This week’s episode goes all the way back to last year’s Curiosity Camp, when Alan shared a ride with Unity Lab’s Timoni West and Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford, recording a podcast along the way. The three discuss the challenges that will arise as AI begins to replace human workers.

Alan: In a very special episode

of the XR for Business Podcast, we're driving in a car with Timoni

West, head of XR... Research?

Timoni: Director of XR in Unity

Labs.

Alan: Director of XR at Unity

Labs, and Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO. So we're driving on our way

up to Curiosity Camp through these beautiful winding roads, and we

decided that we would record a podcast, because Cole, in his

incredible company building the infrastructure of cloud computing,

they built an AR app to help service that. And I thought, what a cool

way to use this technology and this time on this beautiful drive.

Wow. Look at the size of those trees.

Timoni: They are enormous.

Alan: Oh, my God. Wow. Well,

anyway. Timoni, how are you doing?

Timoni: Excellently. And I'm

also enjoying the view. Yeah. Yeah, actually, Cole, I'm really

interested to hear more about why you chose to go with that, and what

the process was like. My team is working on tools for mixed reality.

So for Unity itself, that's used to make, I think, 90 percent of all

Hololens applications right now. Century is using Unity for that. But

the tools that we're making today are allowing, I think, for you to

more easily make robust, distributed applications that can work

across various devices and for various users.

Cole: And that's very needed.

First off, Alan, I just want to say, you sound like you should be a

podcast DJ.

Timoni: So it's cool that you

are.

Cole: Well done. But yeah, I

mean, the issue for us when we started down this journey was very

much a question of, how robust can we make an experience, about how

widely could we make that experience? And the vertical integrated

solutions that you had to choose from in the early days of AR/VR, I

think, are primed for disruption. I'm super glad to hear that Unity

is working on the open APIs, etc., needed to bring this technology to

more users, as I'll quote -- maybe a little cliché being where we

are and where we're going -- but--

Timoni: Yeah, I want to hear it.

What is the problem you company solves?

Cole: Yeah. So we have to think

about not four, but 40,000 different data centers; we're an edge

computing/edge data center infrastructure company. And with that

means you can't Mechanical Turk what was originally done in data

centers. It works with four buildings. It doesn't work with 40,000.

So we had to build autonomy into every aspect of our business, in

every aspect of the infrastructure. And that means building really

simple interfaces for what would otherwise be really complex

problems. And at scale, from a logistics supply chain -- remote hand,

smart hands, all the things that you do in data centers -- what that

means is your FedEx guy, your U.P.S. guy, a contracting company that

otherwise would need specialized training, now it's visually assisted

capabilities for what would otherwise be a job that you would train

for and then go work in a data center. We simplify that.

Alan: So basically what you're

saying is that you've given real-time tools to anybody to be an

expert on the field, in the field.

Cole: It's fair to say that the

software is the exper, and what you need are opposable thumbs,.

Alan: Haha! Which democratizes

the whole need for training.

Timoni: You know, it's funny; I

was just getting drinks with someone from Open AI. H