full interview_jaron lanier_5.mp4
Jaron Lanier [00:00:00] I am Jaron Lanier. I am a computer scientist. I played a significant role in starting virtual reality, but I've done many other things as well. I'm a musician and I write books that people seem to read. So there, that's who I am.
Speaker 2 [00:00:20] I'm going to ask you to do that once more with just computer scientist, musician, author.
Jaron Lanier [00:00:26] Faster, yes. Okay. Are you guys also? Hi, I'm Jaron Lanier. I'm a computer scientist. I write books and I play music.
Speaker 2 [00:00:39] So our series is about how throughout history, art and science have intersected to inform creativity. Do you agree with that?
Jaron Lanier [00:00:51] Yes, I am of the opinion that the arts have been a significant driver of science throughout history, both recently and in ancient times. It is the case, for instance, in Silicon Valley that the first product shipped by a major company, which was Hewlett-Packard, was a music synthesizer for Walt Disney's Fantasia. And in fact, within our hearts, technologists are romantic. And it is frequently the case that music technology precedes other uses of technology. I've seen it again and again. I've see it in the math. I've it in in the engineering.
Speaker 2 [00:01:34] And how have art and science intersected in your work?
Jaron Lanier [00:01:39] When I was a teenager, one of my mentors was Richard Feynman, the great physicist. When he had been young, he was haunted by his participation in the Manhattan Project, as were all of the members of his generation of scientists who were part of it. And they wondered how to help humanity survive. I got this crazy idea that maybe isn't so crazy. What makes technology dangerous is the lust for power. We want more and more power, and so we get more and technology for power, and eventually it's so powerful it could extinguish us. But what if there was something even more powerful than power, which would be intense experience, in other words, good art? And that's how my passion for virtual reality came about. I had this feeling that if we could create very intense, wonderful experiences, and if that's what technology was directed into. It might suck some of the energy out of the lust for power, which would destroy us. So I view art as a path to survival. I hope that's a realistic idea. You know, we don't know. We'll find out.
Speaker 2 [00:02:53] Do you think of any technology as a tool, like the pencil or the screwdriver, or is technology something else entirely?
Jaron Lanier [00:03:04] Technology to me means people through their culture gaining an ability to change their circumstances. And so I would count language, I would account agriculture, I would counter great many early examples from human history. And I think that broad view is necessary. When we say tech these days, we tend to refer to the big computer internet hub companies, but that's a very narrow point of view that I think actually does a little bit of damage and blinds us to how our world is changing and how it can change.
Speaker 2 [00:03:44] So what is technology?
Jaron Lanier [00:03:47] Didn't I just say that? Technology is when we use culture to change our world.
Speaker 2 [00:03:57] So, are there particular people or movements in history where technological innovation unleashed creativity in the arts or in music?
Jaron Lanier [00:04:10] There's some wonderful examples. One of my favorite ones is the origin of the computer itself. If you go back to ancient times, there was a mouth organ from China called a sheng that traveled across the Silk Route and was copied in our ancient world. The Romans made a giant version for the Colosseum called the Hydralis, which was so big that the operation of it had to be partially automated. That turned into eventually both the piano and the pipe organ. But the fact that the early version included a smidgen of automation resulted in pianos being born in part as player pianos. Around Mozart's time, somebody even made a player piano that improvised a little bit. That, in turn, helped inspire automated looms, leading to the Jacquard loom, which then inspired Babbage to try to make. A general purpose calculator which then inspired Turing and von Neumann to define the computer. So you can see this direct line all the way from ancient musical instruments to the modern computer and it's even better than that because the old mouth organs that would thousands of years later inspire the computer were the first digital numbers. It's a series of pipes in specific places that are either on or off. So they're the earliest digital numbers so far as I can tell.
Speaker 2 [00:05:37] Um,
Jaron Lanier [00:05:39] I can play one of these for you later if you like.
Speaker 2 [00:05:41] That is fantastic.
Jaron Lanier [00:05:44] I have a few different varieties here
Speaker 3 [00:05:51] Okay. We good?
Speaker 2 [00:05:55] So, this is something that we read that you said. We are surrounded by a range of beautiful musical instruments, all made from different materials. How do materials impact what musical instruments are and what they do?
Jaron Lanier [00:06:13] Oh, that's a great question. Musical instruments have been made of forest and animal products mostly until very recently, and there's something about the material that adds an almost mystical sense of resonance to instruments. When you play a great violin, there's some thing about the old wood, there is something about it that nobody's ever quite fully understood. Part of that is you're really dealing with nature at a very basic, sensitive, I would even say quantum level when you play a great musical instrument. You're sensing the material at such a profound level of sensitivity that we really don't know how to describe it scientifically. We know a lot about how instruments work, but we don't know the difference between a good instrument and a great instrument. That's not part of science yet. And that almost always relates to subtleties and materials. So musical instruments force us to interact with our natural world at this level of sensitivity that's really unusual, we hardly ever encounter it.
Speaker 2 [00:07:32] In addition to music, do you think materials in general can inform the creative process?
Jaron Lanier [00:07:38] I'd very much like to see computation and information science become more material over time. We've approached them this very abstract way because they started out as math, but I'd like to them turn more into a kind of a touchable, tasteable, you know, genuinely physical, genuinely at the edge of mystery phenomenon. Because that's what we are. That's the nature of being a biological person. And I'd like our information technology to take on that quality. We're not there yet. We're still in this world of abstraction that tends to make computer-y art things just a little, a little sterile or nerdy compared to things that are more material-based.
Speaker 2 [00:08:28] You once commented to a reporter, the thing about technology is that it's made the world of information ever more dominant. Do you think that technology inhibits or advances the creative process?
Jaron Lanier [00:08:50] Technology, if what we mean by technology is stuff involving computers and the internet, it's been both a blessing and a curse for creative people. It's been a blessing in that it has smoothed the path for a lot of people to do things because it really was more difficult before digital technology to do many things, to create images at all. Or to get other people to be able to see your images. Just the very most basic things have certainly gotten easier. And yet, there's this way that our particular approach to digital technology has tended to make everything into a big mush where people pop in and out of their little temporary viral statuses online and tend to not be able to build a sense of presence with. An audience or with people who would appreciate their art and their expression. There's a way that we've made it easier for people to connect and yet harder for people to connect with some kind of persistence or profundity. We've made everything a little too fungible and I believe that's something we do need to correct.
Speaker 2 [00:10:17] So, music and music technology, we've talked a little bit about this and I'm going to read something else that I read that you wrote, if that's okay? If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what our computer should be like, it's a musical instrument. It allows you to be emotionally authentic and more expressive. Can you give us a simple statement about the connection between music and math?
Jaron Lanier [00:10:55] I thought you were going to go to a different question from that statement. There's some kind of weird subway line that runs between music and math. Over and over and over again, people who love one end up loving the other. And I have flirted with so many theories about it over the years, I really have. But I think my favorite explanation is this desire to cut as deep as possible into this reality while we're here. Music is something we can't define. It has this meaning that seems to come from nowhere. It seems to be formed without content. And that's a remarkable thing. And so that cuts deep in one way. Math is a weird thing. Why should it even be there? Why should at work? That's another thing. And so I think these are the two deepest cuts we have on reality. And I think that's why people who like one tend to like the other, but there's so many other theories about that. Oh my God, we could spend hours. On that, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:12:11] Yeah, one other.
Jaron Lanier [00:12:17] Another theory... Is that... Music seems to be a way that people share a sense of flow, a sense of form, and I don't know how to be more articulate than that because music is not fully describable. But math also is that way. When we learn about math, we learn about these forms that we share that also have that sense of this shared phantom that's important. And yet we really can't articulate it any other way. And so in that way, they're similar.
Speaker 2 [00:12:54] And so what do you think, what makes music a universal language?
Speaker 3 [00:13:00] Well... Music
Jaron Lanier [00:13:09] That's a bit of a hard question, because I'm not sure if it is, and music might be a bit less of a universal language than it used to be. Before the internet, I think unfamiliar music was in a way less familiar. Let me try this again.
Speaker 2 [00:13:28] Let me ask it differently, is music a universal language?
Jaron Lanier [00:13:38] Music can be a universal language, but it depends greatly on the attitude of the listener. There's a way that people can become so used to and so inured to a sort of a narrow band of what music can be like. They become a little numb to music that doesn't fit into a narrow set of expectations. And unfortunately I think in some cases the internet has made that a little worse even than it might have been, where you tend to have recommendation algorithms that keep on sending you to the same stuff over and over again, so you might get sort of this narrow view of what music can be. I think if a person develops a little bit of a familiarity and a comfort with hearing unfamiliar music and growing into it and trying to find it, then that'll also expand the circle and then they'll be able to hear more and more unusual music.
Speaker 2 [00:14:37] And what about the human voice as a musical instrument?
Jaron Lanier [00:14:44] The voice for humans is a remarkable thing because we expect so much of it, so much from our voices and in a simultaneous way. I would argue that animals are typically musical, but people both have music and language and it comes out through the same hole. I think this gets to something very deep about the identity of humans, that we have this peculiar dual nature or blurred nature, where is it flow or is it symbols? Is it form or is content? We're at the edge of this thing, sort of at an edge of a kind of chaos, I would say. And that's our identity, it's a remarkable identity.
Speaker 2 [00:15:37] So I'm going to ask you to express that idea again. We are doing, and I will put it in context, we're doing a story with a group called Room Full of Teeth, who use their voices as instruments in very extreme ways. They are pushing the boundaries of the human voice. So language apart, what sort of instruments do you use? Do you smell?
Jaron Lanier [00:16:04] There's no language apart. You can't do that, I'm sorry. That's like saying, I mean, you can't talk about music separated from other aspects of humans and still be talking about music. Music overlaps with language, it overlaps with dance, it overlap with math, it overlap with everything. In fact, one of the amazing things about music is it overlapse with more stuff than any other thing that people do. I can't, you know, but I will still attempt to answer your question.
Speaker 2 [00:16:40] So is the human voice a musical instrument?
Jaron Lanier [00:16:44] Um. Occasionally, I have experienced the human voice as not a musical instrument.
Speaker 2 [00:16:56] So when we're speaking, we're singing?
Jaron Lanier [00:16:58] No, I mean, it's a funny thing. I think the voice becomes musical when you're good at singing. But this is like this mystery in the nature of people. What I find amazing about human beings is that we have the capacity to be unmusical once in a while. That's an achievement an animal does not share. We have an ability to to lose meaning, but that means when we have it, it's all the more unusual and precious and peculiar.
Speaker 2 [00:17:39] So we're doing a story also. I hope this is useful to you. I know you're trying to. I'm sort of listening and speaking at the same time. I think we're in extremely good shape. Chris, do you want to add anything at this moment? No, no, I'm not.
Speaker 4 [00:17:51] No, no, I'm making some notes for the end.
Speaker 2 [00:17:55] So we're also doing a story about pipe organs.
Speaker 3 [00:17:58] Oh, good.
Speaker 2 [00:17:59] Do you agree that the pipe organ is the king of instruments?
Jaron Lanier [00:18:02] Ha ha, I love pipe organs. My pipe organ's up in Berkeley, alas, and it was kind of messed up by a kitten who jumped on the little pipes and gave herself lead poisoning, at least according to Oliver Sacks, who diagnosed her, but anyway, you will probably not use that. Yeah, pipe organs! Pipe organs bring up another variety of overlaps between music and other aspects of human life. One of the most amazing ones is with architecture and space because with pipe organs, you had so much volume and the sound is so spatial that you're really playing the space. And that's an amazing, amazing, amazing thing. And I think it changed how we perceive space actually. I think gave us a more visceral sense. Interiors and of how information moves around in places. I mean, I think the pipe organ had a huge effect on physics. It definitely had a huge effect of mechanical engineering. As I, I'm doing the wrong thing. The pipe organ, the pipe organ was a precedent for computers in having a bunch of little parts that worked together in a coordinated way, even before other things like looms that might be described that way. The pipe organic created a sense of amplification of the individual that was unprecedented. Had an enormous influence on how we thought about technology. Before the fantasies of flying cars, there was a pipe organ where you could just sit there touching buttons and become giant, become giant. What an extraordinary thing.
Speaker 2 [00:19:55] What do you feel when you listen to a pipe organ?
Jaron Lanier [00:20:07] You know, it depends on the player and the organ. I'm trying to think about how to answer that. When I was a kid, I always thought of the pipe organ as being a source of awe and extraordinary power. In a way, a passageway into the grotesque, because I loved E. Powers Biggs playing the toccata in D minor in that sort of fantastical macabre way that he would. But more recently, I've become interested in the gentler side of pipe organs, and it's possible for the pipe organ to be almost like. Another atmosphere, another thing you can breathe, something very gentle and something that feels luminous inside that's unusual in music. And I love that as well.
Speaker 2 [00:21:04] Chris, do you want to add anything to the music conversation? Well, I was just going to say that I was going to add something to the conversation.
Speaker 4 [00:21:08] I'm curious, you know, we interviewed Moby, and he had a great thought about the idea that we think about a lot, which is that music is really just air molecules. You ever think about how it's just air vibrating and makes you cry, and you know your thought about how its kind of inherently tied to human beings, first of all I'm just curious of your thought on that, just sort of waxing poetic a little bit on how amazing that is. But also Are we just labeling it music at the end of the day? Because birds we call singing. You know, the sound of whistling through trees could be music to us.
Jaron Lanier [00:21:46] Right. So I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with Moby, because you could say for the listener, music is just vibrating air molecules, but not for the player. And this is something that I think is often missed. For the person making music, unless it's some sort of more modern computer thing, there's a deep physical connection with the musical instrument. And when I say deep, I mean quantum level deep. The way that you connect to the instrument to play it well is extremely profound. It is at the very edge of our ability to connect with nature, meaning physical reality. And so I think of music as being first haptic and then audio. And I think that's part of what gives music its remarkable qualities because When we hear those vibrating air molecules, part of us is inferring and living back through the physical process by which the music, the musician created them. Can experience ourselves breathing and moving and controlling this instrument in a way a little bit like what the musician did. Now, I don't think this is unique to music. I think that happens when we watch a great athlete. I think there are other examples, but this particular one happens at a level of subtlety and detail that you find nowhere else. And so I think music therefore connects us to our reality in a that nothing else does.
Speaker 4 [00:23:28] Can i just follow up one more question for you on the topic of connection the difference between playing music in a vacuum by playing an instrument by yourself versus playing with a group such as will, god particle uh... The difference in that what that does for you as a human being
Jaron Lanier [00:23:49] Yeah, I like playing music by myself sometimes, but there's something about playing with other people that. Is indescribable and to me a mystical experience. It's not guaranteed. Sometimes people use the science metaphor of chemistry, that musicians have good chemistry. I don't quite know how to talk about it, but there's a thing that happens when you can connect with another person musically that is really precious and transcendent and one of the great things in life. And I wish I could say more about that, but I don't know how to.
Speaker 2 [00:24:32] What is it about music that can make us cry?
Jaron Lanier [00:24:48] Music Music breaks through the barrier of all of the specific crud that accumulates in life. Approaches us as a fundamental form that reminds us of what it was like when we were babies and approaching reality fundamentally for the first time. And we therefore can expose very old and very deep wells of feeling that would not be particularly related to all the complexities that come up in. Other things we do in civilization with language and all these other things that are just filled with explicit references and there's something that bypasses all of that that we find in music and so I think that's what makes it so eternally fundamental.
Speaker 2 [00:25:57] I'm going to change the topic now to gaming. Okay. So you developed some time ago a game called Moondust.
Jaron Lanier [00:26:08] That's right.
Speaker 2 [00:26:09] How did that come about?
Jaron Lanier [00:26:14] Moondust was, gosh, I think I programmed it in something like 81 or 82. And I was younger at that time, it appears, and I was enthused about the idea of doing music with technology and I had this notion that you could make a music improvising game, and I had this notion you could a game in which the music would be generative or different each time. To my knowledge, Moondust was the first game like that. It also had an organic, tinkly feeling and flowy look to it that was very different from other games of that era. And people liked it, it did well, it helped finance the early virtual reality work. I still like it, I still hear from people who like it now and then. So I think of it as more of a musical work than a game. I didn't give it traditional gameplay, there's no sense of competitiveness, there is no goal other than the music really. I think that threw people for a loop back then, but there it is.
Speaker 2 [00:27:39] What prepared you to do that, had you?
Jaron Lanier [00:27:43] Um... You know, in those days, everything was brand new. You know there weren't even any tools to use to program a game like Moondust, meaning I had to actually set each bit. In this type of programming we call assembler, where you're literally directing the chip bit by bit and you have no intermediate language, computer language to use. So there was really no preparation and nobody knew what would be commercial. It was just early. It was already a business, but it was a very, very new business. And it was so new that Nobody could tell me that what I wanted to do was crazy. I think these days, you could do something like Moondust, and people do, but I don't think it would be financed particularly, and in those days, nobody was sure. They were like, oh, yeah, sure, we'll put money into this and promote it.
Speaker 2 [00:28:51] What was your first encounter with computer technology?
Jaron Lanier [00:28:55] Um... When I was a teenager, I went to college early, and it happened that I grew up in southern New Mexico, near White Sands Missile Range. And because of that, there was a technical university that had one of the early computer science departments, which was called New Mexico State. And weirdly, fortuitously, I was able to get access to quite good computers earlier even than people at more elite schools, and it worked out remarkably well for me. So I initially tried to make them into art devices, and I would make weird pulsing psychedelic things on some of the early computers that could show graphics and try to invite people to look at them in the dark in the middle of the night. In the basement of the math building. And I say people, I mean girls, but. And this would have been in the early to mid-70s, and a lot of the programming happened with punch cards, which was ridiculous.
Speaker 2 [00:30:18] So you were an early generative artist.
Jaron Lanier [00:30:22] I was an early generative artist, although I never attempted to promote myself within the art world or the art economy. And so depending on how you think of it, not really, because that's not the path I chose.
Speaker 2 [00:30:35] Just so I'm going back to gaming now, although I could follow you anywhere. So what do you think the appeal is of video games?
Jaron Lanier [00:30:46] Video games are broad, there are many kinds, and I like some better than others. The ideal type of video game for me is one where people are building stuff within the video game. And so therefore, I like things like Minecraft and Roblox. And I think they have created a youth culture of creating that's really healthy. And I will also note that the culture around those games tends to be a little emotionally more healthy, maybe, than the culture around some other games. The type of game I personally dislike the most is the one where the person is being trained as if they're a rat in a maze over and over again to just do this particular thing that the game designer decided is what they should do. And I think that that's quite negative because I think it prepares us for a future where we seed our own creativity and autonomy. And those games are also popular and I would prefer to see fewer of them. And I'll note that the culture surrounding them tends to be. Uh... Crankier and sometimes destructive so to me there's really a great divide in the gaming world between the two kinds
Speaker 2 [00:32:05] or video games art.
Jaron Lanier [00:32:08] Sometimes I think video games are art. You know, this question of art is a little different than the question of music because art's been defined by a pretty narrow economy of collectors who treat art as an alternate private currency. There I said it. And so music has still had an economy that's a little bit more broadly based and so has escaped that sort of narrow economic prison. So the term art has become a little hard. To define outside of that economics. If we do have a broad definition of art, then of course video games can be art.
Speaker 2 [00:32:54] So we're doing a story with a company called Akili, Adam Ghazali, one of the founders. And they have the first FDA approved game for children with ADHD. Do you think that games have a future in the healthcare universe?
Jaron Lanier [00:33:18] Yeah, you know In the early 90s, if I recall correctly, there were the first uses of virtual reality to address issues like phobia and ADHD and dyslexia, all sorts of interesting issues. I was initially skeptical. I thought it was all a gimmick. I thought that people are all chasing publicity, but then it turned out that the clinical trials prove this stuff is real. We do have a situation where interactive digital designs can help people. And here, the only caution I have is that when you use someone else's interactive digital design, there's a danger that they're teaching you to be controlled in some sense. And so what we have to do is make sure that all these designs. Are coming from a respect for personal autonomy and individuality and are not trying to course people into some cycle. This is a whole interesting topic. I'll say just another thing about it. There is a discipline called behaviorism, which is using math to improve training. So it started with famous figures like Pavlov in Russia that go back to the 19th century. But in the U.S., the famous figure of the mid-20th century is B.F. Skinner, who would use statistics to train pigeons and rats to press buttons and all sorts of things. And that little button in the cage turned into the like button on social media. And you might say, oh, I'm just being cynical, but I'm not. Actually, B.F. Skinner, by weird coincidence, ended up being able to be the first person to design human experience over a network. Before the internet, there was a network of Midwestern computers called Play-Doh, and it was the very first time that people were experiencing interacting with each other over a networks. And Skinner got a hold of it, and he became the main designer for it, and his goal was to make interactive experiences that would get people to conform so he could finally fix society and not deal with all these weirdos. So that's exactly what I don't want to see happen. So yes, interactive designs can help people, but let us not allow them to reduce human autonomy, and that's the danger.
Speaker 4 [00:35:56] Yeah, well, I mean, it's so interesting. I mean you're kind of touching on I feel like we don't talk about gamification anymore That was a really like hot topic a while back
Jaron Lanier [00:36:04] It's got too many syllables.
Speaker 4 [00:36:05] Yeah, right, but that kind of Pavlovian thing where, you know, if I get a musical cue and I level up for eating my greens, maybe I'll do that more. Is that not, do you think that's really not the trend?
Jaron Lanier [00:36:17] I am fine with people training themselves using behaviorism. I am not okay with it happening to them without absolute lucidity and awareness on the part of the person. It really becomes a fundamental question of power. You cannot give people the illusion of control and then expect to have a decent society. They have to, as scary as it is and as many risks as there are. People have to have authentic autonomy in order to live in a decent society. As soon as you take away someone else's autonomy, soon yours will also be taken. The project will leach away all of our autonomy. And at that point, I fear we collapse, you know? So I... I am all for interactive therapeutics. However, we have to be aware of the potential for abuse. It's extreme.
Speaker 4 [00:37:15] And then I was just curious if you, separately have a game in the history of games that you felt was a real art piece for you.
Speaker 3 [00:37:26] Oh gosh.
Jaron Lanier [00:37:31] You know, I'm so sorry, I don't really have one in mind. I do apologize for that. I mean, I am tempted to promote some of the work that my students and research interns do, which I think qualify very well, but that would be too self-serving and epitistic, so I'll refrain.
Speaker 2 [00:37:50] What makes a game great, in your opinion?
Jaron Lanier [00:37:55] I think a game is great when the person adds more to the game than the game has given them. And so that does happen, for instance, in the so-called builder games like Minecraft. And I think that's exactly what makes them great.
Speaker 2 [00:38:17] Um, A.I.
Jaron Lanier [00:38:24] Ah! For those who are wondering, I've just been asked about AI.
Speaker 3 [00:38:29] And I'm sick of being, I don't know, no more AI, please! Anyway, okay, okay go ahead.
Speaker 2 [00:38:37] So we have a variety of examples of AI in our series, robot painters, music, etc. How do you think people perceive AI-generated products when they look at them or listen to them? Is that...
Jaron Lanier [00:38:58] I think the things that are called AI right now are potentially great. I know people are enjoying them, and I think there's some cases where they're helpful. But the term AI and the way people experience it have been framed by science fiction, and in particular, the blockbuster movies like the Terminator movies and the Matrix movies and many others. And in that formulation, the AI is like this new alien super intelligence that's joining us on the planet. That view, I think, is demeaning to people, technically incorrect, and just generally useless and confusing. And I really don't like it, so I don't even like to use the term AI. Even though in my professional life, I'm very much in the center of bringing it to the world, which is fine, I prefer to call it something like megastatistics firm. Mash-up or something like that. What it is is it's a way of combining human expression in new ways where you can say, well, all of these people have written, can we ask for a new way of combing their writing, or all these people generated images? Can we come up with a new combination of their images? And that's great as long as we remember it came from people. And I even think we should acknowledge the people. I even they should have a chance to be paid. I think they should have chance for pride in their contribution. I don't like hiding the people, because it's all just made of people. You know, I like the programs. I just don't like the public mythology of them, which comes from science fiction scripts.
Speaker 2 [00:40:40] So you recently wrote a pretty amazing article in Tablet about the mystification of AI. Can you give us a short?
Jaron Lanier [00:40:55] Ha ha ha ha!
Speaker 2 [00:40:57] Yeah, I mean, that was already short.
Jaron Lanier [00:40:59] Yeah There's an impulse in people to seek some kind of transcendently big piece of news. We apparently are all pathologically bored and need this thing. There's some new tech thing. We gravitate to this idea that, oh, there's this new super intelligence, there is this new AI, even if the clearer way to think about it is that it's just a way of combining what people do. This need for this transcendent piece of earth-shattering news is, I guess, just part of us. We're just in need of this drama. I think sometimes it does us damage, but it's just deeply part of us. We just want this thing. I sort of wish we would look to religion for it instead of technology, because I think we can confuse ourselves in ways that can be kind of damaging when we look for this transcendent rush from our own inventions, but that's what we're doing.
Speaker 4 [00:42:20] I've got to ask one follow-up to that, to Marion.
Jaron Lanier [00:42:23] You're only going to be able to use three seconds of this in your three-hour edit of all of these things. There's no way you're going to do it. Yeah, OK.
Speaker 4 [00:42:32] So what model would fit your definition of AI, and is that realistic?
Jaron Lanier [00:42:38] I would prefer to call it a new mashup technology. I would like to say... In the course of history, we've gotten better and better at combining our efforts. If you look at people being able to create compound communication, you see the progress of civilization. You see the ancient invention of libraries. You see invention of markets. Something like the Wikipedia creates a place for people to collaborate on essays. In a sense, this is just another step in that progress. That's what we call AI. It's just another way of compounding our expressions with one another. The only difference is that we're not admitting it comes from us. Instead, we want to pretend it's an alien. To be fair, we did that once before, which is the invisible hand with markets, which is exactly the same thing as AI. It's taking a bunch of efforts of people that can be compounded in a new way that has potentially great benefits, and yet we pretend it is like this entity instead of just being made of us. And I could do without the entity. I think it just confuses things.
Speaker 2 [00:43:51] So you grew up around art, you're an artist yourself. What do you make of today's generative art?
Jaron Lanier [00:44:00] You know. I think some of the generative art is fun, and it appears to me that people really enjoy doing prompt-based art creation. I don't know how long that'll last. I don't know if it's a novelty craze or if it' a long-term thing. It's a little hard to tell right now. I'll tell you a story, though. I was having dinner with a rather well-known film director who said, you know, what's great is I can just use this generative of art for an instant art department and get all kinds of concept art from any science fiction movie. And I said, well, that's great, but you realize pretty soon we'll just be able to synthesize the whole movie. Like you don't need your art department, we don't you by the same logic. I say, well no, that couldn't happen. I say yeah, of course it can happen. It's just statistics, what do you mean? There's nothing magic in here. All it is is statistical combinations of stuff. So with enough computation, of course we'll synthesize a movie. And I think at some point people have to realize that If they want to be acknowledged in society, they have to acknowledge others in society. And that reciprocity is the missing element in the way we think about AI now. But aside from that, if people enjoy generative art, I think it's great.
Speaker 2 [00:45:16] What about robots as artists? Do you think they'll take over?
Jaron Lanier [00:45:21] Well, I feel like I just answered that. A robot is nothing but the same software I was just talking about attached to gears. I mean, it's the same thing.
Speaker 2 [00:45:34] Do you have anything to comment on about Rafiq Anadol's work? We're doing a story about Rafik. Do you, what do you think it does to people?
Jaron Lanier [00:45:44] Here I have a terribly embarrassing admission that although I know the name and I'm sure I know this person's work, I can't put it all together in my head right now because there's too much in my heads.
Speaker 2 [00:45:55] His name is Rafiq Anadal, but we can move on from Rafiqi. I really do apologize for that. No worries. To what extent does technology advance art?
Jaron Lanier [00:46:08] Yeah. This is, this is, um... You know, if you, in the history of art, one of the technological channels has been increasing the variety of pigments that give artists colors to use. And it's interesting to look at the art from before there were a lot of pigaments. And you know, if you look at, oh, I don't know, the Renaissance painters or the Dutch masters, they were dealing with access to pigments as a fundamental problem, a fundamental economic and technological problem. And their use of color has a kind of an awareness and a preciousness to it that might not be as present in later art where you could just go and buy a set of all the colors of paints you could possibly want and it became easier. So I feel there's a sort of a two-way process going on. We have this way of blanching out the preciousness that we should keep paying attention to when technology makes it easier. But on the other hand, of course it's great to get access and to make things easier. So this is part of our story. The question really is where it all goes. So if we get to the point where we wanna make everything so easy that nothing matters anymore, then that's our end, certainly the end of art. But hopefully, we won't do that. Hopefully. Stay attached to the mysteries within one another and within our reality so we won't go into this world of fake ease
Speaker 2 [00:47:52] Along this similar line, are computers and algorithms just the latest tool, like a 21st century paper?
Jaron Lanier [00:48:03] You might think that computers and algorithms are specific things that we can define clearly, but that's not the case. If we're talking about the type of computer that is common now, I suspect those will be supplanted. And if you mean the type of algorithm that's common now I think those will supplanted If we have a very general point of view, I think in the future we might have more physically connected computers that are more like musical instruments. I think we might have algorithms that are more organic and more like music instruments and less explicitly step-by-step constrained. In a broad sense, I think algorithms and computers can get much better and change into better things than they are.
Speaker 2 [00:48:55] You okay? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So what is virtual reality?
Jaron Lanier [00:49:00] Oh, ha ha ha! Oh, virtual reality is the name I came up with to describe people being inside a shared simulation that feels three-dimensional and somewhat normal on some level where people turn into avatars. I had imagined it way back, you know, oh god, almost a half century, which is kind of freakish to think about. I'd imagined it as a way of people directly sharing improvised dreams as a form of communication. I used to call it post-symbolic communication also. My friend Neil Stevenson, a novelist, came up with the term metaverse, in part making fun of me. If you go back to the original use, which is great. But at any rate, it's turned into something a little different in Silicon Valley, which is this idea for kind of living in the simulation, possibly all the time, which I always thought wasn't the right destination. I always though of it as this very special thing that you'd use sparingly. Just like if you make everything art, then nothing's art anymore You have to separate off a little piece of the world to be the art in order for art to be a special thing, right? And I also thought of virtual reality like that, not as some place you just inhabit, but as a thing you'd use sparingly in a very special way. And I hope that that's what people find in it. I think it's better that way.
Speaker 2 [00:50:35] Chris on Vior.
Speaker 4 [00:50:38] No, I'm good. I mean, I think that's like AI for you, as you've spoken of.
Speaker 2 [00:50:44] So, last couple of questions, tell us a little bit about God Particle and how this mix of talent and perspective influence your thinking about music.
Speaker 3 [00:50:58] Oh gosh.
Jaron Lanier [00:50:58] Well, Stéphane Alexandre is a good, close old friend and we've worked together on physics and math stuff over the years and he plays the saxophone and wanted to start a band about physics a while ago, which is great. The drummer in it is one of my oldest closest collaborators, Will Calhoun, and the bass players, Melvin Gibbs, who's spectacular. And it's a fun band. I think we actually are a good band. You know, it's not just a gimmick. It's actually a cool band. And I love playing the music and what more can you want?
Speaker 2 [00:51:40] So Stefan says that music and jazz in particular helps him think about physics. How does talking about physics with Stefan alter the things you think about?
Jaron Lanier [00:51:55] Well, I'll tell you something, I've worked with all kinds of physicists over the years. I'm not a physicist, but I'm physics-adjacent and the ones who are also musicians are just better at it. I'm sorry. It's just, it's really true, like there's something, there's something going on there. I don't know what it is. I really don't. But there's something about... Confronting reality in the instrument and dealing with the flow of things and combining that with the abstract ideas that you might use to think about harmony and whatnot. There's something about it that is kind of physics-like and it's a mystery though, but it's amazing. Like you go to a good math or physics conference and they're all musicians. I mean, it's pretty wild.
Speaker 4 [00:52:48] Do you want to talk about what you're doing tomorrow at all with Will?
Jaron Lanier [00:52:55] You know, until Will and I start, I'm not sure what we're doing, but the main idea for tomorrow is I was hoping to get a showcase for Will for various reasons, and part of it is my evil scheme to get him to move here, but we're billing it as a master class that I'm supporting rather than as a normal concert, and hopefully the flooding and the weather will cooperate and allow an audience to make it to us.
Speaker 2 [00:53:24] And what are you going to do this afternoon?
Jaron Lanier [00:53:27] We're gonna figure out what we're doing tomorrow. I also need to debug a few ideas for things to do for the God Particle Show as well.
Speaker 4 [00:53:37] I do have a couple of things whenever you're... Go for it. I was just curious, you know, on the topic of sort of thinking like a musician and thinking like a scientist, a physicist, is there a qualitative difference in that kind of creativity? Is it a different way of thinking for you? And answer them.
Jaron Lanier [00:54:01] You know, um... What you have in math and science and technology are these criteria that are very much outside of you. In math you have to be able to prove something, in technology you have make something that works, and in science you have something that's repeatable, where other people can repeat the experiment. And so, in all of those cases, you're drawn outside of yourself and you have to work with a criteria from reality. It's not even from within the human world. In music, you're also drawn outside of yourself, and yet the thing that you do still has a human basis. It's different, and it's in a way a little more mysterious, although actually all of these criteria are quite mysterious if you really try to understand them. So the discipline is different. You can know immediately if a piece of music is working, whereas it might take months and months until you deal with the grumpy peer reviewers to know if your science is accepted or not. So it's a different process, a different feeling. But the similarity, though, is having to be drawn outside of yourself to achieve something. And the sense of collaboration is similar.
Speaker 4 [00:55:33] And then I just wanted to ask my favorite unanswerable question to ask, which is the root of that one, which is, what is creativity?
Jaron Lanier [00:55:45] Creativity is a mystical concept that there's something beyond just recombining what we know that we have access to. And the more one considers that, the more remarkable it is. So for instance, within the new big generative AI programs, we're mashing up what's already in the model. So you can say, I would like to have a beach scene in the style of Dalí, and it'll synthesize that in the way that it does. But you could not have asked for Dalí. There's some way that we can make these little leaps of style that seem to punch out of what is known. And that is remarkable and unexplained.
Speaker 2 [00:56:36] So I'm just curious to know what you think, in general, about two ideas that we're working on. We are doing this food story about Indian tally, and we are talking about the creative process in cooking and the science of taste. Do you see those connections? You're a foodie, I understand.
Jaron Lanier [00:56:58] Well, I like food. Let's be clear about that, whether I'm a foodie. So I'll tell you a funny story about virtuality and food. A long time ago, meaning in the 80s, I gave a lecture where I was talking about, and speculatively and just as a joke, that to do food in virtuality, you'd have to make this disgusting thing you'd stick in your mouth that would simulate the texture of food and also emit flavors. And because it was so disgusting to contemplate, it'll never happen. And so then. Naturally, some students in Japan took up the challenge and sent me a letter saying, we are very pleased to announce that we can discuss you. And then they brought this thing to a conference, which was this thing you stick in your mouth that had a little robotics inside it and flavor, you know, like this virtual food thing. And what really killed it was the inability to sterilize it adequately. So. I don't know if somebody will attempt that again, the virtual food with a mechanical device. It's conceivable, I guess. I don't t know if it's desirable. So, at any rate, I find food and smell to be amazing senses because... The underlying logic of them is based on combinatorics instead of spectrum. So I know that sounds very technical. What I mean by it. When you look at colors or when you listen to sounds, there's a spectrum. Colors can shift gradually, and so can sounds. However, fundamental tastes and smells are based on combinations of molecule sensors. And so you have this and you have the stuff. No, it's right. No go ahead
Speaker 2 [00:59:01] If you do that again, I'm so sorry.
Jaron Lanier [00:59:02] That's okay, it's not a problem. I might want to break in a little while because I haven't eaten anything yet today and I'm suddenly realizing I'm kind of worried. Do you want to just take another second? Do you wanna drink some water? I'm going to say something that sounds really nerdy at first, but don't get scared. Taste and smell are based on a different logic than sight and sound. Sight and sound are based in spectrums, where you can have gradually changing colors and pitches, but taste and smell is based on combinations of different fundamental chemicals that we sense. And that quality of being based on combination is super intriguing. A colleague and I once put together a theory that actually smells for the first words because if you look at the olfactory bulb Where we start out the different odorants, it's traveled pretty close to the parts of the brain that turned into the language centers over the course of evolution in different species. And so what we think is that the combinations of smells turn into the combinations of words that turned in to grammar. And so there's a really interesting way that taste and smell, I think, are gonna blend with language in the future someday. When we can come up with a way of synthesizing them, that is not a disgusting device, and that might very well happen.
Speaker 2 [01:00:33] One other quick question. Roller coasters, science, technology. Roller coaster.
Jaron Lanier [01:00:40] Important to the economy of Santa Cruz. Let's see, roller coasters. What can I say? You know, I don't know that I have much to say about roller costers. There's some people who've put VR on a roller coaster so that you're in a virtual world and you experience the acceleration of being on the roller coaster. I've never opted to try that, but I trust that it's an interesting experience.
