What is Metaverse? In the era of LLMs is the idea of Metaverse still relevant?
what is metaverse how can we define metaverse is metaverse something connected only to gaming and entertainment or can it be applied to business and solving real-world problems in the era of large language models is the idea of metaverse still relevant following is my conversation with Mr Metaverse a leading Metaverse expert and a key European public speaker on the topic enjoy Aragon as Mr Metaverse you are probably tired of these questions but I will start with the question that's probably asked you way too often what is metaverse yes what is metaverse it's a question that they always ask every single interview every podcast and it's a question that we simply don't really have an answer to yet because there's so many different people that have such different ideas when you give them the term metaverse I think metaverse is a concept um and different people approach it from different angles right if you would ask somebody that is very active in the virtual reality or augmented reality industry what is a metaverse then they will probably first think of and explain it to you in in the terms of their industry so three-dimensional worlds where you can actually explore those worlds um if you ask somebody from the gaming industry what's the matter verse they might say well it's the connecting of different games in different game universes to into one single game Universe just like the Oasis from the movie Ready Player one right if you ask somebody from the web 3 and blockchain space what does the metaverse they might say well it's all about interoperability of our digital lives and our digital uh the creation of digital assets and digital ownership so what the metaverse is really depends on your approach vector the way I approach it is very simple I a year ago I didn't necessarily use this word but I do now and that's because I've really come to believe that we are approaching what I call what I call what reggae quartz wild the great thinker calls The Singularity and I know that he didn't actually come up with that term that term goes back to the early 80s and there was another science fiction writer I think and thinker that came up with the term Singularity and always forget that name I should really work on that but the courtswell is the one that made the idea of the singularity big and part of the current uh futurist movement where we we look at the future and we think about what's going to happen to humanity and the singularity is this idea that somewhere in um well according to recourse while somewhere in 2048 2049 our technology will reach a development paste a pace of development so a pace of change and Innovation that is so fast that it's trillions of times or at least millions of times faster than it is today and therefore we cannot comprehend what is beyond that because that technological Evolution will lead to our cognitive ability being trillion times faster and trillion times more powerful than it is today and because it will be so powerful there's no way for us with our current monkey brains to understand what is past that future and so how does that relate to the metaverse well I think that the metaverse is really the phase between the singularity and our current technological uh development and that represents a phase a time in space where we will very rapidly completely integrate our physical lives into our digital lives and they will become one and the same our physical reality and our digital realities will merge and we will do that through the rise of a whole set of Technologies of which the first ones have made themselves are known in the past decade uh or the past decade slowly but surely and they're really gaining momentum now so that is blockchain technology which then translates into web 3 and nfts for a digital infrastructure which allows for the building of a digital civilization or Society because in a digital world if you cannot have ownership Etc if you have not do not have an immutable identity then how are you going to build a society because in society it only works because you are Machi and I'm Aragorn and for the law we are with that person and we can get a letter and we can have to follow the rules and a judge can you know make a statement that we we broke the law and that we have to pay a fine and it's only possible because we have one identity we cannot make a new profile when we break the law we cannot make a new profile and then you know continue what we were doing so that's that's web three and then we have virtual reality I mean you know a digital world needs to mean integrating it with a physical world and we experience a physical world all around us through our eyes and our ears we take all this data in but we now have this whole Digital World which only takes place on our phone right now on our laptop but it's it's separated from our existence and for that to really work it needs to be integrated so we need to build that into our lives which is where virtual reality and augmented reality come in and then of course there is the whole concept of compute we've been building computers they're super fast at everything but they're still not connected to our way of thinking we're using really primitive way of inputting data on a keyboard you know so the next step is we're going to have integration with that um through machine human interfacing where neuralink for example the company from Elon Musk comes in where we can uh and and then there's of course artificial intelligence the artificial intelligence is not so much about creating a separate intelligence as much as it is about creating an augmentation to our own human intelligence where we create something that we can communicate with that we can connect with that can then help us to benefit from the speeds that we have created in mechanical they actually I should say digital Computing because our organic brains are actually really slow they're just really really complicated and they have you know parallel Computing Powers but but they are very slow so all of these three all of these you know developments together is what I believe is the metaverse right where we slowly move from our physical world that is digitally augmented but still very separated into a reality where both are completely integrated seamlessly and we don't even really realize anymore so much whether we're interacting with our digital lives or physical lives uh no answer uh yeah it's it's a very elegant answer and uh intellectually I like an answer and very thought-provoking um I must say and um how how the last developments in AI uh will influence metaverse how will the reason developments in AI influence a metaverse yeah that's a great question well I think we before the show we had a few calls you maybe talked and we keep going down all kinds of rabbit holes which I really enjoyed but one of the things that we spoke of is that for example Matthew ball the writer of the book The metaverse and how to revolutionize everything um despite being a very important voice in you know where is things going with the metaverse for over almost a decade now in both in his books and his Publications he almost always completely ignores developments in artificial intelligence right we spoke about this in his book he said something along the lines of one of the biggest challenges of the metaverse will be that we have to build it all so we'll need thousands of developers worldwide to build this these worlds and the technology and the infrastructure to connect it and if you look back at the last three four months since uh chat gbt became public uh and gbt three and now already gbt4 became uh known in the world we have to significantly re-visit that that idea of how the metaverse would come to be because now we have artificial intelligence which completely superpowers our human ability to to do really to do anything but if we specifically translate that to Matthew Ball's statement about the the challenges of constructing a virtual world then we can already see the virtual reality is going to do that for us right a virtual reality or sorry an artificial intelligence is going to do that for us artificial intelligence is already connected up to you know 3D engines like unreal and unity where basically with just a prompt a text prompt it can already build complete worlds yeah we've seen it all yeah and this is just within a few months it's just a few months so imagine where it will be a year from now right so artificial intelligence is probably the most important development in technological history for Humanity and definitely the most important development in the last uh two decades because it's going to superpower everything else because this AI will help us more quickly develop better Technologies both hardware and software it will help us build those Technologies it will help us build better software it will help us build more interoperable software it will help us to reduce the computing power that we need to run this software I mean if you look at Unreal Engine for example it's made Milestone progress over the last few years because it suddenly introduced something um called nanites where we no longer have to render a 3D object from all sides all the time but we can only render the sites that you can actually see which is interesting because uh it that kind of Technology those kind of breakthroughs will now not be once every 10 years they will come every year every few months and they will keep speeding up and that will all be to a large extent because of the introduction of artificial intelligence so with every new advancement every new innovation the speed of innovation itself will speed up artificial intelligence will keep getting better and better and will speed that process up so I think that what we're seeing now is the very early signs of us moving into the knee of the exponential curve of technological advancement that will lead us to what we discussed before which is the singularity and the metaphors phase so the next 20 years will be really defined by that by that exponential growth which will be mainly powered by artificial intelligence I believe coming a little bit down to earth it's it's of course very relevant what you said about uh when I first heard about metaverse I admit it was something like early 2022 only and I thought it's it's another idea of big Tech to make money uh yes because they ran out of ideas uh before I started you know to learn on the topic and and understood all the depth which is uh which is behind the idea but at first it was like it's some kind of gen Z entertainment thing uh what are really down to earth so to say serious applications of of metaverse Solutions we have today already do we have to see that's a very important addition you do there to your question that we have today already okay because if we're not talking about two years in the future we're not talking about five years in future ten years in the future um but we're talking about today then we have to be honest the metaverse is it generally conceived by people which is an interconnected virtual world where that is interoperable where you can move from one game to another without exiting but you don't have to log in and log out where you don't have to go from Facebook to LinkedIn where you don't have to go from your phone to your laptop where we just experienced that that doesn't exist today right there is no current you know environment that is infinitely scalable for infinite users in a virtual environment or an augmented reality that allows us to interact none of that exists so if you holding on to that specific definition there's nothing but if you're looking at the subsequent building blocks of what will be the metaverse right if you're looking into individual Technologies if we're looking at web 3 if we're looking at virtual reality if we're looking at 3D engines then there's a lot there's a lot going on and it's all clearly going in One Direction so one of the things that I spoke about recently and we talked about prior to this call is that last week I visited KLM the Royal Dutch Airlines and Air France and they have an extra one of the biggest airlines in the world one of the biggest airlines in the world um they have an XR center of excellence in Amsterdam at hipple airport which where they research the implementation and applications of mixed reality so that's augmented reality and that's virtual reality and they use it for some really straightforward things that you probably can already think of if you're a little into this so for example they use it to train Pilots right Pilots have to do a kind of exam every few months to make sure that they're still very capable and skillful but in the past it did this with flight simulators and these flight simulators are machines that cost you know hundreds of thousands of Euros to build because they're a complete replica of a cockpit but the interesting thing with the flight simulator is that once you've built it you can change it right but what happens in the real world there's different planes these planes get upgraded and they get changed so whenever the plane is changed or upgraded or replaced and there's a newer plane you have to build a new cockpit simulator which is expensive right all of that is it costs a lot of money because a lot of time and you can do a lot of that in virtual reality so what Caleb is doing is they're using virtual reality to train Pilots not only allows that that allows it does that allow them to keep the the production of the simulators much cheaper they still use the real simulators by the way but they do this inside but also Pilots can do it at home because all they need is a virtual reality headset right a virtual reality headset with with uh hand tracking and facial tracking eye tracking and they can do it at home right so that's an incredible pilot it's incredible a pilot can now practice at home for his exam he can practice at home for the things that they need to do in a plane that he he wasn't really doing very well and he doesn't need a plane for it he doesn't need a simulator for it so their ability to train their pilots and to test their pilots has gone up significantly and the cost for doing it has gone down significantly now that's a very straightforward example but they're also doing this for their ground crew because I don't know if you've ever been to an airport but the planes they come terminal yeah well not everybody of course but you don't really see this because we go into the airport to get into the plane we fly away but planes they land they come to the terminal they go away in that time there's usually a tractor or tow car that pulls the plane to the terminal or pulls it away how do you learn to drive a car like that well either you need to have an empty plane with a tow car and then practice which means that that terminal cannot be used the plane cannot be used and the tow Car cannot be used or you may build a simulation right so again great user simulation they also use simulations now to train the cabin crew at home that cabin crew at home can do virtual reality training with just a headset on to make sure that they understand where everything is in the plane how to deal with new situations how to follow new procedures they also made virtual reality scenarios where they practice the plane crashing yes it's a little scary but now the cabin crew in the past the cabin crew would not know what it would be like if the crane the plane crashes they can only practice once a year at some abandoned plane at the airport that's made for fire fire exercise but now they can be at home and not only can they train what it's like for a clean plane crash they can experience it and because they already experience it that means that once it actually happens they will not panic as much they will be better able to deal with the situation but it goes beyond that because what KLM also did is they're building a new office and because they have all of this VR XR stuff going on they thought why don't we build the office in 3D we use the architect we take our Board of Executives we take them and the architect builds it in 3D and they can walk through it together to see if it is really what we want for the future of our employees right so this is not a business case and the benefit of this is that once you build it in 3D it's a thousand times cheaper than building an unreal and you can already find out oh wait we're walking down this hallway but this isn't really nice or this doesn't work or this and you can do digital twins so you can simulate employees going through the office and you can see oh wait we're getting congestion here we shouldn't place the coffee machine there or wait this fire exit is not going to work because nobody will be able to get through it and it goes one step further because they didn't just do that for their office they're also doing it for the airport so they did simulations with airport traffic and tourists on the airport to see you know what happens if it gets busy what happens if it gets slow how long does it take people to get to the plane you know so there's we have only spoken one virtual reality and augmented reality here and the potential business cases that are already being used today are endless the fire brigade in the Netherlands inventor and I'm talking really fast so maybe I should slow down for people but the fiber grade intentor uses a virtual reality to train their uh their um volunteer fire brigade members to use the fire truck so they can train at home there's endless applications and this is just for training mostly or for uh digital Twins and and simulation but there's there's a lot of other options as well so would you agree that education is probably the the key field for metaverse to start with mass adoption if it's very guys it's a very guiding question but I I will say this education is going to be revolutionized because what is the biggest problem in the world today in any country we don't have enough teachers teachers are underpaid we don't have enough money for the educational system and we have increasing numbers of students and a decreasing number of teachers if we look at the current development of augmented reality in virtual reality and we compare that to the development and the rise of the mobile phone in the early 2000s which is only 20 years ago we had big mobile phones that only had a black and green screen which was you know Nokia 63 yeah what was it you remember that we remember this I remember the one that looked like a little suitcase yeah exactly yeah and you could you could call with it and you could send the text and you could play snake that was it right now we have the super computer in our pocket that took 20 years now if we look at the rate of technological advancement Innovation and growth we can see that that's an exponential curve right so it's going faster and faster so what we will see is that the rise of VR and AR will go much faster than it did with the mobile phone and people say oh there's only 140 million virtual reality headsets around the world and they're not comfortable to wear and they're too big but today I already saw a video of what apple is planning to do with their augmented reality headset which is set to come out you know this year or next year and that will completely change the game again and adoption will will Skyrocket right if there's 140 million this year then there will be more than 300 million next year that then there will be more than 600 million the year after but 600 million is that I mean that's all the the the working people in Europe for example and all of them will have a virtual reality right so if if that means that all of their kids also have virtual reality at home then suddenly you can start replacing classes where you don't have teachers with virtual reality classes or you can augment classes with virtual reality and augmented reality so instead of reading a boring Biology book and having to imagine how you know blood blood particles move through your bloodstream you can suddenly become a blood cell and you can move through the bloodstream of the human body as a child and you can experience what the what it is like that will be a much more impactful experience thereby letting students get a much better idea and understanding and much more enthusiasm and and interest in the topic and it doesn't just stop in biology you can use it for history you can use it for geography you can replace teachers using augmented artificial intelligence right we have GPT I already build courses with chat I use chbt all day long to explain the topics to me so it is just in less than a year from now you'll have to first chat gbt teachers that can completely run a class so you don't need a will teach you anymore so we will we will solve the educational uh bottlenecks of having not enough teachers having boring classes and having outdated lesson material that will be solved two years from now so that means that educational institutes around the world will be one they will have a big challenge because they will have to Revolution or or they will have to innovate at a revolutionary Pace but at the same time that will happen and that will create a much higher level of general education around the world it will make education much more um engaging for students and therefore uh we will see an incredible growth I think and Improvement of Education worldwide can you imagine replica as a famous professors powered with AI yes and although I think that's a very interesting use case and I I'm convinced that it will happen I think that we have to be careful about completely replacing a teacher with a digital twin of Albert Einstein for example I think it can be great as a part of a course to have one masterclass or one lecture from Albert Einstein to just to experience that and to have this kind of interaction but I think ultimately we should be a little wary when it comes to completely um uh bringing back people that are no longer with us but that is more of a philosophical question I think that although I want to be part of the singularity and I want to live a very long time I don't necessarily think that living being Immortal or immortalizing people is good for our Mental Health because death is a part of life it's a very important part because it's the part that makes sure that everything is valuable if you would live in a infinitely and you could do everything in it infinitely then there's no value to doing it because you can do everything in every possible way that would ever be imaginable and therefore there's no value in making choices there's no value in doing anything so but that's a that's a very philosophical conversation it is definitely is and it is definitely is it the case that that determines life as such in most philosophical schools and in most beliefs uh along the various cultures um we've been using the term digital twins during our conversation so far could we clarify or could you please clarify that what digital twins are for our audience as not everyone is is aware of the term yeah so I I think that also I mean digital twinsies can come in many forms and shapes so let me just give a few examples of what they could look like I mean if you just look at the word digital twin we're talking about a copy of a representation in a digital form of something that we have in a physical sense right so with digital twin of me would be a digital Avatar that more or less looks like me and that if for example we use it for medical purposes it is a copy of me that represents my physical health and the the the operation of my physical being in a digital form so therefore that would allow a doctor for example to do tests on my digital twin to see how my body would react so for example if they need to decide on how much anesthesia they want to use during an operation they could run a simulation on a digital twin to see how much would be the perfect amount for me to be you know not conscious during the operation but also have no negative side effects or or grogginess or whatever but just a simple example they could also stimulate the operation on my digital twin to see how the operation would go and what the risks are right so there's many benefits to that but you could also have a digital twin of something completely different like we spoke before about Skip hole airport in fact I don't know about schipple but I do know that for example Hong Kong airport or or is it no Shanghai I think it was Shanghai airport Shanghai airport already has a digital twin in Unreal Engine and this digital twin has two functions on the one hand in this digital twin they have all the same cameras all the same security systems Etc and they are connected to the real system so if they go off they can see in digital twin they can see you know what systems are going off and they of course have a much better way of integrating with those systems like in a game but they also use the digital twin to run simulations so for example if they're considering to repurpose an area or to make changes to the flow of passengers going through the airport they will first do it in the digital twin of the airport to see what effects will happen in the simulation uh how people will start to move around the airport and what potential risks or hazards that might bring with it right they can also do exercises in the digital twin of emergency situations to see how things will go down so that's another use of digital twins if you would think about a digital twin for for example a car factory or or even the car itself you could think about how it you can in a digital world that follows the same physical laws as as the physical world which you can easily set up in a virtual experiment or a virtual simulation you can build a car there and you can do it much faster because if you're an engineer and you think okay we should rebuild this engine because we want to make this part differently now the way we've always done it up until now is that we then we come up with an idea we design it digitally then digitally designed it's it's going to be produced we produce like some kind of prototype version and then we test that right and in recent years that process has become a lot more efficient because we have 3D printing so a lot of the the the things we try to make we can quickly design them we can 3D print them and we can test them so it's much faster than it was before but you're still limited by the fact that you have to make it physical before you can test it run it and use it and then you have to go back to the drawing board in a complete virtual real presentation simulation with a digital twin you can literally change the part parts of the engine of the car You're Building you can do it in a few minutes and you can test it right away to see how it operates whether it will break right so the benefits of digital twins are massive yeah every way every way you think about it um and then there's a last form of digital twin that you could think of and that's the digital twin of me ran by an AI based on all the data available to it about me for example my LinkedIn profile that represents me so that's something that doesn't exist yet but it will exist within two two years I think maybe three in the future you calling if you call me and I don't pick up my phone my digital twin will pick up my phone and that means that you will get somebody on the phone that sounds like me that talks like me that knows everything about me and my a calendar and my you know priorities and that person will then tell you hey everyone's not available right now but I'm his digital twin and how can I help you today and then you say well I want to talk to Aragorn and then the digital twin will say well what do you want to talk about because if it's a simple topic I might be able to help you if it's something where you really want to talk to everyone himself then we can have a look at the calendar and I'll schedule it for you this is speaks in the first person yeah yeah yeah let me see when I can yeah it could be like that because people said to me I saw this yesterday I posted about the future of dating and relationships in the future because I think that in the in the future you know I'm talking about you know five to ten years from now I think that rather than dating apps we will have artificial intelligence this artificial digital twins of ourselves dating other artificial twins of other people to find out whether there's a match so the whole dating process as we know it now will for many people just completely be something we don't even spend time on we will only find out about a potential partner when our digital twins went on a date they figured out that it was fun that they really liked each other and it was a match and then they would tell us hey we got you the right match you got to go out that's where we're headed and I know that this is something that's really hard to comprehend for people and people say I don't want that and it's scary and but I think it's amazing because it's it's a very clear um next step in a trend that we already see because we're already Outsourcing it we outsourced our our uh search process for a mate to to apps but now we're doing on very crude apps where we swipe left and we swipe right and we don't really have an idea of the other person on the other side but we don't want to take the time to really to get to know them we don't really want to read their profile so we're just making very superficial decisions on trying to find somebody so it's a very inefficient stupid process which ends up in a scenario where 10 top 10 of women is competing for the top 10 percent of men and the other 90 on both sides is unhappy yeah exactly which is another which is also ridiculous of course because what we see is that ultimately um people are much happier in a long-term relationship when they have somebody where they have a physical or not just a physical but also a psychological and an emotional connection and and again this is amazing because we can really simulate people quite well using algorithms and I know that an algorithm doesn't allow for free will and that's a whole nother philosophical a rabbit hole we could go down but we can simulate quite well human beings with algorithms already and so being able to run you know do 100 dates in a week or a thousand dates in a week because you have a digital twin that is infinite and can do those days for you will then allow you to much quicker find the right potential partner that is not just a physical attraction for you but also a psychological and an emotional attraction to you which will lead potentially to many more people going into very happy relationships so I think it's an amazing development right look at all the people around the world that are lonely today if we look at statistics we see that gen C is the most lonely generation we've ever seen as a result of social media and it's always darkest just before the dawn so yes that is a horrible development but with this new phase that we're going in with technology in the metaverse I think we're going to be able to solve a lot of those challenges if we go about it the right way and we can actually make people happy again yeah that's that's that's true um how about digital twins in medicine this is a very deep and and relevant topic um yeah well like I said already I think um digital Twins and medicine is going to be massive I think it's going to be revolutionary in every single way because it it will it will completely permeate how we experience Medical Care how medical Innovations and research is done how medical uh you know operations will be done how tests are done um I I've been working with uh with uh somebody uh called Arun and he's building something called social prescribing and he's really looking into you can find him on LinkedIn as well social prescribing he's looking into how the metaverse will uh improve our our Healthcare and I think the most obvious cases in the short term are probably going to be mental care right for example you can very easily talk to a therapist in a virtual space so it could solve an efficiency uh and scalability issue for example now in Amsterdam uh in the covet lockdowns there weren't enough Mental Health Care uh people right so a lot of people had needed mental health care but there was none available because the system was over stressed well it is everywhere yes it is true but especially for children yes but I think a lot of that is also to do with uh with the logistics of it because an expert might be available somewhere just not in the place where you need him at that particular time right so an optimization of that system could be significant so if you're no longer restricted by location because you can meet in a virtual world with a digital Avatar where you can still have that sense of of presence then suddenly you can make a real Improvement in optimization of available resources and again I think that another thing that will really help is artificial intelligence because Believe It or Not 99 of mental health care is about somebody listening to you and we we have especially trained Mental Health Care people because what they need to be trained in ultimately is to listen to you without interfering without telling you what to think or where to go without judging right that's a very big part of mental health care and then all obviously there is the collection of data for analysis so that they might a doctor might come with a recommendation on your treatment or maybe even medical uh medicine Etc but all of that can be done by an AI that can be done by an AI really well in fact it can probably be done better by an AI than it could ever be done by human beings so again there's a potential scalability uh solution there that can help millions of people around the world with the issues that they're facing yeah one of the first examples of eventual passing Turing tests though for me touring tests has not been passed so far even with charge GPT that's just my personal opinion was Lisa which was this uh mental care assistant yeah and it was in the 1960s already yeah so the application of AI into mental Healthcare is is an old old idea yeah yeah exactly it's not a new thing um but uh you know between the 60s and now we've made incredible progress on the on on on the sophistication of the these systems and with the rise of chechi PT now I think that there's great potential of course a lot of people have serious concerns and and and are worried about when it could go wrong but I think that we really need to take in mind here that you humans are suffering from lots of cognitive biases and one of our biggest cognitive bias is that we always value the the impact of a potential risk much higher than the impact of a potential upside right so if we say if we have the same amount of chance for a bad outcome as we have for a good outcome we are still likely to Value to put the weight uh the weight distribution of importance on the bad outcome higher than under good outcome so I hope that makes it clear the problem with that is that we very often forego potential great upsides because we are uh you know um uh we are so afraid of the potential bad outcome even though the out the good outcome is just as big and might have a bigger upside than the negative outcome and the same goes here it's very likely and very possible that a lot of people say we can't Implement any artificial intelligence from mental health care because there is a one percent chance that somebody will have a bad experience but if you do that we ignore that there's 99 chance that 900 million people around the world actually have a good experience just because you know one million people might have a bad experience and you really have to ask the the you know the old question that Spock asks in Star Trek all the time or he doesn't really ask a question he States a statement because he says the um how does he put it the um the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few that's what he says and of course this is another philosophical discussion that we can have to no end but I think I personally am a believer in that when it comes to these kind of uh potential technologies that can help so many people we shouldn't sandbag them just because a few people might not be helped by them which leads us to the last question of mine or the last issue that we also mentioned in our talks before the recording uh China right as I told you I'm a big follower of what's happening in China as I said dichotomy in yeah technological development between the west and China and China is like Spock uh they don't they don't care much about ethical issues no China is uh in that sense very very much like Spock um because they just care about uh about the whole and I think that's a variation approach actually and the funny thing is that in many ways I think it's much more emotionally Healthy Choice even though Spock is supposed to be extremely logical I think for the well-being of the species it's more emotionally it's emotionally better for everybody for most members of such a society if if you think like that right I saw a video this week of an Asian man going down the street and his uh his shopping cart fell over and everything was going across the street and then all of these Asian people they come they came they ran up and they started helping this person get his stuff together and I was looking at that and I was thinking that would never happen in Europe who isn't it I don't think it well maybe to some maybe some people would stop if if I go on the street here and I fall over with my bicycle and groceries somebody might say oh let me give you a hand but it will most people will just pass me by most people will just continue on they won't stop their car they won't stop their buy if they're on a car in a car or on a bicycle they won't stop I wouldn't necessarily agree well maybe maybe you live I don't know where you live if you're in a village it's possibly a little better I live in Warsaw so it's also a little bit more so okay well the Warsaw is a better place in Amsterdam I think but I I think um maybe in Europe it's not as bad as it is in the U.S I think in the US it's even worse because people there have this attitude of don't get involved don't don't get involved it's not your business right but in Asia they there's this kind of the collective idea that you're all there to help each other and I think that's a very healthy thing now to extrapolate that to the metaverse and also to talk about China because China is not just its people it's also its politics and of course the Communist party which is still reigning and very very powerful um there's also some challenges there right because on the one hand I believe that if we have a more of a collective mindset where we believe that we have to do everything together and we have to to support each other and be less individualistic I think that is on the whole it's a good thing for the species but in China of course they also don't believe in in an open inclusive environment right China is not inclusive right they're still removing black people from their movies let's face it this is the truth I mean they're an extremely racist country and they're one of the most powerful if not the most powerful economy in the world uh at least even if they're not yet they will be in the near future because the US is waning um and they don't believe in an open Society with with lots of freedom for everybody right if okay their internet is it completely closed off basically they still have an iron uh uh an iron curtain around their internet and if they're gone if there's going to be a metaverse in China then What's it gonna be it's going to be a close metaverse and the interesting thing is that there's a lot of parallels there because not only do we have on the one hand we have China which is trying to probably build a closed virtual future we also have Apple trying to build a closed virtual future and apple is not just uh China is the biggest country in the world you know with the quarter of the or a third of the world population but uh Apple has almost uh half of the western world's uh technology technology users or smartphone users as their customers and they also believe in a closed world and they also believe in control and I think both of these uh the one is a country the other is a corporation and uh the future will is really going to be interesting because are we going to go and have a Blade Runner future where corporations like apple will take control of humanity uh through their Technologies or will we see a future where somehow a geopolitical uh uh geopolitical entities like like like China will maintain their grip on control over society and maybe uh China through its economic growth and influence in the world will even be able to expand Beyond its borders with you know the way it uh it rules out its technology and influences how we use that technology so we're going to see the next two decades are going to be extremely instrumental right I saw a video yesterday where somebody said oh I'm really worried what's going on because the Warren Buffett uh sold all his shares in a semiconductor Factory in Taiwan and America is already threatening to bomb the semiconductor of factories rather than seed them to China if there's an invasion this is also going on in the world right now right and uh I don't know if you know this but uh I think more than 80 percent of the world's semiconductors which is the chips yeah yeah it's built by tsmc which by the way um uh uh yeah well it's built in China and so that means that if something happens there then all of the things that we're talking about and the technological advancement might also just stop overnight right or at least it will be severely slowed down because if if the chips are not being produced and we can't use the new the new technology in our new hardware then you know we're not going to go anywhere so conflict over Taiwan uh it's also a side topic from our main topic I I think that let's say it will be the rather a series of of provocations clashes between US Navy and Chinese and navy oversized South Asian Sea and it's in nobody's interest you know to it is interesting semiconductor industry yeah true and of course we can also say we can clearly see that China for the past three decades has had a very clear non-aggression policy so they have not been actively aggressive to the outside world they've tried to do everything through diplomacy and through influencing right even Tech talk even Tick Tock is a great example of Chinese policy currently because there's tickets three thousand plus history of Chinese cultures and it's culture not to yeah that nuts to the outside well yeah maybe maybe you're right I I I'm not 100 sure on on the past but I do know for you know the past 50 years where it's the net and I do know that there's two techno caps there's a tick tock app for Chinese people and there's a data gap for the rest of the world and for Chinese people has a limit on how much content you can consume that is not educational meaning that after I think it's three hours but I might be completely wrong on that but after three hours of of non-indication non-educational content you can only watch educational content on Chinese Tick Tock and they did that very purposefully because they want Chinese people to be the smartest people in the world and they want everybody else in the outside world to just to waste their time and their cognitive ability on [ __ ] right and it sounds crazy uh like conspiracy theorist stuff but this is this is real this is really this is really going on so I mean there's a good reason that the us is thinking about banning Tick Tock uh I don't like the US and I think that they do a lot of crazy [ __ ] but uh but in this and I know that and the Senators that are on this case have no idea what they're dealing with they don't understand any of it but the underlying season is not completely [ __ ] there is there's definitely something uh there to consider that in China is effectively doing a lot of different things for example also their investments in Africa to increase their influence in the world and it is completely in line with their policies over the last 50 years to try and influence the way you know we consume information and data and their access to our data etc etc so doesn't matter what what's really mind-blowing is uh that uh having built a closed internet they are into building a closed metaverse and with uh their better infrastructure this is also what Matthew ball is is invoking several times in the book that we are not prepared infrastructurally for metaverse uh and with China having bigger bandwidth um a modified G preparing for 6G and they might be sooner to get into closed metaverse which is extrapolating closed internet and bringing up a closed society which is at the same time more powerful technologically than the Western one this is very possible this is very possible it is definitely possible um I do believe that current bureaucracy in Europe is being absolutely massively damaging to our economies um and to our progress and Innovation and Adoption of new technological infrastructure uh Italy just Banning TI gbt is complete panic panic move which will irreparably damage your economy if they if they hold on to that for more than three to six months um beyond that I think that the amount of damage and and innovational lag that will be sustained by their economies and their businesses will be will be will be unrepairable because again you know like I said before we are in the face of exponential technological innovation and growth and change and so once you lag behind you you you're gonna have a very hard time catching up at the same time I also believe that there is a real possibility now in near future that uh other parts of the world that are not as infrastructurally sound uh as the West will catch up because of this technological innovation think about it China is already digitizing its Villages right so Villages that have no internet connection through traditional means like landlines are getting kind of starlink like upload and download connections where a village can suddenly become a digital hub for production digital assets but also uh their physical assets and instead of using trucks to transport the products out they make small digital things in these Villages and then they throw they ship them out through drones so 65 year old women in Chinese Villages are controlling drones to to send the goods that they build digital chips Etc to the cities it's crazy this is really happening right now this is not a science fiction movie this is really today the same can be done in Africa I mean an African village or a South American village in the middle of the drong Jungle can get a starling connection for about five thousand bucks if there's an investor or the village comes together to bring the money or they're part of some programs subsidizing program by the government they can have an excess to the fastest internet in the world just like that right you don't need to have a copper cable running through the through the ground anymore across the ocean floor right so um there's a significant possibility here that a lot of what we now dubbed the third world will suddenly completely unexpectedly LeapFrog over the current Western World benefiting from what we call the law of uh what's it called the law of slow progress um diminishing returns now in Dutch we call it the vet from the Force form so we the translation would be the law of um of the development yes yes exactly so so there's a very big chance that all of these Western countries where people like you me live where everybody's super happy and comfortable and convenienced you know we have great jobs and we don't need cryptocurrencies because we have a good working bank account and we have we have Apple pay these people are not using these newer Technologies and therefore they will suddenly be leapfrogged by economies or countries where they make a decision to go all in on these new technologies and then suddenly they Leap Frog ahead in terms of innovation and technological prowess that's that's very possible uh future for the next you know a few decades and and I think that that's really underestimated by the Western World and so the question is will it be China will they be the big benefactor of this um or to beg you know take take home the prize with that or or will we see a more distribution uh because other Third World areas uh suddenly rising to prominence and and um making use of this this opportunity to LeapFrog in technological uh Innovation and infrastructure India has just surpassed China I think this week in terms of population yeah so yeah that's not that's another sleeping lion nobody sleeping sleeping uh tiger dragon tiger that nobody is really paying attention to yeah the Western World we are so really in Europe and in the US we are so in Dutch we call it novel starter looking at your own belly button we are so occupied with ourselves and we we're so convinced that we are the center of the world that we're completely ignoring uh the rest of the world and we're completely ignoring Asia because we don't understand the language we don't understand the culture and so we just have decided somewhere subconsciously that it doesn't really matter what they do over there because you know we're the center of the world but the truth is is that we have lost that position a long time ago and if we don't start paying attention we're gonna be at the Lou we're going to be you know at the bottom of of of of this ranking or whatever it is and we're gonna be the ones uh yeah we're going to be on the other end of uh the stick so to say unfortunately I absolutely agree and I encourage I think all our viewers so I don't know to look at Nikkei Asia for instance from time to time at least and some other sources instead of only on yeah Financial Times and all those you know mainstream mainstream media that all of us follow or TechCrunch bye yeah I think that on LinkedIn there's some really a few really interesting people to follow I follow um what's new in China every week and she does really nice LinkedIn posts on that it's a great source of of getting a feel of all the developments in China right now um there's another guy called Lynn I forgot his last name he also talks a lot he's from the Netherlands actually he's actually from my hometown it's kind of funny and he reports a lot on what's going on in China as well yeah making effort get in to know because that's where it's really happening forget about Silicon Valley the real stuff is going in uh is going on in Asia that's where the real change is occurring thank you so much for this discussion it was a pleasure and very refreshing uh to our viewers and to myself and a huge intellectual pleasure to to having a talk with somebody with such a boat wide and in-depth knowledge about uh what's going on in the technological world today not only metaverse so my pleasure yeah well I uh I I wake up with it and I go to bed with it so you know but it's been an absolute pleasure thank you for having me hope it's not our last meeting I hope so I hope it won't be we'll be back here don't worry we'll be back cheers [Music] thank you so much for listening to share passage on Tech if you have enjoyed the show please subscribe to our show wherever you listen thanks again the share passage on Tech podcast is a production of sharepa search an executive Search firm specializing in the tech industry helping hire the right people for expert and managerial positions and Advising how to build and develop long-lasting high-performing I.T teams if you would like to learn more reach out to us at machi.sherba at sherpaset.tech or visit our website sherpasage.tech see you next time [Music]
2023-06-24 19:31
