The [inaudible conversations] in an area located around Fourth Avenue from the union square to astor place from about the 1890s to the 1960s and at the time ithetime it housed 48 n the 90 years since then all but one of the stores has shuttered leaving it to be passed down to my t father who worked here for6 years and just retired recently age of 89 and unfortunately he he is very sik but hopefully this will always be kept in our family and thingu you all for being readers and writers into supporting the store. Tonight im excited to be hosting scientists classical musician and writer author of two International Best sellers who owns the future and you are not a gadget. Best sellers also add the strand, he was an early pioneer of Virtual Reality creating some of the first virtualreality products on the market in the 1980s. The new book dawn of new everything expounds upon this expectations for the Virtual Reality and its vast untapped potential. Joining him to discuss the potential is one of my favorite columnists maureen dowd whos been a contributor sends 1995 where she won a pulitzer prize. Please join me in welcoming jaraon and maureen to the stage thank you. [applause] for the room we use this and then this is for cspan. Something like that. I wrote in the times that jaraon is one of the most unusual people ive ever met, and ive met quite a few unusual people. Including our president. I asked hi him wouldnt you ratr have someone more technical interview you but i love about his books is that they are so alive and vivid and it really draws you in so i feel like you dont have to be an expert to really enjoy it. Ive interviewed him in the past couple of times and he is a hoarder as m. I. He has every Musical Instrument known to man in every square inch filled with the reall the really big floorstanding wood instruments. And a beautiful golden harp and piano is the oldest. Its not oldest the best. Is a 1929 hamlin for concerts that and its the best one. I mean its amazing. And an instrument called the serpent. I wrote a piece that was premiered earlier this year and it was the only bass instrument in the middle ages its hard to o play but its kind of wonderful. Aaron sorkin once wrote this line in a play music is what science does on a saturday nig night. Often times he starts his talks at playing one of his unusual instruments. Lets start that way. [inaudible] [laughter] [applause] what is that . You dont know what that is . [laughter] it is something usually from laos and Southeast Asia and i love it for many reasons. It is a good crowd pleaser i can take so it is effective but also arguably the oldest digital number so this is 16 similar objects so this is where it all started and actually theres a whole lineage that leads to the computer directly from this. These were traded across the silk road and the ancient greeks and romans knew them and made a giant version to a company the coliseum and it was so hard to operate they have to develop these planks that developed into the keyboardnt and piano after they were so big that they had trouble with them as they had to automate records on it and gradually turned into automation mechanisms. There was a piano who didnt play the same each time it had a little bit of randomness and the notion that you could have a piano that kind of made up its own mind to try to see if he could make it programmable that inspired another to make a programmable calculator which in the 20th century inspired another one named alan turing to formulas the general calculations of the computer and here we are safe with a thrown election. [laughter]it so it all started with this little thing. I think it is very good that we have the father of Virtual Reality at the moment the whole reality is up for grabs. I wanted to start with some personal questions because jaraon was born in new york city and then his parents fled the big city when he was one and jaraons life is as colorful as he is as you might imagine. They were running that we are not sure from what and you had a tragedy at a young age and i just wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your youth that you write about in the book. Sure. So, we are jewish, and for my parents generation, they were european. The story as you might imagine applies to my mother was a concentration camp survivor captured 13. My fathers family had been mostly wiped out. They are from ukraine. They made it here and they kind of like an interesting lif liven the 50s in new york. The my dad worked with Science Fiction so he wrote pieces in the back of fantastic and he said he came up with the rumor about alligators [inaudible] i dont really know for sure. This is something she told me when i was a kid and now that i have my own title in both trying to watch how frequently i went to her to gauge how often i was lied to if it is genetic. [laughter] so my doubts about some of the stories have increased slightly based on that research. My dad was kind of a sidekick on one of the earliest radio shows in one of the things he liked to do is make fun of weird pseudoscience to pretend to be into it. He was involved in one of the early flying saucer stuff and might have invented this but there might actually be alligators. Ive never gotten to the bottom of this and i feel like with questions involving new york, no one really does. I was born in 1960 and i think they have this feeling they wanted to run to get away they didnt want me to be around and by the way on a different topic, i have an 11yearold child now, a daughter and i am so haunted by this because my mothers family wai waited until it was o late to like how do you know and i dont have the answer, i really dont know. But they ran as far as they could to the most remote place they had to have a Good University so they ended up at the edge where they meet a. They settled there at that corner at as man his many others in the book. Thel short version is my mother died in a car accident when i was nine. She had just gotten her drivers morning and the after that i felt a profound sense of isolation and it led me to aan fascination with the potential to connect to people, how do you do it. I can almost remember what it felt like remember when you go out at night andre the stars and they are just right there. You can see them, they are real but then when you learn up a bit about how the universe was put together it could take hundreds of thousands of years to get to that place. Thats how people felt to me if its a distance like stars. There were serious bullies whenen i was. The border used to be this open border. It was an amazing thing. You t would take a school bus across the river and you would be in mexico. Theres this whole crazy paranoia about the border that didnt exist. It was just a very sweet place just right across. The at as. Certain point they transferred me to the School System and when i was back, some of the kids in my school drowning killed the only chicana kid they used to refer to as anybody of mexican descent and it wasaw terrifying that was a terrifying environment to live in. After your mothers death, your house burned down and you lived with your father in a tent in a little plot of land he purchased in the new mexico desert and then he lets you draw the design of the house you would build together. Wheneo you are a parent and your daughter is the same age as you were then, would you let her design your house . [laughter] so we negotiated a compromise on this. Did you notice a new part of the house we are building there is an eye shaped window . I let her make a window that is the shape of her eye that way she could do part of the house but its not structurally critical. My father did with the design a house of 11 and we did build it and part of it collapsed about 30 years later so my advice is not to let an ebook i andy levd design a house even if they seem precocious. You might disagree and we can have a conversation about it thats my thought. You write about how you remember vividly the lights for the first time. You are hyper perceptive, hypersensitive and even your own wordsiv hyper romantic. How did this later develop into your becoming the father of Virtual Reality and do you think that you were drawn to the arts of escapism from the men each, so if you are titled with . I dont feel like it was escapism. What struck me about the garden of the rhythmic lights is that here is somebody from centuries earlier who created this thing that didntte represent reality. It was this active imagination. To me its like if other peoples heads are like distant stars you couldnt get it to come it was like this drives that somehow transient between the head. I just had this idea that somehow if you could really see what wasas and someone also said or they could see what is in yours it would be so astonishi astonishing. Serial art for the first time for me had a feeling like that but opened up peoples heads and exposed them and of course surrealism isnt the only genre that does not and ive actually gotten a little bit of flack from peoplely who think that its kind of tasteless so it is a funny conversation to have but i think artt is that. When i was a little older i got super excited by early experiments with Computer Graphics and the guy that invented them was Ivan Sutherland you can get into the weeds of the history but that is approximately true and he also made the first Virtual Reality headset in the late 60s and when there was this journal article i was in college in the 70s and there was this journal article about some of his word and i got so excited i ran out and just stopped strangers in the street and was holding up like look at this we are going to be able to share dreams and you have to understand that was before the internet so there was no way to just Contact People you didnt know. I wasnt a feasible plan so i just ran up to strangers with these Journal Articles and i was a badly behaved boy. Speaking of which and that 70s you found your way back to manhattan and lived in a purple penthouse just behind the dakota and you became part of an avantgarde music stand spending time with john cage and Laurie Anderson y. You might do at that time new york city amplified you] yourself, a giant mirror. As he walked down the street you madera eye contact and exchanged signals with thousands of people no longer such a big. Everyone is looking at their phones. What do you think of new york now . Is it over . When is the last time you were there . I think its still there. I cant say anything bad you wouldnt know more about than me because you are from here. Its less distinct from other places and less flavorful than it used to be with so many chain stores and that sort of thing. One thing i will say is when i was 17 and here forbu the first time i used it just haunt this place and hang out. The employees used to be really strange people. It used to be in augustine so i have fond memories of it. When you use to go to the used e apartment to bed for money. The avantgarde music journal was funded by them so they would periodically have to say the printer wants to bely paid. But thats how things go and i think that sort of thing still goes on today. Some in the audience will know who im talking about. There was a woman that had energy like i have never seen before. Im not sure what her age was, but she was elderly i would say she would be held life running around and she was this patron who a lot of people youve heard of depended on and she claimed to have this amazing house of stainless steel hanging from a mobile with the top inside. It sounded real and true at the time but if something were true like that i would have heard. It must be one of those things. I know this one restaurant if we would run into the alley and grab a block of cheese. In those days it was dangerous and kind of a scary place to. I love the way that he writes about women in this book. He goes off on a discourse and has a lot of insight you ended up with tarantula venom in the fridge. [laughter] there was a house in berkeley california built above a spring and there was a group of people that started publishing a ms. Magazine into the most famous version was called mondo 2000. This group of roommates made this magazine and the woman that was the editor collected these substances and we had a problem with and i dont know why we had it but it became a problem. When you got divorced there was a weird incident with. He was a famous divorce lawyer. Wasnt there a fight about virtual sperm he was going to try a new legal theory if you failed to impregnate somebody who thought it was their last chance and she was certainly young enough you could be sued for failure to were Something Like that. But the interesting thing about it was that he was thrown in jail and disbarred if not a case related to me that Something Else. I almost wish it had gone through because the interesting thing is they say okay we are going to need your sperm samples and prove you could father a child in this lawsuit. So you are going to force me to give you a sperm sample in a delicate state telling me to do with my body and i suddenly felt like men dont ever experience what that feels like that im one of the few that got to experience what it feels like to tell you about your own body and i thought okay. I wish more could experience that. Thats what came out of it for me. Sometimes we are a little too cool and abstract but fundamentally its about the wht the state can come and control someones body and i felt very keenly sorr so i put the story e because it might help somebody else see what a bad idea that is. You talked about the social media as one modification and empire and said empathy becomes impossible and others have said that it will be seen as a passing or maybe we will have president zuckerberg. Who knows. On the chance i hope you are standing up here on that era. So, this is im actually writing another book about this but the short version is they wanted everything to be free but we also love steve jobs and bill gates if you want everything to be free the only answer is advertising so they were born as an advertiser but the problem is they get better and better and faster and faster so what started out as advertising turned into Continuous Monitoring and feedback and its easy to design those to be addictive and hire them out to manipulate people. Shawn admitted this the other day. The day after your piece was published i should note. Is he said they knew they were designing something addictive. The most tragic thing about it is since they require input from people they only work adding their own posts and videos and things. When people add positive minded construct of material, the social media gets routed to terrible purposes for the simple reason social media has to drive engagement of Everything Else and negative emotions drive it better than anything else, so a year after some positive training you have backlash could the arc of history and sets it back because the backlash is more powerful because the social media makes it so, so the arab spring turned into the reign of terror. Women trying to improve their status world, black wives matter turned into sort of a bizarre normalizing of fascism there is no reason for it to stop. Im worried about the need to movement that will turn into something we dont know the details of that all we can say is that will be worse than we expected because that is what happens. On a happier note you mention in the next book can we tell them th that cats and dogs. He has like four cats but he really loves. Its true we are a cat household and i mean theyve outgrown us. Hes worried one is a trump voter. She had been representing these kittens that showed up like why are there immigrants, everything was fine, they are eating with the cat food, really upset about it. Maureen kind of scooped mee up n this because theyd be the intro to my next book into going to have to come up with some other clever things. The cats out of the bag. The cat is out of the bag. You might know cats are especially Popular Online comic cat videos and all that. My theory is simple, we are watching our own independence go away and attacks remind us of what the thing we are losing is like because cat are you know, cats are not domesticated, they domesticated themselves and are still partially wild, they can live in the wild, they have this aloofness and that is what we are losing in ourselves as we lose these tools so we are watching ourselves go away. Ch i hope that fury is wrong. By the way one of our cats is not aloof. [laughter] they are hanging from the ceiling above the antique Musical Instruments. So you were friends with Timothy Leary and once had to help break him out of the initial institute. I noticed in the Financial Times the other day this whole piece about how a new generation of San Franciscos working in Silicon Valley believe that lsd makes them more creative but they are taking it in micro doses i guess, which is a funny thing coming full circle to your story about breaking them out. I have no problem if people want to experiment with micro dosages or something but there might be an audit definition. Says they took their cue from steve jobs and that it was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life. Im sureng he felt that becae it was important to him. I have never met tim but he started speaking about Virtual Reality and for the first time it became a big deal in public life and there was a wave of interest i guess it would have been in the 80s. He said this is the new electronic lsd. I started kind of criticizing him in some places we had little magazines so i wrote some pieces of saying it doesnt do anybody any good to try to Treat Technology as somehow applaudi w things that he said we should meet. I saidthth okay, great. I cant do his voice but i wish i could. He had sort of a gentle irishamerican voice. Im getting paid to do this workshop and i like the money that they really dont want to do it so i am hiring this guy is a professional Timothy Leary in person nader and im going to give him some of money and thend then i wont have tomp do it but the thing is i think i have to show up at least at the start so years but i want you to do. Bring your car and i want you to smuggle the guy thats going to impersonate me in your truck and then smuggle me out a. And this is not east berlin this is like those with beards and tiedyed shirts, highsecurity face. Heres Something Weird there was a story in the times about this institute which now is having a huge comeback by the millionaires and billionaires who decided they want to try to find their soul so they are drinking temperature debate cup. I still know michael and murphy and there is a whole new generation of Silicon Valley people, so it is going to change hands and it does look like it is moving from the original psychology people who started it and over to the new generation of Silicon Valley people. And originally the economists call this and i dont know what this means exactly that a bird alone where people got high and had sex throughout the 60s and 70s before coming home and talking about psycho babble and dangling crystals. [laughter]an they understand sometimes feel the call of flattery an and cover little u overboard there i feel like that is a little unfair. Ive never seen it that way but i dont know. The its halfway between San Francisco and la high above the pacific ocean. Its kind of an astonishing place as a natural spot. The movement and the u. S. Ch that started the breakaway that had its focus a lot of interesting things happened. I feel like it dissented from the characterization. One interesting thing that you said tong me is theres a certain kind of personality emerging from the digital age and use it if you are a mark of social media being manipulated one of the ways to tell us theres a certain kind of personality quality that overtakes you. Its been called the snowflake quality. I people criticize liberal college kids who have it but its the same thing you see in trump, its this kind of highly react to outragedti singleminded us d onmessage one way to think of trump even though he is a con man and an actor and a master manipulator and all that in a sense hes also a victim. I met him a few times over 30 years and as someone who moved from a new york character who was in on his own joke to somebody who was completely freaked out and outraged and felt like he was on the verge of catastrophe every second so my theory about that is that he was ruined by social media. I do think that is exactly right. The addiction algorithms and social media does create this personality affect in that people click zombies when they are using it and then they have this weird nervous kind of a small minded quality. Did you ever think you would see a president running everything on social media or is it just strange . Do you know who the composer terry riley is . For a long time we were writing and not put together and it was about a president who had run things through manipulative computer systems. We didnt get it exactly right but it was enough that it was towas tocome a bit depressing to complete the opera. [laughter] Silicon Valley designers tend to never see the possibility of bad actors and are surprised over and over and over again. Another delight of the book is the footnote which can be really hilarious. In the one you said you had a friend who dated donald trump. Is that in their . Im really indiscreet. Where is my editor. [laughter] i did know somebody dating him for a while, yes. And was about experience . I dont think that was a dignity enhancing experience. [laughter]a because we are inundated with this in my world, i want to just ask you about gender inequity and Sexual Harassment and in Silicon Valley i did the first interview with susan fowler who is number two on the re code list today in terms of power because she kind of got guber to its knees on this stuff. You said something really graves where you said there is a kind of new emerging male jerk persona of the digital age which was the a cross between the driver and maybe milo and palmer lucky and maybe steve, smug, superior, i have the leverage of power, i know better than you like and insecurity and a lot of power at they same time. Its become a recognizable type. If the snowflake persona is what comes from being manipulated by these behavior modifications, did i come up with a name for what that is i guess i cant use curse words on cspan, so this kind w of god, does this kind of other persona that comes over the people that run these schemes. Theres this kind of near insecurity. Its sort of a strange twisted persona but we see it again and again. One thing you seem kind of worried about from bees that tht solve problems like how to pay a stranger for stuff online now contemplate this world where they are the creator of the new reality and perhaps induce and you talk about them getting high othan getting highon their own. Yet. [laughter] back in the 90s when i used to talk about this stuff i would use a bootlegger vocabulary which is dont drink your own whiskey which is to say if you have someone to sell your stuff you shouldnt believe it yourself and then there was the ten crack commandments one of them was dont get high on your own supply so the same thing but updated. I started using that. I forget that was sometime in the late 90s that came out. I think that is a problem. When Silicon Valley does have a way of hyping itself that it then believes we are not to ignore owens holds true as we need to be that theres there d site that. I am one of those rare people that have been inside and i try to call it as i see it and speak truthfully. People still talk to me and i feel like recently when they came out and said yes we used these techniques t that were proven as behavior experiments and then they were tested in largescale that you start to see people realize that its okay to be more honest and i think we are going to see more of that. If you like there is a bit of a shift in Silicon Valley and we might start to see more honesty and clarity. Do we just need to shut it down and start over . But i think would fix it and i dont have a lot of people agree with me on this i think if we just change the Business Model of Big Companies said they were not incentivized to bring out the most addictive designs it would self correct. The biggest problem is the advertising 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 if they had a small fee if it was monetized it would create an alternative for the fewer attention seeking and i think people would rise to the occasion and there would be better quality stuff and it would be perfect and get a lot better and i think facebook could still be in business. Their shareholders would do fine. I dont know if that is the solution we will come to but that is the smoothest solution i know about. This idea of having regulators count on them is tough because hackers cannot run regulators. He gets upset with me when i dwell on this but i am obsessed with the fight with twitter and trashing each other this from going to ask quickly where he thinks the killer ai is coming together and thats why he wants to have interplanetary colonization and rockets to mars and Mark Zuckerberg keeps saying that its hysterical and then he implies that Mark Zuckerberg just wants to soak up more information and get more ads and isnt worried about getting the kill switch to the killer robots, sois just quickly. [laughter] well, in general if you have a company that makes its money by selling goods or services, it is more likely a to be a Decent Company than if it only makes its money through behavior modification to pay, so intrinsically weird its going to bring up the better in him and other people than what zuckerberg does. Zuckerberg fundamental business is to screw up the world almost exclusively. My first round of sympathy on the other hand what they are saying about ai is in my view incorrect and the reason why i said it doesnt exist heres the way i see it. This is a long story we make up the intelligence and it suggests we are godlike because we are creating this new life and i was just thinking you could spend some kind of a theme around it like anyway theres this whole fantasy about it and the problem is that makes you into a terrible scientist and engineer and if you say here is this machine and what its supposed to accomplish and then i accept the reality of the measurement than i can make it better that his engineering but if you say i believe this is alive that isnt welldefined. He should have said its subjective and based on their judgment so you no longer can be an engineer at this point you are a religious ritual practitioner with no basis. So now everything becomes absurd, people take place responsibility and now all of a sudden its okay for some giant corporation to be promoting the these horrible things were personal destruction for people. We will talk to it and see if we can get it to do better. Its ridiculous. Another thing about it is behind every claim of theft. Inin order to run a ei you nee a bunch of data to drive the Machine Learning algorithm and those come from people like language translators. Language translators have seen theirua fortunes plummet like investigative journalists or recording musicians they no longer make money from their daily bread because you can get free translations from Online Services but for the services to work, we have to steal examplele translations from tens of millions every single day because the language changes that passed so on the one hand we say youre no longer needed because there were giant electronic brain will replace you so you wont be paid. You will have to go seek income you are no longer earning your own dignity but on the other hand we actually do need them. There is no electronic brain its just a new channel so it is a lie, its theft. Everything you say we should be afraid of the killer ai you are promoting the myth which itself is the danger. So when he does but hes actually making it worse. This is from the point of view of a woman. I just saw blade runner and ive been watching westworld and i wondered if women are just really screwed in the future because you know, ryan goslin has an alexa that can com can cd looks like a latino Brigitte Bardot and Harrison Ford is still in love with his gorgeous replica. Should women be worried about these robots and is the former editor of cosmo says low Virtual Reality be the greatest thing that ever happened to emails . This is a topic with a lot of angles to it. The first thing i would want to is before we dig too much into this approach is worth saying there are other ways Virtual Reality and advanced media in general could contribute that are far more interesting and creative than this model. Remember if you look at the history of sexuality and art, it was more interesting before cinema came along and we could capture thingif we couldcaptureh the camera. I think what happened is the cinematic capturing creativity this new kind of antisemitism place a vision that have been more variable before because if you look at art from before, youll see this interesting and kind of diverse eroticism with more emotion before in my view. Not to say that it was perfect because historically its been sort of worse and worse the further back you go with some exceptions. I think the cinema made us into the and its possible we will remember it as a sort of unfortunate and sad era. I think it is a possibility, so in Virtual Reality theres these other things you can try that are kind of powerful like sharing a body with somebody else to become a creature in a Virtual World but we have to import in new ways and that may sound abstract into strange but you will see. So i just want to say we shouldntei think about this wih a way of thinking how media intersects with sexuality is the only way it can. I think theres more interesting stuff in the future. And then i will say that the culture is more dominated than this idea that we wont need women anymore has been one of the fantasies to culture for a long time. Every technical utopia theres the sort of nerdy ones out of Silicon Valley that include likl a peer device or prostitution or sex robots or Something Like that so we need to deal with this. Or sometimes in space. I think in their hearts a lot of men who imagine this would like to some debate could have something more than that and they are not just purely consumers of whatever can be fulfilled. I think youre underestimating themselves. I will ask one more question than wthen we will open up for questions. Thist summer we explored the ida of a robot president. Its sounding better andde better, isnt it. [laughter] they were bringing the clueless soninlaw for the ride and so forth. And in india Prime Minister was campaigning as a hologram so where are we headed with this stuff . He was projected as a hologram and the saudis gave citizenship to some ai. To a female robot. Not to their own women but a robot. Gas. [laughter] but the female robot is probably allowed to drive a. Just hope that we can have a program to solve all of our problems is a false hope because they dont do anything. They are just channels between us. Its like the illusion i was talking about where we want to pretend we dont need all those translators supplying the raw materialou and purpose to provie automated translations. We want to pretend theres an electronic brain but there isnt its just us talking to ourselves in a new channel so there can be no such thing as an electronic precedent channeling peoples data. Democracy isro in a row an algorithmic relationship if you want to think of it that way. And i hope democracy is still possible. [laughter] on that note, we have so many questions. Ha they have a question about using Virtual Reality for health. I know thereve been some studies in veterans hospitals using Virtual Reality to manage pain and i wonder if you can talk a little bit about how it can sort of be queued into assisting people rather than demolishing them. Virtual reality and medicine has been very well established for decades. My proudest time in the first wave is a Virtual Realities was the first simulator at stanford. Probably the most pleasant outcome of that personally in the last couple of years where my wife was battling cancer successfully that one of the most difficult procedures to show my old partner and building a p stimulator that could simulator p and he trained for t in Virtual Reality and it was successful. So thats sort of thing is very commonplace and has been in every vehicle is geared at this point. 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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