Digital Dignity: VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier at WIRED25

(soft music)

I'm Nicholas Thompson I'm the editor of Wired.

Thanks, we're having a really good weekend here.

It is my great pleasure to get to interview one of

the smartest most interesting people in Silicon Valley,

Jaron fa he is one of the inventors of virtual reality.

He is the author of many many books,

two of which are downstairs,

after this he will head downstairs and sign them.

They are Dawn Of The New Everything and

Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Account Right Now.

If you don't follow that advice, please tweet this event

with hashtag fa (audience laughing)

but I love I love interviewing Jaron.

So this should be a very interesting conversation.

Please welcome to the stage Jaron Lanier.

(audience clapping)

Hey nick Good to see you again.

Hey audience.

Alright Jaron, so in preparation for this conversation,

I read all the things that Wired has written about you

over the years, which is many.

Wired has been around for 25 years,

it has been 24 years and 11 months

since we wrote our first profile of Jaron.

And I wanna quote from that profile

it's right after your VR our company

had transferred to some other people.

It was an interesting period in your life

and this is one of the things we wrote

that really stuck with me.

Though he has walked through the valley of Silicon,

he fears no evil.

His music and his software comfort him

and having survived reasonably intact,

he can only revel in the exquisite wonder of it all.

And what I like about that,

(laughing)

it's good right?

Probably Kevin edited that.

What I love about that is that, when you ever you read

an interview with Jaron and he's been

a fierce critic of Silicon Valley,

he's been a fierce critic of where technology has gone,

it always comes to music and spirituality.

Every interview abig part of it,

everything turns in that direction.

It's not about product, it's not about efficiency,

it's never about money.

It's always, always ends up with music and spirituality.

And so Jaron, reading some of your recent writings

and your recent interviews, it seems like you're actually

a little worried about what technology has done

to our spiritual well-being as humans,

and to our ability to make peace with music.

So why don't we start with your critique of social media

and what it has done to spirituality and music.

'Cause I just wanna, I don't,

I don't wanna start with like the base level of

your critique I want to go like six levels deep

'cause we got 30 minutes so, go.

Okay, first of all, you describe me as worried

which I suppose is accurate but I want

I wanna say before anything else

that to me criticism and optimism are the same thing.

Mm-hmm.

That when you criticize things it's because

you think they can be improved.

So it's the complacent person or the fanatic

who's the true pessimist, because they feel

they already have the answer all that can be known is known

and the universe is done,

and the singularity is coming,

there are no mysteries, science is complete,

all of those cut.

Those are the people who are the pessimists, all right.

It's the people who think that things are open-ended

that things can still be changed,

through thought, through creativity.

Those are the true optimists, and so worried sure,

but it's optimistic worried.

Okay, that's the first thing I'ma say.

The second thing I want to say is...

to me, a sense of open-ended mystery in reality and in life

is absolutely core to being a good scientist

or a good technologist, or for that matter a good writer,

good artist or just a good human being.

We don't have any consistent scientific description

of the world. Mm-hmm.

We are still groping.

We're still in this little island of discovery

that we've created wonderfully that we can grow

but we're surrounded by a sea of mystery.

And I think that that sensibility,

that there's more to be invented and created than we know

or can imagine is just absolutely core

to any sense of meaning.

So having said that, you want to get to the deepest stuff.

So there's this question of like,

what are we doing here in this life, in this reality?

And to me, like at the cutting edge of reality,

at the cutting edge of the next moment where we invent

what the universe will be,

where we're creating what will be the legacy for the future,

there's creativity and this sort of genius required

to figure out how to be kind, at any given moment.

So we're at the moment right now

where we are inventing that.

Yeah right the second.

Okay, and we have been in that moment

creating it for the last million years

for the last two years.

Like, has something changed that it's put us in a moment

where we are creating.

I don't know.

Mm-hmm.

I tend to, I'm not sure if it's useful to come up with

these grand theories that overreach, where we say that...

It's Wired 25th anniversary conference,

let's get some grand theories that overreach man.

If you think you could make some money from that

I'm not for it , like go for it.

No I mean,

I You know...

there's a the funny thing about this is

if what you think the core meaning is,

is a mystery, if that, if the acknowledgement

is some kind of mystery is central to meaning at all,

then, you kind of have to walk a fine line.

Yeah.

I used to I don't know if this is

in any of the old wired things you read

but I used to imagine this tightrope, that you have to walk

and on one side, maybe to the right let's say,

you fall into some kind of

excessive nerd supremacy reductionism sort of a thing

where you say,

Oh there's this grand system

and we're just on this on this curve

and the curve started at the Big Bang and it has

an inevitable conclusion or something like that.

And then, everything becomes kind of meaningless

because you've made yourself blind with this abstraction

that you think explains everything.

And so that's kind of the the nerdism fallacy

or whatever dataism, and then on the other side,

is superstition.

Yeah.

Where you start to say,

Well just because we don't really understand

how quantum field theory and general relativity can connect

it must mean that my mind can talk to plants or something.

And so, that's the other that's a fallacy on the other side

it's not that unrelated, but finding this point in between

where you say, there is mystery,

and the way to address that mystery is with rigor,

it's with self-doubt, it's with modesty,

it's with intellectual modesty,

where you don't assume narratives that are

really beyond your reach but at the same time,

you believe in a destination and a quest for meaning

that's but, totally beyond your reach

and you quest for it incrementally,

that that tightrope I think, is where technology can improve

it's where beauty can happen,

it's where relationships can be real.

Well let's, let's talk about the technology part

of walking on a tight rope and let's talk particularly about

the social media platform.

So, you've just written a book about them.

What is the role that they should play in keeping society

at the right point as we progress on that tightrope.

That's an interesting way to phrase it,

so kind of a top-down assumption that they have this role

in keeping society a certain way.

Well they have they have some role

in influencing where we are.

Well, alright if we want to talk about

what social media could be broadly.

We're really kind of talking about the idea of

the Internet itself, some way that people can connect

using information technology in a broad way.

And I've always believed that that can

and should be beautiful and even essential.

Mm-hmm.

I mean totally aside from anything else

it's a matter of survival because we couldn't even

understand what the climates doing without connected devices

on an Internet, so it's not,

it's not even a question that the Internet

is something we need and we need we need to be able to

collaborate with each other over it.

So that's, but the thing that's...

When we use the term social media,

what we tend to mean these days, is these giant platforms

that have effectively taken over the Internet

for almost everybody, almost all the time,

that do so using this weird business model where there,

anytime two people connect, it's financed by a third person.

Yeah.

Whose only motivation is to manipulate

those two in a sneaky way.

And so, it's it's created

this whole architecture that on every level, recursively

is based on sneakiness and manipulation often using

weird behaviorist, hypnotic, unacknowledged techniques

to get people more and more engaged or addicted

and persuaded in one way or another or get them

into compulsive behavior patterns that aren't necessarily

in their own interest,

that aren't even necessarily coherent to anybody's interest,

that are practically an open invitation to the worst actors

to jump in to use the thing for their own purposes

which are often terrible.

And, and that thing that is horrible and not survivable

that's the thing I criticize.

So you don't defined social media as that thing.

Well, the thing is, right now there's basically

no social media account you can sign on to

that isn't part of that, because it's taken over so much

because of network effect.

And do you think that it was inevitable

that once we started creating social media systems

they would end up the way they have ended up?

No, in fact the earliest ones were different.

They weren't necessarily perfect

but they were certainly better.

I think we made a series of mistakes, and the funny thing

is that all of the mistakes weren't driven through

a lack of consideration, but rather by a firm ideology

that happens to have backfired.

Okay, so for instance, there was this very strong culture

in the 80s of night and 90s,

demanding that everything be free, and...

That wired when we put that on our cover.

Yeah, Yeah you guys didn't necessarily help.

(audience laughing)

But the problem with that, is that there was also,

in Wired and everywhere else,

this practical worship of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship

that like as Steve Jobs put it,

You're denting the universe.

It's this michi in contact with the future

where you're these magical, special, elevated people

can change the course of events through their brilliance.

And so, if you want to have hero entrepreneurs

and everything's supposed to be free,

there aren't too many ways to reconcile those,

so you land in this finance through third parties

who are sneaky.

I mean it's, there's really no other solution.

So, it was two ideologies that each by themselves made sense

but combined, created this third outcome that was horrible.

But then there were other mistakes too,

there were architectural mistakes,

Let's stay on that one because I think

it's a critique I've, a lot of people have made

and you've made particular articularly which is that

had say Facebook developed with a business model

based on subscriptions, or sales, or commerce,

or individual payments, it would be completely different

and much harder to hack by the Russians then the fact that

it's add support of them.

I believe that.

Do you think though that had Facebook changed

and had it a different business model,

it would truly have evolved in a different way?

Would Twitter have evolved in different way?

If you if you start with a different business model

at the beginning,

are we in a totally different place right now?

Yeah. Totally, absolutely.

Economic incentives are ultimately

the most powerful elements in a, in any system

that has a market.

Okay, so then, what if today Sheryl Sandberg

were to wake up, you say you know what, Ads, enough Ads,

let's make it payments and subscriptions.

What happens?

Sheryl doesn't have the power,

so someone else has to wake up.

Okay,well Sheryl created that business,

Sheryl and Mark they both could wake up this morning

they're watching the live stream.

Okay, now we're talking...

Cheryl and everybody at Facebook

the whole executive management team wakes up, and they say

you know what...

Some of them have by the way,

often, often leaving as a result, so it's happening.

It's not a hypothetical.

But say if you cheat...

So okay, but you're asking like what,

with what should they do, what's the path from here today?

Are the curves so, like so hardened right now

that you can't change the direction,

this was many companies that are to going in,

or can you change it by reversing that decision

that was made eight years ago.

I think you can change it and in fact

because I'm an optimist I'm convinced we will.

Okay.

I don't know exactly how soon,

and there are a lot of open questions about how to do it,

and I don't think it'll be totally smooth,

but I think once it's done, shareholders will be happy,

everybody will be happier.

I think it's a multiple win thing,

Vladimir Putin might not be happy, that's okay.

But I think most almost everybody in the loop

who has any stake in this thing will be happy.

And the way to do it, of course, is the question like that,

to imagine a better destination is vastly easier,

that's not to say it's easy but it's vastly easier

than a path to that destination that won't make things worse

that's the hard part.

And so, from the Facebook perspective,

I would look to a few examples that can serve as inspiration

that might show us how things can be better.

An example I'd like to bring up is Netflix,

and the reason I bring it up is

when Netflix was first starting to push a streaming business

when it was more of a will send you discs by mail business.

A very common worry about that idea

was that, well you can get all the streaming content

you want for free.

Which is, which was true it remains true

and the response to that is,

well, A, We can make an overall experience

that's still worth the money because it'll just be easier,

less hassle, less risk, less whatever,

and B, we can expand our value proposition

so it's actually saving you money versus cable or whatever,

so that it doesn't feel like this new imposition

but rather like a savings.

So if you look at Netflix ability

to start a subscription business successfully,

I think it gives you hope that business models can change

and if people are used to free things

they actually can be persuaded that a paid model

makes the world better.

I think the really revolutionary transition

that has to happen might,

and I mean Facebook is about to announce moves

in this direction, so we don't know.

But I think people who are on Facebook need

to be able to earn money directly through it.

And, so it can't just be give us money

it has to be also you can earn money

you can grow the whole economy, this is a two-way street

and the community that's really been putting energy

into that class of solution is the blockchain community.

Which has been around on a theoretical level

for a while, but in terms of a cultural force

it's pretty recent.

And so, given all those factors,

I'm actually pretty optimistic

ultimately it's up to Facebook to find their own path,

but I think all the ingredients are there.

That's super interesting right 'cause

I have heard the argument that,

what blockchain does,

is it gives you a chance to sort of break up the monopolies.

It will do to the current centralized database monopolies,

what the Internet did to Brick and Mortar stores right

and it'll decentralize , create a new efficient system

and you can actually create

a new Facebook through blockchain.

I've heard that argument it's a plausible argument.

I have not heard the secondary argument that you just made

which is that blockchain companies will push Facebook in

a direction of payments.

Explain how that works and what's happening right now.

Well, I don't fully know. Mmmmhhh.

So there's a...

everyday there's more sort of radiation

from Facebook that they're about to announce

some sort of a thing in the space,

so let's wait and see what they say.

I think it sounds like it'll be soon.

I hope it's creative and bold.

Okay, well let's go back to another thing

that Facebook is genuinely implementing.

So Facebook payments maybe maybe not.

What Facebook is doing, is they're genuinely trying to study

their impact on people.

They're starting to spend more time recommending

that people leave Facebook and go meet people offline.

They've changed their algorithm

to focus on meaningful interactions,

they've changed it to focus on trustworthiness.

They may not have changed it enough,

but if Facebook only were to make changes

in those directions, if they were to push time well-spent

to keep changing their algorithm

but they weren't to change their business model,

can they change their core effect in society

or is that just never gonna work?

No, I think all the changes you mentioned are positive

and they're evidence of goodwill in the community of people

who work at Facebook.

So I view them optimistically, however,

the core business model has to change because

the incentives have to change

if the results are gonna change.

I mean you can have all the good intentions in the world

and all the initiatives and all of the regulations

if your government, you can do all kinds of things

but if the core incentives

are pulling in one direction, they'll fail.

There has to be some kind of coherence between

what you hope to do in the incentives you're creating.

So you have to change the core business model.

Alright, so you're happy with the stuff they've done

but it's just not enough.

So I want to go back five minutes in our conversation,

where I said the core mistake was payment source advertising

and you said well there were other choices made in

the architecture that put it in the wrong direction

what were those choices?

Yeah, and perhaps I bear a little bit of responsibility

for some of that too 'cause I was in the community

that was complacent about this.

So from the 80s into the 90s, there was this...

culture of this sort of pre-Internet

and then the early Internet.

Yeah

And for those who don't remember,

I mean the the packet-switched idea

that's at the core of the Internet had predated

what we call the Internet

but it was a bunch of incompatible

different packet switch networks,

who were persuaded in part through government bribery

basically that was put together by a senator named Al Gore

to become interoperable and out of that we got the Internet.

And the original idea was to make

the Internet super super barebones

and to leave it all to private industry initiative.

So the initial Internet had no representation of people,

there was no membership concept,

there's no identity concept,

there wasn't even the tiniest bit of personal storage

therefore, there was no sense of provenance

or keeping track of where bits had come from,

there was no sense of authentication,

there was certainly no implementation

of commerce solutions, there was nothing.

It was just very very raw

and that spirit of keeping everything

as minimal as possible was kind of replicated

by Tim Berners-Lee in the web protocol,

which in my opinion committed

a primal sin of not having backlinks.

It only had, it would something could point

at something else to get at that things data

but they the thing that was pointed at didn't know

it was being pointed at.

And that created this web,

where there was no provenance for data,

no way of knowing what was real,

no way of knowing where it had come from

and therefore no way for people to build up

a sort of an accumulation of personal achievement.

Well, that's interesting.

Yeah, and so the thing is, if you look

so I was part of this early community,

I was a chief scientist of Internet to for a while

which was the academic insertion that figured out

how to scale this thing in the 90s,

and what we knew and we talked about this,

is that we're making gifts

of hundreds of billions of dollars to persons unknown

to fill these missing gaps, right?

So the backlinks who's gonna fill them,

it turned out Google did.

That's essentially Google's core function

or it was at the start. Right.

Who's gonna create these accounts.

Well, initially firms like Myspace but ultimately Facebook

and that these things naturally become monopolies.

So all the things we left out deliberately turned into

these giant monopolistic or behemoth companies

to fill in the gaps.

So okay let's just Yeah

There's so many interesting things you said.

Yeah yeah yeah

let's focus on one.

So I agree one of the great problems of

the Internet today is that, you don't own your data

your data is owned by whatever company.

Facebook has a lot of my data,

my data stays in a Facebook server

and I can access it as I travel around the web

but that should actually stay with me

as I travel around the web instead of

being pinged in the Facebook servers.

How do you architect an Internet from the beginning,

so the data stays with the person not in

the servers of the companies?

And then relatedly at this moment,

where we built the current architecture,

how do we build a new architecture?

Is it possible?

Yeah, well the architectural problem of letting

of keeping your own data,

is a solved problem

and probably the current proposal

that's making the rounds that's possibly

the model that'll catch on is Tim Berners-Lee's new thing

which is called Solid which just which does that

we should have done it before,

but anyway, it's not a mystery.

The technology is not a mystery for how to do that.

The part that it's not exactly

I wouldn't call it scary or a mystery

but where there's further adventure invention required

is the economics of it .

Exactly how you work out, and the economics

can I say something about the economics?

Please.

Alright, (audience laughs)

to understand this thing you have to kind of come at it

from different angles and the economics is one of them.

So there's this example I use all the time.

So those have you've heard it a million times,

sorry for repeating it, but it's the language translators.

Yep.

So for years and years my mentor Marvin Minsky

had tried to figure out a way to translate

between natural languages like English and Spanish

and it never worked until the 90s,

when some researchers at IBM figured out

you could do it with big data.

And then by having massive statistical correlations

with preexisting corpora that had been translated

you could get results that are readable.

So then companies like Google and Microsoft primarily

these days started offering free services

and that's had the effect of reducing

the employment prospects for professional translators

to a tenth of what they were very much has happened

for recording musicians or investigative journalists bla bla

Okay, but here's the thing.

If you look at this on the surface you might say,

well too bad they're buggy whips like

their economic niche has been made obsolete by automation

they have to find new work,

we'll train them for something else or whatever.

Except if you look a little deeper you discover

that language changes every day.

Every day there are new public events, new pop culture,

new memes, new slang and so we have to scrape or steal from

these people tens of millions

of new phrase translations every day

just to keep the translator current enough

to be usable every day.

So through one side of her mouth we're telling them

you're obsolete you don't get paid,

the robots doing your job,

through the other side of our mouths are saying

oh but we sure better be able to steal data from you

in order to create that illusion.

And it's just fundamentally dishonest and twisted

and this becomes crucial because another of

the big questions of tech is

where the robots will put people out of work

and whether we need to all go on

some you know universal basic income or something.

And so in this case if we could just be more honest

about the provenance of data and the way things work,

we could transition people to new jobs in the data space

instead of telling them they're obsolete.

So you believe that there are jobs

that we are getting rid off because of

our religious devotion to data that

would actually make the data better if we kept them.

Hey, you have a Twitter handle for me?

I have no Twitter account.

[Man] Yeah I just took care of that.

oh for God's sakes.

What is wrong with you people?

You really just believe in this stuff like your religion

like you just, like be skeptical, think, think oh my God.

Anyway sorry what were you saying?

(audience laughing)

I was saying, how do you get to the point then

it seems like the argument you're making

is there jobs that are being wiped away

because of a devotion to data

that would actually be beneficial to the world

having more data and not just to the world but even

to have an efficient language translators.

How can you make the market accept that

if that premise is true?

Well it's like a phase transition,

like right, now the paradigm or paradigm shift or something

the current situation is what might be called

a paradigm shaft, where we're where we have

this kind of fake situation.

So right now, we can't tell the people

that we need their data.

So therefore we have to to trick them into giving us

the data we want, but what would make much more sense

than just to tell them hey this is the data we need,

we love you we'd like you to thrive

we could create a whole new global population

of middle class translators and make our translators better

It would be like win-win for everybody.

The economy would grow, like that's what markets

are supposed to do, but if you're not allowed to talk

to anybody in a market and it's all anonymous

and tricky then the market breaks.

So the thing is right now, within this stealthy tricky world

that we've accepted, it feels like nothing can be different

but that's precisely because we've put hoods on our heads

and we're refusing to look at what's really going on.

If we could actually be honest about what data we need

and how data is used where it comes from,

we could actually offer people more dignity

and have an expanded economy and better working technology.

I mean this to me, is kind of obvious.

It's just the transitions hard because

we're so ingrained in this sort of fallacy.

So that leads to another question

which is you know the point of this conference is

what were the most important choices made in

the last 25 years that helped shape things?

What are the ideas that will help shape the next 25 years?

You've just laid out a couple of very important ideas

they can help shape last 25 years.

Earlier you said one of the biggest errors

of the previous 25 years was free.

In the devotion everything should be free

which leads to the advertising-supported model,

which leads to everything, it leads to.

Are there other things that we got wrong in Silicon Valley?

Are there other big ideas of the last 25 years

that everybody believed and turned out now

from this vantage point we're correct or harmful.

And just to be clear,

I'm not saying that free

is necessarily an impossible destination.

It's just the incompatibility of free

and hero' entrepreneurs.

It's done all kinds of great.

We have to choose one or the other.

Like if we were really going to say from now on

I would choose free.

We want socialist society and we don't want Apple

to charge for iPhones.

We want that to become something that's free.

We don't want you know we like if you're really willing

to demonetize the world

and make it some kind of free information space,

then you have to criticize companies

like Apple that charge for things.

I'm not quite willing to do that.

I think in general for all the flaws of market economy

they've been less likely to degenerate

into horrible dictatorships

and attempts at socialism or communism.

So totally agree

Empirically, I think nothing's perfect

in large system ideas.

Systems are always a little confusing and beyond us

and that's true in economics and in politics

as much as in anything else,

but, just empirically so far

I distrust attempts at some kind of

I don't know how to put this

totally socialistic experiment.

They just seem to degenerate

because there's always some power hub

at the center that gets claimed by the worst people.

You start out with Bolsheviks and you end up with Stalinist.

That's what always happens,

and so that's why you know given the choice,

but the one thing that's the worst,

we're getting the worst of both worlds right now.

We're getting the worst of free

and the worst of paid at the same time.

If you're trying to do this bizarre incompatible combination

But are there other ideas besides other equivalent ideas

like the notion that open-source is a good thing?

If open source means transparent source,

I think it's a totally worthy idea.

Whether it's always the right thing I'm not

Let me explain why it might not always be the right thing.

I think there's this notion that people need to be able

to insulate themselves until they're ready to share,

like for instance you don't want scientists

to show everything they're doing before they're ready

to publish, because then they you would just see

a bunch of stuff that might turn out to be wrong.

People need to be able to have some privacy

in order to be distinct from everyone else

and in order to be able to craft what they're doing.

And so in that sense I think

having temporary secrets benefits society.

It certainly has benefited science and many other things.

And that has to do with more the importance

of having cells and species and sort of structure

instead of just a giant mush. Mmmhmm.

I think that's really important to creativity into society

but the part of the open source movement

that bothers me more,

this idea that the people you know

what we basically did is by making code free,

we made data into the superpower center.

So right now we have this bizarre situation where companies

Oh that's interesting like Facebook or Google

have Apache stacks of open-source code

but it's hidden away in secret data centers

you can't visit with all your data running algorithms

that run the world that are hyper secret,

and so it's exactly backfired.

And then if you look at the open source community,

it's a what tends to happen when you make everything free

is not that you impoverished everyone,

but you take what had been a bell curve

and make it into a zip curve. Mm-hmm.

That's a subtle thing but it's extremely important

That was the effect I was describing in Who Owns The Future

a book from a long time ago.

So if you have an open market society,

you should see results that are kind of like a bell curve

where people for most people

kind of end up with middle results

and there are a few people who's super high performers

and a few people who aren't.

When you have control from a central,

a central hub that seized control in the way

that a Facebook or Google has,

when they have an Apache stack in a hidden server firm

with everybody's data on it,

you end up with a zip curve.

So a few open-source developers end up doing pretty well

through consulting contracts whatever

and then if you look at the what might be called

the long tail, and old wiredism...

you see a lot of kind of impoverished people

who contributed fundamental code

that keeps the Internet running every day,

and it's just bizarre.

So it's created this an absolutely untenable

extreme of reward and lack of reward in society

that I mean totally aside from whether it's fair,

it's just not sustainable you know.

Well I am a central hub who's about to seize control

'cause the clock says zero

but I want to ask you one quick last thing.

You did a marvelous interview with

my colleague Peter Rubin a couple issues ago on Wired,

and at the end that you said the thing you wanted to see

is for people to be able to improvise in virtual reality.

And so very quickly explain what that means

'cause that seems like an amazing concept

and I want to end on something

since we've talked about stalinís and Bolshevism

all the problems with data,

I want to end on something beautiful.

So what does it mean to improvise in virtual reality

and then let's all head off to the rest of our days.

(laughs)

Well, I was just a complete

on fire idealist lunatic

in the 80s about virtual reality that some people in

this room will remember, Kevin will remember.

And one of my thoughts about it,

is that someday there would be this way

we can share through virtual reality

that transcends communication as we know it,

that's no longer about sharing symbols

as we do with words and language,

but is about directly co-improvising a shared world.

Directly making stuff that's experienced

without necessarily predefining

a symbolic contracts for those things

And so then the question is well

how do you improvise reality?

What does it look like?

Does it look like, it certainly doesn't look

like coding as we know it cause it takes too long

and it's too nerdy and after.

Maybe it looks like some kind of virtual musical instrument

you can play within VR that spins reality

and I did a lot of work trying to make those

and this also relates to this idea that

you can think of the cortex of the brain

as being like a planet with undiscovered continents

and this huge part which is the motor cortex

which is kind of runs along the middle

from front to back where a mohawk would go.

This thing and there's a thing called the homunculus

which is a mapping of the body to it.

We know that if people explore abstract computation

through that they have powers of speed

that they don't have through other modalities

such as when a jazz pianist is is figuring out

what note to play and solving remarkably

difficult harmonic problems and voice leading problems

just spontaneously much faster than they can any other way.

And so part of the idea was to try to leverage

this underused part of the brain

for creative purposes by creating musical instruments

within virtual reality within

which you could improvise both code and data and create

this sort of shared world.

It's not a dream I've given up on,

I still make a stab at trying to chip away towards

it every couple years and still to this day

I'm chasing it.

Alright, well having talked with Jaron Lanier,

I'm convinced he uses the entirety of his brain.

Thank you very much for coming, enjoy the rest of the day.

(audience clapping)