#E55 Navigating an Unpredictable Future With Neil Redding
About Neil Redding
Neil Redding is a near-futurist who analyzes how emerging technologies intersect and transform industries. Drawing from over three decades of experience, he guides businesses through digital evolution, helping them anticipate and adapt to technological shifts that shape our future.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript
Briar: Welcome to Hyperscale Neil. It's fantastic to have you in person in our New York studio.
Neil: Yeah, it's amazing. I'm very excited to be here.
Briar: So tell us about your background. It was quite fascinating when I was doing some Googling on you.
Neil: Yeah. So I'm a little fascinated myself actually. My career has lasted over 30 years now. So I've been doing this work for quite a long time, and I studied computer science and philosophy in college, and I really, in retrospect, see that kind of synergy or that those complimentary-ness as the origin of a whole 30 years worth of exploring how disparate things come together, things that people don't expect to be connected, are actually related in interesting ways. When I decided to study both computer science and philosophy and I actually got to college on this music scholarship, I had a lot of raised eyebrows and questions like, how do these things go together, humanities and science and music? But I just found that there was so much intrigue and insight to like comparing things to each other across disciplines and seeing how they relate.
Neil: And so I got out of school and immediately started doing software engineering. I was hanging out with super intelligent people and making more money than I really knew what to do with and having a great time. And so I did that for quite a long time. Particularly in the nineties I was really focused on human computer interaction and creating graphical user interfaces and then eventually developing for the web and including doing early VR for the web VRML. If you've studied the history of Metaverse work, you might be aware of that. The attempt was to bring 3D to the web and it was actually very, very early. I mean, in retrospect, it feels like it maybe was 30 years too early, but we had a lot of money and enthusiasm around it after we all read Snow Crash.
Neil: And continuing to build on that. I mean, I did software engineering for quite a while until about 12 years ago I decided I didn't want to code all the time anymore, and I was more interested in kind of the creative side of things and I was kind of scratching my head wondering how can I continue to make good money and be close to the technology, but not code all the time? So I saw this opportunity to do creative tech and tech strategy in the agency world in New York where I was at the time. And so that allowed me to actually start to bring in more of my love of language and even poetry and narrative into the technology work I was doing. So that really set the stage for this past decade where I've done more and more work at this intersection of digital and physical, including at a big agency called Gensler, Design Firm, Architecture firm that does a lot of work for retail and hotels and hospitality and other sort of physical venues. And I know we'll get into this, but the part of this digital physical convergence that actually is most exciting to me is digital things showing up in the physical world, like being part of our three dimensional experience and sharing space with us as physical beings. And so really the past five years or so I've been doing a lot more work in that space, which we can talk about.
Briar: Fascinating. I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into this because I think it's interesting to see where the next generation is going as well. I just launched my Roblox fashion collection today. We've got this futuristic shopping mall. And when I'm spending time on these platforms, perhaps one might call them the early prototypes of the Metaverse, I kind of see why they enjoy it so much. We have to remember that buying NFTs or socializing on these platforms, it's just normal for the next generations. And I think it's very easy to say the Metaverse is dead and many publications have been saying this, but what's your thoughts about this topic? Is the Metaverse or Web3, is it dead?
Neil: It's absolutely not dead. I mean, I think all of us who spend time even reflecting at all on how social media works, I mean, it's all click and engagement driven. So I mean, saying something is everything, it's taking over the world, it's going to transform everything or something is dead. I mean, these are the best ways to generate engagement and clicks. It's just be really hyperbolic about things. So they're either everything or nothing and the truth is almost always somewhere in between. So I think that just like technologies like IOT or many other types of technologies that have become, these media darlings and then left the public conversation. Metaverse as a term, spatial computing as a term, AR and VR. I mean, these are technologies that continue to evolve as well as massive multiplayer, immersive gaming environments like you're talking about with Roblox and others. I mean, these are continuing to grow separate from all of the media conversation and hype or dismissal, I think. So, yes, I think kind of the younger generations are, I mean, I have a Gen Z daughter who has spent a lot of time in different contexts. Not so much Roblox, but definitely uses digital technology in ways that are quite different from how I use it.
Briar: In what ways does she use it?
Neil: Well, I mean, the things that really got my attention maybe 10 years ago or so was just how, I mean, early on, not really metaverse related, but how she was so much more comfortable texting and would never have a phone conversation, even with her friends. There will be some misunderstanding about something and I'd be like, well, have a voice conversation, like, actually call them up. She's like, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. So just as one example, and then she was really, really into Snapchat, which I didn't really get because she went to school in London. She's like, everyone uses Snapchat and no one uses Facebook or Instagram. I'm like, this is interesting. So, I mean, there are just different ways of engaging with each other on social media.
Neil: And I think to your point earlier, I mean, there's certainly kids that have grown up in these immersive gaming environments and particularly Roblox. I mean, the thing that really excited me about Roblox a few years ago when I started to hear young people saying, especially during the pandemic, I'm going to go hang out with my friends. And what they were referring to was Roblox. And it shifted, I think from being a place to play games or just a gaming environment, to a place to hang out with your friends. And to me that really caused me to pay more attention because a place to be is kind of code for the metaverse to my mind. It's what Neil Stevenson envisioned, I think, with Snow Crash. And it's what those of us have been enthusiastic about it for a long time have always envisioned like a place that you can be and do all the things eventually that we do in our lives, in this immersive context.
Briar: You call yourself a near futurist. What do you mean by this?
Neil: So, I distinguished myself from, I'll just say proper futurists because a number of years ago, because I work in emerging technology, and I've always been passionate about it my whole career, whether it's VR or AR or voice interaction or chatbots or AI or sensors in physical spaces, I'm always really interested in what's emerging. And people started to call me a futurist a number of years ago, and I said, it's not quite right because I know that there are proper futurists whose job is trends and prediction and foresight and calculating probabilistic futures and things like this. And it's not that. So I thought what I'm really focused on is the near future, which is partly about timeframe. Pre-pandemic, I talked about the near future being the next three to five years or so. I think it's much closer in now because we've realized that things can change so suddenly and things are changing actually much more rapidly now. What I say these days is the future is coming at us so fast now that traditional foresight and futurism are no longer enough. And near futurism, as I describe it is really connecting what's emerging as possible today with immediate and practical value for brands and businesses and the clients that I work with, with my consultancy running futures. And so that's how I describe near futurism. It's really what is newly possible today that can be made valuable.
Briar: So what are you most excited about in terms of possibilities today?
Neil: So we touched on this a minute ago. Digital things being part of our shared physical environment, I think is the most interesting. And I've described how I've been fascinated with this convergence of digital and physical for decades. And it's been something that has been part of my kind of daydreaming and also a lot of us, I think have sort of daydreamed or fantasized about digital objects becoming part of our physical or shared environment for a long time. It's hard to say exactly why I am so fascinated by this, but I think there's just something really exciting about digital objects and they're becoming more and more easier, I think, to create. I mean, certainly now with machine learning models. We've seen over the past year and a half, maybe two years with Midjourney and Dolly, the tools that are able to very quickly create 2D visuals and runway creating as an example, creating video.
Neil: And now we've got tools like Blockade Labs that make it possible to use text and even speech to create 3D models and 3D objects. And so I gave a talk recently at South by Southwest that I've been delivering this across other corporate audience as well, where I really present all of these possibilities as we're now at the point where we have the tools for co-creating reality in our hands, in our possession, where the reality that we experience moment to moment, day to day in the world is something that we can create, we can co-create. We can use these tools to actually say things like, I want to watch a video at a mountain lake, under a sky full of stars and then be there, experience that in a headset, have it be fully realistic.
Neil: I mean, this is already possible now using something like Apple Vision Pro using these tools like Blockade Labs go from speech to text to 3D model, to something that gets loaded into a virtual environment and then we can be inside. And so it's super exciting being able to just speak realities into existence like this. And there are of course, lots of applications of this for businesses and brands, but I think at a philosophical or just human experience level, it feels God-like to be able to say, let there be this or that, or the other thing and then experience it right away. So I think that's the most exciting thing to me.
Briar: When you talk about use cases for brands or businesses in this instance, like what are you thinking?
Neil: Sure. So people who've been following along with VR for a number of years are certainly aware of its traction and usefulness for training workers for various kinds of concepts. We could just call it hard skills or mechanical training, like fixing machines or learning to work with certain kinds of machines. One of the things that the team I led at ThoughtWorks a number of years ago built was a prototype for training airplane mechanics to work on airplane engines. And we used fully accurate 3D models of these airplane engines and put these mechanic trainees in a distributed on the internet. I mean, they could be in different cities, but a distributed immersive space where they could experience interacting with these simulations of accurate 3D model airplane engines. Learn about how they tend to fail, and how to approach repairing certain situations.
Neil: So that's just a specific example of this category of using VR to do immersive training, which at the time when we built these prototypes, there was no data to describe how effective this kind of training is. But in the years since there's been a lot of data, a lot of studies that show that learning retention is greater, understanding is greater. So it's a very well established use case. And really the biggest companies in the world now are mostly using VR for training, not just for working on machines, but also for interacting with interpersonal interaction.
Neil: Yeah. So in addition to using VR for training people to work on mechanical context, whether it's airplane engines or elevators or cars, various kinds of things, there's also a lot of demonstrated value at increasing utility, training people to work with each other. So some of this is in the context of, there's a company I advise called Friends with Holograms, where they worked with a social work context to train social workers to enter homes and deal with a very subtle kind of nuanced sensitive context of foster children and helping them navigate that kind of space. So there's also DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion kind of use cases where people are increasingly needing, I mean, mostly men to be honest, needing to learn how to interact more effectively, more sensitively with different kinds of people. I mean, not just women, but also diversity people in the workplace.
Neil: We have more and more high expectations for how people interact and how we accommodate each other, how we're sensitive to each other and so putting people in immersive simulations is really, really valuable. And it's demonstrating its value towards these ends, helping people learn to interact with each other better. So that's a couple different realms of use case that I think have already established their value. And it's demonstrable, it's proven. There's quantitative studies that show this, another realm that is kind of the other side of the coin. So that's putting people in immersive simulations. The other side of the coin I see is putting digital objects or digital information in our physical environments. Last year, I spent 9 or 10 months focused on this commercialization effort for a spatial computing tech startup called Alki Labs.
Neil: And given the retail background that I have, I came on and took this basically general purpose spatial computing platform, which allows for the placement of QR codes in a space that creates then an invisible 3D coordinate system that relative to this 3D coordinate system, you can place digital information, digital labels, digital objects. And so for retail context, we looked at both the problem of store associates, say in a grocery retail context often being assigned tasks like restock these products on the shelf, or here's an e-commerce order, go pick these products off the shelf. Often because of high turnover and difficulty with training, a lot of these store associates don't know exactly where these products are and where they should be. And so there's a lot of lost time and inefficiency. But being able to guide them or place signage, digitally that can be experienced on their phones using augmented reality, placing these objects and content digitally at specific 3D locations is really, really valuable.
Neil: And we're seeing with that company solution called Convergent a lot of value and enthusiasm from different retailers across continents, actually and quantifiable improvements to associate efficiency and effectiveness. And the other side of that kind of retail coin is for shoppers, there's a lot of money and effort and kind of friction in grocery stores again and also in other kinds of stores placing promotional content, signage that says 50% off this product this week, or buy one get one free. These are common ways that promotions are presented in stores, but it actually costs a lot of money to print out paper labels or cardboard signage and they get distributed to stores. And it takes a while. It takes a lot of effort and labor, therefore money to set these up. There are a lot of stores that would love to cycle through promotions more frequently than they do, but just because of the time and the money and the friction around doing it, they don't.
Neil: But being able to similarly place these promotions in augmented reality, putting their locations at specific places in this 3D coordinate system and being able to then control them using a CMS just like you would for a website, is really, really valuable for driving shopper marketing effectiveness and helping shoppers find what they're looking for in a quicker, more efficient way, navigating through a store to find these things. So these are still early stages with some of these use cases, particularly AR in the physical world. But I'm confident that we're going to get there. I think one of the paths of course, is face worn augmented reality glasses, which I think is going to take a number of additional years from now, but probably towards the end of the decade we'll see these kind of hands free ability to engage with digital objects in our physical environment.
Briar: That would be so nice, because I tell you what, wearing a headset for 48 hours is challenging. I don't know if you heard, but I spent 48 hours nonstop in the metaverse. So really just even wearing the damn thing for half an hour, for majority of the time, yeah. So anytime I wasn't wearing my headset, I was on a metaverse platform such as Roblox or one that I couldn't access at the time through my headset. But obviously now Roblox have rolled out their virtual reality aspect to them. So what I love most about virtual reality is that kind of immersiveness. It's almost like that magic God-like stuff you described before, you get that shared experience. And something that really stood out for me that I was thinking of when you were speaking about use cases and men's mental health is I had an experience where I went to a virtual world and the concept of that world was people who are undergoing like chemotherapy or spending time in hospital, they would actually meet there and socialize and experience the water around them or maybe they wanted to be in a desert, they could decide these sorts of things.
Briar: And I thought that was really quite special and needed.
Neil: It is. Yeah. So that's another, you're saying mental health and wellbeing. I mean, that's another very broad realm of use case. Of course it's much bigger than anything immersive or metaverse specifically. I mean, there's a growing understanding of how important it's for humans, for us to invest in self-care and taking care of our own wellbeing in an active way, not just when we're sick, when we're feeling crappy. And yes, I mean I've been friends with and just aware generally of a number of different companies who've been building for quite a few years immersive VR based meditation apps, kind of wellbeing apps and those are also really quite promising as well. I think because we're so visual, I think for many people it's difficult to just close our eyes and meditate and relax that way. But if we see an experience or even more, if we're immersed in an audio visual, immersive environment that is calming, that's designed to help us relax and connect with ourselves in a more kind of pervasive, relaxing way, I think that's going to help a lot of people and it already is.
Briar: The augmented reality thing is interesting. I think as well, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future that's really going to bring this merge of our physical and virtual worlds. I often find myself almost half finding it funny and half finding it disgusting how many hours a day I use my phone, or I'm on my laptop. I'm like, I'm literally trying to be in the virtual world almost more than I'm trying to be in real life these days. And I'm almost embarrassed to admit it in all honesty, but this augmented reality, like do you predict a future where maybe we don't have phones or we're not perhaps using our laptops? Maybe it's like contact lenses or glasses, or maybe even like a BCI chip in our head?
Neil: I do think all of these things are coming, and it's hard to say when they might individually or collectively kind of land or arrive. I mean, I think there's not going to be a single point. I think we're going to continue to gradually see these things emerge. It's interesting that you're saying you feel almost embarrassed or have a negative.
Briar: Disgusted.
Neil: Feeling disgusted. That's a pretty strong negative term.
Briar: Yes. Isn't it?
Neil: But I think, well, why? I mean, I'm kind of curious. Does it feel like an escape?
Briar: No, it feels good. I feel like I'm getting stuff done, but at the same time I rely on my phone so much to do my day to day it's obviously convenient. I have all of my groceries delivered. I'm speaking to my friends, I'm speaking to my team, I'm speaking to my boyfriend if I'm away. I'm enjoying social media. I work in PR, I work in media, like it's my whole life. But at the same time, like my thumb has started hurting, which is like, I feel physical pain in my thumb and I'm getting worried about it. And I often think about how much happier I would be if I wasn't, I feel slow messaging, I feel slow, if I could have that connection without all of the effort that it's currently taking.
Neil: So I think you're pointing to I mean specifically your thumb, but maybe more generally a physical kind of awkwardness or repetitive physical stress.
Briar: Yes it's tiresome.
Neil: Like that,, yes. I think and there is that. I think generally people were a lot more aware of like how much more we're using our thumbs in the early days of smartphones or particularly when the iPhone and Android phone showed up. I guess even before that, there were these keyboard based phones.
Briar: I want to be more nimble.
Neil: Yes, we talked a little bit earlier about just the human computer interaction kind of aspect of the work that I do and the interest that I've had for me ever since computer science and philosophy and kind of the psychology side of that as well. And so I think I, as well as many of us working in this industry have had this dream for a long time that software and software-based technologies will become increasingly natural to use and eventually just become part of our physical environment somehow. Instead of, I mean just as the GUI was an amazing move in the direction of intuitiveness and naturalness in its day, of course it was still 2D, but it had visual images of things like filing cabinets and trash bins and menus and things that we understood.
Neil: So these are starting to represent in the computer, in software, things that we're physically familiar with. I think we're on this long trajectory towards digital things becoming more and more like the physical world, and then eventually just showing up in the physical world. So yeah, it's a long way of saying, I think, yes, we're going to continue on this trajectory. I think there are definitely upsides, like you're pointing to, maybe we don't have to look at these little black slabs in our hands that we've been fetishizing for the last 15 years and will experience just digital content and objects around us in the world.
Briar: We'll be able to look up and experience the world.
Neil: Rather than having to look down.
Briar: Yeah. You walk down the street and everyone's around you, like with their little technology, neck, just looking down.
Neil: I do think that we will live to look back on that period of time with a kind of, I think fondness, a little bit of nostalgia. Because I think there are also going to be a lot of challenges that come from, if I'm looking around the world and I don't know whether people in this room or these objects are digital or physical. I mean, in this moment that feels like a disorienting prospect, but I think it is coming. One of the things that really sticks in my mind about this whole transition that we're experiencing over time is Alex Kipman, one of the creators of the HoloLens Microsoft, early mixed reality headset that was created almost 10 years ago now. He did a TED talk, or he was talking about how this several decade period that we've all lived in our lifetime, where so much of what we interact with in two dimensions will be looked back on eventually as this weird aberration. Because forever before that and forever after these few decades humans always interacted with things in three dimensions but we had this brief period from, I don't know, the sixties or seventies through 2030 or something, where predominantly we were focused on these two dimensional representations of things. And that stuck with me because it's just an interesting perspective projecting ourselves into this future of digital and physical converging, like, yes, we're stuck like tapping our thumbs on these little black 2D slabs.
Briar: Kind of weird.
Neil: It is weird when you think about it.
Briar: Yeah. Well, maybe in the future we'll be able to. I just think BCI like communicating with our thoughts, like, it'd be so much quicker rather than this whole thumb tap thing.
Neil: Are you looking forward to that?
Briar: I think so. Like, the more I think about BCIs, the more interested I am in getting one. I'm getting my micro check with Sophia the robot this weekend. And I used to be so against getting an RFID microchip in my hand and now I think it's one of the most exciting things that I'm doing. So I'm sure BCIs will be like that. Initially, I'm horrified by them, but the more I talk about them, the more interesting and curious I become. Obviously I don't want to be like the first person, but I am actually in talks with the Noland gentleman, he's based in Arizona. He's got a BCI Neuralink. He went viral recently, So I'm really hoping to go and speak to him about his experience, but he's paralyzed. So something like this, it's very meaningful to him. It helps him go about his everyday life.
Neil: Absolutely. I mean, I like all of this. I think eventually BCI is technology that will become commonplace, will become useful, become safe or safe enough for people to consider using it.
Briar: Would you get one?
Neil: I think so, eventually, mostly because my curiosity will win out over whatever.
Briar: You're like me.
Neil: Hesitation. Yeah you and I share this, but it's interesting. I mean, the CEO of this company that I worked with last year, Alki Labs, I mean he's very interested and really passionate about augmented reality as communication. And the ability to, for example, if I'm talking about a cat, like I have this cat, it's a beautiful tavi cat, it has this color pattern, whatever. If I'm describing this to you, you might imagine it in your mind. That's what we do. We use language to project our own imagination into other people's minds. But you wouldn't see it exactly as it is. I see it as it is because this is my cat. I live at home with this cat. But if I could say, here's my cat in augmented reality and there's this digital object that I can present to you, then the fidelity of our communication is much higher.
Neil: I can just say, this is the thing I'm talking about and I'm showing instead of telling. And showing is of course, as we've learned from childhood, from grade school. It's just more powerful than telling. But I think he describes this as the penultimate step, like the next step before bringing computer interfaces. Because once our brains are directly connected, I mean, I have some doubt about whether this can actually happen or whether this would work, societally. But assuming that it can happen then there just doesn't need to be any kind of external representation. Like everything we've grown up knowing about the importance of language for conveying ideas and concepts and thoughts might just go away. And I think it's hard for me to think about because thought is so based in language, and we have language really in order to describe and communicate the ideas, the images and so on that we have in our minds. But if we didn't have to speak, we could just think our thoughts in someone else's direction.
Briar: It's interesting to think about, isn't it?
Neil: It's hard. I mean, maybe I just haven't thought about it enough, but I don't know how. What would that experience be like? I mean, do you still think in words, would we need words? Would we actually think in something that's different from language as we know it? I don't know. I'm sure there are people who are thinking deeply about this.
Neil: But sure. I'm a yes to checking it out. I look forward to hearing how it goes for you.
Briar: Yeah. Well I'm not lining up next week to get a BCI, but we'll see. Hopefully I can get this talk with Noland. I'm very keen to hear his experience about it.
Neil: As you said, I mean, it's going to start with actually solving problems for people that are suffering from debilitating problems, particularly paralysis or otherwise.
Briar: So in one of your articles on LinkedIn, you asked your readers to imagine a world where today's business decisions are already responding to tomorrow's challenges. What do you mean by this?
Neil: Yeah, so in the context I wrote that I was describing ecosystems or an ecosystem lens for creating and evolving business models. And so we think about the concept of ecosystems, and I think more and more people are starting to think about business models this way and really think about almost everything this way. And this is what I argue is that the world is really made of connected ecosystems. Not separate named things, but if we think of business models as these connected ecosystems of different kinds of participants, yes humans, yes machines, yes manufacturing capabilities, yes transport, lots of different types of humans, but also we're on the verge of AIs gaining agency, which is to say they won't just respond when we prompt them like they do today, but they can be given a brief or an assignment or a role description and just go off and fulfill that.
Neil: Once we have these capabilities and businesses become these even more connected and powerful and effective ecosystems of these diverse kinds of participants, then our business models can actually actively evolve in the direction that we prescribe them to evolve. So, yeah, what I'm imagining here, I think is, it feels straightforward to me where you just say let the aspects of a business model kind of go into the wild, but like, let them operate just like we employ people and delegate to them and expect and nurture them in the direction of evolving to become more effective, more capable and so they can respond just like humans do to unexpected inputs, unexpected experiences as the future unfolds. So that's what I'm imagining. I think it's a provocation, it's kind of a thought prompt. And I also think that, as we experience what AI agents can do it feels natural that things will move in this direction. And, just like any other profound new technology, I think AI agents are going to open up possibilities that are really hard to imagine at this point.
Briar: What other things do you think AI will do for society? Are you excited by artificial intelligence? Does it scare you?
Neil: Yes, and yes. I mean, the simple, almost dumb thing to say is that everything powerful is scary. And I think it's certainly true of AI. We're already seeing, I think AI become or just be really, really powerful for helping us manifest what we imagine in these prompt based systems, whether they create visual output like Midjourney or Dolly or text based output, like Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini, like lots of large language models out there, create various kinds of output. Also, video is possible, also 3D objects are possible, as we talked about earlier. And all of this is fantastically powerful and useful. I mean, one of the things that I do most commonly with these tools is use them as thought partners. And I have an idea for a new article or a new keynote speech I want to deliver, or a article I'm going to put on LinkedIn or even with a book outline I've been working on recently.
Neil: And I can create that, run it by Chat GPT, ask it questions about this, how would I frame this to a publishing agent? How would I frame this to my LinkedIn followers? How would I frame this to my 24-year-old daughter and just think through all these different aspects. And I find that even though these tools, they often come up with silly ideas or ideas that don't a hundred percent make sense or I don't like the language that they're using, they're still really, really useful as thought partners, as tools that are something like sitting with another human and saying, here I'm having these thoughts, this idea. Let me bounce this off you. What do you think of it? And so that's really, really powerful and there's no longer much need for anything like writer's block or just being stuck on a problem when you can have this conversation with a tool.
Neil: So, we're talking about agents. I think this is kind of the next stage in both power and trepidation, I think is a reasonable response to what's possible with agents. I mean, one of the things that's kind of a simple everyday example that's relatively harmless is the kind of result we could expect from, say a year from now there's this open AI GPT 5, whatever, it has agents. And I can say, okay, I want to have dinner with my partner at this five star restaurant in Midtown, and I know that there are no reservations available for months, but I have to be able to eat there this Saturday night at 8:00 PM. So do whatever you have to do to make this happen. And so the agent, of course, is going to, if it's unconstrained, if it's not prevented from doing this, will figure out the phone number from this restaurant or maybe the email address, contact a restaurant.
Neil: Somehow I think it could also figure out like who actually has bookings that evening. Maybe it's through conversation, being very tricky or sly in the conversation. Anyway, find out who's actually got reservations, call up on behalf of that person, cancel the reservation, create a space for me so that then I can go with my partner and have dinner there at that place. And that's great because now I get to have dinner and somebody else has their reservation canceled. They don't know why, but it was canceled. Chaos, mayhem, frustration will result from this kind of thing, but it's totally feasible. I mean, the model could do this. And it seems relatively harmless in this kind of microcosm way. This is just dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan. But scaled out across all different other kinds of context in our lives.
Neil: It can start to create real havoc, I think. Having agents just do whatever it takes, whatever they have within their power to create in the world, creating real world outcomes. And so to me, this is like very exciting power and very concerning power at the same time, I think. I'm heartened by the fact that maybe not a fact, but I mean, certainly Sam Altman of Open AI, and I think others that are creating models that can do this sort of thing, seem to be taking very seriously the risks and the power that this kind of technology presents. And I think there's been enough public conversation, including at the level of governments, about the implications of this kind of technology. The people are awake, people are sitting up, people are engaging in important conversations about how do we create alignment, is a term that is used in the AI industry.
Neil: How do we make sure that these models are aligned in terms of what they do and don't do. Aligned with human directives. Things that are important to us, which are in our societies, written into law, written into law enforcement. And some of these aspects of alignment are just sort of social expectations or etiquette or human level expectations. So we're talking about a bunch of different things here related to like the excitement and the fear around AI. But again, I think that any powerful technology or powerful person, frankly, I mean, powerful society is to be both admired and feared. And it all just comes as a package.
Briar: Absolutely. And I was thinking the other day about how, if I imagine a future where AI is potentially going to solve old age or cancers or really big meaningful things in society, then I would also need to be prepared for all of the fear. Like if it's going to be that powerful to do that much good, it's going to be powerful enough to do bad as well. And yeah, I think that's something that we all just really have to be mindful of and consider. I think we should fear it, but I don't think we should let that fear hold us back. And I think, unfortunately, what I'm sometimes seeing in today's society is that people are getting so fearful that they're letting it affect their mental health when it comes to technology. What are your thoughts about this?
Neil: Interesting. I imagine that's true. I can't say that I'm personally speaking with a lot of people who have that level of fear or trepidation. I will say that we've created this kind of infrastructure around media well preceding the rise of the promulgation of AI in the last few years, where the media infrastructure is very tightly tuned to generating fear and anger in people, which has been the case ever since.
Briar: They love creating fear, don't they?
Neil: Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm saying we don't need AI to be doing this to ourselves.
Briar: It's true. The world is always ending according to the media.
Neil: And it's not even just, I was going to say, it's a lot more extreme in the past, I guess 40 years or so since we've had 24 hour news. But if you go back and look at newspaper headlines from a hundred years ago, very similar, largely about people dying, scary things happening, like horrible weather, whatever, whatever. It's the same, evil politicians. So I don't mean to dismiss it, but I do think that there's a way in which humans are kind of addicted to the adrenaline rush of fear and anger.
Briar: It's kind of like a good horror movie really, isn't it? It gives us that little dopamine kick.
Neil: We love it. And I think like any addiction that humans are engaged in a widespread way, whether it's alcohol or caffeine, or dopamine, these things we're talking about, I think we have to grapple with them. I mean that's the context, we could say the platform on which we're having these conversations about AI. So of course, if AI shows up and it's a very powerful technology, but we're talking about it or getting our information about it through this fear and anger focused media infrastructure, then of course AI is going to be in some ways, just another story that is designed by the media to generate excitement, fear, trepidation, all this sort of thing. So we kind of have to try to separate the nature of the story, the nature of this technology from the fact that the media are just trying to get us fearful, angry, engaged, clicking, on whatever these stories are.
Neil: But I do think that, just like with any story, I think that the solution to this is firsthand experience. Instead of like prioritizing, like what did I hear on the internet while I hear from my favorite news source? And the great news, certainly with these large language models like Chat GPT. I mean, I think a huge part of why they've become so kind of world changing or if dominated the conversation for the past year and a half is because anybody can just show up at chat@openai.com and a web browser and start using the thing. And anybody who can type in English or in other natural languages can use it. And so it's very easy to just go there, use the tool for free and get your own, make your own assessment about like is this useful? Is it good? Is it bad?
Neil: How do I feel about it? Rather than listening to someone else tell you a story about it. So I am optimistic that we're going to continue to build and the industry is going to continue to build tools that are this accessible and more and more useful and usable for people. So, I mean, one other thing that is an interesting way of thinking about this technology that I came across recently, I'm forgetting, was on some podcast someone pointed this out, but there's this whole concern about explainability in the world of AI, which you can't really miss this part of the AI conversation, if you follow along in AI news, explainability meaning these tools, these large language models, Chat GPT and others. The people who build these tools don't even understand how they get the answers that they get.
Neil: There's a complexity and an opaqueness to how these tools work. That never has been the case before this in the world of software. I grew up building software that was procedural, where you give it instructions and it executes these instructions and produces an outcome. It's pretty easy to describe how it does what it does. These tools, you can't. And so there's been a lot of concern about explainability for many reasons. But the perspective that the sub-person offered was throughout human history, there have been so many things, of course that we encounter in the world, certainly each other, but also other creatures, weather phenomenon, just about everything that we don't understand, we don't know how to explain. And so we develop stories, narratives, natural sciences. You can say we develop religions as well to explain the unexplainable, but we have ways of creating explanations systematically that allow us to predict what we call science.
Neil: So what was offered in this context is that this is what we're going to have to do with AI, is develop a kind of natural science that helps us explain why these models are doing what they're doing, why these AI enabled, near future robots, AI enabled avatars, AI enabled products, services, etcetera, why are they doing what they're doing? Well, we can study them and develop theories as we need to. And I think explainability, being able to explain why things happen the way they do helps us relax into, like we have a level of understanding. We can feel more, yeah just feel calmer and more relaxed about it. Like we may how would I say? Things like the weather, things like other creatures. How they behave or why are they behaving as they are? I think we feel more comfortable with some kind of explanation or some kind of model for their behavior. And I think the same is going to be true for AI?
Briar: I think it's interesting that you bring that up and curiosity is a big driver for me and I think there's often been things before in my past that I feared and when I think of the feelings of fear and excitement, they're actually quite closely related from the kind of response that your body gives. And I think it's interesting anytime you feel quite fearful to kind of switch that into excitement. And I certainly experienced this when I spent 48 hours nonstop in the metaverse. For me it was kind of like, what the hell is this metaverse thing that everyone keeps speaking about? And I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to immerse myself in there for 48 hours, have a crash course and really get to experience what it's all about. And it was just so interesting how quickly that fear of the future turned into excitement. And I think certainly what you're saying, the point really resonates with me that rather than being dismissive or feeling quite grounded in our fear, it's like we shift that, we're curious, we explore because it's always a double-edged sword, as you mentioned before yourself.
Neil: And it's your firsthand experience. You said, let me just experience this for myself. And once you experience it, inevitably you have a greater level of comfort with it. I think a really obvious thing to say that's been said countless times of course, is that we fear what we don't know and understand. And so, a great way, and I've certainly employed this throughout my life when I've noticed that I'm really afraid of something that I'm considering doing or experiencing that I use that as a signal. I notice that. And unless there's some really obvious risk associated with doing the thing, that's my signal to go towards that, because I know that as soon as I experience it, I'm going to lose that fear and sort of transform the fear into excitement. I also heard, I don't know if it was Carl Young or some other famous theorist or psychologist I think was referenced recently in a book I was reading, as fear is excitement without breath. Fear is like very similar physiologically except we just tense up and we forget to breathe. Whereas excitement, we tend to be more active, engaged and breathing.
Briar: I think we forget to remember sometimes that outside our comfort zone and fear lies growth and achievement. You feel that sense of accomplishment, don't you? And then, the more self-confidence you feel with when it comes to something, the more inspired you are to continue to take action. And I think that, just even not thinking about technology, just thinking from a life perspective as well, if there's something wrong with our lives and we're sitting there feeling really negative and fearing it, like it kind of sucks. But then if we decide to take action and do something about it, suddenly we feel way better about the situation because we're taking it in our own hands. We're empowered by it.
Neil: Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, I think we're continuing to circle around the same idea. If the question is how should people deal with their fear about this technology? I think our answer, certainly my answer would be use it, like it's available to you. You have a phone, you have a computer, you have a web browser. Play around with it, use it, like make your own decision.
Briar: What kind of things would you want people to explore, experiment with? What comes to mind who are listening to this podcast and they're thinking, you know what, I'm going to go out there and experiment.
Neil: Sure. Well, I mean, we've been talking about AI for a little while now, and I think I described earlier using Chat GPT as a thought partner. That's a really simple example that I continue to be surprised how few people I speak with have actually done this. I mean, certainly people that are kind of my peers or do technology work have done this.
Briar: I actually use it in the way that you described as well. Sometimes I might even say like a little sentence or a couple of words and I'm like, aha. Didn't think of that route.
Neil: Yeah. It's just like jogging or unblocking a thought process in a certain way. And so I just use the term thought partner. I don't know if this makes sense to people.
Briar: I like that term.
Neil: It's just when you're thinking through something, if you're going to create kind of anything that you want to create, I mean, we're at a point now where this technology could even be, I mean musician and I'm trying to compose a new song. Here are some lyrics, here's the tune, here's the melody. Where could I go with this? Because now I'm stuck. These tools are really, really good at just taking what we create and riffing on it and enhancing it like, what's the word? Like sort of refracting it, so to speak, through a bunch of different lenses, if you will. So you can say, here's a line, here's a few sentences. I'm trying to say this. What are different ways that I could say this or what do you think I'm trying to say?
Neil: And these tools are really, really good at this. And so for anyone who's ever had the experience of writer's block or just being stuck at trying to articulate something or even you just trying to figure out what am I thinking about this? They're really, really useful. And honestly, more than any other technology that I've encountered in the last couple decades, I would say these tools, Chat GPT is probably the most accessible, but Google has barred now Gemini and Anthropic, clawed and there are others. But I mean just use one of these tools, start typing, start experimenting. One of the things that I think people find is that a lot of people start using these tools and then the usage drops off quickly because they're like, ah, it doesn't really do a whole lot or I'm not sure how to use it.
Neil: And I think it's very similar actually to humans in this way. I mean, these tools are designed to actually interact with us in human type language. And you can imagine, I think these people are frustrated in the same way. They might be frustrated by showing up in a human conversation and starting to talk with someone and then be like, ah, I don't like this conversation. You're not interesting to me or you're not giving me anything useful in response, but I'm not providing much either. And so how does a human conversation go if I show up and say, hi tell me something.
Briar: Yeah, you don't give anything.
Neil: But think of it as a human conversation, like, imagine you're showing up and this is another person. Like how would you actually have an interesting conversation with a human? And if you take that kind of approach with these tools, you can actually get a really useful interaction. I think in my experience, certainly one thing leads to another. And then once you start seeing what they can do, it sparks new ideas and then you wind up having a really kind of productive, fruitful relationship, I would say with these tools. I say relationship to say that certainly with agents, but even already, I think and this goes back to your question about business models already responding to future scenarios, is that these AIs are becoming like another species. And this is also, related to the concept of explainability and natural science for studying AI. They are advanced and sophisticated enough now that we can think of them as a different kind of species that are similar to us, but different. I mean, maybe in that sense we might compare them to certain higher primates or dolphins or other creatures that we've discovered that clearly have language, that clearly have social behaviors. They're not quite like us, but they share certain characteristics with us. I think these AIs, these large language models are similar in that sense and it makes sense to think of them as another species.
Briar: Interesting. What kind of species would you give it?
Neil: You mean like what animal would I compare it to?
Briar: Yeah.
Neil: That's a good question. I'm just thinking about cats because we were talking about cats.
Briar: Oh, I love cats.
Neil: So, I mean these are pets, these are animals, mammals that we really kind of know and love. And so I don't think that Chat GPT ought to be compared to those Exactly. But I'm just thinking like, what are kinds of creatures that are fun to be with, that are friendly. I mean, these tools are designed to be friendly and useful and helpful. And I think in that sense, maybe a well-trained dog is not totally different from, I mean, I think these AI models are much more intelligent in human ways than dogs are. But I think well-trained dogs are also, I don't know, like very eager and willing to play and help and behave in ways that we want them to. And these tools certainly are all those things right now.
Briar: It's been so good to have you on the show today. It was fascinating discussing and I always feel like the time goes by so fast when I'm having these discussions.
Neil: Well thank you for having the conversation with me. Thanks Briar.
Briar: Thank you Neil.
