AI's Polarization Moment - Tech Insiders News, April 2023

Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #33!

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

AI is having its COVID moment!

Ok, now that I have your attention, let me explain.

The COVID pandemic caused a huge polarization in our society. As Peter Limberg from The Stoa put it so well back in 2021, the two sides were fighting and choosing names for each other. The Covidiots are the anti-vaccine, anti-mask, «this is just a cold» side, and the Covidians are the brainwashed crowds blindly following what governments asked them to do.

As a society, we failed at collective intelligence. On both sides, surrendering to the fear of losing freedom or the fear of dying had disastrous consequences. Enforcing our confirmation biases by unconsciously selecting the media to be trusted or blindly outsourcing our sensemaking to experts, depending on your side, we all failed to see the bigger picture; and there were very few nuanced voices trying to find common ground.

It all comes down to our values: what’s important to us greatly influences our morality, and we all have different moral tastebuds we use to understand the world. Let’s dive in:

• Care/Harm: Our sensitivity to suffering and desire to care for and protect vulnerable individuals. Feelings of compassion and empathy.
• Fairness/Cheating: Our sense of justice, equality, and reciprocity. A desire to treat others fairly and our aversion to being cheated or taken advantage of.
• Loyalty/Betrayal: Our sense of belonging and allegiance to a group or community. Feelings of patriotism, loyalty, and the importance of maintaining group cohesion.
• Authority/Subversion: Respect for hierarchy, tradition, and authority. Value of social order and our inclination to follow established rules and norms.
• Sanctity/Degradation: Our desire to keep certain things or ideas sacred, pure, or untainted. Feelings of disgust and the need to protect physical, spiritual, or cultural purity.
• Liberty/Oppression: Individual freedom and autonomy. Importance of resisting tyranny, domination, or any form of oppression.

Realizing that these tastebuds express differently in each individual helps us take a new perspective on all polarizing and political issues.

How’s that related to AI?

For a couple of weeks now, we are seeing the same pattern emerging around the Artificial Intelligence topic.

A perfect example: on March 22, 2023, a letter was published by Future of Life asking the world to pause giant AI training for at least 6 months to really asses the AI risks and pause the escalation. Signatories include Elon Musk, Apple’s Steve Wozniak, and Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal known to have won the Turing Award along with Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief of AI, who… disagrees with the letter and didn’t sign it.
And here it goes. Some quote the letter, trust it and join the movement. Some say it’s a power move from Elon Musk, who wants to slow down Open AI while building its competitors. Some say 6 months is not even enough.

I could go on and on about other AI news. Just look at your LinkedIn feed and notice it unfolding out live.

To understand this, let’s get back to the moral tastebuds and apply it to AI:

• Care/Harm: Will AI steal our jobs, or will AI create a better society?
• Fairness/Cheating: Is AI biased and discriminatory, or fairer than humans?
• Loyalty/Betrayal: Is AI a threat to national security or a key element in global peace?
• Authority/Subversion: Should we regulate AI or encourage unlimited innovation?
• Sanctity/Degradation: Is AI alive? Where does humanity stand if AI becomes sentient?
• Liberty/Oppression: How will AI affect our privacy? Or is a know-it-all AI the key to public safety?

Wherever you stand on this issue, I encourage you to avoid falling into the certainty trap. Let’s accept that many things are still unknown, let’s see where the other are coming from, and we will be able to find nuance and solutions to this huge topic that is AI. Let’s be courageous and choose the nuanced big picture instead of the easy, emotional polarization.

Imagine a world where collective intelligence is prevalent and where healthy, nuanced debates exist. Is it naive? But to me, being naive now is to think that we can solve the global issues we are currently facing by keeping playing the same game. I’ll say it again: don’t hate the players; change the game.

In other news

1. VR Chat, one of the most popular «Metaverse», announced its plans to release a mobile application. This is a major move that will bring more users to the platform. Indeed: users need to be able to access the Virtual Worlds from any platform, not just a VR headset.
2. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, revealed a couple of interesting elements about their AI roadmap:
   By the end of the year, they will add generative AI capacities to their advertisement platform. Imagine how, from one of your campaigns, the AI will generate different versions to match different audiences…
   They will start enabling anyone, from brands to individuals, to create their world in their Metaverse by simply describing it, and the generative AI will create it. “Make the logo bigger!“

From the podcast

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

• What are the usages of Virtual Reality in healthcare, from the precision and accuracy needed by a surgeon; to the vast complexity of mental health? This field was one of the first to see the opportunities and potential of VR. It’s not yet in every doctor’s office, mainly for regulation and cost reasons, but a few years from now, you can imagine wearing a VR headset while being treated.
• Can you imagine what it would be like to choose your point of view while watching a movie? Well, the technology is coming, its name is NERF, and it’s getting better every day thanks to Artificial Intelligence.
• HTC announced its new Vive Tracker. It’s a small device that can be attached to anything moving to capture its movement, mostly used on the body or for props in Virtual Reality experiences. Our takeaway is that its price tag - unknown for now - will be essential to its success, knowing that the main users are probably VTubers.
  If you’re curious, we used Vive Tracker for a fun project in collaboration with Spinifex. Check it out here!

Tune in at 10 am UTC on Wednesdays on Twitch, and listen to the replays on Youtube!