Technology
AI in the Metaverse: Utopia or Dystopia? with Louis Rosenberg
In this episode, pioneers of augmented and virtual reality, Louis Rosenberg, Nick Rosa, and Daniel Kaleani, explore the implications of artificial intelligence in the metaverse. They discuss the poten...
AI in the Metaverse: Utopia or Dystopia? with Louis Rosenberg
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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1995 people believed that virtual reality would be everywhere within five to ten years.
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Were you one of those believers?
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I was.
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Over the last 12 to 18 months, the largest companies in the world have
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realized this is important for their consumers.
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The earth's landing here for you here with the
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universe as a significant part of it.
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You started the foundation for what we know co-authmented reality.
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And now you are operating in the field of artificial intelligence.
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AI have access to our personal history that knows our likes, our tendencies,
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it knows how we're most likely to be persuaded.
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It's reading our facial expressions, maybe even our heart rate and blood pressure.
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There needs to be some guardrails in place because utopian vision could get distorted.
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Hi, I'm Nick Rosa from Accenture and I'm Daniel Kaleani from AIXR.
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So Luis, you are one of the pioneers in the field of augmented and virtual reality.
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Tell us a little bit more about your career and your beginnings.
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So I got involved in the metaverse over 30 years ago back at the early beginning.
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I started as a researcher at NASA working on virtual reality vision systems.
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And so my first work was to model inter-occupier distance,
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so the distance between your eyes, writing software and spending a lot of time using
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various vision systems. And I was immediately captivated by the potential of virtual worlds.
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I felt confident that it was going to change society.
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And so I was very excited from the start.
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At the same time, spending lots of time in virtual reality.
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It also didn't like being cut off from the real world.
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I felt like the experience was amazing, but I also felt like it was isolating
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from my natural experiences.
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And so the real first thing that I felt was, I wish I could take the power of VR
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and just splash it all over the real world.
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And this was back before the phrase augmented reality was in use.
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I pitched it to the US Air Force, and I was fortunate that they funded me to build the first
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really functional augmented reality system.
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It was called the virtual fixtures platform.
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A crazy system required about a million dollars worth of hardware.
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It had a vision system hanging from the ceiling.
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It had a big exoskeleton that people would wear.
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You might have seen pictures of it.
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The exoskeleton would attract hand motions and feedback,
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haptic feedback.
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And so this was a fully functional system, meaning it was the first time people could reach out
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and interact with a really mixed reality of the real world and the virtual world together,
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where you could have a virtual object bump into a real object
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and have this true augmented reality mixed reality experience.
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And so that was again, a great experience for me and really got me even more excited about
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the field. But really the most important thing to my career was that that was a set of experiments
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where I brought in all kinds of people just off the street to experience it.
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Because I was running research studies to see if augmented reality could enhance human performance.
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And so these people would come in, they'd get into the exoskeleton, they would do the tests,
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and then and then every single one of them would get out and say, oh, like that was amazing.
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This was in 1992, so 30 years ago.
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And so I didn't think it would take 30 years, but I did feel like virtual reality,
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augmented reality, we did change the world. And so I went back to Silicon Valley and I founded
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a company called Immersion Corporation, which was one of the early VR companies.
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And we built really the first virtual reality simulators for medical schools where doctors could
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train in VR and the company kept selling them for decades. Immersion went public in 1999.
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I think it's the oldest virtual reality company in the world from the early days.
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I founded my career company, unanimous AI, which is an artificial intelligence company that
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focuses on amplifying group intelligence in shared environments and really focused on the human
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side of things. And the second part of our podcast when we're going to really deep dive into this
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potential danger of the metaverse, I would like to go a little bit back some stories about
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the early days, the real early days of augmented virtual reality.
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Virtual reality got it. It's real start in the late 80s. I was fortunate enough to get into a lab
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at Stanford called the Center for Design Research, which had had a handful of other researchers looking
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at virtual reality, looking at telepresence, augmented reality didn't exist. Back then we would
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think of current technology as television and people had spent decades learning about frame rate
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and learning about the other basic perceptual capabilities that what kind of frame rate do you need
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to so television looks smooth. Backed in the late 80s and early 90s, people were asking the same
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questions about immersive worlds. What kind of update rates do you need so that when you move your
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head you don't get nauseous? What kind of how accurately do you have to be able to model
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into our other distance to get the depth perception? All of these really basic parameters were
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under research topics. Back then between 92 and 95, virtual reality really took off in the
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public consciousness and people don't really realize that. People today at least, they don't
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realize that in 1995 virtual reality was on the cover of a wired magazine with statements saying
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this is the next big thing. People really believed back then, people believed that virtual reality
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would be everywhere within 5 to 10 years. Were you one of those believers?
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I was. When I found in my first VR company which was 1993, I believed that by 2007 years,
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if virtual reality would be everywhere. Venture capitalists believed that as well in the early 90s.
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It was a really off topic and then around 1997 it just fell off the edge of the world and you
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couldn't even mention the word virtual reality to venture capitalists. People often asked,
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what happened? Why did that happen? What happened was the internet happened, which is an important
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critical technology for virtual worlds, but the .com boom happened where every ounce of excitement,
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every dollar of venture capital went into just building basic flat businesses and virtual reality
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fell out of favor for over a decade, probably think about 15 years. This was going to be my question
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to you. I was just sitting there in 2012 and you're hearing now about a VR that is going to be the
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next biggest thing. Were you sitting there thinking, oh no, not this again, or were you sitting there
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now is the time? In 2012, when it started to come back and it was really around 2014 that it was
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there really, you started to see the same kind of hype that we saw in maybe 1995. At that time,
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2014, I was working as a professor at California State University and I was teaching courses
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in entrepreneurship and I was actually advising a variety of companies and I ended up advising
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some student startups in the world of VR. I distinctly remember saying the one thing that I learned
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in this space is that things take longer than you expect. To me, the hype around it in the early 2010s
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felt okay, we're getting closer. It's probably a little overly optimistic and my advice to start
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up at that time was prepare to be in it, to stay in it for the long haul because you're not going
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to have a business plan that realizes itself in three years. You should be on a seven year plan.
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And my personal views at this time, it's real. This time, the industry is really coalesced
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around the concept, not just startups, not just venture capitalists, but major corporations
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are investing in the metaverse in a way where it really will happen at that level that
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realizes all the excitement that people had 30 years ago. Over the last 12 to 18 months,
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the really largest companies in the world have, have realized that this is important for their
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consumer business. This is important for mainstream computing. They are planning their future with the
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metaverse as a significant part of it. I see there being a virtual metaverse and an augmented
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metaverse where the virtual metaverse is the fully simulated worlds, people are avatars and the
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augmented metaverse being a virtual layer over the real world. And the reason I split it up in my
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mind is that it's really two different industries that evolve in parallel. And they're coming from
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they're evolving out of existing industries. I see the virtual metaverse evolving out of
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the gaming industry and social media industry, whereas it's the virtual metaverse, fully virtual
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worlds will evolve, really focused on socializing, entertainment, shopping, gaming,
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infallly simulated worlds, whereas the augmented metaverse is really evolving out of the mobile
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phone industry. It's evolving where the handheld phone will turn into augmented reality,
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I wear and it's really about mobile media. And it's different players, different focus,
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different interactions. I see both of those happening in parallel. You're my personal view is
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it's actually easier to predict the augmented metaverse as looking at the time frame of how things
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evolve. It's easier to predict a very rapid adoption of the augmented metaverse, whereas the
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fully virtual metaverse is a little bit harder to predict because it really depends on people
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wanting to spend significant amounts of time in fully simulated worlds. This is interesting because
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a lot of people think that the metaverse is only virtual worlds. Obviously the most interesting
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aspect of the metaverse is being able to bring digital content into the real world, so creating
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this kind of a connection between what is digital and what is real. Probably one of the most
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fascinating aspects of this is that if you think about it right now and you're talking about
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the augmented metaverse will be the evolution of the mobile market, think about the situation right
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now is that our life without a mobile phone is way less meaningful than when we are mobile phone
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because we're more connected. We can do more things. We can work, we can connect with our friends,
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we can check the news, we have data and information coming towards us. In the future,
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this is going to be probably important or vital because it's going to be also connected
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directly to the meaning of reality itself. Really the metaverse is this transition from
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information being stuck on this little flat window in your hand to information being placed
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into the world in a natural, intuitive locations at the location that you want it. So I really do see
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the augmented metaverse as being a humanizing technology that will put information
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into the form that our perceptual system was designed to perceive it as spatial content all
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around us. The content should just be there and the potential of augmented augmented reality,
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the augmented metaverse is so extreme to make your world more natural and it doesn't have the
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downsides of cutting you off from the real world. In a way I like to think of the adoption path
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is this thing, okay if you go back to I think 2007 everybody was using flip phones and nobody
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thought they needed a smartphone and nobody thought they would ever spend $1,000 for a phone
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and then Apple launches the iPhone. Within five, six years smartphones went from zero to completely
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replacing the flip phone market despite the fact that it was significantly more expensive. When
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major corporations launch augmented reality iware, you could see the same exact kind of
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transition happening which is first will be supported by developers creating interesting content
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when Apple launches augmented reality iware and there's interesting creative content, it will very
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quickly get to the point where people who don't have that iware will feel like they're missing out
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on content. It actually feels actually feel it even more intensely than the difference between a
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smartphone and a flip phone because they literally will be things in their world they can't even see
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by the early 2030s we could really see an augmented metaverse that is really changing society,
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changing how people live. You have been one of the pioneers in the field of virtual reality,
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you started the foundation for what we now call augmented reality and now you are operating
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the field of artificial intelligence. Can you tell us a little bit more about your first steps
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and why you got into AI? Yeah my PhD and my background and my interest is really in technologies
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that can be used to to amplify human abilities. So my interest is really in this interface between
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between humans and computers and so my interest initially in virtual reality and augmented reality
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was to use this technology to allow people to to perform tasks better and for a long time I was
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really focused on how to use technology to make to enhance a single individuals performance.
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The virtual fixtures platform that had built at the Air Force was about can I allow people to
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perform manual tasks with augmented reality and they could perform that task faster and better.
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About 10 years ago I started really thinking about not just individuals but groups of people
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and can we use technology to enable groups of people to perform better and that's when I started
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looking at artificial intelligence things. Can we use AI to connect groups of people together better
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so that we can groups can make better decisions and better predictions and better forecasts and
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that's really led me down this path of using AI really in a unique way which is to connect groups
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of people together and make them collectively smarter. We developed a technology that we call
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swarm AI and we call it swarm AI because one of things that I did 10 years ago was really thinking
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how can you make groups more intelligent and like many types of technology it's always
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useful to go back and look at nature and how does nature do it and it turns out that nature has
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spent hundreds of millions of years evolving methods where large groups can actually optimize
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their combined intelligence and biologists call it swarm intelligence and swarm intelligence is
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the reason why birds flock and fish school and bees swarm they are significantly smarter
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together than alone they make much better decisions and so it's if so it's in terms of swarm
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intelligence you can think of a school of fish a school of fish they can be thousands of individuals
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they each have a slightly different view of their world they each have slightly different
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historical memories of their experiences they have slightly different personalities no one's in
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large there's no fish that's in charge and yet this school of fish can navigate the ocean and
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make good decisions and and be a successful species for hundreds of millions of years by working
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together as a system they don't take a vote they don't take a poll there's they don't take a survey
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they work as a real-time system pushing and pulling on each other by with little signals that
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allow the group to make to make really good decisions and biologists would call them a super
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organism and so when I founded unanimous AI seven years ago I said if birds and bees and fish can
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get smarter in these systems can we use AI to allow groups of people to come together in these
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systems and so we built this system called swarm we see that groups of people making forecasts or
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making decisions can get 30 40 percent more accurate when they're working together as a swarm as
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this interactive system with AI watching their behaviors then if they just took a voter or
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a poll or a survey and an example we did a study with with MIT where we looked at groups of
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traders financial traders when we had them predict the price of gold the price of oil the S&P 500
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and then they would do it alone or they would do it just by taking a group vote or they would do
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it as a swarm and as a swarm there's a constraint they have to all be connected at the same time it's
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a real-time system that they would log in it would question would come up that's the price of oil
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in the next seven days and then we had these groups do this every week for 20 consecutive weeks
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and the groups that used that work together as a swarm were I think 30 percent more accurate
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in forecasting oil and gold in the S&P than the traditional methods.
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And I have a question about it immediately which is does the system become more accurate with more
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people added to the system. So we had that exact same question first which was how many people do
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need and I originally assumed that you would need at least 50 people you may be 100 people we looked
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at swarms of bees swarms of bees it's interesting because this a bee colony has about 10,000 members
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and they make these remarkable decisions they will decide on new homes to move into and things as a
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swarm but they only use about 300 members out of the 10,000 and so it made us think like
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this probably you don't have to you don't have to keep adding members at least the nature
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suggests that and what we found was it depends on the type of question and the type of population but
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usually between 30 and 60 people is really good to get a very accurate forecast from members of the
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general public we've done every year we get asked by journalists to predict the Oscars just using
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members of the general public as an example we'll take in 50 movie fans and we'll predict the Oscars
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in every year we'll outperform the movie critics at the New York Times and the LA Post and the
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and variety and vanity fair because people are smart and when you combine their insights they get
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smarter the thing that surprised me the most was that it when you have real experts the people who
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are not just members of the public trained professionals you can get down to pretty small groups we
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did a study with Stanford Medical School that was funded by NSF where we brought in groups of
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doctors and we had them diagnose chest x-rays as a swarm and and so these doctors would either
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just work on their own and make a diagnosis or they would take a vote by a survey or they would
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log in together and as a swarm converge on a diagnosis and so an x-ray would pop up on their
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screen and then they would swarm and converge and the study that we published with Stanford
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in the journal nature digital medicine showed that when working together as a swarm the doctors
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could reduce their diagnostic errors by over 30% and it was just four or five doctors it wasn't
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30 wasn't 50 yet these experts was just four or five people working together as a system
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could make significant improvement giving your background obviously with immersive technology
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then with virtuality augmented reality and obviously we're discussing this brave new world the
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metaverse how do you potentially proceed the technology and convergence of artificial intelligence
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like the one that you're creating all working with and the swell of the mess of us artificial
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intelligence will be one of the most significant technologies in the metaverse for good and bad and
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technologies that I focus on are really about connecting groups of people in real time the one
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constraint when you get a group of people as a swarm as they have to all be connected together at once
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which immersive worlds are great for immersive worlds are really about real time interactions the
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metaverse is a world where we will be have the ability to collect massive amounts of information
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about people and we can talk about that more detail but artificial intelligence is very often
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used to to characterize people and profile people and it's being used in traditional web to world
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to crunch lots of data and then understand things about people I think AI will be able to
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understand things about people even for more in the metaverse because it will we will have a world
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where people are are being tracked in lots of different ways and so I think that's interesting I
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think I think we will learn about people I also think it gets dangerous because we could start to
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profile people at levels that become maybe predatory and so that's one area the other area that AI
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becomes really significant is there will be AI controlled avatars in the metaverse there will be AI
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controlled agents avatars they will be conversational and and they will be very good at what they do
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with especially with the very recent surge of progress in large language models the prospect that
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you could interact with a virtual AI controlled spokesperson and not even realize that person's not
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real is is definitely within our reach especially in a virtual world where everybody looks like an
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avatar if you are approached by an avatar looks just as real as everybody else and it's it's powered by
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large language model it will be able to interact with you in ways that make you think it's real and
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that's really interesting at the same time it's also dangerous it's dangerous because the most
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likely usage of that type of AI powered avatar is for promotional purposes as AI powered spokespeople
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that are going to engage you in promotional conversation with the goal of persuading you to buy
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a product or service or even worse persuading you to believe an idea that that some third party has
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paid to to influence you and just like advertising in today's world in flat media this type of
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advertising the metaverse will be targeted and so you will be approached by an AI powered avatar
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that will be custom designed to be most persuasive to you the way it looks its voice its mannerisms
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is clothing will be all be chosen based on your profile and and it will gauge you in a conversation
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about a product or service or political propaganda and it will be very persuasive and that
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use of AI I think is very dangerous especially because in the metaverse that AI will also have
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access to your facial features your vocal inflections maybe even some of your vital signs blood pressure
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heart rate and so we could find ourselves in a virtual future where we're engaged by virtual spokespeople
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that are driven by AI that have access to our personal history that knows our likes our
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tendencies it knows how we're most likely to be persuaded it's reading our facial expressions maybe
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even our heart rate blood pressure the whole point of virtual reality and augmented realities to
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blur the boundaries between what's authentic and what's not the do you I guess feel a sense of
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responsibility for that area of the growth in matters given the fact that you're largely responsible
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for a lot of the early pioneering and early growth when these concerns probably won't
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measure the thing people have been promoting the technologies for a long time have a responsibility
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to say hey this has the potential to to make this magical world but there needs to be some guardrails
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in place because utopian vision could get distorted and I think for a lot of people you can look at
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what happened with social media and say hey things don't always turn out the way you expect so
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to media it's a great concept had utopian vision a lot of really utopian benefits brings world
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together gave a voice to the billions of people it had the potential to democratize society but
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at the same time there were no guardrails in place on social media and so it is created these
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created inadvertently a system that also polarizes society and spreads misinformation and disinformation
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and I think we can learn from that and say hey let's think about both the good and the bad
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so that we don't have another utopian technology that I was going to say because like you
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you're a rather famously you have people like I guess Bill Gates and like Mark Cuban who in the past
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have like but vocally limited I guess like screen time for their children to use just like mobile
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phones I think and Bill Gates wouldn't let his children have a phone until they were over the age
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of 14 which in 20 2007 so I guess that's a son of the age there but would you let I guess your
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children use virtuality would you let them enter the mess of us what's your opinion on that?
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Two answers to that one is I think children are young people are going to use technology
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where other young people are and if you restrict them you're actually creating social problems for
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them and so they don't necessarily have a choice and since they're the head of the curve
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and because right now the people who are in the metaverse right now the most are pretty young people
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in Minecraft and Roblox like those are real metaverse worlds and there's a whole generation
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growing up in Minecraft and Roblox and at the other side of it ultimately whether you could
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steer people away from using the metaverse right now while it's in this transition it will get
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to a point where people will not have a choice people do not have a choice right now really to use
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a smartphone they don't have a choice but to use the internet you will be at a disadvantage
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if you don't have augmented reality you'll be a disadvantage if you can't do shopping in
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virtuality. I have a question about this what is from your point of view like the top three or
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top five things that should happen in order to protect the consumers and the metaverse users
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in the future and also how do you see this implemented? Do you see this implemented on a platform
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level? Do you see this implemented on a counter governance level? Or do you see this implemented
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like a sort of a united nation? Digital human rights kind of declaration. I think the way
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it's implemented could be or all of the above it could be platform it could be government it could
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digital human rights do think that the concerns that I have are in terms of where regulation would
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happen is really about putting guardrails on what on the platforms themselves. On the top
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rails do you have like top three or top five things? Yeah so one broad category is tracking right so
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again by its very nature the metaverse has to know where you are right has to know where you are
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your orientation it could be tracking your gate your posture that has to know that stuff to in order
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to simulate the world around you it doesn't have to store that information and limitations on
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and by storage I mean doesn't have to store that information over time it needs that information
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in order to simulate an experience in real time as I think limitations on tracking really go to
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storing information over time and giving the ability to profile people because again and this is
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where AI comes in if you have the ability to track these motions throughout their day after day
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you could then use AI to then predict their behaviors you could use AI on that motion data to
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prop to actually predict health problems putting limits on making a clear distinction between the data
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that's needed for real time providing a real time simulated immersive experience that is magical
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and educational and informative I think that's fully possible I think we don't have to store that
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information over time so that's the input side the output side metaverse platforms will have the
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ability to take whatever information they have about you profiles about you and then target you
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with content with advertising just like in social media but think it's really different about
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targeted content in the metaverse versus targeted content in social media is that in
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today's world when an advertisement pops up it's very clear it's an advertisement it's a
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it's a pop-up ad it's a video in the metaverse advertising will become immersive it will go from
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flat content to immersive experiences and so when advertisements in promotion and propaganda
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become experiences it could become indistinguishable from real from other real events real activities
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in that world an example that I could give of what I would call a promotionally altered experience
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imagine you're walking down the street in a virtual world or maybe in the augmented world
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and and you see a park car you've never seen before and you notice it and then two people are
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standing outside the car having a conversation about it and they're talking the drivers telling
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their friend how amazing that that this new car is and and you just you walk past and you might
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just think that was an authentic experience and it could subconsciously influence you and say
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oh like people who live around here really think that this this car has these great features and
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you might not realize no that was injected into a world as a targeted advertisement only you
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saw that experience and they chose the color of the car and they chose the virtual spokespeople
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their gender and their clothing baked all to maximize persuasion on you and you might have
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no idea of it so this idea of these promotional altered experiences will happen in the metaverse
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and they could be indistinguishable from authentic experiences and that's really dangerous because
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it changes your view of reality if something is a targeted promotional experience it should look
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different it should look different it should sound different I the consumer I the user should be
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able to see when I see that virtual car and people talking yet that's fine but if it looks different
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yeah if it looks different if it just aesthetically looks different and I go oh that's promotional I can
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put it in the proper context and use my natural skepticism to say yeah that was placed there
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I think that we could go on for hours and this is fascinating I like I'm just taking
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in or sucking in all the knowledge I just wanted to do what something on top of this that's you
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are talking a lot about automated profiling system that can potentially you know
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unspeable to purchase products and persuade people in on the metaverse to invest money on products
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but my take on this is not just that this can happen only with automated system this could potentially
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happen also with actors that are real people that are going in the metaverse knowing
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something about you and doing this in real life so it's not just a matter of fact of what is
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going to be automated in the metaverse that needs to appear as a paid for advertising but also
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there's a there are some regulation that need to happen also in the terms of behaviors of real
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people that should be tracked and should put some measure and some chopper on in place in order to
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protect their inhabitants from these kind of behaviors there's really important reasons to have
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strict controls around identity all that said that I do want to point out that even though you could
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do this with human actors AI controlled avatars will ultimately be far more powerful and also
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cheaper to implement and I say that because at scale at scale but even even just on one on one it's
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powerful meta just announced that they're putting facial wreck facial tracking expression
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tracking in their headsets and there's a really good reason for doing that if you put facial
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tracking on a headset now your avatar could express human emotions it's a humanizing thing
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it's positive on the other hand if they can use emotional analysis in real time advertising now
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this AI controlled avatar that's engaging your emotional conversation will adjust its tactics
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in real time based on the emotions you're expressing and it turns out that AI is actually
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better at detecting emotions potentially than humans because an AI can actually detect what are
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called micro expressions that happen so quickly or so subtly that a human salesperson wouldn't
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recognize it but the AI can I think that consumers would would appreciate if there were guardrails in
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place that said hey you can't use emotion detection in real time to adapt advertisements and I think
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the platforms would benefit because if consumers lose trust then it hurts it hurts the whole
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industry and if you put guardrails in place and people feel safe in the metaverse that's good for
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the whole industry so Lewis we're just about here at our time now and I was going to say to Nick
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this definitely is a part too you could have a whole conversation about this just final topic here
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this has been absolutely fascinating to me and I'm sure to our listeners and viewers this
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source has been very interesting as well thank you very much for your time Yano thank for having
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me it was great did you know you can catch this full episode of Field of View and more by subscribing
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on youtube spotify apple music or wherever you get your podcasts to not miss another immersive
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technology moment subscribe today