Founded 1927 in an area called book row located along Fourth Avenue from the 1890s through the 60s that housed 48 bookstores at its height in the 90 years since then all but one has shut down and the strand was passed down to my father who worked here 76 years and just retired recently at the age of 89 and unfortunately is very sick. But hopefully this will always be kept in the family and thanks for being here to support the store. Tonight we are hosting scientist he is the author of two bestsellers and an early pioneer of Virtual Reality creating some of the first commercial reality products in the market in the 80s. His new book expounds on his expectations of Virtual Reality and the untapped potential. Joining him to discuss this potential is one of my favorite columnists who has been a New York Times oped contributor since 1995 where she where she won a pulitzer prize. Please join me to welcome our authors to the strand [applause]. [inaudible conversations] [laughter] i wrote in the times that you are one of the most unusual people i have ever met. And i have met quite a few unusual people including our president. And i asked him what you rather have somebody who is a techie interview you . But what i love about his book his voice is so alive and vivid like a child and savant all at once and it draws you into the world so i feel you dont have to be an expert to enjoy it. I interviewed him at his house a couple times and he is a hoarder so i felt quite at home but he was much more interesting as he has every Musical Instrument known to man like a chinese opium bed what is it filled with . Instruments the really big floorstanding instruments. And a beautiful golden harp. And the piano is the oldest . It is the best. Are there any piano geeks . It is the best one. Really it is amazing. And instrument called a serpent . I actually wrote a piece using that earlier this year. It looks like a big snake with holes but it was the only base wind instrument so it is really hard to play. There was once a great line that music is what science does on a saturday night left laugh and often times he takes his instruments on the plane. I dont have a microphone stand so i will just start. [inaudible conversations] [applause]. What is that . Usually it is from laos in Southeast Asia and i love it because it is effective but also arguably it is an alldigital number there are 16 similar objects and it goes back probably 13000 years it is a big number and where it started and a whole lineage to the modern computer was taken directly from that. These were traded across the silk route the romans had a giant version called hydraulics and it was so hard to operate they had these planks and that evolved into the keyboard and they were so big that the slave boys had trouble so they had to have these cross planks that turned into automation mechanisms of the automated harpsichords. There was a player piano that had some randomness but you could have a player piano and they tried to make it programmable and then the programmable calculator came to formalize the math for a general calculation and here we are with a thrown election left laugh long [laughter] it all started with this little thing. It is very good we have the father of Virtual Reality at the moment when the whole meaning every outlet he is up for grabs. I want to start with personal questions because you were born in new york city than your parents left the big city when he was one and his life is as colorful as he is and you had a tragedy at a young age so could you tell us about your youth that you write about in the boo book . From my parents generation they were europeans this story does apply that my mother was a concentration camp survivor captured at 13 she is from vienna my fathers family was mostly wiped out but they made it here and they lived a life that my dad was the science fact editor so he threatens those Science Fiction pieces. He came up with the rumor of alligators in the sewer . He told me this when i was a kid and now with my own child i try to gauge how often i was lied to on the chance it is genetic. [laughter] so these have increased slightly so my dad had one of the earliest callin radio shows for the things he liked to do make fun of weird pseudoscience that was involved with early flying saucer stuff and would write that actually there could be alligators i have never gotten to the bottom of that and they feel nobody ever does. But he might have and i think there was a feeling based on their experience they did not want me around i have an 11yearold daughter now and i am still haunted by this because my mothers family waited too long to share so how do you know . And i dont have the answer. I dont like that feeling. But they ran to the most remote place with the criteria is it had to have big universities so they ended up at the edge of texas and new mexico and the country of mexico meet so they settled at that corner and there are many other stories i could not tell you all of it but the short version is my mother died in a car accident when i was nine. She had just gotten her drivers license that morning. After that i had a profound sense of isolation. And it led me to a fascination of the potential to connect with people because to see humans looking at you now i could remember what it felt like if you go out at night to look at the stars they are very clear you can see them and they are real but if you learn about the universe then you realize it could take hundreds of thousands of years to get to the place that is right there and we cant that is how people felt to me they were these orbs that felt so distant. There were some serious bullies in that part of the world. It started out around the border it used to be an open border it was amazing you take the school bus across the river then you are in mexico and this whole crazy paranoia about the border did not exist it was just a very sweet place. You just go across. But then the texas will system some of the kids would use terms of people of mexican descent and they got away with it and it was a terrifying environment to live in. After your mothers death your house burned down and you live with your father on some land that he purchased on the new mexico desert then he let you come up with the design of the house of the geodesic dome. And your daughter is now the same age as you were then. So we negotiated a compromise. Did you notice there is the window shaped like an i . I let her make an end outline a window in the shape of her eye. It is part of the house but not structurally critical left laugh because my dad did let me design a house and then collapsed about 30 years later so do not lets and 11yearold designed the house even if they seem. Ships. You can disagree but thats my thought. You talk about the garden of Earthly Delights you are hyper perceptive and hyper romantic so how did this develop into your becoming the father . Were you drawn to that form as the trauma of your childhood . I dont feel it was escapism. What really struck me about the garden of Earthly Delights here is somebody from centuries earlier even artist created this. This active imagination but yet to me it was like a warp drive that somehow i felt that somehow you could really see what was inside of head and it would be so astonishing and for me that is the first thing that had something that could do that to open up in peoples heads and expose them. Of course that isnt the only genre that does that but i actually got some flack that people think cereal is tasteless it is a funny conversation but art does that when i got older i was excited about experiments with Computer Graphics you can get into the weeds with the history but he also made the first Virtual Reality headset and there was a journal article and i was 15 with some of his work and i got so excited that i would stop the strangers in the street to say look this of course it made no sense to anyone there was no way to Contact People you did not know. That wasnt feasible so i went up to strangers and would accost them with the journal articles. I was badly behaved i guess. In the late 70s he found your way back. Used to hang out with the music scene spending time with Laurie Anderson and you write at that time it was a giant parabolic mirror if you made eye contact and exchange subconscious signals. But now everyone looks at their phones what do you think of new york now . Is it over . When is the last time you went . I think it is still there. I havent been there in a while. They have great shepherds pie. They did back then. I believe that. I am not say i can say anything more brilliant about manhattan since you live here but it strikes me it is less flavorful than it used to be there are so many chain stores now. But one thing i will say when i was 17 living here the first time i used to come to the strand i used to hang out all over it and the employees used to be really strange people. It used to be an odd scene like an underground comic. I do have good fond memories and my father came here reforming. When you went up to john and yokos apartment . So that music journal was funded by them they would have to run up discreetly and periodically but i think that still goes on today. And a patron of the arts . Yes. There was a woman who had energy like i have never seen before. I am not sure her age but she was elderly but out all night running around and one of these avantgarde and musicians that people depended on and she claimed to have this amazing thing with her exhusbands bones inside and it sounded real and true at the time but it feels like if it was it would have heard of it again my fluff but i remember we used to run around in the middle of the night to say i know this one restaurant that would put out the cheese and we would run into the alley to grab the block of cheese. Why are we stealing cheese . I dont know but she would wear us out and be off on her own. But we cannot just her because new york city was dangerous and a scary place nobody keeps up with her she can take care of herself. I love the way you write about women in this book. He goes on a discourse about lust and has a lot of insight into men and women and the history of your first marriage you ended up in a house with tarantula venom in the fridge . Yes. There was a house think of an eccentric mansion in it was a group of people who started to publish this magazine that combines horticulture and technology. And it gave that second that psychedelic style so this group of roommates made the magazine and the woman who is the editor collected weird substances it was almost filled with tarantula venom. I dont know why we had that but it did become a problem. When you got divorced there was a weird incidence . Does anybody remember him . Wasnt he a famous divorce lawyer . Wasnt there a fight about virtual sperm . He was going to try a new legal theory that if you failed to impregnate somebody who felt it was the last chance to get pregnant, you could be sued for failure to impregnate it is even hard to reconstruct but interestingly is that he was thrown in jail and disbarred over the course but i almost wish it had gone through because for them to say we need your sperm cell to prove that you could father a child to proceed but i really got the feeling of the state telling me what to do with my body. Maine dont mind men dont experience modification feedback loops. Those are addictive it is easy to hire them out to manipulate people. This was admitted to the other. After your piece was published. He said that they knew they were designing something. Yes. The most tragic thing about it is they require the input from people but if they have positive minded constructive material of social media it isnt routed for terrible purposes because of engagement. So after some positive social change there was some backlash through the arc of history because that is more powerful because of social media and then it turned into the rain of terror and black lives matter turned into a bizarre normalizing of fascism but what i am worried about is if it turns into a horrible thing that all we can say it is worse than we expect because structurally that is what happens. But you mentioned your next book so can we tell them the cats and dog theory . [laughter] he has four cats that he really loves. Its true. We are a cat household. He is worried that one of them is a trump voter. These kittens showed up why are there immigrants . Everything is fine they are eating all the cat food they she was really upset. You scooped me on this now it is out of the bag they are especially Popular Online with cat videos. My theory is simple that we are watching our own independence go away and the cats remind us of what it is like because cats were not domesticated they domesticated themselves they can still live in the wild. That is what we are losing in ourselves we watch ourselves go away. That is the theory. I love that theory. One of our cats is named aloof because she is not. They are haley hanging from the ceiling. Thats true. You were friends with Timothy Leary to break him out of the institute. And i noticed in the Financial Times this piece of a new generation of San Francisco is working in Silicon Valley that believes lsd makes them more creative but it is in a micro dose which is just funny coming full circle about breaking them out. I have a problem with people who experiment but there may be an odd definition of creativity. It says they took their cue from steve jobs who said lsd was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life. I do feel that he felt that. I had never met tim but the first time it became a big deal in public life so with Virtual Reality i would have been interested in the 80s. To say this is the next wave of course he had never seen that but i started so we had these little magazines that we publish to say it doesnt do anybody any good to try to Treat Technology as an outlaw. Or treat drugs the same way. It is there another way to do this . He said we should meet and i said great he had this voice like the gentle american irish voice. I am getting paid to do this workshop i like the money but i really dont want to do it. I am finding this professional Timothy Leary impersonator and give him the money that i dont have to do it but i think i have to show up at the start because they know me. Here is what i want you to do. Bring your car and smuggle the guy that will impersonate me in your trunk and they have a guard gate so you have to keep a straight face. This is not east berlin. This is like guys with beards and tiedyed tshirts so we got him out. That is how i met tim. [laughter] there was a story about the institute now having a huge comeback by these millionaires and billionaires who have decided they want to fund so they are drinking come to china. There is a whole generation of Silicon Valley p will and it will change hands that does look like its moving from transpersonal psychology people to the new generation. Originally that was more like a new age for delaware people got high before they would come home and dangle their crystals left laugh. [laughter] i do understand but i feel that is a little unfair. I have never seen it be that way. It is halfway between San Francisco and los angeles on the Pacific Ocean very hard to access it is a astonishing place as a natural spa but that Psychoanalytical Movement that started to become diverse to break away with its focus. A lot of interesting things happened there so with that characterization. One really interesting thing that you said was there is a certain kind of personality emerging from the digital age and you said if you are being manipulated and the way to tell there is personality quality it is the snowflake but it is what you see with trump the highly reactive and the outraged singlemindedness even though trump is a con man and an actor and master manipulator that he is also a victim i have met him a few times over 30 years he goes from a new york character in on his own joke to completely freaked out an outraged feeling that he is on the verge of a catastrophe every second so i do think he was ruined by social media. Yes left laugh i do think that is right. The addiction algorithms you dont have to go into great detail but it does create a personality Effect People look like zombies when they get off they have this weird small minded quality it is all over the spectrum. It is true for those college kids and all kinds of other people also. Did you thank you would see the president running on social media . That is so strange. I will tell you a story. The composer of the minimalist school of music we were riding in opera together with Science Fiction opera about a president running things three manipulative computer system. We didnt get it exactly right but it was ride enough that it is too depressing. [laughter] so i thought hard among sort of thought of Something Like that. Silicon valley designers never foresee the possibility of bad actors and are surprised over and over again. Another delight of your book is the footnotes one year you said you had a friend who dated donald trump. Is that in there . [laughter] where is my editor . [laughter] yes. I did know that for a while. I dont think she came out of it i dont think it was a dignity enhancing experience. [laughter] because we are inundated in my world i just want to ask about gender and equity and Sexual Harassment and to be above the read code list she brought uber to its knees. You said something great where there is the emerging persona of the digital age with this smug and superior i have the leverage and of power with that insecurity and power at the same time. Yes. It is a recognizable type. If that snowflake persona comes from being manipulated by the behavior modification empires then can i come up with a name . We cannot use curse words on cspan so ask god or Something Like that left laugh i said christmas for asses but it is this other persona from the people who run these schemes. That is that smug insecurity but we see that again and again. One thing you seem worried about is about writing code like how to pay a stranger for stuff online but now they are the creators of the new reality and a new species. One of them was dont get high on your own supply and i thought that was better. I started using that. I forget when that was, the late 90s when it came out. Here, that is a problem. I think sil Silicon Valley has s way of typing itself that it then beliefs and we are not to our own selves true, as much as we need to be. There is a good side to that which i feel im one of the rare people who still inside it and has been incited and i tried to call it as i see it and i try to speak truthfully. People still talk to me i feel like more and more recently theres been when sean came out and said yeah, we made it deliberately addictive in the techniques were proven initially and then in the gaveling industry so thats where they were tested at large scale. We imported it from the gaveling world. You starting to see people realize that its okay to be honest and that weve gotten into trouble and i think well see more of that. I feel i detect a bit of a shift in Silicon Valley we might start to see more honesty and clarity. You dont think well need you mentioned we might need to shut down the internet. [laughter] thats a question i keep on getting that we do need to shut down and start over and you know what i think would fix it and i dont have a lot of people agree with me on this but i think im right. I really think if we just changed the Business Model of some of the Big Companies so that they werent incentivized to bring out the worst emotions in the most addictive designs than it would selfcorrect and basically the problem is the advertising, the advertising Business Model that morphed into this behavior modification scheme so instead of that we had people able to earn money by being popular facebook posters and people paid a small fee to use facebook it was just monetized it would create an alternative to your attention thinking and i think people would rise to the occasion and thered be better quality stuff and it wouldnt get perfect but it would get better. I think facebook would be in business and their shoulders would decline. I think thats the solution will come to but thats the sweetest and best solution that i know about because this idea of having regulators is tough because hackers can out run regulators. He gets upset with me when i dwell on this but i am obsessed with this fight between elon musk and Mark Zuckerberg on twitter and crashing each other. Going to ask quickly where elon musk thanks that killer robots and killer ai is coming to get us and thats why he wants to have interplanetary colonization and rockets to mars and Mark Sundberg keeps saying that elon musk is hysterical and then elon musk implies that Mark Sundberg just wants to soak up more information and get more ads and isnt worried enough about getting the kill switch to the killer robots so quickly. [laughter] in general, if you have a company that makes its money by selling goods or services its more likely to be a Decent Company than if it only makes its money through behavior modification for pace so intrinsically with elon musk it will bring out the better in him and other people like Mark Zuckerberg does. His fundamental business is to scrub the world almost exclusively and musk isnt. My first round of sympathy has to be with musk. On the other hand what hes saying about ai is, in my view, incorrect. The reason why is it ai doesnt exist. Heres how i see it. This is a whole long story and its in the book and its in all my books in some form of another but we make up the story that the machines are intelligence and it exists that we are godlike because were creating new life and i was just thinking that you could spin some type of room and be because there anywal fantasy about it and the problem with it is that it makes you into terrible scientists and engineers if you say heres this machine im making and this is what its supposed to accomplish and then i can measure how well it accomplished it to accept the reality of that measurement that i can make it better and that is engineering. But if you say i believe this thing is alive and its an intelligence and that is not welldefined. Ellen entering shouldve said that its subjective and based on her judgment and so you no longer can be an engineer and youre a religious ritual practitioner. You have no basis for saying why is alive because i feel its alive and so now everything becomes absurd. Interfaces become worse and people take less response ability and now all of a sudden its okay for some giant corporation to be promoting jihadist videos or horrible things or personal destruction for people because well, its all a big ai inside us and its our electronic brain and will talk to it and see if we can get it to do better. Its ridiculous. Another thing about it is that behind every claim of ai is a theft to perrys [inaudible]. In order to run ai you need a bunch of data which is the example set to drive the learning algorithm and those things come from people. The example i also like to use his language translators so language translators have seen their origins plummet like investigative journalists are recording musicians they no longer make money from what used to be their daily bread which is translating memos because i can get free translations from Online Services but for those services to work we have to go and see examples of translations millions of people because the language translates every day and when you were saying you are no longer needed because our giant electronic brain will replace you so youre no longer going to be paid and will have to go in the public on basic income and are no longer earning your own dignity but then we need them and theres no electronic brain but its just been you channel there brought to people. Its alive fast and theres no ai. Every time you say we should be afraid of the killer ai you are promoting the very myth which itself is the danger. Its not the check but the myth. When elon does it making it worse. I love elon. [laughter] so this is from the point of view of a woman i just saw blade runner and ive been watching westworld and i am wondering if women are just screwed in the future because ryan gosling has an alexa that can come alive and looks like a latino bridget bordeaux and Harrison Ford is still in love with his gorgeous replicant and i dont know. Should women be worried about becoming robots and live alexas or will Virtual Reality be the greatest thing that ever happened to female porn. We like to talk about porn on cspan. [laughter] this is a topic with a lot of angles to it. The first thing i want to say is that before we dig too much into this porn like approach is worth saying there are other ways that Virtual Reality advance media in general that contribute to sex, sensuality that are far more interesting and creative than this model. In my view if you look at the history of sexuality in art it actually was more diverse and interesting and peculiar before cinema came along and we could capture things literally camera and i think what happened is the cinematic capturing sex created this new cemented in place this erotic visions that had were variable because if you look at art from before he will see this interesting diverse and eroticism was more in motion before in my view. Not that it was perfect and the role of women was better . Because historically its been worse and worse and in general the further back you go with some exceptions but i think cinema made us into literal visors of sexuality in a way that we hadnt been before and it is possible that we will remember the cinematic era is an unfortunate and sad for sarah for sex and eroticism and i might be wrong about that but i think its a possibility so in Virtual Reality theres these other word things that you can try that are powerful like sharing a body with someone else and become a unified creature within a Virtual World that we have to come control and that was sound abstract and strange but you will see and its really cool. So i just want to say that we shouldnt think that the foreign way of thinking about how media intersects with sexuality is the only way it can. I think theres a lot more interesting stuff in the future and i will say that tech culture is maledominated and this idea that we wont need women anymore has been one of the fantasies and tech culture for a long time. Every tech utopia well maybe not everyone but the dirty ones in the Silicon Valley offer include of paradise where prostitution or sexual robots so will need to deal with these people. Is that like where you would have islands with libertarians. Libertarian, limiting world out on the sea or sometimes in space or where ever. I think its a bit of a mistake and in their hearts a lot of the men who imagine this actually would like to have something thats a little more tender than that and they are not just purely consumers of whatever they think will fulfillment is. I think theyre underestimating themselves. That is one thing i will say. I will ask one more question and then will open it up for questions so feature in politico this summer explored the idea of a robot president some techno. It sounding better and better is it. [laughter] he cant be bought off by lobbyists and they wont bring the clueless sent along wrong for the ride. You know, in india the Prime Minister was campaigning as a hologram so where are we headed with this stuff. Yes, he has protected himself as the big hologram and the saudis gave citizenship to some ai. To a female robot. And. They dont do it for their own women but they will for a robot. They are allowed to drive now but just barely. The female robot is probably also the driver the human female is not. Yeah, this hope that we can have a program that will solve our problems is very much a false hope because the programs dont do anything. There channels between us and thats like the allusion i was talking about where we want to pretend you dont need all those translators who are supplying the Raw Materials thats repurposed to provide automated translation and we want to pretend that theres this electronic brain where there isnt. Its us talking to herself in a unique channel and there can be no such thing as an electronic president. Democracy is innocence and algorithmic leadership scheme. Thats what democracy is. If you want to think of it that way and i hope democracy is still possible. [laughter] on that cheery note do you have any questions . I have a question about using Virtual Reality for health. I know that there have been some studies in veterans hospitals using Virtual Reality to manage pain and wondering if you could talk about how it could be keyed into assisting people rather than demolishing them. Yes, Virtual Reality in medicine has been wellestablished for decades. In fact my proudest time in the first phase of Virtual Reality in the 80s was a simulator at stanford with the doctor and probably the most pleasant outcome of that personally was that in the last couple years my wife has been battling cancer successfully but one of her most difficult procedures was performed by someone who trained with someone who trained joe, my old partner, and the procedure she underwent was designed in a Virtual Reality surgical simulator trained in Virtual Reality and it was successful. It came around to us. Thats the thing is very commonplace and has been in every vehicle that he used was prototype and theres a whole industrial life of it where it has done good things in there are a large variety of medical applications that have been tested including lot of psychiatric ones ptsd, phobia treatment and that sort of thing. I was initially skeptical because i thought they sounded too trendy but they worked out in clinical trials. [inaudible] the question is could you use virtual alley for behavioral modification. Possibly. My friend named Walter Greenleaf has created to help gang members learn to avoid conflict and he said pretty good results in some replication. I dont think theres such a thing as a panacea in this area but i think they could be to. Im wondering if you could talk about what are some possibilities in creating spaces that are not susceptible to this sort of digital pacing. How do we go back to the kinds of places where serendipity and mild danger and excursion are outside of these behavior leaps . I think there is an easy answer to that which is just provide people with some alternative motivation other than the peer seeking of attention. The only thing you can get out of it is seeking attention and youll turn into a kid who is acting out again and everything turns bad. Some examples of systems that offer alternatives if you look at the social networks and look at which are the ones that have malicious information and dont have mop like ganging up on people they are all these ones that there is Something Else to seek attention like a linkedin people are worried about the careers so theres Something Else to think about. In a Virtual World there was second life and someone might remember and there was an economy in it and it had bullies and called [inaudible] back then but not as many and if you just give someone alternative in some broadening an incentive and people rise to the occasion to give them incentive. Could you talk about what you think happened to your telepresence as technology. I believe he did some work on the past and never really seem to emerge as much of some of the other things you have worked on. In the new book it alternates between the story chapters and technical chapters in one of the technical chapters is a section on this and the problem is that we never solved the duplex problem in in order to give telepresence you need some kind of display that can do that in very typically those might be in the form of a headset and then they see with headsets if you make software erase the headset and never quite works right because it was called the uncanny valley and remember. Out a way a to a scheme to solve that. Thats where its one up right now. Is there anything in the music you are working on now or in the music that could help our tattered social fabric or even our personal conditions, especially with what youre working on in music . Music helps my tattered condition and i like it. I am not willing to give up my starry eyed idealism about the power of art. I do think that in the president environment even the best things online are channeled in ways to create negativity because thats the maximum engagement factor. Its very the social networks have taken over Music Distribution and its very, very hard to do it in a positive way stopped disturbing my music a while ago. Theres no way that feels positive to me to do it i just dont do it anymore. Hello. Thank you very much for your talk. I was wondering where does or where could religion fit in to the conceptions you have created . For example, as child as a holocaust survivor im wondering if you read the comic series or Something Else related to what happened and what your response was as a technologist. Have you had any connection to israel and the technology stuff that goes on their . You mentioned music so i was wondering if you had any connection or checked out [inaudible] which is often been called jewish jazz . I view those as for questions that are almost totally unrelated. Although they have some jewish connection. So, lets see. Ill try to run to them in reverse order. [inaudible], hell, yes. Show you something. Absolutely. I love [inaudible]. Its a whole universe in it of itself with Different Things and its great. Israel, ive never been to israel but we have a brazilian israeli and Israeli Companies in the tech circle now sold i see israelis all the time. I should say that the techie part of israel tends to be more like part of israel that hasnt been in power in israel in a long time. Theres almost to israels leaders to america is but i havent been there so i cant say for sure. Then you asked about holocaust literature and you asked about mouth in particular. I have read mouse and other things, of course. Lately ive been reading [inaudible] about histories but then you asked about religion. Here i mean attends what you think religion is. I would say the first type of character raises an interesting thing because the goyim and you wont know what im talking about thats okay because the thing about Virtual Reality that does interest me is theres this way in which i sometimes call it assault noticing device because with other forms of designs to Digital Technology you are interacting with the device and designers typically tell you to talk to it as if its a person that you talk to your phone for you talk to the speaker thing on your counter or to your car and its like a person then youre like a machine and the equivalence comes about in the people demote themselves and they say their big part of the big machine of facebook and it all makes sense. With Virtual Reality is a different story. You can keep somebodys Facebook Page going after they are dead but a virtualreality experience doesnt make sense for the person is dead because of life and interactive moment to moment. When youre Virtual Reality can change a body in the world and you can change everything but theres still something floating there the matter what changes. And that is you and your experience. Its very easy to go through the day without noticing that experience is real thing. Our tech culture asked us to tell us its real because of the experience a real thing it cut the chicken that we understand everything already because the tech mindset is that the reality is understood with details and experiences there and it totally up to something because of the dimension of reality. It is there and you do experience and theres some youth that is floating there you can call it experience or soul and when you experience virtualreality you separate and you can notice it. Time for two more questions. Isnt there some Silicon Valley guy who is doing or looking for that ai got head now . Oh god, yeah, theres always stuff like that left back. I love your mind, beautiful mind. There are at least four big elephants in the room. If you read the article in harpers [inaudible] you know that were on the verge of losing democracy altogether. We know that to keep fossil fuels in the ground for the next two or three years the planet will go over the cliff. Wealth inequality and its all hastening us toward oblivion. So you are just a bundle of cheer. [laughter] heres the good news. Ametek advocate in developing an app and its what kirk and its a battle of forces of good and evil, greed and compassion and the only thing that made a difference is organizing. Try to play with the new concept called crowd acting rather than crowdfunding and are you familiar with the concept . Well, you know what . I have to ask you not to make a pitch using question time because. Its not a pitch but i want to think about what you think of the concept to get people willing to get arrested or massive civil resistance by using crowd acting. So far every time people have used Online Platforms to organize for positive social change its been channeled into negative social change of a vastly greater magnitude than the initial attempt so in principle it can work but it has to be done completely outside of any existing channels. If you use social media at all you are doomed. Im sorry to be so blunt but over and over again it happens. I was wondering if there was any emerging mythical or philosophical cultures within technology that are making you more optimistic for the future and a lot of it is based on myths are using new mythmaking that is a bit more happy . Well, thats an interesting question. In a lot of ways Computer Science is the battle between mythology because computers are such an abstract thing and you have to have some way to think about what the bits are. This is something that might not be obvious to see but if you took a computer like i dont know a macintosh or something and you stick it in an alien world it would be like a lava lamp. In the patterns changing but it wouldnt mean anything because the meaning is lost. The bits only mean anything according to our education and we have to remember the interpretation from when we started the process to when we look at the bits again. That makes sense, right . Therefore Computer Science only has any action to it if its tied to some cultural framework. Therefore, mythmaking is strange and its a technical field that can only exist in accordance with mythmaking process in so and there have been these battle royales about what myths should be in place for computers from the very beginning. Alan turing created the Artificial Intelligence that were making new people and i was one of the first myths but he did it in the weeks before he committed suicide while undergoing horrific torture over his sexual identity. I think Artificial Intelligence myth is in its own way escape us. Its about escaping and creating some sort of pristine human condition that escapes the sexuality and ambiguities of being a person. Its other things to do my thing. I dont want to cheapen or supply what alan turing was thinking because we didnt know everything because it tell us everything but we know a little bit. Shortly after that [inaudible] will talk about in the book came up with a completely he wanted to come up with alternative condition because it was was in creepy to him and he came up with the idea of cybernetics which cyber comes from greek for navigation that computers would constantly be connected to the world like thermostats constantly making adjustments to the algorithm and he warned that if that was applied to people it would become any built manipulation and fire. He wrote a book in 1950 called the human use of human beings where he warned that hypothetically someday someone can make a global computing facility with wireless connections to devices that would be on every person constantly and can make society absurd but of course that is not visible. [laughter] that was his bold thought experiment. And so in a sensible idea of Virtual Reality is another one of these myths. I feel like i made up yet another myth and i sometimes in the book i propose ai in virtualreality are opposites and their opposites in the following way. In virtualreality its always people behind the myths. Theres no angels or aliens were making something happened but its action from people reflected through myths. In virtualreality you change the spatial aspect of a person and you might turn into an octopus we might be in mars and theres the spatial transfer. In ai we steal the example sets real translators is on the back to you as if it was an electronic brain so the transfer and you can think of ai as being orthogonal allusions and another difference is the difference between a charlatan and a magician. The magician announces the track. In a sense virtualreality is when you announce a check in ai is when you do not. Thank you. [applause] we have copies of his book in the back and you will stick around and stop sign copies for us. I am, i guess. Maureen, thank you so much. 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