YouSaid · the spoken record
Jaron Lanier
- lines on the record
- 135
- first
- 2021-09-06
- most recent
- 2021-09-06
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- 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
“Things, but everybody ultimately became McKinsey and because it just didn't work. It really wasn't that smart. It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed, you know. And so if you really, you know, people who really, really, really want to believe in the invisible hand is infinitely smart screw up their economies terribly. You have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool. Everybody does when it's to their advantage. They might not when it's not to their advantage. That's kind of an interesting game that happens. But the thing is, it's just like that with our algorithms. You know, like you can have sort of a Chicago economic philosophy about your computer and say, no, no, no, my things come alive. It's smarter than 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
“My invention or design during the pandemic period was this thing called Together Mode where people see themselves seated sort of in a classroom or a theater instead of in squares. And it allows them to semiconsciously perform to each other as if they have proper eye contact, as if they're paying attention to each other nonverbally. And weirdly, that turns out to work. And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell. I hope it is of some use to somebody. The AI idea isn't really new. I would say it was born with Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing and it gets a bit beyond us. And then we think it must be smarter than us. And the thing about the Invisible Hand is absolutely everybody has some line they draw where they say now we're going to take control of this thing. They might have different lines. They might care about different.”
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, no, no, no. I think Yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments are a great example of that. Musical instruments are technologies that help people connect in fantastic ways. That's a great example.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel sort of separate from and superior to other people or something like that. There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject. And we're just not competent yet to talk about these kinds of absolutes.”
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, look, there's this question of what frame we're speaking in. Do you know who Alan Watts was? So Alan Watts once said morality is like gravity, that in some absolute cosmic sense there can't be morality because at some point it all becomes relative. And who are we anyway? Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures. But here on earth, we're with each other. This is our frame and morality is a very real thing. Same thing with gravity. At some point, you know, you get into interstellar space and you might not feel much of it. But here we are on Earth. And I think in the same sense, I think this identification with a frame that's quite remote.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give me a second, all right. So there's a pragmatic consideration here, and so the biggest questions are probably fetuses and animals lately, but AI is getting there. Now, with AI, I think. And I've had this discussion so many times people say, But aren't you afraid if you exclude AI, you'd be cruel to some consciousness? And then I would say, well, if you include AI, you make yourself, you exclude yourself from being able to be a good engineer or designer. And so you're facing incompetence immediately. So I really think we need to subordinate algorithms and be much more skeptical of them.”
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 thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith. It also has also a pragmatic decision. And this is where things get complicated. If you try to make it too big, you suffer from incompetence. If you say, I don't want to kill a bacteria, I will not brush my teeth. I don't know, like, what do you do? Like, you know, like there's a competence question where you do have to draw the line. People who make it too small become cruel. People are so clannish and political and so worried about themselves ending up on the bottom of society that they are always ready to gang up on some designated group. And so there's always these people who are being trying, we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing person. It's hard to summarize this because it's decades of stuff. The first thing to say is that nobody can claim absolute knowledge about whether somebody or something else is conscious or not. This is all a matter of faith. And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith needs to be updated so it's not about God, but it's just about stuff in the universe. We have faith in each other being conscious. And then I used to frame this as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers. And then it turned into a thing for the animal rights movement, too. I noticed Peter Singer using it. I don't know if it was coincident or, but anyway, there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself and this stuff inside is more like you might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy, of your consideration, and the stuff outside the circle 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
“Oh, no, no. So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail. And I was in Boston, and I was going to the old house in Brookline, his amazing house. And one of our mutual friends said, hey, listen, Marvin's so frail. Don't do the argument with him. Don't argue about AI. And so I said, but Marvin loves that. And so I showed up and he's like, he was frail. He looked up and he”
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 Marvin was really the person. And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about the stuff because I always rejected it. And of all of his Of all of his, I wasn't formerly his student, but I worked for him as a researcher, but of all of his students in student-like people of his young adoptees, I think I was the one who argued with him about this stuff in particular, and he loved 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
“Okay, I don't believe in AI. I don't think there's any AI. There's just algorithms. We make them. We control them. Now, they're tools. They're not creatures. Now, this is something that robes a lot of people the wrong way. And don't I know it when I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky, who's the principal author of the computer as creature rhetoric that we still use. He was the first person to have the idea at all, but he certainly populated AI culture with most of its tropes, I would say, because a lot of the stuff people will say, oh, did you hear this new idea about AI? And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978. Sure. Yeah, I remember 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, what you just moved across this vast cultural chasm that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way, and I can't answer what you just said on the level without this huge deconstruction. Should I 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
“Yeah, Yeah. And so it's kind of this in a funny way. It's the same thing. It's peculiar that to notice that these people who would appear to be opposites in character and cultural references and in their ideas actually are remarkably similar and to an incredible degree, the sort of hardcore computationalist idea about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity together. Like there's the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong thought, you'll piss off the supreme eyes of the future who will come back and zap you and all that stuff. It's like it's really turned into medieval Christianity all over again.”
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're motivated in the same way with a remarkably similar chain of arguments, which is, no, the brain's a computer and I'm going to figure it out in my lifetime and upload myself and I'll live forever.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which certainly continue today. And I was. Interested in how the fear of death and the denial of death played into different philosophical approaches to consciousness because I think on the one hand, This sort of sentimental school of dualism, meaning the feeling that there's something apart from the physical brain, some kind of soul or something else, is obviously motivated in a sense by a hope that whatever that is will survive death and continue. And that's the very core aspect of a lot of the world religions, not all of them, not really, but most of them. Thing I noticed is that the opposite of those, which might be the sort of hardcore, no, the brain's a computer and that's it, in a sense.”
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, you would have enjoyed coming to our house because my wife is Russian and we also have a piano of such spectacular qualities you wouldn't. You would have freaked out. But anyway, we'll let all that go. So the context in which I remember that essay sort of, this was from maybe the 90s or something. And I used to publish in a journal called The Journal of Consciousness Studies because I was interested in these endless debates about consciousness and science.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of place and perception of the world. I mean, we're dependent on each other, and yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably, we inevitably let each other down. We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive. I mean, our fundamental situation is complicated and challenging. And I wouldn't have it any other way.”
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're problematic any kind of social interaction with other people is going to have its problems. People are political and tricky. And like, I love classical music, but when you actually go to a classical music thing and it turns out, oh, actually, this is like a backroom power deal kind of place and a big status ritual as well. And that's kind of not as fun. That's part of the package. And the thing is it's always going to be, there's always going to be a mix of things. I don't think the search for purity is going to get you anywhere. So I'm not worried about that. I worry about the really bad cases where we're becoming where we're making ourselves crazier cruel enough that we might not survive. And I think, you know, the social media criticism rises to that level. But I'm glad you enjoy it. I think it's great.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manipulative economy of social media is making everybody nuts and all that. So I'm anti that stuff. But the core of it, of course, I worked for many, many years on trying to make that stuff happen because I think it can be beautiful. I don't like why not? You know, and by the way, there's the thing about humans, which 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 think it's wonderful to love artistic creations. It's wonderful to love contact with other people. It's wonderful to love play and ongoing evolving meaning and patterns with other people. I think it's a good thing. I'm not like anti-tech and I'm certainly not anti-digital tech. I'm anti, as everybody knows by now, I think 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
“So, if you say, is the universe some kind of computer broadly, it has to be because it's not coherent to say that it isn't. On the other hand, to say that that means anything about what kind of computer, that's something very different. And the same thing is true for the brain, the same thing is true for anything where you might use computational metaphors. Like we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand. And the problem I have with these framings of computation as these ultimate cosmic questions is that it has a way of getting people to pretend they know more than they do”
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 certainly how I see it. And I wish people who become incredibly fascinated, who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations with whether we're in a simulation or not, or there's a whole world of variations on that. I wish they'd step back and think about their own motivations and exactly what they mean. And I think the danger with these things”
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, media technology. You know, I mean, you can stretch that. I mean, you can, let me say, I could definitely play McLuhan and turn this into a general theory. It's totally doable. The program you just described is totally doable. In fact, I will psychically predict that if you did the research, you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already. I don't know, but they might exist. But I don't know how much value there is in pushing a particular idea that far, claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense seems incoherent to me because we can program it. We have technology. It seems to obey physical laws. What more do you want from it to be a computer? I mean, it's a computer of some kind. We don't know exactly what kind. We might not know how to think about it. We're working on 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
“What I hope is, you know, as I said before, I hope that the experience of virtual worlds helps people appreciate. This physical world, we have and feel tender towards it and keep it from getting too fucked up. That's my hope.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, somebody might come back and say, Oh, but you know, technology can go so far. There must be some point at which it would surpass. That's a different question. I think that's also an interesting question, but I think the answer I just gave you is actually the more important answer to the more important question.”
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 could buy a photo of somebody who looked kind of like your loved one to remind you of that person because actually photographing them was inconceivable and hiring a painter was too expensive and you didn't have any way for the painter to represent them remotely anyway. How would they even know what they looked like? So these are all great examples of how in the early days of different media we perceived the media as being really great, but then we evolved through the experience of the media. This gets back to what I was saying. Maybe the greatest gift of photography is that we can see the flaws in a photograph and appreciate reality more. Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording is that we can distinguish that opera singer now from that recording of the opera singer on the horrible wire recorder. So we shouldn't limit ourselves by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect. That's the first thing. That's my first answer, which is I think the most important one.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early demonstration of extremely crude video teleconferencing between New York and DC in the 30s? I think so, that people viewed as being absolutely realistic and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible. And there are many other examples. Another one, one of my favorite ones is in the Civil War era. There were itinerant.”
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 want to give you a few different answers. I want to give you the one that I think has the most practical importance to human beings right now, which is that There's a kind of an assertion sort of built into the way the questions usually ask that I think is false, which is a suggestion that people have a fixed level of ability to perceive reality in a given way. And actually, people are always learning evolving, forming themselves. We're fluid too. We're also programmable, self-programmable, changing, adapting. And so My favorite way to get at this is to talk about the history of other media. So for instance, there was a peer review paper that showed that an early wire recorder playing back an opera singer behind a curtain was indistinguishable from a real opera singer. Now, of course, to us, it would not only be distinguishable, but it would be very blatant because the recording would be horrible. But to the people at the time, without the experience of it, it seemed plausible.”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turing machines are kind of, I call them teases in a way. Because if you have an infinitely smart programmer with an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of memory and an infinite clock speed, then they're universal. That cannot exist. So they're not universal in practice. And they actually are in practice a very particular sort of machine within, you know, the constraints within the conservation principles of any reality that's worth being in probably. So I think universality of a particular model is probably a deceptive way to think, even though at some sort of limit, of course, something like that's got to be true at some sort of high enough limit, but it's just not accessible to us. So what's the point?”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What on earth could you possibly mean if you say it isn't a computer? If it isn't a computer, it wouldn't follow principles consistently and it wouldn't be intelligible because what else is a computer ultimately? You know, I mean, and we have physics, we have technology, you know, so we can do technology so we can program it. So, I mean, of course, it's some kind of computer, but I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine is probably a foolish approach”
2021-09-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of the kind of virtuality that we have now, It's made of software, and software is terrible stuff. Software is always the slave of its own history, its own legacy. It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary, working with it brings out a certain kind of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me, which I'm not that fond of. And there are all kinds of things about software I don't like. And so that's different from the physical world. It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out. On the other hand, you know, I'm a little mystified when people ask me, well, do you think the universe is a computer? And I have to say, well, I mean,”
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 fake anatomy of the simulation, which is incredibly valuable for many things, for designing procedures, for training, for all kinds of things, then to go to the real person, boy, it's really something like surgeons really get woken up by that transition. It's very cool. So I think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation.”
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 I should say also even in what some, well, I called it mixed reality back in the day. And these days it's called augmented reality, but with something like a holo lens, even then, like one of my favorite things is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out as being astounding. You know, it's interactive, it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention. And it's hard to pay attention to that. But when you compare it to virtuality, all of a sudden you do. And even in practical applications, my favorite... Early application of virtuality, which we prototyped going back to the 80s when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med near where we are now, we made the first surgical simulator. And to go from”
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, that's my take on it. That's just me. I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtuality. And at this point, there have been multiple generations of younger people who've come along and liberated me from having to worry about these things.”
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 have always found the very most valuable moment in virtuality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality afresh, you know, as if you were a newborn baby. But with a little more experience, you can really notice just how incredibly Strange and Delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world 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