The Metaverse Needs a Reckoning ft. Evan Helda

27:49You know, I was in, for the Exponentialist every month, Raoul and I do a fireside chat. We get together and we sort of share what we've been thinking about this month. And this is what we were saying, you know, the wave of change coming around large language models next year will dwarf even what we've seen this year. It feels insane that it's roughly 12 months since ChatGPT was dropped on everyone. It feels like a lifetime ago. Look at what we've seen across the last 12 months. But I think - How long ago was it? Was it a year? Was it a year and a half? Yeah, ChatGPT was like November 2022. So it's like 13, it's like 12 and a half months.

28:27It feels like five years because so much has happened since then um that's insane yeah it's like that backwards looking is like the first time where you're it's like being on an airplane you look down and you can see the separation between the runway and the plane we haven't really see that separation so clearly but now it's like oh my gosh we're taking off yeah exactly there's a delta there and i i think yeah for most people you know large language models and chat gpt is like you say, still this kind of fairly raw kind of text box, and they don't really know what to do with it. And it just it feels pretty, it feels a little difficult for most people to really, it's not deeply intuitive.

29:13But next year, we're going to see it wrapped in all kinds of applications and all kinds of other manifestations. And if you spend as much time on Twitter as I do, and I know many people do, or what we're supposed to call X now, you'll have seen those insane clips of the virtual companion girlfriend going around this week. It's getting, like you said, really, really weird. That's what people need to be prepared for in 24. We're going to have this conversation about spatial computing. We're going to have generative AI and conversational AI just going to a whole other place. And then, as you said, we're going to have edge AI and surely Apple are going to do something with that super soon.

29:58They have this powerful AI inferencing capability on their devices through the chips. They're going to put a large language model in those devices that you can use, no internet required, and just have this sane 24-7 virtual companion talking to you all the time, counseling you all the time. All of that is going to make the exponential age tangibly real in a way it's not for so many people now. Do you think Meta, by the way, do you think Meta's sort of AI companions are going to play a big role there? You know, like Zuck launched, you know, the celebrity fueled AI companions at Meta Connect. I'm not so sure that that's the right play.

30:44I mean, it's going to be interesting watching that unfold. Yeah, I'm not so sold on the companions and their current form factor, but I am very sold on the glasses they're building with AI built into it to kind of give you agency in all moments in time, right? Because it's like, it's giving the AI eyes and ears. and that's also going to be a thing that most people are going to be for the first time exposed to starting right now and all throughout next year and yeah again there's no visual there's no visual thing there right it's just um it but it is augmented reality though or you could even argue it's virtual reality it's it's intelligence and language that is augmenting your reality in a sense.

31:35And so I think that's one of the big themes and trends is that augmented reality and virtual reality starts to evolve away from a purely visual immersive thing. And it's just anytime your experience is augmented or enhanced in a digital way is going to be augmented or virtual reality. And that is the metaverse in its most simple essence, for sure. Right, right. And I should say, if you have visionaries out there, viewers out there, If you have questions for Evan, indeed questions for me, please do throw them in the chat. We'll try and come to some questions at the end if there are any, of course.

32:12So, yeah, let's move this on a bit because we've talked about the metaverse and your broad, comprehensive vision of it as a more human internet. And the way spatial plays into that, the way the edge plays into that. It really feels like AI is fundamental, and it can act as something of a bridge to where we want to go next in the conversation. because your vision of a more human internet and a more immersive internet in every sense, not just spatial computing, but an internet that's more human and even part of the world around us, taps into and really is an analog of some of the deep thinking and research I've done this year about the exponential age and how we characterize it.

33:06A really powerful way to characterize it is as the deep merging of information and physical reality, the merging of the realm of bits and the realm of atoms, so that information becomes a part of the world around us. You're going to see that through spatial computing. You're going to see that through AI and in other ways. One of the most powerful ways you're going to see it is the emergence of essentially autonomous, intelligent objects that are fueled by AI. And because they have intelligence, they're able to navigate the world around us, do useful work, just be a part of the world around us in an entirely new way.

33:51That's the internet and the realm of bits, be it moving into physical reality. and one of the key ways we're going to see that that we're all excited about and that you've written about a lot towards the end of this year is humanoid robots and it feels as though we are at the beginning of a takeoff moment for that technology talk to us about humanoid robots why you wanted to write about them at the end of this year and where you think it's all going yeah absolutely well i think the main reason i was drawn to it is i do think it's the ultimate marriage of spatial computing and ai it's the same tech stack the same computer vision technology

34:39similar ways to understand and navigate the world mapping of the world visual positioning systems so all the same stuff that you're seeing the apple vision pro headset become really good at And I think what's exciting about it is that it's, you know, after the internet, if you look at the business opportunity and the TAM, the total addressable market for this, it's one of the largest business opportunities that currently exists. It's going after the physical labor market, right? Which is a$45 trillion market. and within that market, there are some pretty major challenges and pretty big. There's huge gaps in people who are willing to do that work, right?

35:24There's a labor shortage and that's manifesting in all kinds of industries, be it manufacturing, construction, agriculture, even elderly care and healthcare. care. And so I think those are some of the biggest problems to go solve. I think humanoids might be one of the best ways to go do it. I think the macro and kind of meta theme to all of it is that we are at a bit of a crisis point when it comes to the extent to which we need GDP to grow really, really fast in order to address the debt to GDP conundrum that we're in and the amount of debt we have. And then how like, oh, there's so many things that come from that, right?

36:11We're trying to basically inflate away our debt. That's our best solution to the problem. That leads to all the things you go down the rabbit hole and it leads you to Bitcoin and whatnot. But the only other way to fix that problem is just to boost productivity dramatically. And I don't know what creates exponential leaps in GDP beyond something that can kind of have the economic impact of humanity itself, which is sort of a kind of a very philosophical way to put it. But I heard someone say that recently, like, think about the economic impact of humanity and what the human mind and human hands are able to go do even like 100, 200, 500 years ago.

36:50And then think about what that could be now when you have hundreds of millions, if not billions of humanoids running around and that, um, at least all kinds of other philosophical questions, like what, what I think Raul Paul talked about, which is do humanoids become a demographic in their own in themselves? I think potentially, but I just think the, the economic implications are so huge. Philosophical implications are fascinating. And I think there's probably a way where we could build these things to actually help us tremendously. Yeah. And I just, I think, you know, one of the core things people need to understand here, and you touched on it, is the way that this technology is going to be so powerfully supported by structural demographic megatrends that we just can't argue with.

37:39Across the global north, you have deeply aging populations, falling working age populations, and barring some kind of, I want to say miracle, but it would have to actually be some kind of Armageddon, that's not going to change. That kind of population growth is not coming back. And if GDP is essentially population growth plus productivity plus debt or whatever, what can we move? In the end, if the population growth is not coming back, we can only move the productivity, and we can only do that by technology. And that fundamental thought is the birth of the exponential age thesis. Why are these technologies so profoundly important for our future?

38:26Why should everyone on Real Vision give a shit? Because it would appear this is the only way out. The only needle we can move is on productivity if we want to keep growing GDP. And humanoid robots are going to play such an important part of that. Now, look, we all saw, or many of us will saw, if you didn't see it, go and check it out. The clips of the Generation 2 Optimus that were shared on X, like very impressive, handling an egg, very dexterously, doing its little walk and everything. I mean, impressive stuff, but there's a lot of yoga. It can do yoga. Yeah, it can do a bit of yoga. But I will put that online, for example, and some people will say to me, um, like, yeah, this is all just entertainment.

39:15You know, why do we need, why do we need robots that look like humans? Um, what's the, what, what in your view is the answer to that? Like why humanoid robots important? Yeah, there's a couple arguments there. I think the biggest and best one is that, you know, we already have a built world that was designed for humans. And it's sort of like this natural existing API to interact with that world. We had door handles we built, the walkways, the stairs, the tools we wield. These are all things built for human hands and human form. And so if we can just get it right once, we can then cast a much wider net across so many different environments and use cases.

40:02And the overall incentive from a business standpoint is just massive there, right? You don't have to go build a bunch of little point solutions and then hope one sticks. You can just bet all in on one and then find a few use cases that it's going to work for. I also like to think about just like our home, right? I don't want to have 20 robots zipping around my house for 20 different use cases, right? I love to just have one robot that can go into my closet and come back out and do all these different things. Be it fold my laundry, take out the dishes, take out the trash, walk the dog, you know, so on and so forth.

40:39Yeah. And then I think there's also, it's just natural for humans to want to extend themselves in some kind of way. And I think one of the more subconscious reasons that people are striving for this is that we are still such a mystery and how we operate and how our brains work. And a lot of people have to talk about humanoids as, probably our best shot at creating AGI, right? Artificial general intelligence. And text can only get us so far. I'm seeing some articles come out now that like we're going to run out of text data in the next like three to five years. And intelligence comes from interaction and with the chaos of the real world, the complexity of the built world, the uncertainty of the real world.

41:29And so you need that real world data um that behavioral data i think to create agi and then the extension of that becomes okay we can create intelligence understand the mind a bit more to me i think for a lot of people one of the biggest mysteries is still consciousness and so the thing that i'm the most excited about humanoids existing is like is this a way for us to better understand ourselves better understand the mind gives a peek into what consciousness finally is and i know it's getting kind of hand-waving philosophical but i don't know what better path there is understanding consciousness than to try to recreate it um right so i think yeah yeah i think sort of embodying embodying machine intelligence is feels as though it's it has to be a crucial part of building a more powerful intelligence building what some people might yeah what we would probably want to call it a superintelligence or some form of AGI, like a totally disembodied machine intelligence of the kind we have at the moment.

42:32It's hard to feel that that's a general intelligence. It has no sense of the physical world around it. I've gone pretty deep down humanoid robots in 2023. Obviously, we all know about Optimus and Tesla and the position they're building, And we can talk about that in a minute. I think agility robotics have achieved a real coup getting their digit humanoid robot on trial inside Amazon fulfillment centers in the US. I mean, we're going to see how that trial plays out. But as you very well know, because you work at AWS, one of the world's largest employers, 1.2 million people inside fulfillment centers, that's a lot of human labor potentially about to be displaced.

43:26but you like give us a sense of the key players from your perspective because you actually went pretty deep on a startup that isn't on that many people's radar when it comes to humanoids. Yeah that was a Beyond Imagination and they have a humanoid called the BOMNI robot and And I latched onto them because of their really practical approach to trying to get humanoids to be useful today. And also the fact that they're using spatial computing or AR and VR to bring that utility. And that's also, I think, one of the reasons why this human form factor makes a lot of sense is because it's going to be a while before these things can be fully autonomous.

44:11There's also going to be tons of use cases where you want to control it yourself. And so Beyond Imagination is using VR to let users remote in and control the robot like an avatar, right? So you can now be a worker in one of these Amazon fulfillment centers or in a big factory or on an oil rig. Now you don't have to put yourself in harm's way. You can stay at home and you can throw on a headset and you can play a virtual game of sorts and actually do real world work. and get paid very handsomely for it. And then eventually you can do that and control fleets of robots. Now you have these people who have a unique skillset and a unique understanding of these physical places, probably not getting paid that well for it for their one-off one-to-one work.

45:03But now they're controlling fleets of robots and having a much more outsized impact. They can command more pay, enjoy their jobs, be home with their families. And so that idea of using humanoids as avatars to me is just fascinating, especially when it comes to things that are going to be super complex, like running into a burning building. Someone's life's on the line. I don't really want to depend on the AI to make the perfect decision, but if I can have a human at home controlling it running through the burning building, that's pretty compelling. Or how about traveling through space, right? landing on an asteroid, walking around the moon, walking around Mars, controlling it through VR.

45:46That's a pretty awesome one. So that's beyond imagination. I can go to the other ones too, if you want me to summarize what everyone's doing. I do find that fascinating in that there's a couple of other startups taking that approach where essentially, yeah, you build a humanoid that's a kind of puppet for a human user. And perhaps they're using a headset, perhaps they're using a screen to pilot that humanoid around. And you can see, and this is where we can get into, you know, Tesla a bit, you can see two competing approaches to the ultimate challenge, which is how can you train a machine vision model so that these things can walk around in the end completely autonomously.

46:28You can make a whole ton of them and have them piloted by humans. And that becomes training data that in the end allows you to train a model to let these things do it autonomously, or you can get your training data from somewhere else and train a model and do it that way. And obviously, what Tesla are doing is the second one. And the training data is coming from hundreds of thousands, like millions of on-road Teslas and full self-drive beta, which has had its problems and all the rest of it. Now, the borderline consensus view is that long-term, it's hard to see how anyone beats Optimus because Tesla has an unbeatable training data set, building an unbeatable machine vision model, all fueled by Dojo, which is like an insane supercomputer for machine vision.

47:18And so in the end, Optimus is going to be like the one bot that rules all the bots, the humanoids. What's your take on that? Are you convinced? I'm convinced they're going to win the manufacturing market for sure. I mean, Tesla has this incredible internal flywheel where they are their own first customer. And they're going to absolutely figure out all the nuances of making that robot work well in these sort of assembly line factory type settings. So it's hard to compete there. And what's really incredible about that flywheel is that you're going to have them using these robots. creating massive efficiencies, lowering the cost, taking that cost savings, pumping it back into the R &D effort of the robot, advancing it further, getting further efficiencies and cost savings as that flywheel goes.

48:15And yeah, I mean, I view Tesla as a spatial computing company because of the amounts of visual and vision, overall computer vision data that they are gathering. But if you think about it, I mean, they're gathering data from cars. about the world and from factories, but it's not capturing much of that long tail of use cases. Like I want my robot to make me sushi. I don't like Tesla doesn't have a monopoly on that experiential data. And so as we move from a world of large language models to large behavior models, LBMs, which is basically going from like next word prediction to next action prediction.

48:59there's gonna be some pretty cool ways to train those and and that's one of the things about beyond imagination that i was compelled by is it wasn't just this convergence of spatial computing and ai with the vr headset plus the robot there's also this convergence of decentralized networks and marketplaces with ai and there's a bit of a blockchain component there and you know they're not investing heavily in this yet but i've been talking to this founders and they they do see this as where they want to go. And the only way you compete with Tesla is tap into the hive mind of people in the world, right?

49:33You tap into, you crowdsource, crowdsource that data. And so what's interesting about these people who I talked about before who can be remoting in to an avatar, to a humanoid via a VR headset, they could actually be contributing, like you said before, training data to a model. And the marketplace vision that Beyond Imagination has is that you have a two-sided marketplace where you have people that want to create a behavior, they want to create an app, they want to create a service, and they need tons of help to do that. So they can post a job, just like on Upwork, post a job. I'm a sushi expert.

50:11I come in, I put on my VR headset, I'm making sushi, I'm making all these different types of sushi, I'm uploading that data. and now how do I track that data contribution? How do I get paid for it? Well, this is where things like NFTs and blockchain come into place. People think NFTs are profile pictures. It's just a data wrapper to point to ownership. And so I could wrap that around any kind of data set to track it in any kind of way I want to. And then if I can easily pay people for micro contributions with cryptocurrency for the data they're contributing to a large behavior model, that's a pretty fascinating way for people to make money.

50:52That is an incredible vision. Yeah. And imagine, I mean, like if you, you know, imagine what we'll see around sort of decentralized versions of that. I mean, there's no reason why millions of strangers can't kind of aggregate inside a DAO, inside a decentralized organization. It just say like, let's gather like a hundred thousand or a million kind of fulfillment center workers or delivery drivers or sushi makers or whatever. And let's all kind of wear smart glasses. And I just had lunch with a friend from Meta and he's like wearing his Meta smart glasses and everything. Let's all wear smart glasses.

51:28Let's collect this footage of us doing the job, aggregate it all, train like our own model and sort of license model, a large behavior model for this very domain specific task. Very interesting. And perhaps that's how we'll see people trying to compete with what would appear to be the emerging dominance of Tesla and Optimus in this space. Yeah, I think that example also makes a lot of sense in a world where jobs are being lost. And people talk a lot about UBI, universal basic income. And I don't know if UBI is the solution, but I think no doubt you need to create all new ways, all kinds of nuanced long tail ways for people to make money.

52:29And people complain about crypto and blockchain. It's the financialization of everything. It's like, yeah, that's exactly what it is. That's exactly what we need to happen. And we need to be able to financialize and be able to get paid for and track and monetize our data, our culture, things in our culture. I've heard Raul talk about this idea of unlocking intangible value, right? And so unless we have all these different ways to do micropayments, to track contribution, to create more marketplaces, create more incentive mechanisms to bootstrap these markets, It's all things that crypto is very good at.

53:09We're not going to have ways for people to make money and fill that gap when they stop doing the other more manual physical jobs that these humanoids are going to all take away. Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, wrapping crypto into this conversation is so valuable and people need to understand that the nature of value and the nature of human labor is being so profoundly reshaped. and crypto is a way that we reinvent those things to empower people anew. And if we don't manage that reinvention, it could get pretty dark. Because let's finish on humanoids just really briefly, because the hour, crazily, the hour is almost up.

53:53The social implications of this are vast. And in terms of it biting in 24, I can see in 24, Amazon. Amazon is going to say something about what happens next with the digit humanoid robot. And what they say next may have implications for hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs. And then you might see Walmart moving. You might see other big logistics players moving when it comes to humanoids. And very quickly, the social implications of it and the economic implications for ordinary people start to feel very real, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And some people don't like this idea, but yeah, there is going to be a growing pain period.

54:42There's going to be a three to five year, maybe it's a 10 year window. Things are going to probably break and there's going to be upheaval. And that is something we just have to prepare for and embrace because it's always happened. this will be at a bigger scale but to me the the source of the problem is people that don't have the skills you're gonna have people who get who get displaced right and then they're going to be unemployed and lacking the skills to go do certain things but just like ai taketh away it giveth right ai is the great equalizer and spatial computing is the great educator you combine those two things, people can level up and skill up.

55:24It's so much faster. Right. And I think to me, that's probably the biggest thing that has to happen is that our education system needs to wake up to that and realize that, oh, wow, we have these new tools, new forms of education, and new meaning of who the student is and how to access that student. It's not, the student isn't going to be, you know, just K through 12 and it's not going to be college anymore. The student's going to include this whole group of displaced workers. You're going to see a whole system of education prop up to support them because there's a business opportunity there. And there's a huge altruistic impact and a huge economic impact.

56:00Get those people smart on what it means to, you know, work with the intangible value world, right? Things like music, culture, entertainment, and how you can make money there in these game worlds, how you can actually contribute training data and use crypto in these new different ways. And all those things lead to income streams that look and feel like UBI, right? It's like micropayments coming in for certain contributions and certain things. It's not having a job. It's doing work, right? And I think that's one of the biggest things we have to shift. It's moving from a world of jobs and employment to a world of like microwork across all different types of domains and interesting ways to spin up an AI to tap into it and get you paid for it.

56:44So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a great place to end and I totally agree. You know, the wave of change that's coming and we've talked across spatial computing, across AI, across real world AI and humanoid robots. The wave of change that's coming is just so deep. It's going to be something to behold. There's going to be huge economic and social disruption and so many roads lead back to, I think, two places. Our education system and the way we prepare people to live inside this new world we're building and our institutions. We need to remodel our institutions of government and probably our corporations to accommodate an entirely different set of socioeconomic circumstances.

57:32And so much of it does point towards the remodeling of value. And people need to get their head around the idea essentially that we're going to need to pay people for entirely different sorts of things because the old many of the old jobs are just going to are just going to go and that's a it it's going to be very painful but there's a huge opportunity latent in it okay look i have one question i'm going to put to you from the audience uh super quickly because we're essentially out of time uh marty f asks and this taps into the kind of way this all feels somewhat science fiction. So it's a nice one to go into Christmas on.

58:11Historically, Hollywood has driven the innovations in technology from what they show on screen. Do you see this same trend for the metaverse and AI, or is the innovation coming from another source? Essentially, is this all being driven by our science fiction writers and the media, or is it the technology that drives the science fiction? It's a bit of a chicken. It's the eternal chicken and egg question, right? And I've thought I've actually written about this before. Yeah, it's a really fascinating. It's a great question. Maybe I'm a bit biased as someone who's writing. And it's funny that that was asked because the whole purpose of my newsletter and podcast is exactly this, which is our progress is determined by the stories we tell and the imagination we can harness.

59:00and Hollywood's done a great job at showing, you know, certain forms of augmented reality or what AI could possibly do. But then the world that those things are happening in is a kind of usually a pretty depressing one, right? The stories they tell are, you know, of Black Mirror and The Terminator and, you know, fear, fear sells and drama, drama sells. But I really think we need to do a much better job of telling stories that depict what's possible when we do harness all the upside of these tools, but we succeed in keeping those risks in scope and navigating them appropriately. And so we need more stories of optimism and hope and of these utopias.

59:43No one tells stories about utopias because they're probably boring. And so I'm thinking a lot about like, what are some cool short stories, sci-fi things we could be creating that do have the drama, right? Maybe it's inter-human relationship drama, but it's amidst a world that is just full of abundance and opportunity. And so simple answer is I do think sci-fi and storytelling is going to be the tale that whacks a dog. Yes. And I think that, you know, compelling, fascinating utopias and utopian visions are what we need right now. You know, there's something fascinating and there's something compelling naturally about dystopian visions, but we need some more of the brighter visions too.

1:00:26We need some bigger, more compelling answers to what do we want? What are we supposed to be moving towards? And medium energy has that vibe and that is one of the many reasons I love it. So look, to wrap up, remind people where they can find you online and where they can find medium energy. Yeah. Thank you. Um, it's a newsletter on Substack. It's just mediumenergy.io. Uh, the podcast is called medium energy and, uh, yeah, it's all about technology being human and how to find the balance between the two. I'm also on Instagram at, at Evan Helda. So follow me there. And, uh, yeah, a lot of great interviews to come, maybe even you on the podcast or vice versa.

1:01:07and yeah, I'm excited about the next year. It's going to be an exciting one. And the key theme, the final thing to say is that the main thing to watch out for is these intersections of AI, of spatial, of blockchain. They're all part of the same tech stack and they're converging in a really, really powerful, exciting way to transform the world, really. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us once again, Evan, and it certainly won't be the last time. We'd love to have you back next year. I'm really excited to see the journey with Medium energy. And look, visionaries out there, thank you so much for taking the exponential age journey with us in 2023.

1:01:45I will be back next year with lots more postcards from the exponential age, lots more brilliant guests like Evan, including Evan too. We'll get him back for sure. If you want to go even deeper on this stuff, check out Raoul and I's research service, The Exponentialist. You can find that at realvision.com slash the future, where we're going really deep on these exponential age themes month after month. But yeah, for now, wishing you all out there a great holiday season, a great break. Next year, it all starts to feel real. It all starts to feel tangible in a way it hasn't yet. There is a thrilling, fascinating, somewhat terrifying year ahead.

1:02:32And we're going to be watching it closely. We hope you enjoyed this episode. At Real Vision, we arm you with the expert knowledge, time-efficient tools, and a powerful network to help you succeed on your financial journey. Get a taste of financial freedom with our free offer at realvision.com forward slash free.

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