TED2018: Can We Fix the Internet?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jaron Lanier is a pioneer of the modern internet and known as the "father" of Virtual Reality. But at the TED conference in Vancouver, Jane Wakefield hears why he thinks things have gone so badly wrong that there should be a mass deletion of social media, and the tech titans should start charging for their services.
Jane also hears from Gizmodo's privacy expert Kashmir Hill about her experiment with turning her home into an internet-connected "smart-home" and the enormous amounts of data her devices produced, even as she slept. Plus Olga Yurkova, a Ukrainian journalist who set up the website StopFake to debunk fake news and propaganda, and Mikhail Zygar, a prominent Russian journalist who argues that the impact of fake news and Russian trolls is vastly over-stated.
(Picture: Jaron Lanier speaking at TED2018; Credit: Bret Hartman/TED)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me, Jane Wakefield, coming to you today from the beautiful Canadian West Coast City of Vancouver. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm here for TED, the annual gathering of business leaders and thinkers from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design. |
| 0:25.0 | And it's no surprise, given the focus on tech giant Facebook and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's much-watched congressional hearing, |
| 0:32.3 | that data, privacy, and the future of social networks are very much in focus. |
| 0:38.2 | And gradually that system transformed into something that's genuinely sinister, |
| 0:43.2 | which I like to call it behavior modification empire. |
| 0:46.5 | Usually we give up privacy for convenience, |
| 0:48.8 | but my smart home was not convenient at all. |
| 0:51.2 | It was horrible to live in. |
| 0:52.9 | Things didn't work right. |
| 0:54.0 | One day the lights would work, the Things didn't work right. One day |
| 0:54.3 | the lights would work, the next day they wouldn't. One of the most thought-provoking speakers |
| 0:58.5 | of this week of talks and discussions was tech pioneer Jaron Lanier, regarded as the father |
| 1:04.4 | of virtual reality. He has a long history as one of Silicon Valley's most influential |
| 1:09.8 | and outspoken thinkers and has |
| 1:11.8 | authored many books, including You Are Not a Gadget, and the recent work, 10 arguments for deleting |
| 1:17.9 | your social media accounts right now. I asked him what's gone wrong and how the tech sector can |
| 1:23.7 | fix the trust issue, which is dogging the industry. Well, I've been concerned that we made a terrible mistake |
| 1:31.9 | in the world of technology and the Internet |
| 1:34.6 | about 20 years ago now. |
| 1:37.5 | And the mistake was we wanted to have a world |
| 1:41.9 | where everything was free on the Internet, |
... |
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