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welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the internet is perhaps the defining technological advance of the last 50 years. it's opened up a new world of possibilities. but what if it's also representing an existential threat to humanity? that is the alarming possibility raised by my guest today. jaron lanier is no techphobic sensationalist. he is a silicon valley insider, who was a hugely influential pioneer in virtual reality and the consultant to some of the biggest tech giants. so in what ways are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction? jaron lanier, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you for having me. you've spent the last three decades and more in the world of technology and it seems during that time, you have made an emotionaljourney from optimism much more toward pessimism. and i'm wondering why. i have to disagree with you. i find that if i look at human history, things generally in the big picture have gotten better for humanity, and i have no reason to believe that that pattern will go away. i think things can get better and i'm an optimist, however, i believe that every time things have gotten better it's because a critic said, "wow, things could be better." so to me, being a critic is the mechanism by which one expresses optimism.

the enemy of the future is complacency, not criticism. so i absolutely reject the label of pessimist. 0k. well, fair enough. but it does seem to me you're more than just expressing creative, constructive criticism. you're also expressing fear. yeah, and it's warranted, that is warranted. we have done something to ourselves that mankind has never done before, which is we've created a universal system of surveillance and behaviour modification of most of our species through devices, through social media and so forth. now i want to emphasize the problem is not the devices. the problem is not the experience of using social media, per se. i think that can often be extremely positive. the problem is this behind the scenes effort to manipulate everyone. and i think that that indeed is creating a deleterious result for democracy, for interpersonal relationships, for personal

psychological health. it's a very gradual problem but it is very real. i do want to spend time on that notion of manipulation and ask you who's doing the manipulating and to what end. but before we get there, i think it's important to just get to grips with the rather extraordinary story that you bring to this hardtalk table. i mean, your childhood was very difficult and tragic. i mean, you lost your mother in a car crash when i believe you were just ten years old, and your father was badly injured too, and then he took you off to new mexico. and it seems you were sort of living almost off grid for a long time. i have to say compared to many stories in the world, i don't think my childhood was as bad. i had a very unusual mother for her generation in that she was the breadwinner for the family and my father was not.

so when she died, we found ourselves impoverished and we became homeless. and what my father did is, he got the cheapest land available, which was desert land in southern new mexico. and we lived there in tents and gradually built a home for ourselves and he became certified as an elementary school teacher. and over the course of seven years, we built this fantastical house that was made of strange geometric forms and domes and all kinds of things. i think the experience that my father gave me of using creativity as a way to rebel against tragedy has been central and effective. i think creativity is a proper and good response if it's possible. so yes, of course, of course, it's what made me and i'm eternally grateful. you're a tiny bit younger but not that much younger than the generation, the first great generation of sort of tech superstars,

steve jobs, bill gates. you're a little bit younger but you, like them, gravitated to working in california. and i just wonder whether you, like them, were both somewhat idealistic about what technology can do, but were you also driven to create a business, to become a superstar entrepreneur, like they clearly were? not at first. actually, when i first showed up in silicon valley, i had never experienced wealth and i made some video games on the side, right in the dawn of video games, in the 8—bit era, and made money, and i was actually initially uncomfortable and embarrassed by it. and indeed, when my friends and i started the first virtual reality startup, which was in the early 1980s, we were quite embarrassed by it and uncomfortable with the notion of money and business, and we're trying to make it into some sort of a collective or something. gradually though, there's a funny thing, when you're surrounded

by a value system in a society, you do start to take it on. and i felt this thing stirring in me, like i should be an entrepreneur. it's funny how that happens, but the social environment is extraordinarily powerful. it's not that i currently think there's anything wrong with entrepreneurship. i actually have come to really love the business side of silicon valley, but it wasn't what brought me there at all. i'm probing this area of your life and the degree to which you wanted to make money and be an individual success, because coming back to your opening remarks about where the internet and social media are taking us, you seem to have a fundamental problem with a big decision that was taken quite early on in the development of, for example, facebook or even google, which was to say they got this amazing idea, this new technology, and the owners of the idea decided we'll make it free to the great general public, but we'll monetise it by generating ad revenue. and of course, this particularly

applies to a company like facebook. and you seem to be saying that looking back on that decision, it was a fundamental mistake. right. well, you know, the tension that we just talked about between loving entrepreneurship and then also feeling a little uncomfortable with the sort of greed inherent in silicon valley was exactly what caused this all to happen. back around the time that companies like google and facebook were being created, there was a prevailing feeling that everything online should be free, it should be free of capitalism. the notion of the public commons and sort of of opening everything up, a knowledge base for humanity. exactly. so computer code would be made open, music would be free. journalism would be free. everything would be open, but at the same time, we loved the hero idea, the cowboy idea of the great hacker or the great entrepreneur, like a stevejobs.

and if you try to combine those two things, it's rather difficult, you know. and so the solution, and really i think the only solution was what was called the advertising model. but, even though it started off innocent enough, computers kept on evolving, the software got better, the customers got more sophisticated, and that's how we inadvertently, i believe, brought about this surveillance scheme and this manipulation scheme. almost every penny made by a company like facebook is earned from customers who believe that the behaviour of users of facebook will be modified by the use of facebook. and so, you do create this society where any time people connect through the internet, it is financed exclusively by those who wish to manipulate the users. but why is that different from tv advertising?

because tv advertising isn't watching the person in detail. the reason i call it a behaviour modification scheme is that behaviour modification, is that in behaviour modification, you're watching an individual continuously and then making constant adjustments in response to how the individual responds to things, to discover the pattern that will alter that individual. that has never been available before in advertising or in any other scheme on such a mass basis. so here we are, you have this notion, that you know, and i am focusing in on particular companies because you do, like facebook can google. you call them behaviour modification empires. i do. and that is clearly not a good thing. well... but let mejust, you know, let me just reflect on what mark zuckerberg says, for example. he says look, the thing we're trying to do at facebook is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently. this is sort of what makes the situation confusing. the direct experience of users and what they do can often be quite legitimate, quite positive, quite authentic,

and i'd be the last to dispute that. the problem is that in the background, it's feeding this manipulation machine that's also present. what i would advocate is not attempting to destroy the whole thing. instead, what i'd advocate is getting rid of this background manipulation machine and keeping the good work. to be fair, you know, the book you've written, "ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now." i mean that, if everybody reading the book were to take it seriously and act upon it, would be a death knell for companies like facebook. well, facebook has two advantages that make the scenario you're describing extremely unlikely. one is that they've deliberately created an addictive scheme so that large numbers of people are genuinely addicted and will not be able to delete their accounts, and two they have a network effect lock, where there's nowhere else to go because everybody‘s already on their scheme. so therefore, when i say this, i have really two reasonable hopes. one is that young people, who have only known life

while they are connected to these things, will be motivated to get off them, at least for a while. in order to — for purposes of self—exploration, to get a sense of contrast to what life is like without the manipulation. and then the second thing is, if the whole society is universally tied into a manipulative scheme, then it's impossible to have conversations because there's no—one left to give perspective. so if even only a minority of people are off of them, then it widens our possibilities, it widens our conversations. it's only seven years since the arab spring in tunisia and then, in particular in egypt, with all of the popular street protests that were taking place. they were being described, particularly in egypt, as a facebook revolution. and there was this idea that social — notjust, we don't have to just focus on facebook, but social media platforms generally were creating a new sort of discourse,

which was bottom up rather than top down, which was allowing people to bypass the normal centres of authority and power and control and create new communities, and therefore, actually, to empower themselves. are you saying all of that, just seven years on, is now gone? the situation is subtle and i'd like to describe it. what happened with the arab spring was authentic. however, the problem is that the algorithms that are gathering data from people and then using that data to drive who sees what in their customised feeds, their customised experiences, has to rely on the emotional responses of those people, how they become engaged. now, if i may, there are two general categories of how people respond to things that can be used for behaviour modification using social media. they might respond positively to something, which means they start to trust it or have affection for it and so forth, or they might respond negatively, which means they're afraid, they're startled, they're angry.

now the thing is that the emotions that i described in the second batch, the negative ones, come on more quickly. and so the algorithms that are sampling people so quickly tend to amplify the negative ones, and the result of that is that whenever there's a positive movement, like an arab spring, the algorithms gradually start to emphasise those people who are alarmed by it over the people who were part of it. and therefore, you start to get a phenomenon like isis, which gets even more mileage from the same social media platforms than the arab spring did, or in the united states. fear is exaggerated. fear... yeah, fear and irritation and paranoia, alarmism. and everything you're telling me is actually — it's fascinating and i know it's based on a huge amount of experience and knowledge. but i come back to a simple thought. you made a lot of money out of working with some of these companies. indeed, i believe you sold one of your own startups to google itself. yeah, i'm absolutely an insider,

i'm part of the community. i mean, do you have — now that you see so many potential pitfalls and alarms with the way social media is developed, do you have a sense of guilt or responsibility? well, the responsibility, absolutely, thus i am here with you. and guilt — i mean, it happens in my case that i have been warning about this scenario for many years. what is different now is that there's many others in silicon valley who who have also started to recognize the trouble that we've created. i'm not saying i was the only one to foresee it, there were others as well. but it's a much less lonely position. and i think those who should have been aware but weren't or were aware but ignored it perhaps should feel a bit more guilty. but of course i'm part of it, so i share some collective guilt. just a couple of thoughts on your bleak analysis.

you seem to be suggesting that — you know, we talked about that crucial moment when a decision was made to create these services as free to the user but to finance and fund them and make them profit making centres by using advertisements. you say that, in your view, was a mistake, but there are some different examples which do tend to suggest that this notion of the public commons really can work, in a way you've told me you don't think it has. what about wikipedia ? what about linux? what about these amazing offers to the general public across the world which are free and which really do work on the basis of a sort of common collective accessible knowledge? i remain a true believer that this can work. i think we still need to work on the concept though. in the case of linux, for instance, the idea was that if you have open source then you'll be able to detect trickery and you won't be fooled by sneaky software. however, what's happened is that this linux—based software is now hidden away.

indeed, companies like facebook and google often use linux—based stacks of software in their hidden locked away secret giant computer centres, so you can't get access to them. you don't get to see the google algorithm, you don't get to see the facebook algorithm, even though they run on linux. and so the linux approach failed to achieve the result that it sought. i think it was a sincere effort. so we just have more work to do to figure this out. but i remain absolutely an idealist, and i absolutely believe that this general direction can improve our experience. let me shift focus. you are known as one of the fathers of virtual reality because you were working on virtual reality sets way back in the 1980s. and of course now it's a deeply sophisticated sort of offer to kids who are gaming. oh, it's still pretty early and crude. we have a long way to go, but it's making progress. you say a long way to go. we've already used this word addiction, and there are increasing noises coming not only from the british national health service,

who just talked about the degree to which they are having to pick up, as they say, pick up the pieces of kids who are addicted to virtual reality gaming, to all sorts of different social media platforms. and that is really damaging their health. do you accept that there is something going on, particularly with with young people, that is very damaging? yeah, i absolutely accept it. and i think that we have a moral responsibility in the tech community to do everything possible to address it. it's indisputable. so i can only agree. and i want to say about virtual reality, very early on, for me, the motivation — you mentioned my difficult childhood and losing my mother, i always saw virtual reality as a way of potentially overcoming that. i viewed it as potentially a shared dream space that would help reach other people, because i was an awkward kid at that point,

and i viewed other people as being these mysterious, distant things. but i also became aware very early, when i was about 15, of this potential for it to be an addictive and manipulative device. you have a child now, how old is...? i have an 11—year—old. yeah. right now, there is a craze going around the world called fortnite. it's a game that kids and older people seem to love but it can be somewhat addictive. some people are playing it for hours every day. if your...your child, a daughter. yeah. if she were to start playing fortnite and started playing it for hours and hours per day, would you be very worried about that? yeah, well, this is such an interesting thing. in the culture of silicon valley, it's very typical for parents to have a profound aversion from allowing their kids near technology. they often enroll them in schools that are very hippy, antitechnology places. in other words they're not allowing their own children to use

the products that they make a living selling. i've taken an intermediate approach, where i'm trying to let my daughter learn her own lessons, and find her own way. that might be perilous. i don't think there's any perfect solution to this. i don't think these technologies are all bad at all. you think all of the big companies dominating this space, they should have a statutory duty, obligation, to consider the impacts upon mental health, particularly of children and young people. and should there be some way of putting that concern into a regulatory framework? yeah, so i think this is an area where we have to become more sophisticated as a society, and where the law has to catch up. if you have a continuous feedback system that can manipulate a person without their knowledge, that should no longer be understood as a form of free speech. that should be understood as something more like a drug

or something that is intrinsically, perhaps, to the disadvantage of the person. how do you control it? well, i think maybe the people who operate such schemes have a fiduciary responsibility to those who use them. very much like doctors or lawyers have responsibilities. i mean, we have to discover the right framework. i'm not claiming to have the complete answers. i do know one thing, though. one thing that must be disallowed is a commercial incentive based on manipulating people, because then that encourages the growth of these kinds of schemes. i'm absolutely convinced that silicon valley will make plenty of money without them. i don't think we need them. the future really is going to be dominated by artificial intelligence, machines that can, in a sense, think, or at least take actions which appear to be increasingly autonomous and based upon some sort of thought. how far does that go in your view, and how dangerous is it? well i have a perspective on this that might be a bit unusual but i think it's correct

of course, since i hold it. when i was young my most important mentor was marvin minsky, who is the principal author of the narrative about al that you describe. i used to argue with him about it when i was very a teenager and i'd say this is so ridiculous, it's just software we're writing, why do you have to make this whole thing about how it's coming alive? and he would say, oh, gosh, don't nitpick, this will be great marketing when we're going for funding, and it worked. and so it started off as storytelling to make money and that's essentially how it's continued. i want to emphasize that scientifically we don't know how a thought is represented in the brain. we don't know what a thought is. we don't scientifically understand what meaning is. i mean, this isjust completely beyond our reach. so genuine autonomy for machines is a long way away? but here's the here's the key thing. the right way to understand ai, in my view, is as a form of theft. and what i mean by that is that these programs, machine learning programs, require enormous amounts of data from people and we simply take the data... if you talk to people from google they'll say our realjob is building ai, and we need all

your data to do this. but then the trick, the thing that is terribly annoying, is that they then turn around and say, because we've taken all your data and correlated it and interpolated it and projected it, we're creating this program that will now replace you, you are no longer needed. you're out of work. but the thing is, you are needed because they need your data. so it bothers me terribly that we're talking about potentially putting people out of work when those people are still needed, because their data is needed. when i talked before about a system where maybe you pay for social media, what if you were also paid so you had a chance to achieve knowing dignity by making better and better data ? the other invention over the last 80, 90 years that i'm thinking of is the nuclear bomb. you've talked about the fears you have for the internet. do you ultimately think that we humans, as a species, are more threatened by the bomb or by the malign uses of the internet?

there are currently a few existential threats to our species. uncontrolled climate change is one, weapons of war are another, including biological weapons. but the thing is, to face those clearly, society has to be sane, at least to some degree. and if we make ourselves insane through a scheme of universal manipulation and trickery... make ourselves insane? you see that as the fundamental threat? well, we have to overcome that in order to even talk about the the physical threats of warfare and climate change. and the thing is, in the united states, we have our former national security adviser james clapper saying outright that russian intervention through these internet schemes threw our last election, and if we get to the point where we can't trust our on elections, we've passed the point where we can as a society address our real problems honestly. well it's a powerful thought to end on. jaron lanier, thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you for having me.

thank you very much indeed. hello again. love it or loathe it, it looks like the hot weather is set to return to south—east england towards the end of the week and the weekend as well. before we get there, though, we'll showers on monday. there will be further showers around today as well. of more immediate concern is this developing area of cloud towards the south—west approaches. this is going to reactivate a weatherfront, and during the early hours of tuesday, we will see showers widespread in southern england, wales, the midlands and one or two in northern england as well, but as well as those showers, there's going to be a clump of heavier rain that will probably become quite widespread across central, southern england,

the south midlands and swinging into east anglia and south—east england. the thing with this big area of rain is we will have squally winds and could have some lightning in it as well. the rain could be intense, so we could have some pretty awful conditions on the roads first thing in the east midlands, east anglia and south—east england, somewhere in that part of the world. the rain could be quite slow to ease off in the morning. by the afternoon, they will be long out of the way and we will see sunshine following on behind. looking at the weather picture further northwards and westwards, it was always going to be a kind of cloudy and windy kind of day and there's rain in the forecast too, especially in the highlands and western isles. a few showers pushing into north—western counties of northern ireland, but otherwise, there should be a fair bit of dry and cloudy weather. temperatures, 18 in belfast. moving further south and we lose the early rain in eastern areas, that could be quite heavy and the afternoon is much brighter with some sunshine, and temperatures

pushing on to around 25 degrees. it might feel a little on the humid side for you. that's tuesday's weather, let's take a look towards the middle part of the week, and we've got this warm front approaching the british isles. that's going to thicken the cloud up in northern ireland, and outbreaks of rain setting in here through wednesday afternoon, turning quite heavy as well. i think it probably will cloud over across wales and south—western england too. we'll get some rain towards the end of the day working into west scotland, but that still leaves east anglia and the south—east of england with warm air, temperatures up to 27. so pushing into the 80s in terms of fahrenheit. showers will continue to be a feature on thursday into north—western areas, some of these could be quite heavy, and normally there's a good deal of cloud in the north—west, keeping the temperatures generally in the low 20s. not bad for the time of year, but it's the heat is really lingering in east anglia and the south—east of england as well. those temperatures build further towards the end of the week into the weekend. look at cambridge, not far from 30 here. cloudy but bright in north—western parts of the uk but towards the end

of the week, some areas could reach the low 30s in the very hottest spots. that's your weather. welcome to newsday on the bbc. i'm sharanjit leyl in singapore. the headlines: burning out of control. raging wildfires in california force 50,000 people to leave their homes. shouting: everybody go down! hundreds of hikers trapped on a volcano in indonesia after an earthquake scramble down the mountain to safety. i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: fleeing syria to fight another day. we have a special report on the hunt for is fighters still on the run. and a crushing blow against crime in the philippines. millions of dollars of luxury vehicles a re destroyed to deter smugglers. live from our studios in singapore and london,