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

“I didn't say for legitimate transactions. I said for economic growth, for creativity. I think what's happening is people are using it a little bit for buying, I don't know, maybe somebody's companies make it available for this and that. You can buy a Tesla with it or something. Investing in a startup hard. It might have happened a little bit, but it's not an engine of productivity, creativity, and economic growth. Whereas old-fashioned currency still is. Anyway, look, I think something I'm pro the idea of digital currencies. I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics as a result. I think they have to exist in some balance to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, I gotta say, if you look at people who've been able to decode blockchains, and they do leak a lot of data, they're not as secure as it's widely thought, there are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales from pretty early, and they're huge. You ask who are these people, there's evidence that a lot of them are quite not the people you'd want to support, let's say. And I just don't, like, I think empirically this idea that there's some intrinsic way that bad governments will be disempowered and people will be able to resist them more than new villains or even villainous governments will be empowered. There's no basis for that assertion. It just is kind of circumstantial. And I think in general, Bitcoin ownership is one thing, but Bitcoin transactions have tended to support criminality more than productivity.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resist it through. So let me ask you unbalance today in the real world in terms of actual facts. Do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes or to resist those regimes? Where do you think the balance is right now?”
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 wife's family were refused Nicks. And so we have like a very, and her dad was sent to the gulag for what it's worth on my father's side, all but a few were killed by a pogrom in post-Soviet pogrom in Ukraine.”
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, but people, see, this idea that the problem is always the government being powerful is false, the problem can also be criminal gangs. The problem can also be weird cults. The problem can be abusive clergy. The problem can be... Infrastructure that fails, the problem can be poisoned water, the problem can be failed electric grids, the problem can be a crappy education system that makes the whole society less and less able to create value. There are all these other problems that are different from an overbearing government. Like you have to keep some sense of perspective and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem because then the others will pop up.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, this quest to avoid government is really a quest to avoid that political feeling, but you have to have it. You have to deal with it. And it sucks, but that's the human situation. That's the human condition. And this idea that we're going to have this abstract thing that protects us from having to deal with each other is always an illusion.”
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 politics. If you don't have perpetual annoyance, something's gone very wrong and you suppress those people that it's only temporary. It's going to come back and be horrible. You should seek perpetual annoyance. I'll invite you to a Berkeley City Council meeting so you can know what that feels like. What perpetual annoyance feels like. But anyway, so freedom is being the test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people. If you're not, you're not free. If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion that's going to fall apart.”
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 mean, what I want to ask you to do is to replace the word government with politics. Like our politics is people having to deal with each other. My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form of freedom is perpetual annoyance. All right, so annoyance means you're actually dealing with people because people are annoying. Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable so it doesn't destroy us all. So if you have perpetual annoyance, then you have freedom. And that's part of 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
“So Bitcoin's not new. It's been around for a while. I've been watching it closely. I've not seen one example of it creating economic growth. Was this obsession with the idea that government was the problem that idea that government's the problem let's say government earned that wrath honestly because if you look at some of the things that governments have done in recent decades it's not a pretty story like after after a very small number of people in the US government decided to bomb and landmine Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back and say, oh, government's this great thing. The problem is that this resistance to government is basically a resistance to politics. It's a way of saying if I can get rich, nobody should bother me. It's a way of not having obligations to others. And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation.”
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. So, like, there are people in the community who are trying to be thoughtful and trying to figure out how to do this better.”
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 just like, I'm just mystified, but that's a different question than when you ask can you have a cryptographic currency or at least some kind of digital currency that's of a benefit? And absolutely. And there are people who are trying to be thoughtful about this. If you haven't, you should interview Vitalik Buddha in sometime.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thoughts on Bitcoin. It's kind of funny. I wrote, I've been advocating some kind of digital currency for a long time. And when the... When Bitcoin came out and the original paper on blockchain, my heart kind of sank because I thought, oh my God, we're applying all of this fancy thought and all these very careful distributed security measures to recreate the gold standard. Like it's just so retro. It's so dysfunctional. It's so useless from an economic point of view. It's always amazing. And then the other thing is using computational inefficiency at a boundless scale as your form of security is a crime against Atmosphere obviously a lot of people know that now, but we knew that at the start. Like the thing is, when the first paper came out, I remember a lot of people saying, oh my God, this thing scales, it's a carbon disaster, you 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
“So, you know, when people use TikTok, there's a lot of, it's kind of funny, I was going to say cattiness, but I was just using the cat as this exemplar of overcoming. I contradict myself. But anyway, there's all this cattiness where people are like, this person's like. And I just, what about people getting together and considering, okay, we're going to work on this move. We're going to get a bit of, can we get a better musician? And they do that, but that's the part that's kind of... Off the books right now, you know, that should be like right there. That should be the center. That's where that's the really best part.”
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 kind of version. Why not? I like it. I love it. I just like right now when people use, by the way, father of teenage daughter. It's all”
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 that's an example of an algorithm that could be manipulative or not. Going back to your question before about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative? And I would say a GitHub like, if you just have this vision, GitHub plus TikTok combine, is it possible? I think 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
“I mean, a lot of the reason that money works is actually information hiding and information loss. Like one of the things about money is a particular dollar you get might have passed through your enemy's hands and you don't know it. But also this is, I mean, this is what Adam Smith, if you want to give the most charitable interpretation possible to the invisible hand is what he was saying, is that like there's this whole complicated thing. And not only do you not need to know about it, the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried and just like let the economic incentives solve for this whole thing and that in a sense every transaction is like a neuron and a neural net. If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it and let the whole thing settle to a solution and don't worry about it. I think this idea of having incentives that reduce complexity for people can be made to work.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GDPR. And so therefore we've been able to have empirical feedback on how that goes. And the problem is that most people actually get stymied by the complexity of that kind of management. They have trouble, and reasonably so. I don't. I'm like a techie. I can go in and I can figure out what's going on. But most people really do. And so there's a problem that it differentially benefits those who kind of have a technical mindset and can go in and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works. I kind of still want to come back to incentives. And so if the incentive for whoever's, if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people of the future make more money, because you get a cut of it, that's how you grow an economy.”
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 certainly believe that we're definitely in the territory of wholehearted agreement here. I do want to caution against one thing, which is making a future that benefits programmers versus this idea that people are in control of their data. So years ago, I co-founded an advisory board for the EU with a guy named Giovanni Buttarelli, who passed away. It's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it, a remarkable guy who'd been, he was originally a prosecutor who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily. So he was like this intense guy who was like, I've dealt with death threats, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me or whatever. So we worked on this path of saying, let's make it all about transparency and consent. And it was one of the theaters that led to this huge data privacy and protection framework in Europe called the”
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's an alternate economic system that rewards productivity, creativity, value as perceived by others. It's a genuine market. It's not doled out from a center. There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable. It's actual market. And the money is made by supporting that instead of just grabbing people's attention in the cheapest possible way, which is definitely how you get the lizard brain.”
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're negotiating for returns. They join different artist societies in order to soften the blow of the randomness of who gets the network effect benefit because nobody can know that. And I think an individual person might join a thousand different data unions in the course of their lives or maybe even 10,000. I don't know. But the point is that we'll have like these very hedge distributed portfolios of different data unions we're part of. And some of them might just trickle in a little money for nonsense stuff where we're contributing to health studies or something, but I think people will find their way. They'll find their way to the right GitHub-like community in which they find their value in the context of supplying inputs and data and taste and correctives and all of this into the algorithms and the robots of the future.”
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 mean, imagine a future Probably a lot of people would love to make their living doing TikTok dance videos, but people recognize generally that's kind of hard to get into. Nonetheless, Have an experience that's very similar to programmers working together on GitHub. So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub. And they get together and they have rights. They're negotiating.”
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 that's the story of Twitter. I think that's the story of Twitter. One of the things that I observe is that if you just want to look at the human side, meaning like, how are people being changed? How do they feel? What does the culture like, almost all of the social media platforms that get big have an initial sort of honeymoon period where they're actually kind of sweet and cute? Like, if you look at the early years of Twitter, it was really sweet and cute, but also look at Snap, TikTok. And then what happens is as they scale and the algorithms become more influential instead of just the early people, when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it, then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style, and then they start to get dark. And we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so I got to tell you how to get from what I'm talking, how to get from where we are to anything kind of in the zone of what I'm talking about is challenging. I know some of the people who run, like I know Jack Dorsey, and I view Jack. As somebody who's actually I think he's really striving and searching and trying to find a way to make it better, but is kind of like, it's very hard to do it while in flight. And he's under Norm's business pressure too.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, what I believe, I'm not going to talk about AI, but I will say that I think there'll be more and more algorithms that are useful. And so I don't think everybody's going to be supplying data to groundskeeping robots, nor do I think everybody's going to make their living with TikTok videos. I think in both cases, there'll be a rather small contingent that do well enough at either of those things. But I think there might be many, many, many, many of those niches that start to evolve as there are more and more algorithms, more and more robots. And it's that large number that will create the economic potential for a very large part of society to become members of new creative classes.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few people who do really well, a lot of people who do okay, and then we should have an expanding economy reflecting more and more creativity and expertise flowing through the network and that expanding economy moves the result just a bit forward. So more people are getting money out of it than are putting money into it. So it gradually expands the economy and lifts all boats. And the society has to support the lower wing of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income. It has to be for that lower wing and we have to support those people. There has to be a safety net.”
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 what should happen is in the future there should be massive data unions for people putting content into the system and those data unions should smooth out the results a little bit so it's not winner take all but at the same time And people have to pay for it too. They have to pay for Facebook the way they pay for Netflix with an allowance for the poor. There has to be a way out too. But the thing is people do pay for Netflix. It's a going concern. People pay for Xbox and PlayStation. Like people, there's enough people to pay for stuff they want. This could happen too. It's just that this precedent started that moved it in the wrong direction. And then what has to happen, the economy's a measuring device if it's an honest measuring device, the outcomes for people form a normal distribution, a bell curve. And then so there should be a”
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 know, I mean, I think you can believe in AI and be in Future too. I just think it's a little harder. You have to do more. Contortions, it's possible”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Waves of creative groundskeeping with spiral pumpkin patches and waves of cultural things. There'll be new ideas like, wow, I wonder if we could do something about climate change mitigation with how we do this. What about freshwater? What about can we make the food healthier? What about all of a sudden there'll be this whole creative community on the case? And isn't it nicer to have a high-tech future with more creative classes than one with more dependent classes? Isn't that a better future? Future one and future two have the same robots and the same algorithms. There's no technological difference. There's only a human difference. And that second future too, that state of dignity.”
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 so, and they say we're going to form a data union and we're going to not only are we going to sell our data to this place, but we're going to make it better than it would have been if they were just grabbing it without our corporation. And we're going to improve it. We're going to make the robots more effective. We're going to make them better and we're going to be proud of it. We're going to become a new class of experts that are respected. And then here's the interesting. There's two things that are different about that world. from future one. One thing, of course, the people have more pride, they have more sense of ownership of agency, but what the robots do change is instead of just like this functional, like, we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood from burning down, you have this whole creative community that wasn't there before thinking, well, how can we make these robots better so we can keep on earning money?”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“60 something people own a quarter of all the Bitcoin. The things that we think are decentralized are not decentralized. So let's go to Future 2. Future 2, the gardeners see that van with all the cameras and the kindergarten paint job. And they say the groundskeepers.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These people have lost dignity, they don't know what they're going to do. And then someone will say, well, they go on basic income, whatever. They become wards of the state. My problem with that solution is every time in history that you've had some centralized thing that's stolen out the benefits, that things get seized by people because it's too centralized and it gets seized. That's happened to every communist experiment I can find. So I think that turns into a poor future that will be unstable. I don't think people will feel good in it. I think it'll be a political disaster with a sequence of people seizing this central source of the basic income. And you'll say, oh no, an algorithm can do it. Then people will seize the algorithm. They'll seize control.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Lot to Lot. They have this whole little web that's keeping us safe. I didn't know about this at first. I just started talking to them because they were out there during the pandemic. And so I try to just see who are these people. Who are these people who are keeping us alive? Now, I want to talk about the two different fates for those people under Future One and Future Two. Future One, some weird like kindergarten paint job van with all these cameras and weird things drives up, observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing. A few years later, some amazing robots that can shimmy up trees and all this show up. All those people are out of work. And there are these robots doing the thing. And the robots are good and they can scale to more land. And they're actually good. But then there are all these people out of work.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me do the fastest version of this I can do. The fastest way I know how to do this is to compare two futures. So future one is then the normative one, the one we're building right now. And future two is going to be data dignity. And I'm going to use a particular population. I live on the hill in Berkeley, and one of the features about the hill is that as the climate changes, we might burn down and all lose our houses or die or something. It's dangerous, you know, and it didn't used to be. And so who keeps us alive? Well, the city does. The city does some things. The electric company kind of sort of maybe hopefully better. Individual people who own property take care of their property. That's all nice. But there's this other middle layer, which is fascinating to me, which is that the groundskeepers who work up and down that hill, many of whom are not legally here, many of whom don't speak English, cooperate with each other to make sure trees don't touch to transfer fire easily.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, this is why this gets us into the economics. So there's this thing called data dignity that I've been studying for a long time. I wrote a book about an earlier version of it called Who Owns the Future. And the basic idea of it is that Once again, this is a third conversat”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subjective One that I've been really interested in is GitHub It could change. I'm not saying it will always be, but for the most part, GitHub has had a relatively quite low poison quotient. And I think there's a few things about GitHub that are interesting. One thing about it is that people have a stake in it. It's not just empty status games. There's actual code or there's actual stuff being done. And I think as soon as you have a real world stake in something you have a motivation to not screw up that thing. And I think that that's often missing, that there's no incentive for the person to really preserve something if they get a little bit of attention from dumping on somebody's TikTok or something that they don't pay any price for it. But you have to kind of.”
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 will tell you, I think one way to do this is to try to look around at social, maybe not things that are officially social media, but things where people are together online and see which ones have more healthy conversations, even if it's hard to Completely objective in that measurement, you can kind of at least crudely”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard to do this work solidly. Many have repeated this experiment, and yet it still is kind of anecdotal. I'd like to do like a large citizen science thing sometime and do it. But then I think the problem with that is YouTube would detect it and then change 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
“I've done that many times now. I have, because of how large YouTube is and how widely it's used, it's very hard to get to enough scale to get a statistically solid result on this. I've done it with high school kids with dozens of kids doing it at a time. Every time I've done an experiment, the majority of times after about 17 or 18 hops, you end up in really weird paranoid, bizarre territory. Because ultimately, that is the stuff the algorithm rewards the most because of the feedback crudeness I was just talking about. So I'm not saying that the video never recommends something cool. I'm saying that it's fundamental core is one that promotes a paranoid style that promotes increasing irritability, that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger, promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people. And I would encourage the thing 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
“Let me ask you something. Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube recommend videos to you, either starting from an absolutely anonymous random place where it doesn't know who you are or from knowing who you or somebody else is, and then going 15 or 20 hops. Have you ever done that and just let it go top video recommend and then just go 20 hops?”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, yeah, curation people have to be responsible algorithms shouldn't be recommending. Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend. Algorithms are crap in this era. I mean, I'm sorry, they are. And I'm not saying this as somebody as a critic from the outside. I'm in the middle of it. I know what they can do. I know the math. I know what the corpora are. I know the best ones. Our office is funding GPT-3 and all these things that are at the edge of what's possible. And they do not have yet, I mean, it still is statistical emergent pseudosemantics. It doesn't actually have deep representation emerging of anything.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personal growth. I don't think you should try to engineer personal growth or happiness. I think what you should do is design a system that's just respectful of the people and subordinates itself to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives. And then at least there's a chance of something decent 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
“Although I always said, I don't know that you should. I can give you the arguments, it's up to you. I'm always very clear about that. But, you know, I get like, I don't have a social media account, obviously. It's not that easy for people to reach me. They have to search out an old-fashioned email address on a super crappy antiquated website. Like, it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy. And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail from people who say, oh, I quit my social media. I'm doing so much better. I can't believe how bad it was. But the thing is, what's for me a huge flood of mail would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective of Facebook, right? And so I think it's rare for somebody to look at themselves and say, oh boy, I sure screwed myself over.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes I wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens and maybe even actually the title of the book was just arguments to delete your account.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helpful in survival once in a while, but are not us at our best. They're not who we want to be. They're not how we relate to each other. They're this old business. So then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically, totally aside from whatever the topic is, you start to get incrementally just a little bit more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive. You know, you get a little stupid and you become a jerk. And it happens slowly. It happens. It's not like everybody's instantly transformed, but it does kind of happen progressively where people who get hooked kind of get drawn more and more into this pattern of being at their worst.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have this incredibly crude back channel of information. And so it's crude enough that it only catches sort of the more dramatic responses from you. And those are the fight or flight responses. Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off or aggressive or horny. These are these ancient, the sort of what are sometimes called the lizard brain circuits or whatever, these fast response, old, old, old evolutionary business circuits that we have 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
“Perhaps there's a thing where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use. Now, where the damage comes is a different thing, though. Social media... Algorithms on social media have to work on feedback loops where they present you with stimulus and they have to see if you respond to the stimulus. Now, the problem is that the measurement mechanism for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop is very, very crude. It's things like whether you click more or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more, if there's a forward-facing camera that's activated, but typically there isn't.”
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 you might say, am I contradicting myself? Because I was saying you should manipulate people. Yeah, I am. Probably here. I mean, I'm not pretending to have this perfect airtight worldview without some contradictions. I think there's a bit of a contradiction there.”
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 it's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme at this point. Because the science behind the persuade part, it's not entirely a failure, but it's not what there's, we play make-believe that it works more than it does. The damage doesn't come, honestly, as I've said in my books, I'm not anti-advertising. I actually think advertising can be demeaning and annoying and banal and ridiculous and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff. Like there's a lot of ways to criticize advertising that's Accurate and it can also lie and all kinds of things. However, if I look at the biggest picture, I think advertising, at least as it was understood before social media, helped bring people into modernity in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall.”
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 a cognitive access blackmail payment at this point. Just to be connected, you're paying the money. It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms. So Stanford renamed its program, but it used to be called Engage Persuade. The engage part works. The Persuade part is iffy, but the thing is that once people are engaged in order for you to exist as a business, in order for you to be known at all, you have to put money into 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
“Oh, fixing social media, that diverts us into this whole other field, in my view, which is economics, which I always thought was really boring, but we have no choice but to turn into economists if we want to fix this problem, because it's all about incentives. But I've been around this thing since it started, and I've been in the meetings where the social media companies Sell themselves to the people who put the most money into them, which are usually the big advertising holding companies and whatnot. And there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction, and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody, that the algorithm will get really good at getting people to buy something. Because I think people have looked at their returns and looked at what happens, and everybody recognizes it's not exactly right. It's more...”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source