Making Sense with Sam Harris - #136 — Digital Humanism

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Jaron Lanier about the economics, politics, and psychology of our digital lives. They discuss the insidious idea that information should be free, what we should want from an advanced economy, the role of advertising, libertarianism in Silicon Valley, the problems with social media, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

I am here with Jaron Lanier. Jaron, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Well, again, thank you for your patience in overcoming a surprising number of technical ordeals to get this conversation happening. This is ironic because you are among the more technical guests, and yet we collectively have some bad technical karma. Hopefully we've purged that problem and we can move forward. Yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you about your irrational belief in karma. And I don't know where this comes from, but I don't think there is really such a thing in our world. Although in my old startup, the engineers accused me of having some weird psychic field that

caused demos to crash, especially on important occasions. Well, I believe them. Your reputation precedes you. Yeah, well. Okay, well, let's jump in because I know your time is short and precious, and we have around an hour here and a lot to talk about. So I just want to plow on. But before we start, can you just describe what you do? How do you summarize your

career at this point for people who are unfamiliar with you? Oh, I make no attempt to do that, nor do I have any motivation to, except when somebody like you asks me. But I've done a few things. I'm a computer scientist. I started the field of virtual reality approximately after the founder of computer graphics really started it, which was Ivan Sutherland. But I named virtual reality and I had the first startup and prototyped a lot of the apps and made the first commercial gloves and headsets and so on. I was chief scientist of Internet2, the academic consortium that scaled the Internet in the 90s. I've done video games, lots of other tech stuff. I've been working with Microsoft a lot lately.

I've done a bunch of startups as well, including the one that became Google's first machine vision. And I am also a musician, and I've played with all kinds of people, like Philip Glass and George Clinton, all kinds of people. And I write books, which is the immediate reason why I go on podcasts like this. And the most of people. And I write books, which is the immediate reason why I go on podcasts like this. And the most recent book, which I'm sure the publisher would

want me to mention right away, is called 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Yes. Yeah. And I am a huge fan of your books. And ironically, you just mentioned everything you do for which you are well known that has virtually nothing to do with what we're going to talk about, because I have found this side hustle of yours especially valuable, which is writing books and thinking all too presciently about the problems with our digital economy and social media and what the internet is doing to us. The book you just mentioned is your most recent, which we'll talk about, but you have two prior books that are relevant here,

You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future? There's just so many issues that intersect here. So I just want to kind of summarize for a minute or two my interest in this and then set you off. It seems like there are three areas that we'll talk about, and it's hard to know where to start here. But the first is economics, and there are questions about how we create a world where good and necessary work gets incentivized and supported, and how we can have a

large middle class, for instance, in the presence of increasing automation and AI. Then there's politics, where we need to think about the influence of the internet and social media on our ability to make sense to one another and even just understand the behavior of other people. And this is a fundamental issue of human cooperation that's getting, in some ways, much harder based on our technology. And then there's this third piece, which is personal psychology, for lack of a better word, which is just how is this technology affecting each of us directly? And so among the 10 reasons you give for deleting one social media, one is that social media is turning everyone into an asshole. And I can say that I've personally run that experiment and it works.

I have been turned into an asshole on Twitter. So this is just an incredibly important topic. And I think perhaps we should start with the economic piece because I guess one more thing by way of preamble is that many of the worst decisions we've made here, and this is something you point out in your books in creating this technology, are not on their face bad decisions. I mean, they're certainly not sinister decisions. And to start talking about economics here, one of the first decisions we've made is around this notion that information should be free. And that just seems like a very generous and idealistic way to start. It just seems quite noble.

So perhaps we can start here with the digital economy. What could possibly be wrong with information being free? Right. Well, this idea that information should be free was held in the most profound and intense way. It was something that was believed so intensely during a period starting in the 80s. And in some ways, it still holds for a lot of people. And to defy that was very, very difficult. It was painful for my friends who couldn't believe that I was defying it. It was painful for me. I did lose friends over it. And on its face, it sounds very generous and fair and proper and freeing.

But there are problems with it that are so deep as to, I think, threaten the survival of our species. It's actually a very, very, very serious mistake. So the mistakes happen on a couple of levels here. I would say the first one has to do with this idea that information is totally weightless and intrinsically something that's free in an infinite supply. And that's not true, because information only exists to the degree that people can perceive it and process it and understand it. It ultimately only has a meaning when it grounds out as human experience. The slogan I used to have back in the 80s when we were first debating these things is that information is alienated experience, meaning information is similar to stored energy that can be released. You put energy into a battery, then you can release it, or you lift up a weight, and then you let go of the weight, and it goes back down, and you've released the energy that was stored.

And in the same way, information ultimately only has meaning as experience at some point in the future. And the problem with experience, or maybe the benefit of experience, is that it's only a finite potential. You can't experience everything. And so therefore, if you make the mistake of assuming that information is free, you'll have more information than you can experience. you'll have more information than you can experience. And what you do is you make yourself vulnerable to what we could call a denial of service attack in other contexts. So a denial of service attack means that malicious people send so many requests to a website that it's effectively knocked out off the web. You can't reach it anymore. And every website that you use reliably actually has to go through this elaborate structure of other resources created by companies like Akamai that defend it from denial of service attacks, which are just any cost to themselves. And there's no postage on email. And everything

can just be totally filled up with spam and malicious bots and crap to the point where reality and everything good about the world gets squeezed out and you end up amplifying the worst impulses of people. And so it's created this world of darkness and falsity. It's reversed the enlightenment. You know, it's like you can't there'sity. It's reversed the enlightenment. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's no such thing as free information. There's no such thing as infinite attention. There has to be some way that seriousness comes into play if you want to have any sense of reality or quality or truth or decency. And unfortunately, we haven't created a world in which that's so. But then there's a flip side to it, which is equally important, which is

we've created this world in which we're talking about technology often as something that's, if not opposed to humanity, opposed to most of humanity. So there's a lot of talk, and a lot of this comes from really good technologists. So it's not from malicious outsiders who are trying to screw us up. It's our own fault, where we'll say, well, a lot of the jobs will go away because of artificial intelligence and our robots. And that might either be some extreme case where super intelligent AI takes over the world and disposes of humanity. Or it might just be that only the most elite, smart, techie people are still needed and everybody else becomes this burden on the state and they have to go on some kind of basic income. And it's

just a depressing, it's like everybody's going to become this useless burden. And so even if that means, oh, we'll all get basic income, we won't have to work for a living, there's also something fundamentally undignified, like you won't be needed. And any situation like that is just bound to be a political disaster or an economic disaster on many levels we can go into if it isn't obvious. But the thing to see is that this economic hole that we seem to be driving ourselves into is one in the same as the information wants to be free. Because the thing is, ultimately, all these AIs and robots and all this stuff, they run on information that at the end of the day has to come from people. And each instance is a little different. But for a lot of them, there's input from a lot of people. And I can give you some

examples. So if we say that information is free, then we're saying in the information age, everybody's worthless because what they can contribute is information. The example I like to use as just an entry point to this idea is the people who translate between languages. So they've seen their careers be decimated, their tenth of what they were, in the same way that recording musicians and investigative journalists and many other classes of people who have an information product, they've all been kind of reduced under this weird regime we've created. But the thing is, in order to run the so-called AI translators that places like Bing and Google offer, we have to scrape tens of millions of

examples from real-life people translating things every single day in order to keep up with slang and public events. Language is alive. The world is alive. You can't just stuff a language translator once. You have to keep on refilling it. And so we're totally reliant on the very people that we're putting out of work. So it's fundamentally like a form of theft through dishonesty. I hope that should become clear. in every case. So I think we could imagine some significant percentage of work that will get automated and it won't require this continuous drip of yet more human-generated information. Well, what I'd say to that is that I think anytime somebody considers what they want from an advanced economy or an economy in a situation where technology is getting better and better, is they should want more and more of the economy to essentially be about subjective value, about things like entertainment and cosmetics and sports and lifestyles and design and all that, like that's what we should want, because that's a signal that we're creating technologies in an economy that's really serving us, right? And so I would

suspect, whether you want to call it AI or not, that some kind of growing core of functionality will probably require less and less continuous input from people because it ultimately is composed of problems that can be solved approximately at least once, and then you can keep on using the solution for a long time. But the world of subjective value should be in constant creative churn and evolution. And so to me, it might very well be the case that you don't need to rescan the roads all the time to have self-driving vehicles, let's say. You still have to do it because there'll be potholes or fallen trees or whatever, but you don't have to do it constantly. But most of the economy should be about these subjective things, about style and arts and fashion and joy and connection and all

that. And that's exactly the stuff we've thrown the most into the free bin, where you're supposed to do all that stuff for free by uploading YouTubes for free to YouTube and posting on Facebook for free and so forth. And to me, the AI case and the creative case are not different. It's just data coming from people. I think the AI thing is just a fancy way of talking about information that confuses and muddies the issue. So this concern that AI will get really good simply doesn't concern me because what the economy should be about is precisely more and more subjective value, which can only come by definition from people.

That's what it means. Okay, so we've hit the ground running here. I want to back up for a second and try to perform an exorcism on some bad intuitions here, because I think people come into this, we've trained ourselves to expect much of our digital content to be free and free forever, and it now seems just the normal state of the world. And of course, podcasts and blogs and journalism and ultimately music should be free. Or if it's not free, it should be subsidized by ads. And I think there's this sense that TV and radio were free, so there's this precedent. And advertising has its excesses,

but I think people feel, what's wrong with ads? Some ads are kind of cool looking and amusing and stylish, and we've lived with them forever. And then there's these other elements, like having a personalized news feed. What's wrong with that? Why can't Facebook just give me what I want? And I think it might be useful to focus the conversation here on a couple of case studies that you deal with in your various books. And one, I think, that will be familiar to people is the music industry and what happened to really the economic basis of creating and selling music. Perhaps let's start there. I mean, because there was one thing that I remember vividly when music became digitized, is that it actually wasn't clear ethically to me and to, you know, millions of other people that copying an MP3 file was stealing in any sense. I mean, that piracy seemed benign and to, I think, a whole generation of

people still seems benign because you're not depriving anyone of the material you're copying. You're not, you're copying an MP3 file or any other digital product doesn't deprive anyone else of that information. And yet the effect of this has been to shrink an economy that at one point sustained a very valuable form of creative expression and now has been in free fall for quite some time. So let's just, let's talk to me about what happened to music. Sure. Well, there's a couple of things I'd like to say. If I could, we've had an interesting experiment performed, but not in music, but instead in TV. Sure. And so I'd just like to mention that first before coming back to music. Is that okay? Yeah, that's great. All right. So in the case of TV, during the same era in which there was this kind of craze for making music free, which was kind of 90s into the first decade of the century, there was also a feeling that that should happen with TV. TV and that in the future, TVs and movies would be created by a process that was reminiscent of the Wikipedia, where it would just be a bunch of volunteers who would self-organize and do it for free and everything would be better. And a lot of people tried to do that. My friend Will Wright, who made The Sims, had a company like that, and there were dozens of others. There were a lot of

attempts. And see, at the same time, there were companies like Netflix saying, no, no, no, that's not the right thing. What the internet allows us to do is have a direct billing relationship with people. And if we make the experience good and clean and smooth enough for them, they won't mind paying. And I just think there's no question that Netflix won that argument. I mean, that was a fair test. That was a fair showdown between two different philosophies. was a fair test. That was a fair showdown between two different philosophies. And there's just no question that the paid philosophy won. And in particular, people frequently refer to this era in which we're paying for TV and we don't see advertisements on HBO or Netflix. That might be changing now. But this direct pay model instead of the old ad model or the copy it model,

they're calling it peak TV. Everybody's heard that phrase. Whether it is or not, of course, is a matter of opinion. I'm personally not into a lot of the shows that have captured the imagination of so many like Game of Thrones, but it seems to be working, you know, so we have a very clear thing. And so, you know, what I'd say about this question of if you copy something, the original is still there. If you copy information, I just have to say that what we decide is worth paying for is always something of an, I won't say an arbitrary, but there's always a cultural element. There's an element of values into how we decide to do this. We decide not to pay for what we think of as women's work. We decide, for a long time, we decided the air was free, so you just breathe it and the plants

make more air. But then we realized, no, it's not. And we have carbon credits. We realize we have to preserve our air and everybody has to pay for it, ultimately, if we're going to survive. It's a matter of how we express our values, where we perceive our self-interest, how we see a path to a decent society. Ultimately, the decision of how you value things and what's worth spending money on is not rational. For all of the books you can read about economics with all the fancy diagrams and equations, at the end of the day, a lot of economics with all the fancy diagrams and equations, at the end of the day, a lot of it is really based on values and cultural expression. And so there isn't a way to absolutely justify some of these decisions, but that's always been

true. Well, in some ways it can be made rational in that you can trace the negative effects of bad incentives or, in this case, you know, I mean, if you're going to pirate every CD that gets produced in the year, whatever it was, 1998, then that's going to have a very predictable effect on the economics of producing music. And then musicians will have to tour, right? But not everyone wants to tour or can tour. And then if you do it to writers, if you pirate books, well, writers, for the most part, can't even tour, right? I mean, they're not musicians. Only some of them can have careers giving lectures. So what you do in your books is offer a very rational case for why these incentives we've created or these new norms around treating information as free have been really ruinous

to certain sectors of the economy. Well, you know, it's a strange thing. Like these kind of clouds of negative assumptions can overtake a society. So currently we assume that there's no way to have a college education that won't be infinitely expensive that will put you in debt forever. We assume that there are these horrible things that are just indelible. And there's an assumption that if you're a musician, it's inconceivable there could be an economy to support you. So you better have rich parents, you know, and that's approximately what's going on now for the most part in the average case.

What I try to tell younger musicians is that this is not really so. In the 90s, for a while, I made my living as a recording musician and leaving aside performances just from the recording business. I could sell like 30,000 records. I was kind of a minor artist, I would say, in the kind of avant-garde classical crossover world. And I'd get $100,000 advance per record and the big label that had signed me would earn it back. And that was cool, you know, and we got to record in a nice studio and all these things. It was, it was a very cool time. I wish younger musicians could experience that. It was just extraordinary. And everybody was basically happy. I mean, it was working. bands who would who i think got something like 90 of their revenue from selling their music see that revenue shrink to whatever 30 and then touring had to make up the difference and so that it created a whole new business model for music but that that works in the case of you know many

musicians i don't know you know what percentage but it doesn't work for many journalists, right? Or, or many authors. And even in the case of musicians, it's been heartbreaking. I mean, when this music wants to be free thing started happening, we just started having weekly fundraisers for people like famous musicians who'd gotten sick in old age and had like no support anymore. And it was just so tragic. Recently, my very dear buddy, friend for many, many years, John Perry Barlow passed away. And he had been a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, one of the most successful bands, which had actually pioneered a lot of this idea by encouraging tapers at their concerts from a very pure feeling, from a very generous feeling.

But then, you know, at the end, even though he penned, you know, these songs and these huge selling records, he just basically didn't have income, you know, and it just pissed me off so much. It's just so unfair. It's like what I call it is singing for your supper for every single meal. You never get to build up any life. You know, you can't build up any reserve so that you can have a sick day or grow old or have a kid who needs to go to college. You know, it's everybody goes into this gig economy where you're basically this disposable element in somebody else's fortune. And that's what that's what making music free actually did. That's a very important distinction because it's to take the case of music. So it may seem like a

distinction without a difference for people. Because if I tell you that a band like whatever, Radiohead, used to make all of their money selling music, but now they have to tour. But the crucial difference there is if you're making your money selling your intellectual property, well, then that is money that you can continue to make even when you stop working. Whereas if you're making your money touring, there's a linear relationship between every gig and every dollar. And once you stop touring, you stop making money. And that looks very different in your old age as a rock star. Yeah, yeah. There've been so many tragic situations. And of

course, if you're young, what you think about is, it's in my interest to not have to pay for this file, you know. But then you will not stay young forever, no matter what weird rhetoric comes out of Google spinoffs, you know. You will also grow old. You will also have a biological body, and you will have needs, and you will not always have perfect days. And this whole idea of intellectual property, kind of like a lot of things in our society, you can think of it as something that only benefits elites, but actually it was fought for by unions trying to support people who were not elites at all. The musicians union battled long and hard to get these rights, to create dignity for people who produced information

in their lives, and to have it lost by people who thought they were doing the right thing is just one of the great tragedies of our era. Yeah, yeah. And there's so many elements here. But so, for instance, you know, as a writer of books, I know you have experienced this as well. You find yourself continually in competition with free versions of yourself. So, you know, if you give a TED Talk, you know, rather often you give the talk because you want to give the talk, but also because you're a writer of books and this is, you know, this is a great way to get word of your work out. But the truth is that more and more in the current era where everyone feels starved for time and attention and it's becoming harder and harder to even commit to reading a book, you are actually, your TED Talk is going to satisfy some significant number of people that they understand your thesis well enough that they don't even have to read your book.

The business model of publishing is in tension with all of these opportunities to get the word out about a book now in digital form. And a podcast like this is another case in point. And to that end, it would be only decent of me to assure people that we will in no way exhaust what is of interest in your books by having this conversation. If I may, there's one of my books you haven't mentioned, which is called Dawn of the New Everything, which is a memoir and an introduction to virtual reality and possibly my best book, but also the least known one.

If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free

and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.