back in the 1980s actually i gave my
first talk at ted
and i brought some of the very very
first public demonstrations of virtual
reality
ever to the ted stage um
and at that time we knew that we were
facing a knife edge future where
the technology we needed
the technology we loved could also be
our undoing
we knew that if we thought of our
technology
as a means to ever more power
if it was just a power trip we'd
eventually destroy ourselves that's what
happens
when you're on a power trip and nothing
else
so the idealism
of digital
uh culture back then was all about
starting with that recognition of the
possible darkness and trying to imagine
a way to transcend it with beauty and
creativity
i always used to end my early ted talks
with a rather horrifying
line which is we
have a challenge we have to create
a culture around technology that
is so beautiful so meaningful so deep so
endlessly creative
so filled with infinite potential that
it draws us away from committing mass
suicide
and uh you know i mean so it's it's we
talked about extinction
as being one in the same as the need to
create
an alluring infinitely creative future
and i still believe that that
alternative of creativity as an
alternative
to death is very real and true maybe the
most true thing there is
in the case of virtual reality well the
way i used to talk about it
is that it would be something like what
happened when people discovered language
with language came new adventures new
depth new meaning new ways to connect
new ways to coordinate new ways to
imagine new ways to raise children
and i imagined with virtual reality we'd
have this new thing that would be like a
conversation but also like waking state
intentional dreaming we called it post
symbolic communication
because it would be like just directly
making the thing you experienced instead
of indirectly
making symbols to refer to things
it was a beautiful vision and it's one i
still believe in
and yet haunting that beautiful vision
was the dark side of how it could also
turn out
and um i suppose i could mention
from one of the very earliest computer
scientists whose name was norbert weiner
and he wrote a book back in the 50s from
before i was even born
called the human use of human beings
and in the book he described the
potential
to create a computer system
that would be gathering data from people
and providing
feedback to those people in real time in
order to
put them kind of partially statistically
in a skinner box
in a behaviorist system and he has this
amazing line where he says one could
imagine as a thought
experiment and i'm paraphrasing this
isn't a quote
one could imagine a global computer
system where everybody has devices on
them all the time
and the devices are giving them feedback
based on what they did
and the whole population is subject to a
degree of behavior modification
and such a society would be insane could
not survive
could not face its problems and then he
says but this is only a thought
experiment and such a future is
technologically
infeasible and yet of course it's what
we
we have created and it's what we must
undo if we are to survive
so um
in uh i i believe that we made a very
particular mistake
and it happened early on and by
understanding the
mistake we made we can undo it it
happened
in the 90s and going into the turn of
the century
and here's what happened early digital
culture and
indeed digital culture to this day
had a sense of um i would say lefty
socialist mission about it that unlike
other things that have been done like
the invention of books
everything on the internet must be
purely public must be available for free
because if even one person cannot afford
it
then that would create this terrible
inequity
now of course there's other ways to deal
with that if books cost money you can
have
public libraries and so forth but we
were thinking no no no
this is an exception this must be pure
public comments that's what we want and
so
that spirit lives on you can experience
it in designs like
the wikipedia for instance many others
but at the same time
we also believed with equal fervor in
this
other thing that was completely
incompatible which is
we loved our tech entrepreneurs we loved
steve jobs we loved
this nietzschean myth of the techie who
could
dent the universe right
and that that mythical power
still has a hold on us as well so you
have these two different
um passions for making everything free
and for the almost supernatural power
of the tech entrepreneur how do you
celebrate entrepreneurship
when everything's free well there was
only one solution back then which was
the advertising model
and so therefore google was born free
with ads facebook was born free
with ads now in the beginning
it was cute like with the very earliest
google
the ads really were kind of ads they
would be like you know your local
dentist or something
but there's this thing called moore's
law that makes the computers more and
more efficient and cheaper
their algorithms get better we actually
like have universities where people
study them and they get better and
better
and the customers and other entities who
use these systems just got more and more
experienced and got clever and clever
and what started out as advertising
really can't be called advertising
anymore it turned into
behavior modification just as norbert
weiner had worried it might and so
i i can't call these things social
networks anymore i call them behavior
modification empires we have
and and i i refuse to vilify the
individuals i have dear friends at these
companies
sold a company to google even though i
think it's it's one of these empires
um i i don't think this is a matter
of bad people who've done a bad thing i
think this is a matter
of a globally tragic
astoundingly ridiculous
mistake rather than a wave of evil
let me give you just another layer of
detail into how this
particular mistake functions so
with behaviorism you give the creature
whether it's a rat or a dog
or a person little treats and sometimes
little punishments
as feedback to what they do so
if you have an animal in a cage it might
be candy
and electric shocks but if you have a
smartphone
it's not those things it's a symbolic
uh symbolic punishment and reward
uh pavlov one of the early behaviorists
demonstrated the famous
principle you could use you could train
a dog to salivate just with the bell
just for the symbol so on social
networks social punishment and social
reward
function as the punishment and reward
and we all know the feeling of these
things you get this little thrill oh
somebody liked my stuff and it's being
repeated
or the punishment oh my god they don't
like me maybe somebody else is more
popular oh my god
so you have those two very common
feelings and they're doled out in such a
way that you get caught in this loop
as has been publicly acknowledged by
many of the founders of the system
everybody knew this is what was going on
but here's the thing
traditionally in the academic study of
the methods of behaviorism there have
been comparisons of positive
negative stimuli in this setting a
commercial setting
there's a new kind of difference that
has kind of evaded the academic world
for a while
and that difference is that wither
positive stimuli are more effective the
negative ones in different circumstances
the negative ones are cheaper they're
the bargain stimuli
so what i mean by that is uh
it's much easier to lose trust than to
build trust
it takes a long time to build love
it takes a short time to ruin love now
the customers of these behavior
modification empires
are on a very fast loop they're almost
like high-frequency traders they're
getting feedback from their spends or
whatever their activities are if they're
not spending
and they see what's working and then
they do more of that
and so they're getting the quick
feedback which means they're responding
more to the negative emotions because
those are the runs the ones that rise
faster right and so therefore
even well-intentioned players who think
all they're doing is advertising
toothpaste
end up advancing the cause of the
negative people the negative emotions
the cranks
the paranoids the the the cynics the
nihilists
those are the ones who get amplified by
the system
and you know you can't pay one of these
companies to make the world suddenly
nice and improve democracy
nearly as easily as you can pay to ruin
those things
and so this is the dilemma we've gotten
ourselves into
the alternative is to turn back the
clock
with great difficulty and remake that
decision
remaking it would mean two things
it would mean first that many people
those who could afford to would actually
pay for these things you'd pay for
search
you'd pay for social networking how
would you pay
maybe with a subscription fee maybe
with micro payments as you use them
there's a lot of options
if some of you were recoiling and you're
thinking oh my god i would never pay for
these things
how could you ever get anyone to pay i
want to remind you of something that
just happened
around the same time that companies like
google and facebook were formulating
their free
idea a lot of cyber culture also
believed
that in the future televisions and
movies would be created in the same way
kind of like the wikipedia but then
companies like netflix amazon hbo
said actually you know subscribe we'll
give you great tv
and it worked we now are in this period
called
peak tv right so sometimes when you pay
for stuff things get
get better we can imagine a hypothetical
we can imagine a hypothetical world of
peak social media
what would that be like it would mean
when you get on you can get
really useful authoritative medical
advice instead of cranks
it could mean when you want to get
factual information
there's not a bunch of weird paranoid
conspiracy theories
we can imagine this wonderful other
possibility
ah i dream of it i believe it's possible
i'm certain it's possible
um and i'm certain that the companies
the googles and the facebooks would
actually do better in this world i don't
believe we need to punish silicon valley
we just need to remake the decision
of the big tech companies it's really
only two
that depend on behavior modification and
spying
as their business plans google and
facebook and
if you and i love you guys i love the
com
i really i do like the people are
fantastic
um i want to point out like if you like
if i may if you look at google they can
they can
propagate cost centers endlessly with
all these companies
but they cannot propagate profit centers
they cannot diversify because they're
hooked
they're hooked on this model just like
their own users they're in the same trap
as their users
and you can't run a big corporation that
way so this is ultimately
totally in the benefit of the
shareholders and other stakeholders of
these companies
it's a win-win solution it'll just take
some time
to figure it out a lot of details to
work out
totally doable um
i don't believe our species can survive
unless we fix this
we cannot have a society in which
if two people wish to communicate the
only way that can happen
is if it's financed by a third person
who wishes to manipulate them
[Music]
um in the meantime if the companies
won't change
delete your accounts okay
enough for now thank you so much