Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218

The following is a conversation with Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher, writer, futurist, musician, and the founder of the field of virtual reality. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. As a side note, you may know that Jaron is a staunch critic of social media platforms. Him and I agree on many aspects of this, except perhaps I am more optimistic about it being possible to build better platforms and better artificial intelligence systems that put long-term interests and happiness of human beings first. Let me also say, a general comment about these conversations: I try to make sure I prepare well, remove my ego from the picture, and focus on making the other person shine as we try to explore the most beautiful and insightful ideas in their mind. This can be challenging when the ideas that are close to my heart are being criticized. In those cases, I do offer a little pushback, but respectfully, and then move on, trying to have the other person come out looking wiser in the exchange. I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations, nor in life. My goal is to learn and to have fun. I ask that you don't see my approach to these conversations as weakness. It is not. It is my attempt at showing respect and love for the other person. That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking, but you probably already knew that, so please give me a pass on that as well. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier. You're considered the founding father of virtual reality. Do you think we will one day spend most or all of our lives in, uh, virtual reality worlds?

I have always found the very most valuable moment in virtual reality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality, uh, afresh, you know, as if you were a newborn baby-

Mm.

... but with a little more experience. So you can really notice just how incredibly strange and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is. Um...

So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be, in the physical world?

Well, that's my take on it. That's just me. I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtual reality, and at this point, there have been multiple generations of younger people who've come along and liberated me from having to worry about these things.

(laughs)

Uh, but I should say also, even in, uh, what somet- well, I called it mixed reality back in the day, and these days it's called augmented reality, uh, but with something like a HoloLens, even then, like one of my favorite things is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out as being astounding, you know? It's- it's interactive, it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention. And it's hard to pay attention to that, but when you compare it to virtual reality, all of a sudden you do. And even in practical applications, uh, my- my favorite early application of virtual reality which we prototyped going back to the 80s when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med, near- near where we are now, uh, we made the first surgical simulator. And to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation, which is incredibly valuable for many things, for designing procedures, for training, for all kinds of things, then to go to the real person, boy, it's really something. Like, uh, surgeons really get woken up by that transition. It's very cool. So I think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation.