Big data analytics, blockchain technologies, and artificial intelligence force us to rethink existing business models and develop the organizations of tomorrow. Joining us on this episode of How AI Happens is four-time author, entrepreneur, future tech strategist, and The Digital Speaker himself, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam. As an expert on disruptive innovation like big data, blockchain, AI, and VR/AR, Mark explains how these emerging technologies can benefit organizations and how we can use them to develop products and services that are ready for the twenty-first century.
Joining us on this episode of How AI Happens is four-time author, entrepreneur, future tech strategist, and The Digital Speaker himself, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam. Mark explainsthe extraordinary opportunities and challenges facing business leaders, consumers, regulators, policymakers, and other metaverse stakeholders trying to navigate the future of the internet; the important role that AI will play in the metaverse; why he believes we need to enable what he calls ‘anonymous accountability’; and how you can actively participate in building ethical AI.
Key Points From This Episode:
Tweetables:
“The social and the material [systems are] very good but, for the organizations of tomorrow, we need to add a third actor, which is the artificial.” — @VanRijmenam [0:03:05]
“Once we reach AGI, that will be a fundamental shift because, once we have AGI—which is as intelligent as a human being, but at an exponential speed—everything will change.” — @VanRijmenam [0:08:34]
“How can we create a metaverse that doesn’t continue on the path of the internet of today? We have this blank canvas where we can construct this immersive internet in ways where we do own our data, [digital assets, identity, and reputation] using a self-sovereign approach.” — @VanRijmenam [0:15:09]
“Technology is neutral. My objective is to help people move to the positive side of technology.” — @VanRijmenam [0:29:24]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Dr. Mark van Rijmenam on LinkedIn
Dr. Mark van Rijmenam on Twitter
‘The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience’
EPISODE 37
“MR: The moment we reach AGI, we pretty much soon afterwards reach super AI because the first company or person to reach AGI will then continue an exponential curve, and the AGI will improve itself exponentially. And within maybe even a few seconds after the moment we reach AGI, we have super AI.”
[INTRO]
[00:00:19] RS: Welcome to How AI Happens, a podcast where experts explain their work at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. You'll hear from AI researchers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers, as they get technical about the most exciting developments in their field and the challenges they're facing along the way. I'm your host, Rob Stevenson, and we're about to learn how AI happens.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:31] RS: Joining me today on How AI Happens is author, entrepreneur, future tech strategist, The Digital Speaker himself, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam. Mark, welcome to the podcast. How are you today?
[00:01:41] MVR: Hi, Rob. Thank you for having me. It's great to be on your show.
[00:01:44] RS: Really pleased to have you. You wrote a book about AI machine learning. You have a new book coming out about the metaverse. We're going to get into all of that. There's just a million directions I think this conversation could go in. So I'm excited to see where exactly that is. I guess, can we just start with you a little bit? Would you mind sharing for the folks at home a little bit about your background and how you came to be where you are now?
[00:02:03] MVR: Sure. Happy to share a bit about my background. So I've been an entrepreneur for over a decade now. I am originally Dutch. I currently live in Australia. I am, as you mentioned, a future tech strategist. So I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and change society, and how we can create, and how can we use these technologies in ways that are beneficial to humanity.
I run the platform called Datafloq, which is a media platform around emerging technologies. Over a decade ago, I started with discovering the big data space. From the big data space, I moved into the blockchain space, which was my second book that I wrote about that. Then I did a PhD at the University of Technology in Sydney in Australia, where I did research on how big data blockchain and AI are changing organizations, which resulted in my third book, The Organisation of Tomorrow.
Recently, in October, Wiley asked me to write my fourth book, Step Into the Metaverse, because the metaverse is really like a sort of convergence of big data blockchain and AI, all leading to this next iteration of the Internet. I took a deep dive in that, and I'm currently working on a new startup in this space. It's very exciting.
I also run a podcast like you, which is Between Two Bots, together with Dan Turchin, where we talk about the ethical side of AI and how we can create AI that's beneficial, again, to humanity and society. So that's really my focus. As I said, I think about how emerging tech changes organizations and how we can use them in ways that are beneficial.
[00:03:20] RS: Thinking about The Organisation of Tomorrow, your third book, I suppose, is that correct?
[00:03:25] MVR: It’s correct, yeah.
[00:03:26] RS: Thinking about the organization of tomorrow, what was the role that AI took, I guess, just in that book? Because the idea was just to document some of the disruption happening to the way we do work, right, and the way organizations are built. So you spend a good amount of real estate in their books talking about the blockchain as well. AI in the blockchain, a good chunk of that book. Why those two? I guess we'll start with AI because of the name of this podcast.
[00:03:48] MVR: That's a good point. So the book really is a management and easy to read version of my PhD dissertation because nobody reads the dissertation. It’s boring, difficult to read.
[00:03:58] RS: My audience might, actually.
[00:04:00] MVR: Oh, really? Okay. I don't want to offend anyone but –
[00:04:04] RS: What was your dissertation about? Let's start. Let's go back even further.
[00:04:07] MVR: Yes. So my dissertation was about how these technologies change organizations. But I had a theoretical lens called social materiality, which is a theory that looks at how the social, being humans, and the material, being technology, interact with each other and how they influence each other. It’s a very dry theory that looks at how this would affect research. How does it affect organizations, etc.?
During my research, I argued that the social and the material is very good. But for the organization of tomorrow, we need to add a third actor, which is the artificial because artificial intelligence is becoming more and more intelligent. Especially when at some point we reach AGI or super AI, this artificial agent behaves differently from the human agent or even the material agent, which can be anything. It can be a table. It can be a chair. It can be just microphone. That’s also material from a theoretical perspective.
My argument was very much so how do we look at an organization from these three actors, the social, the material, and the artificial? What role does the artificial play, and how can we make sure that the artificial plays rightful? My PhD was on PhD about publication, so I published several papers. One paper was on the ethical side of AI, and I took the approach of [inaudible 00:05:23] chat bot for Microsoft, which obviously your listeners might very well remember. [inaudible 00:05:27].
[00:05:29] RS: It was a disaster. But wasn't it more a reflection of the way it was used, right? The technology wasn't the issue there. It was Twitter.
[00:05:38] MVR: No. Detecting low technology was also the issue because the way it was constructed, and the way it was – There was no – The way the feedback loop worked and, obviously, also, the way Twitter works because people started feeding it with all kinds of crap. But the way the bot was constructed, it learned from that crap. As a result, we saw the other things that have sped out.
But I took that as a starting point to sort of understand how can we use AI in ways that are beneficial to organizations to avoid these kinds of things, and how can the artificial, the actor artificial, be used to be constructed within the organization? So a very dry research. I thought it was very fascinating but obviously not much topic to read on your Friday afternoon voluntarily. That’s why I turned into management book.
I still left that part in, but I try to rewrite it in such a way that it is really easy to understand. But that's really the approach that I take to technology. I take a strategic perspective, hence my title future tech strategist. I look at what these technologies, and what does that mean, and what are the downsides and upsides of this technology? That's the approach that I took for The Organisation of Tomorrow, where I added also sort of a digital transformation framework based on my research.
How can organizations digitally transform their organization, if they identify the processes and customer touch points, if they distribute that data, either using data lakes or the cloud, if it's internal or the blockchain, if it's external when they're collaborating with industry partners, when analyzed that data using descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. Then automate their processes or customer dashboards using AI or smart contracts. That framework, digital transformation framework, really helps I think organizations move forward and actually digitally transform their business.
[00:07:22] RS: I'm glad you brought up this notion of the artificial agent. At what point does the technology transcend from a tool or ascend from a tool into its own semi-autonomous or fully autonomous entity? I don't know what the better word for it is. But what is that shift that you've received and the need for it to go from just a tool that is deployed by AI practitioners or by really anyone who has the software design for them to its own sort of agent?
[00:07:48] MVR: Well, I think it’s a very good question. At the moment, technology or AI is very much still in his narrow domain. But it's certainly shifting rapidly, where we have this very narrow domain where the AI is really, really good at, whether it's creating images or labeling images or creating tax or whatever.
Like last week, I was watching Elon Musk's TED talk that he gave at global tech in mid-April, as well as the interview that he did in the new Gigafactory. The way he looks at AI and where they are trying to build real world AI to have self-driving cars. But once they have that real world AI, they can also apply it to their Tesla bots, the robot that they're building. I think that's when we start to move from actor, which is sort of can't really operate autonomously, to an actor that might have its own will or its own approach, its own way of doing.
I think that's still – Especially before seeing it integrated within large organizations, they're still probably 5, 10 years away, at least. But that's sort of where you start to see this approach. If we don't take a step further down the road to super AI, which is, I think, I’m convinced that that will happen, there's a lot of debates in the world where some people say that will never happen, and other people say will happen next 5 years or 15 years or 20 years. I think once we reach that stage, then the world will fundamentally change.
Then the artificial will become a very important, a crucial role within society, that we not necessarily may control in the ways that we want to control it. Therefore, we need to think about it today so that we're not sleepwalking into a situation where the artificial is just all powerful and omnipresent. So that's all sort of ways to look at it, I think.
[00:09:25] RS: How would you distinguish AGI from Super AI? Or would you distinguish it?
[00:09:29] MVR: That's good question. I think the moment we reach AGI, we pretty much soon afterwards reach super AI. That's the way I look at it because the first company or person to reach AGI will then continue an exponential curve, and the AGI will improve itself exponentially. Within maybe even a few seconds after the moment we reach AGI, we have super AI because we'd go so much faster.
But it might also take a lot longer, obviously. Or AI might trick us into thinking that it hasn't reached AGI. But in the meantime, it’s already super AI. Who knows? I think those are sort of the same pitch. So I think once we reach AGI, that will be a fundamental shift because once we have AGI, which is as intelligent as a human being but at an exponential speed, everything will change.
[00:10:14] RS: So what is super AI?
[00:10:15] MVR: Super AI is an AI that is infinitely more intelligent than humans and operates at the speed of silicon instead of the speed of carbon. Because of that, it can solve all kinds of problems that we not necessarily understand. I think the best way – I think Nick Bostrom, he's a well-known researcher in the space, I think he can make the comparison to an ant and humans. So compare it. To an ant, an ant lives in a 2D world, and an ant cannot just fathom how we come up with computers and build skyscrapers, whatsoever. This is miracles.
Now, the same would apply for a super AI. We would be the ant, and the super AI will be the human, which would not understand what the super AI would come up with and how the super AI would create stuff and solve things. So therefore, it's so important to think about today. Today, we can construct AI in such a way that it is beneficial to us.
[00:11:13] RS: Yeah. That makes sense because when – Say you accomplish AGI. You don't stop. It doesn’t stop like, “Okay. We did it. We replicated human intelligence and thought and processing and whatnot,” right? It's inherent in that notion of AGI is the ability to think and grow. You put that really well, the speed of silicon versus the speed of carbon. So once it gets there, now it's – You let it loose, right? That's where the fun begins. So a different question, I suppose.
The people who say it'll never happen, that strikes me as hard to believe, right? It feels like we're on kind of an unstoppable path towards that sort of thing. How do you think about that?
[00:11:47] MVR: I think that the challenge here is that humans are not made for exponential thinking, and there are only few people who can think exponential curve and can see how technology changes. So, yeah, we've seen the same thing. That I think, in the past, yeah, there's only room for five personal computers in the world. I mean, the Internet is a fad. We've seen famous examples of these mistakes.
For me, just the way I look at technology, I look at it from an exponential lens, and I see AI is getting better. We collect more data, especially with the metaverse coming, which will 100x times the data that we collect today. We have quantum computing, so we merge the quantum computing with the AI capabilities. Then we have AI quantum algorithms, however you want to call them. So it only goes faster and faster and faster. We've really left a hockey stick to the bottom of the curve, and we’re now on an exponential trajectory.
For me, looking from that perspective, there's only one way this can go, and that's exponential improvements in the years to come from now to 10 years, to 20 years and onwards. Unless we kill ourselves and we ruin the planet, of course, unless humanity continues to exist, and there's no global disasters happening, I am convinced that we continue on this trajectory, and we will continue to improve because human beings, we are driven by that. We want to innovate. We’re also capitalist beings. If we can find a way to do something cheaper and faster and more efficient, then we'll do that.
From that perspective, looking at – It’s a guarantee that we'll reach this, again, unless we screw up the world, obviously. Then once we reach that, the question is what's it going to do to humanity. That's a very open question. I don’t have too much answer yet.
[00:13:21] RS: Yeah, absolutely. On the note of humans not being disposed for exponential thought, the metaverse feels like the next logical example of that, especially when you brought up the example of, “Oh, the Internet will never catch on. People will never want to text from their phones,” these sorts of things. The last 20 to 30 years really is littered of these examples of the whole it'll never catch on thing, and it feels like we're kind of at that point again with cryptocurrency, with the blockchain, with Web3, and with the metaverse.
With the metaverse in particular, when you look at the kind of investments being made, when like Microsoft buys Activision, they didn't do that to make more Call of Duty games, right? Facebook has completely rebranded itself to be like metaverse forward. Whether you like it or not, these products are coming to market. So they will exist, like they will be. The question is when is it really going to be disruptive? When is it really going to be adopted?
That feels like the latest example of humans being ill disposed toward exponential thought, but here we are. You have this book coming out called Step Into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy. I want to get into how AI plays into Web3 in the metaverse. First though, would you mind sharing a little bit about this book and why write this book to begin with?
[00:14:35] MVR: Sure. So I think we are at the dawn of a new age. We are at the dawn of the metaverse, the immersive Internet, where the physical and the digital are converging a so-called phygital environment, which is a very horrible word. But it really explains quite well what it means. It means where the digital enhances the physical and the physical enhances digital worlds in its shortest form. It also means that this is not only virtual reality. It's also augmented reality. It is also just 2D on your computer. It’s also Fortnite games or Call of Duty games or whatsoever. It's everything.
When I was approached to write this book, for me that was really a key moment to start going down this rabbit hole of the metaverse and to try to understand what's happening here. So for the book, I interviewed 100 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, the builders, the creators, the investors to create it off the metaverse. I had 150 people completing a very long survey to really have a good understanding of what the community thinks and where the community thinks that the metaverse is going.
The way I look at the metaverse is – So I've written this book as a way to be a blueprint for an open metaverse. I think that that's really, really important to stress. Because we are currently on the Internet where we have a closed walled garden, which is - the internet is walled and ruined, so to say, almost, by big tech. We’ve sort of become addicted to these free services that have been created in really good ways by the Googles and the Facebooks of this world. But as a result, we see that we have no control over our data. We have no control over our own identity.
As I mentioned earlier, in the metaverse, the amount of data that we create will be 100x compared to today. So what we really don't want, we don't want to end up in a Snow Crash scenario or a Ready Player One scenario. These are the books that sort of first mentioned the metaverse, where the metaverse is controlled by one person, one company. Of course, Mr. Zuckerberg really wants to strive for that, and I'm not a big fan of this understatement of Mr. Zuckerberg and meta because he says all the right things. But he's proven to be very untrustworthy and doesn't have – I think he's restructured democracy to where he builds and construction companies.
But that set aside, so the way I wrote my book is to find ways. How can we create a metaverse that doesn't continue on the path of the Internet of today? Because we have this blank page, this blank canvas, where we can construct this immersive Internet in ways where we do own our data, in ways we do own our digital assets, where we do own our identity and reputation using our self-sovereign approach.
For me, that is absolutely crucial if we want to unlock those trillions of dollars for the social economy, instead of having it end up in the hands of the few tech elites who built platforms. So the book is really about not only what is the metaverse and what can the metaverse become in the coming decades. But also how can we create this open metaverse? So I describe six characteristics that I think every organization that's doing something with the metaverse should adhere to, to at least ensure that we have this is open approach.
I also discuss what the metaverse is going to do with identity because I believe it's going to cause a Cambrian explosion of identity. If all of a sudden you can be who you want to be, whether that's a flying purple centaur, or whether it's a gold princess, or whether that’s Toad or Bowser from Mario Kart, I don't really care. You can be whoever you want to be, which I think is absolutely fascinating.
At the same time, I look at where you can go in the metaverse and how you can go and move between the different worlds, how it's going to change entertainment, sports, education, and also how brands can step into the metaverse, where you see the digital fashion coming today. After all, avatars are also born naked, so to say. So you need to dress them. Digital fashion is going to be really, really big.
But at the same time, the manifest is not only for consumers. It's also for enterprise organizations. In my perspective, digital twins, so exact digital replicas of physical machines or factories or systems or systems of systems, are sort of foundational layer of the metaverse because it allows you to interact with the physical world.
Then in the book, I continue on discussing the economics of the metaverse. So what's the role of NFTs? What are NFTs? What at the challenges and dangers of NFTs? Because it's not all perfect as people think at the moment. How can NFTs, by giving for the first time through digital ownership, ownership of digital assets, what does that mean? If all of a sudden you can prove that you own a particular digital asset. Well what it means, it means that you can then monetize that, and you can sell it. You can borrow against it. You can put it up as collateral, and that will open up an entire new economy.
But at the same time, all this metaverse, just like with artificial intelligence, there are many dangers lurking in the corner of the metaverse because everything that we – All the problems that we have in today's web will be extrapolated in the immersive web. We see this already happening. You have sexual harassment in the metaverse. You have deep fakes. You have polarization. You have mental health issues. So I discussed these problems, but I also provide some, I think, solutions to these problems.
In the end, I finished the book with a look into the future. How probably by 2035, we will beam the metaverse straight into our brains, and we become this sort of bionic homo digitalis where we are completely merged with technology.
[00:19:30] RS: Wow. I hope that's been a spoiler for the end of your book because that is –
[00:19:34] MVR: No, it’s not. It’s definitely not.
[00:19:36] RS: That's fantastic. Really interesting convergence of trends here, particularly this notion of taking back control of one's personal data, where we've been generating all this data. For really all of the Web2 era of the Internet, we've just been giving it away because in return we get these products we like. Like Facebook is free because you pay for it with your data.
The Web2 version of taking control of your data is embarrassingly insufficient. Really the best example of it is like GDPR, where now you get a pop up saying, “Here are the cookies that you can choose to share or not.” Web3 would enable you to participate in the value that your data creates, right? In a way that previously you can't. When Facebook makes money off of your data, you get nothing.
But in a Web3 version of your identity in the metaverse or Web3-enabled companies will allow you to participate in that data, in the value created by that data. So is that what you think is going to make this more widely adopted? Is the trend towards controlling your personal data, how does that play into the metaverse’s growth and acceptance and why it's relevant to the average user?
[00:20:44] MVR: Sure. I think at the moment, the web and the Internet consist of value extraction. So as you rightly say, we get all these free services, and we pay with our data. If a product is free, you are the product. We will be sleepwalking into this world where our data is up for grabs by the highest payer. It’s, I think, a very frustrating approach to live in.
Now, with the metaverse, again, we have this blank canvas, where we can create a rule where we move from value extraction to value creation. As I said, we own the data, the digital assets and our identity, and we have full control over you. A good example is that just after Zuckerberg announced Meta in October, I think the day after our show, I'm not sure I've got her name, but the Australian artist who has to handle metaverse or Instagram got completely banned and deleted from Instagram because she was carrying the handle metaverse, which she already had for decades. She couldn't reach out to Instagram. She couldn't reach out to Facebook. Nobody responded, only until she reached out to the New York Times. They said, “Oh, we're so sorry. This happened by accident. I'm sorry.”
But that's absolutely BS, and I think that's the problem of Web2. We do not want to be in a situation where one single person has this control over the lives of billions of people. So we have to move to away from the system, and that's also a responsibility for us as consumers, where we have to stand up. We have to vote without data. Maybe we should move also from consumer rights to data rights, where we have more control. Also, from a governmental perspective and a regulator perspective, we take the stand from the consumer that we need to protect our data. Because once we have this value creation aspect, I think that will change everything.
Again, another example. Let's say, hypothetically, you are a Fortnite game. If you playing Fortnite for the past five years, so you have created a lot of value in the game. You've amassed a lot of assets, a lot of skins. You're very good at the game. So you spend, I don’t know, 10,000 hours playing the game. Then you decide, “Well, I've been doing this for five years. Now, I want to buy a house.” So you go to the bank, your local bank, and say, “Look, I worked 10,000 hours on Fortnite. I've amassed all these assets. Can I put it up as collateral to get a $200,000, whatever, loan?” I'm pretty sure the bank will laugh at you or ask you to leave really quickly.
But that doesn't make sense because that person has amassed a lot of value. However, at the moment, that value ends up in the hands of Epic Games and nowhere else. If that Fortnite gamer was able to move, though, that value from one platform to another, so to have interoperability to sell those assets and rent out those assets and borrow against those assets, then that same Fortnite game, it might be able to drop their NFTs, which are interoperable, into a defy protocol and do get that loan of $200,000 to buy a house.
Then we've moved from value extraction to value creation. That’s a very long way to get to that world because, obviously, the current players don't like change, because they, obviously, don't want to give up all the data that they’re collecting. But I think also from a Generation Z, Generation Alpha perspective, they have a different look at the world, and they no longer accept this mentality. They want to have more control. So there is definitely hope that we achieve this.
But I also want to warn, is that a lot of people think that the metaverse equals Web3, and that's absolutely not true. So the metaverse can be built on top of Web3 infrastructure, but there's no guarantee that it actually will because the metaverse can perfectly exist built on Web2 technology, which we already have. I think that's very important. Whether we want to end up in a metaverse built on Web2, or my answer is obviously no, because then we will remain in this role of value extraction. If you build it on Web3, it will be value creation.
That’s very important to be aware of. I think, yeah, in the years to come, again, we have a blank canvas. We need to think about how are we going to create metaverse. We need to think about it now because, otherwise, we end up in the same situation as today.
[00:24:47] RS: That is a great point. Surely Zuckerberg’s metaverse will be a Web2 metaverse because it will be tied to Facebook. It’ll be tied to Meta. He gains nothing by allowing Web3 to take part in this.
[00:25:02] MVR: No, of course not. They said that everyone who is - they now opened up or they're going to open Horizon Worlds for creators and creatives to sell their assets. They’re taking 47.5%, which they say is a very competitive price, which actually is true because Roblox takes 75%. Not a lot of people know that, but it's just ridiculous.
[00:25:22] RS: It's not competitive with any like [inaudible 00:25:23] or any Web3 that takes like half a percent, right?
[00:25:27] MVR: Yeah. Or even 10%. That’s already a million times better than this case, and I think it's just arrogancy of especially Meta that they say that and they can do that. If it were up to me, I would not invest in Meta. There’s no financial advice here.
[00:25:43] RS: Not financial advice. Do your own research, etc., etc. All of the incantations we have to cover our ass here. Yeah, that's a good call. Also, the Fortnite example and the value or the items that you would get in a game that have value to other players or in a marketplace, where these items can be transferred. That's an example of the data that you are not allowed to participate in the value creation of historically. It’s not just personal data. It's not just your own face and your own posts and your activity, right.
The other part, if you view like a video game, for example, as an economy of like these moving parts of pieces that are exchanged for value. Whether it's an experience point or like a sword you use, that sword is given to you because of the output you had in the game, right? That's a transaction. That has immense value in that marketplace. So if you're not like a Fortnite player, the idea that someone would pay real world money or that you could put up your Fortnite information as a collateral would probably break your brain a little bit. But to someone else to whom that item has a lot of value, then you can see why that exchange would happen.
I really wish we could just talk about the metaverse in and of itself and the applications there for the next few minutes. But I really want to bring it back home to AI a little bit. How do you see AI participating in the metaverse? What is its role to play with this new world?
[00:27:04] MVR: Well, I think AI will play a very important role and that there are two approaches briefly discussed. The first approach I think is AI is necessary because of everything that's going on, and we need to make the metaverse work because there's so much data collection. It's necessary to stream all the hyper realistic volumetric data to compress that AI plays a role in various aspects in creating digital fashion that is connected to the real world weather and changes depending on whether it rains or not.
AI is there in the streaming and compression of the hyper realistic content. AI is there in building the virtual worlds, building the augmented experiences to offer this new approach. I think AI is really playing a crucial role in this regard, and I don't think we could build the metaverse without it, especially if we want to – The metaverse is infinite, and currently we have the Decentraland. We have The Sandbox. It’s all very low polygon, very blocky styles, which is because of the problems of streaming hyper realistic data.
Another example that end of 2021, Warner Bros., together with Epic Games, they released this teaser, this demo for The Matrix Awakens, which I can definitely recommend having a look online. What they did is they had this 10-minute show where everything that you see is digital. So Keanu Reeves that appears in the demo is digital. He doesn't exist. Whatever he does there is created digitally. Obviously, that can only be created with AI.
But then, and that’s my second point that I want to mention, it’s super cool that we can do this kind of stuff. It’s really amazing that we can have meta humans that look and feel like the person. I'm currently building a digital human of myself with MetaHuman. Being digital speaker, obviously, I have to have this digital clone of myself. But the problem is here, and I know not a lot of people talk about it. But a lot of people –
If I can create a digital human of myself [inaudible 00:28:55], you can do the two of me. If you have my voice, which you do now, you can clone my voice, and you can be me in the metaverse. Because if I look like me, if I sound like me, probably a lot of people will think that it is me. So then you need to start to prove that you playing me is not me. It just gets confusing really quickly. Then we need to link it to NFT. So that if you own the NFT, probably that is indeed the mark that you think.
But then as we all see on the Internet, NFTs get hacked all the time. So then we need to link it to biometrics, my heart data, or my iris scan, or whatsoever. That is indeed that that NFT and that avatar is indeed controlled by me, which you can then again fake as well. So we are entering using it. Also, because of the advances made with AI and machine learning, we are entering a world where digital defects can no longer be distinguished from the reality stuff, real stuff.
If people would copy me, that will be annoying because people will probably say stuff that I would not say on the Internet. But that wouldn't cause any world war three or cause a stock price to crash. Because if you can do it for me, you can do it for Elon Musk, or you can do it for whatever. Then that person can say stuff that that person didn't say. So if we think that deep fakes in today's world are bad, wait till we have digital, hyper realistic deep fakes, which are coming 100%. We have a serious problem here.
So this is all something I pointed that this is also where AI plays a massive role in probably also in combating it again. But this is something people are gullible. If people think that person sounds and looks like a person they know and moves like a person they know, they probably think that it is that person. This already happens with Elon Musk giving away free bitcoin, which obviously is nonsense.
So here, I think two ways. AI plays a massive positive contribution to the metaverse but also a negative contribution, and that's with everything, I guess, with technology. Technology is neutral, and my objective is to help people move to the positive side of technology and not to use the negative side of it.
[00:30:56] RS: Quick aside, is the digital Mark here in the room with us right now?
[00:31:02] MVR: Who knows? Who knows?
[00:31:04] RS: I wouldn't know because the quick solution to the whole fake digital version of someone or a deep fake version would be the blue check, the Instagram verification, the Twitter verification. But as you say, that could also be faked. But then you link it to, what, facial recognition technology. So I do believe there's a countermeasure.
But to your point, right, like Facebook puts a little warning on news stories and say they this is disputed. This might not be accurate. But it doesn't stop people from just like people read a headline, or he will see a photo, and then like that's their reality. So for someone like you or I, who might bother to like go into the block scanner and figure out, “Okay, this is actually Mark. This is owned by Mark. This is his wallet. Like it has to be him.”
[00:31:46] MVR: It's interesting that you say that because up until about a year ago, I was working on a startup, which unfortunately failed. So I have a failed startup under my belt, which I think is good –
[00:31:53] RS: Congrats. Yeah.
[00:31:56] MVR: We were working on trying to fight misinformation with AI and the crowd. One of the reasons it filled is, one, because publishers speak the truth, obviously, and they don't need such a tool, which we all, of course, know that it's not the case. But more importantly, the crowd, John Doe on the street, doesn't care and just shares and clicks and reads whatever he or she wants to share, click, or read. I think that's sort of the problem where there's also a responsibility for you and me that we need to – Unfortunately, we cannot trust – I cannot trust you and your blue eyes anymore on the Internet. I think that is a real big problem. I have a few ideas how we can solve that. But that's from a technical perspective, also very, very difficult.
[00:32:37] RS: That’s partially where AI comes into picture is like deploying some of these solutions to some of the problems you foresee. Is that right?
[00:32:44] MVR: The way I think we can solve this is by enabling what I call anonymous accountability. So that basically means people can be anonymous on the web because I think that's a fundamental right to have your privacy. But people are always accountable for their actions, whether you're anonymously saying something or whether you are not anonymously saying something.
I think that works with blockchain technology [inaudible 00:33:06], as well as self-sovereign IDs. So you have control over that. I think, to me, that would be the solution so that I can – Whenever I interact with you, it can be robbed. It can be your anonymous avatar or whatsoever. But I can see, okay, this person has – I don't know. X profiles has an average reputation of 80%. I don't know this person. I don't know who it is. But I see that this person has a reputation of 80% across 10 profiles, that says something to me. Okay, this person is probably reliable.
Or if I see an anonymous character with a reputation of 20 and 100 profiles, then I probably know this person might not be that reliable. I can still interact with that person because that's up to me. Or if I'm a platform, I can still allow that person to have full rights and full functionalities on the battlefield or not. But at least we start to move to a society where your actions will be held accountable.
Now, the challenge is not only technical here. The challenge is also, of course, society because it would mean that a lot of the big tech would move to a new system. I'm also a realist. I don't see that happening anytime soon, unfortunately.
[00:34:15] RS: Mark, if I'm listening to this, I'm an AI practitioner, machine learning engineer, what have you, I'm working on some of these technologies, what can I do to participate in what's surely going to be a huge explosion of different kinds of career options to work in Web3 in the metaverse?
[00:34:30] MVR: Well, I think the way we should construct AI is really try to do it in an ethical way. Try to train the AI with unbiased data. Try to make AI explainable so that we can understand whenever a decision has been made. So it's not a black box, and these are all very hard technical challenges. I'm fully aware of that. So I think with the role that AI will play in our society, with the role that AI will play in the metaverse, I think it's crucial that we should focus on that.
From a career opportunity, and I think that area is something that is very much necessary and I think also very rewarding, if you can contribute to creating AI that is explainable, that is ethical, that is unbiased, that will be sort of my take, I think.
[00:35:13] RS: Mark, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing with me today.
[00:35:13] MVR: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Rob.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:35:20] RS: How AI Happens is brought to you by Sama. Sama provides accurate data for ambitious AI, specializing in image, video, and sensor data annotation and validation for machine learning algorithms in industries such as transportation, retail, e-commerce, media, medtech, robotics, and agriculture. For more information, head to sama.com.
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