XR for Business

Talking AI and Future of Work in XR — In a Truck — with Timoni West and Cole Crawford


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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. He is working on
the robotic hands with opposable thumbs. I wonder whether or not
that’s really necessary. It is a tremendous challenge. Okay, so from
what I got from our earlier conversation, someone goes to a data
warehouse, they’re looking at a… “RU,” you were saying?

Cole: A rack unit.

Timoni: A rack unit. Yeah,

right. Yeah. And they get some information that comes up that says if
it’s broken, if the client wants it serviced or just repaired or
replaced entirely. So anyone can have the Hololens on and, using an
image marker, know what is contextually needed for this particular
server RAC. An advantage using augmented reality for this versus just
having a bunch of displays is that the monitors don’t break; if a
Hololens doesn’t work, you get another one. That’s awesome.Is there
any other use cases that you’re using augmented reality for? Or
virtual reality? I like seeing the warehouse at scale, etc.

Cole: Absolutely. Yes. And some

of the work that you guys are doing I think is incredible. If the
Hololens breaks or if a Magic Leap breaks or whatever the hardware
happens to be, to go back to that cliché quote, Mark Andreesen said,
“software is eating the world. If something fails in hardware,
you should be able to take out your phone and have that same
experience.”

Timoni: Exactly.

Alan: I think that’s the real

key to scale.

Cole: It has to be, right? It

has to be kind of a “bring your own device.” You have to
get to that point.

Alan: Well, even the new

glasses. So Nreal launched their glasses this week in AWE and their
glasses plug in USB C into your phone. It’s using the processing
power of your phone to give you really, really good heads up AR, and
it’s positional tracking and everything, just kind of very
lightweight pair glasses for $500 bucks.

Timoni: And the image quality

was really great. I mean, the field of view, obviously it’s
constrained to the glasses. But it fits so nicely in the frame, I was
super impressed when I tried it out.

Alan: They’re very lightweight,

comfortable.

Cole: And this is what’s amazing

about Silicon Valley today. I mean, I’m just reminded of where we
are, and I just wish you guys can see this–.

Alan: You know what? I’ll take a

video of us driving up and we’ll put it in as a gif.

Timoni: It’s just like Lord of

the Rings.

Alan: We’re driving with

thousand-year-old redwood trees going up a giant mountain in the
windiest road you’ve ever seen.

Timoni: Talking about AR.

Alan: In an enormous tank of a

truck.

Cole: It’s true. But the pace of

innovation, if you think back — Alan, you and I were chatting
earlier about your first experience of VR — and I just–

Alan: Actually I got to say

this; my first experience in VR was at Curiosity Camp five years ago,
and we’re on our way to Curiosity Camp now.

Timoni: Oh, that’s amazing.

Alan: And then Chris Milk put VR

on my head and I had this kind of “aha, come to Jesus”
moment when I was like, “this is the future of human
communications.”

Cole: And isn’t that what got

you into tech?

Alan: Yeah.

Timoni: That’s… Wow. That is

so cool.

Alan: Well, I was in tech

before, but I made DJ stuff. So yeah, a little bit different.

Timoni: It’s all coming together

now.

Cole: It totally is.

Convergence, you know?

Alan: You were to talk about

kind of the speed of acceleration of technology? And I think people
neglect– because maybe they’re working in IoT, or are working in
cloud computing, or they’re working in 5G. But if you take a really
10,000-foot view, they’ll all work together. And the fact that they
all work together and they’re all in their infancy now, but all
maturing at the exact same time. You have IoT, 5G, quantum computing,
cloud edge computing, you’ve got blockchain, VR, AR, all at the same
time.

Timoni: Also, I truly believe

that — and this has been coming up a little bit more slowly than
perhaps that you just described — but the moment we started really
having sensors on computers and being able to make sense of that
data, apply semantic analysis to it — that is another turning point
in computing. That’s the equivalent of going from the mainframe
that’s the size of a room to–

Cole: I got chills, that you

actually said that. Yeah. It’s great that you did.

Timoni: Yeah. That is… wow,

you’ve really got goose bumps… this is the next great thing, having
all this world information and then having computers able to
understand what’s going on.

Cole: It’s a hundred percent

right. Lord Kelvin — just a little history — Lord Kelvin, if you
know the Kelvin scale.

Timoni: Yeah.

Cole: He said to measure is to

know; if you can’t measure it, you can’t know it.

Timoni: I love that.

Cole: It’s a really cool quote.

But think about what we could do and what we have access to. Alan,
you mentioned 5G. What we have access to in 5G is a network that is
as real as the fiber optics in the ground. With speeds that are the
same. So from a latency perspective, human eye can see 150 points
vertically and 180 points horizontally. And at every point there is a
level — you can see about 200 points of data — it’s chemical.

Timoni: And there’s different

resolutions.

Cole: And different resolutions.

But you take some mild compression associated with that to deliver a
4K experience to each eye.

Alan: And then foveated

rendering.

Cole: Its refresh rate. You’re

talking about 10 gigabits of data per second per eye.

Alan: And then that’s not

including what you’re collecting from the sensors from the outside
world to make it all synchronized.

Cole: That’s 100 percent

accurate. So I mean, think about what you can do with the
contextualised data with the real world.

Alan: That’s all I think about.

Cole: Yeah, it’s incredible, the

capabilities we’re going to have over the next five years as these
new networks come out.

Alan: It’s super human.

Cole: It’s going to change. It’s

going to change the way humanity interacts with each other.

Timoni: Yeah.

Alan: I can’t wait till we go to

a networking thing and everybody’s — it’s facial recognition — and
it puts up their their names, and who they are, in front of them.
Because I don’t remember anybody’s bloody name. That should be the
new name tag. You wear these glasses in, everybody’s face pops up.

Timoni: I just said this

earlier, but I’ll say it again for the record for the podcast: If you
meet me and we’ve met before, and I don’t remember your name or your
face, I’m so sorry. As soon as you start talking about what you
worked on, I swear to God I’ll remember that part, because that’s
always the coolest part; hearing about all the cool shit everyone is
doing. I also love that my group has something — it’s a little
clique-ish-sounding — we say like, “oh yeah, that person, they
kind of get it,” right? What I mean by “getting it”
is that we have a shared similar vision of spatial computing outside
the bounds of not just talking about augmented reality or virtual
reality. Those are components, those areR displays in this larger
ecosystem of network computers. They run on edge that are all
consistently talking to each other, and had this world information.
To me, I don’t want a computer to be a single contained piece of
hardware anymore, nor is it, really. Every device I have is
networked. But I want to live in a world where computers sort of
surround me in the most intelligent and privacy-sensitive way. But
really, just sort of customizable to the point where I can wake up in
the morning and have computers help me along my day in the way I want
them to, as opposed to having a phone, then I have to pick up the
haptic glass, or not having my Sonos talk to my shoe lights or
whatever. I really want the whole thing to be the computer.

Alan: It’s interesting. I wrote

an article recently on BCI and AI coming together as a bi-directional
brain computer interface. So, being able to insert a chip into a
brain so that you can hijack all the senses. I talked with this
example of your walking down the street, and you start smelling
cookies and coffee and it gets stronger, stronger because you’re
getting close to a Starbucks.

Timoni: Or it hides it so I

don’t have to eat the cookies.

Alan: Exactly.

Timoni: Let me give you an

example. I’m not talking so much about… like, BCI is so cool, but
do you really want everything?

Alan: I don’t know.

Timoni: I’m having trouble with

that. But I gave this example in my talk yesterday, and I talk about
all the time; when I wake up in the morning, I want to have little
snippets of display UI that are kind of scattered around my home. And
it could be a projector, could be glasses, or it could be a branch of
them or whatever, that are all just little subsets of a larger
computer session that is happening in the cloud. And I’ve customized
and put these things where I want them. Oftentimes there’s no
visuals. Maybe I’m just talking to the computer that is in the house.
Maybe I’ll have cameras all around the house. Oh, side note; some
people will say things, like, “is it really going to put a bunch
of computers and sensors in your house?” A hundred years ago,
nobody had electricity, and we either retrofitted or were willing to
take out pipes and put electricity in all of our homes.

Alan: I think everyone is going

to have a 5G repeater in their house.

Timoni: We’ll build

infrastructure as long as there is enough value to us. And as long as
we trust it enough that we’re fine with it. And I think that’s really
going to happen. I really just want computers to be distributed
little snippets of things, like a great Internet of Things combined
with the best types of displays you could possibly have in the
moment.

Cole: As you say in your side

note, you have to make the capital work. I’m reminded of the
autonomous drones, autonomous cars, and the dollars that go into
putting everything on board. And the way I see this at city scale is
that, from a Silicon perspective, why are we putting $100 computers
on 1996 sensors?

Alan: It makes no sense.

Cole: It makes no sense.

Timoni: Yeah.

Alan: It’s because we don’t have

5G yet.

Cole: Exactly correct. Exactly

right.

Alan: But here’s the thing.

There’s so many great use cases for 5G and headsets. And up until…
the problem is nobody’s going to have a headset for another five
years. Maybe more. It won’t be a thing that everybody has and it
won’t be really good enough — in my opinion — for consumer scale.
So for now, it’s enterprise. But what can we do with the phones that
still give people superpowers? And I think that’s a really practical
thought experiment where you have a device in everybody’s pocket. The
5G ones are gonna be epic. And what can we do with that that we can’t
do with what we have now?

Timoni: I really don’t want to

be running most of my compute power on local devices. Well, Edge,
sure, fine; but I don’t want to have an individual application that I
must add onto my phone, or augmented reality just simply won’t work.
But I don’t want it anyway. Like Google Studio, for example, of being
able to run enough frames in the cloud.

Alan: That’s pretty cool.

Timoni: Have them go down to the

device. That’s more effectively what I want. And the advantage is
that if we all have these compute sessions running in the cloud or
concurrently running apps, if I want to send you something, your
app’s open, and my app is open, it’s just a better way to compute.

Cole: One hundred percent. And I

don’t know, you guys might be shocked to learn this, but I’m old
guard telco. And the reality is–

Timoni: By the way, he looks

very young. This is a very strange statement.

Cole: Very. Yeah, this is like

the late 90s. But we’ve built this thing called the Internet
backbone, which we all know on the wireline side. But what a lot of
people don’t know is that on the wireless side, we built —
fundamentally — four different networks. We built the modern
networks as we know them today with AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint,
Verizon, etc. They all built their 3G networks and their 4G networks,
etc., and we’re all plugging into this big Internet backbone because
that’s what you do. If we’re on our phones and are watching YouTube,
we’re going to Amazon or Netflix, — whatever it is — we’re back on
the wireline side. We have to get from the phone and the modem and
the phone to some radio substation that’s mounted on a macro cell
tower site. Take fiber optic cable back to a data center somewhere.
And it is so not optimized. I mean, you might be shocked to hear that
it is not.

Timoni: I always imagine the

building that Netflix had to build in New York. They had, like,
Radiolab podcasts about it or something.

Cole: Yeah, yeah. You don’t get

better at delivering these experiences by algorithms, because you’re
not going to algorithmically speed up the speed of light. This is
really where edge comes in. Right? If latency is a function of
proximity, all of a sudden, you need to move the compute as close to
the device or the user as possible.

Alan: But when it’s not…

Cole: [crosstalk] I’m all for

it.

Alan: I don’t think people are

ready for this, because once we figure out edge computing at scale
with all of these other technologies at the same time? I don’t even
know.

Timoni: What are you worried

about?

Alan: So here’s what I’m worried

about, and it keeps me up at night: AI is going to really quickly
replace large swaths of jobs, mainly accounting jobs and data
sciences, and huge office towers full of people that are literally
doing spreadsheets are gonna be wiped out because they don’t need
that anymore. Lawyers — entire swaths of lawyers — are gonna be
gone (which I don’t think any of us are really going to complain
about). It’ll be the law firms with the best AI that will win. And
that’s a whole job category gone. And it’s not that there won’t be
other jobs, there will be a transition. But the transition is going
to get quicker and quicker and quicker. And I don’t think we have the
infrastructure education-wise to retrain and reskill people fast
enough, which is why VR an AR is needed for education and training.
Your use case is literally paving the way. That’s why we want to do
this as a podcast, because you literally have built something that
will be a case study for years to come.

Cole: Look, we hope so. But I

think to your point — and you could do a whole separate podcast; in
fact, we should do a whole separate podcast on the political
implications to this. Part II! — do we tax computers? If narrow AI
is replacing sort of these first-level jobs in these companies, do we
tax them?

Timoni: Okay. So if in the

future, we have AI that does genuinely replace human workers — and I
have some reservations about whether or not that will happen, that
have nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with
socialization — I think that if we tax the AIs, does that lead to
the window tax problem? In the 16th century, “let’s tax people
by the number of windows they had,” and everyone then bricked up
their windows to avoid taxes.

Alan: I think we just have to

have a restructure of the tax situation so that corporations pay
higher tax than individuals, because what’s going to happen is
individuals are going to have fewer and fewer long-term jobs and will
be more the gig economy, which if we can fundamentally teach the
younger generations how to use the tax loopholes by incorporating
themselves and using the tax loopholes, then you’ve actually kind of
artificially changed the tax structure around; because right now the
tax structure is based on taxing the individual at the highest rate,
and corporations get all the breaks. Well, if individuals start
acting as corporations, then you get the breaks and the government
will take a while to catch on… wow, that’s beautiful. We should
stop there and take a photo.

Cole: Do you want to?

Alan: I think we should.

[Intermission]

Timoni: So one thing I point out

is that through most of human history, we did not have careers.We did
not have salaried jobs; only the landed gentry could be assured of
this consistent sort of income. And while there were other social
structures in place to make sure that most people reasonably knew
where they were going to be able to eat or, you know, it was more
that the vagaries were natural, not social. This whole return to the
gig economy means we were only changing the social structures from
the last hundred years. So while people might think of it as this
long-term system that is fundamentally changing how humans are. If
anything, the last century was the blip and this is a return to the
norm.

Alan: I think we can fix making

women who just had a baby work after they’ve gone… It’s crazy. We
should be celebrating that and making sure the parents have as much
time with their children as possible because that’s what makes the
whole thing better. Not making people work 80 hours a week.

Cole: A hundred percent. If the

computers, if you can tax them, and maybe.

Timoni: Lessen the human burden,

is what you’re thinking?

Cole: Well, look, if there’s

more time for us to do the things that we care about — not saying
that we shouldn’t care about our jobs — but some of the things
narrow AI can accomplish alleviate some of the pressures on how we
would train, how you would optimize for that function to be done by
human. Does it not make sense if we’re taxing the computer that we
create some universal basic income?

Alan: One of my friends, Floyd,

is a huge proponent of basic income and it’s something we have to. I
think nobody’s going to go for it. First of all, in America, it’s not
going to happen. But what we can do is we can change the tax laws to
tax the corporations to basically redistribute and give services to
people and make it so… because tax was there to serve the people,
not greedy corporations, that only government… something got off
track in the world. It’s not just America, but the world. I think too
many people let bankers get away with stuff.

Timoni: I think it’s gonna

settle down. The modern economic structure is not even 500 years old,
not even. I think we’re at a weird sort of inflection point and
people will start over the next few generations. I always like to
think very long term. Over the next 60 to 100 years, I think we’ll
start to calm down again. I just… dystopias rarely happen, and they
happen in blips and they don’t usually last that long. I don’t know.
And just one more thing. If it turns out that we actually in the end
should have a series of large scale-companies running the world, that
might not be terrible as long as the companies are set up correctly.

Alan: I agree with that.

Timoni: A lot of people are

going to be like, “no, corporations should not be in charge of
anything!”

Alan: Here’s my challenge to

that: What is the one measurement of the success of a corporation
that the world uses as a standard?

Timoni: Today, you mean?

Alan: Yes, right now.

Timoni: Shareholder value.

Alan: Economics. Yes. How much

money? That’s it.

Timoni: And that has always

been–

Alan: It’s artificial

shareholder value. Like, we drive the share price of companies up
based on nothing and drive them down based on nothing.

Cole: Not “nothing.”

So obviously there’s a microcosm that exists in Silicon Valley, but
for a publicly-traded company, its one of two things. Either a
dividend payout, or you’re paying off your debt and growth. That’s
what it is.

Timoni: But that has been the

case for any social structure humans care to name throughout all of
human history. You either grow or you’re stagnant and you don’t grow.
Corporations just happened to be like a very close, tight-loop
version of any society. Could have been a kingdom, could have been a
tribe. What have you. Humans: we’re consistent.

Alan: We are that.

Cole: I feel like the hardware

is more consistent. The software… I often think of us as
1st-century hardware running on 21st-century software.

Timoni: Yes, totally. Totally.

[Intermission]

Alan: So we just got back in the

car, we stopped on the side of a mountain to take some beautiful
photographs and we’re back. I don’t know where we left off, but let’s
think about this. We were talking about the future of work, how
technology is going to fundamentally change, how we train and educate
people. But also…

Cole: We were talking about

what’s the role of… maybe this is a question I’ll ask you guys.
What is the role of the first-level citizen when narrow AI is
starting to–

Timoni: Actually come into play

in the factory, and becomes a worker?

Cole: Yes. Yeah. Actually

becomes that worker.

Alan: The thing is, it’s not

going to be overnight that it becomes the worker. What it’s going to
do is slowly, one by one, take large swaths of tasks.

Timoni: So… and two things

here. First, AI is a [expletive] misnomer. People are like, “cool,
an artificial intelligence.” Nope, this is a heavily-curated and
single-purpose, like, basically extremely good algorithm that is
designed to do like one single thing. And it might be like, find cats
with whiskers versus don’t find cats with whiskers. Right?

Alan: But it could also

procedurally generate digital humans.

Timoni: That is not going to

happen for very long time.

Alan: Or buildings, which I’ve

seen.

Timoni: Oh, you mean like an AI

that makes the procedurally-generated buildings?

Alan: Exactly.

Timoni: Sure.

Alan: So the content for

something that would take a content artist — a 3D rendering artist
— maybe months to build a scene, now they’re procedurally generating
this stuff in seconds. So that’s interesting.

Timoni: So you touched on this a

little bit earlier. I mentioned this very briefly in our last round
of podcasts. But there’s a social component, right? So I have had the
good fortune to meet a lot of people who make top-tier, triple-A
content for movies and for games. These are the people who will
obsessively work, like, thousands and thousands of hours to bring you
the final scene in Avengers. And even if they have procedurally
generated content, the reality is they always feel like they can just
finesse the shit out of it, definitely. And what I see is the
creators getting more and more picky. I always go to the
post-production talks at SIGGRAPH and they’ll talk about how, like,
in Blade Runner, how long it took them to get an artificial human
looking good — the Rachel character — and how they had to argue
with the director because he wanted the scene in Vegas to have no
blues in it whatsoever. And they ended up creating this new type of
filter for the camera that had no blues; the director saw it and he
was like, “no, I still see some blue,” and had to literally
prove that there were no blues in the scene. Now, this is on top of
all of the best tech; like, these are the highest-end effects houses
in the world. These are the ones who are really pushing the limits
and they’re working together. It’s WETA, it’s Rodeo. It’s all of the
other greats. And so what do they do when they have these tools and
these great machine learning algorithms, they get more and more picky
and so on.

In Infinity War, they literally had, I

want to say like five petaflops of data, because they scanned every
single character cropped in-scene in that whole movie so could have
it in post. And OK, so sure, maybe at some point these will actually
be replaced by AIs. But I feel like humans inherently don’t trust the
machine enough, or we just want to get our hands dirty. And with
lawyers, too. Sure, you have an AI that can make a better decision.
But the reality is humans do not make decisions based on data. We use
data to justify our predetermined decision processes.

Yes, but if we did use data, we’d be

actually way more effective. Honey, I know. So that’s the thing. If
if a law firm figures this out and says, hey, wait a second, this AI
is outperforming our lawyers 10 to 1 because it will on everything,
because IBM Watson can read 5 million case files in an afternoon,
making the lawyer read five maybe. But what are you trying to do?
You’re trying to set a precedent, be looking for precedents. Maybe
you’re looking for. You could scan the entire country’s records,
looking for precedents in seconds. But who created a.

Cole: So I always come back to

the the whole, “do computers dream of electric sheep” and
the morality. Look at the divisiveness going on in social media
politics right now. It’s been determined that the coders that write
this stuff up, they have cognitive bias and they write that into
their code. And the code gets trained and it becomes biased.

Timoni: And that’s how you end

up with a hella racist [AI].

Cole: [Laughs] that’s exactly

correct!

Timoni: But here’s a cool thing.

I actually love this about the AIs; when we are concerned about bias
and data that we need to de-bias the data — and honestly, we’ve only
begun work on what that even means — what does it mean to be biased?
What is a cultural bias versus a universal human value that needs to
be removed or cleaned up or gotten rid of? Then also it forces us to
think about ourselves. And I really love that if you meet a machine
learning algorithm that happens to be biased, that teaches you
something about yourself. Right? In the cold light of day, if
something was you and did the same thing five billion times until it
trained up to, like, the essence of you? I think that’s a great
learning tool. No one’s gonna think about it like that. And now it
has. They just sort of talk about it and reactionary way. But there’s
some real value to that. I actually love the idea of having this sort
of listener that I can talk to that helps me work through my biases,
because it can see where any individual’s action I take or statement
I make, like, where that can go, taking to its logical extreme.

Cole: Yeah, I don’t know if

humans are ready yet for it for the self-reflection that would take
to actually get over it. I think we live in a world of naive realism.

Timoni: You know, I love that.

Yeah. I think you’re right. Well, it’s true. For example, I’m a
designer by trade. Did UX for years (we called it information
architecture before). I studied literature in college. And we always
viewed literature through what we called it at the time, “different
critical lenses,” which I now know are just different mental
models to a different context, or at least that’s how I would
describe it. And there are a lot of people online. There are entire
communities around rationalism and mental models and really trying to
get to the right decision. To your point. Like we don’t care about
being… let’s see, what’s a good way to put it?

Alan: We don’t need to feed

people’s egos. We just need the right answer.

Timoni: Exactly. It’s what is

known about being right. It is about seeking the truth and finding
the truth. And this goes all the way back to the pragmatism of
William James, early 20th century. Well, he probably even before
that. I don’t know. I do feel like we’re… maybe it’s just because I
live in my tiny little rationalist bubble, but I do see more and more
people talking about this stuff and interested in this stuff. And I
can’t help but think inherently most people would rather be right
than… I don’t know. You’re laughing.

Cole: No, I think you’re

optimistic. But I think you’re right. I just think it’s going to take
some time.

Alan: I think this road has

gotten sketchier.

Cole: Yeah, it’s gotten

narrower, for sure.

Alan: The road went from two

lanes in a winding road to one lane.

Timoni: It’s very s-curvy right

now.

Alan: It’s pretty beautiful.

Timoni: And it’s right dappled,

like the sunlight as we as we go further into the woods.

Cole: Right. We’re going further

down the rabbit hole.

Alan: Yeah. This is great.

Timoni: So getting back to

machine learning and artificial intelligence, I do think, as I
mentioned earlier, I really want to see people starting from where
they want to end and start with what their vision is. And then we can
work backwards from there to figure out what could potentially go
wrong. What I see instead is people sort of being alarmist about what
could possibly go wrong with no real end in sight. And that just
always ends in this kind of dystopian picture of, well, imagine a
world where people know your every thought, emotion, and hope, and
therefore can constantly feed this to you.

Alan: I’ve got news for

everybody listening. Guess what other people are thinking about you:
Nothing. They’re thinking about themselves, really.

Timoni: I mean, it’s true.

Marketing is designed to manipulate you. But there’s given a
population, too. Right?

Alan: “Make better health

decisions. Exercise. Think positive things.”

Sure. But if I’m at Disneyland, which

is a gigantic mega corporation and I’m waiting in line for Indiana
Jones, the line is designed to make me feel like it’s taking less
time than it is. That is a great example of good environment design
that does, in fact, manipulate you. And yet, it’s to everyone’s best

[interest]

. You can’t make the lines shorter. Right? So why not make

it more pleasant along the way?

Alan: It’s a great analogy. OK,

so let’s go deep down, since we’re going down the rabbit hole.
Timoni, what is your vision for the future?

Timoni: So I would like to see a

world in which everyone is able to use computers to the best of their
abilities, imagination, and intelligence. Right now, people are using
computers all the time. We talk to computers more than we talk to any
individual human throughout the day. And yet we have this sort of
siloed set of experiences where people can do a task per application.
Part of this is just due the nature. Then I have a niece, for
example, who is on TikTok probably six hours a day. But if she wanted
to describe and illustrate and animate a dream that she had last
night, she would have no ability to do this. I think there are
several different ways that we can attack the problem. First is to
make creation tools that are easier to use, which I think we’re
continuing to evolve, and AI can actually help with that with
procedurally-generated things. But I also think that we just need
computers to be able to listen and react to humans specifically. We
do not have operating systems right now that can listen for what I
call “the no.” If a computer does something I don’t like,
if an application does something I don’t like or don’t want it to do,
there is no “no.” We see this slightly with notifications
where it’s like, oh, do you want less notifications or to turn them
off? We’ve had computers for 60 [expletive] years and that’s as far
as we’ve gotten?

Alan: Turn off all your

notifications. It’s actually liberating.

Cole: Yes.

Alan: Turn them all off. You’re

going to check the apps anyway.

Timoni: I do the same thing.

Cole: How about a better life

hack: leave your phone at home a couple of times a week.

Timoni: Oh, interesting.

Alan: Wow.

Timoni: You do that?

Cole: Yeah.

Alan: Do you really?

Cole: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Timoni: Are you carrying an

iPad? Are you cheating here?

Cole: No it’s so good for your

mental health. I mean, I’ve not had cell phone service on my phone
for 45 minutes now and I’ve not had to look at it. So no, it’s not
there. Or if you can’t leave it at home while you go take a hike in
the woods with no spectrum, go to dinner with friends. Hang out with
real people. Put your phone underneath the salt shaker and whoever
picks up the phone first–

Alan: Pays the bill.

Cole: Pays the bill! Put it

down.

Alan: Yeah.

Timoni: That can lead to some

lengthy small talk after dinner.

Alan: “We’re not leaving,

but the bills getting higher.”

Timoni: That’s cool. But any

case, getting back to a vision for the future. I want to have my
computing session in the cloud. I want apps to work interoperably. I
want to have a series of continuous… like, in my house. I have
pasted a little digital interface here, a little digital interface
there, I put up a little inventory. And it’s got all the things that
I want. And I can combine them in any given way to do whatever it is
I want to do on a computer. Actually, a RISD… I think MFA student
recently posted a concept OS that he made called Mercury. I highly
encourage you all to take a look at it. It just came out, I think on
the 28th. If you just do a Google search for Mercury OS, it’ll come
up. And he had rethought the concept of an operating system as a
series of stated tasks — like “I want to check my email”
— and then everything that you would need in order to effectively
check your email, which does not just include your inbox, comes into
a set of containers and this is called a flow state. So you’ve got
your inbox, but then maybe you’ve also got your calendar open, and
your map open, and your to-do list–.

Alan: Ahh, the tabs that you

need for that.

Right. And you can drag and drop in

between all of these different what we now think of as applications.
But if you remove the data layer itself from the container, from the
visualization, then you have a really robust way to interact with the
computer and digital objects, and in a way that makes sense for you
at the time, in the mode that you’re currently in. The cool thing
about this for augmented and mixed reality is that it makes no
difference if you’re doing this on a 2D screen display or if you’re
doing this in a headset that is also showing your 2D screen, or a 3D
screen, or a 3D object if that makes more sense, depending on what
you’re doing now. This is really essential for augmented reality that
we start to remove the data layer from the container layer, because
if I am in augmented reality, if I’m looking through my Hololens and
I have two apps open with two cubes that look identical, one in each
application, I cannot — and I can’t expect any user — to context
switch between what one app does and the other app does. Like, if one
of them is a modelling app and the other one is an interactivity app
and I’m dealing with the same cube, it needs to be the same cube in
the same place. So what I’m talking about is, like, far afield; 50 or
100 years. We’re going to have to rethink computers, but we’d start
talking about it now. We’ve been talking about it since the early
2000s. Let’s just continue to push this idea forward.

Cole: Quantum, baby. It was only

a matter of time before quantum computers came into this podcast.

Timoni: Ok, so let’s talk

quantum.

Alan: Let’s talk quantum.

Timoni: Should we pause and

quantum later?

Cole: I think we should quantum

later.

Alan: So, part 3 of this podcast

is going to be quantum later, around the campfire.

[Intermission]

Cole: …government was any

block as part of a blockchain. Now all of a sudden, you are in
control. You have an immutable record of truth.

Alan: And you can cancel it.

Cole: Exactly. You can expose…

Timoni: So for context, we’re

talking about why is it bad to have your data collected? Why do we
keep hearing people say, “oh, but what if the insurance agents
know that I have cancer before I do and then [expletive] me over?”
The answer to this question as they shouldn’t be able to [expletive]
you over. Right?

Alan: That’s the simple answer.

Timoni: In the world that we

want to live in, it should be great that everyone knows you have
early stage cancer so you can fix it. So now Cole’s talking about
this concept to the smart citizen who has ultimate control over their
data.

Cole: Yeah. And I just think

it’s going to take… so A) It goes back to what you talking about
before, which is how do we get corporations to realize that the data
they collect is for the benefit of all mankind? And that’s hard to
get them over because right now the dividend or the capital power or
the debt pay off, etc. or the growth is what these guys get rewarded
on today. So I think it takes a–

Alan: What if — ready? What if

we had a new system and it was an education-based system that,
instead of charging people to learn, you got paid to learn? Every
time you learn something–

Timoni: What is this,

Scandinavia?

Yeah, well, I come from Canada — we

have socialized everything, c’mon. But we paid you to learn. And so,
little micro currency; five minutes of reading gets you five points
or whatever on you on your blockchain ledger. Right? But what if that
same system also took care of your health care, your insurance, your
banking needs, everything that you need. Kind of like WeChat, but
instead of one corporation owning it, as you progressed in the
education component and you graduate, you become an equity
shareholder in the company? And the company that has paid you to
learn the whole time now is selling you all the services you need,
but you own that company that’s selling you the services? So you’ve
basically created like a shareholding system, but nobody can own more
than anybody else. Everybody’s equal in it, and it automatically
waterfall distributes the profits.

Timoni: What the profits are..?

Alan: The profits would come

from a number of different ways. So the participants in the program
are being educated and trained in mindset and maybe it’s a percentage
of their income in perpetuity or something like that. But they always
own this company. I don’t know what that looks like in the long-term,
but the company itself can make products that are sold outside of the
network. We can make products like a health care product; if you make
the best health care insurance in the world for your members, other
people outside are going to want it as well. And you can give it,
make it available to other people, make it a huge profit center. They
didn’t grow up in the system. They can only access certain services
that are profitable to the system and the people. You have to go
through the system to be part of it. You can’t after 18; you’re not
allowed in. Like, you have to go through the system, graduate from
it. Now you’re in and you’re in it for life.

Timoni: Sounds a little caste-y.

I don’t know.

Alan: I’ve been working on

different ways to solve this at scale around the globe. So then now
you have global citizens all interconnected with the only purpose of
helping each other.

Timoni: So one thing that has

always puzzled me is why doesn’t socialism work unless it’s kind of
sneaked in? Like, socialism is a great idea, actually, I think as a
concept — like, on paper. Absolutely, this is sort of a tribal
communal way humans kind of inherently want to work and think anyway.
And yet at scale, when people claim they’re going to start socialism
or a communist country, it always ends up being a cult of
personality. Right? It always ends up actually being a fascist
society instead. And yet they call themselves that.

Alan: Because it’s usually by

some egotistical leader.

Timoni: But why do you think

that is?

Alan: Well, why do you think you

have the president you have here? The public can be easily swayed by
showmanship and flashy shit.

Cole: Is it fair to say that

power corrupts and absolute power corrupts? Absolutely.

Alan: I see what you did there.

Timoni: But why can’t we just do

socialism from the get-go as a stated goal? Sans cult of personality.

Alan: This is what I’m

proposing; a new social exchange where everybody benefits from going
into the experience economy. So we’re not going to buy cars. We’re
really not going to need to buy houses. We can live anywhere.
Imagine, you don’t need to own anything, but you need to have access
and experience everything. And so what if part of the program was
experiences? And as you educate yourself more and became more
valuable to the organization, you got invited to more and more
experiences?

Cole: Yeah, I think this has to

start. So today we talk about the… I think it’s up to 75 billion
connected devices by 2025? Ridiculous.

Alan: 44 zettabytes by 2020.

Cole: Correct. And 120

zettabytes by 2025.

Timoni: I didn’t even know what

a zettabyte was.

Cole: A zettabyte is a thousand

terabytes.

Alan: Thank God we have a data

scientist.

Cole: Beyond the Internet of

Things, I think as you pointed out, the experience. So today we have
what’s called the knowledge economy. I think after IoT, after the
Internet of Things, we start thinking about the Internet of Skills.
And with that, with the Internet of Skills, I think you’re going to
finally get to a place where, end-to-end, you could build the proper
incentives for contextualizing what’s good for a corporation in
context of what’s good for a human.

Alan: And what if the only goal

of the corporation was the well-being of the students and of the
members and owners of the corporation?

Timoni: Have you read The

Diamond Age?

Cole: Yes.

Timoni: The Diamond Age has

corporations, as sort of citizen state economies where — with class
systems.

Alan: I’ve got to read that.

Cole: Yeah, it’s good. That’s

funny; I’m reminded of a company… do you guys remember, back in the
early, early, early 2000s, around Napster and what was happening? It
had prompted me to think about a company that it would — it would be
illegal. — put your hat on for like 20 years ago and this is
controversial. But could you build a company where if you were a
monthly subscriber where that came in the form of some sort of stock
in the company, you are a shareholder and you can provide that
platform to your shareholders. Back then, could you do some kind of
peer-to-peer network where, as a shareholder, you’re entitled to the
content that sits on that network?

Timoni: Like Usenet?

Cole: A little bit. A little

bit. So. But it takes… I mean, good luck. Have you ever read Flash
Boys?

Timoni: Oh, I’ve heard of it.

Cole: Fantastic Michael Lewis

book. And he actually has a list of podcasts. And he did a recent
podcast, fairly recent, called The Magic Shoe Box. Really
interesting. And it’s all about high-frequency trading and the
latency associated with high-frequency trading. And a general by the
name of Ronan Ryan, who who went and created entirely new stock
exchange just to create fairness in the stock exchange. So coiled up
miles and miles of fiber, got rid of the HFT guy. So it took no skill
at all. The idea of stock exchanges, where you are informed enough
about the mission of a company that you feel like you want to invest
in what that company is doing and where it’s going, high-frequency
trading came about. And a lot of these companies, just because they
were one or two milliseconds faster, they just saw big buys happening
so they could get in front of that. They could buy it, then sell it
to the actual purchaser. Billions of dollars.

Alan: I think the major problems

in the world can be solved by putting a leash on bankers, because
they tend to make the rules in their own favor. And that’s how you
ended up with–

Cole: Money makes the world go

around.

Alan: You ended up with a

trillion dollar bailout or other.

Cole: That’s right.

Alan: And here’s the thing. Many

people don’t realize this right now in America. They don’t realize
that the problem in 2008 with the subprime mortgages, it’s being done
all over again with retail properties. Some of these big malls that
are now empty because the big players have pulled out, the malls are
dead. They’re all still being treated as if they were full of
triple-A real estate rates.

Cole: So you know, the guy that

ran that hedge fund–

Alan: Yeah.

Cole: –is that Curiosity Camp,

today. Yeah.

Alan: Wow.

Timoni: All right. Well, we’ll

talk to him.

Alan: Let’s have a little

conversation about this.

Cole: He was the guy that went

to went to Goldman Sachs and said, “hey, this is what we want to
do and we can short all of this stuff.”

Alan: Well, he saw an

opportunity.

Cole: If you guys are out for

it, whether it’s at Curiosity Camp next year or else, I’m down to
make this an annual special edition podcast.

Alan: I love it.

Timoni: This is awesome.

Cole: You were talking about,

you can just create the rules.

Timoni: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

It’s to see a curious property of money. And I think also, again,
just like the modern economics is just not very old. It’s like as old
as the enlightenment and started trading in the rise of what is now
the modern day corporation. You do what you want until a law stops
you. Usually you can do what you want at least once before someone
makes a law to stop you from doing it again.

Cole: Do you guys know this guy,

John LeFevre?

Timoni: No.

Cole: John LeFevre has the

Twitter handle “@GSElevator.”

Timoni: OK. OH! Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. “Goldman Sachs Elevator Overheard.”

Cole: So he actually never

worked at Goldman Sachs, but he wrote a book. He did run the
syndicate desk for City, if I remember correctly. But he wrote a book
called Straight to Hell: Deviance, Debauchery and Billion-Dollar
Deals. All of that investment banking in the 90s. And it is… I
highly recommend it. It’s very short, but a really good read. And you
do make up the rules as you go along.

Timoni: It’s partly like

interior social motivation. Like, obviously you want to win. People
who do this are highly competitive by nature, etc. But also you do
have a mandate to make money. However you feel you can best do that
within the law, within your own ethical practices, or whatever you
think. I was listening to Knowledge Project recently and I forget who
was being interviewed, but they were talking about Enron and how the
CEO thought of himself as a fundamentally moral person who was doing
the right thing. People are going to laugh, but even his, I guess,
pastor vouched for him as just being this fundamentally good person.
And I think there comes a point, especially when you are authority,
it means that you have the responsibility for multiple different
large-scale entities, the corporation itself, to shareholders and
then the people in that corporation. I can see where you think you’re
really working in the best interests of all against all of what
anyone would call conventional morality. And the whole banality of
evil, yadda yadda. I get it. But like, I understand where this is not
something humans are good at thinking through on a macro scale.

Cole: Yeah, I couldn’t agree

more. You end up having to do some pretty gigantic mental gymnastics
to get to what Enron did and say yep, there were ethics and good
intent behind those decisions.

Timoni: Right. You can see how

they got there.

Cole: Totally. C’est la vive.

Timoni: No, “So say we

all.”

Alan: Interchangeable. So we

just pulled into this…Oh my God!

Timoni: I feel like rowing a

boat in choppy water.

Alan: We are in a boat of a

truck. Scout camp is beautiful.

Timoni: Oh, so speaking of, you

were talking about your first time doing virtual reality. My first…

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XR for BusinessBy Alan Smithson from MetaVRse

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