YouSaid · the spoken record

Jaron Lanier

lines on the record: 135
first: 2021-09-06
most recent: 2021-09-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, maybe I think so. I think music actually does escape any particular context. That's how it feels to me, but I'm not sure about that. That's once again crazy artist talking, not scientists.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better friends, or something because they have a similar setup. But the thing is, if you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context, you can't talk about ultimates with it because obviously it's not suited for that. So there's some ideas that are their own context, general relativity is its own context. It's different. That's why it's hard to unify. And I think the same thing is true when we talk about These types of questions, like meaning is in a context. And to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category or it's not a resolvable way of thinking. It might be a way of thinking that Is experientially Or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring. But to try to treat it analytically is not sensible.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, There's a confusion sometimes in trying to use Set up a question or thought experiment or something that's defined in terms of a context to explain something where there is no larger context. And that's a category error. If we want to do it in physics in computer science, it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine because a Turing machine has an external clock and an observer and input and output. There's a larger context implied in order for it to be defined at all. And so if you're talking about the universe, you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine. Quantum mechanics is like that. Quantum mechanics has an external clock and has some kind of external context depending on your interpretation that's either, you know, the observer or whatever. And there's similar that way. So maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, yeah, I don't know. It might be right. I'm just thinking of all the civilizations that grew up under clouds. I mean, like the Vikings needed a special diffracting piece of mica to navigate because they could never see the sun. They had this thing called a sunstone that they found from this one cave. Do you know about that? So they were in this trying to navigate boats, you know, in the North Atlantic without being able to see the sun because it was cloudy. And so they used a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really was because they couldn't tell by eye and navigate. So I'm just saying there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive that have to deal with a lot of clouds. The Amazonians invented our agriculture and they were probably under clouds a lot. I don't know. I don't know.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reminds me of that old Isaac Asimov story where there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while and it turns out they're in the middle of a globular cluster and they're all these stars. I forget what happens exactly. God, that's from when I was the same age as a kid. I don't really remember.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of funny. I feel like sometimes I've taken when she was younger I took my daughter and her friends to a few around here that are kids can go and use and they would like look. Don't know if they quite had that because it's like too. It's been just too normalized, and I think maybe I was scrowing up screens weren't that common yet, and maybe it's like too confusible with a screen. I don't know.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telescopes that would put to shame a lot of like, I mean, he really did his telescopes, you know. And so I remember he'd let me go and play with him and just like looking at a globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons. And with a good telescope, it's really like this object. You can really tell this isn't coming through some intervening information structure. This is like the actual photons and it's really a three-dimensional object. And you have even a feeling for the vastness of it. I don't know. So I definitely, I was very, very fortunate to have a connection to this guy that way when I was a kid.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, just because you know, I don't know what meaning is, and I think I do know that sense of awe. I grew up in southern New Mexico, and the stars were so vivid. I've had some weird misfortunes, but I've had some weird luck also. One of our near neighbors was the head of optics research at White Sands, and when he was young, he discovered Pluto. His name was Clyde Tombau. And he taught me how to make telescopes of grinding mirrors and stuff. My dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid. But Clyde had like...”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask, but I... I feel like going down that path is just too tedious for the moment. And I don't want to do it.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll see meaning's a funny word. Like we say all these things as if we know what they mean, but meaning we don't know what we mean when we say meaning. Like we obviously do not. And it's a funny little mystical thing. I think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that said, life seems kind of short, but you know, whatever. I've tried to find, I can't find the complaint department. I want to bring this up, but the customer service number never answers and like the email bounces.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Although less so. And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or revelation to become less afraid. I think I just, like I say, it's kind of familiarity. It's just knowing people who've died and... I really believe in the future, I have this optimism that people or this whole thing of life on earth, this whole thing we're part of, I don't know where to draw that circle, but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of Value and you can't both believe in the future and want to live forever. You have to make room for it. You know, like you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own humility. You have to make yourself small to believe in the future. And so it actually in a funny way comforts me.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what's funny is I used to not be able to, but as you get older, you just know people who die and there's all these things, it just becomes familiar and more of a More ordinary, which is what it is.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's playing James P. Johnson or something. It's like another musician who did something and they're talking. And it's very cool to be around. It's very kind of... Freeing to see someone have that relationship.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, the thing is he has this way of with the same persona and the same philosophy moving from the blues into Beethoven's really, really fascinating to me. It's like, um... I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz, but he kind of does. It's kind of really, and he talks, well, he was reasoning, he talks, like Beethoven's talking to him. He's like, oh, yeah, here he's doing this. I can't do John. But, you know, it's like, it's really interesting. For me, I was introduced to Beethoven as almost like this godlike figure. And I presume Pauline was too that was really kind of oppressed and hard to deal with. And for him, it's just like.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moonlight's amazing. You know, You know, you're talking about comparing the blues and that sensibility from Europe is so different in so many ways. One of the musicians I play with is John Battiste who has the band on Colbert Show. And he'll sit there playing chasm and suddenly go into moonlight. He loves moonlight. And what's kind of interesting is He's found a way to debate. And by the way, he can really do Beethoven. He went through Juilliard and one time he was a lot. One time he was at my house, he's saying, Hey, do you have the book of Beethoven's name to say, Yeah, I want to find one I haven't played. And he read through the whole damn thing. Perfectly, and I'm like, oh God, I just Get out of here. I can't even deal with this. But any”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, I don't know. I mean, he's not here to speak for himself, so it's a little hard for me to answer that question. But it was interesting because I'd always thought of Beithome. I was like, whoa, you know, this is like Beethoven is like really the dude, you know, and she's like, ah, you know. Beethoven, Schmethoven, you know, it's like not really happening.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. This is hard. Like, I mean, it would seem to be his misery was somewhat self-imposed maybe through, but I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I've known some people who loathed Beethoven. Like the composer, late composer Pauline Oliveiveros, wonderful modernist composer. I played in her band for a while, and she was like, oh, Beethoven, like that's the worst music ever. It's like all ego. It completely, it turns information into, I mean, it turns... And it's ultimately all about your own self-importance, which has to be at the expense of others, what else could it be? And blah, blah, blah. So she had. I shouldn't say, I don't mean it to be dismissive, but I'm just saying her position on Beethoven was very negative and very unimpressed, which is really interesting for the man.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like they actually got happier, and I'm not sure if Beethoven got happier. I think it's a different... Of concept of the place of music, I think the blues, the whole African-American tradition was initially surviving awful, awful circumstances. You could say, you know, there was some of that in the concentration camps and all that too. It's not that Beethoven's circumstances were brilliant, but he kind of also...”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a reasonable question. I mean, the fashion these days is to be slightly Apollonian, even with Beethoven, but one imagines that actual Beethoven playing might have been different. I don't know. I've gotten to play a few instruments he played and try to see if I could feel anything about how it might have been for him. I don't know really.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, she was in Vienna, so she had the whole Viennese music thing going, which is this, you know, incredible school of... Absolute skill in romance bundle together and wonderful on the piano, especially. I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her and I played them in this exaggerated drippy way. I remember when I was a kid”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I still connect to her through music. She was a young prodigy piano player in Vienna. And she survived the concentration camp and then died in a car accident. Here in the US”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes skill. It takes hard lessons. Um... You'll never be perfect at it. The degree you get anywhere with it, it's the most rewarding thing ever. Let's see, what else would I say? I would say when you're young, you can be very overwhelmed. By social and interpersonal emotions, you'll have Broken hearts and jealousies you'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the ladder. It feels horrible when that happens. All of these things. And you have to remember... What a fragile crust all that stuff is. And it's hard because right when it's happening, it's just so intense. And... If I was actually giving this advice to my daughter, she'd already be out of the room. So I'm just, this is for some like hypothetical.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's one thing. Another thing is to recognize That kindness requires genius, that it's actually really hard. That facile kindness is not kindness, and that it'll take you a while to have the skills, devind impulses to want to be kind. You can have right away, to be effectively kind is hard.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to try to escape the constant sway of social perception or manipulation, whatever you wish, not to escape it entirely, that would be horrible, but to find cover from it once in a while, to find a sense of being anchored in that, to believe and experience as a real thing, believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic. That goes with my philosophy of dualism. I believe there's something magical and instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs, I think experience is something real and something apart and something mystical and your own.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think they deserve to have. Little grace period of naivete that's pleasant. I mean, I do, you know, if it's possible, if it's These things are, this is like tricky stuff. I mean, if you Okay, so let me try a little bit on this advice thing. I think one thing. Any serious broad advice will have been given a thousand times before for a thousand years. So I'm not going to claim originality. But I think trying to find a way. To really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally, what your sense of the world is, what your intuition is if you feel like an intuitive person, what you're”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have to learn their own lessons and lessons don't come easily and a world which avoids hard lessons will be a stupid world. I don't know what to do with it. That's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it, but this is like when I'm saying that, you know, freedom equals eternal annoyance. There's the degree to which honest advice is not that pleasant to give. And I don't want young people to have to know about everything. You don't want to.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, listen, I gotta say. The moments that defined me were not the good ones, the moments that defined me were often horrible. I've had successes, you know, but if you ask what defined me, my mother's death. Being under the World Trade Center in the attack. Things that have had an effect on me were the most were sort of real world. Terrible things, which I don't wish on young people at all. And this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to young people that”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the line's there or anything like that, but I don't think I should be required to all the same questions or equally mysterious for no line. So I don't feel disadvantaged by that. So I shall remain a duelist. But if you... Listen to anyone trying to explain where consciousness is in a dualistic sense, either believing in souls or some special thing in the brain or something, you pretty much say screw this, I'm going to be panicking.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people interested in theoretical physics eventually land in panpsychism. But I'm not one of them. I still think there's this pragmatic imperative to treat people as special. So I will proudly be a dualist.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this thing there. Yeah, there's. There's some kind of a thing in it. I've never ever, I've run across a lot of explanations from all kinds of interesting people that it's some kind of A flow language between people or between people and how they perceive and that kind of thing. Sort of explanation is fine, but it's not quite it either.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, music is something that just towers above me. I don't feel like I have an overview of it. It's just the reverse. I don't fully understand it because on one level, it's simple. Like you can say, oh, it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains on a pattern level or something like that. There's all these things you can say about music, which are, you know, some of that's probably true. Also There's kind of like this. This is the mystery of meaning. Like, there's a way that just instead of just being pure abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality to it that is philosophically impossible. I don't know what to do with it.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr. Sachs, where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality in people in like a paragraph. And I couldn't reproduce it for you here, but it's like, yeah, like there are these bulbous things that walk around and they make these sounds. You can sort of understand them, but only kind of, and then there's like this. And it's just like this amazing, like just really quick, like if some... Spirit being or something was going to show up in our reality and had knew nothing about it. It's like a little basic intro of like, okay, here's what's going on here.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, lately. But in terms of, there's another level at which I can think about it where Sometimes think that if you are just quiet and you do something that gets you in touch with the way reality happens, and for me it's playing music, sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is and it feels like there's a lot more going on in it and there is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening. And a lot more stuff flowing through. I'm not speaking as a scientist now. This is kind of a more my artist side talking and it's, I feel like I'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you, but.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hope so. I hope so. I Think if I'm just going to answer you in terms of truth, the first thing I'd say is we're not in a privileged enough position, at least as yet, to really know much about who we are, how we are We're really like in the context of something larger, what that context is like all that stuff we might learn more in the future. Our descendants might learn more, but we don't really know very much. Which you can either view as frustrating or charming like that first year of TikTok or something.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like that. I mean, we're kind of weird. We sprout this hair on our heads. I don't know. We're sort of weird animals. That's a few.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really want to emphasize this is all super baby steps. I don't want to overclaim. It's like, I think a lot of the things we're doing, we're approaching some old problems in a pretty fresh way, informed. There's been a zillion papers about how you can think of the universe. And that actually works out crazy well. Like, I mean, that is actually kind of eerie when you look at it. There's probably two or three dozen papers that have this quality, and some of them are just crazy good. And it's very interesting. What we're trying to do is take those kinds of observations and turn them into an actionable framework where you can then start to Things with landscapes or theories that you couldn't do before, and that sort of thing.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He still is like, no, this is going to be the kind of time we're talking about in which evolution happens is the same time we're now and we're talking about something that starts and continues. And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind of time that's timelike? And that sounds like metaphysics, but there's an ambiguity, you know, like it has to start from something. And it's kind of interesting. So there's this A lot of the math can be thought of either way, which is kind of interesting.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The starting condition has to get kind of fine tuned, and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect. And so we were thinking, well, look, what if we could push the storytelling about where the universe comes from much further back by starting with really simple things that evolve and then through that evolution explain how things got to be, how they are through very simple principles? And so we've been exploring a variety of ways to push the start of the storytelling further and further back, which, and it's an interesting, it's really kind of interesting because for all of his, Lee is sometimes considered to be To have a radical quality in the physics world.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we start to publish more about where it's gone, I think you'll start to see tools and ways of thinking about theories that I think open up some new paths that will be of interest. There's the technical core of it, which is this idea of a correspondence to give you more facility. But then there's also the storytelling part of it. And this is something Lee loves stories and I do. And the idea here is that A typical Way of thinking about physics is that there's some kind of starting condition and then there's some principle by which the starting condition evolves. And the question is like why the starting condition”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason to want to do that is to just have more tools and more options because Well, theoretical physics is really hard, and a lot of programs have kind of run into a state where they feel a little stalled. I guess I can, I want to be delicate about this because I'm not a physicist. I'm the computer scientist collaborating. So I don't mean to diss anybody's. So this is”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Well, I should say that paper reflected work from last year and the project, the program has moved quite a lot. So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff that's not published that I'm quite excited about. So I have to kind of keep my frame in that last year's thing. So I have to try to be a little careful about that. We can think about it in a few different ways. The core of the paper, the technical core of it is a triple correspondence. One part of it was already established and then another part is in the process. The part that was established was, of course, understanding different theories of physics as matrix models. The part that was fresher is understanding those as machine learning systems so that we could move fluidly between these different ways of describing systems.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had her as a she used to walk around if you were wearing Hollands for a bit. I don't think that's happening anymore. I think you should turn a software into a creature.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, Bob was another thing. Bob was this other screen character who was supposed to be the voice of AI. Cortana, Cortana with Cortana do it for you?”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not speaking for Microsoft. I have an explicit arrangement with them where I don't speak for them. Obviously, that should be very clear. I do not speak for them. I am not saying I like him. I think Sachi's amazing data dignity was coined by Satcha. Like, so we have, it's kind of extraordinary, but Microsoft's this giant thing. It's going to screw up this or that. You know, it's not. I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I've had a few occasions in my life to see how things work from the inside of some big thing. And, you know, it's always just people kind of, it's, I don't know, there's always like coordination problem. And there's also...”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you've just described the psychology of virality or the psychology of trying to base a civilization on semi-random occurrences of network effect peaks. And it doesn't really work. I mean, I think we need to get away from that. We need to soften those peaks. And except Microsoft, which deserves every penny. But in every other case,”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They paid for entertainment as they lost money, so that's fine. And Las Vegas does up the losing of money in entertaining way. So why not? It's like going to a show. So that's one argument. The argument that was made to me was different from that. It's that, no, what they're doing is they're getting a chance to experience hope. And a lot of people don't get that chance. And so that's really worth it, even if they're going to lose. They have that moment of hope. And they need to be able to experience that. And it's a very interesting argument.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had an interesting conversation. I don't, I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy, but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin, I remember having an argument about it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme. The early people have more than the later people. And the further down the chain you get, the more you're subject to gambling-like dynamics, where it's more and more random and more and more subject to weird network effects and whatnot, unless you're a very small player, perhaps, and you're just buying something. But even then, you'll be subject to fluctuations because the whole thing is just kind of like that as it fluctuates, it's going to wave around the little people more. I remember the conversation turned to gambling because gambling's a pretty large economic sector. And it's always struck me as being non-productive. Like somebody goes to Las Vegas and they lose money. And so one argument is, well, they got in.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the whole point was to talk about how bad network effect was, that it always created distortions that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives that created dangerous distortions. But then somehow even after the pandemic, we think of Viral as this good thing because we imagine ourselves as the virus, right? We want to be on the beneficiary side of it. But of course, you're not likely to be.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that you can make better designs and worse designs. And I think, and you know, the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs because we're all so hooked on that horizio alger story on like, I'm going to be the one who gets the viral benefit. You know, way back when all this stuff was starting, I remember it would have been in the 80s somebody had the idea of using viral as a metaphor for network effect.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source