Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous question for you.

Is artificial intelligence intelligent in any meaningful way? Or is it just scraping all of its

troves of input data in order to spit out essentially what is a very fancy auto-complete.

The latter would be the position of one of the most influential people in technology in the

world, Jaron Lanier, who has written a number of books, including 10 arguments for deleting

your social media accounts right now. You are not a gadget and dawn of the

new everything. He is the man who coined the term virtual reality. He was one of the first virtual

reality pioneers. He founded the first company to sell virtual reality products in the 1980s.

And he has since become a vociferous critic of social media and now of

the kind of doomsday culture that surrounds artificial intelligence, the reverence that so many

people in Silicon Valley have towards this tipping point moment, as so many people see it,

this fork in the road for civilization. He says, calm down everybody, keep your pants on.

Artificial intelligence is a tool. It is, there's nothing going on behind the scenes. The lights are not on,

and they will never be on. This point of view, and he may be the world's most visible exponent of this

point of view, bumps up uneasily against the experience of so many

of us when we interact with artificial intelligences like chat GPT. So I wanted to pick Jaron's

brain about it. His name mostly comes up when people Google, who is the guy with dreadlocks

in the Netflix film The Social Dilemma, which was

Netflix's documentary about the perils of social media. So you may recognize Jaron from that

film. This is a fascinating chat. It's worth understanding that before the chat began, Jaron was

fiddling around with his connection to the web-based platform that we use to record these interviews on

for about 17 minutes trying to log in correctly.

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