Episode Transcript
Louis Rosenberg [00:00:03]:
In the future, we're going to look back at movies from today where we see people staring down at phones, and we're going to say, that looks silly. Content shouldn't be trapped on this little phone in your hand. You should just be walking down the street with glasses on that just look like normal, natural glasses. They look stylish just walking down the street. And the content just appears where you need it, when you need it. And so the reason that it's inevitable is that it's natural. And it's a funny word to say to call it natural, because if you look at the vision pro headset today, or other or Meta's quest three headset, you look at somebody wearing it, they don't look natural.
Mizter Rad [00:00:44]:
Mizter Rad. Rad. Welcome to the Mizter Rad show, where I talk to the most interesting global personalities about the future of humanity. Hello, beautiful humans. Today, I would like to go on a journey to imagine how the Internet of the future will look like. What does it mean to live in an augmented world? And will those augmented worlds bring us together as a human species, or instead, bring us apart? Now, I also want to understand why and how AI, artificial agents and avatars could transform forever the way we see and understand what culture and personal identities are. And I think there's no better person I could think of than Louis Rosenberg. Luis is an entrepreneur and researcher with massive experience in AR, VR, the metaverse, and AI.
Mizter Rad [00:01:52]:
Louis, how are you doing? And how did you end up involved in VR in NASA and Stanford in the nineties? That's impressive.
Louis Rosenberg [00:02:00]:
Yeah, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. This should be a fun conversation. My interest in my background is really in using technology to amplify human abilities. Going back 35 years, I was a graduate student at Stanford, focused on the design of computing experiences that could enhance what it means to be human. And back then, one of the hot technologies that was just emerging was virtual reality, was coined in 1987. And I was lucky enough in 1991 to get a gig doing research at NASA in their very first virtual reality lab. And back then, things were much simpler than today.
Louis Rosenberg [00:02:44]:
I was focused on doing research on how to model in software the distance between people's eyes so that you can improve perception of depth in virtual environments. Again, the technology was much simpler back then, but I was convinced that virtual reality, or immersive experiences would become the future of computing. And I was convinced about this, really, because we humans evolved to perceive our world and to gather information spatially. We weren't meant to stare at flat screens. The way we experience our world, explore our world, remember our world. The way we build empathy for other people in our world is spatially face to face, real encounters. And so even as far back as 1991, I was convinced that immersive environments would become the future of computing. But there was one thing that made me feel uncomfortable with virtual reality back 30 plus years ago, and that was being cut off from the real world.
Louis Rosenberg [00:03:53]:
When you're cut off from the real world and cut off from your real desk and cut off from the other people around you, you're giving up a lot to have the benefit of this spatial information. What I really wanted to do was to take the benefits of virtual reality and just splash it all over the real world and allow you to experience both at the same time. And this really hadn't been done before. And so I pitched that to the US Air Force, and they funded me to go to Wright Patterson Air Force Base and build what became, it's called the virtual fixtures platform. But it became the first real mixed reality platform where people could experience the real and the virtual at the same time. And that, for me, especially because I had a lot of human subjects experience that, and then tell me what it.
Mizter Rad [00:04:40]:
Was like at that point.
Louis Rosenberg [00:04:41]:
I was convinced 30 years ago that the future of computing would be the real world, embellished with virtual content, so you don't have to leave the real world, and you can put content in the place that you need it and experience things just as naturally as if you were just in the normal world. It's really about taking information off of the flat screen and just putting it into our world. And I was convinced back then that was the future. I really didn't think it would take 30 years or more to get there. But with the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, their mixed reality headset, it really is becoming clear to the whole world that ultimately will really be the future of computing. You don't think about the real world or the virtual world, you just think about one reality, and you can bring virtual content into that world and just experience it naturally. That's where we're headed. And whether we're looking ten years out or 50 years out, as you like to do, the future will be a mixed reality, and we will stop thinking about the real world and computing.
Louis Rosenberg [00:05:48]:
We will just think about one reality, and it will be magical, because virtual content will just be naturally integrated into our experiences throughout our daily life.
Mizter Rad [00:06:00]:
Is that what you call or what one could call the augmented world or the metaverse?
Louis Rosenberg [00:06:06]:
Yes. So there's a lot of different words that people talk about. There's augmented reality, there's mixed reality, there's the metaverse, there's now spatial computing, which is Apple's phrase. All these things are deeply related and also confused a little bit. Back when I was developing these mixed reality experiences, there actually was no language. There was just one word, virtual reality. I had to talk about it as well. What if we could take the real world and the virtual world and combine it into a single perceptual reality? And then in the mid nineties, the phrase augmented reality started to be used to describe that.
Louis Rosenberg [00:06:45]:
And the phrase augmented reality, for much of my career was the word that would describe this merger of the real and the virtual. But then, in the 2010s, Google launched a product called Google Glass, which you might remember a single eye, really interesting device where you can bring content just into your life, but it wasn't spatially projected into your world. It wasn't really augmented reality. But the media referred to it as augmented reality and became confused, like, is augmented reality just flat content brought up into a single eye, or is augmented reality really this unified world where content is integrated? And so a few years later, when Microsoft launched the first product that really was a true augmented reality, the HoloLens, in 2013 or 2014, they shifted the language to mixed reality. They used that as their branding to really distinguish from these simpler devices that are useful, like Google Glass, but aren't really giving you the sense of being immersed in a single reality that has real and virtual content. And so, really, since the Microsoft HoloLens, for the last decade, people have referred to this unified world as a mixed reality. Now, Apple launched their Vision Pro. They've taken this one step further, and they refer to even a broader category they call spatial computing, which is really mixed reality.
Louis Rosenberg [00:08:11]:
Plus, what Apple has done is they've built an amazing spatial operating system where you don't have to think about there being your desktop computer that you use for some things and your mixed reality environment that you can use for other things. They've created basically a spatial computer where the vision Pro headset can be, really can be, your only computer if you wanted it to be. You could experience all the traditional productivity applications and also have amazing virtual reality experiences, augmented reality experiences. And so they refer to this. This broad category plus their operating system as spatial computing. And so that's where we are today. The interesting thing and the exciting thing is that Apple's vision Pro device really points the way towards a future where we will stop thinking about computing and the real world as two separate things, but we'll just experience the real world and have digital content just appear where we need it, when we need it, in valuable and convincing and powerful ways.
Mizter Rad [00:09:23]:
And why do you think humans should have or should live in augmented worlds like that? Or is this something inevitable? And that's why we're talking about it, right?
Louis Rosenberg [00:09:33]:
So I would say that we already live in a world with a digital life, right? So we all already have a digital life. We already spend most of our life interacting with content on flat screens, whether we're sitting at a desktop or walking down the street, staring down at a phone, bumping into things. And so in the future, we're going to look back at movies from today, where we see people staring down at phones, and we're going to say, that looks silly, like, content shouldn't be trapped on this little phone in your hand. You should just be walking down the street with glasses on that just look like normal, natural glasses. They look stylish just walking down the street. And the content just appears where you need it, when you need it. And so the reason that it's inevitable is that it's natural. And it's a funny word to say to call it natural, because if you look at the vision pro headset today or other, or Meta's quest three headset, you look at somebody wearing it, they don't look natural.
Mizter Rad [00:10:35]:
No, they also don't feel natural.
Louis Rosenberg [00:10:37]:
Right, right. They don't look natural. They don't feel natural. I mean, the vision pro gets the closest, but the experience. So people don't look or feel natural, but the experience of having digital content be taken off of a flat screen, whether it's on your desk or in your hand, and just putting it into the world in a natural way like that is natural.
Mizter Rad [00:10:57]:
That is.
Louis Rosenberg [00:10:57]:
In fact, it's the way our perceptual system was designed to perceive information. For millions of years, we evolved to explore and understand information spatially in our world, and these technologies are bringing digital information into that natural format. So I do think it's inevitable, and I do think that it's a positive for humanity. I also think there's all kinds of significant risks and dangers that we have to protect against. But the technologies that ultimately will win, in my mind, the technologies that will win, and the world that we're headed towards, and we can call it the metaverse. And we used, and we didn't really touch on that word, the metaverse. And people refer to the metaverse.
Mizter Rad [00:11:48]:
How would you define the metaverse? Actually?
Louis Rosenberg [00:11:50]:
Yeah. So I would say that the metaverse is a persistent world where you, as the user, are immersed in that world with other people. And I believe that there's two different ways that a world could emerge. It could be a fully simulated world, which is really how most people think of the metaverse, as this fully simulated world where people can gather or have entertainment experiences. But I also believe that the metaverse can be an augmented world, where it's just the real world with augmented content. And I firmly believe it's the augmented world that really will be the metaverse that impacts society. And I say that for the same reason I said 30 years ago, that people don't like to be cut off from the real world. That was my first experience at NASA, which was that, yeah, having immersive content is great, but if you're cut off from the real world, you're giving up way too much.
Louis Rosenberg [00:12:45]:
I do see that in the future, there will be fully simulated worlds, and I think those will be for entertainment experiences and professional experiences. But I think people will engage those experiences just for a couple hours at a time, just like you lose yourself in a movie today. You could lose yourself in a movie, and you want to cut out the real world. But after a couple hours, that's enough. And I see that for virtual experiences. But I think for the vast majority of our daily life, we will be in a mixed reality, an augmented metaverse, and we'll be walking down the street, and it will just look like the real street. But there will be immersive content that appears at places that we go that's useful in those locations at that time, and it will become so photorealistic that it will be hard to distinguish between what's real and what's virtual? And we're very close to that today, and it will be deeply infused with artificial intelligence, and we can talk about that as well. These worlds will be intelligent.
Louis Rosenberg [00:13:47]:
And part of the reason for that is that if your goal is to create an augmented metaverse, really is to take the whole, the real world and add virtual content everywhere in useful and helpful ways.
Mizter Rad [00:14:02]:
What do you mean with, like, putting a virtual layer on the real physical world? Like, are we talking about goggles? Are we talking about the raven sunglasses that meta and Raven pull out in the market recently? Or is there something that you think could work better than those artifacts? So my question, I guess, is, in the next decade, do you think everyone, instead of having a phone here in their hand, will have their phone in their eyes, kind of whether it's a contact lens or raven pair of glasses, so.
Louis Rosenberg [00:14:36]:
Right, so great question. So we're really talking about eyewear, right? And the, you know, right now, the highest quality device that can enable this is the vision pro from Apple. And it. And it can do this. It's not something that most people would feel comfortable walking down the street wearing, although we now see people doing that now that it's out there, but that's more of a novelty. And so we're talking about the capabilities that are possible in a device like the vision pro, but in a form factor that looks and feels much more just like traditional glasses. And so people will be wearing what will look like traditional glasses, but will enable these immersive experiences where, again, you could be walking down the street, and it will be a world where you will see real people walking past you. You'll also see simulated people walking past you.
Louis Rosenberg [00:15:37]:
And those people will look photorealistic. We're close to that being to looking photorealistic. There will be content in your world, whether it's products or services or artwork or work for your job, that will just be in your world. If you're a car designer designing the interior of a new car, that car will just sit in your office, virtually. You'll put on your eyewear, and that car will be there. You'll be able to look at it and experience it in your office without, again, you'll still feel like you're in your office. You'll still be able to grab stuff off your desk, drink coffee off your desk. And so it will be this mixed reality between the real and the virtual.
Louis Rosenberg [00:16:26]:
So right now, where we are is that these technologies exist. The vision pro can do all of these things, but it's large and it's not socially acceptable. The form factor, within five to ten years, the form factor will be, will look like glasses and will look more like the ray ban glasses that we see from meta, but will be truly immersive. If we think another ten to 20 years past that, very likely we will get to the contact lens phase. And that's a hard problem. There are some who think it's an impossible problem, but I do suspect that it really is ultimately where we're going, because, again, it's the most natural way to present the information.
Mizter Rad [00:17:16]:
Do you think that as we get more into the metaverse or the matrix, and we cannot differentiate now who is real and who is an avatar or we cannot make a difference between are we online or offline? And basically, we would. In that world, we'll always be online. If we are already hooked to the newsfeed, on Instagram or TikTok. I can't imagine how the world would look like in ten years from now where you have digital content everywhere you go. And I wonder if that new Internet will set us apart from what we have evolved to be, and that is species that are connected to each other, to the flesh of human, to also to nature, to trees, to rivers, to water, to the air. How do you see that? Because I feel like the more we get, again, into the metaverse, the more apart we grow of that that we know from our years and years of evolution. That is our essence.
Louis Rosenberg [00:18:31]:
Yeah. So there's all kinds of really serious downsides to the direction that this technology is going. And as you point out, in today's world, we all have this digital life, and people are glued to social media that has all kinds of really negative impacts on people, and it actually isolates people. It takes people away from each other. And so if you think, like, when I think about social media and social media is kind of interesting because you think it connects people together, but really it's just people passing notes to each other, right? Like, you're separated from everybody else. You're passing notes, you're giving thumbs up to notes. It really does isolate everybody. So we've already done that to ourselves.
Louis Rosenberg [00:19:18]:
We've already isolated humanity in this negative way. What would it be like if we take this step to this augmented metaverse, where now we're not glued to a flat screen, but instead we're in the real world? Our eyes are up. Right now, our eyes are down. I mean, it's funny, you watch a group of people at a restaurant these days, especially younger people, and they're all just staring at their phones. They're not even looking at each other. So mixed reality is going to take people's eyes back up to each other and actually enable new levels of connectivity. So imagine this. You know, I said, imagine I'm walking down the street, and there's virtual content around, and my eyes are up.
Louis Rosenberg [00:20:07]:
Well, now imagine that a friend of mine who lives 1000 miles away is walking down the street next to me, virtually, and I can just turn and see that person next to me. Realistic. Or a whole group of friends decide they're going to have this experience together. And so instead of us passing notes to each other on Instagram, or we could actually have real experiences. So once you start to eliminate this boundary between the digital world and the physical world and really make it one world, I think there's a potential for it to actually bring people back together to give us back those face to face interactions, to take our eyes back off of screens and into the world and make the content. Like right now, we have to have choose between the real world or the digital world. And a positive future would be when there's just the real world and there happens to be digital content that's conveniently accessible. And so I think that that is the vision that we're headed towards.
Louis Rosenberg [00:21:21]:
How we create that future could go either way. It could be used in negative ways, it could be used in isolating ways, or it could be used in connective ways. But I do think it has the potential to be better than today's world that is social media dominated. And that is at least my hope.
Mizter Rad [00:21:39]:
Well, we never know, of course, but it's funny that you said that taking your side of the ground and looking up, it's almost like a symbolic thing, but I think it makes a lot of sense in the sense that it could have a great impact without knowing, just by looking at people to the eyes. It's kind of like a very human thing to do. But still, I want to push back on that because I feel like you say, yeah, okay, we live in a world where we also have the digital information coming in, and everything can be sort of blended in, and that has a lot of possibilities and positive things, which I see. But I also see on the downside, so much information, so much input coming into our brains, and I'm not sure if our brains have evolved to deal with that kind of information. So it's almost like a bombardment of information that is stressful. It affects our mental health. It's difficult to cope with. And it's difficult also to say, I don't want this anymore.
Mizter Rad [00:22:44]:
I'm going to switch off and go offline, off the grid. It's almost impossible. I mean, I've tried to close my social media accounts, and I go back two months later because I kind of need to communicate with people or whatever it is.
Louis Rosenberg [00:23:00]:
So I fully agree with you that we live in an age of information overload. And it's not just that we feel bombarded with information, we actually feel obligated to pay attention to it, that we'll be missing out on information if we're not focused on it. And this is a kind of a cultural choice more than a technology choice. We've created this culture where digital content takes priority over direct real world experiences, and that digital content can interrupt our life at any moment of the day. Just it shows up and we give it priority. And I think that people universally realize that this is not a positive way to live. And so I would hope that culturally we push back on that. But that issue exists today already.
Louis Rosenberg [00:23:58]:
It will exist whatever new computing technologies emerge, what we do need is a better culture of technology. I think part of the reason that the culture is in this bad state is that it's evolved so quickly, right? There hasn't been enough time for us to collectively react and push back. And by the time we start to push back, the technology changes. I do think what we really need is for the technology to stabilize, in a sense. And I think that the final stable state of technology is when the digital world, again, doesn't take precedence over the physical world. It's just embedded into our day. And so when you're going about your life and you open up the refrigerator, and you're looking at, well, what should I make for dinner? But I have augmented reality, mixed reality glasses powered by AI. And it sees what I see, and I ask the AI, what can I make with these ingredients? And it just tells me and shows me, if we think about that experience and that's where we're headed, we're very close to that.
Louis Rosenberg [00:25:10]:
Imagine this experience, and again, imagine that the glasses are almost invisible for you.
Mizter Rad [00:25:14]:
They're comfortable.
Louis Rosenberg [00:25:15]:
You walk up, you open your refrigerator, you see the ingredients, and again, you just say, what can I make? And then the information comes up, and I go, oh, I like that one. Give me the recipe. And that just comes up and compare that to today's experience where I could open up the refrigerator, look at the ingredients, and I say, maybe I should go over to the computer in the other room and sit down and do a search for recipes. This technology direction has the potential, if it's implemented smoothly and seamlessly, it has the potential not to be overwhelming, but to augment our. Our lives. And again, I think that's where AI will come into it, because AI has this potential for us to be able to request what we want when we want it, in our spatial world, rather than it just bombarding us. And that's why I often talk about AI in parallel with this mixed reality augmented metaverse, because AI is on a similar path in terms of it's pushing computing to a more natural state. And again, it's funny to say that, because AI is very unnatural, and there's lots of dangers of AI.
Louis Rosenberg [00:26:27]:
But the thing that people overlook with what AI is doing right now is we're in the middle of a revolution that I would call conversational computing. We are now AI is now really pushing us into a place where, again, we can get away from the flat screens and the keyboards and the mice, and we will just talk to our computers, and they will talk back, and it won't be like Siri or Alexa, where we just issue a command, you know, Alexa, find this. We're now with. With large language models and the advances that have happened over the last 18 months. We're now headed to a world where we can just talk naturally to our computer, and our computer can talk back, and it can give us information in the form that we evolved to perceive it conversationally. And the other advancement that's important, that ties into all this is called multimodal large language models.
Mizter Rad [00:27:26]:
Okay, wait, let me stop your ride there, because I don't understand what multimodal language models are. But I also wonder, the AI that we're experiencing right now with Chai GPT and stuff is based or is built on data from the past. Is that a problem in the first place?
Louis Rosenberg [00:27:46]:
Yes, yes, and no. And so today's large language models are trained on all this data, like you said, data from the past, its ability to do conversations, which is really what this technology was originally designed to do. It's really not a problem. This technology, it trained on this massive amount of human content, and now it can communicate conversationally. Where I worry about the data from the past is when we start using these large language models, also called generative AI, to create content, to create artwork, to create architecture, to create poetry, to create music. It's a problem because people think of these systems as creative, right? You can ask a large language model to create a painting of a cat juggling, and it will. And it will create it, and it could look photo realistic. You could say, create a picture of cat juggling in the style of Picasso.
Louis Rosenberg [00:28:41]:
And it will do that. You could say, create, you know, create a. Just a new, beautiful piece of artwork about a landscape. It will do that. And people think, oh, these systems, now, creative people can use them. Well, they're creative only in the sense that they look at the past, all the previous artwork, all the previous literature, all the previous movies, and they just create derivative work. And that would be the first time in human history that our culture looks backwards, right? We're now creating content that looks backwards, that's emulating the past. These AI systems can't really create new content that looks forward.
Louis Rosenberg [00:29:21]:
Humans can do that. Human artists? Yes, human artists get trained on the masters. They get trained. They're inspired by the past, but they bring their own sensibilities their own creativity, their own unique self, and they create entirely new things. And as more and more artwork and creative content is generated by AI, it now has the risk of stagnating our culture and actually having making us as a species actually less creative in the same way. Because alt now have millions of people creating content that are backwards looking as opposed to forwards looking. You could think about this in virtual worlds. If I'm going to create a magical virtual world for an entertainment experience, and I'm going to ask an AI to help me because I have to create a huge amount of content and I'm going to ask it, design a building that's an amazing building to go into this virtual world.
Louis Rosenberg [00:30:25]:
It will create an amazing building that looks very much like today's buildings. And think about that. In a virtual world, you can create buildings that they don't have to stand up under the force of gravity. They don't have to like all of the physical constraints that have guided our architecture, human architecture for the last 5000 years don't apply in a virtual world. But if we're using AI to help us create the architecture, we're not breaking free in the way that a human could. So I definitely believe and hope that human artists remain relevant. And it's such an important issue because AI is going to affect everybody's job going forward. And there's all kinds of threats and risks because AI has become so powerful.
Louis Rosenberg [00:31:23]:
But it's artists and creators who are being hurt right now. If you're a graphic designer or a commercial artist, right now you're competing with AI that will do the work 100 times faster and almost for free. And that is damaging to this whole profession of human creatives. But it also doesn't value the fact that human creatives are really, truly creative and can truly bring a piece of themselves and create entirely new things where again, these AI systems are backwards looking, but because they're so cheap to use, corporations are using them to create our culture.
Mizter Rad [00:32:07]:
When you say that artists create stuff from, from nothing, let's say I have a lot of artists in my network. We build a company that work with artists, work with more than 5000 artists worldwide. And I've talked to a lot of artists about this topic and I've heard a lot about the fact that some artists believe that their creations, they're not born from nothing. They're born from their, you know, experiences that they had when they were children. The kind of art or artists that they follow, the studies that they had, the kind of travels that they had where they went, who they met, all these experiences, influence, of course, their creations. And so some of them philosophically think that they cannot call the art original, in a way, because they. It's a copy or it's a. It's a collapse of different things that are already there, if that makes sense.
Mizter Rad [00:33:06]:
And I wonder if right now, if we're talking about AI, it's a collection of data from the past. Will we have an AI agent that acts a bit like a life of an artist? Let's say that throughout their life, having different experiences, meeting different people, interacting with different other AI agents, will that AI agent evolve? Or will the creations of that AI agent be based on whatever that AI agent got exposed to?
Louis Rosenberg [00:33:46]:
Yeah, that's a great question. And so I agree with you that human artists exist within our culture, and so their art and their sensibilities are influenced by our culture and by countless previous artists who came before. But every human artist who's, you know, who really considers themselves an artist, they know they're bringing something of themselves to that artwork. They're bringing their own sensibilities, their own emotions to their artwork. They're also usually, most often bringing something about what they're trying to say into their artwork that what is the feeling they're trying to convey in their artwork? Now, today, an AI system cannot bring something of itself to artwork. It cannot bring something it's trying to say to its artwork. Can we have AI systems that have different experiences and therefore generate artwork differently from other AI's? Yes, that absolutely can happen.
Mizter Rad [00:34:53]:
Is that happening already, or.
Louis Rosenberg [00:34:55]:
It is, because there's lots of different AI systems out there. They're all trained on different sets of art. They're all being improved and getting feedback in different ways. So if you use a piece of artwork mid journey or dolly or any of the others, they all function differently enough that you can actually tell just looking at it stylistically. Oh, that came from Dolly. Oh, that came from midjourneys. But again, that doesn't mean they're bringing a sense of themself to the artwork, and that's because they're not self aware. They don't have a sense of self.
Louis Rosenberg [00:35:22]:
A human artist is self aware, has a sense of self, has a sense of their own identity, and has a sense of what they're trying to say in their artwork. So the question that you're asking really boils down to, will AI systems become self aware? Will they become conscious? Will they become, in a sense, a being, just like the way a human is a being? Because once an AI becomes a being. Well, now, each AI will have a different life experience and different personality and different. And then an artificial artist, arguably, would be just as creative and expressive as a human artist. Now, will that happen? I personally think it will happen. Will it happen tomorrow? No, but I think that within the next 20 to 50 years, we will have artificial agents that are self aware. And unless we, as a species, decide that we should not allow that to happen, I think there's a lot of good reasons to not allow that to happen, because once these artificial agents are self aware and have a sense of self and have their own sensibilities and their own interests and. And their own.
Louis Rosenberg [00:36:41]:
Well, now we have to wonder, will those interests align with human interests? And I think that it's wishful thinking to just assume that if we create this other intelligence that's smarter than us and faster than us, that also feels self aware, has a sense of self, it also has its own interests to just assume, oh, that AI, its interests are going to align with ours. It's going to be safe and friendly. We have no reason to believe that. Now, you could also argue that it will be, but we're taking a really big risk by taking that one last step. And I don't think we should be taking that risk without really knowing what we're doing. Because the one thing that we. If you look at intelligent beings in the world, there are lots of organisms that have self interest, that have a sense of self. You know, if you.
Louis Rosenberg [00:37:44]:
If you have a dog, you know that your dog has its own interests. And those interests are usually pretty aligned with us humans, because these dogs, they evolve to be friendly to humans, and they're dependent on humans. But when an AI emerges that is significantly smarter than us, we have to assume that it will behave towards us the way we have behaved towards other intelligences on the planet. And it has not been very positive. I do think that AI has amazing things that it can do for humanity. But once you get to this place where an AI can become self aware with its own interests, I think that's a step that is far more dangerous than a lot of people appreciate.
Mizter Rad [00:38:22]:
We've talked a lot about augmented worlds and how AI has a role in that. But there's also the whole topic of augmented bodies, meaning, you know, you can have a phone in your hand, but what if you had a chip in your. In your skull, in your brain? Or you could, you know, have an implant in your hand that makes it, you know, make you. Maybe your leg make you. Makes you run faster there's a new, I don't know if you've heard about this. There's the new company with a bunch of investors, really high profile investors from the US, trying to launch this new brand, I think it's called enhanced, and they want to basically organize the Olympic Games that for enhance humans. And so I feel like not only we are augmenting worlds, but also trying to augment ourselves. And as we augment ourselves, maybe we start behaving or thinking more like machines, less like humans.
Mizter Rad [00:39:27]:
And that brings a lot of issues and concerns in my head, at least.
Louis Rosenberg [00:39:31]:
I mean, I agree, it's a dangerous direction. I also think it's an inevitable direction because. Because once there's a certain group of people who start to augment themselves, they will have an advantage over other people, and they will create pressure for other people to augment themselves as well. And so it will be an arms race that we almost can't avoid, but it is dangerous. And we will augment ourselves with technology. We will also augment ourselves with embedded technologies. I do think the embedded technologies, brain implants, I think that will go slow because there's a pretty big barrier to get people to be willing to do that, to be willing to put a chip into your brain, a really big barrier to be able to be willing to have surgery. Pretty big barrier.
Mizter Rad [00:40:25]:
There's a bunch of Europeans, actually, especially Sweden, that they already have implants under their skin, here in their hands, for payments, or to hold their vaccination passport. But, yeah, it is. It's a big barrier. Yeah, I agree.
Louis Rosenberg [00:40:38]:
Right. So when we're talking about augmenting humans again, we could talk about implanting chips in your brain or implanting technology into your. Into your skin. Really. We're much closer to something that I call augmented mentality, which is just integrating artificial intelligence into our daily life so that it's present with us everywhere we go. It involves really two things. One, a wearable device, and I think that wearable device would be glasses, like the meta, augmented reality glasses, and an AI model, but a new generation of AI model that's called a multimodal model, a large language model like chat, GPT originally just responds to text as input. A multimodal model can also respond to video, audio.
Louis Rosenberg [00:41:27]:
So a multimodal model is basically giving the AI additional senses, right? It can see and hear, not just talk. And so meta has incorporated this multimodal model into their ray ban classes. And that means now you can walk around the real world, and the AI can see what you see. It can hear what you hear, and it can communicate to you by basically whispering in your ear, because it has the ability to communicate conversationally. And so with the current meta glasses, and this is just getting started, you could go into a, in fact, they have a demo of this that they show from meta. You can go into a clothing store and pick something up off the shelf, a shirt, and you could say, you know, what, what pants would go with this shirt? And the AI model can see what you see and hear what you said, and then just tell you, you know, give you options. It could even guide you to where in the store to go find that shirt if it had scanned the store. And so, and I call it augmented mentality, because we're adding this AI that's there to help you throughout your day, seeing what you see, hearing what you hear, whispering in your ear, potentially showing you things in your field of view as well.
Louis Rosenberg [00:42:46]:
And so that's really going to be how we augment ourselves mentally. We're very close to it. And as I mentioned, some people might find that to be creepy, and there's lots of reasons why it's kind of dangerous. And I, and I worry about the danger, because if you're meta and you can whisper in people's ears, you can also try to sell them things and manipulate them. And so I'm very worried about that direction. But I also know it's inevitable, because as soon as a certain percentage of people are using devices like this that are giving them all kinds of abilities, like imagine that you're walking down the street, you meet an old friend on the street, you don't remember that person's name. The AI is going to whisper that person's name in your ear. You're going to see them, they're going to tell you, oh, that's so and so.
Louis Rosenberg [00:43:34]:
The last time you saw them was this time. And so as soon as some people have that ability and other people don't, they will feel like they are outmatched if they don't also adopt that technology. So there will be very strong social pressure to use products like that. So this augmented mentality, this direction, will drive people to adopt a technology that, again, they might not, they might not want it in their lives, but they also don't want to be at a disadvantage. And that's what drives so many of these technologies. It's what drives social media. Most people will say they hate social media, and yet they feel like they're at a disadvantage if they don't have it. They're disadvantaged socially, their disadvantaged professionally.
Mizter Rad [00:44:24]:
And it is convenient as well. I mean, having a phone is convenient. And I think humans, we are convenient. We can always complain about meta or Google or whatever other tech company stealing our data or manipulating our choices, but in the end, I think most of us want to have a convenient life, so we kind of ignore that bad aspect, unfortunately. But that's a reality. Tell me something, first of all, you talked about the gap between the person having that virtual layer versus the one not having that virtual layer and how those people having that virtual layer will have more convenience or be more informed or have better choices. Do you think, in general, that this new technologies will increase the gap between people with more access and people with less access? And I'm talking not only from an individual level, from poor versus rich, but also from a country level.
Louis Rosenberg [00:45:28]:
Yes. So, absolutely. You know, we talk about this digital divide that really has existed since the, you know, the birth of the personal computer, it will get much worse. It'll get much worse because, again, if you're wearing eyewear that is powered by AI, and it's giving you information as you walk through your world, and it's giving you suggestions about what to say and what to buy and what to do, and it's doing that in a positive way, you have an advantage over people who don't have that information. And if that difference is because some people just can't afford the technology, then they're just stuck at that disadvantage. If they're choosing not to use it, that's one thing. But, but if they can't afford it or it's not available to them, then they have a disadvantage. And that disadvantage will only increase the reality that they can't afford it, because now they're cut off from a piece of society.
Louis Rosenberg [00:46:19]:
Imagine if there are people who just can't see the same content that other people can see. They're cut off from a layer of society. That's a fundamental disadvantage. And so there should be a role that government has to play to ensure that when these technologies become a requirement of being part of society, that it's available and accessible to everybody in that society. Otherwise, it will only perpetuate and exacerbate the societal differences between people.
Mizter Rad [00:46:53]:
Tell me something, Luis, because I'm very interested as an entrepreneur, and I know a bunch of our listeners are also entrepreneurs, are trying to build a company. Now, I wonder, in this new world, how do websites look like? How do companies get built? Do they need an app? Will we still build the website as the forefront of our shops? Let's say, because this new technologies bring a lot of change. And so if I'm building a startup today, should I be focused on building the perfect website with the perfect Ux? Should I be more focused on creating a community? Because websites won't matter anymore that much. I don't know. What's your view on.
Louis Rosenberg [00:47:37]:
So I think websites and online presence of businesses is going to change greatly, very quickly because of AI and because of, as I mentioned, this, what I consider to be this revolution of conversational computing. We will very soon, within just the next few years, be in a world where when you engage a website, you're engaging a digital representative that you're going to hold a conversation with. It's going to look photorealistic, it's not going to be immersive, it's going to be on a flat screen in the near term, but you'll go to a website, there'll be a digital representative, a spokesperson that you just talk to conversationally, and it will guide you through the process, just like a human representative, if you went into a store, would guide you through the process. And it will be, it will be very natural, it will put you at ease. It will be skilled at easing you into conversation. It will draw information out of you in ways that are a little bit dangerous because it will be able to ask you questions and size you up. This is the direction that websites will be ten years from now that we will just be thinking about the virtual representatives that man our website, not, you know, not these flat pages. And again, this is role for government to make sure that these AI powered virtual agents are helpful, but not manipulative, because these AI systems will have the ability to be deeply manipulative, because they will engage you in conversation.
Louis Rosenberg [00:49:11]:
They could very easily assess your reactions in real time, how you respond, and they could be designed to overcome your objections. And so you can think of a very skilled salesperson as somebody who can draw you into friendly conversation and talk you into a purchase. These AI systems will be even more effective than the most skilled human salesperson unless there's regulation and restrictions that say no. You can't use these AI systems to manipulate people. You can use them to be informative, but you can't be characterizing the person on the other side and assessing what is the best technique to overcome their objections in ways that cross the line from marketing to manipulation. And I think this is an issue that will become very significant in just the next few years.
Mizter Rad [00:50:11]:
These multimodal models of AI, like you said, they listen to what you're saying, see, what you're seeing, basically what's missing is that they know what you're thinking. We might get there at some point, but for now, this new AI multimodal model, what I see a risk as well, is because you said, yeah, it's up for our governments to regulate it, but they can also very much benefit from knowing what we're seeing, how we're behaving, how are we feeling? And so it's kind of scary as well, because they could know, okay, this guy, when he sees this or when he goes to this political rally, he has a lot of anger.
Louis Rosenberg [00:50:52]:
Yes, great point. Which is it puts people at a danger of manipulation and a danger of privacy from whoever controls the technology. The parties that control the technology could be large corporations or could be state actors, and both could abuse these technologies in really dangerous ways, both by really knowing everything that you see and do and hear in your world, and also by using AI to manipulate people, whether they're trying to get you, sell you on a product or service that you really don't need or to get you to believe a piece of misinformation or propaganda that you normally wouldn't believe. And so, yes, there's really significant dangers. The first level of dangers will most likely come from corporations, but these same dangers will come a little bit later from state actors. And it requires that we, in some sense, globally have restrictions and requirements. On this. I will mention I have a new book that's coming out.
Louis Rosenberg [00:51:57]:
It's called our next reality. It actually, it's available in March. I wrote with Alvin Grayland, who's also, also has spent about 30 years in this space. And we spend a lot of this book talking about this exact issue of how do we point the world towards a safe implementation where we could take advantage of the magical capabilities of both AI and immersive media and avoid these really significant dangers that we. When you enter an immersive world that's powered by AI, you're giving some third party the ability to track what you do and what you hear and what you say, and that same third party the ability to change the world around you or put artificial agents into your world to potentially manipulate you. And so the way I express it in the book is that these technologies could be, you know, the most powerful tools for humanity that we've ever had in terms of making computing natural, or they could be the most powerful tools of persuasion that could ever be abused. And the decisions that we make now, both corporations and governments, I think, will help guide us one way or the other. And so the point of the book is to guide, help guide the conversation towards the.
Louis Rosenberg [00:53:25]:
The safer path.
Mizter Rad [00:53:27]:
Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Louis Rosenberg [00:53:30]:
So it's a funny question, because the book is actually written as a debate where Alvin takes the optimist side and I take the pessimist side, where I really focus on the dangers. And I don't just focus on the dangers just to be a pessimist, but to really raise awareness and hope that we put protections in place, because I think that we have the ability to deploy these technologies in a positive way, but we have to do a better job than we've done in the past. Social media and other technologies also have really positive uses, but we didn't do a great job. And these new technologies are coming very, very quickly because I do think that the actions we take now can prevent those risks, actions from corporations, actions from government.
Mizter Rad [00:54:23]:
In your eyes, that would be almost like, you know how we have a nuclear treatise that apply to the whole world? It has to be something like that, right?
Louis Rosenberg [00:54:32]:
Yes.
Mizter Rad [00:54:32]:
Something that applies to every single country on earth.
Louis Rosenberg [00:54:36]:
Yes. Especially when it comes to AI. The potential is so dangerous. We do need that level of nuclear treaties to make sure that AI's cannot be deployed to manipulate us, cannot be deployed in ways to invade our privacy and track us and report on us and all these things that could be all the abuses that could happen. And what makes it particularly dangerous is the technology is moving so quickly, and so governments really need to be moving faster on AI than on previous technologies.
Mizter Rad [00:55:09]:
Is there any government that you would say right now is at the forefront of protecting its citizens against the dangers of AI?
Louis Rosenberg [00:55:18]:
The European Union is out in front pushing the hardest. I think Australia also pushes hard. I think a lot of governments are being more cautious. They also don't want to hurt the industry in their country and put them at a competitive disadvantage with other countries. And that's kind of silly, because if people don't trust these technologies or these technologies are just dangerous, it hurts everybody and it certainly hurts their own companies. So I think as a few countries lead, like the European Union and Australia and others, makes it easier for other countries to feel like, okay, they can go this direction to not put their companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Mizter Rad [00:56:05]:
Right. Luis, to wrap up, I would like to know really quick what you guys do at unanimous AI, because I think that's super exciting as well.
Louis Rosenberg [00:56:15]:
Absolutely. So unanimous AI. We're a very different type of AI company, and I do run an AI company, and I have for the last ten years, even though I'm very concerned about AI. So for the last ten years, I've run this company. And the reason that we're different is that rather than using AI to replace people, we use AI to connect groups of people together and make us smarter together. And we push, while all these other companies are out there, pushing towards what they refer to as superintelligence, AI systems that are just smarter and faster and better than people in every way, which, again, to me, is very dangerous. We're pushing towards what we call collective superintelligence, where we're not allowing AI to make decisions for us, we're not allowing AI to replace us. We're using AI to say, hey, we can connect groups of people together and make us smarter by harnessing the knowledge and wisdom and insight and intuition of large groups.
Louis Rosenberg [00:57:14]:
And it turns out that it works. And we can have groups log into our system and answer questions together and get more insightful answers and smarter answers and better answers together than they could do on their own. And it's interesting, we just had groups of people, we run experiments with different universities, and we just had groups of people come together in our system, which we call thinkscape, to take an IQ test together as a group to see, do we really measure their intelligence. We had large groups of people. Their average iq was 100, which is what you expect when you take a group of people to have an IQ test. When they took the test together in thinkscape, we boosted the iq to 128, which means we took a group of people who averaged the 50th percentile, and we had them up at the 97th percentile as a collective intelligence. And so we see groups of people where we can make better medical decisions together, better financial decisions.
Mizter Rad [00:58:17]:
Can you give me an example in the real practical world?
Louis Rosenberg [00:58:20]:
So the United nations has used our technology to predict famines around the world. And so they have groups of experts, and they normally have to try to bring these experts together to get into a room and argue and say, what's the likelihood that a particular country is going to have a famine? And the experts include experts on climate, experts on economy, experts on politics, on warfare, all the different issues that go into it. When they use our technology, we can bring groups of people together, and we make them smarter, and they can get more accurate forecasts by combining all of their insights.
Mizter Rad [00:58:54]:
Is it always about forecasts?
Louis Rosenberg [00:58:56]:
It's not always about forecasts. The reason we talk about forecasts a lot is you could measure the outcome and see, yes, it got more accurate. We've had groups of people make business decisions together, prioritizations together, and significantly get more accurate. We've had groups of people decide on investments, investment decisions, medical. We did a big study with Stanford Medical School. We had groups of doctors diagnose patients as a collective intelligence, as a swarm intelligence. And we saw that when we brought groups together in our software, we reduced the diagnostic errors by over 30%. Basically, the doctors became 30% more accurate in their diagnoses.
Louis Rosenberg [00:59:38]:
When you can combine their knowledge and.
Mizter Rad [00:59:40]:
Wisdom and insight, would you say that the future of, let's say, managing a company or even managing a country could be done by swarm intelligence?
Louis Rosenberg [00:59:49]:
Yes. So we, our current technologies are really designed to allow groups of people to deliberate on any issue. Could be a political issue, could be a scientific issue, could be, you know, our goal is to be able to allow, you know, groups of hundreds of scientists to solve climate change problems by combining their knowledge and wisdom and insight and converging together on better solutions and the technology. Right now, we can allow hundreds of people to hold a single conversation and deliberate and amplify their intelligence. And by this time next year, we'll be able to allow thousands of people to come together and amplify their intelligence. And so that is our pursuit, is this idea of collective super intelligence. People can learn about it. Our website is just unanimous AI, and we have a couple different technologies that do this.
Louis Rosenberg [01:00:39]:
One is called Swarm, which is for small groups, and one is called thinkscape. That's designed really for very, very large groups. Ultimately, right now, hundreds of people, but ultimately thousands. And it's potentially, we could imagine a million people having a single conversation and reaching really good decisions together. That, to us, is the alternative to just building a super intelligent AI that replaces us.
Mizter Rad [01:01:06]:
Luis, if people want to connect with you, or if people want to know more about you, where can they find you?
Louis Rosenberg [01:01:12]:
I'm on LinkedIn, just Lewis Rosenberg. And I post a lot of information about the articles that I write. And again, I mentioned I have this book coming out, our next reality. It's on Amazon. It's available for preorder on Amazon right now. You can check it out. Talks about all these issues. Virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, talks a lot about the dangers and the potential regulatory solutions.
Louis Rosenberg [01:01:35]:
And again, my company is called unanimous AI. Unanimous AI. And we talk about collective superintelligence.
Mizter Rad [01:01:44]:
Beautiful. Luis, it was a pleasure to have you here. I really appreciate the time we spent learning from you, and I appreciate as well your positiveness, but also the fact that you're aware of dangers on the other side of all these technologies, but I'm happy to talk to you, to connect with you, and hoping that we have a next time.
Louis Rosenberg [01:02:04]:
Yeah, absolutely. This was fun. Happy to chat again. I agree there's a lot of exciting things, but also a lot of risks that we need to weigh.
Mizter Rad [01:02:19]:
Here at the Mizter Rad show, we provide firsthand information straight. Straight from the original source of knowledge. The personal opinions of our guests don't necessarily reflect those of Mizter Rad. This show is brought to you by the Rad house. An unbiased, transparent agenda. Less independent media house. Our theme music is written and produced by Marco Melo.
