good evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation with virtual reality pioneer jaron lanier about his complicated relationship with technology. in his new memoir he writes about its beauty and endless possibilities as well as his fears about the ways digital technology is affecting our minds and influencing the world. we're glad you've joined us. computer scientist and author jaron lanier, coming up right now. ♪ ♪

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ please welcome jaron lanier to this program. more than 30 years ago he founded the first virtual reality company and is widely credited with popularizing the term. his new memoir, "dawn of the new everything: encounters with reality and virtual reality," gives us a glimpse into his unusual childhood and how it led in part to his lifelong

relationship with technology. an honor, sir, to have you on this program. i saw the maureen dowd piece on you, did you like it? >> oh, yes, charming piece. >> it opened my eyes to things about your life that i didn't know, so i was honored to have you on the program. i promised you that if you -- so first of all, yeah, thank you, so explain why you have no shoes on. >> this is the fourth time in my whole life that i've worn a jacket. they have a dress code here. i said, i'll wear the jacket if i don't have to wear shoes. that was my bargain. >> do you typically walk around barefoot? >> i like walking around barefoot if i can, we have a nice climate here. >> i know you don't normally wear a jacket, for me you did, i thank you. will you be more comfortable if you take it off? >> my only problem is you're wearing shoes. >> would you be more comfortable if i took them off?

>> i would be more comfortable. >> it would be a problem if you ask for more than that. >> hey, listen. we've got to think about those ratings, man. >> take off my shoes, take off my socks. my mama is having a heart attack in indiana right now. >> oh, no. he's a good boy, you have nothing to worry about. >> are you comfortable now? >> i am so comfortable. >> let the conversation begin. [ laughter ] tell me about when you first became interested in, enamored by the notion of technology. >> oh, god. you know, for me it had a really emotional start. what happened is my mom died when i was little, and she had had a tremendous weight on her when she was alive. she was a concentration camp survivor. and somehow just the world seemed so dark. especially other people seemed

to distant, like these planets far away, these fleshy planets with brains inside that i could never know. i felt so isolated. i had this encounter with a painting, heironymus bosch's "garden of earthly delights." you can bring things out and share them with other people, call that art, call that technology, that we can do things to bridge that gap to distant others. it seemed like the only hope. i started discovering technology. i thought, this is the way i can do it. and i did everything i could -- i mean, this is kind of crazy, but when i was a little kid, i would like build these electronic haunted houses to create an experience inside my head that would be meaningful to other kids. for me, i guess ultimately it's

about reconnecting with my mother, if you can believe it. i know it sounds far-fetched. >> not at all, it roots it and grounds it for me. it's hard for me, not being the techie you are, to imagine how your brain conceptualized this notion of virtual reality. the story you just told me now gives me some understanding of what you were aiming for. tell me more about the practical process of what you were doing with your research company. >> before i get to the company, let me go back a little bit. it's the '70s. i'm a teenager. i'm like about 15. i discover that there's a guy named ivan sutherland. he invented computer graphics. he invented interaction on the screen, all that. he actually made in the late '60s the first thing we would call a virtual reality goggle, a very simple one, obviously,

because it was the first one. when i read that, i was so excited, i thought this is my path to create this dream sharing thing. i would run up to people on the street and say, you have to look at this, we're going to share dreams. they're like, who is this kid? in those days there wasn't an internet, that was the only way to reach people, was to run up to them on the street. i wanted to take what ivan had done when turn it into a social thing with multiple people. i was fortunate in the early '80s, i had a hit video game. i had royalty checks coming in. instead of doing anything sensible like buying a house or whatever one is supposed to do, my friends and i started building these machines in garages. we didn't know if we were starting a company, we didn't know what we were doing. eventually one of the silicon valley founding venture capitalists came up to me and said, young man, you need venture capitalists. >> whatever that is. >> so all of a sudden we had a

company. we built a little factory just with local people working. you couldn't go to china. it was a whole different world. we started building these things. and so virtual reality means ivan sutherland's original one was a virtual world, one people. virtual reality meant multiple people, shared, that's reality. it meant you would see each other, we would have what we called avatars and turn into different creatures. you might say who would buy this weird dream machine, since it cost over $2 million a person back then. it was all people designing cars, designing surgical procedures, all kinds of fancy customers. really what it was about for us was this dream of dreams, you know. >> and what do you make, jaron, of what has become of the efforts that you all put forth then? >> i have really mixed feelings. i have some incredibly positive and warm feelings. and then i'm really creeped out by some other things and really

disappointed. i have a really wide spectrum. >> give me the range of the joy and the creeped out. >> the good first or the bad first? >> whatever you want, i got my shoes off, wherever you're going, i'm following you. it's too late to ask me now what i think, i'm in already. >> that happens, i guess. >> it happens in life. >> all right. so the joy is, you know, there's this whole new generation of young people now who are building their own virtual reality stuff. i think some of them are creating works of real beauty. i think virtual reality has the potential to be maybe the greatest art form. the way i like to think of it, it's a combination of jazz, because you can improvise, you can make stuff up. you have this freedom that jazz brought to music. it's that plus obviously computer stuff, there's programming. and then it also has cinema, because it's vivid. and so you have jazz, programming, and cinema all

rolled into this thing. there are kids making that now. i sometimes crey, really, when see somebody in their 20s and they build this beautiful thing, and it's just amazing to see, it's just fantastic. the creepy side, this is not very pleasant, but there's this other side to virtual reality. so at the same time when i was a kid, and i got so excited about the possibilities, i also read an early computer book called "the human use of human beings" by norbert wiener. he talks about if you have a computer that's continuously interacting with somebody, you can turn it into a behavior modification device that could be the most powerful positive one. it's like putting a literal in cage where you're constantly monitoring it and giving it different stimulus. he says in the book in order to do that you would need a global computer system where everybody is connected wirelessly all the time and they have devices wherever they go, and that's

impossible. of course that's exactly what's happened. so we have now these huge businesses, social media companies that are effectively giant behavior modification empires. >> that's a damning indictment. it might be right. >> it's right. and it breaks my heart and it terrifies me. and of course, you know, facebook owns one of the big vr companies. you know, if vr goes down that same path, then what we've seen so far with election meddling and all these things is going to be so tiny compared to what could happen. it could be the creepiest invention ever. it could be the most beautiful way of connecting with people and the most beautiful platform for art. or it could be the way we lose our free will forever, like "the matrix" movies. both are very real, both are very present. and i have to say something else. some of your viewers might say, turn back from it, why even go

there? i'll tell you why. in the '80s, my proudest moment was co-creating the first surgical simulator with some of the folks from my group and with a surgeon from stanford named joe rosen. in the last couple of years my wife was battling cancer and she had an operation by a surgeon who was trained by somebody who was trained by joe, my original collaborator, using a procedure designed in virtual reality that he trained for in virtual reality and now she's cancer free, okay? so we cannot turn back. technology is live. we cannot turn back to the helplessness and the suffering of the past which we so easily forget. what we have to do is move forward. but we have to move forward with our eyes open and not confuse ourselves to death. we have to choose the good side of it and not the bad side of it. >> when you said rhetorically for those who say, you know, why not turn back, what italy you

were about to say was, there is no turning back. it's not just not turning back because there's so much more good to be done. in my mind there's no turning back, i don't know if that's possible. it's like, pardon this old world phrase, but the genie is out of the bottle. >> sure. >> in any aspect of technology, is it possible in any field or form of technology, to turn back at this point? >> once in a while it is. and sometimes we should. but overall, we can't turn back. like i personally would like to see a total ban on nuclear weapons, for instance. they do no good. like, why? there used to be an argument they create peace. well, now they're just creating horrible regime. >> mutual deterrence is the argument. >> it's mutually deterring between the most awful regimes. if it was mutually deterring stable democracies, that would be one thing.

enabling north korea is not a viable long term solution. >> the other thing, jaron, that got me thinking, as you were talking, i was trying to do two things, i was trying to multitask, listen to you, and at the same time i'm thinking, trying to think of another art form that does what you think vr has the capacity to do or technology more broadly, as you suggested, to be the arbiter of everything artistic and beautiful and good and beautiful about the world, and at the same time to be the worst invention ever created. so to your point about the nuclear weapon, that's just bad all the way around, to my mind. is there anything else that rivals vr for the capacity to be both good and evil at that level? >> yeah, to me, the language. >> language? >> yeah, language. >> okay. i can see that. >> so i used to call virtual reality post symbolic

communication. believe me, you can spend all year arguing with philosophiers about those terms. when you're a little tiny baby, you don't know what's real and what's just in your head. that makes you like a god. suddenly you discover you're this horribly weak little pink thing that wets itself, it's a huge demotion. then you start learning words and you discover at least there's this little part of your body, the tongue and the mouth, that can at least reflect and refer to all the other things, you don't have the immediate powers to affect or control. and then by communicating with words and by doing things with your hands, you start to gain not perfect god-like control but gradual control of the world. essentially with virtual reality, what you can get is a fluid or virtueosic way of

making something real, something like a musical instrument for creating reality, i believe such a thing is possible. then you have this other option, not just to use symbols to refer to things, but to directly make the stuff of reality. i think of it as being sort of like another step in the same direction that language took us. >> i never processed it that way. now you've really got me thinking. >> this goes on and on. >> i can see. i need more time to process that. i think you're right about the language thing. let me shift, while i'm thinking about that on this side of my brain, let me shift to this side. note kn net neutrality, a big debate now. 180 degrees, the trump administration, from what obama said and attempted to do. where are you at in this debate? >> ooh, yeah. this is a tricky one. okay. so look. if the choice is between facebook as over-lord or comcast as over-lord, choose facebook.

>> those are not good options either way. >> no. what i believe, that there should be a third option. what bothers me about the net neutrality act is we're sort of being asked to choose who the natural monopolist will be. all right? and like what we should be asking is how can we avoid natural monopolists, how can we have a more vibrant market, a more vibrant society without this kind of power and wealth concentration and total control of communication that will accrue to one side or the other. >> that would be un-american, you realize. that's how things are done in america. >> i mean, in theory, america is supposed to work on some combination of capitalism and democracy. >> in theory, yes. >> and absolute democracy -- absolute monopoly on information transmission is not really in line with either of those. for the moment, i mean, i think we have to demand net

neutrality, i think it's the better option. in the longer term there are other options that are better still. if you make everything -- so this is a case where a very beautiful and very pure hearted and angelic project from the left backfired terribly. so what happened is in the early days of the internet, there was this tremendous feeling, which remains for a lot of people, that everything should be free, that free music, free journalism, free tv, free news, free e-mail, free social media, everything is free, but, but, we still adore and myth oologize o entrepreneurs, our bill gates and steve jobs. if everything was free but with ads, that would be fine, except that when you have computers watching what everybody does every second and then providing feedback every second and

advertisers are influencing that feedback, you've totally left behind advertising as we've ever known it and you've entered into this other realm of algorithmic behavior modification, okay? and so essentially this project of the left turned into this massive behavior modification scheme. so the only way out is either to make everything free or everything paid. if we try to do this combination of free stuff in a market society you end up with behavior modification, and that's not survivable. we have to find our way to some kind of solution where there can be millions of little entrepreneurs, incredible diversity, and no giant over-lord who is controlling information. >> how can you explain how the godfather of vr can end up growing to become, can morph into someone who is such a

staunch critic of the internet or certainly activities that the internet allows for? >> look, to me it all goes together. i want to say something. i love silicon valley. i love the big companies. my friends and i sold a company to google, i'm currently working with microsoft, total disclosure. it's my world, it's my world. but the thing is, as much as i love my world, i think it's not only our duty but just our truth, our joy, our center, to be honest with ourselves. if you're going to engineer something, you have to see how it functions. you have to be honest and look at the results. otherwise you're just a superstitious con man. it's the results that make engineering engineering. to me, i love what we do. you just feel we have to be self critical. we have to look at what we do critically. and, you know, it used to be kind of lonely. there weren't too many people

saying that. but it isn't anymore. more and more, a lot of folks in silicon valley are recognizing that it's really time to change our orientation a little bit and think of it more self-critically. and it only makes us better engineers. >> to the extent that you can, can you give me some evidence of that? give me more specifics on what you're saying that makes you believe that the industry, silicon valley is becoming more self-critical. >> for one thing, there are just a lot of people in silicon valley who are saying there's something wrong now. the election had a lot to do with it. i think a lot of people, that was a real wake-up call, you know. and i think we have a ways to go. but i really kind of feel optimistic we're going to get there, i really do. >> let me ask a question that has nothing to do with your book or anything except it's one of my issues and i've raised it so many times, countless times in the course of my career, which is, and i'm only raising it,

jaron, because if silicon valley is becoming more self-critical then maybe they'll finally get around to this, which is the democrat okization of silicon valley, why there is still so precious little color in silicon valley. if they're starting to be self-critical, are they going to get around to that? >> we have to. >> it's like people of color are good enough to be consumers but not producers. >> so there's a lot of ways to address this question. i could go on for hours about just this one thing. let me mention a couple of ways. and this is not a pleasant thing to talk about because it's -- the current situation is crappy, let's just be blunt about it. okay. so the first thing to say is that technology, and especially information technology, is a very human endeavor. it's -- we like to pretend that

we're like in lab coats and that we're doing this thing that's very objective but it isn't. when we make algorithms, it reflects our assumptions and our culture. to the degree we can't diversify our own teams, we're actually limiting ourselves and making ourselves worse. i saw some research that indicated that virtual reality worked better for men than for women, the researchers said this is intrinsic. i said, look at the teams, guess what, there's no diversity on the teams, try it with more diverse times, oh, now all of a sudden it works. initial bias and initial exclusion compounds itself over and over again. it's critical not to let it get started. there's another level of this which is pretty dark. i'll do my best to explain this really quickly. the way the algorithms work on social media and in general with what we call advertising, the

behavior modification loop business plan, is you have to give people stimulus from whatever they have, whether it's a social media feed or whatever, that keeps them engaged. this is engagement, right? so what keeps you engaged? unfortunately negative emotions, fear, anxiety, anger, these things are more engaging, more immediately and more persistently engaging. okay. so i will ask you a question. why is it that there have been so many phenomena where people use social media and it seems to be creating positive social change and a year later there's this backlash that's worse than anybody could have imagined? i could mention a few examples. the arab spring was the first prominent example. i also want to mention black lives matter. what's going on is that the people -- and there's sort of two levels to what's going on. on the surface level, which is what people see, these things are incredibly beautiful, like i personally found black lives matter to be incredibly moving, and i think that black twitter

is major literature, literature for the ages. no, really. it's astonishingly beautiful. but the thing is behind the scenes there's a completely different game going on that has nothing to do with any of that. what's happening is that all of the content, the energy, the fuel that's coming in from movements of this kind has to be processed in such a way as to generate engagement and profits for the machine. and so there's no evil genius doing this, it's just algorithmic. so it gets processed to be turned into negative emotions for somebody because that's the most efficient way to use the fuel. so then what you have is this prime thing where it's somehow packaged in order to ir-i tate as many people as possible. and because the negative emotions are more powerful, the backlash that arises which would probably have not been stimulated otherwise is even greater than the initial thing. so the reaction online from black lives matter will always be more intense than black lives matter. >> stop. i need more time. and i'm out of time right now.

the new book -- hold on. come back tomorrow night, i promise, i've got a few more questions. this stuff is getting good now. i'll still have my shoes off. if you come back tomorrow night. the book is called "dawn of the new everything"" encounters with reality and virtual reality." mr. lanier will be back with us again tomorrow night. thanks for watching. come back tomorrow night. i'm all choked up. and keep the faith until then. ♪ for more information on today's show, visit tav tavissmiley@pbs.org. join me for part 2 of our conversation with jaron lanier, next time. we'll see you then.

-- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

good evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley. it's make or break week for the gop's $1.4 trillion tax cut plan, mostly for the wealthiest americans. the senate could pass its version of the plan as early as thursday despite democratic opposition and a razor-thin republican majority. tonight former labor secretary robert reich joins us to talk about the numbers and the politics. we're glad you've joined us, a conversation with former labor secretary robert reich coming up in just a moment. ♪