Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, a musician, and a writer. In this episode, he talks about how technology is turning everyone into an asshole, and why we should all be deleting our social media accounts. He also talks about his new book, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, and why he thinks the Internet is making us all into an A.I. A.K.A. "asshole." He's also the author of two other books, You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, which are both out now. He's a regular contributor to the New York Times and Slate, and is one of the most influential people in the world in the field of computer science and technology. He is also a musician and has played with some of the greats like Philip Glass and George Clinton, and writes books about the problems we're all facing in the digital world. And he's a great friend of mine, which is why I wanted to bring him on the podcast to talk about all of it. Thanks to him for coming on the show, and for being willing to take the time to talk to me about it, and I hope you enjoy the podcast, as much as I enjoyed having him on. . Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcast is a production of Gimlet Media. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron patron of Making Sense. or any other good podcast you care about what we're doing. We don't run by a good company like that helps fund the podcast. the best podcast you can do the best thing we can do for you, and we'll make the podcast even better! Thanks for listening and supporting the podcast you're making sense of it! - Sam and I'll be looking out for you in the best of what you're listening to, making sense, and you'll get the most out of it, right here. - Thank you for listening, again and again, again, thank you, again & again, forever grateful for all of that. Thank you, Sam and -- thank you for being kind and truly appreciating you're being kind, good and good morning, good day, good night, good evening, bye, bye. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - 2:30 - How do you feel about it? 3:15 - I'm not a Gadget? 4:40 - Why we should delete my social media account? 5:20 - Who Own the future? 6:00 7:30 8:40 9:00 | Why is it so important to me? 11:10 - How can I make the world better? 12:30 | How is it possible to be an asshole? 13:40 | Why are you an A? 15:00 -- How can we become an Aristotle? 16:10 17:00 Is the Internet a better word?
00:06:13.300And on its face, it sounds very generous and fair and proper and freeing.
00:06:20.220But there are problems with it that are so deep as to, I think, threaten the survival of our species.
00:06:27.160It's actually a very, very, very serious mistake.
00:06:30.580So the mistakes happen on a couple of levels here.
00:06:34.420I would say the first one has to do with this idea that information is totally weightless and intrinsically something that's free in an infinite supply.
00:06:46.400And that's not true because information only exists to the degree that people can perceive it and process it and understand it.
00:06:54.620It ultimately only has a meaning when it grounds out as human experience.
00:07:00.220The slogan I used to have back in the 80s when we were first debating these things is that information is alienated experience, meaning information is similar to stored energy that can be released.
00:07:11.740You put energy into a battery, then you can release it.
00:07:14.200Or you lift up a weight, and then you let go of the weight, and it goes back down, and you've released the energy that was stored.
00:07:20.020And in the same way, information ultimately only has meaning as experience at some point in the future.
00:07:26.020And the problem with experience, or maybe the benefit of experience, is that it's only a finite potential.
00:08:01.520And every website that you use reliably actually has to go through this elaborate structure of other resources created by companies like Akamai that defend it from denial-of-service attacks, which are just infinitely easy to do.
00:08:14.620But in the same way, when you have services like Twitter or Facebook, where anybody can post anything without any cost to themselves, and there's no postage on email, and everything can just be totally filled up with spam and malicious bots and crap to the point where reality and everything good about the world gets squeezed out, and you end up amplifying the worst impulses of people.
00:08:39.500And so it's created this world of darkness and falsity.
00:08:42.500It's reverse the enlightenment, you know, like you can't, there's no such thing as a free lunch, there's no such thing as free information, there's no such thing as infinite attention.
00:08:53.280There has to be some way that seriousness comes into play if you want to have any sense of reality or quality or truth or decency.
00:09:04.220And unfortunately, we haven't created a world in which that's so.
00:09:08.140But then there's a flip side to it, which is equally important, which is we've created this world in which we're talking about technology often as something that's, if not opposed to humanity, opposed to most of humanity.
00:09:23.860So there's a lot of talk, and a lot of this comes from really good technologists, so it's not from, like, malicious outsiders who are trying to screw us up.
00:09:32.280It's our own fault, where we'll say, well, a lot of the jobs will go away because of artificial intelligence and our robots.
00:09:38.140And that might either be some extreme case where a super intelligent AI takes over the world and disposes of humanity, or it might just be that only the most elite, smart, techie people are still needed and everybody else becomes this burden on the state and they have to go on some kind of basic income.
00:09:54.700And it's just a depressing, it's like everybody's going to become this useless burden.
00:10:01.200And so even if that means, oh, we'll all get basic income, we won't have to work for a living, there's also something fundamentally undignified, like you won't be needed.
00:10:08.300And any situation like that, it's just bound to be a political disaster or an economic disaster on many levels we can go into if it isn't obvious.
00:10:16.920But the thing to see is that this economic hole that we seem to be driving ourselves into is one and the same as the information wants to be free.
00:10:26.700Because the thing is, ultimately, all these AIs and robots and all this stuff, they run on information that at the end of the day has to come from people.
00:10:34.060And each instance is a little different, but for a lot of them, there's input from a lot of people.
00:10:40.700So if we say that information is free, then we're saying in the information age, everybody's worthless because what they can contribute is information.
00:10:50.880The example I like to use as just an entry point to this idea is the people who translate between languages.
00:10:56.300So they've seen their careers be decimated, their tenth of what they were, in the same way that recording musicians and investigative journalists and many other classes of people who have an information product, they've all been kind of reduced under this weird regime we've created.
00:11:15.740But the thing is, in order to run the so-called AI translators that places like Bing and Google offer, we have to scrape tens of millions of examples from real-life people translating things every single day in order to keep up with slang and public events.
00:11:51.140Well, I guess one question there is that I can see how it's true in the case of translation, but it seems to me nowhere written into the book of nature that it should be true in every case.
00:12:01.080So I think we could imagine some significant percentage of work that will get automated and it won't require this continuous drip of yet more human-generated information.
00:12:16.780Well, what I'd say to that is that I think anytime somebody considers what they want from an advanced economy or an economy in a situation where technology is getting better and better, is they should want more and more of the economy to essentially be about subjective value, about things like entertainment and cosmetics and sports and lifestyles and design and all that.
00:12:42.500Like, that's what we should want, because that's a signal that we're creating technologies in an economy that's really serving us, right?
00:12:50.720And so I would suspect, whether you want to call it AI or not, that some kind of growing core of functionality will probably require less and less continuous input from people, because it ultimately is composed of problems that can be solved approximately at least once, and then you can keep on using the solution for a long time.
00:13:15.420But the world of subjective value should be, but the world of subjective value should be in constant creative churn and evolution.
00:13:21.380And so to me, it might very well be the case that you don't need to re-scan the roads all the time to have self-driving vehicles, let's say.
00:13:31.800You still have to do it because there'll be potholes or fallen trees or whatever, but you don't have to do it constantly.
00:13:36.760But most of the economy should be about these subjective things, about style and arts and fashion and joy and connection and all that.
00:13:46.960And that's exactly the stuff we've thrown the most into the free bin, where you're supposed to do all that stuff for free by uploading YouTubes for free to YouTube and posting on Facebook for free and so forth.
00:13:57.860And to me, the AI case and the creative case are not different.
00:14:04.540I think the AI thing is just a fancy way of talking about information that confuses and muddies the issue.
00:14:10.680So this concern that AI will get really good simply doesn't concern me, because what the economy should be about is precisely more and more subjective value, which can only come by definition from people.
00:15:21.980Why can't Facebook just give me what I want?
00:15:24.900And I think it might be useful to focus the conversation here on a couple of case studies that you deal with in your various books.
00:15:36.960And one, I think, that will be familiar to people is the music industry and what happened to the really the economic basis of creating and selling music.
00:15:49.940Perhaps let's start there because there was one thing that I remember vividly when music became digitized is that it actually wasn't clear ethically to me and to millions of other people that copying an MP3 file was stealing in any sense.
00:16:08.840I mean, that piracy seemed benign and to, I think, a whole generation of people still seems benign because you're not depriving anyone of the material you're copying.
00:16:20.340You're not you're you're you're copying an MP3 file or any other digital product doesn't deprive anyone else of that information.
00:16:28.140And yet the effect of this has been to shrink an economy that at one point sustained, you know, a very valuable form of creative expression and, you know, now has been in free fall for for quite some time.
00:16:42.580So let's just let's talk to me about what happened to to music.
00:17:04.240So in the case of TV, during the same era in which it was there was this kind of craze for making music free, which was kind of 90s into the first decade of the century.
00:17:15.920There was also a feeling that that should happen with TV and that in the future, TVs and movies would be created by a process that was reminiscent of the Wikipedia, where just be a bunch of volunteers who would self-organize and do it for free and everything would be better.
00:17:38.700There was like there were a lot of attempts and see that at the same time, there were companies like Netflix saying, no, no, no, that's not the right thing.
00:17:47.180What the Internet allows us to do is have a direct billing relationship with people.
00:17:51.100And if we make the experience good and clean and smooth enough for them, they won't mind paying.
00:17:55.980And I just think there's no question that Netflix won that argument.
00:18:30.020Whether it is or not, of course, is a matter of opinion.
00:18:32.440Again, I'm personally not into a lot of the shows that have captured the imagination of so many like Game of Thrones, but it seems to be working, you know, so we have a very clear thing.
00:18:43.860And so, you know, what I'd say about this question of if you copy something, the original is still there.
00:18:50.260If you copy information, I just have to say that what we decide is worth paying for is always something of an, I won't say an arbitrary, but there's always a cultural element.
00:19:04.640There's an element of values into how we decide to do this.
00:19:08.100We decide not to pay for what we think of as women's work.
00:19:11.280We decide, for a long time, we decided the air was free, so you just breathe it and the plants make more air.
00:19:21.120We realize we have to preserve our air and everybody has to pay for it, ultimately, if we're going to survive.
00:19:26.360It's a matter of how we express our values, where we perceive our self-interest, how we see a path to a decent society.
00:19:32.980Ultimately, the decision of how you value things and what's worth spending money on is not rational.
00:19:38.820Like, for all of the books you can read about economics with all the fancy diagrams and equations, at the end of the day, a lot of it is really based on values and cultural expression.
00:19:51.140And so there isn't a way to absolutely justify some of these decisions, but that's always been true.
00:19:56.660Well, in some ways, it can be made rational in that you can trace the negative effects of bad incentives or, in this case, you know, if you're going to pirate every CD that gets produced in the year, whatever it was, 1998, then that's going to have a very predictable effect on the economics of producing music.
00:20:21.660And then musicians will have to tour, right?
00:20:26.540But, you know, not everyone wants to tour or can tour.
00:20:29.320And then if you do it to writers, if you pirate books, well, you know, writers, for the most part, can't even tour, right?
00:20:37.700Only some of them can have careers giving lectures.
00:20:40.460So what you do in your books is offer a very rational case for why these incentives we've created or these new norms around treating information as free have been really ruinous to certain sectors of the economy.
00:21:02.340Like, these kind of clouds of negative assumptions can overtake a society.
00:21:07.840So currently, we assume that there's no way to have a college education that won't be infinitely expensive that will put you in debt forever.
00:21:15.180We assume that there are these horrible things that are just indelible.
00:21:19.660And there's an assumption that if you're a musician, it's inconceivable there could be an economy to support you.
00:21:24.700So you better have rich parents, you know, and that's approximately what's going on now for the most part in the average case.
00:21:31.540What I try to tell younger musicians is that this is not really so.
00:21:35.160In the 90s, for a while, I made my living as a recording musician and leaving aside performances just from the recording business, I could sell like 30,000 records.
00:21:46.500I was kind of a minor artist, I would say, in the kind of avant-garde classical crossover world.
00:21:52.060And I'd get $100,000 advance per record, and the big label that had signed me would earn it back.
00:22:01.300And that was cool, you know, and we got to record in a nice studio and all these things.
00:22:14.580Right, but so my understanding here with music is that you had major bands who would, who I think got something like 90% of their revenue from selling their music, see that revenue shrink to whatever, 30%, and then touring had to make up the difference.
00:22:33.920And so it created a whole new business model for music, but that works in the case of, you know, many musicians.
00:22:41.720I don't know, you know, what percentage, but it doesn't work for many journalists, right, or many authors.
00:22:48.420And even in the case of musicians, it's been heartbreaking.
00:22:51.540I mean, when this music wants to be free thing started happening, we just started having weekly fundraisers for people like famous musicians who'd gotten sick in old age and had like no support anymore.
00:23:06.620Recently, my very dear buddy, friend, for many, many years, John Perry Barlow passed away, and he had been a songwriter for The Grateful Dead, one of the most successful bands, which had actually pioneered a lot of this idea by encouraging tapers at their concerts from a very pure feeling, from a very generous feeling.
00:23:26.480But then, you know, at the end, even though he penned, you know, these songs and these huge selling records, he just basically didn't have income, you know, and it just pissed me off so much.
00:23:48.520You know, you can't build up any reserve so that you can have a sick day or grow old or have a kid who needs to go to college.
00:23:54.840You know, everybody goes into this gig economy where you're basically this disposable element in somebody else's fortune.
00:24:02.340And that's what making music free actually did.
00:24:05.540That's a very important distinction because it takes the case of music.
00:24:08.700So it may seem like a distinction without a difference for people because if I tell you that a band like whatever, Radiohead, used to make all of their money selling music, but now they have to tour.
00:24:22.060But the crucial difference there is if you're making your money selling your intellectual property, well, then that is money that you can continue to make even when you stop working.
00:24:33.680Whereas if you're making your money touring, you know, there's a linear relationship between, you know, every gig and every dollar.
00:24:41.440And once you stop touring, you stop making money.
00:24:43.620And that looks very different in your old age as a rock star.
00:24:46.700Yeah, yeah, there have been so many tragic situations.
00:24:50.020And of course, if you're young, what you think about is it's in my interest to not have to pay for this file, you know.
00:24:56.640But then you will not stay young forever, no matter what weird rhetoric comes out of Google spinoffs.
00:25:04.120You will also have a biological body and you will have needs and you will not always have perfect days.
00:25:09.980And this whole idea of intellectual property, kind of like a lot of things in our society, you can think of it as something that only benefits elites, but actually it was fought for by unions trying to support people who were not elites at all.
00:25:26.180The musicians union battled long and hard to get these rights, to create dignity for people who produced information in their lives and to have it lost by people who thought they were doing the right thing.
00:25:40.040It's just one of the great tragedies of our era.
00:25:44.860But so, for instance, you know, as a writer of books, I know you have experienced this as well.
00:25:51.380You find yourself continually in competition with free versions of yourself.
00:25:57.880So, you know, if you give a TED Talk, you know, rather often you give the talk because you want to give the talk, but also because you're a writer of books and this is, you know, this is a great way to get word of your work out.
00:26:12.840But the truth is that more and more in the current era where everyone feels starved for time and attention and it's becoming harder and harder to even commit to reading a book, you are actually, your TED Talk is going to satisfy some significant number of people that they understand your thesis well enough that they don't even have to read your book.
00:26:32.920And the business model of publishing is in tension with all of these opportunities to get the word out about a book now in digital form.
00:26:43.140And a podcast like this is, you know, another case in point.
00:26:46.440And to that end, it would be only decent of me to assure people that we will in no way exhaust what is of interest in your books by having this conversation.
00:26:54.360If I may, there's one of my books you haven't mentioned, which is called Dawn of the New Everything, which is a memoir and an introduction to virtual reality and possibly my best book, but also the least known book.
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