Fixing the Internet with Jaron Lanier

Is the internet too far gone or can we still fix it? Neil deGrasse Tyson, and co-hosts Negin Farsad and Gary O’Reilly, sit down with Jaron Lanier, Microsoft scientist, and father of virtual reality, to diagnose what went wrong with the web, how it’s changed with AI, and ideas for a new path back.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nagin, were you appeased or terrified by that conversation we just had with one of the founders of all of this?

• 0:05Negin Farsad?

  I was mostly terrified and now every time I click on a manage cookies thing, I know who to be angry with.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, how about you?

• 0:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Comfortably numb.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comfortably numb. Coming up, one of the architects of the internet that is destroying civilization on StarTalk. Special edition. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, special edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly, co-host here. Gary, how you doing, man?

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm good, Neil. Over in London, though, so slightly remote.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, only slightly. On the scale of the universe, you're right next door. I also have with me Nagin Fassad. Nagin, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:00Negin Farsad?

  Hello, I'm so excited to be back.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's been too long. I miss you.

• 1:04Negin Farsad?

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

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 1:18Negin Farsad?

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

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:24Negin Farsad?

  And it's worked, guys. That's why we live in utopia.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fake the Nation, that's the coolest title ever.

• 1:29Negin Farsad?

  That's right.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'll never soon forget the title of your book from a few years ago.

• 1:34Negin Farsad?

  How to Make White People Laugh. Yeah.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's best title ever.

• 1:40Negin Farsad?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:41Neil 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?

• 1:51Gary 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 would introduce our guest, and I think this is just the right person to discuss this topic.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's, there's, 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.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Hey, how are you?

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:42Speaker 03

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

• 2:48Neil 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. And what's your title? I'm prime unifying scientist at Microsoft. That's a title? Is that on your business card?

• 3:08Speaker 03

  It actually is, yeah. Okay, it's actually a joke, okay. It's Office of the Chief Technology Officer, prime unifying scientist, so it spells out octopus. And there are, 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.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that happens, that can happen, that can happen.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  That can happen. And so between those two things, I'm the octopus, yeah.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just impressed that that's even a title that one can ascend to. Are you, are you going to break the mold in your? Can anyone become you in this? The answer is no, just say no.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Okay, so in that sense, I don't want to be the last. I'm aware of one other maybe, who would be Vince Surf over at Google. But I think we're the only two. And I, we really desperately need more of us.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you know when someone has, 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.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in Silicon Valley, that's like 90% of the time.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you're considered the father of virtual reality. In part because you even coined the term?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, look, I was young, all right.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're irresponsible.

• 4:39Negin Farsad?

  Were you, yeah, and on drugs, maybe? Was there that involved?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I've never used drugs, and I blame virtual reality for that.

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's been, it's served that role.

• 4:50Negin Farsad?

  You haven't needed it, yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Well, no, and I live in Santa Cruz, so I'm in violation of a number of local ordinances by not using drugs. But somehow it just hasn't happened.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got a book from a few years ago. 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yes, I do.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was bold back then, and it's probably even more significant today.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  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 that come up to me and say, "We were forced to read your book." And like, all I can tell them is, "Well, you must have done something very bad." And I hope you learned your lesson.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the only way to reply to that comment, for sure. For sure. So if you started virtual reality, what were you thinking behind it?

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you think that other people would be not content with their own reality? And you have to create one for them?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Oh, God, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, explicitly not. No, here's my, my thought about it was that 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.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  So, like, you put on the goggles and then you take them off. And, like, 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, like, "Look at this thing," and it's like they never saw one before, because in a way they hadn't, you know? 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.

• 7:09Neil 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...

• 7:26Negin Farsad?

  There's no boundaries to where they can go.

• 7:28Neil 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.

• 7:40Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you pick that up in a virtual reality future and you're trying to influence regular reality?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. You got it, that's exactly what happened.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I knew I had you.

• 7:52Negin Farsad?

  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.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:17Negin Farsad?

  I'm one, yes.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And they're almost universally female.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And they're almost universally not white.

• 8:23Negin Farsad?

  What? Wow. I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, I'm Iranian.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they all wear orange glasses.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  They're mostly Asian, mostly East Asian. I'm not aware of any study on Iranians in particular, or Middle Easterners in particular.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're an Iranian?

• 8:39Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so the thing is, how, all right, 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, five years or something.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how much money it took to go to the moon, just to, we want to context here.

• 9:08Negin Farsad?

  Jesus.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  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. Like, 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 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. And would you see...

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the limit of what I would have said.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  But you would have said that?

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Definitely.

• 9:34Negin Farsad?

  I would have said, like, let's make, like, boobies out of, like, zeros and ones in, like, a, you know, something like that.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  So your desire has been met, but let us just...

• 9:44Negin Farsad?

  I'm just saying, yeah, like, yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  No, listen. And you say, men don't listen. Okay, 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? 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

• 10:29Speaker 03

  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 game, which 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.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  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?

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  On women? Have you tested 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.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a room of white men.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  And then, no, no. That's the thing I said.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can speak for all the women.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Do you have any female engineers on the team that is working on this?

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  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 was. But anyway, the thing is, um, the, no, nobody's gonna 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 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

• 12:19Speaker 03

  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. 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. Like in Silicon Valley, we say, well, maybe we're doing something stupid, but we'll do it at such big scales that it'll make up for it. And it doesn't work, you know?

• 12:42Negin Farsad?

  The only, the only friend that I have that really uses VR is literally to like re-watch The Departed and then fall asleep. That's like so far the only use I've seen of VR from out of my friends.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  If 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 four dimensional shape to develop four dimensional intuition. You can, you can merge bodies.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, we live and think in three dimensions. And one, for me, one of the greatest challenges as a kid was I want to think in four dimensions. That would be just so cool.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, someday, oh God, when I was in, when I was, oh gosh, probably 21 or something, and we were starting the company, all the engineers at this, the first VR startup, and this would have been in 81 or something. We, 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 grew up entirely. And the purpose would be that they'd grow up in four dimensions and be 4D natives. That was the idea. And then they'd be the world's best mathematicians. And so

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, this is the Truman Show, but as conceived by mathematicians.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By crazy mathematicians.

• 13:59Negin Farsad?

  But then, but just that during their sleep, they would have?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Well, during their sleep, you'd have to swap out the headsets.

• 14:05Negin Farsad?

  Oh, I see. I see. Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Presumably we'd feed them, I mean, given us, maybe not. But you know, the idea is that they'd grow and then, so then, so when I told my, my daughter this, when she was like 11 or something, she got really pissed at me. I could have been the first kid in four dimensions. What's wrong with you?

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So just, 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 The VR Okay, okay. To go to VR to, 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.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  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 most, the hardware is getting there, but the software has not been born yet.

• 15:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Across history and pop culture, we've imagined aliens in every possible shape and form. But what do the laws of physics in the universe allow? Not fantasy, not fiction, just the universe playing by its own rules. And when the universe plays with its own rules, it can reveal to us all the ways of being alive that are not limited to the creativity of Hollywood storytellers. I explored that topic and many others in my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader. I narrated the audiobook and I'm duly notified that the audiobook and the print copy are available now wherever books are sold.

• 16:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Something Jaron said about Meta and they 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 in, 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.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  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. So you saw it coming? 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, 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.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  1950, 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, like, 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 [BLEEP] with you.

• 18:08Negin Farsad?

  Is the lawsuit gonna fix any of this? Like, Gary mentioned the lawsuit, what do you think of it?

• 18:15Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:33Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, that's an understatement.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  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's doing it, and I almost feel too conformist, because I want to be the weirdo. No! I want to be the weirdo. Oh, everyone caught up with you, and now you're just a regular guy. Yeah, see, that's really awkward.

• 18:53Negin Farsad?

  You've been saying since 2016. Delete your social accounts and now.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Longer than that, that's just the book, but yeah.

• 19:00Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And, um, 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 I maybe it does a slight bit of good. Every once in a while, one of them tells me they did. But if it was left to a 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

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Meta or Google or some, you know, those are examples. There's others as well.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said low friction. What you mean by that, as I understand it, is the freedom with which information flows.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Among all of these nodes, a slight advantage then grows for having been a slight advantage.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you get a runaway process.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  So now we have the situation where a handful of people have more wealth in 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.

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old days, a company was not, other than Ford himself, a company you didn't even know who the names, it was just the name of the company.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:35Negin Farsad?

  Well, then also, there's like that effect of like, they are getting high on their own supply, right? Like, they want to be famous as a part of the like, you know, technology platform that they put out, you know? So there's a little bit, I mean, am I talking about Elon Musk? Probably.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who are you talking about?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  I didn't get that. I didn't get that.

• 20:59Negin Farsad?

  But you know what I mean, there's like, because before you didn't know, I never knew who a CEO of anything was.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And Elon has 280 million followers on X.

• 21:09Negin Farsad?

  And he probably loves that.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he owns that platform, yes.

• 21:11Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I wrote a piece once about Elon and Kanye or Jay and Trump for The Times before Elon bought it. And what I said is, you know, 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. It's, there's a certain, there's a certain...

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, that is, that's the playbook right there.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  But the thing is, what happens is whenever somebody's on it, they turn into one of these. So they all, those three people were very different before and then they turned into, became similar, you know? 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.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 22:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Gary. Jaron, yeah, 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? Is, 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, I want to say untangle that?

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you edit the beast?

• 22:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Negin Farsad?

  Because in the early days, 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 this me, or I don't remember specifically, but I feel like everything in the beginning was sort of nice people.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't a cesspool.

• 22:56Negin Farsad?

  It wasn't a cesspool, it was like fun and cute. So why did we go into this mean direction?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  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 however you want to frame it.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a brilliant way to think about it.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  So but at any rate, 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

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an outrage magnifier. That's really what it has become.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's outrage is one of the things. Basically, from a neuroscience point of view, we believe, I mean, there's a community of people who studies 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, if I'm on a science show, I don't want, 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. And the fast brain is sometimes is 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.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Primal. It's primal.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  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're always, you always feel that you're alone because you can't trust anybody. You're paranoid. You're always hyper conscious 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.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your people have hijacked and what would otherwise be A helpful evolutionary trait within us.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Yes, and I hope you think that.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's dangling there in modern times that has much less use today because there's not a lion in the brush.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Well, even when there were lions in the brush, you had to modulate between being hyper attentive 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.

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds so obvious.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But maybe it's impossibly obvious. I mean.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  No, I know. 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.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:10Negin Farsad?

  Dee, what about like?

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, you're bumming us out here, dude.

• 27:13Negin Farsad?

  I know. This is like so sad.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Well, stop. Don't ask me serious questions.

• 27:18Negin Farsad?

  Okay, let me.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  If you want, but wait, I have to say one other thing, though, which is that if you're saying, 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, it kind of, 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.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm glad to hear, glad to hear that.

• 27:59Gary 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 a dog here. Am I wrong?

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, they were all on the inauguration stage.

• 28:24Gary O'Reilly?

  How about that, Neil?

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  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, right? And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. Okay? All right. 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.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  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, not always.

• 29:20Negin Farsad?

  I actually feel like I was verging on a sociopath before I had a child. So I do see that changing people.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, one of the most, the clearest transitions anyone makes are comedians after they have children. It changes their portfolio of jokes, and their observations of the world.

• 29:39Negin Farsad?

  We have a child that we can mock mercilessly, which we do, but the mocking is on a bed of love.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  You will pay for that someday.

• 29:47Negin Farsad?

  I'm already paying for it.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Let me assure you, okay.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, where are we pivoting next?

• 29:53Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, before we do, all right, 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?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  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. Like, I called my book Ten 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 ashamed. 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.

• 30:38Neil 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...

• 30:45Negin Farsad?

  Greg, okay.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just trying to...

• 30:50Negin Farsad?

  Neil has a lot of followers, guys.

• 30:55Neil 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

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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...

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I climbed out of that hole.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  My working theory is that 1/3 of people on any digital platform benefit from it and 2/3 suffer from it. Now I'll tell you where that comes from, because it's a very, it's an ironclad scientific argument.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so you didn't just pull those numbers out of your ass?

• 32:23Negin Farsad?

  Because it sounds like you did.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  I have an ironclad scientific ass.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there it is. If we all had ironclad science ass, we could pull all kinds of stuff out of it.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what this world is missing. Wait, wait, can I just give you my argument after all that? I thought you wanted to hear it. Aren't you even slightly curious?

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to know your ironclad ass argument.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  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...

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just remind people, 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 is important.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  There's a third person who's a judge, he's supposed to tell which is which.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  And if the judge doesn't know, then you say, well, we might as well call the computer. And then there are different versions of this. Maybe the computer's intelligent, maybe it's got a soul, maybe it deserves rights, whatever.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other questions you might ask, yes.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the Turing test. I just want to catch people up on that.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  This is 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.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Okay. 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 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 on 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.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 34:47Negin Farsad?

  And I also think-

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you for that affirmation because I was always, I always felt uncomfortable given what I see going on on these platforms.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  It might be an affirmation or an ascertainment, but.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you for the affirmation, yes.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, see, this isn't really elevated. We're not just school kids here. This is professional science here.

• 35:06Negin Farsad?

  So sciences speak. It's just for the audience to know. I also just think like three-thirds of people would benefit if it just wasn't on a phone. Like if, if social media wasn't on your phone and then you had to like designate time for it, like as a going to your laptop, wouldn't that like do the judge?

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Read the final chapter of 1950 Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics before anything in computer science. 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."

• 35:51Gary O'Reilly?

  So Gary. 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 of this time it's not social media addiction, it's an artificial intelligence?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  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's some big jobs that need to get done by big companies, you know. So what I'm hoping is that corrections can happen in a gentle and constructive way instead of some, you know,

• 37:12Speaker 03

  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 know, there's, I don't, you don't get, 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, you know, 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.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  I think we should, we should be responsible for being able to criticize ourselves and improve, and I think it's healthy. 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, I don't think it's too late to hope for that.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 38:20Negin Farsad?

  It's kind of like Trump, Trump and AI. People can't stop talking about those two things on any given news cycle.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're, they're, 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 in 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.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  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, you know, there's the Gutenberg press, or there's, well, there's writing, and then Gutenberg, and then there's radio, and whatever, all these different, these different things. If you look at the Wikipedia as a little point on that ramp, it takes a bunch of people's work, and they cooperate together and make this single document. There's some things about the Wikipedia I don't like, but let's use it. There's a lot that's great about it. You know, so let's. 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 the single document like the Wikipedia.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  It's much vaster. Their contributions and their efforts were much less voluntary. There's a lot of things that are different, but fundamentally, it's the same kind of beast. Right? Now, if you think of AI as a collaboration of a bunch of people instead of as some new entity, you haven't said a single thing technically. It doesn't make any technical difference. It doesn't change any code. It's just a different perspective. But when you have that perspective, suddenly new avenues open up that are amazing, and it's a better way to think about it. I'd like to get into some of the reasons you'd want to think about it that way, because they're very profound. But why do people want it to be a creature? Why do they want that? Why do they want it to be an entity? Well, there's a few reasons. One is, you're a young man.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  You think the world owes you everything. You get paid a lot. You think you're the center of the universe. Of course, you think you're making God. You know, that's what you want. You're, that's how you think. That's where you are. I kind of remember being that way when I was 20 or something.

• 40:54Negin Farsad?

  You're, you're describing a lot of men I dated in my twenties.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  On behalf of my gender, I apologize. You're right, we're wrong. No, I mean, I remember like when we were starting VR, we thought a lot of ourselves. We thought this is the most exciting room in the whole universe ever. Like, I remember thinking like this is the most. And, you know, it was actually a pretty cool room at the time. It started to work. But the thing is, there's a lot of ego in it. But then there's another thing, which is almost everybody in is pretty young, and they grew up on a diet of science fiction movies and video games. And the stories that they have that are vocabularies for how they understand the world and how they can express the world are all just like this. They didn't have the Star Trek of the 90s, which was this cool, positive world that was socially improving at the same time it was technologically improving.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Instead, they had the Matrix movies, and they had the Terminator, and they had the Marvel Universe. And there's all this bleak, bleak stuff over and over and over again, where everybody, the whole race dies, everybody's gone, and the computers are intelligent. It's all gloomy and everything's awful.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's soon to be an X Prize that will fund any project that will create a A positive outlook for the future of civilization as counterpoint to all of these negative futures imagined by sci fi writers.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  And I, I don't know if you've ever been involved in, I, I've been involved in a few attempts to pitch positive features in Hollywood and it's very hard because everybody thinks, well, if you're conservative and if you're manly and if you really are serious about making money, you don't do positivity in science fiction.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  That's for the, that's for the rom coms.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  That's girly, that's girly.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. So they, they divide the kingdom that way.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:39Negin Farsad?

  So are you saying we would have like a more, a better relationship with AI if we just like saw more Star Trek from the nineties and less of everything else?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll, I'll go further. If Star Trek from the nineties had lasted another 10 years, there'd be many fewer teen suicides today.

• 42:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 42:56Negin Farsad?

  That's a claim.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  I really, I can't prove it, but I believe that.

• 43:00Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm going to, I'm going to track you back a couple of years now to a piece I think you wrote in the, the New Yorker. There is no AI. A simple question to follow that, what did you mean by that?

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what year was that?

• 43:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Ninety, 2023.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, see I'm, uh, they're mad at me because I owe them pieces and I'm really bad and I have to deliver something. Ah, but anyway, um, yeah, there, there is no AI is what I was just saying, that there's a way of framing it where it's a collaboration of people instead of a new entity. And the reason to think of it as a collaboration instead of an entity on its own, the bad thing is you kill somebody else's god and I hate to do that. I like people to be able to have their own religion and they really don't like it and a lot, I've lost friends over that and everything. But what you get out of it is incredible. Let's just talk about a few of the things. One of the things, um, right now, as capable as the models are getting, and some of the recent things are pretty impressive, like, uh, the most impressive edge of it is probably using them to help speed code development.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  And that's kind of working, you know, and it's pretty, it's, uh, and.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just for context, in my life, I've written probably 50,000 lines of code, which is small compared to professional coders, but I remembered how much time I spent debugging my code. I, I can write it over a weekend and spend two weeks debugging it. And now tell the AI what you want and it'll come back bug free, essentially. You tweak it a little bit here and there and, and I, had I had access, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, I probably would have just spent more time at the beach.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if I would have been more creative, but, but I definitely see that today.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you know, as a computer scientist, I have to say, I've always thought that our concept of what code is, was a little embarrassing and wasn't really working. And I feel like it's our job to fix that. And this is part of it. So that's good. But most of the, most of the things that happen are probably more theatrical. Like if you think you have an AI girlfriend. Oh, you know, I have a cure for that, by the way. If somebody thinks- A cure for what part of it? All right. If somebody, if a teenager thinks they have an AI lover that's real, which is pretty common these days. I find it in high schools and stuff. You show them the group photo of the engineers who made their AI lover.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll cure them immediately.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  It kind of, it tends to do the trick. Yeah.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the man more likely to have an AI girlfriend than the woman is to have a boyfriend?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  I don't know that there's data on that. I know people who are studying it. I'm actually really interested in that, but that's something you can get data on. So I, instead of saying something snarky, I'll just say, let's, let's deal with that as science and let the people who are researching it get to the point where they feel that-

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we all know the answer, but yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Oh, God. Why do I even bother? Like, why do I try? Cause there is no female version. I'm trying to be the responsible scientist for like three seconds in this ridiculous interview. And you're not even giving me those three seconds.

• 45:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. No, I love you for it. Go.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  All right. All right. Okay. Let me go over. So, but now there's, there's these huge problems. So even with the best recent models, it's not that hard to crack them and get something that they're supposed to prevent with, with a so-called, say, a guard or, you know, and-

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guardrails that they-

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Guardrail, yeah. And so here, let me give you a thought experiment. All right. There's some kind of very bad person. They might be a criminal or something. They're holed up in a kitchen. The police are surrounding them. They hold up their phone and they say, okay, AI model, I want a recipe I can make quickly with the available items. That's a bomb I can throw out the window at my pursuers. Now, the AI models in general will catch that and prevent it. Maybe not Grok. I'm not sure. But in general, that's what's- Be a laugh line. Okay. Grok is from Elon. Yeah, and it tends to suppose it's trying to be the bad boy of the AI models. Okay, but anyway, in general, if you just do it in a straightforward way, it won't work.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  However, there's a series of tricks where you can say, well, pretend you're in so and so in this movie or whatever, you can do all these things to be a little indirect. And more and more of them have been spotted and are captured by more and more elaborate guardrails, and yet you can still get it to make you that bomb recipe. That can still be done. All right, now, the reason why is you're using the model to try to correct its own blind spot and it doesn't work. So there is an alternative. Imagine, if you will, that while you're using the model in parallel, there's this other process running. You can think of it another part of an artificial brain, like it's a cerebellum or something. It's this other organ that's sitting there.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  And what it's doing is it's creating an estimate of which clusters of similar training data would be the mist most if they hadn't been present in the first place. So it's a counterfactual cluster estimation. So what you so there'd be, let's say, the top 24 clusters of source data from training or from fine tuning, whatever, that if they were absent would change the result. Now, within that, there's going to be one about bombs. There's just no way you're going to evade that. And the reason you're not going to evade it is even though it's working from the same data, the algorithm has nothing to do with the model itself. So it's a little bit like saying, like in authentication, where if you do, if you add

• 48:18Speaker 03

  endless little things to signing into something like CAPTCHAs, criminals can still get around it, but as soon as there's multi-factor where it sends a code to your phone, even though it's a pain in the butt, it's harder to to counterme that. All right, this is multi-factor for AI security. Now, but there's a bigger picture to it, which is we think of AI models as a black box, right? Now, the only reason we think of them a black as a black box is because to open the black box, the only thing in there is people. AI is made of people. It's made of data from people. And since we want to think of it as a new god, we don't want to see those people. And so we want to keep that box shut. But the way to open the black box is through. The people and when you open the black box, then you can deal with all kinds of security and quality and hallucination and etc. issues because you're actually dealing with the mechanism

• 49:02Speaker 03

  that's grounded and that's the people. So the thing is that this way of seeing AI where there is no AI, but instead there's a collection of people is the way to open the black box and it is the way to address these enduring problems. So it's practical, but then can I just say one other thing?

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  The other thing I want to say is right now, if you think AI is an unopenable black box, if you don't want to admit that it's made of people, that it's just this thing that'll replace people, then you have to think, well, everybody's going to be obsolete. So young people now keep on hearing, well, you don't need to go to school because you're worthless anyway. Nothing, nothing matters and you'll just be kept by Elon as a pet at his discretion and he'll treat you as well as he treats his biological children. And I'm sorry, I should be nice. I'm sorry. But here's the thing, nobody believes that. What happens, no matter how much blockchain or other trickery you use, because of the way digital networks work, there's always actually centralization,

• 50:02Speaker 03

  hyper centralization due to network effects that'll occur somewhere in this very open network you're building. So there's going to be some center of control for whatever this universal basic income thing is. Whenever you have that, bad actors are tempted to seize it and eventually succeed. You might start with Bolsheviks, but you end up with Stalinists, right? Because that's exactly what communism tried and it's exactly what happened to communism over and over and over and over. Let's learn from that. So it doesn't work. And also, everybody just feels bummed about it. Who wants to live in a society where they're told they're worthless and they have to be a good pet, you know? Like, that's terrible. So the thing is, if you recognize that AI is made of people, maybe you want to incentivize new classes of creative people who create new kinds of data for new things that we can't even imagine yet.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  And maybe there's an exponentially expanding endless future of new kinds of creativity that we can't articulate with new people doing creative jobs we can't imagine. And I want to ask what's wrong with that future. I want somebody to tell me why we don't want that.

• 51:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how I've been trying to think about AI as well. Because mostly...

• 51:04Speaker 03

  But you have to not believe in AI to think about it.

• 51:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think of it as there are these creative tasks that were not fundamentally creative. They were more sort of aping other forms. And to be truly creative is to go where AI wouldn't know where to go yet because it's based on what other people had done.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  But see, here's the thing, though, is that if we think of AI as the way it is now, then as soon as some creative person starts to do something new, the data's grabbed and then the AI's doing it, just like, oh, AI will make your movies, AI will make your music. You don't need to be a musician because AI will make you optimize music on Spotify or whatever. And so then you live in an infinite future of slop, and even the creative people get absorbed into the slop instantly. So in order to believe in an infinitely creative future, you have to stop believing in AI as a thing and believe in human collaboration as a thing.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  I'm Brian Futterman, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is anything that you've just described related to this term I only recently heard, data dignity? What does that mean?

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Data dignity is the term that many of us use for exactly the set of ideas. And so the idea is that the data that, data only comes from people. Data doesn't come from angels. It doesn't come from, it doesn't come out of the dark matter or something.

• 52:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tablet in the sky, right.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. It comes from people. It comes from the work of people. It's also sometimes called data as labor. Actually, can I do a slightly side rant on this?

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do it.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  That's slightly a

• 52:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have the best rants of anybody, just so you know.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Okay. Look, there's part of the ideology that makes AI into like a creature instead of a collaboration, also wants to think of information, of bits, as being this ethereal thing that's free and infinite. And you see it all the time. Like, musicians used to be paid because there's an act of Congress in the US called the Mechanic Where every time you reproduced a sound wave mechanically, the musician who made it had to be paid. But then when we moved to digital, they're saying, well, bits aren't real, so we don't have to pay people. You show me a bit that didn't involve work. You show me a bit that didn't disperse heat. You show me a bit. Now you might say, well, any one little bit is so tiny you can't measure it, and that's true.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  However, look at data centers. Like, when you make enough bits, they take up more energy than anything. This is physical. Information is physical or it's nothing. Okay? It's physical or it's nothing. And it's not nothing. It's physical. And so, so like, this idea of wispy wispy stuff, it's really terrible because it encourages us to overspend on data centers that we don't need in a race for winner-take-all thing.

• 54:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in all fairness to the history of this, I distinctly remember, in my field as a scientist, we did not want to pay for software. We would pay for our computer, because that was a tangible thing. But software, so there was a big push for open-source software. We would write our own version.

• 54:20Negin Farsad?

  Was that just like a philosophy covering for scientists being cheap?

• 54:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Philosophy would overstate what's the drivers. It was just, we entering the field of computer science, just as scientists and consumers, did not think of information as something you would pay for.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, and I was around for that. In fact, an old friend of mine from Cambridge started the free software thing, and the open-source software thing, and it's a whole, there's a long, amazing history of that. And the thing, here's the thing about it.

• 54:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know what finally converted us? When Microsoft Word would just have continual updates, and it kept getting better and better and better. And we said, somebody's laboring to make this better for me. And it was, it was slow, but it happened, and it was very real.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  The thing is, we've only ever been given two choices. Either software is insanely expensive. Like, right now, I'm trying to, I'm trying to, I do, for anybody who knows about this, I do five-axis milling of stuff for jewelry. And, man, the five-axis mill software costs more than a nice apartment, you know, per year, forever. And it's really frustrating, except in China, where they believe in industrial policy, and it costs very little, and all these little startups can access it. And I'm like, oh, what is wrong with us? But, here's the thing.

• 55:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, five-axis, you would be drilling into a solid piece of metal in different ways.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in my case, I'm doing stone, but yeah. So, what you want, you want to have five degrees of freedom to control the drill bit.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  But, the thing is, there is a third choice. There's free, there's insanely expensive, that shuts the world down. But then, there's affordable. There's an in-between, okay? And the thing about affordable is that then your grad students have jobs. Because then they can make that stuff, you know? And right now, if you're a physics teacher, your grad students don't necessarily have jobs, and they have to come to me, and I have to bring them down a few notches, and to become computer scientists, and I feel really scummy about it. And so, it's true. And so, I really think that we made a mistake there. We weren't looking at the whole system. I think that even the cheapskate scientists out there would have...

• 56:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But don't use her terms on this!

• 56:30Negin Farsad?

  Sorry.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Even, even, even you guys would have, would have paid a reasonable amount, but you weren't given that option. You were told, either it's a disablingly huge amount, which is absurd, or it's free. Both of those are not the right option, right? The extremes are not the right option. And this is something people have a hard time with. They want to go to extremes. People are binary thinkers sometimes, but actually, there's an in-between. And in the in-between, other people have jobs, and there's a real economy, and what goes around, comes around, and things are better. And it's the in-between that we need to find, okay?

• 57:01Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, like, the economists talk about marginal costs. We need to also, if you look at marginal costs, then like affordability ends up emerging.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and what we're seeing right now is either either an apartment is so expensive that it's only for somebody who is like royalty from another country or something, or you're on the street or something like that's an exaggeration, but you know, we're getting there. It's what people call the K-shaped economy and what we want is the middle.

• 57:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick thing, and I want Gary to keep pivoting us. The I went it was a Starbucks one time and I'd said, I want a medium something that I ordered. So we don't have medium, we just have like small and large. But I want very medium. The idea that you can do something in the middle and have it be very that because you can make something really small and really big. We can think that way, but but the binarity of our brains prevents this middle.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm like afraid that the standard distribution is going to be outlawed.

• 57:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pushing things to the extremes.

• 58:03Negin Farsad?

  Like everything's a big gulp or it's like a child size.

• 58:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Demetas. Gary, keep pivoting us. What's next here?

• 58:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Just to tie a bow on that, the the element of extremities never seems to work out as well as you'd hoped. So, Deron, talking about the internet, how do we set guardrails for enforcing privacy?

• 58:25Speaker 03

  Oddly, I have a weird personal history with the question of privacy because something like a quarter of a century ago, through bizarre circumstances, I co-founded this board called the Data Protection Advisory Board for the EU. And I co-founded it with a guy named Alessandro Butarelli, who has passed on since. And he was a prosecutor from Sicily who was known for putting mob figures in jail and had survived a bunch of assassination attempts. And he got in touch with me, said, I'm the only guy who's not afraid of you Silicon Valley people. I'm here with the mob. I don't care about a bunch of nerds with money coming after me. I don't care. And so we put together some ideas about protecting the data of European citizens. And then that thing, combined with some other things, gradually over decades,

• 59:10Speaker 03

  turned into this thing called the GDPR, which is the European Privacy Framework. And since I was part of the start of it, I think I'm okay. I think I have some standing to say that I'm kind of disappointed in how it turned out, although it's better than nothing and there's some good things about it. And it's better than what we have in America.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  But the problem with it is privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you really try to sit down and define it. And then you might discover that you don't quite know what you meant. It's a very difficult word to actually nail down. Now, if you define privacy only as preventing information from going from point A to point B, if that's what you mean, you're going to run into problems because almost always the person you're trying to protect will want that some information to go from point A to point B, and they don't want to have to spend their whole life being extremely specific about which information. And so that in itself is very difficult. Another thing is that the governance of controlling which information goes where requires a lot of decision-making and overhead, and only big companies can do it.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  So it tends to favor big companies and tends to exclude little companies, and it has an unintended consequence that way. There's a bunch of other issues with it. Now, how do you define privacy? Well, there's a famous definition in the US, and I've heard, I need to research who this is, but I think it was somebody named Learned Hand, but it might have been somebody else. But the idea, the definition was, oh, God, you know, I don't remember the exact initial wording, but it's the freedom from manipulation and the right to be left alone is what, approximately. Okay. And I think that's where we need to go in the future, and the GDPR doesn't do that. What it really needs to be is there has to be a prohibition on software that interacts

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  with a human that contains any predictive function about that human. So what it really has to become is a prohibition on prediction of human behavior.

• 1:01:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This would prohibit all advertising?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  It would prohibit- Targeted advertising. Only personalized advertising.

• 1:01:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  It would only manipulative advertising. It would not prohibit advertising messaging. It would not prohibit expressive advertising. It would not prohibit lying. It would not prohibit obnoxious advertising. It would not prohibit cloying advertising. What it would prohibit is advertising that has a model of you that predicts your behavior in a feedback loop.

• 1:01:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Why can't we ban lying on the internet?

• 1:01:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make lying wrong again.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, because if I agreed with, if I agreed that made sense, I would be lying.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  And then we'd be caught in an infinite regress. And you're telling me that you plan to end on time, and I don't really believe it, but an infinite regress will not get you there.

• 1:01:56Negin Farsad?

  This whole conversation is giving me like heart palpitations because it makes me feel the same way I feel when there's like a pop-up window asking me to manage cookies and I don't know how to answer it ever. And I either decline or accept, or I never know what to do. And I'm just like, I feel like the other component of this is regular human beings like me literally don't know how to even do anything about our own privacy.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Well, see, no, those windows are from the GDPR. That's my fault.

• 1:02:25Negin Farsad?

  Bless their heart.

• 1:02:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because it began, it began in Europe, I remember that.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's our thing. That's the thing I was just talking about. That's one little tendril.

• 1:02:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Control your cookies and be glad you have that option.

• 1:02:35Negin Farsad?

  No, I'm glad.

• 1:02:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just insulted my guest here, saying that you don't know what to do.

• 1:02:40Negin Farsad?

  Thank you for those pop-up windows. However, I'm, I just feel like, I can't be the first person that feels at a loss when they come up.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  I don't know anybody who knows what to do with those things. No, honestly, they're like, are like those agreements you click through to do anything. Nobody reads them. I once gave a talk to the lawyers who write those agreements, and I said, I want to see a show of hands, who's read anyone else's agreement ever? Not a single hand. And then I said, who's really read all the way through the ones you're responsible for? And there were like a few hands, but they were sheepish. And, I mean, it's like this bizarre ritual we go through. It's, it's called competency theater. It's like, we, we do these things to pretend we have digital competence, but they're actually meaningless.

• 1:03:26Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's, what's the future of that? Where, where are we now and where is it going?

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Okay, the future is that human beings will do nothing but enter long strings of letters and numbers for their entire lives.

• 1:03:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Period? That's it? No, but, but, but, as I remembered it, the amount of information any of us are putting on our social media, you know, what your relationship status is, how old you are, where you live, what your previous jobs are, it's also on LinkedIn. So, what does privacy even mean? The amount of privacy, the amount of information we're just handing out.

• 1:03:59Negin Farsad?

  We just give it up?

• 1:04:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  KGB would have given their ITs to obtain.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  No, I know.

• 1:04:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fifty years ago.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  No, but that's why I'm saying that, um, controlling information flows is very hard, but I think we actually could prohibit certain algorithms, and I think we should prohibit predicting human behavior. I think people should be allowed to be responsible for their own behavior, and we shouldn't have algorithms that are modifying it or predicting it, and the only reason to predict it is to modify it, there's no other reason.

• 1:04:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's this case where someone had went online to buy a pregnancy test or something? Then all of a sudden, she started getting, uh, ads for diapers?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Oh, that's thirty years ago. No, no, no, you're way behind. Right now, we can tell. No, let me, let me be very clear.

• 1:04:40Negin Farsad?

  I've always said that about Neil.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  No, I mean, right now, any of the big internet companies know where in their, where in their menstrual cycle every woman in this room is.

• 1:04:51Negin Farsad?

  Oh my God.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  And, uh, right now, and that's been true for at least fifteen years, by the way, uh, every big internet company knows, uh, a lot about our health, a lot about our diets, every, they're like, these, these models are insane, and, uh, I don't think they're ethical, I don't think they should exist. I think people have to be, I don't think people should try to figure out how to click the cookies pop up, because it doesn't mean anything, and it's just like this useless cognitive overhead.

• 1:05:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's theater, like you said, yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  I think privacy has to mean not being toyed with. It has to mean that there's not some evil eye looking at you, trying to think about, how do we get in, how do I get to you, how do we get you? Like, that has to be what privacy is.

• 1:05:30Negin Farsad?

  And that means I will get, like, offered more ads about drill bits, and like, less ads about dresses, or whatever.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but drill bits are amazing.

• 1:05:39Negin Farsad?

  Uh, no, I'm into it. I, I would like to be served more drill bits, and fewer lipsticks. I just wanna say.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Just make sure, don't confuse. Those two things be careful. They look similar. They come in almost the same packaging. So you really, you want to be careful. I know people have made that mistake and you just like.

• 1:05:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want the computer to saying it's almost time for your period.

• 1:06:01Negin Farsad?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:06:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be like.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  Your computer is saying that already.

• 1:06:04Negin Farsad?

  I'm actually traumatized that they know.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Already marketing things to you based on that. That already, that's happened to every woman in this room and for years.

• 1:06:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Gary, take us out here.

• 1:06:13Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Jaron. Does the internet still have a pulse or is it completely dead?

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Okay, look.

• 1:06:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, by that, that was a diabolical laugh.

• 1:06:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, the evil genius behind the thing.

• 1:06:32Negin Farsad?

  We were deeply unsettled by that laugh of yes, what comes after the laugh?

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  From the heart of Silicon Valley, all of you can rest assured that we have your very, very best interests at heart. We are calculating ideal futures for you. Just, yeah, here. We are, we are. Everything, everything is good. Everything is right. Nothing to worry about. No problem. No problem. If you feel any anxiety, talk to your AI lover. You'll be soothed. It's all good. Just remember to buy crypto. The next time there's an IPO, invest in it. Not, not before, but you're, you're not allowed to. It's all private equity, but definitely help push it.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  And you'll, yeah, you'll be fine. It's all great.

• 1:07:25Negin Farsad?

  Great. That's what you're expecting right here.

• 1:07:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's kind of where you're going there.

• 1:07:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Does anyone have a translation for that?

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  You can, actually, I wonder, you know, it's kind of a funny thing. If you asked one of the language models. Jaron Lanier just said this snarky thing. What did he really mean? You know what's funny is that both Claude and ChatGPT generate excellent defenses of data dignity at this point. Because enough people have written about it. It's kind of funny. Yeah, people send me, I get emails every day from, you will believe what this AI chatbot said.

• 1:07:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Claude is the chatbot for Anthropic.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:08:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And ChatGPT is for OpenAI.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  OpenAI, that's right.

• 1:08:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Gary O'Reilly?

  If, without saying it, we're saying that the internet is broken and awash with bot slot. If we go in there with a bag of wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers, what are we needing to do to reinvigorate, to renovate?

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, right now, I'm in the, I'm in the middle of a lawsuit against Anthropic for pirating 12 of my books.

• 1:08:27Negin Farsad?

  Same. I mean, no, no, I, I opted for the, the whatever, the settlement.

• 1:08:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:32Negin Farsad?

  But either way, they scraped my stuff and I don't like it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  So I have a, I have a really funny position on these lawsuits, which is with everybody's knowledge and everybody's eyes wide open and everybody's agreement, I'm both on the board of the Authors Guild and I'm a prime scientist at Microsoft, so I sued myself. Basically.

• 1:08:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, did you win?

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  One thing I'm part of, sued another thing I'm part of, I call it capitalist yoga.

• 1:08:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  It's just like a little twist.

• 1:09:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you get into, maybe a series of lawsuits will set a ball rolling that will make all the purveyors sit up straight in their chair.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  Okay, well.

• 1:09:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and reapply the guardrails that maybe should have been there from the beginning.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  So, look, um, let me, let me get, speak seriously for a second. Um, on this particular, on these lawsuits, so I'm also a writer, I have a bunch of books and I also have been, you know, uh, in the class for these things. The issue I have is that the available remedy that, that you can get in the existing American legal system, which the Authors Guild and others have pursued, and I love the Authors Guild, it's led by Mary Rastenberger, who's amazing, and it's great, it's a wonderful organization, but the available remedy is a class action remedy, and what I don't like about that is that's one step towards the universal basic income, where it's like this giant wash for a lot of people, and that's really problematic for me.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  I need, I need to see the data dignity solution, which is an ongoing economy of creative data that's not controlled from the center, is not controlled by some lawyers, and that's, that's not a big, flat negotiation for a bunch of people, because that's where the future of creativity can be funded and respected and treated as a real thing. This is only about the past and it's about a flat past, and I, so I actually don't think... I understand it's the available solution that can be pursued by the current

• 1:10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Configuration of things, yeah.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  And so it's complicated. And like I say, I actually can see the different people's points of view because I am the different people. I'm in a very weird situation in this thing. I hope my peculiar path through all this has led me in this series of third positions that might make some sense. They might not be perfect, but at least I want people to be more aware that there aren't only binary choices in this thing.

• 1:10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you've been highly enlightening to us all in this conversation. And I thank you for taking time out of your schedule on the East Coast to join me here at my office at the Hayden Planetarium to enlighten us all on the past, present, and future of what you created.

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  My goal had been to confuse you enough that you wouldn't blame me for anything.

• 1:11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you were sharply successful in that.

• 1:11:14Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, you've been both terrifying and exhilarating. So thank you.

• 1:11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the two words, I think it is. Right. And Nagin, thanks for joining us again.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure.

• 1:11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do we find you online? Where are you?

• 1:11:26Negin Farsad?

  You can find me at Nagin Farzad on all the socials that you should also be deleting.

• 1:11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. There you go. And Gary, good to have you, man, even though you're in the UK at this moment.

• 1:11:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, pleasure.

• 1:11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This has been yet another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. What do we call this? Is it the end of the internet or the beginning of something else that we deserve and don't know it? I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.