How Blockchain and AI Can Lead an AR Revolution

31:37This is one of those more niche examples that no one thinks about as to how other people can make money. And so towards that end, you guys are using a token as an incentive mechanism. And for people listening, this is a crypto forward crowd people might be familiar with um the helium network which uses um just doing something similar i believe for for bootstrapping a 5g network right where any kind of piece of compute um or router uh could be i could install it i could give you know people access to a 5g um network you guys are doing that for 3d maps of spaces can you break down for us what this economy looks like.

32:21Cause there's, there's multiple players, the tokens move in some unique ways. Um, and there's lots of challenges right now with trying to bootstrap these types of networks, right? There's lots of speculation. People come when they leave. I'm curious how you guys are attacking those problems. So can you just break down the economy of the pose mesh network? I think there's a foundation, right? And then talk about how you're kind of overcoming some of these challenges are inherent to tokens and to something that looks feels like money limit accrues value. So there are a couple of jobs that need to be done by computers and their owners for the post-mesh to function well.

33:03In no particular order, we've already talked about low latency networking and the bet that we are taking with our protocol on using ubiquitous microcomputers, things like smart TVs and routers and computers that are already out in the world that have spare CPU cycles. And more importantly, they have spare bandwidth. They're typically connected to unmetered internet where they don't pay per megabyte, where, you know, you can think of it a little bit of, ask Airbnb for microcomput. This is one thing that we need to do well. but low latency is only one part of it. And the 3D map is another part, right?

33:49And the difference between low latency networking and the 3D map is low latency networking has no requirement of persistence. The data does not have to survive until tomorrow. We're just exchanging messages as fast as we can. But when we're making a 3D map that we want to be able to return to, then that 3D map has to be persistently stored. And not just persistently stored, but it has to be served in real time to people that are trying to connect to that domain, as we call it. We call a domain the digital representation of a physical space. So now we can already see three kinds of jobs that computers can have inside the PostMesh.

34:33One is to be a networking relay. One is to be a domain server, which is the machine that answers participants with information about the domain, like literally serves it over the network in real time when someone asks, is there a wall in front of me? The domain server would answer that question. But we also need replication where the data in the domain server is backed up in other places in case the domain server wants to leave the network or has some fatal error or gets overloaded some way. So clearly three jobs at least that computers can do in the post-mesh. But on top of this, there are also trust and performance issues where the protocol needs to know that no one is lying about the work that is being done there to extort value from the protocol and get paid for work that didn't happen.

35:34So some sort of, you know, I'm reluctant to say proof of work because this is a crowd where proof of work means something, but proof of having done something is also important and proof of contribution, proof of contribution. And so another role within the post-mesh that we are hopefully rolling out this year is something a little bit like a validator, where really what you're doing is you are randomly selected to view interactions between other participants in the post-mesh and provide your third-party account of what happened there so that there's no funny business going on. So now there are at least four different jobs, right?

36:24That, um, that four jobs that the post-match needs computers to do, right? It needs network. How do you educate people? Cause I guess, so sorry to interrupt, but like, I think one of the biggest hurdles here is just to get people to understand the complexity of such an economy and a network and how they can add value. How do you guys approach the challenge of just awareness and marketing this as something that's viable to people? With difficulty. With language, you need AR to better communicate it. We try to build in public. We have a Discord community where we talk openly about how we build and the challenges we face because we have to be honest about the fact that we don't have all the answers.

37:12No one does. And we have to build really quickly anyhow because there's a race against the clock. we believe because we you know we believe ar is fundamentally just unstoppable technology it's coming and that means we have to build it in a decentralized way before it's already been built in a centralized way the way we learned with social media that you know once you've let something out of pandora's box it's very hard to put it back in it's very hard to put it back in so we go to work every day feeling a great time pressure that, you know, we have to build something that's not just an alternative, but it has to be the superior alternative, not just morally, but technically and performance wise.

37:57So to do that, we try to build publicly to find contributors that are passionate and join. Some of our best contributors were found through these community outreach. Our head of developer relations and our creative technologist, Tracy, is a great example of someone that literally found us through our Discord and now is a very key contributor in our project. But also we use language. We talk, we write, we go on podcasts, we write long-form articles and try to shape the conversation about what spatial computing is and what it can be. One of the projects that I feel very passionately about is we work with science fiction writers and ask them to write stories about future with spatial computing, not as a fluff piece for us.

38:57We just say, you know, here's the technology that we think is coming. Can you write a story about the near future, how you think this technology will impact us? And that becomes a learning experience for us as well. Like we get to read these stories and see potential pitfalls of how things are being built and the dangers that it can create. The first story that was written by someone outside of our team was written by Alistair Reynolds, one of my favorite science fiction authors from when I was a kid. He wrote a fantastic short story called End User, which, you know, the first three times I read it, I got goosebumps.

39:40because he had captured something that can very easily happen with augmented reality technology if we're not careful and if it's not built in a decentralized way. And I find myself returning to that piece often to educate myself. Like, why is this important? But to get back to the question, how do we educate people? It's hard. We try to build in public. I think you just said it, right? It's, it's, it's the science fiction narratives. I think science fiction has become no longer just a tool for entertainment and for fantasy and for narrative. It's, it's a tool to educate now because it's not fantasy, it's reality.

40:21The only way we're going to get people to adopt these tools and to do so with, with gusto, not with fear, I think is, is by telling these stories and both the dystopian and the utopian stories are equally as important. right because you won't get people using your platform unless they see the dystopian outcome otherwise that's the problem statement of any good investor pitch deck right to get them to care and then and then you can counter that with a utopian story about here's the alternative and so yeah i'm super bullish on sci-fi as a key part of any go-to-market strategy for any company working in this exponential age so so we got a bit sidetracked from the the token space um to recap there's four different contributions one could make to this network.

41:09We can get rewarded in a token. So that's, we'll call it the supply side of the network. On the demand side, you have developers. Can you talk about how you guys are trying to solve that chicken or egg problem that's inherent to any kind of two-sided marketplace conundrum? So the first thing we did that we were very fortunate to get to do was we created two legal entities. We created one legal entity that is building the protocol and one legal entity that is building applications on top of the protocol. And that allowed us to raise money separately for building the first applications on top of the protocol.

41:51So seven of the 19 million we raised was raised towards building the first experiences on that protocol. And then on top of that, There's, of course, a, you know, the token is launching later this month. And as part of the token ecosystem, there is a sizable treasury and ecosystem reward pool that will be used to incentivize people to come and build on this platform. So short term, arguably the largest rewards you can get for participating is not being on the supply side, but actually being on the demand side. and building things on, on top of the protocol, because we understand, of course, and our backers understand that there is this time window that I talked about.

42:43Like we need to very aggressively get people to adopt this technology rather than, for example, what Niantic is building. Because what Apple's building, I think that's the more important thing to consider here is that in terms of the commercials here, right today, if Apple builds the AR cloud or Google, there's this app store. There's a huge tax you got to pay. They take a ton of revenue and have all the upside. And yeah, sure, you can make money as a business, but relative to the value you're adding, you're not capturing nearly the upside that the company is. But in this case, as a developer, as a creator, I have equity effectively in the place I'm choosing to build on and build with.

43:25So I think that's a huge deal. I think that's very important. And I want to take a few steps back, you know, because when you and I are talking to each other, we're preaching to the choir. We both work in the spatial computing space and we know how much money is being spent by these companies to build these things. But for the sake of Real Vision's audience, I want to just load the context that spatial computing was arguably, at least from Silicon Valley's point of view, the real thing that was happening with hashtag metaverse, right? When people like Mark Zuckerberg or Jensen Huang talk about metaverse, they're not talking about NFTs.

44:13They are talking about spatial computing. And just for scale, I think this is important for the crypto community to remember. in the previous bull run, Meta fired more engineers than there were active contributors to Web3 at the time. Like Web3 is massively outgunned when it comes to the amount of engineers. Meta literally fired more engineers in the last bull run than there were contributing engineers to Web3 at the height of the bull run. It's a hell of a standup. So there is an enormous amount of money going from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Snap, you name it, trying to become leaders in spatial computing.

44:59When Apple announced the Vision Pro, if you listen to what Tim Cook said, he said that just as the Mac introduced us to personal computers and the iPhone introduced us to mobile computers, the Vision Pro will introduce us to spatial computers. It's hard to overstate how seriously you should take that statement. What Apple believes is that after mobile computers is spatial computers. And as a listener, you shouldn't think that, oh, what it means is that we're going from phones to glasses. That's not what's happening. What's happening is we're going from the internet being indexed in databases sorted alphabetically, blah, blah, blah, by being indexed by physical location.

45:45Digital information is moving into physical space, and you're going to start looking through computers more. Your Android or iPhone is already a spatial computer, most of the new phones. Like this iPhone is definitely a spatial computer. It's been a spatial computer for a long time. The big shift that's happening is that the internet is becoming indexed by physical location. And this is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. And one of the perverse incentives here is that if a company like Microsoft or Google or Apple can own the infrastructure that solves the positioning, then that's very much like kind of owning the next part of the internet.

46:29Imagine a world where, you know, Intel owned the internet. That would be a very, very different internet to grow up on. But that's literally what's at stake and why there are so many billions of dollars being spent by these companies on spatial computing. The biggest thing to have happened to computers since the internet is spatial computing. And it's very easy to miss that if you don't know what it is these companies mean when they say spatial computing and what it is they mean when they say metaverse. Because I assure you, Mark Zuckerberg, when he talks about the metaverse being the future, there's no part of him that means that, well, yeah, like in the future, we'll all have profile pictures, blah, blah, blah.

47:14That's not what it is. What it is, is he believes we're going to move over to devices that have a physical understanding of the world, like his VR headsets and the upcoming AR headsets. Andrew Bosworth, Metas CTO just a few days ago, said that Metas AR glasses prototype is the most advanced piece of technology that humanity has produced as a species. Like they are really, really trying to win the spatial computing race. And I think the decentralization movement should pay very close attention because this could be a much more important battleground than even the decentralization of the banking system.

47:55If I can be a bit of a Cassandra here, you know, who knows if in a post-AI world money will even be that meaningful? You know, at the end of the day, the world has functioned with money for some time now. but we have never seen what the world will be like with centralized spatial computing and the the decentralization the decentralization community should pay very close attention to how much money and how much effort how many engineering years are being spent every day on owning this piece of critical infrastructure how much money yeah it's crazy how much money facebook and apple and microsoft are putting into this space and people aren't really talking about They're starting to wake up to it for sure.

48:41Now, I guess my concern here is I think it's safe to say that Apple and the Vision Pro is probably going to be the lead horse in the near future with the most superior tech. If there's a world where the Apple headset, Apple glasses win, it's a very closed ecosystem. Is the PoseMash Foundation and is Alkylabs in trouble in that worlds that happens or are there other ways in which you guys can still thrive you think and of course i assume one argument would be oh there's the android more open and it's going to be the closed approach too but are there ways for apple users to tap into your network if it's if they remain closed there are definitely ways for apple users to tap into the network um you know even iphones can use aws right it's not that close to an ecosystem uh most of the development we do are on Apple devices.

49:35Apple devices are the best spatial computing devices out there already when it comes to handheld. I think that Apple has treated AR very responsibly so far, sometimes so responsibly that it's even a little frustrating because a lot of people would love to have access to the camera feed for a bunch of cool features. But Apple has been very, very protective about their users' data, which I think is great. And if I can wear my tinfoil hat just for a little bit, the two years prior to the Vision Pro being released, a really, really big deal for Apple's marketing was privacy. iPhone, that's privacy, or privacy, that's iPhone, whatever that campaign was.

50:26and i remember thinking as soon as i saw that the headset's coming the headset's coming because it's it's about preparing people because now we're scanning the room yeah now we're scanning the room yeah um yeah yeah i i think at the risk of sounding like an apple fanboy i think it's probably good for the world uh if apple comes out the lead uh in ar because i think it will will shape the privacy narrative quite a bit. I don't think that Apple is in a position to win the entire computing industry in the spatial computing era in the immediate short term. But I'm convinced that Apple believes that those are what the stakes are, that if you do this really, really well, you know, Apple went from being obscure to being one of the most valuable companies in the world.

51:23a big part of that was how they saw the transition from the personal computer to the laptop to the mobile computer and how well they ushered humanity through that transition and i'm sure they believe that as we go into the spatial computing era they can increase the size of the pie a lot and their share of the pie by even more i am more worried about actors like niantic Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Apple, Apple's a master of marketing. They're master of telling, telling stories that make their products cool. And one of the most noticeable things about the Apple was in pro announcement is they didn't use the word metaverse once.

52:08In fact, I think they avoid it like the plague. They might even ban the word metaverse internally. Why is that word you think so polarizing and how do you navigate it? I I'm starting to become more like Apple and trying to use the word less, but how do you think we rectify it? Because if the word's out of the bag, it's useful in some contexts for marketing. Meta still uses it. How do you see that word evolving over time? And what's your approach to talking about that word with people who are polarized by it? The metaverse means different things to different people, which is something we haven't been honest about or even necessarily aware of.

52:51You know, we have backers both that have come at this from a spatial computing perspective and people that have come from a decentralization and blockchain perspective. And when they talk to us about metaverse, they talk about completely different things, which is kind of how I got savvy to the fact that, oh, hold on, there's a disconnect between what crypto means when they talk about metaverse and what Mark Zuckerberg talks about when he talks about metaverse. And it was clear, you know, that Twitter didn't necessarily understand that when, or crypto Twitter didn't understand that. Oh, you know, does Meta think that they can compete in the crypto?

53:31No, they don't. You think they're trying to do that. What they're trying to do is they're trying to compete with Apple and Google and Snap when it comes to spatial computing. We're having completely different conversations. And I think part of why the word has gotten so infectious was because it was so poorly defined. People that agree on what the metaverse are don't have bad exchanges about the metaverse. People that don't agree about what the metaverse is, they have bad exchanges about what the metaverse is. I think the metaverse as a word, as a meme, is still waiting for a dominant narrative to really define what the word is.

54:11And I think it's more likely that the metaverse will be rehabilitated by Web 2 than by Web 3. Just because of how much bigger Web 2 is and how much more money is going into this. As I said, there are more engineers working at any of the companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft, than in the entirety of blockchain engineering. So if they decide to really talk about the metaverse, that's what will shape the conversation. And we already saw that when meta renamed because the mainstream media started talking about VR headsets and not digital ownership. The people that talked about digital ownership was the decentralization community, the blockchain community, but you're not going to read about that in the mainstream media.

55:07The mainstream media is going to talk about how we're going to be living in the metaverse and we're going to be wearing VR headsets.

55:15maybe you know if if i was a pr consultant for the decentralization movement i think i would tell the decentralization movement to pick another word than metaverse because i think we lost that word already when it comes to describe things like digital ownership and equitable participation all of these things are very important there's a conversation we need to have and we need to not confuse people uh into them thinking we're talking about vr headsets when we're talking about decentralized infrastructure, equitable participation, and digital ownership. We probably need a better word for that. Yeah, there's so much nuance to Metaverse and its evolution.

55:53The way I've started to try to just encapsulate the whole thing is by trying to compress it into a sense that people can't agree with, or sorry, they can't disagree with, which is, it's just the internet, but it's more empowering and more experiential. and the more empowering part has to do with your data, where it lives, how it moves and what you can do with it and how you can benefit from it. Experiential is the spatial computing part. It's the immersion. It's the fidelity. It's how you feel from an experience you're getting and how you're able to communicate with someone, which of course creates feelings all around for all involved, hence the collaboration piece.

56:32And at the end of the day, that's all we're trying to do, right is just live life and feel and feel good and so that's what keeps me hopeful about this this future and why it's so important uh to end on a bit of a philosophical note when you're when you're out at a bar talking to people and you tell them what you do and they they grimace about that future right they go oh it sounds so black mirrorish and you're like yes i'm trying to solve black mirror but for them still just the idea of ar glasses and digital information and it all sounds like Black Mirror. How do you flip that narrative and get them to think differently and be aware of all the good that could come from this?

57:10What's kind of your main talk track in like an elevator pitch or even shorter? Bring it back to language. If we can invoke the great Terrence McKenna again, he said that a civilization can only evolve at the speed that its languages allows and can only be as glued together as the bandwidth of his languages will allow. What follows from that is that one of the most radical things that you can do as a technologist and perhaps even as an effective accelerationist is to build the actual language stack. Build the actual language stack. What spatial computing and augmented reality will do is empower us to have more and better language, language, to communicate more clearly with each other, to better manifest our imagination and knowledge in the minds of others, to help other people see what we mean and to see what other people mean so that we can collaborate more effectively, we can love each other better, we can be a better species.

58:18I think everyone knows deep down that language is our friend and not our enemy. And we might lose track of that if we think of AR and blockchain intersecting with Pokemon Go clones with NFTs rather than thinking about, no, 10 years from now, how we communicate with AR is going to be as impactful to human communication as chat rooms and emojis and video calls have been. we're about to enter a new age of human communication and the things that we will be able to accomplish as a species when we understand each other better it's hard to even imagine from where we're standing now yeah and one more layer on top of that it's not just language for better communication amongst our soundals but better communication with ai right because now computers are becoming language oriented machines and so how do we stay in the loop, right?

59:19How do we, I mean, they're going to become amazing, amazing companions to us. How do we remain companions back to them? How do we understand the insights that are gleaming? It's not going to be just text in a text box. It's going to be visual representation of what the AI is learning about the, the forests, about the deep unexplored oceans, about space, about the nature of consciousness, even one day. Right. And so where that all spirals, where where language takes us is amazing and yeah it's hard to argue that like if you want to try to solve the most upstream problem like that if you want to solve problems and go the first upstream possible to solve them it's probably better communication right which leads to better empathy better understanding and less conflict in the world so if you would allow me to be a little bit cyberdelic, I would say that over the last few decades, humanity has been invited into the world of computers, and we've gone into digital worlds.

1:00:21The great inversion that is happening now is that the digital beings are being invited into the physical world. Spatial computing represents our desire to invite the digital things that we have made into our physical world, summoning the demon, if you will, or summoning angels, depending on how you see this. We're bringing digital things into our world for the first time, and that's going to be incredibly radical. And I think there are very few things that you can work on as a technologist that is more meaningful than spatial computing because spatial computing is ultimately the eyes and ears and the proprioception, the physical understanding of the world of AI.

1:01:12When you're building spatial computing, you are building the sensory apparatus of our future AI companions. And that's a really meaningful thing to do. The sensory apparatus of our AI companions. That's a good way to end, I think cheers to that Nils here, water cheers. Maybe we can do a beer cheers, uh, sometime in the near future. Um, before we wrap here, how can people stay in touch with you, with Alki labs, follow y 'all's progress, anything we can point them to. Uh, you can find us on Alki labs.com. You can follow the development of the post mesh on post mesh.org. And, uh, you can come hang out on our discord discord.gg slash Alki verse.

1:01:55I am Brood Sugar B-R-O-O-D-S-U-G-A-R on Twitter and my DMs are open if you want to build something cool I'm around Brood Sugar we'll have to save my questions about that one for the next interview perhaps but amazing well Nils thanks for coming on Education Month and Tech Week here with Real Vision and hopefully we can chat about it about your progress sometime in the near future and do this again thank you so much for having me

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