Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, author, and founder of the field of virtual reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Jaron's Website: http://www.jaronlanier.com/
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:39 - What is reality?
5:52 - Turing machines
7:10 - Simulating our universe
13:25 - Video games and other immersive experiences
17:12 - Death and consciousness
25:43 - Designing human-centric AI
27:17 - Empathy with robots
31:09 - Social media incentives
43:29 - Data dignity
51:01 - Jack Dorsey and Twitter
1:02:46 - Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
1:07:26 - Government overreach and freedom
1:17:41 - GitHub and TikTok
1:19:51 - The Autodidactic Universe
1:24:42 - Humans and the mystery of music
1:30:53 - Defining moments
1:41:39 - Mortality
1:43:31 - The meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Jaron Lanier,

a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher, writer, futurist, musician, and the founder of the field of virtual reality.

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

As a side note, you may know that Jaron is a staunch critic of social media platforms.

Him and I agree on many aspects of this, except perhaps I am more optimistic about it being possible to build better platforms and better artificial intelligence systems that put long-term interests and happiness of human beings first.

Let me also say a general comment about these conversations.

I try to make sure I prepare well, remove my ego from the picture, and focus on making the other person shine as we try to explore the most beautiful and insightful ideas in their mind.

This can be challenging when the ideas that are close to my heart are being criticized.

In those cases, I do offer a little pushback, but respectfully, and then move on, trying to have the other person come out looking wiser in the exchange.

I think there is no such thing as winning in conversations, nor in life.

I ask that you don't see my approach to these conversations as weakness.

It is my attempt at showing respect and love for the other person.

That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking, but you probably already knew that.

So please give me a pass on that as well.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier.

You're considered the founding father of virtual reality.

Do you think we will 1 day spend most or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds.

I have always found the very most valuable moment in virtual reality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality afresh, as if you were a newborn baby, but with a little more experience.

So you can really notice just how incredibly strange and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is.

So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be, in the physical world.

I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtual reality.

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.

But I should say also even in what's, well, I called it mixed reality back in the day, and these days it's called augmented reality, but with something like a HoloLens, even then, like 1 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 virtual reality, all of a sudden you do.

And even in practical applications, my favorite early application of virtual reality, 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 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.

So I think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation.

It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere in the physical space can help you appreciate how much you value your home once you return.

I mean, once again, people have different attitudes towards it.

What do you think is the difference between the virtual world and the physical meat space world that you are still drawn, for you personally, still drawn to the physical world?

Like there clearly then is a distinction.

Is there some fundamental distinction or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology?

In terms of the kind of virtual reality 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, 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, 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?

And we have physics, we have technology, 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.

Whether this computer we call the universe performs the kind of computation that can be modeled as a universal Turing machine?

Or is it something much more fancy, so fancy in fact, that it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand?

Turing machines are kind of, I'd 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.

And they actually are in practice a very particular sort of machine within the constraints, within the conservation principles of any reality that's worth being in probably.

And 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?

Well, to me, the question of whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation is interesting in the following way.

How difficult is it to build a machine, not that simulates the universe, but that makes it sufficiently realistic that we wouldn't know the difference, or better yet, sufficiently realistic that we would kind of know the difference, but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway.

I want to give you a few different answers.

I want to give you the 1 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 asked 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 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.

And so 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.

There was an 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.

Another 1, 1 of my favorite ones, is in the Civil War era, there were itinerant photographers who collected photographs of people who just looked kind of like a few archetypes.

So you could buy a photo of somebody who looked kind of like your loved 1 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.

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.

So that's my first answer, which is I think the most important 1.

Now, of 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.

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.

But can you, the second question, which you're now making me realize is way different.

Is it possible to create worlds in which people would want to stay instead of the real world?

Like, en masse, like large numbers of people.

What I hope is, 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.

So basically technology helps us appreciate the more the more technology-free aspect of life?

Let me say, I could definitely play McLuhan and turn this into a general theory.

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.

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.

What more do you want from it to be a computer?

Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right.

That's my fascination with the AI as well, is it helps in the case of AI, I see as a set of techniques that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans.

In the same way, virtual reality, and you're putting it brilliantly, It's a way to help us understand reality.

I appreciate and open our eyes more richly to reality.

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.

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.

I think the danger with these things is, 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 you know 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.

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.

Can you maybe, this is a therapy session, psychoanalyze me for a second.

Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world?

And then there's people you could talk to and you can just like, it's an escape, but my life is awesome.

I'm truly happy, but I also am happy with the music that's playing in the mountains and carrying around a sword.

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.

You know, 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 manipulative economy of social media is making everybody nuts and all that.

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.

And by the way, there's a thing about humans which is, We're problematic.

Any kind of social interaction with other people is going to have its problems.

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 gonna get you anywhere, so I'm not worried about that.

I worry about the really bad cases where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough that we might not survive.

And I think the social media criticism rises to that level, but I'm glad you enjoy it.

And I like that you basically say that every experience has both beauty and darkness, as in with classical music.

I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much.

I mean, every, and even the darkest, it's a man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps.

Even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty.

And so it's, that's the interesting thing about humans, is the capacity to discover beautiful in the darkest of moments, but there's always the dark parts too.

Well, I mean, it's, our situation is structurally difficult.

We perceive socially, we depend on each other for our 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, it's just, our fundamental situation is complicated and challenging and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Okay, let's talk about 1 of the most challenging things.

1 of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of, being human, allegedly, you wrote an essay on death and consciousness in which you write a note, certainly the fear of death has been 1 of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought and in the formation of the character of civilization.

A great book on the subject, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker deserves a reconsideration.

I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this.

See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house because my wife is Russian, and we have a piano of such spectacular qualities, you would have freaked out.

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, 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 1 hand, the 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 a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions.

Not all of them, not really, but most of them.

The 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, 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 it, upload myself and I'll live forever.

Yeah, that's like the implied thought, right?

And so it's kind of this, in a funny way, it's the same thing.

It's peculiar 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, this sort of hard core computationalist idea about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity.

Like there's the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong thought, you'll piss off the super AIs 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.

This is so the Ernest Becker's idea that death, the fear of death is the 1 at the core, which is like, that's the core motivator of everything we see humans have created.

The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core, is like a prerequisite.

So what you just, 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.

Now, this is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

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 wasn't the first person to have the idea at all, but he certainly populated the 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.

And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about this stuff because I always rejected it.

And of all of his, I wasn't formally his student, but I worked for him as a researcher, but of all of his students and student-like people of his young adoptees, I think I was the 1 who argued with him about this stuff in particular, and he loved it.

I would have loved to hear that conversation.

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 1 of our mutual friends said, hey, listen, Marvin's so frail.

He looked up and he said, are you ready to argue?

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.

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 don't know if it was coincident or, but anyway, there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself and the 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.

And outside the circle might be a rock, or, I don't know.

And that circle is unknowingly based on faith.

The thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith.

It's 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.

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 tried, we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.

And so- Aren't you shoving AI outside the circle?

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 exclude yourself from being able to be a good engineer or designer, and so you're facing incompetence immediately.

So like, I really think we need to subordinate algorithms and be much more skeptical of them.

Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly with social media, how things can go wrong.

Isn't it possible to design systems that show compassion not to manipulate you, but give you control and make your life better if you so choose to.

Like grow together with systems and the way we grow with dogs and cats, with pets, with significant others in that way.

I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible.

You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble by thinking you know what's good for people.

Well, look, there's this question of what frame we're speaking in.

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.

At some point, 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 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.

So I agree with you that a lot of technologists sort of lack this basic respect, understanding and love for humanity.

The thing I'd like to push back against, it's not that you disagree, but I believe you can create technologies and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer that does build systems that respect humanity, not just respect, but admire humanity, that have empathy for common humans, have compassion.

I mean, I think musical instruments are a great example of that.

Musical instruments are technologies that help people connect in fantastic ways.

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 semi-consciously perform to each other as if they have proper eye contact, as if they're paying attention to each other non-verbally.

And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell.

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Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218