Most AI futures give us two options: mass unemployment, or a government handout to soften the blow. But what if there's a third option, one centered on completely new categories of creative work that don't yet exist, where people get paid for contributing to AI rather than replaced by it?
In this episode, we talk with Jaron Lanier, pioneer of virtual reality and scientist at Microsoft Research. He proposes a radically different way of thinking about AI, and unpacks its consequences from AI safety to the future of the economy.
We touch on:
Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open
0:50 40 years in Silicon Valley: how tech became a pseudo world government
4:19 Self-driving cars, Tesla, and the moral paradox of tech progress
7:13 Why \"artificial intelligence\" is a marketing term, and how you should think about it instead
15:16 AI as human collaboration: what it makes possible and how it makes you a better user
21:37 From the Turing test to the truth crisis: how science shifted from seeking truth to performing it
25:36 Data dignity: going back to the people to solve AI's biggest safety failures
32:55 The alternate future worth building, and challenging the AI orthodoxy
38:41 Why UBI won't work and why a creativity-based economy is more stable
45:20 How to be an optimist about technological progress while acknowledging the risks