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NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And you’ve got a book from a few years ago, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts.
JARON LANIER: Yes, I do.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was bold back then, and it’s probably even more significant today.
JARON LANIER: 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 all I can tell them is, “Well, you must have done something very bad. And I hope you learned your lesson.”
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s the only way to reply to that comment, for sure. So if you started virtual reality, what were you thinking behind it? Did you think that other people would be not content with their own reality and you have to create one for them?
Virtual Reality as a Palette Freshener
JARON LANIER: Oh God, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Explicitly not. No, here’s my thought about it. 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 in 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 inured to it. So like, you put on the goggles and then you take them off.
One of the things I used to love to do 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 headset on, and they’d take it off and they would look at this thing and it’s like they never saw one before, because in a way they hadn’t. And so as a palette 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 appreciate reality by finally having a contrast, because it’s very hard to make a contrast to reality.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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 regular reality becomes less interesting to them because they’re on a hike, they’re on a space adventure, they’re—
NEGIN FARSAD: There’s no boundaries to where they can go.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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.
NEGIN FARSAD: Yeah, I love it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Did you pick that up in a virtual reality future and you’re trying to influence regular reality?
JARON LANIER: Yeah, you got it. That’s exactly what I knew.
The VR Nausea Problem
NEGIN FARSAD: I have to say, can I also speak up for a subset 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?
JARON LANIER: I have two rants I have to give. Can you guys handle a rant? 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.
NEGIN FARSAD: I’m one. Yes.
JARON LANIER: And they’re almost universally female and almost universally not white.
NEGIN FARSAD: Now what? I wasn’t expecting that.
NEGIN FARSAD: I’m Iranian.
JARON LANIER: They’re mostly Asian, mostly East Asian. I’m not aware of any study on Iranians in particular, or Middle Eastern.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And you’re Iranian? Yes. Okay.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. And so the thing is— 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, 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 or something.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s how much money it took to go to the moon, just to give you a context here.
JARON LANIER: Okay, well, think about—
NEGIN FARSAD: Jesus.
JARON LANIER: Think about what you could do with that money. Okay, now, before we get to the question at hand, I want to point something out. 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 would 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s the limit of what I would have said.
JARON LANIER: But you would have said that. Definitely. Okay.
NEGIN FARSAD: I would have said, “Let’s make, like, boobies out of, like, zeros and ones in, like, a, you know, something like this.”
JARON LANIER: So your desire has been met. But let us just—
NEGIN FARSAD: I’m just saying, yeah. No, listen.
JARON LANIER: And you say men don’t listen.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay.
JARON LANIER: We do. We do. All right. But I want to address this question of, like, would you 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?
GARY O’REILLY: Mm-hmm.
VR’s Unfulfilled Potential
JARON LANIER: Okay. Now, if I show you a VR headset and I 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 a 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 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 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 it 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.”
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We have a room of white men.
JARON LANIER: And then— no, no, no.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Western men.
NEGIN FARSAD: Yes, we can speak to all the women.
JARON LANIER: “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 it was.
But anyway, the thing is, nobody’s going to bother. 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, absurd 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 in Silicon Valley. We say, “Well, maybe we’re doing stupid, but we’ll do it at such big scales that it’ll make up for it.” And it doesn’t work.
NEGIN FARSAD: The only friend that I have that really uses VR is literally to rewatch The Departed and then fall asleep. That’s like so far the only use I’ve seen of VR from out of my friends.
JARON LANIER: 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 4-dimensional shape to develop 4-dimensional intuition. And you can merge bodies.
Thinking in Four Dimensions
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Which just to be clear, we live and think in 3 dimensions. And for me, one of the greatest challenges as a kid was I want to think in 4 dimensions. That would be just so cool to be able to do that.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. Well, I mean, someday— oh God, when I was probably 21 or something and we were starting the company, all the engineers at the first VR startup, and this would’ve been in ’81 or something, 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 4 dimensions and be 4D natives.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh.
JARON LANIER: That was the idea, and then they’d be the world’s best mathematicians. And so—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This is the Truman Show, but as conceived by mathematicians.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Excuse me, by crazy mathematicians.
NEGIN FARSAD: But just that— during their sleep they would have—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, during the swap, you’d have to swap out the headset.
NEGIN FARSAD: Oh, I see, I see.
JARON LANIER: Presumably we’d feed them. I mean, given us, maybe not, but the idea is that they grow. And then— so when I told my daughter this when she was like 11 or something, she got really pissed. “I could have been the first kid in 4 dimensions. What’s wrong with you?” And I was like, okay, so just—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, okay, because 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 VR 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 experience as opposed to a completely new experience like your 4D child.
JARON LANIER: 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. So look, in a way, VR doesn’t exist yet. Like just the most basic apps— the hardware is getting there, but the software has not been born yet.
GARY O’REILLY: Nope.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s lame.
GARY O’REILLY: Mm-hmm.
Social Media Addiction and the Dangers of VR
GARY O’REILLY: Something Jaron said about Meta and them 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, 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 Jaron’s thoughts on that, if at all possible.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, this was something all of us in the VR world warned about from the early days, that it could be turned into an addictive medium, definitely.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So you saw it coming?
JARON LANIER: Oh, everybody saw it coming. Okay. 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 Wiener, 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 be networked— he has a thought experiment in there about people walking around with little radio-connected devices that would go to a central computer. So we’re three-quarters of a century ago, and how dangerous this would be. And he thinks of it as an extinction level event that we have to start foreseeing 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, 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 f* with you.
NEGIN FARSAD: Is the lawsuit going to fix any of this? Like Gary mentioned the lawsuit. What do you think of it?
JARON LANIER: 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 upcoming elections both here and elsewhere will be important to what happens. Right now, the population in general is very uncomfortable with the tech industry.
NEGIN FARSAD: That’s an understatement.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. And I mean, it’s funny for me because 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 seems to be criticizing us. And I almost feel too conformist because I want to be the weirdo. I want to be the weirdo.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Everyone caught up with you, and now you’re just a regular guy.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, see, that’s really awkward.
NEGIN FARSAD: You’ve been saying since 2016, “Delete your social accounts,” and now—
The Network Effect and Hyper-Centralized Power
JARON LANIER: Longer than that. That’s just the book. But yeah, yeah. 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 maybe it does a slight bit of good. Every once in a while, one of them tells me they—
But if it was left to 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 Pareto effect, or there’s other words for it. And what happens is when you have a very low friction 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 something. Those are examples, there’s others as well.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You said low friction, what you mean by that, as I understand it, is the freedom with which information flows.
JARON LANIER: Exactly.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Among all of these nodes, a slight advantage then grows for having been a slight advantage.
JARON LANIER: Yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And you get a runaway process.
JARON LANIER: 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.
GARY O’REILLY: Whoa.
JARON LANIER: So now we have the situation where a handful of people have more wealth than 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In the old days, a company was not— other than Ford himself, a company you didn’t even know who the names were, it was just the name of the company.
JARON LANIER: Right.
NEGIN FARSAD: Well then also there’s that effect of like they are getting high on their own supply, right? Like they want to be famous as a part of the technology platform that they put out. So there’s a little bit— I mean, am I talking about Elon Musk? Probably.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, no.
JARON LANIER: Who are you talking about? I didn’t get that.
NEGIN FARSAD: There’s— because before you didn’t know. I never knew who a CEO of anything was.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Right. Right. And Elon has 280 million followers on that.
NEGIN FARSAD: And he probably loves that.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And he owns that platform. Yes.
The Social Media Addiction Personality
JARON LANIER: Yeah. Well, I wrote a piece once about Elon and Kanye, or Ye, and Trump for The Times before Elon bought it. And what I said is, 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 petty, vain. It’s confrontative and nervous. It’s mean. It’s never satisfied. There’s a certain—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There’s a certain— man, that is it. That’s the playbook right there.
JARON LANIER: But the thing is, what happens is whenever somebody’s on it, they turn into one of these. So those 3 people were very different before, and then they became similar. And so what we have is the behavior mod machine that Norbert Wiener warned us about 75 years ago, 76 years ago, and it’s actually working, and it’s turning the founders into the victims.
Can Social Media Be Fixed?
GARY O’REILLY: Just to touch on that point, this systemic process of social media addiction, and as you’ve just highlighted, the creation of characteristics, is there any way to take that out and keep what is, in principle, a decent idea of social media? It’s just the way that it’s been developed to be addictive. Is there any way to untangle that?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Can you edit the beast?
JARON LANIER: Yeah.
NEGIN FARSAD: Also, just to follow up on that, in the early days of the internet, there was like Friendster and stuff, right? And it wasn’t— I don’t remember specifically, but I feel like everything in the beginning was sort of nice. It wasn’t obsessed. It wasn’t a cesspool. It was like fun and cute. So why did we go into this mean direction?
JARON LANIER: 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. 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—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: However you want to frame it, that’s a brilliant way to think about it.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. 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 as we’ve described. Now, as for the—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s an outrage magnifier. That’s really what it has become.
The Fast Brain and the Algorithm
JARON LANIER: Well, outrage is one of the things— basically, from a neuroscience point of view, we believe— I mean, there’s a community of people who study this, of course, and I don’t know that the science is complete because we don’t really understand the brain. So I don’t want to over— if I’m on a science show, I want to be careful to state the limits of what we actually know.
But 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. The fast brain is sometimes known as the fight or flight or the twitch response brain that is very alert to dangers and sometimes for opportunities to pounce on prey or find a mate or whatever it might be. But there are these things.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Primal. It’s primal.
JARON LANIER: And so the thing is, when you’re under the regime of 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 stalked. You’re always stalking. You’re always horny, but you’re never satisfied. 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Your people have hijacked what would otherwise be a helpful evolutionary trait within us.
JARON LANIER: Yes.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I hope that’s dangling there in modern times. That has much less use today because there’s not a lion in the brush, right?
JARON LANIER: Well, even when there were lions in the brush, you had to modulate between being hyperattentive and not. You can’t be on all the time and be mentally healthy even in that environment. It wears you down. So, or at least that’s our present understanding. 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. 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—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This sounds so obvious.
JARON LANIER: Yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But maybe it’s impossibly obvious. I mean, it’s—
JARON LANIER: No, look, 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 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 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 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 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.
Who Regulates the Tech Giants?
NEGIN FARSAD: What about like—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Damn, you’re bumming us out here, dude.
NEGIN FARSAD: I know, this is like so sad.
JARON LANIER: Well, stop that. Don’t ask me serious questions. No, wait— like if you want, but wait, I have to say one other thing, which is that if you say, 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 GitHub is better than 4chan or something like that. And so if you look at 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, 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I’m glad to hear that.
GARY O’REILLY: All right, Neil, before Jaron 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 the dog here. Am I wrong?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, plus they were all on the inauguration stage.
GARY O’REILLY: How about that, Neil?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm.
Popular Legitimacy and the Limits of Power
JARON LANIER: 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. And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. 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 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, it always does.
NEGIN FARSAD: I actually feel like I was verging on a sociopath before I had a child. So I do see that changing people.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In fact, one of the clearest transitions anyone makes are comedians after they have children.
NEGIN FARSAD: Oh, I mean—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It changes their portfolio of jokes.
NEGIN FARSAD: Oh, absolutely.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And their observations of the world.
NEGIN FARSAD: We have a child that we can mock mercilessly, which we do, but the mocking is, “You do know you will pay for that someday.” I mean, yeah, I’m already paying for it.
JARON LANIER: Let me assure you.
Delete Day: Would It Move the Needle?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so Gary, where are we pivoting next?
GARY O’REILLY: All right, before we do, Jaron, 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?
JARON LANIER: 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. I called my book 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media, but I didn’t say that you should do it. 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 really don’t. 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Can I tell you what I did? I noticed over the years, because I have a pretty high following in social media. I noticed that—
NEGIN FARSAD: Drag.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Drag? Okay.
NEGIN FARSAD: I’m just trying to—
JARON LANIER: All right. I’m just trying to—
NEGIN FARSAD: Neil has a lot of followers, guys. Okay, go ahead.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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 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— well, okay, so I climbed out of that hole.
The One-Third Rule
JARON LANIER: My working theory is that one-third of people on any digital platform benefit from it and two-thirds suffer from it. Now I’ll tell you where that comes from because it’s a very— it’s an ironclad scientific argument.
NEGIN FARSAD: But you didn’t just pull those numbers out of your ass because it sounds like you did.
JARON LANIER: I have an ironclad scientific ass.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, there it is. If we all had ironclad science ass, we could pull all kinds of stuff out of it.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, that’s what this world is missing. Wait, can I just give you my argument after all that? Don’t you want to hear it? Aren’t you even slightly curious?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I want to know your ironclad ass argument.
JARON LANIER: Okay, 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—
The Turing Test and Its Implications
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Let me just remind you — Alan Turing wrote a paper called “The Imitation Game” where he describes an experiment, this is 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 distinction isn’t important.
JARON LANIER: There’s a third person who’s a judge who’s supposed to tell which is which. And if the judge doesn’t know, then you say, well, we might as well call the computer intelligent. And then there are different versions of this. Maybe the computer’s intelligent, maybe it’s got a soul, maybe it deserves rights, whatever.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Other questions you might ask, yes. Okay, now, it’s a Turing test. I just want to catch people up on that.
JARON LANIER: It’s based on 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, okay.
JARON LANIER: So that’s where it comes from. 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 you can’t tell if the computer got stupid or the person got smarter, but there’s two people and one computer because there’s the contestant and the judge and only one computer. Therefore, there’s a two-thirds chance that a person got stupid and a one-third chance that the computer got smarter.
So therefore, as a general rule, my ass tells us — my highly reliable ass tells us — that two-thirds of the people on any digital thing, whether it’s AI or whatever, are going to be degraded by it. But one-third will see a genuine benefit. And I think you’re in that one-third.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah.
JARON LANIER: Okay.
NEGIN FARSAD: And I also think that—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you for that affirmation because I always just felt uncomfortable given what I see going on on these platforms.
JARON LANIER: It might be an affirmation or an ascertainment.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you for the affirmation.
JARON LANIER: Yes. This is a really elevated — we’re not just school kids here. This is professional science here.
NEGIN FARSAD: This is how scientists speak. Yeah. For the audience to know.
JARON LANIER: Right.
NEGIN FARSAD: I also just think 3/3 of people would benefit if it just wasn’t on a phone. Like if social media wasn’t on your phone and then you had to designate time for it, like going to your laptop? Wouldn’t that do the job?
JARON LANIER: Read the final chapter of 1950 Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, before anything in computer science. The final chapter says, just as a thought experiment, imagine there was a small portable device that’s radio connected you could carry around that undertook 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.
AI, Big Tech, and the Responsibility Question
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So Gary.
GARY O’REILLY: Yeah. 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 that 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 — this time it’s not social media addiction, it’s an artificial intelligence?
JARON LANIER: 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 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. So what I’m hoping is that corrections can happen in a gentle and constructive way instead of some 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,” 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 don’t squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube easily, and you don’t rebuild from rubble easily, and 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 I want to be part of that. That’s why I’m both inside it and a critic, because I don’t think that’s inconsistent. I think we should be responsible for 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—
Mythologizing AI vs. AI as a Tool
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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? Because AI is on everyone’s tongue today and everyone’s mind and everyone’s fear.
NEGIN FARSAD: It’s kind of like Trump. Trump and AI — people can’t stop talking about those two things on any given news cycle.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. And they’re both hollow. Let me — so a couple of things about AI. Let me propose to you something. 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.
Throughout history, 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 there’s the Gutenberg press, or there’s writing, and then Gutenberg, and then there’s radio and whatever, all these different things. If you look at Wikipedia as a little point on that ramp, it takes a bunch of people’s work and they cooperate together to make this single document. There’s some things about Wikipedia I don’t like, but let’s use it. There’s a lot that’s great about it.
Now, you can think of large language model AI — the kind that’s on everybody’s mind — as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into a single document like Wikipedia. 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 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, because there are very profound ones. 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. That’s what you want. That’s how you think. That’s where you are. I kind of remember being that way when I was 20 or something.
NEGIN FARSAD: You’re describing a lot of men I dated in my 20s.
JARON LANIER: On behalf of — 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 this is the most — and you know, it was actually a pretty cool room at the time it started to work.
But the thing is there’s a lot of ego in it, but then there’s another thing, which is almost everybody in it is pretty young and they grew up on a diet of science fiction movies and video games. And the stories that they have as vocabularies for how they understand the world and how they can express the world are all just like this. They didn’t have the Star Trek of the ’90s, 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There’s soon to be an X Prize that will fund any project that will create a positive outlook for the future of civilization as a counterpoint to all of these negative futures imagined by sci-fi writers.
JARON LANIER: And I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in — I’ve been involved in a few attempts to pitch positive futures 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 rom-coms. That’s girly.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So they divide the kingdom that way.
JARON LANIER: Interesting.
NEGIN FARSAD: So are you saying we would have a better relationship with AI if we just saw more Star Trek from the ’90s and less of everything else?
JARON LANIER: Yeah, I’ll go further. If Star Trek from the ’90s had lasted another 10 years, there’d be many fewer teen suicides today.
NEGIN FARSAD: All right, that’s a claim.
JARON LANIER: I really — I can’t prove it, but I believe that.
“There Is No AI” — Reframing the Conversation
GARY O’REILLY: I’m going to track you back a couple of years now to a piece I think you wrote in The New Yorker, “There Is No AI.” A simple question to follow that: what did you mean by that?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And what year was that?
GARY O’REILLY: 2023.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, they’re mad at me because I owe them pieces and I’m really bad and I have to deliver something. But anyway, yeah, “There Is No AI” is 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 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 right now, as capable as the models are getting — and some of the recent things are pretty impressive — the most impressive edge of it is probably using them to help speed code development. And that’s kind of working, and it’s pretty impressive, and code—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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 can write it over a weekend and spend 2 weeks debugging it. And now you tell the AI what you want and it’ll come back bug-free, essentially. You tweak it a little bit here and there. And I had access — you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, I probably would’ve just spent more time at the beach. But I don’t know if I would’ve been more creative, but I definitely see that today.
The AI Girlfriend Cure and the Black Box Problem
JARON LANIER: Yeah. Well, 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 things that happen are probably more theatrical. Like if you think you have an AI girlfriend — I have a cure for that, by the way. If somebody—
NEGIN FARSAD: Wait, a cure for what part of it?
JARON LANIER: All right, specifically, if somebody thinks they have an AI girlfriend. 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’ll cure them immediately.
JARON LANIER: It kind of, it tends to do the trick.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, is the man more likely to have an AI girlfriend than the woman is to have a boyfriend?
JARON LANIER: 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 instead of saying something snarky, I’ll just say let’s deal with that as science and let the people who are researching it get to the point where they feel they can.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I think we all know the answer, but yeah, okay.
JARON LANIER: Oh God, why do I even bother? Why do I try? There is no female version. I’m trying to be the responsible scientist for like 3 seconds in this ridiculous interview and you’re not even giving me those 3 seconds.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, no, I love you for it.
Guardrails, Bombs, and Breaking the Black Box
JARON LANIER: All right, okay. Let me go over, but now there’s these huge problems. Even with the best recent models, it’s not that hard to crack them and get something that they’re supposed to prevent with a so-called guard, or guardrails. And so here, let me give you a thought experiment.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: All right.
JARON LANIER: 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 Grok, I’m not sure. But in general, that’s supposed to be a laugh line. All right. Okay.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Grok is from Elon Musk.
JARON LANIER: And it tends to suppose it’s trying to be the bad boy of the AI models. Okay. But anyway, 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-and-so and 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.
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 as 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 missed the most if they hadn’t been present in the first place. So it’s counterfactual cluster estimation.
So let’s say the top 24 clusters of source data from training or from fine-tuning, whatever, 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, in authentication, where if you add endless little things to signing into something like CAPTCHAs, criminals can still get around it. But as soon as there’s multifactor, it sends a code to your phone. Even though it’s a pain in the butt, it’s harder to countervene that. This is multifactor for AI security.
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 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 other issues because you’re actually dealing with the mechanism that’s grounded, and that’s the people.
AI Is Made of People — And Why That Matters
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 can I just say one other thing?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Please.
JARON LANIER: 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 matters. And you’ll just be kept by Elon as a pet at his discretion. And he’ll treat you as well as he treats his biological children.” And I’m sorry. I should be nice. I’m sorry.
But here’s the thing. 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 Bolsheviks, 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 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 they have to be a good pet? 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 want that future.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s how I’ve been trying to think about AI as well.
JARON LANIER: But you have to not believe in AI to think about it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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.
JARON LANIER: So 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, they’ll make your music. You don’t need to be a musician because AI will make you optimized 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.
NEGIN FARSAD: Hmm.
Data Dignity and the Value of Human Labor
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Is anything that you’ve just described related to this term I only recently heard, “data dignity”? What does that mean?
JARON LANIER: Data dignity is the term that many of us use for exactly this set of ideas. And so the idea is that the data that — data only comes from people. Data doesn’t come from angels. It doesn’t come out of the dark matter or something.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A tablet in the sky, right?
JARON LANIER: Yeah. It comes from people. It comes from the work of people. It’s also sometimes called “data as labor.” Actually, can I do a slightly side rant on this?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Do it.
JARON LANIER: That’s slightly—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You have the best rants of anybody, just so you know.
JARON LANIER: Okay, look, there’s part of the ideology that makes AI into a creature instead of a collaboration that 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, musicians used to be paid because there was an act of Congress in the US called the Mechanical, where every time you reproduced a sound wave mechanically, the musician who made it had to be paid. But then when we moved 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. They might say, “Well, any one little bit is so tiny you can’t measure it.” And that’s true. However, look at data centers. 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 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-take-all thing.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Just in all fairness to the history of this, I distinctly remember in my field 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.
NEGIN FARSAD: Was that just like a philosophy covering for scientists being cheap?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, philosophy would overstate what the drivers were. It was just us entering the field of computer science, just as scientists and consumers, we did not think of information as something you would pay for.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, I know, and 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 there’s a long, amazing history of that. And here’s the thing about it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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 slow, but it happened, and it was very real.
The Third Choice: Affordable Software and the Cost of Extremes
JARON LANIER: The thing is, we’ve only ever been given two choices. Either software’s insanely expensive — like right now, for anybody who knows about this, I do 5-axis milling of stuff for jewelry, and the 5-axis mill software costs more than a nice apartment 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? But here’s the thing.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So 5-axis, you would be drilling into a solid piece of metal in different ways.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. And in my case, I’m doing stone. But yeah, so what you want, you want to have 5 degrees of freedom to control the drill bit. Sure. But the thing is, 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. 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 to become computer scientists, and I feel really scummy about it. And so 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 cheapskate scientists out there would have — would have—
NEGIN FARSAD: What?
Finding the Middle Ground: Privacy, Data, and the Future of the Internet
JARON LANIER: Don’t use her terms for this. Even you guys 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.
NEGIN FARSAD: Like the economists talk about marginal cost. We need to also, if you look at marginal cost, then affordability ends up emerging.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. And what we’re seeing right now is 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. That’s an exaggeration, but we’re getting there. It’s what people call the K-shaped economy. And what we want is the middle.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Just a quick thing, and I want Gary to keep pivoting us. I went to a Starbucks one time, and I said, “I want a medium something that I ordered.” “Oh, we don’t have medium. We just have small and large.” “But I want very medium.” The idea that you can do something in the middle and have it be very that, because you can make something really small and really big. We can think that way, but the binarity of our brains prevents this middle.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, I’m afraid that the standard distribution’s going to be out, pushing things to the extremes.
NEGIN FARSAD: Like everything’s a big gulp or it’s a child size. Yeah, totally.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Demi-tasse. Gary, keep pivoting us. What’s next here?
Setting Guardrails for Privacy on the Internet
GARY O’REILLY: Just to tie a bow on that, the element of extremities never seems to work out as well as you’d hoped. So, Jaron, talking about the internet, how do we set guardrails for enforcing privacy?
JARON LANIER: Oddly, I have a weird personal history with the question of privacy because something like a quarter of a century ago, through bizarre circumstances, I co-founded this board called the Data Protection Advisory Board for the EU. I co-founded it with a guy named Alessandro Buttarelli, who has passed on since. He was a prosecutor from Sicily who was known for putting mob figures in jail and had survived a bunch of assassination attempts.
He got in touch with me and 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.” And so we put together some ideas about protecting the data of European citizens. And then that thing, combined with some other things, gradually over decades turned into this thing called the GDPR, which is the European Privacy Framework.
And since I was part of the start of it, 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.
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, 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. 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 it tends to exclude little companies and it has an unintended consequence that way. There’s a bunch of other issues with it.
Now, how do you define privacy? Well, there’s a famous definition in the US — I need to research who this is, but I think it was somebody named Learned Hand, but it might have been somebody else. The definition was — the freedom from manipulation. Privacy of information, the right to be left alone, approximately. And 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 on prediction of human behavior.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This would prohibit all advertising.
JARON LANIER: It would prohibit targeting — only personalized advertising. It would only prohibit 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 feedback loop.
GARY O’REILLY: Why can’t we ban lying on the internet?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Make lying wrong again.
JARON LANIER: If I agreed that made sense, I would be lying. And then — I see what you did there. We’d be caught in an infinite regress. And you’re telling me that you plan to end on time, and I don’t really believe it, but an infinite regress will not get you there.
The Cookie Pop-Up Problem: Privacy Theater
NEGIN FARSAD: This whole conversation is giving me heart palpitations because it makes me feel the same way I feel when there’s a pop-up window asking me to manage cookies and I don’t know how to answer it ever. I either decline or accept and I never know what to do. 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.
JARON LANIER: Well, those windows are from the GDPR. That’s my fault, I’m sorry.
NEGIN FARSAD: Which, bless their hearts.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It began in Europe, I remember that.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, that’s our thing, that’s the thing I was just talking about, that’s one little tenderloin.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Control your cookies and be glad you have that option.
NEGIN FARSAD: No, I’m glad.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You just insulted my guest here, saying that you don’t know what to do.
NEGIN FARSAD: Thank you for those pop-up windows. However, I just feel like I can’t be the first person that feels at a loss when they come up.
JARON LANIER: I don’t know anybody who knows what to do with those things. Honestly, they’re like those agreements you click through to do anything. Nobody reads them. I once gave a talk to the lawyers who write those agreements, and I said, “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 a few hands, but they were sheepish.
It’s like this bizarre ritual we go through. It’s called compliance. Competency theater. We do these things to pretend we have digital competence, but they’re actually meaningless.
NEGIN FARSAD: Yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So what’s the future of that? Where are we now and where’s it going?
JARON LANIER: The future is that human beings will do nothing but enter long strings of letters and numbers for their entire lives.
NEGIN FARSAD: Period.
JARON LANIER: That’s it.
How Much Privacy Do We Really Have Left?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: As I remembered it, the amount of information any of us are putting on our social media — your relationship status, 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 information we’re just handing out—
NEGIN FARSAD: We just give it up.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: —the KGB would have given their eyeteeth to obtain. 50 years ago.
JARON LANIER: No, I know. But that’s why I’m saying that 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And what’s this case where someone went online to buy a pregnancy test or something, then all of a sudden she started getting ads for diapers?
JARON LANIER: Oh, that’s 30 years ago. You’re way behind. Right now we can tell — let me be very clear.
NEGIN FARSAD: I’ve always said that about Neil.
JARON LANIER: Right now, any of the big internet companies know where in their menstrual cycle every woman in this room is. And that’s been true for at least 15 years. Every big internet company knows a lot about our health, a lot about our diets. These models are insane. And I don’t think they’re ethical. I don’t think they should exist.
I don’t think people should try to figure out how to click cookie pop-ups because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just useless cognitive overhead. It’s theater. 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 to you, how do I get you? That has to be what privacy is.
NEGIN FARSAD: And that means I will get offered more ads about drill bits and fewer ads about dresses or whatever.
JARON LANIER: Drill bits are amazing.
NEGIN FARSAD: No, I’m into it. I would like to be served more drill bits and fewer lipsticks.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I just want to say, okay, just make sure—
JARON LANIER: Don’t confuse those two things. Be careful. They look similar. They come in almost the same packaging. So you really want to be careful. I know people have made that mistake.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You don’t want the computer to say it’s almost time for your period and you forgot. Oh my God, that would be like—
JARON LANIER: Your computer is saying that already. I’m actually traumatized that your computer is already marketing things to you based on that. That’s happened to every woman in this room, and for years.
Does the Internet Still Have a Pulse?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: All right, so Gary, take us out here.
GARY O’REILLY: All right, Jaron, does the internet still have a pulse or is it completely dead?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was a diabolical laugh.
NEGIN FARSAD: I know.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was a laugh of the evil genius behind the internet.
NEGIN FARSAD: We were deeply unsettled by that laugh.
JARON LANIER: Yes.
NEGIN FARSAD: What comes after the laugh?
JARON LANIER: 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 touching—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I just know it’s getting longer.
JARON LANIER: —your heels. Yes, sir. Just, yeah, here we are. Everything is good. Everything is right. Nothing to worry about. No problem. No problem. If you feel any anxiety, talk to your AI lover. It’s all good. Just remember to buy crypto. And next time there’s an IPO, invest in it. Not before — you’re not allowed to. It’s all private equity, but definitely help push it. And you’ll be fine. It’s great.
NEGIN FARSAD: Great. That’s what you were expecting, right, Gary?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, that’s kind of where you’re going there.
GARY O’REILLY: Does anyone have a translation for that?
JARON LANIER: You can actually — it’s kind of a funny thing if you asked one of the language models, “Jaron Lanier just said this snarky thing, what did he really mean?” You know what’s funny is that both Claude and ChatGPT generate excellent defenses of data dignity at this point because enough people have written about it. It’s kind of funny. I get emails every day from people saying, “You won’t believe what this AI chatbot said.” So Claude is the chatbot for Anthropic.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, that’s right. And ChatGPT is for OpenAI. That’s right. Gotcha.
Lawsuits, Data Dignity, and Closing Thoughts
JARON LANIER: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
GARY O’REILLY: If without saying it, we’re saying that the internet is broken and awash 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 middle of a lawsuit against Anthropic for pirating 12 of my books.
NEGIN FARSAD: Same. I mean, no, no, I opted for the whatever, the settlement. Okay, but either way, they scraped my stuff and I don’t like it. So I haven’t—
JARON LANIER: 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 Authors Guild and I’m a prime scientist at Microsoft, so I sued myself. It’s basically— Okay, did you win? One thing I’m part of sued another thing I’m part of. I call it capitalist yoga. What? It’s just like a little twist.
NEGIN FARSAD: Very lexical.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Just 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 reapply the guardrails that maybe should have been there from the beginning.
JARON LANIER: So look, let me speak seriously for a second on these lawsuits. So I’m also a writer. I have a bunch of books, and I also have been in the class for these things. The issue I have is that the available remedy that you can get in the existing American legal system, which the Authors Guild and others have pursued— and I love the Authors Guild. It’s led by Mary Rasenberger, who’s amazing, and 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 the universal basic income where it’s like this giant wash for a lot of people. And that’s really problematic for me.
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 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.
So I actually don’t think it starts— I understand it’s the available solution that can be pursued by the current configuration of things. And so it’s complicated. And like I say, 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. 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.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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.
JARON LANIER: My goal had been to confuse you enough that you wouldn’t blame me for anything. Oh, this—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You were partially successful in that.
NEGIN FARSAD: Yeah, you’ve been both terrifying and exhilarating.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you. Words, I think it is, right? And Negin, thanks for joining us again. Yes, thank you so much. How do we find you online?
NEGIN FARSAD: You can find me at Negin Farsad on all the socials that you should also be deleting.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 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 StarTalk Special Edition. What do we call this? Is it the end of the internet or the beginning of something else that we deserve and don’t know it? I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.
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