"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..."

"you're considered the founding father of virtual reality do you think we will one day spend most or all of our lives in uh virtual reality worlds i have always found the very most valuable moment in v..."

"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 ..."

"than the simulation that's fascinating i never really thought about that it's almost it's like traveling elsewhere in the physical space can help you appreciate how much you value your home once you r..."

"personality in people or at least in me which um 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 w..."

"understand turing machines are kind of um i'd call them teases in a way because like if you have an infinitely smart programmer with an infinite amount of time an infinite amount of memory and an infi..."

"well to me the question of like whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation is interesting in the following way there's a technical question is here how difficult is it to build a machine n..."

"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 c..."

"the flaws in a photograph and appreciate reality more maybe the greatest gift of audio recording is that we can distinguish that opera thing on our singer now from that recording of the opera singer o..."

"helps us appreciate the more sort of technology-free aspect of life well media technology you know i mean i i you can stretch that i mean you can let me say i could definitely play mcluhan and turn th..."

"is it uh helps in the case of ai i see it 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 which it's a i..."

"of course i worked for many many years on trying to make that stuff happen because i think it can be beautiful like i um i don't like why not you know and and by the way um there's a thing about human..."

"interesting i mean every and even the darkness a man's search for meaning with victor franco and uh in concentration camps even there there's opportunity to discover beauty now and so it's that's that..."

"okay let's talk about one of the most challenging things one 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 no..."

"and the denial of death played into different philosophical approaches to consciousness because i uh i think on the one hand uh this sort of sentimental school of dualism meaning the feeling that ther..."

"this sort of hardcore uh computationalist idea about uh the brain has turned into medieval christianity with together like there's a they're the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong though..."

"prerequisite so what you just you just moved across this vast cultural chasm uh 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 hu..."

"loved to hear that conversation it was fun did you ever converse to a place oh no no so the very last time i saw him he was quite frail and and uh i was in uh in boston and i was going to the old hous..."

"people are so clanished 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 peop..."

"choose to like grow together with systems and the way we grow with dogs and cats with pets with significant others in that way they grow to become better people i i don't understand why that's fundame..."

"that i really have to reject and we're just not competent yet to talk about these kinds of absolutes okay so i agree with you that a lot of technologists sort of lack this basic respect uh understandi..."

"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 uh you you can uh you c..."

"that and i think they i mean that's a technical discussion of whether they need to have something that looks like more like ai versus algorithms something that has a identity something that has a pers..."

"problem because it's all about incentives but um i've been around this thing since it started and and uh i've been in the meetings where the social media companies sell themselves to the people who pu..."

"because it funded some efforts that perhaps yeah i mean i think like there's a there's a thing where uh sometimes i think it's actually been of some use now let's where the damage comes is a different..."

"relate to each other they're this old business but it's 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..."

"somebody none of us find that easy right well the reason that's hard the reason i ask this is is it possible to design social media systems that optimize for some longer term metrics of you huge being..."

"just not like i mean that i'm speaking the truth here and you know it well let me push back on this this uh there's several truths here so one you're speaking to the way certain companies operate curr..."

"do like a large you know citizen science thing sometime and do it but then i think the problem with that is youtube would detect it and then change it yes i definitely say i love that kind of stuff on..."

"shared stake you know a little secret so get so github does a bit of that um github was wonderful yes but i yeah i'm tempted to play uh the gerund back at you which is that so github is currently is a..."

"different faiths for those people under future one and future two future one um some weird like kindergarten paint job van with all these like cameras and where things drives up observes what the gard..."

"the bitcoin like like the things that we think are decentralized are not decentralized so let's go to future two future two the gardeners see that that van with all the cameras and the kindergarten pa..."

"future one and future two have the same robots and the same algorithms there's no technological difference there's only a human difference yeah and that second future too that's state of dignity the e..."

"support the the the lower wing of the bell curve too but not universal basic income it has to be for the you know because if it's an honest if it's an honest economy there will be uh that lower wing a..."

"do you think it's possible to um to create a social network that competes with twitter and facebook that's large and centralized in this way not centralized or large large how do we get all right so i..."

"twitter i think that's the story of twitter um 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 ..."

"or happiness is i i if you give control to people to define what their long-term happiness and goals are then you that optimization can happen for each of those individual people you know well i mean ..."

"simplified in the way that you can truly you know simply understand everybody can simply understand um the the basics in the same way it should be very simple to understand how the data is being used ..."

"solution and don't worry about it um i i think this idea of having incentives that reduce complexity for people can be made to work and and that's an example of an algorithm that could be manipulative..."

"i um it's kind of funny um i i wrote i've been advocating some kind of digital currency for a long time and when the the uh when th when bitcoin came out and the original paper on on blockchain um my ..."

"for like checking the security of those transactions 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 there was ..."

"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 the idea and i apologize i uh overstretched the use of the word govern..."

"pop up but empirically speaking some problems are bigger than others so like some uh like groups of people like governments or gangs or companies leaders are you are you a u.s citizen yes has the gove..."

"that's a way to resist that's not actually saying government bad that's saying some of the ways that central banks get into trouble can be resisted through defense so let me ask you on balance today i..."

"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 of course they woul..."

"i 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 uh bitcoin i i remember having an argument about like it..."

"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 ..."

"the source of hope and it's heartbreaking to me how many people is the source of hope yeah um you've just described the psychology of virality or the psychology of of trying to base a civilization on ..."

"back oh clippy but clippy pronounced the myth of a.i well that's why this how about i think you're wrong how about if we all right could we bring back bob instead of clippy which one was bob oh bob wa..."

"passage in kerouac's book dr sachs where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality and people in like a paragraph and i i couldn't reproduce it for you here but it's like yeah li..."

"it's simple like you can say oh it's it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains on a pattern level or or something like that there's all these things you can say about music which you know s..."

"it and i've never ever i i've run across a lot of explanations from all kinds of interesting people uh like that it's some kind of uh a flow language between people or between people and how they perc..."

"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..."

"young people at all um and this is this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to young people that they have to learn their own lessons and lessons don't come easily and a world which avoids ha..."

"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..."

"your own personal internal experience that you just have and then you're saying yeah silence the rest of the world enough to hear that like whatever that magic just yeah and that experience find with ..."

"hypothetical yeah teenager that doesn't really exist that really wants to sit and and listen to my wife or your daughter ten years from now maybe a difficult question yeah sure you uh you talked about..."

"played them in this exaggerated drippy way i remember when i was a kid and uh exaggerating meaning uh too full of emotion yeah like just like it's just it's not the only way to play beethoven i mean i..."

"and uh blah blah blah so she had i shouldn't say i don't mean to be dismissed but i'm just saying like her position on beethoven was very negative and very unimpressed which is really interesting for ..."

"he was sight reasoning he talks like beethoven's talking to him like he's like oh yeah i hear he's doing this he's i can't do john but you know it's like it's really it's really interesting like it's ..."

"maybe through music answer it for yourself my impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask but i feel like going then that down that path is just too tedious for the moment and i d..."

"it's it's it's 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 um to have had that experience again the emphasis yeah experience i um ..."

"the amazonians invented our agriculture and they they were probably under clouds a lot i don't know i don't know to me personally the the question of the meaning of life becomes most um vibrant most a..."

"poetry are for 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 artists talking not scienti..."