Our Love-Hate Relationship With Tech - Digital Explorers' Diary #46

Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #46!

A curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Executive summary:

• An exploration of the love/hate relationship between humans and technology,
• The incredible Las Vegas Shpere,
• Apple (the fruit, not the brand) picking drones,
• And Augmented Live streams, the future of concerts!

Technology: a love/hate relationship!

After a few weeks focused on creativity and interactive experiences, let’s go back a bit on the topic of Artificial Intelligence.

We may like what the machines do for us, but we don’t like what they do to us.

Jacque Fresco – The best that money can’t buy

This quote beautifully captures the essence of our relationship to any technology, and in our case, Artificial Intelligence.

We love what AI can do for us. We can work more efficiently. It completes us in areas where our knowledge is limited. It has great promises in healthcare, medicine, supply chain optimization, customer support, and virtually anything we can think of. We can generate and adjust images and videos indefinitely, even without technical art skills, and soon, voice and music will follow. We will enjoy our personal AI agent that will manage a lot of tasks for us: email, scheduling, and shopping; we are moving towards having our own personal AI.
The «A» is not standing for Artificial here, though; it’s an Augmented, Assisted, Amplified Intelligence.

On the other side… We hate what AI can do to us. It will steal our jobs. It will spread disinformation, fake news, and fake websites. It will help social media and online shopping stores to track our habits and generate precise and extremely efficient advertisements. It will steal our privacy. We will be dependent on it as much as we are now dependent on smartphones. It will facilitate hacking and be a threat to cybersecurity. And some people think it might even kill us all.

To add to the complexity, some of the effects above might not be obvious immediately and might emerge later on, or even worse; we might not even be conscious of. We love the connection to our friends through social networks, but we suffer the consequences of 1 hour of doom scrolling without knowing it. We love how fast we can unlock our phones with face recognition; we will hate when our government uses it for social credit tracking. We love a global, interconnected supply chain so we can get everything we want in days; we hate when prices rise or supply halt because of a war far from us or a pandemic that blocks whole countries.

To move forward, we need to decrease the amplitude of oscillation between these two sides, and find a middle ground, a perfect balance between risks and benefits. And for that, we all have our role to play, in our work, companies, communities and institutions. We can make the good choice. We can plant the seed of a tree our grandkids will enjoy. We can be the first stone of a cathedral whose completion we will never see.

This Week's News:

1. Just in case you didn’t see it, checkout the incredible images of the new Las Vegas Sphere. Crazy numbers:
   $2.3 billion budget, 54,000 square meters LED, 157 meters wide, 111 meters height. It seats 17,600 people, with a 20,000-person standing capacity. Ground-breaking sound system, temperature control, wind…
   The first show will be held in September with U2.
   It looks surreal… Blade Runner vibes!
2. Related, the Sphere might be great for people who can come in, but what about the ones who can’t? Something that we will see more and more is augmented livestreams that enhance and support the concerts visuals for a more immersive experience. See for example this MXR Concert Tool. Looks promising!
3. To cope with agricultural labor shortage, a company named Tevel is creating drones that can pick up Apples. Again a step towards automation of labor. The future is rushing towards us faster and faster, and we’re not ready!

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week:

1. First, we analyze a video from Meta on their new technology to reconstruct a full-body avatar movements from just the headset and the controllers. It’s a very promising technology to bring more immersion to the virtual experiences! For self-avatars – when you look at yourself – it needs to be very precise though, as even a slight variation is very uncomfortable.
2. Then, we discuss the limitations of the Apple Vision Pro. It seems that the area that you will be able to freely cover in Virtual Reality is only 1.5 meters around the starting point. Although it might be fine for at-home experiences, it really limits greatly the range of VR experiences that we will be able to create on this device.
   Important note though: this doesn’t apply to Augmented Reality. Since the release, we can see that Apple really side tracked VR to focus on «Spatial Computing», so that makes sense, but still…
3. We expressed our doubts about the market for that AR Monocle. It’s only one eye, there is no tracking of any sorts, just a simple «Assisted Reality» in front of the eye…
4. And finally, a few insights taken from that long interview of Oculus VR Headsets founder (now owned by Meta). Overall very interesting to hear what he things of Meta’s strategy, and we agree that building a community of users is what is the most important… Check it out!

Watch the podcast below, and tune in at 10 am UTC on Tuesdays on Twitch, and listen to the replays on Youtube!

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