The Future of AI & the Spatial Web: Denise Holt on the tech life, personal and public
the space itself becomes a domain and the modeling language is what's used to program those spaces and it can program all kinds of things the ontology for the programming language it takes into account activities it takes into account credentials it takes into account all kinds of aspects multi-dimensional aspects about those things and what's occurring with them over time in that space and with who and who has access who all kinds of things like that like if it can be measured in uh physical or digital reality it could be programmed using the the hyperspace modeling [Music] language hi Denise I'm so glad you're here today hi Andrea thank you so much for having me I'm excited to be here I am really excited about your work I have to say sort of found it through my collaborations with inference groups and I really love what you're doing the podcast the substack so I really want to know how you got here how did you get into this well Verses AI they're leading this whole effort with the active inference methodology being used for AI they've got Karl Friston as their Chief scientist not a bad Chief scientist I must say right so um one of the original Founders Dan Mapes um is a longtime friend of mine and so I've known that he when he and Gabriel Renee started verses back in like 2017 is um I knew about it I knew what was happening so I've been kind of following along in the shadows watching because I knew what the vision was I knew what I've watched it unfold and grow and expand and um they wrote the book The spatial web back in in 2018 I think it actually was published early 2019 but that laid out this whole vision and then they started um collaborating with Carl and it all just expanded from there so about two years ago talking with Dan um we hadn't been in contact for a little while and we were catching up and he was telling me that versus had just gone public up on the Neo exchange up in Canada and that the platform was going to be launching to the public within like a year and a halfish that was the project projection at the time and I was like oh okay there's a transition mindset here people know about this at the time I was really heavily working in the web 3 space okay and you in technology for my adult life I've always been kind of a tech ner and like when um back in like 19 I want to say like 1998 is I was using Photoshop and I started really getting into these 3D Graphics programs back then like Ray dream studio and Bryce and all these but rendering time was painful yeah so that was actually one of the big motivators that really got me diving into technology was I was using these programs on more of a creative side but to be able to actually make them useful with a home computer I just started building my own computers yeah I think that's what I'm trying to figure out about you a little bit what's the driving motivation because when I listen to your podcast the spatial podcast I I think it feels to me that something is motivating you more than just that you want to be a podcaster yeah so no and I have a lot of so what I've done I mean I have my podcast but the way I've done all of my writing around this and um the podcast and yeah you're a writer first we should say that I write a lot better than I speak well you clarify things very well we'll get into it a bit but this deep learning versus spacial web active inference um AI I mean I think some of your writings on that clarify it really well but we'll get into that but anyway yeah yeah so what I've been TR what I've been building is a media vehicle around all of this and because I have a bigger Vision with it and a lot of it has to do with the technology that's coming out with versus in their platform I really see that when their platform comes out and it enables anybody to be able to build one of these intelligent agents these active inference intelligent agents um within our internet because that's what's happening with their platform our internet is expanding into this 3D digital twin space so it's going from the worldwide web to include all entities and the programming language bakes context into all the things in the spaces and relates them to activities and it's all credentialed and permissioned and everything that informs the AI that coupled with the Internet of Things sensors everything that's going to give these active inference agents the real time information to learn from their perspective within the network all of these agents are going to be aware of each other they're going to be aware of the network it's gonna I feel like we're about to see this explosion of develop of in it's almost I mean it's what we we should probably back up a little bit because when you say the vehicle you want it to be a vehicle do you mean sort of a place where people can come and start at as a beginner or any place yeah and so at this point yes education I feel like is the most important aspect because there's a lot of people that are building amazing Technologies and one of the biggest problems especially with the web 3 Technologies or the extended reality Technologies is that they're all just desparate Technologies it's really hard to um bridge that interoperability Gap and that's what the spatial web is going to do so it's going to do that and then also Empower everything with AI so to me it's exciting because all these people that are building these amazing um products within those spaces I feel like they need to know this is coming because it's going to solve a lot of their problems it's going to expand their capabilities and I feel like it's going to usher in this um kind of augmented reality mixed reality existence that we've all kind of envisioned but the foundation hasn't been there and this is bringing so like let's try for people who maybe even haven't never heard of spatial the spatial web yet or web 3.0 even because there's a wide variety of different people who are G to probably watch this but so what do you think of as 3.0 or web 3 and web 3.0 maybe you can help me and others understand what that means to you so that's a really important distinction so um to me web 3 refers to the Technologies themselves right the um so you mean like augment crypto blockchain crypto augmented reality virtual reality Internet of Things um all of these technologies that kind of enhance that web three space web 3.0 is simply the next evolution of our Internet Protocol so um
the worldwide web that's web 2 mobile with the worldwide web was 2.5 and we are about to Evol evolve that into web 3.0 which is also called the spatial web and what's interesting is versus actually created the protocol but they donated it to the public because nobody could own the Internet it's just that the protocol had to evolve into into this 3D digital twin kind of space to where like a it had to become a spatial protocol it had to take us away from a library of pages and documents like the worldwide web um it had to take us away from the concept of the internet has always been this decentralized Vision but it's impossible with the worldwide web because all the transactions take place under the umbrella of whoever owns the domain and the domain is the website so it's a centralized transactional process right right so you you it's self- Sovereign identity is impossible um security is really difficult the worldwide web is the most unsecured environment to even try to be using all these Technologies in because um the only permissions you the only permissions you're granting within the worldwide web is do you agree that they can have all your information and data or not there's no Nuance to it at all how long will you pay for whatever service or right right so um what's really interesting with the spatial web protocol which is hstp hyperspace transaction protocol and hsml hyperspace modeling language um so versus they developed the protocol about three and a half years ago donated it to the public to the itle E which is the largest core standards body in the world they develop core standards for anything that's like a public good as far as a technology that's going to be used globally wonderful what is the protocol though for people who have no idea what we're talking about what's like maybe we should even let's just think like let's think of a little Narrative of so we have we'll skip the invention of the internet and so on up to kind of the fact that it's a part of all of our lives and we're all using it we're all embedded in it we all sort of take it for granted that this is what happens like that this is just the way this kind of Technology works that you go to a two-dimensional or whatever depending on how you're looking at you go to a page and that's what uh the web is it's that's HTML and all these different coding languages are writing these uh things that end up just being pages that you visit um and there's always a medium someone owns the service usually and you have to kind of go through them so that's kind of what you're saying is you're basically handing over your data and rights in this way and we've just assumed this is the way it is right this is yeah it go yeah and what you just said is that and I think I've heard or seen it somewhere maybe you wrote it or Dan or I don't know someone that instead of the page and this whole way that I just described we're going to start thinking about space itself S as the interactive um environment I I wish I had the I guess like instead of programming a page you're going to program the space I think that's what the quote was that's a completely different flipping weird way of thinking about this thing that's now become normal for us which was also very weird when it first came out the internet so that's what this like you just talked about um hsml which I think is so cool even just the name hyperspace moding language oh my God as someone who's knows a little bit about programming it like it's very exciting but um for someone who doesn't know anything about like what this means how would you just you've done it in your writing and I'll link to it but just how would you kind of introduce them to what what's going to change what could change what's happening with spatial web so you know instead of having website domains all entities become a domain so people places things um they become domains that are programmable and you're not going through a medium anymore is that right yeah the space itself becomes a domain so um and the modeling language is what's used to program those spaces and it can program all kinds of things um the ontology for the programming language it takes into account activities it takes into account credentials it takes into account um all kinds of aspects um multi-dimensional aspects about those things and what's occurring with them over time in that space and with whom and who has access who all kinds of things like that like if it can be measured in uh physical or digital reality it could be programmed using the the hyperspace modeling language the spatial web talks about being natural and and the way you just describe that that sounds like a human life that kind of develops and you have a history and a trajectory which we don't have in deep learning you just have a or programming it's totally different way of thinking about it um does that make sense for you because I think a lot about how we each have these kind of paths in life and so on and so forth and um something like a deep learning AI has has not anything like that um right yeah no and what's really fascinating though is that you're programming these attributes about the phys phical life but also about a digital realm too right so that means that everything then becomes a digital twin and then you can run simulations with the digital twin you can do projections you can um you can run simulations to find out all kinds of things tweak parameters and stuff and it's going to um really give us a lot of control with this simulation aspect of it businesses will be able to to run real time real simulations based off of real data and real things and um make better decisions we'll be able to address things like climate change problems and stuff and run simulations of our planet and really be able to see what we need to do to what degree to get the results we want when you think of smart cities um city planners will be able to run simulations and really find out what's going to be effective what's going to um make a difference for the population for systems within the city in a way it's um giving us better predictive processing skills by sort of Yeah by having this twin simulated layer but I guess what I'm trying to Envision is like do you okay so do you imagine I could just walk into my garden and simulate what I might do there in that space or would it be more like similar to something that we're used to where I would go into a VR environment or even something just normally like a computer screen and simulate what's the difference and the way that everything is linking together I I think what we need to really take into consideration is that um a lot of things are going to be evolving over the next even just the next couple of years trillions of sensors are coming on board over the next 10 years and those are all sensors that are going to play a part within this network as far as AI is going to be able to interact with it with the information coming in off of Those sensors um it's going to be imperative that we have ai to help us parse all this information and then devices are going to evolve I mean we've already seen the Apple Vision Pro and you know what that kind of does um there's going to be different types ofi of devices that evolve once it's like with any technology once there's new capabilities then people start refining how you're going to integrate with it some kind of wearable perhaps or some kind of I mean we already talk about this the biological not implantation or something but more no but like that you already see stuff like with the little retina things all kindar implants and stuff for parans I mean it's there's plenty of examples um but I guess what I would like to try to clarify before we talk more is what are the kind of main goals of raal web or maybe not even goals but priorities that are different from the deep learning world because we've already sort of mentioned them a few times but so what it enables is a completely different type of AI than deep learning because it it enables distributed intelligence at scale so the big difference is obviously you've got deep learning and then you've got the active inference and they function completely differently they're two different methodologies but what the space web does is it gives this um common language for all of the AI to the intelligent agents to communicate with each other across that Network so it it enables a network where you can have multitudes of these intelligent agents that are all learning from their own frame of reference within the network people will be developing these intelligent agents humans will be developing these intelligent agents and imparting their own knowledge into them right so it's going to preserve all of these all the diversity of knowledge throughout our world um You've Got Deep learning a monolithic machine that is trained off of Just trillions of pieces of data that are intended to to get it to output something that seems appropriate or matches kind of your expectation of what you're hoping to get out of it right but all it's doing is reformulating what it's been fed right and spitting it out right it can't come up with new information it can only draw off of the information that's there right now within the spatial web with these active inference agents they're learning based off of realtime data they're learning based off of the real world that is constantly evolving and with the way active inference works with the action perception Loop and they're actually learning yeah they're able to they're able to adapt with all that new information they're able to then share it with each other learn from each other so then you have this distributed knowledge that grows into this ever evolving collective intelligence and that's really the difference yeah very well said I guess um so with something like deep learning you there's a programmer who's putting in the information and yes we could we can train it on tons of data we can put all the data in but it's still once you put it out then it's trained on that data so you're going to have to do a whole update like chat GPT 4 or whatever you have to keep updating um but what you're saying is this this um AI a spatial AI would be more about the space itself continually updating itself much the way the real world already works I mean that we all sort of um dynamically interact and update one another um markk of blets or whatever but is that kind of the yeah yeah when you think of our human knowledge it grows because we have a diversity of intelligences that are sharing with each other but also pushing back on each other and challenging each other and that's how the information gets tested and then what's right sticks and then it grows um it's the scientific method right yeah and that's really the difference and that's why when you just have one brain it's not going to grow its knowledge beyond what it knows how can it it can be introduced to more information that then is in its bank but those machines they're they cannot adapt to new information just like you said they're because of the way they're trained they take a lot of adjustments to to to get it to actually um yeah yeah per do whatever we want it to do write a paper exactly they're very useful but they're tools and I think what we're gonna see is that they're not going away but they will also come on to the network as tools just like every other every other technology I don't know if you've seen this I wonder in your experience I I also wonder when you first started like encountered Ai and I don't mean using it but thinking about what a i is and um becoming part of the creation of it or whatever but well I've been a nerd for a long time so like so you always asov and H okay that's great yeah we're all a lot of us start with sci-fi um yeah but I guess um I wonder if you've seen this like with people who aren't nerds about AI I'm not I've become more so but when you just are like in your normal life a normal person doing their normal job who doesn't need to think think about AI every single day but now most people do because it's it's suddenly everyone's thinking about AI or they see AI doing art or they realize AI can write their paper for them it's changed right in the past few years in a big way with language really with chat GPT that that really brought it to the surface for most people yeah and I guess PE people seem to imagine that it is learning in the way that you described the spatial web it's it doesn't seem that it um people really understand that it's actually very language-based in terms of this kind of that you're putting in the representations and that's all that can it can give you back yeah I mean people definitely misunderstand what's actually occurring there because it's it's a parlor trick yeah it is I mean it seems magical if you don't know what's it's really good at making people think that oh my gosh it must be thinking because I asked it this and it gave me an answer and but but the reality is is If people really understood that the way these language models are working it's not hard to recognize you give it enough training data it's not hard for it to start recognizing the patterns I mean we've got 26 letters in the English alphabet and you find that certain letters tend to follow each other certain words tend to follow each other and then you train it on Specialized data like legal data or whatever then it starts to learn patterns that are of things that are said over and over so you give it a prompt it's going to search through its database and go okay well this is probably suffice and sound appropriate but appropriate and accurate are two different things appropriate doesn't mean that it's understands anything um so it's like if you ask me a question and I just search on the internet and tell you what I find I don't have to understand it at all it's kind of the Chinese experiment thought experiment and philosophy where you're just it's just take it it is um the way the language works if it didn't have all those very repeatable regularities and patterns it wouldn't be language so the machine as it's built just learns those and then can reproduce them but spatial web how is it I mean I know it's going to use this it's using active inference AI so maybe we should talk about that what's like what do you see H how would people begin to understand that is it more like how they're actually Imagining the current AI yeah so the thing is these active inference agents they actually can um do causal reasoning right they the way it works within the free energy principles it's constantly trying to uh it's taking in sensory information and it's trying to predict what was causing that right so that it can to minimize surprise I guess how what's your like one one sentence idea of the free energy principle yeah I mean basically you said it it's taking in sensory information and then acting on it to make better predictions yeah to make better way yeah I think we can it's generalized but we can just for people who don't know what haven't heard it if there is that it's pretty simple it's what we're doing and when we we're moving through the world um we don't want to we want to develop certain habits and patterns so that we can continue moving through the world so that we can exist that's what we learn how to walk we learn how to talk we learn all these kind of um ways of being in the world making our way in the world and and you can think about that as the body minimizing surprise and just aligning with the world in a certain way um Daniel fredman he actually gave me the most simplistic example which you know I've been using with people because actually it does kind of give you that understanding he was like okay say you have a wooden table right you think it's wood um and or it's wood but you're wondering is it rough or is it smooth you have to touch it you have to actually act on it and find out and then gives you more sensory information and oh it is smooth or it is rough now right but it's that whole that Curiosity by acting on your environment so that you can get more information to gain that understanding and yeah great so the spatial web would be using a kind of it would instead of deep learning which where you're just training the agent on on data that pictures or words or whatever um what's what happening with the active inference in this so it's taking in real time information through sensory data in like iot sensors so you have cameras you have robotics you have devices all kinds of things that are feeding real-time information um into the network and then you also have all of the um hsml that has been programmed into the network with providing context for all of the entities in the spaces and their inter relationships with each other so so when in active inference when you're taking in these the sensory information you're measuring it against what to be true the model that you've built of your world right and it starts out as an infant it's just your mother and then you start opening up to the room around you and the other people in the room and as children evolve and we evolve into adults we start getting into more specialized intelligences but you know it's that expansion of our own world model by this constant interaction with our environment and learning in that way that's how these active inference agents are going to learn they're going to be constantly taking in real-time data through uh sensory input measuring against what they know to be true which is the the model they've developed from all of the context baked into all the things in the world around them yeah um they'll be operating from their own frame of reference like whether it's like right now I'm here I'm sitting in my house and so this is my frame of reference uh my frame of reference expands on things that I learn things that I've St studied things that I'm My Own programming basically yeah I mean this is what I call like a way making or I think of as navigability in terms of just that throughout our life we're born and we go through all these experiments and when we do develop what you could call a model um even though it's not like a static thing that's sitting inside your body more your body itself in the interaction ongoing um but you develop a way of being in the world so as to keep being in the world and so I guess what this is going to do is help in in a way extend that so it's almost um we almost have to kind of rethink what it even like it almost feels weird to call it artificial intelligence now even though of course it's in that um scope to me to me when like with because my whole channels are spatial web AI but to me just because what you just said and I mean if you listen to Gabriel Renee or any of the versus Team they're like doing natural intelligence not artificial intelligence so to me it's like autonomous intelligence that's good I feel like that's what AI is going to be transitioning into actually meaning when it's referring to this you'll have autonomous intelligence systems um yeah is it still human Centric though because I hear the word natural used a lot and it's almost like natural versus artificial and of course with Carl's work and active in inference I mean it's literally building from a living Dynamic biological system so it's um but I wonder is it like do you really how do you think of that do you see that as a kind of a dichotomy that um or is it blurring a lot this idea of natural and artificial is it what is the natural part well the natural part is because the way these intelligent agents learn is the way we learn the way life way that that biological systems learn according to active inference which is based on the free energy principle and free energy principle is how neurons learn um so that's why it's termed natural intelligence because it's the intelligence of nature now um which is another confusion Because deep the Deep learning people think it comes from the brain but it's actually not not really the way that life works it just has the name like that it's yeah no engineering it's inspired by of engineering yeah versus science right you know I mean that's really the difference what's really interesting is that um Jeffrey Hinton came from University College London Carl friston University College London at one point they worked across the hall from each other that's crazy but you know Jeffrey focused on um an engineering approach and Carl was like no I'm yeah and like you were saying before it's it's not either or I mean we have this AI traditional AI deep learning it's pretty amazing that we can use it to better understand things to save ourselves time and energy um for as far as like um the only approach to AI it's just not sustainable energy-wise yeah that's really interesting is versus just gave a demo a few weeks ago demonstrated what they so they've been doing these AI Benchmark tests that are like really important within the AI industry because they so like looking at the Go Arcade games and stuff yeah like aari challenge yeah and what was really interesting is um in one of the benchmarks which I think was playing pong right all right you know the fastest best deep learning machine could get to a human level performance within two hours they did it within 12 minutes W and they did it at like 1% the model size and they did it on a standard laptop using a standard uh graphics card so that's yeah that's a huge difference too that means that um that means that all of the energy resources required for the AI is distributed yeah among our devices we're already using right incredible yeah so much more like the body learns because you can't yeah you have to learn in that kind of a at that kind of a pace too as you're talking I'm realizing it's spatial web but it's also spacio temporal I mean there's a whole time um Paradigm Shift happening here too yeah it's exciting to me and that's why like um because I think maybe because I've seen like the vision unfolding and I've kind of knew knew it was coming right yeah you know to know that they did it and it's even bigger than anybody imagined and it's just it's exciting to me because I've known what this the potential of this could be I and I think I think once people start to see really clear understanding of what sets their technology apart from what is happening in the um the Deep learning world I think that there's going to be a lot light bulb moments this year where people are going to start really understanding oh this is Dan Mapes he he refers to um the this collective intelligence within the network as a um nervous system for the planet I mean it's pretty interesting I think we I mean we already gosh it's already been some time but I really um I really think it's important to talk about that idea of transparency that idea of Energy Efficiency you talked about it a little bit already but this that people could own their own data um there's all these things now that we assume as I was saying we have this kind of system and we assume it has to be this way that we have to give over our data that we have to go through a middle we don't really own our domains all this we just assume is the way it should be also what you were just describing about the efficiency the time we spend so much energy and it's not transparent all these things I guess when I was asking you about what are the kind of visions of spatial web I see there's a bigger there's a philosophical Vision too and a value based and we haven't mentioned that word yet but there's a value shift right now we take for granted that we just are addicted to our phones and our computers but those are algorithms those are things that those are that's on purpose um doesn't have to be that way right isn't this opening up like another way for people to imagine how that they could use technology yeah and I what I think it's going to do is it's going to integrate itself um into our daily lives a lot more naturally um because it will'll be we'll be interacting with sensors and interacting with all of these different um elements of it and we'll have so everybody's going to have their own active inference agent personal assistant that's going to be able to help parse all this crazy amounts of data that we are that that we encounter it's going to be able to um help us navigate all of this information according to our own preferences and desires too right now like you said we're all subjected to these algorithms that are predatory yeah they're built to be I mean that's the way they're built because that's how they get attention and money and and we're going to have a lot more control over our data because we'll be able to um will be able to decide how and when it's shared and for how long and with whom and um people will still trade data for um access and different things like that but the difference is you'll actually control a lot more of the Nuance with it and you'll be able to decide and there will be a value exchange that actually rewards you directly yeah I mean it sounds wonderful but how I mean for I can imagine people listening and they're thinking this sounds great but I don't see it has to the protocol and the way the protocol works right so the way H hstp hyperspace transaction protocol um every all entities right so people places things spaces every entity has an identity and and uh becomes a domain and so is it kind of a blanket sensor that just goes over the whole earth or something I mean I guess I'm trying to understand how there's going to be a registry right and the um to be able to access domain domains through activities um it will require credentials right so um credentials that can prove Identity or ownership or um Authority or um I mean all of that right so so there's more transparency not less right because the control is in your hands it's in the user's hand so um I will be able to control who can have access I'll be able to go to the doctor and tell the doctor like okay you can access this information this guard railed amount of information for this long you can put an expiration on it there the spatial web enables um zero zero trust architecture right so um because it's going to be powered by AI within it too there will be able to be con confirmation of certain um aspects of data that where you don't even have to reveal it to a source you don't have to reveal the sensitive data but it can be confirmed within the network so it completely protects your your private data there there's so much privacy protection one of the things um that Dan told me a while back that when he and Gabe were really contemplating um how to do what this protocol would need to be they really wanted to solve the three main problems with the worldwide web which is like hacking track in and faking right so surveillance um the whole hacking and um hacking tracking and faking that's yeah good way to say it so it is it's secure and it truly is decentralized and so the power then is in the hands of all of the individuals everybody within the space you're AI agent your personal agent is going to be able to know all of your details and know know you so well but that will be guard railed um it's not going to be accessible unless you give permissions and its nuanced permissions it's not just like oh you can access me it's like right now that's what we have you can access or not yeah or you just give your data away a blanket statement yeah I think that's um I mean I think people just assume that's the only way it can be too and it's kind of amazing to realize how much we just sign away that stuff or whatever the next five years or forever or whatever and this is more like a disappearing message or something where you can share it for the amount of time it needs to be shared and then it's not there anymore and that's possible with this technology that's clearly um yeah there yeah and then when you think about like even what that's going to do for for business and for like big Enterprise organizations one of the issues that Enterprise organizations have right now is um a lot of them are saying saying to their employees don't use these llms don't use chat GPT don't use them and the biggest reason why is because of the privacy concerns an Enterprise organization has all this proprietary data that's opening their data up to a third party that is not part of their organization yeah now with the spatial web you can guard rail any aspect of the data because you can guardrail the domains you can guardrail the data as domains and so when you've got an Enterprise organization that Enterprise that can be within the network and guard railed off to where the capability is still there to build agents within that guard railed part of the network it can learn off of all of that data it can access the network but it can protect all of the data within that Enterprise right that Enterprise can decide who in their organization can access what data that Enterprise can decide what data is allowed to be access by the public or what parts of the public or memberships or anything like that Enterprise most Enterprises have several disparate data Lakes right where they've got data from this part of the company data from this part of the company and there's no way to join those data that's like those silos you were talking about before now with this the data is all getting they can build these intelligent agents that can share the data learn and they can create they can gain insights that they never had before in their uh companies but it all stays proprietary and it's not private and transparent weirdly yeah yeah so it's really interesting I mean I think when people really start to understand what's happening here and what's being built and they start to really think about the implications of it they're going to see that it's it's pretty powerful what do you see what do when you're thinking it's powerful what do you envision like what what would be your kind of one one scenario that's makes you I don't know that that's happy or good or for the future once people do realize this because it is a lot to think about all these terms and it's hard to get your head around but like how do you imagine that this could in your own life or your someone's life you love change how would it change their life for the better yeah so it depends on how like near or far in the future you want to go um although when I say far in the future to me that's just like five years five years but let's go five 10 years best case yeah five 10 years I mean honestly I feel like it's going to really shift the way we um experience life as humans and I think that it's going to enable us to shift in all kinds of ways um the all of this technology it's going to usher in this realm of abundance I feel like it's a transaction protocol it's blockchain agnostic all blockchains can work within it all um I feel like we're already seeing a shift away from Fiat into digital currency and I feel like within the spatial web then we're really going to get to that value exchange position right to where it our idea of what we've had for money I think will completely shift so um I feel like everything that we um that we understand about the way we interact with each other the way we interact with technology it's all going to um I think it's just going to change into a way like I I know a lot of people think um when I talk like this that it's um it sounds very utopian but um I definitely see there can be so much good in this I I think that right now as a society we've been so used to kind of scratching and clawing for existence there's been this competitive nature because of that right um we we have a society that operates off of ego and um there there's just so much um it's funny so maybe this just popped into my head but there I forget who it was I think it might be in like CS Lewis's like like some of his writings and stuff but it was a distinction between aspiration and ambition and it says ambition okay yeah aspiration is High um ambition is just higher than someone else like with ambition you're just trying to be higher than the next person but am but aspiration is high right so the ideal it's the ideal that you're going for your own personal best and I think that we're going to we have the potential to kind of shift as a society to where we're kind of like looking more outward we're more Community focused we're more we're less we're less in that vein of just trying to get better than the next guy or get the the next thing to higher up to I don't know and maybe I don't even know as you're talking I'm thinking about how technology is such a big important part in so many people's lives personally but also work and how it does dep on this kind of judgment um likes follows how you look on Instagram or whatever I mean we've really gotten stuck in a way with u what the algorithms have the param have parameterized for us what's that yeah it's that reward function the dopamine and all that but just also that we I wanted to talk about this idea of a sense of self um you talked about it with um Mal I think but I'll just have to link to it but there's this um there's also this the way you were describing the agent or the AI or the um the technology it's kind of going to develop a bit of a sense of self because it's biological but because it's interacting with us it's also opening up how we can see ourself in the same way that the old technology the stuff we're still using now which is great but also has really Limited in a way um the ways we think of self so when you said you see it opening up our experience of the world it made me think like maybe we're going to look around ourselves again and notice the space we're in um and start thinking of self differently as more spatial instead of clicks and likes and images on screens and all this yeah I would definitely agree with that I think it's going to to that point I think it is it's going to be able to enable us to interact with technology more in the world yeah it will take us it will take us from being um Tethered to the devices which is yeah do you experience that in your life are you also or gosh if I leave the if I don't have my phone like say I accidentally leave the house which that never happens anymore if I leave house my phone it's like oh my gosh you feel naked you feel like a a part of you is missing and I know everybody feels that way your battery dies on your phone oh my God God have you experienced any kind of like disconnection from space the world because I I keep coming back to this idea of natural and I start I wonder if this is also going to be um an advocate so to speak for other beings and forms of life um in a way have you ever thought about that like or in your own life do you have you experience some kind of way in which your focus has gone more toward technology and could open up ecologically through something like this technology well so to me it's not all negative because in that vein I actually so I live in South Lake Tahoe right now I've been up here since the beginning of Co wonderful um when I came up here it was with my ex-boyfriend we have not been together for the last two years so I've been here by myself but all my friends are like in the Bay Area or Southern California or the rest of the globe right so um and because I was up here for the first two years with him it wasn't like I was out trying to make friends so I it feels kind of isolating up here but you know I've also been working really hard for the last two years and so the Solitude I've been embracing it and just keeping my head down and building and stuff but a lot of my social needs are met through technology right now that's how I'm keeping in touch with my friends and we do the same silly stuff as everybody body else just send each other memes and all kinds of stuff you know but those are little touch points of connection and I think they're important because you're not just sharing something you're sharing things that you will find like a common laugh or a common heartstring that you're pulling together that kind of stuff it's beyond just sharing benign images but um but and like Facebook and stuff like that that really that helps me feel connected with the people in my life even though I'm not near them so I think that's really cool now the way this technology is evolving yeah it would be pretty cool to be able to like jump into a space and feel like I was in the room with my friends and we could all just like gather like that or like I've thought for years like why is teleportation still not a thing all those sci-fi books made it seem like we'd be having it by now yeah yeah maybe it's just a different teleportation that we're gonna so yeah that would be exciting I think it's great you brought that up because um I mean technology is wonderful and it's not either or and we do uh connect very deeply through technology um it's not that we in a way that it's opened up ways for us to connect and um I don't know do you think that's kind of the point of it in a way I do so it's interesting um because I have friends that they get they feel very pressured by technology they feel um I think that a lot of I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're all individuals and we all have different psychological makeup we all have different experiences and traumas and different things like that we're emotional so I know some friends that they feel a lot of insecurity and a lot of um pressure from social media to where it really deters them from wanting to have a whole lot to do with it because otherwise then they kind of get sucked into this rabbit hole that makes them feel really bad about themselves yeah yeah and I've always kind of approached social media differently than that because to me I've seen it more as the positive sides of it of like oh great like when my kids were young family members were always wanting me to email them pictures great now you could just check my Facebook it's a bulletin board it'll let you feel like you're involved to email people it easier for me and we can all keep in touch that's true wonderful thing so like to me I've seen a lot of positives I like even with like Facebook with the Facebook memories and stuff like that's cool to me I love seeing stuff e even like things that you maybe wrote as like little like posts 10 10 years ago now right and it's like oh my past self is giving advice to My Future Self because that's res with me aspects of it that maybe nobody even considered but um it's kind of unfolding that way so I tend to like look at those parts of it and the positive sides and then also too like when I first got a smartphone I turned notifications off on everything because it killed me like I was like I can't be interrupted every second of my day like I I just can't so I think part of it is taking control of the technology and making it work for you right because to me that was too much of a distraction it's like okay well I'll check my email every 10 15 minutes during a work day I'll I'll do these things but I don't want it dinging me constantly because then it'll drive me nuts yeah um I did the same do and as you're talking I'm thinking maybe there's because I know a lot of people who are really familiar with technology do these kinds of things and don't take it as seriously as or don't get as sucked into the um the aspect of it that where you're comparing yourself and feeling bad but those are real spaces for people but do you think there's something about having thought about technology worked with technology for so long that's given you a way to um have that kind of distance or space to be healthy about it and enjoy the emotional side of it without the judgmental side um or is it just you like your personality or I I really don't know um because it's really kind of hard to say because I've actually had kind of I I'm definitely somebody who embraces change and a lot of people have a fear of change right and I think that comes down to the free energy principle that fear of that uncertainty a lot of people that that creates this sense of fear because they're uncomfortable with it you like surprise maybe a little bit Yeah to me in my life that's where I've found possibility possibility lies in the the surprise and it's kind of like in physics could always go one way or the other so um but for the last probably I would say probably at least since like 2008 2008 is watching what was happening with technology and seeing things that were unfolding and things that were starting to really wake up um with these emerging Technologies I have just felt like lucky to be alive right now to be able to witness this and you can't stop any of it so find your place in it then you actually have this opportunity to make a difference and so I've been so preoccupied with that mental state that I think it lets me embrace all these things in this way that's very beautiful yeah I think people maybe who aren't that entrenched in that kind of a excitement over it all um then maybe they get preoccupied with other aspects of it and um it has a different effect on their mental state and there's something about understanding how it works even when we were talking about the Deep learning and understanding that you're just being fed a bunch of stuff that was trained like once you kind of understand that it does take uh it does give you at least for me I guess I'm speaking for myself it's easier to not take it so seriously and to understand it's it's it is just what it is and maybe you can um use your own agency to decide how you're going to use it but yeah and you can kind of laugh at it at that point you can like there was a meme that I saw and it was probably a couple of years ago now but it was like my favorite way of shopping is just to call out what I want and let you know Facebook serve me an ad for it right right that's great and it's that it's like what you're talking about it's the understanding of the underlying of How It's all working so it allows you have a playfulness with it I think that's very healthy um yeah well so I guess to end I want to hear about what you've been working on all these years I want you everyone to kind of know but this is called love and philosophy it's really Beyond dichotomy too but I wonder about that word love like we've been talking about all this technology and stuff but do you feel like when you look at these this what you're doing your work and um what you're sharing with people it's a a big word I know but does it feel like that or like passion or like something that goes deep in you oh yeah yeah I'm definitely very passionate about what I've been doing and it's because I do see a good outcome from all of this I do see like the good that that can come from all of this technology and with what I see that Verses has been building and doing too I feel like they're doing it the right way they're doing it with kind of the benefit of humanity in mind it's very Mindful and or something yeah yeah and to me I see a lot of Promise in this next era of computing whereas we've been kind of in this state of like the technology has been taking advantage of all of us feel like we're moving into this space where that's going to shift and that's pretty exciting and that me I just see that can only result in so much good well thank you for your optimism and for it feels like it's a very authentic place that you're coming from um and just kind of to end like tell us what you're doing I'm really interested in your substack for example I found some very interesting articles there which I wanted to talk about but we're out of time but what would you like people to know or how can they find you well so um yeah so education right now is my focus on this space and so I've been doing a lot of writing I've been doing a lot of podcasting um this year in January started a Substack excuse me because um I wanted to be able to kind of have a space where we could build community around it there there's so many people I've been meeting who are interested in it they're working on projects or there there's a lot of people who are either coming from the developers side or the the education side or the research side or even the investor side right and they're all curious they all want to know and so I wanted a space where people could find Synergy and kind of connect with each other and we could all learn together so so yeah I started the Substack and then I've also been hosting these learning Lab live sessions so monthly I'm creating a a new presentation every month that's an educational presentation to kind of introduce these Concepts and walk people through it and I do two different days with two different times so that people could try to I've got people coming from all over the globe so um that must be exciting wow yeah it's been great yesterday was the first one for this month so we did it last month there were two sessions this one was a brand new presentation um it's like a 40 minute presentation and then about 45 minutes of just open discussion and everybody has been participating it's been so fun the discussion's become my favorite part so you present um on some particular almost like a class or yeah wonder and I'm gonna be using the videos for for a larger curriculum that I'm building around this um yeah and this month was on the spatial web protocol that's what the presentation is for this month and it's an overview it's a very in-depth overview but it's the beginning of what I'm creating for like this e-learning class around the actual protocol uh itself because it's very detailed and it's going to be um it's going to be made public soon so when it is then there'll be something that people can actually learn from oh good so at some point that's that's where my focus is right now there's already a lot people can learn you already have given you have a ton of content um just explaining what this is and I encourage people to go I would say read it and listen to the podcast and will there'll be a way so if I join I was telling you I was trying to do the substack but it didn't work quite well but once I join can I go back and look at the are you recording the lectures that you gave and you'll have them in an archive or something or yeah so they are being recorded um I'm still trying to figure out how that's going to work because it the classes are for the paid membership on the substack and so I have to be able to host them in a way that can be accessed by MERS sector so I'm figuring that out um but yes the probably it goes into the classes anyway at some point so yeah but it's EXC it's exciting because right now people are starting to find out about this I mean it's I think the book came out in 2018 2019 spatial web but that's actually not that long ago for these kind of things it feels long when it's happening but it's starting to really break now and it's great that you're right there riding the wave and helping people understand it so thanks for that and I'll be sure to link to all this um oh thank you so much Andrea I appreciate it and thank you thank you for having me on your show this has been a really real nice it's been a really nice conversation yeah it's been fun to talk to you is there anything that you want to say before we go we didn't talk about yet that we should touch on real quick or I mean I my my one thing that I will say is I want people to get excited about this because the opportunity it's not like it's not like this is something that's distant in the future this is all unfolding this year right now versus uh genius platform it's in beta with a closed beta but they're opening it up up to the wider developer Community this summer so yeah it's upon us now is the time yeah if you want to be at the Forefront okay well that's good to know I'm glad to hear that and I wish you lots of luck and I'll be following you oh thank you so much same here great thanks bye bye bye [Music]
2024-05-14 05:14
