh isn't that interesting yeah um nevertheless it did involve using interact more putting more interactivity into simple poker machines and can conceivably be seen as being part of the problem rather than part of the solution in in relation to gambling can you tell us about the relationship between gambling and social media that you've been discussing recently yeah so uh first of all i just have to mention in passing that i want to in any way deny australia's unique and cherished relationship to criminality however in america as well the video game industry has an origin that's in part from the organized crime world the uh our early video game machines not the very earliest one like pond but just right after that the ones that had a general look like this where there'd be a screen and some graphics largely came from a company called bali based in chicago that was kind of a legacy company for money laundering and you know like i don't want to accuse anybody of anything but you know they did generate a lot of slots and it did create a certain opportunity for the statements of dubious historical value which i'm also making but with a different intent and quality all right so gambling um gambling's an ancient human addiction and a universal one it's something that's part of who we are uh it's part of who we are because we evolved to be able to make very quick and committed cognitive uh summaries assessments of what's going on should i be scared this is the fight or flight the lizard brain it's sometimes called what should i you know because we don't have time to sit around analyzing data in in in in our evolutionary context you know we're just like got to figure it out and so gambling takes advan activates those circuits where you're sort of trying to discern a pattern but where there isn't one the behaviorists uh particularly bf skitter but starting with pavlov realized that adding a bit of random feedback in a behaviorist modification program where you're training a pigeon or a rat or a person particularly like a facebook user to do something the randomness intrigues them because the the drive for our brains to try to pick out what's going on even if there's no real information there it's just so deep and so profound that we cannot resist it so that is that and and so um facebook algorithms work that way to drive engagement and as well as all the other social media youtube and so forth um same with gambling uh social media is worse than gambling because gambling is redundant like you just keep on doing the same thing it's like the same car it's the basic same game all over again but the um algorithms on social media use the same underlying uh cognitive quirks uh to customize uh content that people are getting that optimizes that kind of you know addictive degradation and then that makes people crazy they start believing weird things they start getting weirdly nervous and uh scared or aggressive gradually but it just kind of raises the temperature all over the world of of craziness and so it's it's worse than gambling but fundamentally the relationship between gambling algorithms and uh and human cognition and social media algorithms and human cognition are quite similar and gambling uh gambling addiction is an excellent uh model to understand uh social media addiction right and you advocate to um turn off our social media disconnect well i mean i don't advocate that people do anything because i don't i don't know people's individual cases i'm always adamant about that i'm not telling people to i did write a book called with arguments to delete your accounts i'm not that doesn't mean i think anyone should i think they should know the arguments for doing so they should be more conscious ultimately people are powerless to resist on some levels not just because of the addiction algorithm but just because of the centrality that these services have taken on in the world but i think the solution is obviously to change the business model so that it's based on providing a service people are willing to pay for rather than manipulating the people and i believe that that's a transition that we actually will make i'm i'm optimistic i just don't think it'll happen fast good i might ask you one more question if i may before i believe you're going to uh perform for us but this is can i mention an artifact may i interrupt you and just please um this is an iphone and uh first oh yes yeah yeah so um do you know what the pocket big brain was the pocket big brain no i don't know okay it was the prototype for the iphone uh many years earlier the when was the first iphone exactly was that 2007 i think it came out yeah so there's something that looked very much like an iphone in about 87 and it was called the pocket big brain it was kept quite secret although jobs were sure obsessed about it uh i remember playing with one of them and it was a french design it was a french startup in great stealth it was only black and white kind of big pixels but it was a little thing about that form factor with little apps and the whole thing and they were foreseeing this thing called 3g that would happen someday when they'd be connected and the whole thing was there it was actually started as a french company for those who are curious about the history and somewhere somewhere there are prototype pocket big brands you should try to get one of those they're amazing they really are the iphone i mean that was not apple's design that that far predated i mean thanks for that two decades two decades earlier yeah something like that anyway please go ahead and ask the question that i prevented you from asking so um the museum has one of its you know mandates we sort of document innovations through our collecting a lot of technological innovation but not exclusively along those stories in the view that we will tell those stories stories of successful innovation will beget other innovations um uh it's not unlike the one that we had when we started in the 1880s if we imagine the the world if the word innovation hadn't been stripped of most of its meaning by you know inauthentic overuse um we tell stories of innovation um we promote the value of science the importance of creativity education learning and the engagement with um with the everyday stuff of everyday life you know with a an attempt to try and re-enchant the stuff of everyday life in doing so we're attempting to encourage a culture of of innovation right that would be what we're trying to do how do you think as a society or as several connected societies engender a culture of sustained and sustainable innovation where we appropriately solve our own problems right is there all you know do you think it's already there but less utopian than we think is it too complex to influence is it the wrong question no it's a good question and i also i appreciate your acknowledgement of how fraught the word has become as you ask the question i've asked this question a great deal i have been many many times and the undertone is often we would like our own silicon valley wherever it is like why can't we have all these super rich companies here wherever it might be um and i i'm going to say something really weird i um i don't think we should have silicon valleys for innovation in the future i i mean in one particular sense which is that at the time that apple started or my my old company vpl that started virtuality um i think our idea was that you you make something that people need they buy it and then you have a great business it's kind of very straightforward i feel that the new idea is that you get some kind of very special network effect where you go viral and then you have your your super viral cryptocurrency or your super viral stock or something something uh your even your super viral tick tock video or whatever and if you just get that thing just because of the inherent ways that only a few things can go viral that'll get and everybody will know about them and they intensively get more and more viral once it happens because that's how networks are this this drive for virality is the is the culprit that has made us less less creative and less innovative in the term the the sort of attractive use of the term and so i think what we need to do is have some way of identifying and discouraging or banning or punishing virality as a thing in the future it's funny because i remember when the term virality first came about it was intended as a warning because viruses are bad you know like a virus is a thing that leeches off of these elaborately adapted species that have spent billions of years getting to where they are and then the virus comes in and and destructively catches a free ride just because it can and there's there once in a while they're good but you know um not too much and mostly they're destructive and uh i i once was part of a little thought experiment like what if we could just destroy large classes of viruses would there be anything wrong with that would it do any damage to ecosystems or anything and some of the the ones that attack bacteria phages might keep bacteria populations healthy they're like a few things here and there where they might do something but actually a lot of them we could really do without they're kind of like mosquitoes like you know truth is we could get rid of them and we'd be better off and and that that thing became this metaphor that every everybody imagines that if you have a world driven by virality they'll get to be the virus but of course very few will that's how the statistics work out so it becomes a world based on false hope and much more failure than success virality is just a terrible thing yet everybody wants it and i think that that is probably our core problem in technical culture now that's fantastic thank you very much um i think that brings us to the end of our conversation i understand you might be ready to play some music for us yeah well i'm surrounded by instruments so i could play many um since you brought up the can and the idea that it might be the first digital instrument i'll play one for a little bit if there's time maybe i'll play something else that comes from australia [Music] [Applause] be [Music] so i hope that wasn't too loud and didn't distort for you it's quite a sound i must say it's a wonderful sound it's really a great instrument to play this is not a traditional style i um when i go to laos and i play this they really think i'm nuts and and but more recently i've noticed some of the kids copying the style so it's starting to to to catch things yeah so and thank you everybody who's watching online stay safe and stay interested

Channel: Powerhouse

Views: 2,902

Keywords: Virtual reality, VR, Jaron Lanier, SSF, Sydney Science Festival, Powerhouse, Robotics, Museum, technologyrevolutionprojects, digitaldarkage, jaronlaniermusic, socialmediaaddiction, jaronlanier

Id: 8mdU6jnIPIQ

Length: 56min 36sec (3396 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021