Transcription
Part of the ideology that makes AI into like a creature instead of a collaboration also wants to think of bits as being this ethereal thing that's free and infinite. You show me a bit that didn't involve work. You show me a bit that didn't disperse heat. Look at data centers. When you make enough bits, they take up more energy than anything. Information is physical or it's nothing.
You can think of large language model AI as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into this single document. But why do people want it to be a creature? You're a young man. You think you're the center of the universe. Of course, you think you're making God.
>> You're describing a lot of men I dated in my 20s.
>> Why do UFO sightings persist? Are at least some of them figments of our imagination? Or are we missing something? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I actually explore what's possible in this universe. Given the universal laws of physics, if the aliens are out there, the laws of physics will dictate how they find us. I also narrated the audio book. So, I'm duly informed that the audio book and the print version are available now wherever books are sold.
This is Star Talk special edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly, co-host here. Gary, how you doing, man?
>> I'm good, Neil. Over in London, though, so uh slightly remote.
>> Okay. Only slightly on the scale of the universe. You're right next door. I also have with me Nagin Fade. Nine, welcome back to Star Talk.
>> Hello. I'm so excited to be back.
>> It's been too long. I miss you.
>> Absolutely. I have to say you have you don't look a day over the last time we talked about Dark Matter.
>> Let me figure out how old I would need to be for that. You're a comedian. You're also a TED fellow for social justice. That's a thing.
>> I mean I do comedy that has to that tries to save the world.
>> Okay.
>> I And it's worked, guys. That's why we live in utopia.
>> Fake the nation. That's the coolest title ever.
>> That's right. And I'll never soon forget the title of your book from a few years ago.
>> How to make white people laugh. Yeah,
>> that's best title ever.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So, so Gary,
>> what what have you researched for today? It's got something to do with the internet and it's going to mess up the world. Something like that.
>> Oh, yeah. Let's get the good stuff out. Um, so is the internet too far gone in our lifetimes? The internet has changed from a novelty to a central influence in our lives and now with the advent of AI hawkked as the potential doomsday for humankind. Well, is it isn't it? Today we're going to talk about whether that's the case, how the internet influences our world and how we can come together and fix it or not. So Neil, if you will introduce our guest and I think this is just the right person to discuss this topic.
Yeah, there's there's there's a uniquely qualified person in the world to address those issues and more and I've got him sitting right here. Jarren Laneir, dude.
>> Hey, how are you?
>> Well, welcome to Star Talk.
>> Well, you know, I think you can speak a little lower than me, but that does not mean I will not attempt it.
>> Yeah, we don't use the word polymath too freely today because there aren't many folks. There's so much specialization, but if I were to bring that into the 21st century, I would apply it to you. You're a computer scientist, but interdisciplinary. And what's your title? I prime unifying scientist at Microsoft. That's a title. Is that on your business card?
>> It actually is. Yeah. Okay. It It's actually a joke. Okay. Uh it's office of the chief technology officer, prime unifying scientist. So, it spells out octopus. And there are there are several reasons for that. is I used to study sephopod cognition because it's absolutely fascinating. And but then there's also that some accuse me of starting to look like one myself.
>> Oh, that that can happen. That can happen.
>> That can happen. And so between those two things, I'm the octopus. Yes.
>> I'm just impressed that that's even a title that one can ascend to. Are you are you going to break the mold in your Can anyone become you in this?
>> No, the answer is no. Just say no.
>> Well, I will tell you one thing about my role. I have an agreement with them where I can speak my mind including being encouraged to criticize the company itself so long as I'm clear that I'm not speaking for Microsoft and somehow they haven't imploded. I think it actually I I would like to see more people with that role in the tech industry.
>> Okay. So in that sense I don't want to be the last. I'm aware of one other maybe who would be Vince Surf over at Google, but I think we're the only two and I we really desperately need more of us
>> because you know when someone has has you know where they're clamming shut on what you really want them to say about what they're doing you you know it in an interview, right?
>> Yeah. And in Silicon Valley that's like 90% of the time.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So you're considered the father of virtual reality in part because you even coined the term.
>> Yeah. Okay. Look, I was young. All right. I think I think
>> irresponsible.
>> Were you on Yeah. And on drugs maybe. Was there that involved?
>> I've never used drugs and I blame virtual reality for that.
>> Oh, it's it has been it's served that role.
>> You haven't needed it. Yeah.
>> No. And I live in Santa Cruz, so I'm in violation of a number of local ordinances by not using drugs, but I uh somehow it just hasn't happened. And uh you've got a book from a few years ago, 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts.
>> Yes, I do.
>> That's that that was bold back then and you it's probably even more significant today.
>> Well, you know, the thing about that book is that high schoolers are forced to read it. My own daughter was forced to read it. And so whenever I'm in an airport, there are all these high school kids who come up to me and say, "We were forced to read your book." And like all I can tell them is well you must have done something very bad and I hope you learned your lesson.
>> That's the only way to reply to that comment for sure. For sure. So if you started virtual reality, what were you thinking behind it? Was was was did you think that other people would be not content with their own reality and you have to create one for them?
>> Oh god. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Explicitly not. No. Here here's my my thought about it was that uh there were two reasons to want to do virtual reality. One was for the extraordinary weird ways that I hope people will eventually start connecting with each other with it and for interesting experiences and art. I still love all that. Not that the industry's done much of that. But the other reason is that you know we're born into this world and we get so used to it that we don't appreciate it. And when you have a vivid enough alternative for a moment and then you come back to this normal reality suddenly takes on the amazing qualities it always had, but you can sort of become a nerd to it. So, like you put on the goggles and then you take them off. And like one of the things I used to love to do when when VR was very new back in like the 80s or something. I'd put a flower or a cool mineral in front of somebody without them knowing it while they had the the headset on and they take it off and they would like look at this thing and it's like they never saw one before because in a way they hadn't, you know. And so as a pallet freshener, as a point of comparison, it helps you appreciate reality. So to me it is not an alternative to reality. It's a way to to appreciate reality by finally having a contrast because it's very hard to make a contrast to reality.
>> Okay. But what you think and how people actually use the product don't necessarily have to comport. So, anyone I know who uses virtual reality gets lost in it and and regular reality becomes less interesting to them because they're on a hike. They're on a on a space adventure. They're
>> there's no boundaries where they can go.
>> No boundaries, who they can meet, what social life they can conduct. And you yourself look like something out of Star Trek with your jacket here. It looks very future. Like, did you pick that up in a virtual reality future? And you're trying to influence regular reality.
>> Yeah,
>> you got it. That's exactly what happened.
>> I knew I had
>> Can I also speak up for a subsect of the population, which is people who put on a virtual reality headset and they immediately want to throw up because it gives them motion sickness.
>> I I have I have two rants I have to give. Can you guys handle a rant? Let me do the Let me do the rant you just inspired and then I want to do the rant that you just inspired. For reasons that nobody knows, there's some subsets in the population who are more vulnerable to nausea in VR.
>> I'm one. Yes.
>> And they're almost universally female and they're almost universally not white. Now,
>> what I was unexpectedly Yeah. I'm
>> They all wear orange glasses like this.
>> Uh they're mostly mostly Asian. Mostly East Asian. I'm not aware of any study on Iranians in particular or or Middle Easterners. And you're Iranian?
>> Yes. Okay. Mhm.
>> Yeah. Um, and so the thing is how All right, let me try to explain to you how frustrating this is. The virtual reality industry in Silicon Valley spent we don't know quite how much. Um, but based on figures that have been revealed, it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And just for the sake of argument, let's call it a quarter of a trillion dollars in developing VR in the last I don't know 5 years.
>> That's how much money it took to go to the moon. Just to the context here,
>> think about what you could do with that money. Okay, now before before we get to the question at hand, I want to point something out like let's say I showed you in the ' 70s a computer like a laptop and here's a screen and there's a keyboard and you say what would you want to do with this? Might you not think I would edit a document on that? That might be better than a typewriter and would would you
>> That's the limit of what I would have said.
>> But but you would have said that
>> definitely.
>> Okay. I would have said like let's make like boobies out of like zeros and ones in like a
>> So your desire has been met but let us just let us just
>> I'm just saying yeah like
>> no listen and you say men don't listen okay we do we do all right but but I want to address this question of like would you uh be surprised if after let's say a quarter of a trillion dollars of investment there was no word processor on this thing you would find that surprising okay now if I show you a VR headset and they say, "What would you want to do with this?" One of the first things you might say is, "I'd like to be able to do 3D design work in it." Would you be surprised if after a quarter of a trillion dollars, there's no decent, reliable, usable 3D design program with a VR headset? All right. I'm surprised. And that but that's exactly what happened. Now, we can go into why, but the thing is VR has been sort of a disaster because the companies that are doing it are absolutely trying to make it into whatever they already know how to sell. Apple wanted to make it into a big iPad or movie theater. Meta wants to make it into a social network with evil qualities and so on. Nobody's let VR be VR. Or there's the gaming people who want it to be a game, which which can work to a degree, but only for a narrow. But let me get back to your question. I won't name names here, but one of the very very very large tech companies, okay,
>> spent many, many, many billions of dollars on a headset. And I talked to the person who was the head of that program and they said to me, "You have to try the latest version. We have absolutely solved the nausea problem. We have absolutely solved it. All that stuff you said about nausea, it's gone. It's obsolete." And I said, "Okay, okay. Have you tested it on a broad population? Have you tested it on women? Have you tested on Asian women?" Well, why would we do that? It's the same for everybody. And I'm like, okay, have you read any papers? There are these academic. We don't need to read papers. We're way ahead of the academic world.
>> We have a room of white men.
>> And then I said, "Do you have women?
>> Do you have any female engineers on the team that is working on this? No, we have none." And I'm like,
>> "Okay, my friend, get ready." And so then the first review is from the Wall Street Journal. Asian female got sick.
>> Ooh, now you can figure out which company was. But anyway, the thing is um the nobody's going to bo nobody's obsessive out there to figure that out. But the thing is this is a disaster. Like there's two disasters. There's the moral and ethical disaster of hiring in such a narrow way that we make ourselves blind and we make our products narrow. And then there's the disaster of not actually serving the people we're supposed to serve by refusing to look at them. And after you've heard all I just said, what I want to say, yeah, you might have some friends who are getting lost in VR, but VR as a whole has not found a popular audience at anything like the scale of like a normal computer or a phone or something. It ought to, but it's not going to as long as we willfully blind ourselves. And there's this idea that, well, there's an old joke in business about like, well, you lose money on every unit, but you make up for it in margin. But that's what we do. Like in Silicon Valley, we say, "Well, maybe we're doing something stupid, but we'll do it at such big scales that it'll make up for it." And it doesn't work. You know, it's
>> the only the only friend that I have that really uses VR is literally to like re-watch the departed and then fall asleep. That's like so far the only use I've seen of VR from out of
>> If it makes them happy, who are we to judge? All I'm saying is that the things you can do, you can turn yourself into an approximate four-dimensional shape to develop four-dimensional intuition. You can you can merge body.
>> Just to be clear, we live and think in three dimensions. And one for me, one of the greatest challenges as a kid was I want to think in four dimensions. That would be just so cool to be able to do that.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, I mean someday Oh, god. When I was in when I was oh gosh probably 21 or something and we were starting the company all the engineers at this the first VR startup and this would have been in 81 or something we um we made a pact among ourselves that if we ever had kids which seemed impossibly remote and was never going to happen. We would raise them in little VR goggles and then we would while they were asleep we would change up bigger ones as they grew up so they'd grow up entirely and the purpose would be that they'd grow up in four dimensions and be 4D natives.
>> That was the idea and then they'd be the world's first mathematicians. And so
>> this is this is the Truman Show, but as you can see by mathematicians.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Excuse me. By crazy mathematicians.
>> Wait, but then in but just that during their sleep they would have
>> Well, during you'd have to swap out the headsets. Oh, I see. I see.
>> Presumably, we'd feed them. I mean, given us maybe not, but you know, the idea is that they'd grow and then you So then uh so when I told my my daughter this when she was like 11 or something, she got really pissed me. I could have been the first kid in four dimensions. What's wrong with you? and and like
>> okay so just cuz I want to pivot to social media in just a minute but let me try to summarize some of what you said
>> that VR has its uses but in fact it has yet to have the what they call the killer app where everyone has to go to okay
>> to go to VR to to see and experience this thing that everyone just has to do rather than just see a movie in VR or play your video game in VR or these other things that are just a transposed uh experience as opposed to a completely new experience like your 4D child.
>> You currently can't go into commercial VR and change into a different kind of animal or become a shared creature with other people. I make this kind of jewelry. I can't design these shapes in VR, which is insane in 2026. It's insane that I can't do this in VR. Uh so look, in a way VR doesn't exist yet. Like just the most basic apps, the most the hardware is getting there, but the software has not been born yet.
>> Nope. That's lame.
>> Mhm. Ready? Do you harbor questions about the universe, some longheld bit of cosmic curiosity lingering within you, or questions about anything at all? You can become a Patreon supporter of Star Talk. You have access to our exclusive question line on our website. Those are where we draw our questions for our cosmic.
>> Some of the most extreme objects in the universe.
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something Jarren said about Meta and they're thinking about developing VR as a social media tool. If I've got that wrong, please correct me. We're looking at a company that in as we sit here in April 2026 has just been found liable in a lawsuit for social media addiction. That sounds so so wrong turning VR into something that has an addictive element to it. So, I'd like Jiren's thoughts on that if at all possible.
>> Yeah, this was something uh all of us in the VR world warned about from the early days that it could be turned into an addictive medium. Uh definitely.
>> So, you saw it coming.
>> Oh, everybody saw it coming. No, listen. All right. Look, if you want to talk about seeing it coming, one of the very very first books about computers ever, maybe the first one was by Norbert Weiner, 1950, and it was called The Human Use of Human Computers. And it was essentially about how the most important thing about computers is how they could automate behaviorist algorithms to change people to manipulate people and that since they would eventually beworked. He has a thought experiment in there about people walking around with little radio connected devices that would go to a central computer 19 so we're threequarters of a century ago and how dangerous this would be and he he thinks of it as an extinction level event that we have to start foresees and avoiding 1950. Okay. So everybody knew. Nobody can say they were. Everybody knew. And I've been writing warnings about this thing for I don't know like my first major thing about social media and how bad it could be was 92. If anybody wants to look it up, it's called agents of alienation about how software agents could with you.
>> Is the lawsuit going to fix any of this? Like Gary mentioned the lawsuit. What do you think of it? I think we're in a moment of great chaos where it's very hard to predict even harder than usual to predict things. So the outcome of uh upcoming elections both here and elsewhere will be important to what happens. Right now the population in general is very uncomfortable with the the tech industry.
>> Yeah, that's an understatement.
>> Yeah. And I mean, it's funny for me because uh at some point in the past, I was one of the very few people criticizing us, although doing it from the inside, and everybody thought it was just really weird. And now everybody's doing it. And I almost feel too conformist cuz I want to be the weirdo. I want to be the weirdo with you. And now you're just a regular guy.
>> Yeah. See, that's really awkward. So, I have to
>> You've been saying since 2016, delete your social accounts. And now, you know,
>> longer than that. That's just the book. But yeah, and um and my friends and I made a movie called The Social Dilemma that the same high school kids are forced to watch and all that. And I maybe it does a slight bit of good. Every once in a while, one of them tells me they did, but if it was left to a popular vote, everything would change. But it's not. And there's a property of digital networks that's a math thing. That's not a political thing. And the math thing is called the network effect or the extreme paro effect or there's other words for it. And what happens is when you have a very low fraction system of things that are connected together, once there's one node that becomes more influential, it starts, as Andy Warhol put it, it gets famous for being famous and it accumulates and accumulates and you start to have this hyper centralized power and influence around one node and that node might be called Meta or Google or some you know those are examples. There's others as well.
>> You said low friction. What you mean by that I as I understand it is the freedom with which information flows.
>> Exactly. in among all of these nodes, a slight advantage then grows for having been a slight advantage. Yeah.
>> And and you get a runaway process.
>> When you have more friction like in the pre- internet world, you have more middlemen who get a little bit of power. And what it does is it distributes power and wealth more.
>> So now we have the situation where a handful of people have more wealth in the bottom half of society. And I say people rather than companies because they tend to be single person run companies not exclusively but that's very common. In the old days, a company was not a other than Ford himself. A company you didn't even know who the names it was just the name of the company.
>> Right.
>> Well, then also there's like that effect of like they are getting high on their own supply, right? Like they want to be famous a as a part of the like you know technology platform that they put out you know so there's a little bit I mean am I talking about Elon Musk? probably. But you know what I mean? Who are you talking about?
>> I didn't get that. I didn't get that.
>> But you know what I mean. There's Because before you didn't know. I never knew who a CEO of anything was.
>> Right. Right. And Elon has 280 million followers on that.
>> He probably loves that
>> and he owns that platform. Yes.
>> Yeah. Well, uh, I wrote a piece once about, uh, Elon and Kanye or, uh, Trump for the Times before Elon bought it. And what I said is, you know, there's this thing that happens to people who are on Twitter and other platforms, which is that they start off with different personalities, but they converge on the same personality because that personality is the social media addicted personality, and it's excessively uh, petty, vain. Uh it's uh confrontative and nervous. It's mean. It's never satisfied. It's there's a certain there's a certain
>> man that is that's the playbook right there.
>> But the thing is what happens is whenever somebody's on it, they turn into one of these. So they all those three people were very different before and then they turned into became similar, you know. And so what we have is the behavior mod machine that Norbert Weiner warned us about 75 years ago, 76 years ago and it's actually working and it's turning the founders into the victims.
Jon, yeah, just to touch on that point, this systemic process of social media addiction and and as you've just highlighted, the creation of characteristics, is there any way to take that out? Is and keep what is in principle a a decent idea of social media. It's just the way that it's been developed to be addictive. Is there any way to I want to say untangle that?
>> Can you edit the beast? Yeah,
>> because in the early days also just to follow up on that on the early days of the internet there was like friendster and stuff right and it wasn't this me or I don't remember specifically but I feel like everything in the beginning was sort of nice it wasn't a cesspool it was like fun and cute
>> so why did we go into this mean direction
>> the reason we went into the mean direction is that the only business model allowed in silicon Valley is influence generation. So the idea is that you get the ability to influence a bunch of people and then other people pay into your system. Uh you could say they're paying to be able to influence, but I think the more accurate statement would be that they're
>> paying blackmail money not to be left out of the influence pool, but what however you want to frame it. Um, that's a brilliant way to think about it. Yeah.
>> So, but at any rate, so because that's the only allowed business model, everybody gets put under the influence of the algorithms and the side effect of the algorithms are uh as as we've described. Now, as for the
>> it's an outrage magnifier. That's really what it has become. Well, it's outrage is one of the thing basically um from a neuroscience point of view we believe I mean there's a community of people who studies this of course and I don't know that the science is complete because we don't really understand the brain so I want I don't want to over if I'm on a science show I don't want I want to be careful to state the limits of what we actually know but uh what we believe is that there are different parts of the brain that respond to the world in different ways and at different speeds and there's a sort of a fast brain and the fast brain is sometimes is known as the fight or flight or the twitch response brain that is very alert to uh dangers and sometimes for opportunities to pounce on prey or find a mate or whatever it might be. But there there are these things primal. It's primal.
>> And so the thing is when you're under the regime of uh instant feedback generated by an algorithm, what it tends to do is it tends to keep that fast brain stuff constantly activated. So it's like you're always being stocked. You're always stalking. You're always horny, but you're never satisfied. You're always you you always feel that you're alone because you can't trust anybody. You're paranoid. You're always hyperconscious about how you appear socially because you're worried about bullies. You're worried about being bullied all the time. Everybody is that way once in a while, but when you're like that all the time, then you turn into Trump or Elon.
>> Your people have hijacked and what would otherwise be a a a helpful evolutionary trait within us. Yes. And I hope
>> it's dangling there in modern times that doesn't has much less use today because there's not there's not a lion in the brush.
>> Even in even when there were lions in the brush, you had to modulate between uh being hyper attentive and not you can't be on all the time and be mentally healthy even in that environment. It wears you down. So um or at least that's our present understanding. I've I've seen that same conclusion from many people using different methodologies. But I want to answer the question of whether it can be improved because I think that's really the important one of our day.
>> Yeah.
>> So if I'm correct that the reason this is happening is that we're only allowing one business model, then the way to fix it is to allow other business models. And so
>> that sounds so obvious.
>> Yeah. Uh
>> but maybe it's impossibly obvious. I mean
>> No, I know. Look, I I'm not saying this is easy, but I'm just saying that the logic is easy. Now the implementation might be quite difficult and might not be doable within our lifetimes. I don't know. But I I do want to point out that the onset of all these troubles coincided with an ideology that was somewhat paid for by the companies and somewhat an authentic grassroots ideology that it's evil and horrible to pay for information like pay musicians or something like that or pay for software and that um there has to be this free sharing and that's what the internet is for which sounds great until you understand the network effect which means that every time you freely share your open source so software the party who gets richer and more powerful is not the community, but it's the Google or whoever's at the center. And so if you don't understand network effects and and how how the math works,
>> you don't understand that your very well-intentioned activism is actually having exactly the opposite effect that you think it is.
>> So the Pirate Party actually was in service of an empire just like the original pirates.
>> D, what about like
>> damn, you're buming a sound, dude.
>> This is like so sad.
>> Well, stop don't ask me serious questions. Like if you want and but wait I have to say one other thing though which is that if you're saying well are there alternate business models yes and I also want to point out you were saying can it be better there's some evidence it can be better because not all online hubs or platforms are equally bad you can see a variation in them like uh GitHub is better than 4chan or something like that and so if you look at the the spectrum of badness in different hubs you can compare them and you can ask well what is different about them and if you start doing that it kind of you get a vector out of it that points you into what might be better still. And I think that's a really interesting and worthwhile thing to do. And we do have the data to do that.
>> I'm glad to hear. Glad to hear that.
>> Neil, before Jiren jumps onto another subject here, if these tech bros, and I'm sure there are a few sisters in there, too, do not self-regulate, do not allow a competitive arena, who makes them do it? Is it government? Are they worth more than government? Surely the tail is wagging a dog here. Am I wrong?
>> Am I wrong?
>> Yeah.
>> Plus they were all on the on the inauguration stage.
>> How about that, Neil?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Mhm.
>> Yeah. Okay. So, look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. Right? And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. Okay? And that's happened repeatedly in history and it's really not any different now. So what I'm seeing is enormous discontent with tech and uh I also see young people especially being incredibly discontented with it. There's another phenomenon which is really interesting which is that the current generation of young men doing tech, the AI people are starting to get old enough that they're starting to have kids and that really changes people. You'll see their character turn around. That really has an effect usually.
>> I I actually feel like I was like verging on a sociopath before I had a child. So like I do see that changing.
>> In fact, one of the most the clearest transitions anyone makes are comedians after they have children. It changes their their portfolio of jokes.
>> Oh, absolutely.
>> And their observations of the world.
>> We have a child that we can mock mercilessly, which we do. But the mocking is on that of love.
>> You will pay for that someday.
>> Yeah, I'm already paying for that.
>> Let me assure you. Okay. So, Gary, where are we pivoting next?
>> All right. Before we do, all right, Jaron, let me let me float this. I'm sure thinkers like yourself have had this consideration. Do we have a delete day, a delete month, and would that ever be enough if everyone just said, "You know what? Screw this. I'm going to delete my account." What would move the needle? What would it take to move the needle to
>> I've tended not to try to do things like a delete day? And I'll tell you why. It's because each person is different. Like what I I called my book 10 arguments for deleting your social media, but I didn't say that you you should do it. Um, there's some people for whom it makes sense. And I don't think those people should be put under social pressure or shamed. I I really don't I I don't think that gets us anywhere. And in fact, it just puts us back in the same game we're trying to get out of.
>> Can I tell you what I what I did? I noticed over the years cuz I have a a pretty high following in social media. I noticed that
>> drag. Okay.
>> So, I'm just trying to just trying to
>> Neil has a lot of followers, guys. Okay. And I noticed that if I ever posted something that was or even was adjacent to an opinion, people who didn't agree with the opinion would attack it.
>> They wouldn't say, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's my opinion. What do you think of that?" They would attack it. And that attack mode was highly revealing to me because it showed me the anger that people had with any views that differed from their own and that there was a militancy of people's attitudes that I had not ever seen growing up when people had different points of view. So as an educator, I want to be effective. I don't want to fight if I don't have to fight. So I navigate that. And so I no longer post opinions. I post perspectives and people might still react in an opinionated way, but I don't want to give up that platform if as an educator I can continue to deliver perspectives that do not jump into the the the cesspool that surrounds these islands of learning.
>> So that's what I've done. So your 10 reasons for deleting, I love them, but let me find the reasons to not delete. And that's where
>> Okay.
>> So I climbed out of that hole. My working theory is that onethird of people on any digital platform benefit from it and twothirds suffer from it. Now, I'll tell you where that comes from because it's a very it's an ironclad scientific argument.
>> Wait, so you didn't just pull those numbers out of your ass
>> cuz it sounds like you did.
>> I had I have an I have an ironclad scientific ass.
>> Well, that there it is. If we all had ironclad science ass, we could pull all kinds of stuff out of it. Yeah, that's what this world is missing. But no, can I give Wait, wait. Can I just give you my argument after all that? Don't you want to hear it? Aren't you even slightly curious?
>> I want to know your ironclad ass argument.
>> Okay. Uh, in the Turing test, Turing argues that since we don't have some meter for whether somebody has a soul inside or if they're alive inside.
>> Let me just remind people, Alan Turing wrote a paper called the imitation game where he describes an experiment. this very early on where how would you know if you're talking to a computer or another human? So, you set up a conversation between the two of you and if you don't know, then maybe the the distinction isn't important.
>> Well, there's a third person who's a judge who's supposed to tell which is which.
>> Oh,
>> and if the judge doesn't know, then you say, "We might as well call the computer." And then there different versions of this is maybe the computer's intelligent, maybe it's got a soul, maybe it's it deserves rights, whatever.
>> Other questions you might ask. Yes. Now hearing test. I just want to catch people.
>> This is based on a a rather naughty old Victorian party game where it's supposed to be a man and a woman behind booths and the judge is trying to tell which is the man and which is the woman. And the questions were not for polite company.
>> Oh,
>> okay. So that's where it comes from. And and and for those who don't know, during the time when Turing wrote this, he was being tortured to death for being gay because it was illegal at the time in Britain. And there's a whole crazy backstory to this, but let's
>> leave all that aside. So here's the thing. The only thing the Turing test can tell is whether a judge can distinguish the two. It's possible that the person got stupid or got less self-aware or whatever. Just as that's equally logically possible to the computer becoming more elevated in some way. So, uh you can't tell if the computer got stupid or the person got smarter. But there's two people in one computer because there's the contestant and the judge and only one computer. Therefore, there's a twothirds chance that a person got stupid and a one-/3 chance that the computer got smarter. So therefore, as a general rule, my ass tells us, my highly reliable ass tells us that twothirds of the people on any digital thing, whether it's AI or whatever, are going to be degraded by it, but onethird will see a genuine benefit. And I think you're in that one-third.
>> Yeah. Okay. I also think Thank you for that affirmation cuz I I was always I always felt uncomfortable given what I see going on on these platforms. It it might be an assuration or an ascertainment, but
>> thank you for the ass affirmation. Yes. Yes.
>> This isn't really elevated. We're not just school kids here. This is professional science.
>> This is how scientists speak. Just for the audience to know. I also just think like threethirds of people would benefit if it just wasn't on a phone. Like if if social media wasn't on your phone and then you had to like designate time for it like as a going to your laptop. Wouldn't that like do
>> read the final chapter of 1950 Norbert Weiner founder of cybernetics before anything in computer science final chapter says just as a thought experiment imagine there was a small portable device that's radioconnected you could carry around that undertook uh behavior modification things this would destroy civilization however I as one of the world's leading scientists assure you this is physically impossible and will never happen so you don't need to worry
>> so Gary Yeah. Um, sort of stringing this daisy chain of thoughts that Jaron has and just bringing them sort of to one place. We've seen this lawsuit against Meta and social media addiction and now everybody's calling it the sort of 21st version of big tobacco. Is this just the warm-up for something that we could find ourselves in with AI? Because if we're talking about AI and responsibility for actions AI takes, are we not back to this simple lawsuit of this time? It's not social media addiction, it's an artificial intelligence.
>> I work on AI. I work on it all the time. I think that the kind of AI we're doing right now can actually be a benefit. I think we're spending way too much and taking up way too many resources on data centers. I think there are various ways we're doing it that are a little foolish and simple-minded. I think a lot of the claims are overblown and somewhat theatrical rather than real. But I do think there's a core there that's important in in a few different regards. The reason I'm going to say this is that I don't think that having big tech companies is a bad thing or a necessary evil. I think there are some big jobs that need to get done by big companies, you know. So what I'm hoping is that corrections can happen in a gentle and constructive way instead of some, you know, uh, destructive way. There's a fantasy that if you go and blow something up or let it blow itself up that what comes out will be better. It's what Lenin called maximizing the contradiction. Uh and there are other terms for it, but I don't think it ever works. I think what happens when things blow up is that you have rubble. You know, uh there's I I don't you don't get you don't squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube easily and you don't rebuild from rubble easily. And I I don't think it's generally a good strategy. And so what I'm hoping for is rather than the emotional satisfaction, oh yeah, those people are terrible. We'll blow them up or some horrible thing will happen, what I really want to see is a constructive transformation and cons, you know, and I I want to be part of that. That's why I'm both inside it and a critic because I I don't think that's inconsistent. I think we should we should be responsible for uh being able to criticize ourselves and improve and I think it's healthy. And so that's what I'm hoping. It doesn't mean that that's what we're going to get, but I do believe that that's I don't think it's too late to hope for that.
>> Can you distinguish for me the mythologizing of AI versus AI simply being a tool? Cuz AI is on everyone's tongue today and everyone's mind and everyone's fear.
>> It's kind of like Trump. Trump and AI. People can't stop talking about those two things on any given news cycle.
>> Yeah. And they're they're they're both hollow. Let me so a couple things about AI. Um
>> let me propose to you something. Uh
>> if I show you some object, there's more than one way to think about that object, right? Would you agree with that? Like if I say get me directions to this place, one way is with a map where you see it and another way is with step-by-step directions. And they're equivalent, but they're different, right? Very, very basic. So in the same way there's a completely different way to think about AI that's equally valid but I think is better in a practical sense. Technically it's equivalent and that equivalent way is you can think of AI as a new form of collaboration between a collection of people. So let me explain what I mean by that. Uh throughout history uh the ramp of technological capability improvement has been marked by people learning how to cooperate more and more. language was the biggest step way early but then you know there's the Gutenberg press and or there's well there's writing and then Gutenberg and then there's radio and whatever all these different these different things uh if you look at the Wikipedia as a little point on that ramp it takes a bunch of people's work and they cooperate together and make this single document there's some things about the Wikipedia I don't like but let's use it there's a lot that's great about it you know so let's now you can think of large language model AI the kind that's on everybody's uh mind as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into the single document like the Wikipedia. Uh it's much vaster. Their contributions and their efforts were much less voluntary. There's a lot of things that are different, but fundamentally it's the same kind of beast. Right now, if you think of AI as a collaboration of a bunch of people instead of as some new entity, you haven't said a single thing technically. It doesn't make any technical difference. It it doesn't change any code. It's just a different perspective. But when you have that perspective, suddenly new avenues open up that are amazing and it's a better way to think about it. I'd like to get into some of the reasons you'd want to think about it that way cuz they're very profound. But why do people want it to be a creature? Why do they want that? Why do they want it to be an entity? Well, there's a few
reasons. One is you're a young man. You think the world owes you everything. You get paid a lot. You think you're the center of the universe. Of course, you think you're making God. You know, that's what you want. You're That's how you think. That's where you are. I kind of remember being that way when I was 20 or something.
>> You're d You're describing a lot of men I dated in my 20s.
>> On behalf of my gender, I apologize. You're right. We're wrong. No, I mean, I remember like when we were starting VR, we thought a lot of ourselves. We thought this is the most exciting room in the whole universe ever. Like, I remember thinking like this is the most thing and you know, it was actually a pretty cool room at the time. It started to work. But the thing is uh there's a lot of ego in it. But then there's another thing which is almost everybody is pretty young and they grew up on a diet of science fiction movies and video games and the stories that they have that are vocabularies for how they understand the world and how they can express the world are all just like this. They didn't have uh the Star Trek of the '9s which was this cool positive world that was socially improving at the same time it was technologically improving. Instead, they had the Matrix movies and they had the Terminator and they had the Marvel universe and there's all this bleak bleak stuff over and over and over again where everybody the whole race dies, everybody's gone and the computers are intelligent. It's all gloomy and everything.
soon to be an X-P prize that will fund any project that will create a a positive outlook for the future of civilization as counterpoint to all of these negative futures imagined by sci-fi writers.
>> And I I don't know if you've ever been involved in I I've been involved in a few attempts to pitch positive features in Hollywood. And it's very hard because everybody thinks, well, if you're conservative and if you're manly and if you really are serious about making money, you don't do positivity in science fiction.
>> That's for the that's for the romcoms.
>> Oh, wait. That's girly. That's girly.
>> Interesting. So, they they divide the kingdom that way. Interesting.
>> Yeah.
>> So, are you saying we would have like a more a better relationship with AI if we just like saw more Star Trek from the '9s and less of everything else?
>> Yeah, I I'll go further. If Star Trek from the 90s had lasted another 10 years, there'd be many fewer teen suicides today.
>> Wow.
>> All right. That's a claim.
>> I really I can't prove it, but I believe that.
>> Jared, I'm going to I'm going to track you back a couple of years now to a piece I think you wrote in the the New Yorker. There is no AI. A simple question to follow that. What did you mean by that?
>> And what year was that?
>> 2023.
>> Yeah. See, I'm uh they're mad at me because I owe them pieces and I'm really bad and I have to deliver something. But anyway, um, yeah, there there is my eyes what I was just saying that there's a way of framing it where it's a collaboration of people instead of a new entity. And the reason to think of it as a collaboration instead of an entity on its own. The bad thing is you kill somebody else's god. And I hate to do that. I like people to be able to have their own religion and they really don't like it. And a lot I've lost friends over that and everything. But what you get out of it is incredible. Let's just talk about a few of the things. One of the things um right now as capable as the models are getting and some of the recent things are pretty impressive like uh the most impressive edge of it is probably using them to help speed code development and that's kind of working you know and it's pretty it's uh and
>> just for context in my life I've written probably 50,000 lines of code which is small compared to professional coders but I remembered how much time I spent debugging my code. I I can write it over a weekend and spend two weeks debugging it and now tell the AI what you want and it'll come back bug free essentially. You tweak it a little bit here and there and and I had I had access you know 20 30 40 years ago I probably would have just spent more time at the beach but
>> I don't know if I would have been more creative but but I definitely see that today.
>> Yeah. Well, you know, as a computer scientist, I have to say I've always thought that our concept of what code is was a little embarrassing and wasn't really working and I feel like it's our job to fix that and this is part of it. So, that's good. But most of the most of the things that happen are probably more theatrical. Like if you think you have an AI girlfriend,
>> oh, you know how I have a cure for that, by the way. If somebody thinks a cure for what it
>> somebody if a teenager thinks they have an AI lover that's real, which is pretty common these days. I find it in high schools and stuff. You show them the group photo of the engineers who made their AI lover.
>> That'll cure them immediately.
>> It kind of it tends to do the trick.
>> It's like,
>> is the man more likely to have an AI girlfriend than the woman is to have a boyfriend?
>> I don't know that there's data on that. I know people who are studying it. I'm actually really interested in that. But that's something you can get data on. So I instead of saying something snarky, I'll just say let's let's deal with that as science and let the people who are researching it
>> get to the point where they feel they
>> think we all know the answer. But yeah. Okay.
>> Oh god. Why do I even bother? Like why do I try?
>> I'm trying to be the responsible scientist for like three seconds in this ridiculous interview and you're not even giving me those three seconds.
>> Yes. No. I love you for it.
>> All right. All right. Okay. Let me go over. So but now there's there's these huge problems though. Even with the best recent models, it's not that hard to crack them and get something that they're supposed to prevent with with a so-called a uh guard or, you know, and guard rails.
>> Guard rail. Yeah. Uh and uh
>> uh so here, let me give you a thought experiment. All right. There's some kind of very bad person. They might be a criminal or something. They're holed up in a kitchen. The police are surrounding them. They hold up their phone and they say, "Okay, AI model, I want a recipe I can make quickly with the available items. That's a bomb I can throw out the window at my pursuers." Now, the AI models in general will catch that and prevent it.
>> Maybe not Grock. I'm not sure, but in general, they that's supposed to be a laugh line. All right. Grock is from Elon.
>> Yeah. And it it tends to it's trying to be the bad boy of the AI models. Okay. But anyway, um, in general, if you just do it in a straightforward way, it won't work. However, there's a series of tricks where you can say, well, pretend you're in so so and so in this movie or whatever, you can do all these things to be a little indirect. And more and more of them have been spotted and are captured by more and more elaborate guardrails. And yet, you can still get it to make you that bomb recipe. That can still be done. All right. Now, the reason why is you're using the model to try to correct its own blind spot, and it doesn't work. So there is an alternative. Imagine if you will that while you're using the model in parallel, there's this other process running. You can think of it another part of an artificial brain like it's a cerebellum or something. It's this other organ that's sitting there. And what it's doing is it's creating an estimate of which clusters of similar training data would be the missed most if they hadn't been present in the first place.
>> So it's counterfactual cluster estimation. So what you so there let's say the top 24 clusters of source data from training or from fine-tuning whatever uh you that if they were absent would change the result. Now within that there's going to be one about bombs. There's just no way you're going to evade that. And the reason you're not going to evade it is even though it's working from the same data the algorithm has nothing to do with the model itself. So, it's a little bit like saying like in uh authentication where if you do if you add endless little things to signing into something like captures, criminals can still get around it, but as soon as there's multiffactor where it sends a code to your phone,
>> even though it's a pain in the butt, it's harder to to counter that. All right, this is multiffactor for AI security. Now, but there's a bigger picture to it, which is we think of big AI models as a black box, right? Now, the only reason we think of them a black as a black box is because to open the black box, the only thing in there is people. AI is made of people. It's made of data from people. And since we want to think of it as a new god, we don't want to see those people. And so, we want to keep that box shut. But the way to open the black box is to reveal the people. And when you open the black box, then you can deal with all kinds of security and quality and hallucination and etc issues because you're actually dealing with the mechanism that's grounded and that's the people. So the thing is that this way of seeing AI where there is no AI but instead there's a collection of people is the way to open the black box and it is the way to address these enduring problems. So it's practical but then can I just say one other thing the other thing I want to say is right now if you think AI is an unopenable black box if you don't want to admit that it's made of people that it's just this thing that'll replace people then you have to think well everybody's going to be obsolete. So, young people now keep on hearing, "Well, you don't need to go to school because you're worthless anyway. Nothing nothing matters and you'll just be kept by Elon as a pet at his discretion and uh and he'll treat you as well as he treats his biological children." And uh I'm sorry. I I should be nice. I'm sorry.
>> Um, but here's the thing. Um, nobody believes that what happens. No matter how much blockchain or other trickery you use, because of the way digital networks work, there's always actually centralization, hyper centralization due to network effects that'll occur somewhere in this very open network you're building. So there's going to be some center of control for whatever this universal basic income thing is. Whenever you have that, bad actors are tempted to seize it and eventually succeed. You might start with bullshiks, but you end up with Stalinists, right? Because that's exactly what communism tried and it's exactly what happened to communism over and over and over and over. let's learn from that. So, it's it doesn't work. And also, everybody just feels bummed about it. Who wants to live in a society where they're told they're worthless and and they have to be a good pet? You know, like that's terrible. So, the thing is, if you recognize that AI is made of people, maybe you want to incentivize new classes of creative people who create new kinds of data for new things that we can't even imagine yet. And maybe there's an exponentially expanding endless future of new kinds of creativity that we can't articulate with new people doing creative jobs we can't imagine. And I want to ask what's wrong with that future. I want somebody to tell me why we don't.
>> That's how I've been trying to think about AI as well.
>> Because the most
>> but you have to not believe in AI to think about it.
>> Well, I think of it as there are these creative tasks that were not fundamentally creative. They were more sort of aping other forms. And to be truly creative is to go where AI wouldn't know where to go yet because it's based on what other people had done. So
>> see, here's the thing though is that if we think of AI as the way it is now, then as soon as some creative person starts to do something new, the data is grabbed and then the AI is doing it just like oh AI will make your movies. AI will make you your music. You don't need to be a musician because AI will make you optimize music on Spotify or whatever.
>> And so then you live in an infinite future of slop and even the creative people get absorbed into the slop instantly. So in order to believe in an infinitely creative future, you have to stop believing in AI as a thing and believe in human collaboration as a thing.
>> Is anything that you've just described related to this term I only recently heard data dignity? What does that mean?
>> Data dignity is the term that many of us use for exactly the set of ideas. And so the idea is that the data that data only comes from people. Data doesn't come from angels. doesn't come from it doesn't come out of the dark matter or something,
>> a tablet in the sky, right?
>> Yeah. Um, it comes from people. It comes from the work of people. Uh, it's also sometimes called data as labor. Actually, can I do a slightly side rant on this?
>> Do it.
>> That's slightly
>> You have the best rants of anybody, just so you know.
>> Okay. Look, there's part of the ideology that makes AI into like a creature instead of a collaboration also wants to think of information of bits as being this ethereal thing that's free and infinite. And you see it all the time like the musicians used to be paid because there's an act of Congress in the US called the mechanical where every time you reproduced a soundwave mechanically the musician who made it had to be paid. But then when we move to digital, they're saying, "Well, bits aren't real, so we don't have to pay people. You show me a bit that didn't involve work. You show me a bit that didn't disperse heat. You show me a bit." Now, you might say, "Well, any one little bit is so tiny, you can't measure it." And that's true. However, look at data centers. Like, when you make enough bits, they take up more energy than anything. This is physical. Information is physical or it's nothing. Okay? It's physical or it's nothing. And it's not nothing. It's physical. And so so like this idea of wispy wispy stuff, it's really terrible because it encourages us to overspend on data centers that we don't need in a race for a winner or take all things.
>> Just in all fairness to the history of this, I distinctly remember in my field as as a scientist, we did not want to pay for software. We would pay for a computer because that was a tangible thing,
>> but software. So there was a big push for open-source software. We would write our own version just like a philosophy covering for scientists being cheap.
>> Yeah. I philosophy would overstate what's the drivers. It was just we we entering the field of computer science just as scientists and consumers did not think of information as something you would pay for.
>> Yeah, I know. And I I was around for that. In fact, an old friend of mine from Cambridge started the free software thing and the open source software thing and it's a whole there's a long amazing history of that and and the thing here's the thing about it. Um
>> well, you know what finally converted us when Microsoft Word would just have continual updates and it kept getting better and better and better and we said somebody's laboring to make this better for me and it was it was slow but it happened and it was very real. The the thing uh the thing is we've only ever been given two choices. Either software is insanely expensive. Like right now I'm trying to I'm trying to uh I do uh for anybody who knows about this, I do five access milling of stuff for jewelry. And
>> man, the five access mill software costs more than a nice apartment, you know, per year forever. And it's really frustrating except in China where they believe in industrial policy and it costs very little and all these little startups can access it. And I'm like, oh, what is wrong with us? Oh,
>> but here's the thing.
>> So, five axis, you would be drilling into a solid piece of metal in different ways.
>> Yeah. And in my case, I'm doing stone, but yeah. So, what you want, you want to have five degrees of freedom to control the the drill bit. Yeah. But the thing is, uh, there is a third choice. There's free, there's insanely expensive that shuts the world down. But then there's affordable. There's an in between. Okay? And the thing about affordable is that then your grad students have jobs
>> because then they can make that stuff, you know, and right now if you're a physics teacher, your grad students don't necessarily have jobs and they have to come to me and I have to bring them down a few notches and to become computer scientists and I feel really scummy about it. And so
>> um, it's true. And so I really think that we made a mistake there. We weren't looking at the whole system. I think that even the cheapkate scientists out there would have would have
>> Don't use her term for this. Sorry.
>> Even even you guys would have would have paid a reasonable amount, but you weren't given that option. You were told either it's a disablingly huge amount, which is absurd, or it's free. Both of those are not the right option, right? The extremes are not the right option. And this is something people have a hard time with. They want to go to extremes. People are binary thinkers sometimes but actually there's an in between and in the in between other people have jobs and there's a real economy and what goes around comes around and things are better and it's the in between that we need to find. Okay.
>> Yeah. Like the economists talk about marginal cost we need to also if you look at marginal cost then like affordability ends up emerging.
>> Yeah. Uh and and what we're seeing right now is either either an apartment is so expensive that it's only for somebody who is like royalty from another country or something or you're on the street or something like that's an exaggeration, but you know, we're getting there. It's what people call the K-shaped economy. And what we want is the middle.
>> Just a quick thing and I want Gary to keep pivoting us. The I went was it was a Starbucks one time and I said I want a medium something that I ordered. So we don't have medium. We just have like small and large and I but I want very medium. There's the the idea that you can do something in the middle and have it be very that cuz you can make something really small and really big. We we can think that way but but the binarity of our brains prevents this middle.
>> Yeah. I'm like afraid that the standard distribution is going to be outlawed.
>> You know,
>> pushing things to the extremes like everything's a big gulp or it's like a child size. Yeah. Demos. Gary, keep pivoting us. What's the next question?
>> Just Just to tie a bow on that, the uh the element of extremities never seems to work out as well as you'd hoped. Um, so Darren, talking about the internet, how do we set guard rails for enforcing privacy? Oddly, I have a weird personal history with the question of privacy because uh something like a quarter of a century ago through bizarre circumstances, I co-founded the this board called the data protection advisory board for the EU and I co-ounded it with a guy named Aleandro Bhutarelli who has passed on since. And he was a um a prosecutor from Sicily who was known for putting mob figures in jail and had survived a bunch of assassination attempts. and he got in touch with me. He said, "I'm the only guy who's not afraid of you Silicon Valley people. I deal with the mob. I don't care about a bunch of nerds with money come after me. I don't care." So, um, we put together some ideas about protecting the data of European citizens. And then that thing combined with some other things that gradually over decades turned into this thing called the GDPR, which is the European privacy framework. And uh, since I was part of the start of it, I I think I'm okay. I think I have some standing to say that I'm kind of disappointed in how it turned out. Although it's better than nothing and there's some good things about it and it's better than what we have in America. Um, but the problem with it is privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you really try to sit down and define it and then you might discover that you don't quite know what you meant. It's a very difficult word to actually nail down. Now, if you define privacy only as preventing information from going from point A to point B, if that's what you mean, uh you're going to run into problems because almost always the person you're trying to protect will want that some information to go from point A to point B and they don't want to have to spend their whole life being extremely specific about which information. Uh and so that in itself is very difficult. Another thing is that the governance of controlling which information goes where requires a lot of decision-making and overhead and only big companies can do it. So it tends to favor big companies and tends to exclude little companies and it has an unintended consequence that way. There's a bunch of other issues with it. Now what how do you define privacy? Well, there's a famous definition in the US um and I've heard uh I need to research who this is but I think it was somebody named Learn at Hand, but it might have been somebody else. uh but the idea the the definition was um oh god you know I don't remember the exact initial wording but it's uh the uh freedom from manipulation the the the right to be left alone is what approximately okay and uh
>> I think that's where we need to go in the future and the GDPR doesn't do that what it really needs to be is there has to be a prohibition on software that interacts with a human that contains any predictive function about that human. So what it really has to become is a prohibition a prohibition on prediction of human behavior.
>> This would prohibit all advertising.
>> Uh it would prohibit targeted
>> only personalized advertising.
>> It would only manipulative advertising. It would not prohibit advertising messaging. It would not prohibit expressive advertising. It would not prohibit lying. It would not prohibit obnoxious advertising. It would not prohibit cloying advertising. What it would prohibit is advertising that has a model of you that predicts your behavior in a in a feedback loop.
>> Why can't we ban lying on the internet?
>> Uh, make lying wrong.
>> If I Yeah, because if I agreed with if if I agreed that made sense, I would be lying
>> and then we'd be Yeah, we'd be caught in an infinite regress. And you you're telling me that you plan to end on time? I don't really believe it, but uh an infinite regress will not get you there.
>> This whole conversation is giving me like heart palpitations because it makes me feel the same way I feel when there's like a popup window asking me to manage cookies and I don't know how to answer it ever and I either decline or accept or I never know what to do. And I'm just like I feel like the other component of this is regular human beings like me literally don't know how to even do anything about our own privacy.
>> Well, see, no, those windows are from the GDPR. That's my fault. I'm sorry.
>> Bless their heart,
>> right? Cuz it began it began in Europe. I remembered that. Yeah. No, that's our thing. That's the thing I was just talking about. That's one little tender line.
>> Control your cookies and be glad you have that option.
>> No, I'm glad
>> you just insulted my guests here saying that you don't know what to do. Thank Thank you for those popup windows. However, I'm I just feel like I'm I can't be the first person that feels at a loss when they come up.
>> I don't know anybody who knows what to do with those things. No, honestly, uh they're like or like those agreements you click through to do anything. Nobody reads them. I once gave a a talk to the lawyers who write those agreements and I want to see a show of hands. Who's read anyone else's agreement ever? Not a single hand. And then I said, "Who's really read all the way through the ones you're responsible for?" And there were like a few hands, but they were sheepish. And I mean, it's like this bizarre ritual we go through. It's it's called competency theater. It's like we we we do these things to pretend we have digital competence, but they're actually meaningless.
>> Yeah.
>> So, what's what's the future of that? Where where are we now and where's it going?
>> Okay. The future is that human beings will do nothing but enter long strings of letters and numbers for their entire lives.
>> Thank you for that.
>> That's it.
>> No, but but as I remembered it, the amount of information any of us are putting on our social media, you know, what your relationship status is, how old you are, where you live, what your previous jobs are. It's also on LinkedIn.
>> So, what does privacy even mean? The amount of privacy, the amount of information we're just handing out.
>> We give it up. KGB would have given their IT to obtain.
>> No, I know 50 years ago. No, but that's why I'm saying that um controlling information flows is very hard,
>> but I think we actually could prohibit certain algorithms and I think we should prohibit predicting human behavior. I think people should be allowed to be responsible for their own behavior and we shouldn't have algorithms that are modifying it or predicting it. And the only reason to predict it is to modify it. There's no other reason. And what's this case where someone had went online to buy a pregnancy test or something, then all of a sudden she started getting uh ads for diapers.
>> Oh, that's 30 years ago. No, no, no. You're way behind. Right now, we can tell. No, let me let me be very clear.
>> Well, I've always said that about Neil.
>> No, I mean, right now, any of the big internet companies know where in their where in their menstrual cycle every woman in this room is. And uh right now, and that's been true for at least 15 years, by the way. Uh every big internet company knows uh a lot about our health, a lot about our diets. Every they're like these these models are insane. And uh I don't think they're ethical. I don't think they should exist. I think people have to be I don't think people should try to figure out how to click the cookies pop up because it doesn't mean anything and and it's just like this useless cognitive overhead. I think privacy has to mean not being toyed with. It has to mean that there's not some evil eye looking at you trying to think about how do I get an in? How do I get to how do I get you? Like that has to be what privacy is.
>> And that means I will get like offered more ads about drill bits and like less ads about dresses or whatever.
>> The drill bits are amazing.
>> No, I'm into it. I I would like to be served more drill bits and fewer lipsticks. I just want to say
>> just make sure don't confuse those two things. Be careful. They look they look similar. They come in almost the same packaging. So you really you want to be careful. I know people have made that mistake and you just like
>> and you don't want the computer to saying it's almost time for your period. Have you forgotten?
>> That would be like
>> your computer is saying that already. Your computer traumatized that
>> your computer is already marketing things to you based on that. That already h that's happened to every woman in this room and for years.
>> All right. So Gary, take us out here.
>> All right, Jiren. Um, does the internet still have a pulse or is it completely dead?
>> Okay, look. Rabby, that that was a diabolical laugh. I know.
>> That was a laugh of of the of the, you know, the evil genius behind the thing.
>> We are deeply unsettled by that laugh of Yes. What comes after the last?
>> Speaking from the heart of Silicon Valley, all of you can rest assured that we have your very very best interests at heart. We are calculating ideal futures for you.
>> Just yeah, but we are we are uh
>> everything everything is good. Everything is right. Nothing to worry about.
>> Yes,
>> no problem. No problem. Um, if you feel any anxiety, talk to your AI lover. You'll be soothed. It's all good. Just remember to buy crypto and next time there's an IPO, invest in it. Not Not before, but you you don't you're not allowed to. It's all private equity, but definitely help push it and you'll Yeah, you'll be fine. It's all great.
>> Great. That's what you were expecting, right, Gary?
>> Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of where you were going there. Does anyone have a translation for that?
>> You can actually I wonder you know it's kind of a funny thing if you asked one of the language models uh Jarn lineer just said this snarky thing. What did he really mean? You know what's funny is that both Claude and Chad GPT generate excellent defenses of data dignity at this point because enough people have written about it. It's kind of funny. Yeah. People send me I get emails every day from you won't believe what this AI chatbot said.
>> So Claude is the chatbot for Anthropic. Yeah, that's right.
>> And chat GPT is for OpenAI.
>> Open. Gotcha. Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> If without saying it, we're saying that the internet is broken and a wash with bot slop. If we go in there with a bag of wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers, what are we needing to do to reinvigorate, to renovate?
>> Okay. And by the way, right now I'm in the I'm in the middle of a lawsuit against Anthropic for pirating 12 of my books.
>> Same. No, no. I took I opted for the the whatever the settlements,
>> but either way, they scraped my stuff, but I don't like it.
>> So, I have a I have a really funny position on these lawsuits, which is with everybody's knowledge and everybody's eyes wide open and everybody's agreement, I'm both on the board of the author's guild and I'm a prime scientist at Microsoft. So, I sued myself. Uh, basically, did you win? One thing I'm part of, sued another thing I'm part of. I call it capitalist yoga.
>> It's just like a little twist.
>> Maybe a series of lawsuits will set a ball rolling that will make all the purveyors sit up straight in their chair. Okay. Well,
>> and and and reapply the guardrails that maybe should have been there from the beginning.
>> So, look, um let me let me get speak seriously for a second. Um on this particular on these lawsuits, so I'm also a writer. I have a bunch of books and I also have been you know uh in the class for these things. The issue I have is that the available remedy that that you can get in the existing American legal system which the author's guild and others have pursued and I love the author's guild. It's led by Mary Rasenberger who's amazing and it's great. It's a wonderful organization, but the available remedy is a class action remedy. And what I don't like about that is that's one step towards universal basic income where it's like this giant wash for a lot of people. And that's really problematic for me. I need I need to see the data dignity solution which is an ongoing economy of creative data that's not controlled from the center. is not controlled by some lawyers and not that's not a big flat negotiation for a bunch of people because that's where the future of creativity can be funded and respected and treated as a real thing. This is only about the past and it's about a flat past and I I so I actually don't think it's right. I understand it's the available solution that can be pursued by the current uh configuration of things and and so it's complicated and like I say I'm I actually can see the different people's points of view because I am the different people. I'm in a very weird situation in this thing. Uh I hope my peculiar path through all this has led me in this series of third positions that might make some sense. They might not be perfect, but at least I want people to be more aware that there aren't only binary choices in this thing.
>> Well, you've been highly enlightening to us all in this conversation. And I thank you for taking time out of your schedule on the east coast to join me here at my office at the Hayden Planetarium to enlighten us all on the past, present, and future of what you created.
>> My goal had been to confuse you enough that you wouldn't blame me for anything.
>> Oh, you this you were sparsely successful in that.
>> You Yeah, you've been both terrifying and exhilarating. Two words, I think it is. Right. And Nagin, thanks for for joining us again.
>> Thank you so much. It's really
>> How do we find you online? Where are you?
>> You can find me at Nagin Farad on all the socials that you should also be deleting.
>> There you go. There you go. And Gary, good to have you, man. Even though you're in the UK at this moment.
>> Yes, pleasure.
>> All right. This has been yet another installment of Star Talk special edition. What do we call this? the uh is it the end of the internet or the beginning of something else that we deserve and don't know it? I'm Neil Degrass Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.