 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering LiveWorks 18, brought to you by PTC. Welcome back to the Boston Seaport, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at LiveWorks, PTC's big IoT conference. Jaren Lanier is here. He's the father of virtual reality and the author of Dawn of the New Everything. Papa, welcome. Hey there. Hey, how's it going? It's going great. How's the show going for you? It's cool, it's cool. It's fun. I'm actually here talking about this other book a little bit too, but yeah, I've been having a lot of fun. It's fun to see HoloLenses applied to engines and factories. It's been really cool to see people seeing the demos, mixed reality. Well, your progeny's being invoked a lot at this show where everybody's sort of talking about VR and applying it and it's got to feel pretty good. Yeah, yeah. It seems like a VR IoT blockchain are the sort of the three things. Wrap it all with digital transformation. Yeah, digital transformation, right? So what we need is a blockchain VR IoT solution to transform something somewhere. Yeah. So tell us about this new book. Yeah, this is called Deleting All Your Social Media Accounts right now and I realize most people aren't going to do it, but what I'm trying to do is raise awareness of how the psychological manipulation algorithms behind the system we're having in effect on society and I think I love the industry but I think we can do better and so I'm kind of agitating a bit here. Well, Jared, I was reading up a little bit, getting ready for the interview here and people often will attack the big companies but you point at the user as we need to kind of take back and we have some onus ourselves as to what we use, how we use it and therefore can have impact on that. Well, what I've been finding is that within the companies in Silicon Valley, a lot of the top engineering talent really, really wants to pursue ethical solutions to the problem but feels like our underlying business plan, the advertising business plan keeps on pulling us back because we keep on telling advertisers we have yet new ways to kind of do something to tweak the behaviors of users and it kind of gradually pulls us into this darker and darker territory. The thing is, there's always this assumption, oh, it's what users want. They would never pay for something the way they pay for Netflix. They would never pay for social media that way or whatever it is. The thing is, we've never asked users. Nobody's ever gone and really checked this out. So I'm kind of putting it out there as a proposition and I think in the event that users turn out to really want more ethical social media and other services by paying for them, you know, I think it's going to create this enormous sigh of relief in the tech world. I think it's what we all really want. Well, I mean, ad-based business models, they're clear incentive to keep taking our data and doing whatever you want with it but perhaps there's a better way. I mean, what if, you're sort of proposing, okay, maybe users would be willing to pay for various services which is probably true, but what if you were able to give users back control of their data and let them monetize their data? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, you know, I like a lot of different solutions. Like, personally, if it were just up to me, if I ran the world, which I don't, but if I ran the world, I'd make every single person of the world into a micro-entrepreneur where they can package, sell, and price their data the way they want. They can form into associations with others to do it and they can also purchase data from others as they want. And I think what we'd see is this flowering of this giant global marketplace that would organize itself and would actually create wonders, I really believe that. However, I don't run the world and I don't think we're going to see that kind of perfect solution. I think we're going to see something that's a bit rougher. I think we might see something approximating that or getting like a few steps towards that. But I think we are going to move away from this thing. Like right now, if two people want to do anything on line together, the only way that's possible is if there's somebody else who's around to pay to manipulate them sneakily. And that's stupid. I mean, we can do better than that and I'm sure we will. Yeah, I'm sure we will too. I mean, we think blockchain and smart contracts are a part of that solution and obviously a platform that allows people to do exactly what you just described. And you know, it's funny, a lot of things that sounded radical a few years ago are really not sounding so radical. Like you mentioned, smart contracts. I remember like 10 years ago for sure, but even five years ago when you talked about this, people were saying, oh no, no, no, no, no. The world is too conservative. Nobody's ever going to want to do this. And the truth is, people are realizing that if it makes sense, you know, it makes sense. And so I think we're really seeing like the possibilities opening up. We're seeing a lot of minds opening. So it's kind of an exciting time. Well, something else that I'd love to get your thoughts on and we think a part of that equation is also reputation. That if you develop some kind of reputation system that is based on the value that you contribute to the community that affects your reputation and you can charge more if you have a higher reputation or you're dinged if you're promoting fake news that that reputation is a linchpin to a successful community like that. Well, right now, the problem is because in the free model, there's this incredible incentive to just sort of get people to do things instead of normal capitalism where you say buy my thing, it's like, you don't have to buy anything but I'm going to try to trick you into doing something, whatever it is. And if you have a direct commercial relationship then the person who's paying the money starts to be a little more demanding. And the reason I'm bringing that up is that right now there's this huge incentive to create false reputation. Like in reviews, a lot of the reviews are fake. Followers, a lot of them are fake. It's like there's this giant world of fake stuff. So the thing is right now we don't have reputation, we have fake reputation. And the way to get real reputation instead of fake reputation is not to hire an army of enforcers to go around because the company is already doing that. It's to change the financial incentives so you're not incentivizing criminals. You know, I mean, that's incentives come first and then you can do the mop up after that but you have to get the incentives aligned with what you want. Here, here, and I love the title of your book. We interviewed James Scott, I don't know if you know James Scott, he's one of the principals at ICIT down in DC. We interviewed him last fall and we asked him, he's a security expert and we asked him, what's the number one risk to our country? And he said the weaponization of social media. Now this is before fake news came out and he said 2020 is going to be a, you know, what show? And so, okay. Yeah, you know, and I want to say there's a danger that people think this is a partisan thing. Like, you know, it's not about that. It's like, even if you happen to support whoever has been on the good side of social media manipulation, you should still oppose the manipulation. You know, like I was just in the UK yesterday and they had the Brexit vote where there was manipulation by Russians and others. And you know, the point I've made over there is that it's not about whether you support Brexit or not. That's your business. I don't even have an opinion. It's not, I'm an American. That's something that's for somebody else. But the thing is, if you look at the way Brexit happened, it tore society apart. It was nasty. It was ugly. And there have been tough elections before but now they're all like that. And there was a similar question when the Czechoslovakia broke apart and they didn't have all the nastiness. And it's because it was before social media. That was called the velvet divorce. So the thing is, it's not so much about what's being supported. Whatever you think about Donald Trump or anything else, it's the nastiness. It's the way that people's worst instincts are being used to manipulate them. That's the problem. Yeah, manipulation denial is definitely a problem. No matter what side of the aisle you're on. But I think you're right that the economic incentive, if the economic incentive is there, it will change behavior. Frankly, without it, I'm not sure it will. Well, you know, in the past, we've tried to change the way things work in the world by running around and outlying things. For instance, we had prohibition. We outlawed alcohol. And what we did was we created this underground criminal economy. And we're doing something similar now. What we're trying to do is we're saying we have incentives for everything to be fake, everything to be phony, for everything to be about manipulation. And we're creating this giant underground of people trying to manipulate search results, or trying to manipulate social media feeds. And these people are getting more and more sophisticated. And if we keep on doing this, we're going to have criminals running the world. I wonder if I can bring the conversation back to virtual reality. Absolutely. Sorry about that. But you have some concerns about whether virtual reality will be something youth for good or if it could send us off the deep end. Oh yeah, well, look, there's a lot to say about virtual reality. It's a whole world after all. So you can, there is a danger that if the same kinds of games are being played just on smartphones these days, we're transferred into the virtual reality or mixed reality modalities. Like you could really have a poisonous level of mind control. And I do worry about that. I've worried about that for years. What I'm hoping is that the smartphone era is going to force us to fix our ways and get the whole system working well enough so that by the time technologies like virtual reality are more common, we'll have a functional way to do things and it won't all be turned into garbage. Because I do worry about it. I heard a positive segment at NPR saying that one of the problems is we all stare at our phones and maybe when I have VR, I'll actually be talking to actual people so we'll actually help connections. I'm curious your thoughts on that. Most of the mixed reality demos you see these days are a person looking at the physical world and then there's extra stuff added to the physical world. For instance, in this event, just off camera over there, there's some people looking at automobile engines and seeing them augment it and that's great. But there's this other thing you can do which is augmenting people. And sometimes it can be fun. You can put horns or wings or long noses or something on people. Of course, you still see them with the headsets. All that's great. But you can also do other stuff. You can have people display extra information that they have in their minds. You can have more sense of what each other are thinking and feeling. And I actually think as a tool of expression between people in real life, it's going to become extremely creative and interesting. Well, I mean, we're seeing a lot of applications here. What are some of your favorites? Oh gosh, of the ones right here? Well, you know, the ones right here are the ones I described and I really like them. There's a really cool one of some people getting augmentation to help them maintain and repair factory equipment. And it's clear, it's effective, it's sensible. And that's what you want, right? If you ask me personally, a lot of the stuff my students have done really charms me. Like there was this one project a student intern made where you can throw virtual like goop, like paint and stuff around on the walls and it sticks and starts running down and this is running down the real world and you can spray paint the real world. So you can be a bit of a juvenile delinquent basically without actually damaging anything. And it was great, it was really fun. And you know, stuff like that. There was this other thing another student did where you can fill a whole room with these representations of mathematical objects called tensors and I'm sorry to geek out but you had this kit where all these people could work together manipulating tensors in this social environment. And it was like math coming alive in this way I hadn't experienced before that really was kind of thrilling. And I also love using virtual reality to make music. That's not one of my favorite things. Really, so talk more about that. Well, this is something I've been doing forever since the 80s, since the 80s. I've been, it's like, I've been at this for a while but you can make imaginary instruments and play them with your hands and you can do all kinds of crazy things. I've done a lot of stuff with like, oh, I made this thing that was halfway between a saxophone and an octopus once and I'll just, I'll just, I love that stuff. I still love it. The dimensions are similar. So it hasn't gotten old for me. I still love it as much as I used to. So I love, you mentioned before we came on camera that you worked on Minority Report and you made a comment that there were things in that that just won't work. And I wonder if you could explain a little bit about that mean. Oh yeah, sure. I have to imagine there's a lot of things that you talked about in the 80s that we didn't think would happen that probably are happening. Well, I mean Minority Report was only one of a lot of examples of people who were thinking about technology in past decades trying to send warnings to the future saying, you know, like if you try to make a society where there are algorithms predicting what'll happen, you'll have a dystopia, you know. And that's essentially what that film is about. It uses sort of bio-computer. They're the sort of bio-engineered brains and these weird creatures instead of silicon computers doing the predicting. But then, so there are a lot of different things we could talk about in Minority Report. But in the old days, one of the famous VR devices was these gloves that you'd use to manipulate virtual objects. And so I put a glove in a scene mock-up idea which ended up, and I didn't design the final production glove. That was done by somebody in Montreal, but the idea of putting a glove on the hero's hand there was that glove interfaces give you arm fatigue. So the truth is, if you look at those scenes, they're physically impossible. And what we were hoping to do is to convey that this is a world that has all this power, but it's actually not designed for people. It actually wouldn't work. And of course it kind of backfired because what happened is the production designers made these very gorgeous things. And so now every year somebody else tries to make the Minority Report interface and then they discover, oh my God, this doesn't work. But the whole point was to indicate a dystopian world with UI that didn't quite work. And there are many other examples I could give you from the movie that have that quality. So you just finished the book. When did this go to print? Yeah, so this book is just barely out. It's fresh from the printer. In fact, I have this one because I noticed a printing clause. I'm gonna call the publisher and say, oh, you gotta talk to the printer about this. But this is brand new. What happened was last year I wrote a kind of a big book about virtual reality that's for real aficionados. And it's called Dawn of the New Everything. And then when I would go and talk to the media about it, they'd say, well, yeah, but what about social media? And then all this stuff. And this was before Cambridge Analytica, but people were still interested. So I thought, okay, I'll do a little quick book that addresses what I think about all that stuff. And so I wrote this thing last year and then Cambridge Analytica happened and all of a sudden it seems a little bit more well-timed than I could have imagined. Relevant. Yeah. So what are the cool stuff are you working on? By the way, I have to say something. This is a real cat. This is a black cat who is rescued from a parking lot in Oakland, California and belongs to my daughter. And he's a very sweet cat named Potato. Awesome, you're based in Northern California? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was an extra on the set of the Black Panther movie. He was a stand-in for like a little mini Black Panther. So, John, what are the cool stuff are you working on? What's next for you? Oh my God, there's so much going on. I hardly even know where to begin. Well, one of the things I'm really interested in is there's a certain type of algorithm that's really transforming the world, which is usually called machine learning. And I'm really interested in making these things more transparent and open, so it's less like a black box. Interesting. Because this has been something that's been bugging me. You know, most kinds of programming, it might be difficult programming, but at least the general concept of how it works is obvious to anyone who's programmed. And more and more we send our kids to coding camps and there's just the general societal awareness of what conventional programming is like. But machine learning has still been this black box. And I view that as a danger. Like you can't have society run by something that most people feel is like this black box because it'll create a sense of distrust and I think could be potentially quite a problem. So what I want to try to do is open the black box and make it clear to people. So that's one thing I'm really interested in right now. And while there's a bunch of other stuff, I hardly even know where to begin. Well, the black box problems in machine intelligence is a big one. I mean, I always use the example I can explain. I can describe to you how I know that's a dog, but I really can't tell you how I really know it's a dog. I know I look at a dog, that's a dog. But I can't really in detail tell you how I did that. But isn't AI kind of the same way? A lot of AI. Well, not really. It's a funny thing right now. In the tech world, there are certain individuals who happen to be really good at getting machine language to work and they get very, very well paid. They're sort of like star athletes. But the thing is, so there's a degree of almost like folk art to it. We're not exactly sure why some people are good at it. But even having said that, it's wrong to say that we have no idea how these things work or we can certainly describe what the difference is between one that fails and one that's at least pretty good. And so I think any ordinary person, if we can improve the user interface and improve the way it's taught, any normal person that can learn even a tiny bit of programming, like at a coding camp, making the turtle move around or something, we should be able to get to the point where they can understand basic machine learning as well. And we have to get there. In the future, I don't want it to be a black box. It doesn't need to be. Well, basic machine learning's one thing, but how the machine made that decision is increasingly complex, right? Not really. It's not a matter of complexity. It's a funny thing. It's not exactly complexity. It has to do with getting a bunch of data from real people and then massaging it and coming up with the right transformation so that the right things fit out on the other side. And there's like a little, it's like a, to me, it's a little bit more, it's almost like, I know this is gonna sound strange, but it's almost like learning to dress. Like you take this data and then you dress it up in different ways and all of a sudden it turns functional in a certain way. Like if you get a bunch of people to tag, that's a cat, that's a dog, and now you have this big corpus of cats and dogs and now you wanna tell them apart, you start playing with these different ways of working with it that have been worked out maybe in other situations. You might have to tweak it a little bit, but you can get it to where it's very good. It can even be better than any individual person, although it's always based on the discrimination that people put into the system in the first place. In a funny way, it's like a cross between democracy and a puppet show or something because what's happening is you're taking this data and just kind of transforming it until you find the right transformation that lets you get the right feedback loop with the original thing, but it's always based on human discrimination in the first place. So it's not really cognition from first principles. It's kind of leveraging data gotten from people and finding out the best way to do that. And I think when you really work with it, you can start to get into it and feel for it. It's just that we're looking forward to seeing your results of that work. Jared, thanks for coming on theCUBE. You're a great guest. Really appreciate it. I really appreciate you guys having me here. Good luck to all of you. Hello out there in the land of those who are manipulated. Thanks again. The book, one last plug if I may. The book, it is 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. And you might be watching this on one of them. So I'm about to disappear from your life if you take my advice. All right, thanks again. Okay, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break you're watching theCUBE from LiveWorks in Boston. We'll be right back.