00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, Jaron Lanier, S8, S9, Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:00:00] S0: People are disappearing again just like before. [00:00:05] S1: Nocturne. Now streaming on Apple TV. Liev Schreiber. [00:00:11] S2: Walter has a way of getting to people. When he does, they don't come back. [00:00:14] S3: Steven Graham. The world [00:00:15] S4: is full of dark places. Zarzee Beats. [00:00:19] S5: How's he getting messages out? [00:00:20] S6: He's locked under six feet of concrete. [00:00:21] S7: She's still alive. [00:00:23] S8: I'm a fighter. [00:00:24] S1: Nocturne. Now streaming on Apple TV. Subscription required. [00:00:30] S9: You're always on the move. School drop off, back to back meetings, catching the game with friends. Being on the move means juggling a lot. It can also mean making a lot because when you move your money to Citizens, you can earn a significant cash bonus. Just how much? Check out citizensbank.com/makemore, or head to your nearest branch to find out. But move quickly. This offer is only available for a limited time. Offer available on select new accounts, qualifying balance deposit activity requirements, and additional terms and conditions apply. Member FDIC. [00:01:02] S10: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. [00:01:06] S11: Danny, one thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company? [00:01:14] S10: Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech, and teams all doing things slightly differently.
00:01:14 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Jaron Lanier
[00:01:14] S10: Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech, and teams all doing things slightly differently. [00:01:23] S11: ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization. [00:01:30] S10: Connecting people, systems, data, and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos. [00:01:36] S11: Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. [00:01:46] S7: A similar argument for me has to apply to AI, which is, you know, if we make a machine and we declare it god, what's the consequence? And the consequence is we have to let it run rampant, and letting a machine run rampant is really stupid. [00:02:02] S10: Hello, and welcome to the interview from Times Tech. I am Danny Fortson. [00:02:07] S11: And I'm Katie Prescott. [00:02:09] S10: And this week, I've been talking to Lanier. Jaron is a fascinating person. He's a computer scientist and futurist and is recognized as [00:02:17] S11: a futurist? [00:02:19] S10: Yeah. Yeah. [00:02:21] S11: Crystal bull gazing. [00:02:22] S10: Are you not a futurist? [00:02:23] S11: Maybe. Maybe I am now. Podcast. [00:02:25] S10: We'll see after the pod. We'll see what you think. He is recognized as one of the founders of virtual reality back in the eighties. He coined the actual term itself.
00:02:25 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Jaron Lanier
[00:02:25] S10: We'll see after the pod. We'll see what you think. He is recognized as one of the founders of virtual reality back in the eighties. He coined the actual term itself. [00:02:35] S11: No way. I have to say, I was looking him up. And futurist isn't his only job title. And obviously tech has got some good job titles. But he is currently the prime unifying scientist at Microsoft's Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which if you switch the two around, spells Octopus. You're interviewing Microsoft's octopus, and perhaps he'll explain what that means. [00:03:05] S10: Yes, indeed. And most importantly, most importantly, probably his most important title, his friend of the pod, of this very pod. He's been on this pod back when it was Danny in the Valley many, many moons ago. Is nicknamed the dismal optimist because of how he contrasts his criticism of digital technology with the way it's used to protect human creativity and agency. So with everything moving around us at such a rapid pace, I thought it would be a great moment to catch up with him and maybe do, you know, a little bit of future gazing in this week where we have, you know, the big anthropic news and all things AI and what's going on in the world. So here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier. You may not remember this, and I see all the, instruments behind you. [00:03:53] S7: Yeah. There are some.
00:03:53 · Jaron Lanier, Danny Fortson
[00:03:53] S7: Yeah. There are some. [00:03:54] S10: I sat in your house in your other room with all the instruments back in Berkeley in 2018. You were on this podcast when it was called Danny in the Valley. But the occasion, which is why I wanna start here, the occasion was you'd published this book, 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. And I remember just really enjoying that conversation, and it stuck with me because you were making an argument that, you know, we're eight years later, and it feels like the world has kind of caught up to that to a large degree. You're having these bans across the world, and, obviously, social media is still social media, but it does seem like there is a general awakening to, like, this extractive manipulative kind of business model is a problem. Is there a through line to your mind with what we are seeing right now with AI, the business models at the heart of this new industry, and, you know, how it is developing and, you know, obviously developing very quickly?
00:04:56 · Jaron Lanier, Danny Fortson
[00:04:56] S7: Yeah. Unfortunately, we're seeing much too strong of a through line, and it's kind of a tragic one because it's so unnecessary, and there would be better decisions. In my view, what happened, and I say this not as an outsider, but as an insider, and I'm speaking to my friends and of my friends and of myself and of my community, what happened is we became addicted to addiction as a business model. We ourselves became addicted to the thing which was addicting others. So if you look at the stated major benefits of AI algorithms, which is, you know, maybe we'll find cures to major diseases, maybe we'll transform the way we get energy to use and material science and all these things, and that could improve human life and prospects. So there's all that. But the way we make money, if you look at the very large numbers of people with subscriptions to AI services now, is extremely similar to the kind of emotional addiction paradigm that we saw with social media and that we continue to. And, there's a couple of things to say here, which are... You know, there's a lot of layers of irony and complexity and also, I think, lot of layers of hope. [00:06:30] S10: We're speaking, you know, in the week that Anthropic comes out with its 355 page IPO prospectus, you know, potentially the largest deal in the history of capitalism. So it's obviously very much on people's minds. And, you know, they spend almost a 100 pages on the various risks, including, hey. This new digital god we're creating might kill us all.
00:06:52 · Jaron Lanier
[00:06:52] S7: Yeah. That's right. I guess I should just take a moment here to say that I'm not an absolutist critic at all. What I had always thought is that the core issue is really the business model that if the way you make money from computation is by manipulating people, which is very, very easy to do with computation. It's the very easiest thing to do with it at all. Then your incentives become rather dark, and you tend to make money from doing things that are darker and darker. And in my view, that's why we have a kind of an unfortunately dark and depressed culture in younger generations all over the world. And it's why politics went off the rails in a lot of ways during this period and many other things. Just as we're saying that tech should be able to improve medicine, tech is actually probably doing more to harm people by making them reject modern medicine through cranky algorithms. So, you know, we make ourselves so absurd. Now the thing is, the business model for AI has a lot in common. It has the addiction dynamic in common. People definitely get addicted to using their chat. It definitely has the inherent ultra easy readily available illusions of computing in common. And what I mean by that, for those who don't know, way back in the mid sixties when computers were so small, they really couldn't do anything, there was an experiment called ELIZA where somebody made a chatbot that just kinda spit back what somebody had said, and people were convinced it was the most empathic, fully conscious, real therapist god ever. Like, you know, like, it takes no technical know how to make computing into this addictive manipulative thing because it's just so natural, just having this information system that can respond. It's just super easy to turn it into a manipulation box. This is going back to the social media era. If you say everything's free, then you're the product as the saying goes and as many have discovered it. The interesting thing about the AI era is people are actually paying for these subscriptions for the most... A lot of them are, not everybody. But... So in a way, what I wanted is happening. But here, the problem is a different problem where... Because we now have GenAI, we have a way of filtering all of the wealth and efforts and creativity of mankind through this scrambler so that it seems like it's just coming from the company.