[Music] [Applause] [Music] Jon lir is an American Computer scientist visual artist and author born in New York City he popularized the term virtual reality for a field in which he was a Pioneer in the 1980s Time magazine named jod one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010 his book you are not a gadget was also released in early 2010 Jon writes and speaks on numerous topics including high technology business the social impact of technological practices the philosophy of Consciousness and information internet policy ICS and the future of humanism Jon's writing has appeared in the New York Times discover the Wall Street Journal Forbes Harper's magazine Wired Magazine and Scientific American please welcome to the stage Jerome laner um I I play music too I don't know if it said if the robot said that but anyway I brought one of my weird instruments to play and I'll tell you about it wait in a second [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] so this this is uh called a can it's from Laos and I brought it because so far as I can tell this design is the origin of digital information uh this is uh a very old design we think maybe about 8,000 years it's best known in a Chinese variant which is called a Shang but this one might be older it's the first human-made thing where you have an orderly row of objects that are either on or off so these are the first bits the notes on this it is uh an instrument that has a remarkable history in crosscultural influences in ancient times it was traded across the silk route the Greeks knew about it the Romans copied it in ancient Rome there was a giant version this created for the Coliseum called the hydraulus that was used to accompany uh Slaughter in the Coliseum the hydraulus was so big that it had to be powered by steam it was so big that you couldn't operate the little holes with your hands anymore and there were these panels operated by slave boys those panels became the keyboard and the hydraulus evolved into the pipe organ another thing happened though which was that the Hydra could sometimes be played semi-automatically where a bunch of the of its uh Proto Keys could be up lifted and closed at once and this gradually turned into automatically playing organs a little stream that coexisted with organs from the beginning and eventually evolved into the player piano when organs turned into pianos the most sophisticated of the player pianos could actually improvise a little known device which inspired a guy named jacard to make a programmable Loom which inspired a guy named babage to make a programmable calculator which inspired a guy named touring to formalize the whole thing with math so we can have computers so um it's not the only Story one could tell of history but a a potentially reasonable story is that this is the origin of computers now you believe that one yeah okay good good uh now um I'm going to tell a story about a different related technology which is the history of avatars that actually is bound up with instruments as it happened my little team in the early 1980s invented avatars we made the first uh virtual reality machines which is people embedded in simulations who could see each other in a social setting and in order to see each other we have to turn into something and thus was born the Avatar and ever since of course avatars have become a cliche of pop culture and there's that movie about the blue aliens and all that so there's the idea of the Avatar has become extremely uh wellknown and yet the science of avatars and the cultural potential of them is amazingly obscure still because almost nobody's experienced being one now I know you've experienced maybe making your avatar in Second Life or something like that or in an online gaming world but actually in being in 3d1 where you see other people and in real space and time you're in this other creature that's a whole other thing and it's more of a different thing than you can know until you try it it's been deeply frustrating to me the the sort of um slow motion way in which some of these Technologies open up I've been waiting for 30 years now to get virtual reality as I understand it out to people um back in those days I used to predict that 2020 or 2025 was when virtual reality would really hit for people and I still think that's about right so we're we're we're not there yet but let me talk to you a little bit about the Avatar experience uh in the early days and in fact these early days continued until precisely last week because something happened about a week ago that's extraordinary that's changed everything um how many of you know what I'm talking about ah okay well you'll figure it out uh I'll get there uh but the thing that the the problem until last week was that in order to measure your physical body to turn you into an avatar in real time required that you get into this special suit and in the early days these suits were incredibly inconvenient it would take like 20 minutes to put it on then an hour to calibrate it and then after you used it you'd end up with these gashes and marks all over your body it's sort of like tribal markings and uh these things eventually evolved into better suits which are these days known as mocap suits and they're used in uh computer special effects all the time for like the Golem in Middle Earth or something you have an actor wear one of these things uh but they were originally used for realtime Avatar control uh what changed a week ago or so is um a uh there's a thing called connect um a consumer gadget for measuring somebody's full body pose and it goes with Xbox and I should disclose just I I'm doing my research in Microsoft research now which made that thing so uh there might be some bias here but I've been working on this from before MSR existed so I I uh uh I'm I'm not really swayed by it but the uh the connect camera is this $150 thing you can buy and it instantly will measure your full body pose so now you can actually measure everything your body is doing without wearing one of these suits that's never been true before so suddenly the Avatar experience can open up now why is that a big deal in order to begin to explain that I will tell you about a bug that occurred in our well I could call it our lab but it was really a garage in paloalto as it always is almost 30 years ago um I had an I was an avatar I think it's something humanoid something boring and accidentally my hand was a mile long you know just one of these typical bugs there was probably only one you know extra zero uh and um I curled my finger and suddenly this gigantic finger swooped in and swallowed me and I was inside my fingertip and and so you know the first thing one thinks is well this will be a good story but let's fix it and move on but something very interesting happened people in the garage started playing with distorted avatars and discovered some extraordinary which is that you can be a really weirdly shaped Avatar and still control your avatar body quite well you can start you can instantly adapt to weird body shapes and so then we got interested in this question of well how weird can they get and we started turning into all kinds of different animals and aliens and weird fantasy creatures and some of them didn't work some of them did a famous early one was designed by a woman named D Lasco uh that was a lobster and the thing about lobsters if you've ever taken a close look at them they have extra arms there's these three little arms on the side and there's this question well how would you control them with just your physical body uh that's all you have to start with to control an avatar and it turns out by pulling bits of data from different parts of your body and combining them like just a little a little bit of wrist a little bit of ankle a little bit of hip to control say the middle of the uh middle arm joints on the left side you could suddenly learn to control extra limbs which is really pretty strange not something you'd expect so uh a friend of mine biologist Jim Bower saw this phenomena and he said this actually makes perfect sense because the nervous system has evolved through all of these different body shapes through deep time through deep fenetic time the same nervous system we have had evolved to swim to crawl and in fact everything in biology is pre-adaptive for evolutionary designs that don't exist yet and in a sense when we make weird avatars we're putting the brain in a time travel machine for species that might evolve to be able to control in the future everything in biology is always pre-adaptive so so this is time travel for the brain across tens of millions of years hundreds of millions of years so uh the phenomenon is called homuncular flexibility the homunculus is the part of your is the mapping of your motor cortex onto your body uh it's usually visualized as this weird OB seeing impish thing stretched across under your scalp under where a mohawk would be more or less uh it's got an extra big tongue an extra big thumbs it looks really sort of bizarre there's this avantgard or conceptual art project of making an avatar that is exactly a homunculus that nobody's done yet I really want to do that one and um now what might be important about this in order to explain why I think this might be important I want to go back to musical instruments I I play piano and I improvise at the piano and anyone who studies improvising at the piano will notice that there's a certain special point in your studies where all of a sudden you notice wow my hands just seem to solve this complicated Harmony and voice leading thing that my brain can't even follow what just happened and and uh I I I've seen the same thing in great athletes and basketball players I've seen it in Great pilot I've seen it in Great surgeons um and what's going on there it's not that your hands are smarter than your brain precisely it's that the part of your brain that's running your hands is actually capable of complex problem solving and it's doing it in a different Channel than the sort of verbal symbolic temporal lobe stuff that we're mostly used to and it happens a little less consciously but it's a real phenomenon and so then the interesting question is how far could that go that's the kind of question that really excites me because when I look at progress in technology I'm really interested in opening up new continents of human potential I'm really interested in how we can wake up aspects of human character that might actually be functional that we've never even noticed before that's what really gets me going so um there's this enormous part of the brain the motor cortex that usually we think of as being this thing that just gets us around but if we can apply it to complex problem solving could it do things that we can't do in the sort of verbal symbolic way we're used to or could it augment the usual way we do things or or something we don't know what so we've taken early baby steps in researching this I've worked with uh children in making them into molecules to learn chemistry for instance so in that case you take a kid and you turn the kid into say a glucose molecule and normally a molecule is very thermal and jiggling around through its degrees of freedom but in this case it becomes an avatar so you're responsible for moving it through its degrees of freedom and then you can play with Docking it or you can play with changing your hydration layers distribution all all kinds of things I've played with turning kids into triangles there's a huge Frontier waiting to be explored I'm really interested in using this for ab abstract information design of having your body pose directly map into program structures data structures uh equations think we can do all these things I don't know I don't know what to expect you know one wants to be optimistic and say oh suddenly this huge intellectual capability will be revealed for mankind of course one doesn't know that I do know one thing which is it's a fantastic educational modality because it leverages narcissism because you you become the thing you're studying so of course you pay attention you know uh and it's interesting that's the idea that got the response here uh so um I'm not saying anything uh and uh the uh so the amazing thing is that we can do this now I mean getting getting a fifth grader into a special bodysuit for kids takes hours and is a real pain in the butt in every sense literally and in terms of squeamishness and nuisance value it's just terrible putting a kid in front of a connect camera is really easy so um I'll let you know about a bit the current research going on there's a lab at Stanford with a wonderful collaborator of my named Jeremy binson that is attempting to draw out an atlas of homuncular flexibility that is to say how weird can avatars get such that you can still control them and he puts undergraduates through you know strange experiments where they turn into all sorts of things um I'm very pleased to say that we're about to start a lab based in San Francisco for applications of homic flexibility it'll be located in a very strange place place it's upstairs from the Westfield Mall cuz we have if you can believe that it's because we have a little Microsoft research spot there so if you go into the Westfield mall and you look up at the Dome and you sort of look Southwest and just through there there's going to be a room where people are turning into all these things so that's actually that's actually happening it's the strangest thing isn't it um I finally wanted to say a little bit about the philosophy of all this uh I I'm I uh I think Kevin had to take off but Kev Kevin who just spoke before me is a a dear personal friend we've we've known each other for many years and I have tremendous respect for his work and yet we disagree profoundly uh about ideas which is great and um one of the things uh as you might know I have a book out called you not a gadget which is quite controversial and quite a few people disagree with it quite profoundly and um one of the uh uh important exercises in having a book like that is being able to maintain friendships with people you disagree with tremendously so I was very pleased to blurb Kevin's book and say you know I you must read this even though I disagree with it terribly but it's just so it's so well done it's the it's the essential statement of the stuff I I disagree with you must read it and and being able to do that is absolutely crucial but just to say a little bit about our disagreement I I think that the the perspective of imagining technology as an autonomous force or as something that's its own Center is entirely plausible we do it all the time and yet I don't think it's that functional I think it's important to always um reframe the uh discussions about technology for its own sake uh as technology for human sake or even for guia sake or for all sorts of other centers one can come up with it's not so much that I don't think technology has a life of its own but uh we're so able to confuse ourselves we're so able to reduce ourselves to fit whatever our most recent idea about technology was uh technology design is our most effective way of self-c confusion ever and and uh thus I uh I tend to not be too supportive of a lot of the recent media designs even though in many cases my friends designed them social networking and tweeting and all this stuff and the reason why is just I'm concerned that we're all um fitting more and more into Data database representations of ourselves I'm concerned that we're letting algorithms recommend friends and music and movies to us in a way that's separating us from each other I'm concerned that we're creating um an economic trap for future Generations because we've come up with this bizarre idea that would have just seemed alien at a certain point but somehow it just slipped in there that the right way to do business online is to operate these spying operations where we give people stuff for free but then we spy on them to advertise at them and I just don't think it's sustainable I think we have to have a different idea in which the whole thing is inverted and becomes very human- centered where we're helping people sell things to each other uh rather than trying to get everybody to do everything for free um there are two reasons for that one is that if you have an all volunteer Society it's easily corrupted uh we found this recently when the did anybody read the expose on the cotch Brothers in the New Yorker where yeah so it turns out the blogosphere is really corruptible with a little bit of money because nobody H nobody has any Cloud on it because they're all working on a volunteer basis you to have a middle class you have to have a distribution of wealth that's just life and uh uh and the internet has been drifting radically away from that the original design of the internet which was from 1960 was all about creating an online middle class where people could sell each other creative efforts and I I'm certain we have to bring that back both for Spiritual reasons and for political reasons anyway I am so grateful for your attention and I hope you all have a chance to experience the joy of becoming an avatar it's truly one of the greatest gifts you can give your brain and I bet you'll be able to do it within a few years all right take good care [Music]