Jaron Lanier argues AI is a human collaboration, not an independent entity

Editor’s Note: In this special edition episode of StarTalk, host Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Gary O’Reilly, and comedian Negin Farsad sit down with computer scientist and “father of virtual reality” Jaron Lanier. Together, they explore the evolution of the internet, the societal impacts of social media addiction, and why we should view artificial intelligence as a human collaboration rather than an independent creature. The conversation dives deep into alternate tech business models, data dignity, and finding a constructive path forward for the future of technology.

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction: Meet Jaron Lanier

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Why do UFO sightings persist? Are at least some of them figments of our imagination, or are we missing something? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I actually explore what’s possible in this universe, given the universal laws of physics. If the aliens are out there, the laws of physics will dictate how they find us. I also narrated the audiobook, so I’m duly informed that the audiobook and the print version are available now wherever books are sold. This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means I got Gary O’Reilly, co-host here. Gary, how you doing, man?

GARY O’REILLY: I’m good, Neil. Over in London. London though, so slightly remote.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, only slightly. On the scale of the universe, you’re right next door. I also have with me Negin Farsad. Negin, welcome back to StarTalk.

NEGIN FARSAD: Hello, I’m so excited to be back.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s been too long, I miss you.

NEGIN FARSAD: Absolutely. I have to say, you don’t look a day over the last time we talked about dark matter.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, now let me figure out how old I would need to be for that. You’re a comedian, you’re also a TED Fellow for social justice. That’s a thing?

NEGIN FARSAD: I mean, I do comedy that tries to save the world.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay.

NEGIN FARSAD: And it’s worked, guys. That’s why we live in utopia.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Fake the Nation, that’s the coolest title ever.

NEGIN FARSAD: That’s right.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I’ll never soon forget the title of your book from a few years ago.

NEGIN FARSAD: How to Make White People Laugh. Yeah.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s best title ever.

NEGIN FARSAD: Thank you so much.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah, so Gary, what have you researched for today? It’s got something to do with the internet and it’s going to mess up the world, something like that?

Is the Internet Too Far Gone?

GARY O’REILLY: Oh yeah, let’s get the good stuff out. So is the internet too far gone in our lifetimes? The internet has changed from a novelty to a central influence in our lives, and now with the advent of AI, hawked as the potential doomsday for humankind. Well, is it? Isn’t it? Today we’re going to talk about whether that’s the case, how the internet influences our world, and how we can come together and fix it or not. So, Neil, if you will introduce our guest, and I think this is just the right person to discuss this topic.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, there’s a uniquely qualified person in the world to address those issues and more, and I’ve got him sitting right here. Jaron Lanier, dude.

JARON LANIER: Hey, how are ya?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Welcome to StarTalk.

JARON LANIER: Well, you know, I think you can speak a little lower than me, but that does not mean I will not attempt it.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, we don’t use the word polymath too freely today because there aren’t many folks, there’s so much specialization, but if I were to bring that into the 21st century, I would apply it to you. You’re a computer scientist, but interdisciplinary. What’s your title? Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft? That’s a title? Is that on your business card?

JARON LANIER: It actually is, yeah. Okay, it’s actually a joke. It’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Prime Unifying Scientist, so it spells out OCTOPUS. And there are several reasons for that. One is I used to study cephalopod cognition because it’s absolutely fascinating. But then there’s also that some accuse me of starting to look like one myself.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, that happens. That can happen.

JARON LANIER: That can happen. That can happen. And so between those two things, The Octopus, yes.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I’m just impressed that that’s even a title that one can ascend to. Are you going to break the mold in your— can anyone become you in this? The answer is no, just say no.

JARON LANIER: Well, I will tell you one thing about my role. I have an agreement with them where I can speak my mind, including being encouraged to criticize the company itself, so long as I’m clear that I’m not speaking for Microsoft. And somehow they haven’t imploded. I think it actually— I would like to see more people with that role in the tech industry. Okay, so in that sense, I don’t want to be the last. I’m aware of one other maybe, who would be Vint Cerf over at Google, but I think we’re the only two. And we really desperately need more of us.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Because you know when someone has— you know where they’re clamming shut on what you really want them to say about what they’re doing. You know it in an interview, right?

JARON LANIER: Yeah, and in Silicon Valley, that’s like 90% of the time.

The Father of Virtual Reality

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah. So you’re considered the father of virtual reality, in part because you even coined the term?

JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, look, I was young, all right? I think there’s—

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You’re responsible.

NEGIN FARSAD: Were you on drugs, maybe? Was there that involved?

JARON LANIER: I’ve never used drugs, and I blame virtual reality for that.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, it’s served that role.

NEGIN FARSAD: You haven’t needed it, yeah.

JARON LANIER: Virtual reality has served that role.

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

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.

This document continues at the source.