hello how's everybody doing at this time that my favorite well one of my favorite sci-fi authors Douglas Adams refers to as the long dark tea time of the Soul guys that's that's what gen xers call Sunday scaries guys doing all right all right wow all right well let's change Vibes not permanently just momentarily in August my mom passed away and it was the Apex of a year of sustained grief she had a brain tumor that turned out to be double bad news it was a metastasized uterin cancer and over the
course of a year we lived 100 % of maso's no not maslo the Kubler Ross stages of grief right there was a little bit of denial there was a whole lot of anger fair amount of bargaining right and gradually the depression and then the acceptance but gradually grief gave way to relief and we moved to the least discussed and certainly least published six phase that nobody ever talked talks about cleaning gale force clean up mom had a little house but that little house was full of a lot of memories so
many memories because Mom was a collector she wasn't a hoarder but she was a Storyteller and nothing filled her cup more than collecting the momentos and memories of our small family's journey through this world and mom was a widow and I was an only which meant that I had the burden and the blessing of going through all this stuff picture after picture after picture ranging from in this case the the poetic to the profound to the problematic I love my dad but that stuff doesn't fly in 2024 goodn
ess gracious dad but like John Lennon said right life's what's busy or life's what happens when you're busy making other plans and most of the pictures that we found were what what you might say is prosaic which is geek speake or or nerd word for everyday Slice of Life stuff like little me hanging out my jams enjoying the 1982 version of screen time and what's this kid watching well Mom collected that too because she doesn't just have photo she has every art project I ever did since the moment I
popped out of the womb for example the forensic file carbon dated suggests that this picture likely finds me watching Star Wars two years later my Nuance taste had evolved to the geekery of Star Trek and by age nine I was all in on Transformers now it wasn't enough for me to be a consumer of Science Fiction I wanted to be a producer of Science Fiction which was why at the ripe old age of 10 I wrote my first book Marty the Martian's day in space which mom also collected next to all the other tri
nkets Curiosities and surprises now are you guys ready for today's first science fiction reading that sounded decidedly half-hearted and I don't blame you because I would not trust a 10-year-old children's author writing for fellow 10-year-olds but here we go Marty the Martian's day in space Marty the Martian was looking for fun he flew his dad's spaceship up to the Sun the temperature grew warmer the closer he got forget this place it's much too Hal I was quite proud of myself and to think ther
e were nine more planets 36 more Rhymes where that came from God help my parents my teachers and my siblings that I never had here's the thing fast forward I've got the solar system figured out let's go Interstellar let's graduate from science fiction to science fact in what might be the world's worst fifth grade science project I decided to go ahead and prove Einstein's hypothesis that there was something called a black hole now if that weren't questionable enough you should have seen the appro
ach also documented in mom safe science project this little twerp took took a Mac hoop placed a black garbage bag inside it took a lead weight spray painted it black so as to create a super massive Singularity here's where it gets good put marbles around the edge of the macra hoop put it on two chairs in the dining room and per the saved science project abstract quote observed the marbles Behavior daily for a month mind you we're not accounting for EXO variables like the dog but the punch line i
s this six marbles fell in two marbles fell out two remained on the rim Argo QED black holes most certainly exist sounds like good science to me and it did to my fifth grade teacher too Miss Gambino who is a musician and an Arts person she said it's such a good story and the science is interesting then I met my junior high science teacher in sixth grade he said are you the uh you the black hole kid I said yes sir he goes between you me and the heavenly father that shit's not going to fly in juni
or high so folks I was deeply conflicted Oh wrong way by e8th grade per our graduation booklet also saved by Mom I didn't know whether or not I wanted to be an Entertainer or a computer engineer and I was facing what my team has come to learn is something called a dichotomy a dichotomy a division or contrast between two things that feel completely opposite completely different what am I going to do I don't know uh a dichotomy between arts and science uh uh uh that wasn't the only one I was feeli
ng a dichotomy between respectability and Rebellion look at that Grunge guitar Vibe topped off with the young Republican haircut this kid was mixed up from the jump well all the way through college I talked to the guidance counselor I said I don't know what I want to do I love to read and write and create and tell stories but I'm also decent enough you know at math and science I had improved since the black hole affair and my guidance counselor gave me advice that I'll never forget and I slightl
y regret he said well our Engineers start at 40 Grand a year our arts and letters graduates typically go to graduate school and that costs about 40 Grand a year and so I jumped right into engineering and I hated it not because of the content but because of the format right the medium is the message in the medium was too cold these people were asleep they were disengaged and so I said are there any arts and letters careers that make money maybe maybe I can be a lawyer so I jumped into pre-law and
it was too hot like Goldilocks right it was too hot they literally enjoyed arguing with each other for a living and I thought this ain't it either and I'm looking out the window and I see these long-haired hippies and I think to myself I wonder what those kids major in anthropology which worked for me because I was a fledgling hippie by this chapter and there was a really cute young woman in the class with whom I shared a shocking degree of Interest married three kids happily ever after but tha
t's not important right now what's important right now is that I ended up meeting a professor who would curiously teach me more about technology and the future than anybody I would have ever found in our engineering school his name was Professor James Bellis may he rest in peace past last year big loss Professor Bellis or Jim he insisted he focused on physical anthropology and he focused on human evolution and I'll never forget he told us he said listen technology is a puffy chested fourl four s
yllable synonym for Tool and tools have been Inseparable from The Human Condition from the jump he said the first Homo habilis 2.7 million years ago fashioned the first sharpen stone tools as a hack to free precious human cycles for higher order Pursuits 5,000 years ago the Sumerians recorded the first written language as a hack to free precious human cycles for still higher order Pursuits right you don't have to remember everything all the time because we got it well jump forward the printing p
ress a hack to free precious human Cycles for higher order Pursuits in this casee you don't have to repeat yourself all the time because we got 30 copies of it well we all know where this went oh can I get some volume please old I think it might have been let me back that up really quick I remember uh reading an article when I was about 12 years old I think it might have been in Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth uh how many
kilo calories did they expand to get from point A to point B and the Condor one uh came in at the top of the list uh surpassed everything else and humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation and uh but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor all the way off the top of the list and it it made a really big impression on me that we humans
are tool Builders and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes and so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind uh something that that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities and uh I think we're just at the early stages of this tool well under statement of the century the first computer was a hack to free precious human Cycles from having to calculate and that gave way to the worldwide web which was a hack to save pr
ecious human Cycles from having to collaborate inefficiently remember crowdsourcing 2006 the idea that a sufficiently large number of amateurs properly aligned could equal or exceed the value of a singular paid expert the end of cisc and eberts and the beginnings of rotten tomatoes and IMDB's and then here we are folks from a bicycle for the mind to a motorcycle for a mind to a rocket ship for the mind the point is the future of technology is anchored in the history of technology and none of thi
s stuff is a random unprecedented Revolution it's a series of shockingly straightforward evolutions that predate homo sapiens now armed with this anthropological Mojo fast forwarding 20 years my team of futurists and I at deoe are partnering up with the world economic Forum the mission paint emerging Technologies in a way that businesses and governments around the world can understand them inoculate these folks against the snake oil against the Mindless optimism against the grumpy skepticism sep
arate signal from noise and get down to breast tax for those of you who joined my session last year we chronicled this in great detail we call our model A Brief History of the future the recognition that the interfaces of today spatial Computing AR VR headsets that's not snake oil it's simpler and simple tense to win that that artificial intelligence and data science advances are all about getting smart SM because smarter has only ever won and that the number crunching Place underneath tends to
move towards abundance because stronger always wins and we showed this to our stakeholders at the world economic Forum in Switzerland and we said not only that but we've got case stories and understandable business examples to prove every point and our stakeholders in Switzerland were quite happy about it they said this is good because they have the case studies which makes it real and I said yes I'm glad you like it and Fritz if you like that you're going to love this because we're going to dra
w towards those end games and use that same science to project those precious few technologies that will in fact be worthy of your time your talent and your treasure and the team looking equally happy they said this is great then will you have the case studies I said Fritz this stuff literally takes place in the future and one of the problems with that is that we do we we definitionally don't have case studies and there was a Vibe shift Fritz said but the case studies make it real well with a mi
x of inspiration and hallucination and perspiration I said ah well here's an idea what if we took Memoirs written from imagined personas in the year 203 something 2040 something 2050 something documenting their successes struggles even failures with these emerging not ready for Prime Time texts and Fritz said you're talking about make believe I saidwe prefer to call it speculative fiction he said ' have you done this before my inner voice said it's been a while but my outer voice said trust us a
nd our client Ruth wasn't having it that's another story my teammate Raquel right up here in front brought to life augmented in virtual reality Gog in the form of a story about a young woman in Southeast Asia who not only learned medicine but was able to practice surgery Halfway Around the World using Advanced Physical robotics after a short flash I was in a tunnel speeding down a water slide on an inner tube on closer inspection I realized it wasn't a tube at all it was a red blood cell I looke
d up with just enough time to dodge a flying platelet of course I smiled I was inside an artery how did Med students manage in a world before Sims best guesses instincts I suppose every generation looks at their predecessors with a mix of reverence and pity how did they learn and accomplish so much with so little my teammate Lucas wrote a story about a chief algorithms officer named Frank and our designer gave him a man bun which was very exciting yti pants robot ordered a 30% pay cut for the en
tire company including you and me our quote fair market value is apparently significantly lower than Legacy HR estimates it can do that even as VP ofal go I honestly had no idea the program had that kind of agency now folks when we shared these stories and stories like Maple a social media influencer 30 years out and then our client from the world economic Forum wrote a story about Alex uh a bureaucrat managing surveillance States The splinternet decentralized Ledger not only did we end up creat
ing the most red World economic Forum Flagship report of 21 but these stories these stories ended up being the most downloaded assets on the site that year and what it showed us team and this is a big honk and takeaway what it showed us other than that the Swiss finally came around and they say never let the truth get in the way of a good story but I cannot tell this kind of lie folks this was Peak pandemic this was all over Zoom right but what it taught us were four critical takeaways and I wan
t to share these learnings with you because what we're finding is this is shaping the very fabric of the way we do Futures work in emerging technology research with our clients around the world one stories are the original Information Technology as a geek I imagine the optimal communicative method wherein let's say I want to move something from my Noggin to your Noggin I might see this picture it's pretty swell and if I could I would goop bloop and you would go without having to hear anything ou
t of my mouth you'd go yeah but I hate to break it to you the media's obsession with brain computer interfaces notwithstanding take it from a geek this stuff ain't ready and so we have to settle for what we might call a lossy application programming interface highly compressed and highly problematic it's called Speech it's called language and the sounds coming out of my mouth run through the perturbations of the air surrounding us run through the perturbations of your ear and cortex result in ha
lf understood signal now it's worse than that because the truth is we're living in an age of what I call Weapons of Mass distraction right we're sitting here we're like half on our phone and we're half on the zoom and the teams thing with the back and the TV's on and oh my God and it's all of us which is why we have a bad time storytelling is the original Information Technology because storytelling hot wires the connection from fields to Fields this is the agta tribe in the Philippines these cat
s are remarkable because they haven't just survived right survival is a hell of a feat in Modern Age but they've thrived they're doing just fine and a big part of it anthropologists believe is their facility with selecting Chieftain not who are the tallest or the fastest or the strongest the oldest the wisest none of this they're the best storytellers because storytelling is the cultural carrier signal that brings the beacon from the elders to the youth with minimal loss and compression storytel
ling is the original hack now there's a certain kind of Storytelling called fiction which excels as a means of making meaning a really uninspired executive might say my problem with fiction is that it's not factual and I get it but there's more going on here moving from the Philippines to the Western tradition Aristotle created something called the Aristotelian rhetorical triangle though I'm sure he just called it the rhetorical triangle triangle and the way it works is that if you're going to c
ommunicate any story into somebody's head with maximum efficacy you need to pull three levers and it has to be all three the first is logos logic is it smart the second is ethos credibility should I trust you but the third is pathos feeling am I moved why does this matter why does this matter for business well let me show you in our report we started our research with smarty pants smartness there was science there was Data it was quantitative it was great and the early reception felt like this w
ell we Zed it up a notch we said well if you recall this ain't just a couple of schmoes here we're talking about the world economic forum and deoe which elevated the enthusiasm to roughly this they don't dislike it they just but oh my God you put the stories in the mix it's the Spoonful of Sugar that helps the medicine go down I had a boss when I was a cook at a restaurant New Mexico he said you always put the lime juice on the fajitas before you serve them to the damn table I said why he said b
ecause we don't sell the steak we sell the sizzle the point team is that when you're firing on all three cylinders intellectual heft credible source and the fields you are unstoppable and so fiction is a means of getting to those fields of bringing sugar to that medicine that other people wouldn't otherwise take let Give an example I'm in high school it's sophomore year I'm sitting there reading Animal Farm by George Orwell and I remember saying to my mom mom check this line out all animals are
equal but some are more equal than others my mom goes you realize that book's not about animals don't you I was back to this guy right two years later mom's wife watching her favorite movie on television The Wizard of Oz she probably in the DVD era watch that thing three times a year she loved it and me being this smart High School senior I come in I go ma you know what I learned in school today it's not about witches and flying monkeys at all bom was talking about us monetary policy and our adh
erence to the gold standard and mom looks at me and she goes don't ruin it for me the point though being that fiction has a superpower of both activating the fields and of serving as a trojan horse for truths that are too profound or profane to hit on the nose because there's no way some 17-year-old kid's going to get through a book about the bulvik revolution but you make it horses and pigs and I'm all in now we get to science fiction now we get to the fun stuff speculative fiction is a trojan
horse for today people wonder they go they go sci-fi we got enough problems today why would I worry about tomorrow why would I focus on the freaking future well when I was a kid I was into the spaceship side of this stuff right I mean I was really into the spaceship side of this stuff that book is called the Star Trek the Next Generation technical manual which details how all the fake systems and the fake ships work that's Peak geek right there but as I got older I realized that Star Trek isn't
about that at all Star Trek used space as a safe space to talk about deeply important things Star Trek had the first interracial kiss on television because it's the future and it's space and it's fine Star Trek had the United Colors of beniton the United Nations as the cast we've got we've got the the Asian-American gentleman the African-American lady we've got Spock who was sort of the embodiment of AI before AI right and then you've got Czech off who is a Russian but he was one of us because t
he Klingons are the new Russians it was brilliant and good speculative fiction is brilliant right how many times at work in a given year do we talk about Big Brother do we talk about surveillance and and double speak because Orwell wasn't writing about Asia versus Eurasia and Truth is lies and lies he was talking about a Prem mcarthism censorship autonomy freak out Dune is a big deal right now and I remember having that same discussion mom had with me on Animal Farm where we're sitting there I'm
watching Dune with my son and I look over to him and I go you realize Iraqis is the Middle East and spices oil right and he goes because you don't make a movie about that Neuromancer 1982 the future is already here it's unevenly distributed talking about the idea of man and machine cyborgs corporate overreach companies getting bigger than governments because that was already a worry then and then one of my favorites parable of the sewer written by an African-American woman in 1993 about a futur
e of ecological waste environmental disaster and the power of Faith Community right as a means to persist and survive well team when I say science fiction spec fiction is a trojan horse for today I mean it for real I worked as a CTO at a national non for-profit focused on early childhood education those are real kids who are in one of our school's real classes and that teacher Dr to Island willerford I come up to her I go hey I really want to bring Tech into the classroom I want to help she says
honey I'd love to connect these kids to the internet but I can't take my hands or eyes off these precious babies for as much as one second at that time I had been reading a book called The Diamond age by Neil Stevenson one of two Chief futurists I knew before I dared claim that title the other one was rakers while it was just here the diamond age or a young lady's Illustrated primer talked about a supercomputer the size of a tablet that would allow a kid in the proletariat to learn at such a ra
te they could become a queen so I built a 2010 version of that our team Jerry rigged an early generation iPad to listen to the classroom and demonstrate Wikipedia Amazon book previews and Google images in real time so that when the teacher wanted to grab it and show that young urban kid what a pear tree looked like she could and that would not have happened if not for the power of speculative fiction team the fourth and final thing we learned here was that humans are front and center in all of t
his and critically will be more not less important in this AI fueled Singularity is nearr future here's why I had the privilege of being quoted in Forbes a couple of months ago and they said this nuts running around talking about people when everybody should be talking about robots and I said no it's about the people I was at our deoe University which is a training campus for our executive clients right I got eight people standing around they're all Chief Financial officers the kind of people yo
u'd see on you know talking head TV with the stock tickers under their faces and I say Gang This tool is called an image diffusion model it'll show anything you want you just have to ask it you're literally limit it only by your imagination and these eight captains of industry were profoundly limited by their own imagination this one dude bro steps forward he goes show me a sunset this is the actual picture saved for posterity it rasterizes before him it's a profoundly ho hum Sunset his buddy ne
xt to him goes jimy dry did you ever hear garbage in garbage out that was a garbage request just as I'm despairing for the future of American Finance his chief of staff this young woman leader breaks into the circle she says can I try I says sure she says okay she literally cracks her knuckles I want to see potato chips versus pretzels in a fight we all look at her like you're nuts she goes that's not all potato chips get numchucks pretzels get squirt guns whole flipping things on the planet Mar
s suddenly everybody's waiting with baited breath the diffusion model too the diffusion model cranks out this masterpiece of Modern Art but here's why this matters for business grumpy Sunset guy literally steps in he goes I do believe this is going to change the trajectory of our company I'm like what the point is it's not just garbage in garbage out anymore people it's garbage in garbage squared when you're dealing with exponentials the inputs matter more not less good news that lady showed us
that it can be genius in genius squared and and frankly this feels like oh God it's that thing again a dichotomy which one's true which is it well I'm here to tell you the future is both and we are the heroes we're looking for our future is is about humans to the power of these tools when we're using little tools sticks right homohabilis sharpened rocks a mindful use can find your dinner a Mindless use can bump your leg a malicious use can hurt your neighbor you kick that up a notch to Weaponry
a mindful use well I don't know that you get a good good a good uh use out of Weaponry let's say fire fire okay cook your dinner right or burn your neighbor's house down or Lord contribute to global warming you blow it out to the jet skis rocket ships for the mind you find all the cliches are true Arthur C clarks's claim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic yeah if we do it mindfully and with great intent or maliciously Nick Bostrom will tell you yeah that's
how you get an extinction level event but notice that middle one mindlessness is malignant goofing off at scale is worse than noise it's malignancy and harm and what our team has learned is that that Top Line is alluring and worth our precious human cycles that have been freed by all the things but both of those bottom two both the mustache twisting cou vill in the red and the knucklehead that leads to unexpected outcomes in the orange no bueno and so we've created a series called dichotomies th
at details what could go profoundly right and what could go profoundly wrong with the emerging Technologies dour it's the world economic Forum fiction realization plus plus Plus or maybe plus minus with a recognition that we need to Chronicle the North and South Frontier and so it's my absolute and distinct pleasure to walk our talk and invite our authors and teammates in a sort of Garrison Keller um Lake wagon uh manner read to you a couple stories about what could go right and what could go wr
ong with generative AI specifically so let's get a little warmup Applause for ab reu Sarah mortier Nathan Bergen and Angela hang as they show you up and down on geni it's Monday morning Ary card drives itself with ease into a sharp Loop off the highway she drums her fingers incessantly on top of the steering wheel a bad habit she picked up from her father as the car parks at her office arth's ears perk up to the nostalgic voice of Anderson Cooper rendered by AI at her request her custom News pod
cast plays a snippet on the latest healthc care Scandal that makes her cringe arthy strides into her lab and greets the tired faces of her researchers for the past few weeks they've been assigned to a drug development project that could ease the symp symptoms of dementia and their board wants results as soon as possible arthy and her colleague Roger studied the latest outputs of their proprietary AI a dozen viable High Fidelity protein structures replete with percentages to indicate likelihood o
f side effects arthy guides Roger to feed a few structures into their Quantum molecule simulator to forecast viability but suddenly she receives a call in her tablet ooh aren't these in trouble Roger Jo oh shash she replies a hologram of their CEO Lars looking distraught appears on 's tablet he immediately shares a video with Ary a press release from the wh alerting the world to a novel zuntic virus identified in Zurich ary's eyes widen Lars I want to I know that's why I called Lars cuts her off
shove the current project and give me five viable vaccine options to move towards clinical testing by the end of the week Lars cuts the call short Roger and the other researchers stare at Ary well let's get started arthy gives the word and the lab Springs into a frenzy feeding the who's virus sequence into their AI while the team scrambles arthy sits still at her desk drumming her fingers nervously across the marble surface more than a decade ago her father passed away from covid-19 before a va
ccine was available even with only one Spike protein to address drug develop velopment took an entire year this newest virus could have hundreds of mutating spikes still with the speed at her fingertips now she knows her team could help millions of families like hers arthy snaps out of a revery and instructs an AI marketing assistant draft a press release about our desire to create the first vaccine work in details about my father's passing permission to generate a video using my face and voice
so the audience can better connect with the message remembering the Scandal she heard about on her morning podcast about the marketing issues of a startup named delivery Ary makes sure to send the article to salute Tech's PR manager for review then she rejoins her team she's eager to dive into the details now team let's see what can go south let's hear about the flip side the concern and keep in mind that company delivery you just heard about in RT story it's Monday morning only one today he mut
ters to himself as he sits down with his morning coffee Xavier the marketing lead of AI startup delivery is trying to cut back after dozens of alerts from his Smartwatch about caffeine fueling his anxiety and insomnia he opens a laptop for his daily download a report generated each morning with his agenda and relevant news before he can begin a leisurely read he snaps to attention as his AI assistant Cara flashes on screen you're late to an urgent meeting with AJ how did I miss that his alarm in
creases as he reads the article within the meeting invite the irony of delivery the AI that failed to deliver shocking patient testimonials reveal how the London based startup perpetuated stereotypes and prejudices toward expectant mothers in the black community the technology which leverages generative AI to create virtual training scenarios for Physicians promis reduce costs improve bedside Manner and more yet black mothers claim that Physicians trained by delivery have stereotyped them and pr
ovided inappropriate dosing for pain management says one mother it's like they trained their AI on medical thinking from the 2010s Xavier can't believe the contents of the article before he can even process Cara alerts him that the company's founder AJ is calling and Xavier knows better than to make his boss wait AJ is yelling at his team as Xavier joins what do you mean you can't retrain the program isn't that what I pay you to do Maya the head engineer hesitates to find the right words for his
temperament well uh you asked us to use the AI as a service to cut cost and the bias is baked into the vendor's training data it's going to take time a scoffs H Xavier please be more useful use brand boost for a marketing campaign that shows how inclusive we are send it up before lunch before Xavier can object AJ ends the meeting AJ had laid off over half the staff and increased Reliance on generative AI vendors which meant Xavier was the entire marketing department he Raks his hands through hi
s hair as if to call forth some ideas out of his head he opens brand boost an AI that builds multimodal marketing campaigns he rushes to enter various prompts to produce press releases and video ads and uploads them to beat the lunch deadline as the afternoon passes Xavier asks Cara to assess engagement with the post seed distributed it's not positive she declares savior's eyes widen at the flurry of comments pointing out that the ads only include white mothers and infants not the black mothers
who've been impacted by delivery savior instructs Cara book an urgent meeting with AJ at the next available time slot he looks at his coffee Mark from this morning pondering how much more caffeine he'll need to get through what looks like a horrible evening thank you team folks what we're finding with our clients is that five minutes of quality time putting yourself in the shoes of Imagine fure future protagonists not only reset your commitment to do what needs to be done tomorrow but redoubles
your commitment to do the basic bra tax hygiene you need to do today the number of Executives I talked to that think they want a geni project that actually turned out to need a data hygiene data management data governance project probably 85% and they don't realize that unless they get in these shoes now debuting for yall here today distinctly pumped to share with you two more short stories these not on gen because gen is interesting but let's be honest it's all everybody's talking about let's h
ear two stories hot off the presses by our team about the Allure and the concern of spatial Computing AKA arvr gasp metaverse the hotel room is small just like everyone said but she doesn't plan to stay long it's Tam's first time in Tokyo and she's itching to explore back home in Austin it would be dinner time but when she opens the shades bright Sun extends over a glimmering city and Mount Fuji Looms in the distance tamy puts on her smart glasses to see an annotated overlay of the city's differ
ent districts and suddenly a personalized advertisement displayed on the wall across the street catches her eye a historical architecture tour yes perfect she thinks it's happening in 2 hours even better and hosted by no way Maxwell Suzuki my favorite architect Cara book me a spot on that tour Timmy asked her AI assistant as she watch watches the city's organized Symphony of cars and pedestrians below all set 35 minutes to the starting point including a short train ride Cara Chimes Kitty as she
sips her morning coffee tamy records a video clip of her view to share with her City Planning team in Austin using an architecture app she sets the time back 500 years and Records a view of how the different neighborhoods around her have developed over the centuries once outside Tami follows a street navigation projections directing her to the train station until a group of people staring up at a construction site catches her eye she joins the crowd and a prompt appears on her right lens offerin
g to show different project phases she blinks twice to approve the overlay and swipes through the design renderings by raising a hand to gesture as she looks over the final image a survey appears would you prefer a restaurant or a clothing store on the first floor of this building Timmy holds her gaze to select restaurant and sees that 65% of people agree with her the train station overwhelms her the people the ads the signs crowd her vision so Timmy turns off all notifications except navigation
until she boards the train as her display begins counting down the stops to her destination she turns notifications back on and is presented with another Choice advertisements with human models or Kawai animations that reflect Japanese pop culture she chooses the latter and Marvels at the cute cartoons projected over the dark train Windows after doddling at the train stop Timmy realizes she's a little late and hurries down a busy Main Street she turns the corner to reach her destination and nea
rly runs into plastic construction barriers Cara pipes up I didn't realize there was a detour I can message them that you'll be late if you'd like impatiently tamy mutes Cara and scans a block she spots a group of uniform students all of whom are wearing glasses and are highlighted green indicating they speak English after A hurried explanation to one of the students she wirelessly shares a drop pin of her destination and learns from one student about a pedestrian overpass the girl Maps it for h
er and shares the root back feeling nervous about making a good impression on Suzuki tamy bows and heads off quickly at the meeting spot Suzuki has started his introduction in Japanese Timmy feels a sweat on her brow from running as she turns on her live language translation setting and Hears A dubbing of the architect's words in his own voice she briefly checks her screen to see all attendees have given recording consent and starts capturing her live feed of meeting Suzuki on the very first day
in Tokyo her teammates and Austin just aren't going to believe it otherwise so team let's lean into our final story today and then I'll be leading us through a wrap-up our final story is about the concerning side of spatial Technologies in assist of reality even if you don't love it this is the real world and you have to deal with it Amari is irked to see the Avatar of his sister disappear from his laptop Maya ended the call with him after a scold he stares out of his dorm room window for a mom
ent wondering how a call to plan his birthday ended in an argument Maya suggested an immersive gaming experience they could attend without leaving their respective States but Amari longed for an inperson meeting with his sister to EAS his loneliness they'd been Inseparable as kids but since Maya began working in Tech all she does is hype up the digital world in fact she's even bought an AI partner and a robot that simulates hugs which still confounds Amari Amari tries to shake off his doubts as
he gathers his belongings for the big day ahead he'd won a college competition to meet with renowned French architect jacqu Moro who was only going to be in town for a couple of days Amari is passionate to share his ideas for redesigning underserved neighborhoods like where he grew up in Austin to contain more green space walking trails and food sources the physical needs that cities have ended up neglecting in favor of expanding Digital Services he Daydreams about working with jacqu as he walks
across campus until his friend Kayla calls out to him from across the road Amari starts to cross over when from the corner of his eye he spots a car speeding toward him Kayla screams Amari hurls himself out of the way just in time in disbelief he watches the car speed away and he recognizes the license PL Kayla rushes over to help Amari stand up someone's going to get killed by a driver wearing smart contacts they need to bring back the physical stop sign here Amari SI was that Casey I think so
I heard a rumor that he blocked the two of us out of his smart contacts ever since we called him out in class for being privileged amar's jaw drops as Kayla details other classmates who had blocked those they disagreed with his mind whirls how many realities is he excluded from how could people turn him into a ghost I have to go Amari says speeding off in a days he rushes into an office for a scheduled meeting and is greeted by a robotic assistant who leads him to a booth and directs him to wea
r a pair of smart glasses as he does so the face of jock Moro slowly spreads across the wall in front of him hi Mari pleasure to meet you you I arranged for this office so you could borrow some glasses I know you might not be able to afford them I thought we would meet in person Amari responds surprised as it at his own curtness he didn't expect this ah you see but this is how Architects work now you'll have to get used to it jacqu rolls his eyes as he displays and manipulates models of City pla
ns that Amari sent in advance but Amari is distracted by the self viw in the corner of his eyes it makes his skin look much lighter than his usual complexion was that a setting forced by J as the architect begins to Rattle on about the need for changes in demographics and urban centers amar's neck hair stand up for the remainder of the call as he tries to get in a word he can't help but recall what his sister said this morning nothing about this world feels real I want some love for our authors
and readers in the Wings come on out gang there they are all right abith our primary narrator good job buddy Nathan Sarah Angela great job team great job so team our spatial Computing issue with four other individual stories will be available in about a week's time so if you want to be the first to receive it when it drops there'll be three sets of two stories so six stories on spatial Computing our episodes on Biometrics and gen are already out and we'll keep that there for you how's that for s
ome slide craft so you can keep going team some conclusory energy here with our five minutes or so remaining in a world where you can't tell what's real in a world where we've got rocket ships for the brain we understandably think what in the hell are we going to do what is the purpose and the role of humanity and I always think it's great to reach to all the traditions and and and I don't know those of you who've seen this particular Illuminating take but Buddha what makes us human okay so that
's that's not it um but what is well what I would tell you is that our team's done some real media material research discussions both quantitative and qualitative with leading researchers with our clients and with the World At Large and and one of the things that we've really found is that back to the potato sh pretzel lady Ingenuity doesn't matter less it matters more Ingenuity sits at the intersection of two uniquely human capabilities curiosity asking great questions showing up as a learner n
ot a knower wanting to know why and to do better that's curiosity creativity generativity instantiating novelty where none exists thinking to ask for the potato chip thing do we celebrate the Wonka machine that pumps it out or the lady who thought to ask Albert Einstein was Albert Einstein not because he had a giant IQ every scientist who Albert Einstein ever worked with had a pretty giant IQ what made him special was he thought to ask different kinds of questions and he thought to approach thos
e questions in different kinds of ways it was Ingenuity not IQ two empathy this feels sort of intuitive and maybe even a little squishy but we ask our clients when we get together we've talked to over 5,000 people who've contributed to this word cloud and it's a blind Cloud they don't see that empathy is the big one and so type empathy and almost universally people say it's something about empathy something about being in someone else's shoes that makes us human and there's something about story
telling fiction and spec fiction that allows us to get out of our heads and into others finally initiative this one might not seem as intuitive but I think it's a big honk and deal and here's why I sat down with a large language model and I said what's initiative said well it's you know the ability to light a candle without needing to be prompted by others it's about self-starting behavior and I thought prompted are you jealous robot and so I went there I said is it fair to say that uh you know
we uh carbon based life forms kind of better at this than you bro to which it said yes I think it's fair to say that you have Superior initiative compared to large language models in for those of you who are a deep technologists this is like the silliest parlor trick ever but for those of you who are my fellow humanist technologist you realize that this is a real thing right I was reared on movies where the robots become quote self-aware and we all have a terrible time there is nothing in the li
terature though I did miss Rey's recent talk suggesting this self-awareness grab the switch and Skynet moment right it's more like digital Sheldon Cooper who's really smart but mostly harmless when you take these three things together what I realize is it all goes back to some of my most formative memories as a kid right what is ingenuity empathy and initiative if not creating new ways to help one another without having to be asked folks I'm Goosebump hard here because my mom would tell me that
the first time she ever saw me cry at a movie was this for those of you of a certain age needs no description for those of you who've never seen it none might do but remember that quasi artificial intelligence that cold embodiment of logic Dr Spock seeing his friends in Peril proactively creatively jumped into the ship chamber radiated himself to pieces and saved everybody's life and in the eulogy when I was small watching that scene crying my eyes out Kirk says of all the souls I've met in my t
ravels his was the most human a few months ago before my mom passed I took her out for gelato every week and because South by has their act together I knew I had this presentation set up for like the last nine months and I got to telling Mom about it I said Mom we're going to be doing a talk about how fiction and specifically speculative fiction is a vehicle for business value creation and she said oh God is this this is with the Wizard of Oz and the Banks don't ruin it for him and I said no ma
it's really not about that at all it's about this idea in co8 though at the time it was I said it's about this idea that Ingenuity empathy and initiative will continue to be the keys to the castle and it was only in the last couple weeks that I realized that in class classic inimitable mom style it had been the storytelling Basics all along and so folks you can be a technologist and a humanist you can be a charismatic geek you can be a practical change maker because those aren't dichotomies they
're sides of a coin and we are the heroes we're looking for I want to thank my mom for modeling that right I love you to pieces I want to thank my team for modeling that every damn day you guys are the best and I want to thank each and all of you who stuck around during the long dark tea time of the Soul Sunday afternoon good God to join this fight with us thank you so very much folks and I'm so deeply grateful for your time thank you folks we have to my shock and surprise a minute and 15 second
s for questions I thought we'd have negative 15 so does anybody have any questions because we're certainly here for it awward all right go enjoy your Sunday folks have the best time see [Music] you
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