Tribeca Film Festival: Futurist Jaron Lanier in conversation with Natasha Lyonne, on 13th June 2024

hello young Jaren yes sir hello hi [Music] guys um thanks for bringing these I appreciate the gesture you want to tell me about them maybe oh well these are a peculiar flute that I'm supposed to play a a benefit later on tonight and I came by them once when I was a teenager in the train station in Vienna and I saw a gypsy kid a Roma young man a fine young man playing this while his compatriot performed a pickpocketing maneuver on the transfixed audience and I went up to them they said I have never seen this instrument I'm an instrument fanatic and um this this is an instrument that is unknown to the musicology world and has no name if there was only one of them it would have a name but when they're two together it's a new thing in the world and I I really love it uh I meant I'll play I would appreciate that thanks so much um please uh be aware of your personal items okay I'm holding my vape tight yeah yeah yeah you really want to watch out for the Vape fight yeah uh so I sometimes call it the walrus [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] that's that's a good time Jaren I love that there are things in the world that haven't been named or classified yeah so that has no name to my I mean at at the time maybe by now I've been playing this for 30 years there might be an exhibit at the instrument collection with a name I don't know maybe there's I it's my flute yeah all it's all instruments uh at the end of the day I'm just a mouth flowing nothing um so and it's helpful for pickpocketing is something that we've learned which is great you know and and uh you know relevant to the entertainment industry let us be clear okay so um we should Dazzle we should Dazzle well uh tonight we're here and and uh hi guys uh so uh are you guys in uh the the the film world is uh that what brings you to Tribeca so you have uh all kinds of uh thoughts and and fears and uh concerns about our future I bet uh as a community um uh we've been hearing a lot about those uh and um yeah yeah yeah what what is the future jiren uh you wrote a book who owns the future who does own it yeah well for the moment the closer you are to one of the biggest uh computers in the world the more you in the future so I'm doing great yeah rest of you I don't know yeah God bless you grateful to know you yeah I mean uh I feel like the future has changed over the years you know the future wasn't really a thing for a while because and then it was like we started on this feeling of being on a ramp in the world with the Enlightenment and ideologies like Mar ISM and technological progress and capitalism and all these things all this ramp going going going up up up up and I feel like there was this feeling it was going up maybe into outer space but what I detect especially in young people lately is that we lost the future and it's not quite there anymore or it feels like one that's maybe not for people or not for most people there's a a kind of a blankness in the way young people I talk to are talking about the future and and it breaks my heart it does you know yeah well uh as a middle AED person uh I guess there's uh I I have a little bit of optimism see I think as a young person thank you uh and that is why I like to hang out with you know a players primarily and pick pockets incidentally but um yeah I I do I I do think maybe it's also because it breaks my heart Darren and so I I'm trying to hold a little uh space and maybe that's something we have in communist Pals uh is uh you know this Vision that's a fully dystopian nightmare is uh you know to too heavy a load uh to carry uh and uh it seems like gosh it would be great if it did not uh turn out that way um yeah that's my thought I mean often I think about like uh Prince you know singing like tonight we're going to party like it's 1999 and that's as far as he could imagine or curi could only imagine 2001 right it's a A Space Odyssey and we're in 2024 how did that happen of course shit's weird is my full thesis there well I usually um when characters are put into uh a maze of weird dystopian Darkness they don't quite emerge from it except for yours you never lose yourself or your character Lo lose themselves and I I think that that is amazing you articulate not losing yourself in all the weirdness uh thanks for that uh yeah yeah you told me something like that the other night uh I don't know um um playing the dark with a I love I love making you speechless it's favorite likewise uh no it's hard for me to take a compliment um no I don't you know I guess I am I am always sort of curious about uh the contents of uh the soul or like what makes uh uh one uh person obviously I got lost in this whole Deep dive and my uh years of uh Russian doll and that's how I fell into kind of uh hofstead and and a strange Loop and Ted Chang and uh found out about you or um you know I went on that journey and of course back of that journey is a you know a sort of a rock bottom that leads to a dark KN of the soul that goes on for about a decade at the end of which they say you know find yourself a a higher power which for me really ended up um opening this world of sort of Science and things I did not understand that were just clearly much greater than anything I could conceive of that sort of right sized me in uh the scope of the world uh so in an effort to move away from ego which is still a terrible problem for me as much as any other guy um but along that sort of Walkabout I think my my curiosity became just that of like what is the content of what makes a person what makes me me or you you and in uh the most D dystopian future scenario um where where were sort of a Consciousness live in a person uh do you have any sense on how that's going to play out [Music] Jaren well I mean I for some reason one of the gifts given to us in this reality is is quite a bit of latitude on how we interpret it so if you want to believe that an artificial intelligence is alive you have the freedom too if you want to believe that a fetus is alive so you could control the mother's body the fetus isn't you have the latitude to have that belief apparently uh you have there's there's a lot of uh this was the you know the circle of empathy is this thing I used to talk about decades ago and became what's that well I used to have this idea of a circle of empathy which is the circle that uh you draw around yourself and everything inside it is the stuff you believe is kind of really alive or really conscious that you can have empathy for and everything on the outside of it you don't so on the inside is like people you know and on the outside is like rocks and and then there's this fuzzy border where things can be tricky uh uh conservatives want to make the circle smaller liberals want to make the circle bigger geologists uh unified and GE the theory of this entirely yeah geologists get real kinky with this idea uh and then uh uh the um if you make the circle too big you can get incompetent if you make it too small you can get too cruel but there's always this ambiguity there's always this fuzziness so um uh I I don't think there's any absolute way to prove that other people are real the Consciousness is real there's no way to prove you have it um very much like in an earlier time people were more worried about whether God existed perhaps and then just decided it's a matter of faith we have to do that with each other we have to decide that each other exists through faith that's a modern version of K for those of you who are trying to forget your college days sorry and then uh and um now in virtual reality there's a very interesting in my view demonstration of Consciousness but there's no guarantee that everyone else will take it the way I do in Virtual Reality you can make very very strange experiences you can turn into different animals and things uh because your brain is adapted to control the animals that you evolve through to get the human form and it's pre-adapted for the ones you might evolve into so you can turn into all kinds of crazy animals and still kind of feel that body it's a wonderful thing you can split up your body into pieces and feel a diffuseness you can change the flow of time you can kind of blend your sense of body with others all like very radical experiments are possible uh not easily doing virtuity well is actually hard work absolutely as hard as any other craft but but but through all the weirdness there's there's this little nub that continues like you're in one weird thing you're in another weird thing you wear a gazelle now you're an octopus now all this stuff but what's that little thing that continues well that's your Consciousness so with the AI concept of computers we help people ignore Consciousness with the VR concept at least in my experience we help you notice Consciousness so I think of it as a Consciousness noticing machine now whether you want to believe you can still believe Consciousness isn't really a thing or it's just it's like any information system has it or it's rocks have like there's people who believe that the rocks have a little bit of it or whatever um there's ultimately a pragmatic thing which is that you can't be a technologist without knowing who the beneficiary is who you're designing for you can't have empathy without the empathy being for someone you have to fill in all the parts of the sentence to do something and Consciousness is the only way I know to identify the beneficiary of being a human it's the only way I know how to benefit others is to believe in them as being real yeah I uh I think about that a lot I was thinking about that last night it's like everybody is um so real you know like sort of a a person I work with a a person that works for them their uh husband recently passed away suddenly you know what I mean and it's like you have no idea what's going on behind uh the world of like the person that you're connected to third part like that there's so much uh uh you know um just real life connected to every moment and interaction that we have in this one uh on the relative plane there's so much kind of uh backstory happening at all times and uh sometimes in these uh in in many ways you know when you're um uh with a arguments to delete your social media accounts I did not Jaren spiler alert I tripled down um but you know we have sort of arrived at a new moment where we've almost uh become lost in the sauce you know so Nuance is lost in that sort of current of humanity or remembering um just how real we all are is really what seems to end up lost and just sort of ideas move very quickly and radically and and then uh binary in a way that sort of like I don't know maybe that's a I don't know it's a ones and zeros I don't know but it's it's uh challenging because these are quite complex times that really demand uh Nuance it seems and uh certainly one of my fears um and I think probably everyone's around uh AI to a certain degree is uh you know we talk a lot about um how everyone has suddenly anthropomorphized artificial intelligence and uh that that's dangerous but that it's potentially a concept uh purposefully introduced by uh Silicon Valley or Hollywood or whatever in an effort to kind of uh properly terrify us such that uh you know the stakes keep rising and so and then you can watch on social media the tide change as they sort of soften us to the idea again and uh things like that did you have some sort of take I know that's not really a a question uh but I'm sure you have some sense of a thread of an answer yeah I well let me say a couple of things and response to what you just said one is that computer science as it was for the first 80 or 90 years or something was all ones and zeros and lately it's become more statistical where the ones and zeros are really buried so far down that they don't matter anymore and I'm hoping so when you start with ones and zeros as your foundation it tends to reproduce itself one Z one zero and you tend to have all these binary things that are often pretty false percolating up through your experience um one way that happened I think and and you know it's funny I was right there I I I sold I think Google its first acquisition company and first an AI company a long time ago and I was around when they were starting and I'm but even the people directly doing it sometimes don't quite know what's happening I shouldn't tell you but that kind of remains true these days for the tech companies we're not totally sure what's going on but um uh what I think happened is the algorithms of well first of all there was this idea we're both leftist and we're capitalists at the same time that's a contradiction hm how we fix that well it'll feel free and communitarian and socialist share share share open Culture open source it's great but but but but but we'll also gather all the information and then we'll make money from people who want to influence all of you who are sharing so we'll have capitalism on this side but an experience of something that's more like socialism is that a contradiction just don't talk about it don't think about it don't think about it and then but the thing is in order to get that then the algorithms are incentivized not the people but the algorithms kind of gradually turn into attention uh uh collectors you know and the way you collect attention it just happens that people evolved these different cognitive systems and the one that's most readily addressable in a feedback loop is is the fight ORF flight quick Twitchy stuff which is all negative it's all about fear and aggression and it's all you know fighting and killing and you know eat that thing try not to get eaten by that thing and all don't trust people uh and so uh they found their way into getting people kind of paranoid and self-obsessed and Twitchy and nervous and uh which is the experience of social media and has made a number of our friends crazy who we don't need to name but one of them has a first letter of e in his first well and I I would argue one of them has a first letter n and the last letter uh L I mean it's just you know they're rampant 's it happened to a certain presidential candidate yeah we don't need to talk about him and no but I but and I guess next you're headed to Kanye aren't you I could I could discuss that but but but let us not let us not dwell there what I want to say is that um that this paranoid thing does tend to break the world into binaries where everybody has to get tribal about every damn thing and be opposed to it's it's become this is what everybody knows about social media but there's this interesting thing like I was saying the the AI is um it's not really artificial intelligence that's just a marketing thing but what it does represent is making code much more statistical and that interest me because in science as opposed to computer science that the fuzzy thing the the thing that's statistical is the most real thing right the building that bends a little bit is the one that won't fall over in the earthquake which is more if we were in California that would have more meeting for you than here but but these people they don't know these [ __ ] New Yorkers I know walking around streets never shaking you know New Yorkers are used to such a soft life they don't get it you don't [ __ ] get it not like la la is [ __ ] hard I mean yeah they just don't know but I mean great Bagels at every corner like SCE But but so the thing that bends instead of breaking is the real thing and so in quantum mechanics we never get a perfect measurement and yet that's where reality is in in engineering it's all statistical science is all statistical and this notion of you you were talk so the reason I'm getting to this is you were talking about science has a higher power to get out of the traps of being yes sir caught in the rigid thing and I actually think there's something to that I think that could actually work out like I don't know how how because I like the world just seems like it's stupider every year but if somehow people can get keyed into the way we actually can know reality and do anything they might be able to overcome the artificial binaries that social media has kind of you know excited them into which none of us are immune from and I do think that it is it's because there's something empirical there's something very uh healthy about uh you know knowing how much we do not know so like you say the sort of a shady statistical Prospect of the building that bends or whatever this is a Quantum thing like the Carlo relli the order of time you know why can I remember my past but I can't remember my future the fact that that's real science is oddly an a healthier tether than many other things because it sort of stops you in your track site sometimes I'm even reminded of like as a teenager I think looking at the New York Times s being a like why is it called Arts and Sciences you know and it's sort of something about the Music of the Spheres that I could never quite touch um but that did feel in some way like there was a that was a healthier place to put this idea of uh something greater than myself that I do not understand um you've talked a lot to me about the idea of incremental experiments versus sort of sads of ego and delusions of grandeur and how that's sort of a problem uh presently in uh Silicon Valley and Hollywood both that is sort of damaging this kind of more human connectedness or this little nub of self that moves from octopus to gazelle and so on it's very cute how Hollywood people think they have egos they have no idea we from Silicon Valley look up look down upon Hollywood and we think what a humble well adjusted B you very curious yeah yeah like it's like Hollywood is like a little well Grom pitting Zoom for our delation we'll stream you guys give you ever less money every year just be nice you look cute the horor the horror sorry I just Tred to tell the truth that's all like and what are they up to over there uh yeah so um Carlo relli and uh my best friend Lee Molen Co created luk quantum gravity the thing that's kind of taking over after String Theory sort of petered itself out and they have a wonderful disagreement about time right now so Lee thinks the present moment is a real physical thing that what's going on here in order for this moment to be different from past moments is like there's this calculation going on where the present moment is calculating itself and it's a it's a it's a wonderful the math behind it is so Splendid and so great Carlo doesn't Carlo thinks but here's the thing if you believe Carlo and you think that all the moments are kind of the same which a lot of people have thought Einstein's concept all the moments are the same past and future then what makes the present moment the present moment so there's only two answers uh but they both go on to the same thing which is this is the one we're conscious of so there's Consciousness again like you try to get rid of Consciousness you can bang it can try like guacamole you can try to get rid of it it'll pop up again very hard to really get rid of Consciousness um and I guess that's been said before too that uh artificial intelligence is not artificial Consciousness and you know lest we mistake one for the other because they're quite different if you're ever in Silicon Valley raising money for some movie or something don't say that oh sorry I'll get ahead of that thing that that that'll get you into a religious fight like just don't say that thing you just said and why what why well cuz there's this thing I there's this emerging Tech culture Tech religion that really really really wants to believe we're building these new superc consciousnesses it's okay it's all right I S my float b b away um no it's the weirdest thing like um people just really really want to believe in it and I'm I'm not I'm trying to I've been trying to understand why for years I because my my main Mentor when I was a kid was one of the first people to really believe this deeply his name was Marvin Minsky and like who cares like what is the big deal about thinking that your machine is conscious like why does it why is it such a thing for you well I guess it's probably uh fear right like in other words if we're naming sort of like our three Basic Instincts is you know uh I think they're actually sex society and security I've been told uh but you know to your point of sort of uh fight or flight kind of you know it's really security yeah so like you know that our instincts are kind of to mate or something you know like you know procreate and Society like we want people to like us or uh security is like you know a roof over your head or something safety um uh but anyway I think it's ultimately about mortality right like everything is about mortality at the end of the day and uh you know I on some level it's uh what's interesting to me I guess about um the future is uh how insignificant of a timeline uh human beings are relative to the rest of eras like do we even qualify as an eror no right I mean we have a shot at some form of being around for a long time we don't know yet uh I mean I think mortality is that's one Theory I've always been interested in that maybe this idea that we can make the big computer that gets conscious is our way of be that's a lot of my friends want to be uploaded into it and become immortal in it that that's definitely one of the things and um yeah and I I'm not fully opposed I might be in that camp uh TBD that's why I'm so curious about where the Consciousness goes like does it travel you know I've made a lot of jokes over the years about being like a brain in a jar and that that would be my ideal State and you know unload this thing since reading uh Welcome to The Monkey House Kurt vaget as a kid I was uh obsessed with that idea of like you know get rid of this [ __ ] this is nothing but a bunch of problems like uh so he kind of upgrade these organs or uh like lose the whole thing and just carry but does the soul live in the brain and sort of uh brings me brings us back there but I I'm not fully opposed to the idea of uh uh uploading except for the fact that what then is our sort of tangible reality and then does anything have meaning at all right well I'll let me propose a couple of thoughts about sure thanks yeah because I'm about to do it like tomorrow so thanks for getting I mean there I can introduce you to Silicon valy Rich crazy people who will you know put your brain in of that ah I'd be so grateful Jaren I just it's it's in my living will uh but I really don't have a plan you might yeah when you meet them you might change your mind though yeah so I like that it's Eerie out there huh yeah it sounds Eerie so look there's a there's a couple of things I want to say one is that you can't explore this idea without considering the the political and economic side of it so when people talk about AI in the abstract they always imagine it as just this sort of ambient thing that's happening it's like yeast in the air and there's an AI here and an AI there but that's not true AIS are always owned by companies they're big computers they're specific ones so like in the movie Her um you never meet the company there's like some company that supports this AI but like what's their motivation what's their business model why is this thing happening we never learned that um which is different from the Truman Show where we do right and so with AI there's this extra layer this extra sort of eyelid over our eyes that hides the company because there's this fantasy that it's a freestanding thing but it isn't so the thing is as soon as you believe in AI might be worthy of being uploaded into you're also giving extraordinary economic and political power to whoever owns that and if you wish to do that do it with the Microsoft one because then I get more money and I can buy more weird instruments which really really really important but um uh so make the right choice but but but but um there's another thing I want to say which is um there's an artificial binary between believing you have to either be very conservative about human nature and presume that if there's a person in a thousand years or a million years if we make it they'll look like us today and uh or maybe they'll have like some weird rubber mask like on Star Trek or something but they'll be basically sort of humanoid and recognizable and then the alternative that no it's all unconceivable we're going to go through a singularity and everything will become unknowable because it's so advant Ah that's interesting that you're bringing up the singularity because my old buddy Ray Kurtz um I is not my friend I don't know the guy uh but I thought that he was sort of perceived as a hack historically uh but is he the guy that introduced the concept of sing because also I guess the whole movie Transcendent man or whatever falls apart because then he wants to Frankenstein his dad at the end so seems like a right uh but what what you know do you believe in the singularity or the singularity was uh first proposed by John V noyman one of the two oh van noyman a Hungarian a Hungarian yeah um and um uh from apparent you know U very uh brilliant incredibly productive mathematician like just crazy uh but anyway um the thing is there is a middle path so the singularity is this idea that the AI will suddenly get smart enough to design itself and it'll just explode and then all reality will be transformed it'll make nanor robots that'll transform the Earth and everything will become totally different and we won't recognize it and we can't even talk about it some new Transcendent holy thing but the thing is from an information science point of view if you pass through a singularity or even a near Singularity what doesn't make through as much information like the amount of information that you can send into a black hole and get out is very minimal oh right we're were talking about this the other night the teleporting and sort of like what re structures on the other side well if there's if there's a wormhole maybe you can preserve information that depends on what physics is who that's let's like it we don't yeah we don't have time for that guys we don't have time for that all right I know you thought we had time for them we just don't yeah but but for you know but ities lose information and so if we everything I know and love about reality is based on cumulative incremental feedback and learning so we've learned more over time we've become more things have become richer um I meet these hoodlums and learn to play the instrument they were using as a as a scheme and everything everything incrementally improves but the singularity breaks all that so there's an in between path where people don't have to stay the same or you don't have to stay a traditional person arbitrarily into the future but at the same time everything's continuous so there's continuous learning and information isn't lost along the way that middle path is the one where people might still be around in a million years or billion years but will be unrecognizable to us and yet we have had a continuity of memory and learning and growing back to us instead of a total break that's a that's a possible future I like that future better better than either the one that imagines people will be the same forever or the one that imagines that it can't be imagined instead continuity in principle can go on forever there's no reason not to the universe is like that the Universe has been continuous all this time if we break thaten if we break that if we break that with an artificial Singularity where're insulting our universe you know [ __ ] that yeah I I sort of feel like a plotting on the inside for that because that's very promising right so God doesn't roll dice type of a an idea not that I'm a God guy I want to make that clear I'm a full you know Satanist fulltime um but uh it's a interesting yeah it's so wild scientists seem to love uh the concept of uh some sort of order uh that makes sense of things I always in that's so wild cuz you'd think it'd be the inverse uh well how much time do we have does anybody have a sense of that uh all this T of time it's become Mercurial about 15 um well uh I you know I guess um it might be I would love uh for you to share with these guys um uh some things that we've talked about as far is uh was it so interesting about uh Taiwan maybe uh because I think for uh Us in the Arts what's uh so harrowing is a concept of of uh copyright you know and then on the other side what I've spoken to you about uh historically is this idea of um you know skin in the game or uh you know uh there's a blood on the page every uh page jfki writes or for any of us as you know writers or filmmakers we know that it's a back of anything you make is um like there's a uh bodies are piled up it's like your personal life you know cigarettes like my lungs are dead it's a what I've done you know what I mean relationships destroyed marriage is broken you know um and then it's like the thing doesn't even get made or something and so I often think about um like is is there a possibility of sort of uh like life extension for the artist of that you have the ability to make more things or is it uh ultimately just a way of completely shutting down and robbing us of uh our previous work you know and and I think that that's one of the primary things that in as relates to film making or the Arts is uh so specifically kind of harrowing for all of us is trying to you know square that circle with uh you you know the fact that we all have these cell phones or um the uh the new uh Adobe um uh edit Suite that's AI already you know as a lowbudget filmmaker who doesn't want to extend that shot you never made it at the end of the night you know it's there's sort of all these weird ways in which it's embedded in our Tech already and uh and then there's this kind of bide of like what happens to everyone as Craftsman what happens to our work what H do you have any sense of that even though it's not necessar your area of speciality um oh yeah or is it I mean sort of I guess I mean you more than me that's for sure sir yeah going back uh when the internet was starting up uh there was a strong aspect of technical culture and Technical culture is incredibly influential it can defy the profit motive even it's it's one of the most influential things in the world and yet it's kind of underrecognized so there was this idea of everything being open and sharing um which was started uh oh I have a personal history with this but it's like too long I guess I won't go I won't go into that I used to for those of you who know who Richard stalman is we used to crazy crazy times back in the early 80s but anyway um the um uh I think we've kind of zigged and zag between two extremes so um what happened with some Arts not all is that coming out of the Great Depression the labor union movement was strong and uh certain creative professions were able to get reasonable deals in our culture and it and that included the actors uh sag that striked recently in part over AI um John up right the hunger the the Jungle the Jungle the Jungle jungle that was a big one and musicians uh musicians got Mechanicals which were kind I so there's no such thing as information that isn't mechanical like there's no information that isn't embodied and yet we've decided digital information isn't a mechanical which is scientifically nonsense but whatever we want to believe in information in a certain way it's our religion now I guess so whatever but the point I want to make is that um this idea of copyright and other intellectual property protections maybe was taken a bit far and so for instance The Heirs to an artist continue to exploit the artist and so you have all kinds of things coming out of I don't know Walt Disney or Jim HS like they're all these things with The Heirs uh do things it's often wonderful and it is kind of like an extension of that artist's work and um that came out of intellectual property law and then you have the people saying no intellectual property Wars it's it's a horrible idea to have IP everything should be open everything should be shared but then what that did is instead of supporting artists it just sent all the money to the central computer server that routed things right it do total backfire complete disaster so now we live in this world of these two extremes where you kind of flip between these two crazy things and um in Silicon Valley we're relentlessly trying to Stamp Out the last little bits of the other culture so now it's like well if you if you want to sell your copyright thing it's fine but it's going to go through our streamer and you're going to make less money than you used to in fact yeah I mean we definitely experienced that as a community a long time ago obviously you know as one of the first kids on Netflix I mean it was wild that we were signing these uh and but then now you know as a never have I ever done a sort of 360 body scan or something which I think many people do I just don't get into that much action uh many action pictures but it's sort of already a thing like I remember back in the um wait variety said you're doing a martial arts movie oh thanks variety you know I know guy there and I have him play some stuff because you know I love the Dow of the woo and so I'm hot for the subject lovely guy that thing yeah yeah yeah no but so um but where does um can you talk a little bit about uh Taiwan oh Taiwan yeah yeah yeah so um uh for some years there's a small circle of people who've been trying to articulate what an alternate digital economy would look like in a digital culture and I wrote a book called of future outlining a sort of a middle ground where you don't have the kind of absolute intellectual property thing but you have a sort of a soft thing but it would be Universal and um in fact the very first design for a digital Network goes back to a guy named Ted Nelson who was always imagining it be being this way his parents were both in Sag and he really wanted to support artists and then it got blown up by other people so it didn't happen and that's a whole interesting long tale but uh some of the other people include Glenn wild an economist I work with in many others and there an amazing how many people who know who Audrey Tang is only from you yeah you know she seems like a fascinating figure I sort of wanted to get there just to kind of end us on a bit of an uh an uplift an optimistic uh something in all thisness so an earthquake just happened uh right here in New York so you know I want to say you feeling happy I don't understand why people don't know about important things honestly like the whole the internet was supposed to make this impossible where people would know important things and it's not working okay Audrey was until very recently the minister of information in the Taiwanese government uh she's the highest ranking out trans politician in history that we know of unless you count there there might have been an Egyptian and Pharaoh that's that's like a whole controversial but anyway she's unique in that way um and she implemented uh and tested in the real world some of these ideas about an alternate way of doing the internet and in Taiwan there's measurably less polarization me measurably less Mis information like it worked it's incredible uh so now um I won't say anything that's not in the media already but keep your eye on the major effort to try to buy Tik Tok and Improvement and improve it and there's a chance we can make things better I'm hoping hoping hoping hoping hoping I don't know for sure but anyway um the interesting thing about Audrey is that Audrey actually got in a position of influence and prove the internet can be better than we're used to so all the people say well it's just inevitable it'll make us hate each other and we'll be stupider and stupider and we'll get populist horrible politicians and that's all it's going to be forever no we have the counter example like those people who tell me oh science fiction has to be dystopian or nobody will buy it no no because Star Trek so for people who tell me that internet has to suck I say Audrey Taiwan we have the counter example but we don't know about it because the internet makes us blind like I just can't even believe it like how can you not know about this but you know there you are uh well certainly what's been revealed is that these are uh very expansive questions uh that are sort of you know uh endless genuinely uh it's uh uh they're huge uh uh Concepts uh that sort of Encompass everything and uh nothing and um you know uh it's it it is it is it it does feel I think high stakes and uh high risk uh and and um as somebody who usually enjoys those types of behaviors I got to say this one's pretty out there um uh but it's it's wonderful to know um you know that you're out there uh sort of fighting the the good fight and um trying to sort of create an ethical uh world uh somewhat within all this um so uh you think it's possible and maybe we'll end on that I think we're about out of time right uh how do you see a sort of um uh how I guess you discussed this sort of middle this middle path uh do you think that that's uh really viable from where we are now um I I mean it's viable I don't know what's the most likely outcome it's a very scary moment obviously I I'm nervous every day I'm I'm nervous about what's happening with our country with the world everything in the big picture seems like it's teetering on the edge of just horrible near Futures right um but what I try to remember is in history somehow people have pulled through a lot of really stupid times and sometimes it's happened with catastrophes along the way uh but not always sometimes we actually kind of get it together and um I'm I hope we can do it this time with some without a lot of you know know war or the other things we traditionally do um oh yeah it reminds me and maybe we should end on this this meme I saw that said uh why does all AI well all AI has be screenwriters no none of the AI can pick plastic bottles out of the ocean um is there a plan for that Jaren like some good news coming from this front it's it's an excellent question now first of all there are AIS taking plastic out of the ocean uh one less problem for us to worry about tonight however they're underutilized and underfunded ah so you know it's in it's in between um there are uh one of the gigantic gaps which is really annoying to me is that all the people interested in Ai and robots aren't revolutionizing the mining and resource extraction Industries like that stuff that's like the big piece of the puzzle that's under under addressed um like maybe certain people who are good at starting companies could work on that instead of D social media things I don't know just thinking yeah you know uh and um the potential is there um there are a lot of things I think one of the problems is that um Everybody Wants Infinity instantly like you don't want to just make a good investment you want some meme stock or some stupid nft or crypto thing that'll give you 10,000 return instantly and and like and you want some kind of of um you want some kind of high that this technology will change everything it'll change everything but you know that no technology does in any particular way like I mean the way Improvement happens is incrementally you know always always always always um and to like we have to somehow love progress as it is instead of this sort of cartoon version of instant everything that everybody thinks they deserve and should get you know and I mean that applies generally to life you know it's not um and I I'm sounding like a stoic I guess but there there's just a lot of uh truth to it and uh I the worst thing about silon Valley right now is this insistence on absolute instant everything that oh we're not going to invest in this thing the world needs because we can do a meme stock we'll make lots of money or something like that you know and um you see that um in my opinion really undermining a lot of uh people who would otherwise be intelligent technologists or investors um well I think that you know for me the takeaway uh has been or at least what I've you know gleaned sort of uh uh as I started investigating you know my um this journey uh down this rabbit hole is uh really like uh educating uh ourselves on all of this information is a lot more helpful than sort of uh following uh you know the echo chamber whatever of our own uh social to really understand because at the end of the day like something that I was very struck with that you said uh when we were hanging out after some other panel about subjects like this because these are popping up all around town now uh um is you know that people are forgetting that there's actually still people uh in control of these uh you know tools at this moment or whatever they are and so sort of the further we remove ourselves from that kind of conversation in a way uh the more that you know we're at risk of letting it just be this amorphous blob of uh Terror that's washing upon us um and uh and so I think you know I guess I just thank you for your humanity and a way uh being out there H and reminding me of that uh so I don't know [Music] uh well we don't want to end on us s anybody got a hot tip hot question life hack yes sir uh can you tell us what the Taiwan internet is like and why it's better um it uh you should read about it and uh you can look it up and and uh if you look up articles by either me or Glenn wild especially there's some good description in English language about it but what they do is they um they have hierarchies of committees who govern it and they have the way they use algorithms is not to gather attention but to avoid replication of statement and they have a uh a proportion proportional voting systems at high granularity for managing issues about neighborhoods and whatnot they have a lot of things that are actually um from from the perspective of what we do here like incredibly sophisticated although they were exactly what we all thought should happen with the internet decades ago but they're actually doing it it's the only place so I'm sorry to not go into more detail right now but you know uh technically one second technically we're out of time so that's the best I can give you right now well kids it's been real it's been fun uh it's been really fun uh you don't have to go home uh but you can'ts stay here and um and those are the facts as we know them uh for just for today uh your Martial Arts movie yes and please do catch me and uh hatch itach three uh coming soon to theaters near you um thank you so much guys thanks for being here