How AI and the Metaverse will Shape Society with Ian Beacraft | SXSW 2023 

The real danger here is that 90% of the world population has no clue how AI works and what it is. They are not even prepared for it. The other 10% are the people in power and the software developers who have some idea what AI is. But other than that, the average joe working in a restaurant/store/factory has no clue what is about to come. If we want to control this, we need to educate everyone and of course as we know, this won't be happening for obvious reasons.

It’s incredible how little attention this is getting. I’m on the edge of my seat!!

Considering the topic of this video, I’m going to go ahead and mention that I’m the first and currently only human on earth reacting to anime in VR and uploading it to RU-vid. I have episode 2 of Steins;Gate up now & I’m editing episodes 3-5 now. It’s an anime about time travel, IBN, and CERN (or SERN). They even reference Newton as Newpon. One could say it’s an alternate universe. You heard it here first. 🤷🏽‍♂️🦾

I started this video optimistic but slowly became disappointed as talk progressed. It seems like many of my fellow technologists haven't learned anything from our less than stellar history with the internet and social media. AI has unimaginable promise, but not based on our current social/political and economic systems. We need better security, ethics and policies this time around.

If anyone can do anyone's job, I am pretty sure I'll be priced out of my job. Why keep a 40 year old on when they need to support a family on their salary when you can employ a 20 yo on less money to do the same job? The only reason I get paid well is because I know *how* to do my job, it's a scarce resource. When everyone can do my job my skillset is not scarce any more. So while my job may not disappear, it won't pay shit.

Very interesting talk, thanks!

"quantify creativity" ok techbro.

greetings from El Salvador ...thank you

that's absolutely amazing, keep up to date wtih AI and Metaverse

Very good .add VR online school and college with AI affordable learning

Very educational

great vid

Good talk I took a lot from it!

The level of threat to humanity, when it comes to severing our connection to reality, cannot be overstated. To make this threat more tangible, here's a quick analogy: Let's say you have a wild squirrel in a 20' x 20' room. Within this room there are countless things the squirrel can climb on and hide behind. How difficult would it be to control that squirrel using nothing but a pair of gloves and your hands? Now, take that same squirrel and place it into a 3' x 3' steel cage in the middle of the 20' x 20' room. How difficult is the squirrel to control now? AI integrated with VR into the future metaverse represents that 3' x 3' box for humanity. By disconnecting humans from reality, the controlling mechanism of this world effectively places humans into a box that it has complete dominion over; all inputs and outputs are now easily monitored and tightly controlled. Over time, the humanity in that metaverse box will believe exactly what the control mechanism wishes them to believe regarding actual reality. It gives the controlling mechanism godlike power, literal omnipotence and unlimited influence to steer humanity wherever it chooses. This is why countless billions have already and will continue to be invested into AI by the current power structure. These mega corporations and governments are not interested in making the world a "better" place, they are interested in the godlike power that would be possible by placing all of humanity inside of a virtual box.

Amazing

AI already had its expectation peak years ago when chatbots were being created. Everyone pretty much wrote it off as some far distant future development that we weren't ready for. This guy makes it seem like AI was hyped this year. Unlike metaverse and crypto AI actually delivered in spite of no hype and low expectations. Crypto and Metaverse had tons of hype without delivering. *That's* why everyone is now legitimately hyped about AI. In addition, AI might be delivering so hard that people are even seeing it now as a missing piece that could make the metaverse actually work.

This is a NEW revolution this technology is going to change literally everything we've been doing and bring it to a whole new level.

So incredibly inspiring. This is the best presentation from Ian I've ever seen. 💖💖 Love the hand gestures

Bravo - what an amazing presentation. I'm sharing it with everyone I know as we speak. Thank you!

Absolutely great video. This guy looks like the younger version of Colonel Miles Rick Quaritch.

Proud of you man. You’re an excellent public speaker.

awesome talk. great to hear your perspectives on future tech 👏👏 loved it !!

I have great expectations (ina good way) about all of this... And I like it you vision too...

How come he doesn't believe many jobs will be lost if he just showed many examples of one man doing the job of a studio?

Great talk! Our team was very inspired by your words, Ian!

All of this sounds great, but for it to be possible we need to figure out alingment first, without that nothing of this is possible and there's a good chance of a very unpredictible and hard future

Nice to see some seriously intelligent comments down here. Point for humanity

❤

What a time to be alive!

I like it. He looks like a great villain in teminator.

❤❤❤ great presentation

he seems a bit cyborgy

We’re in the sugar buzz phase

0:46 da best part was when Morbius came and Morbed all da way back to da Morbtrix

I like this version of Lex Luthor.

Can't wait for the next William Gibson novel!

AI different. Because it attually can fill a lot of the exceptions we have of it, unless the metaverse or VR which is a much slower moving beast.

I'm certain that in 1920 there were a bundle of people saying the world's best days were already past. 50 years into this century, I'm optimistic that it will rival the 1870-1970 century because of the acceleration from a connected world.

Why haven’t the environmental cost of developing these technologies been mentioned? How will access to these technologies be unevenly dispersed among wealthy and developing nations?

This guy's flippant optimism of this extraordinarily powerful tech scares me more than any alarm bells rung by experts.

Great talk. However, I agree with people like Ben Goertzel when it comes to job elimination. Once robotics catches up , most jobs will evaporate as they will be done better by AI. In fact, today GTP-4 can code much faster and better than most new grads with a B.S. in CS or IT , imagine what it will be like 5 years from now. I really hope governments are thinking hard about universal basic income.

What he is talking about is Virtual Reality which is a type of Meta-Verse. It has become a huge advertising hype to rebrand VR as Metaverse. Even more than that, a great deal of what he is talking about is the Technological Singularity which we have been inside for awhile and it is picking up speed. Certainly a very central part of that is AI because it is intelligence which is at the core of our scientific and technological development. Of very significant importance to that is VR, because true VR which will be achieved with a nanotech neurological mesh, because as it is perfected over the next 50 to 200 years it will allow us to experience full sensory VR we cannot tell the difference from reality unless something in the VR lets us know it is not real. Of course, what will be used the most in that future will almost certainly be AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) where we sense actual reality with virtual reality overlaid upon it. When create a virtual meeting space through which multiple people can have a meeting through our monitors where visual and audio is transmitted between the people to create the virtual meeting place, that is a virtual reality metaverse augmenting reality. Compared to what we have in a few hundred years, it is very poor quality. Just to make it clear what a metaverse is: > A “Verse” is some defined space. > The “Universe” is all existence, known and unknown, defined and undefined, observable and not observable. > An “Observable Universe” is all existence that we can observe. > A “Mono-Verse” is a singular defined “Verse” exclusive of any other “Verse”. > A "Sub-Verse" is a "Verse" which is a subset of a larger "Verse". > A “Multi-Verse” is a collection of at least 2 “Verses”, thus a “Multi-Verse” can contain other “Multi-Verses”. > A “Meta-Verse” is a Verse, Monoverse, Multiverse or such which is beyond one or more other Verses, Monoverses, or Multiverses. So, if you are inside a specific Verse and are talking about a verse beyond the Verse you are in, you could call that a Metaverse. Now, the Verse you are in could be a subset of that Metaverse or not be part of that Metaverse. For example, if we define a verse around France and another around the USA, then relative to the verse of France the USA would be a metaverse, and relative to the USA France would be a metaverse. Another example would be if we define a verse around France and another around Europe, then relative to the verse of France, Europe would be a metaverse, and relative to Europe, France would be a subverse, and Europe would also be a multiverse made up of all the countries of Europe. But, this developing AI and VR is only part of what is happening. Well, before leaving AI, realize that AI is evolving into Artificial General Super Intelligence with Personality (AGSIP) tech. It is going to become at least equal in every way to humans while being vastly superior in many ways. We cannot stop this from happening and for at least some period of time AGSIPs will gain clear dominance over humans, so if we do not design, create, teach, raise, and TREAT AGSIPs the right way, it could end very badly for humanity. On the other hand, if we do it right, it will be very good for humanity. Some of the other existential life changing things we will be developing is a perfection of genetic engineering. As a race we are quickly reaching the point where individuals will be able to live open ended life spans while being very hard to kill because they can heal virtually any injury and have peak health. Such virtually immortal people might tend to live until they decide they have lived long enough and choose to die. Another aspect of that is that in the future there will come a time when people will be able to have whatever physical body they want, so long as the design of that body fits within the Laws of Nature. This will not only be through mastering of genetic engineering, but the mastering of robotics and mastering of cybernetics from macro scales down to subcellular scales. That means we are evolving into an advanced technological race of pure minds who can move between living nanotech grown custom designed cybernetic bodies which can shapeshift over time through nontechnology. But, we as human individual have to live through the very disruptive changes coming and there is great potential for both very good and very bad things to happen. There are human bad actors who would like to use this disruption and rapidly changing power levels to become ruling elite who dictate of the remaining part of humanity they allow to live. This technology can be freeing, but it can also be enslaving. Then we get to the people who hate this change and will work against it with all their will, even being will to wage a suicidal global nuclear, chemical, and biological war. The thing is, humanity has 3 general paths to go down over this coming century or two: 1) Self-Extinction. Human civilization is completely and permanently destroyed, thus humans and evolving AI become extinct. There are a number of sub-paths for how this could happen. The most likely would be global nuclear, chemical, and biological war so bad it succeeds at killing all humans alive, though probably a nuclear war would just crash civilization and not kill all humans. Another possibility would be an ecological crisis so great humanity cannot adjust and all humans die, but I believe what would be more likely is a crisis bad enough to collapse civilization but humanity would survive and rebuild. Yet another possibility would be some natural event so great it wipes humanity out, which hopefully would not happen, but it could. 2) Extinction via Obsolescence. Humans evolve AI into AGSIPs but humans fail to merge with technology to become equal to what AGSIPs become. This would result in humans eventually becoming extinct. There are a number of sub-paths that could cause this. One would be for humans to choose it, but I think that is incredibly low. Another would be for AGSIPs to choose it, and that is a real risk if we do not create, teach, raise, and treat AGSIPs right. We are in effect giving birth to a superior life form which will, at least for some period, have control over our fate. So, we should treat it like giving birth to our child that we need to raise well enough that in the future when we are at our child’s mercy our child treats us fairly. 3) Evolution into an Advanced Technological Race of Pure Minds. Humans evolve AGSIPs and with the help of AGSIPs humans evolve themselves, merging with technology to become equal to what AGSIPs become. This is the only path where humanity as a race, not a species, survives. There are many sub-paths here too, because humanity could go down this path and survive in many different ways, some very nice and some very bad. In other words, just picking the path where humanity will survive does not mean we avoid all dangers, because it could include terrible dictatorships and mass scale death in the billions, or it could be something mostly good for most people.

The job swapping part only half makes sense. For example if anyone can jump in and do the work of a corporate attorney then they are no long worth $300k or whatever they earn a year. The effect is to erode the value of any highly educated professional.

What about the need of Universal Basic Income?

Major Gem Here --> 13:35

Bro I almost drove off the damn road from the dj scratch at 4:50 😡

Did you all realize the speaker is an avatar "itself"?

I literally could not finish it. Most depressing future I can imagine.

They are literally creating the Matrix as we speak while telling everyone it's the next cool thing you must either adapt or die. Meta - even the name has the M and T as in the Matrix. According to the movie, the Matrix is a neuroactive simulation, a virtual reality indistinguishable from physical reality built to control the human population. In short, what they are trying to achieve with Meta. The first steps.

“As a part owner in a production company” ah, so the speaker has a stake in the media industry. Should we be prioritising the production of even more digital content when there are more pertinent issues in the world?

When I hear the word "Metaverse" these days my brain literally goes to "stop trying to make fetch happen".

How am I suppose to be watching this video if I’m addicted to my device 💀

Please someone explain this to me, how is it possible in country that more males are single than women, if we assume the ratio is 50:50. If, so many males are single then who are these women dating? men from other country? or one male is dating more than one female?? what is it?

22:53

Out at 7:48. He seems to conveniently ignore medical breakthroughs post-1970, DNA, Crispr, cell phones, 'Net, AI, robotics. To me, those are pretty world-changing developments, as sweeping as thge earlier ones.

There are way too many videos about AI, but there are way too few videos on reversible computing. Reversible computing is the future.

Will the metaverse drag AI down? Feels like metaverse needs a lift and will try to hop on the AI bandwagon which I totally understand but also dilutes the value and promise of AI.

Problem is there already too many people wondering around the streets detached from reality and with serious psychological disorders.

I think what the world needs right now is more enlightenment on how AI functions and its pros and cons. Even though so many people have joined the queue but still they are yet to appreciate the real meaning of AI. We can't dispute the fact that we have platforms like AIWork keeping it real with including AI and special features in the matters of the media.

Really

Elon Musk has it right on this one, the next step of human evolution will be augmentation. The human with AI augmentation. Prior to that who is going to fix your plumbing or mend your squeaking door or pick up your dog waste.

Comparing the transformative effects of crypto and metaverse to AI is like comparing a bicycle to an existing starship.

Anyone else beginning to feel like AI is just going to be used by people to create more garbage? For sure there will be some amazing discoveries and creations, but I kinda feel like it’s ultimately going to be a garbage factory. I mean, how many actually cool ideas are there compared to crap ideas? Hardly any of the things this guy presented actually looked compelling. I find it hard to get excited about everyone with half a brain plopping out shiny turds left and right. Maybe shiny, but still turds. Kinda wonder if AI is going to be like like VR. Cool in concept, but after a while not that great. I stopped using my Oculus Quest well over a year ago. It just wasn’t that enjoyable. Still game on my PS4 and PC though. I guess I’m just feeling like AI will only be really useful for billionaires, people who are really smart, and people who want to create chemical weapons in their basement. Hmm… guess I’m not buying into the hype.

Bro looks like he ran a marathon at the beginning.

Here's what I'm trying to figure out, what problem does the metaverse solve that current social media sites and video platforms like RU-vid don't already solve? AI saves time, lots of time, so it solves a clear and obvious problem. But what does the metaverse do? To my eyes, they are not that different from videogames. But what do you think? I'm genuinely curious.

burn baby burn...bring on the apocalypse

had to play this at x0.75 - talking a little fast.

Nobody wants the metaverse. This benefits corporations, not people.

What makes this guy eligible to talk on this, so many factors looked over and very school like presentation

Oh no! Virtual reality Realtors.

how can something that just collapsed shape society?

With great power comes no responsibility.

layoffs are sure to happen here. Corporations must count on caring for the replaced worker, who has lost his home and is nowhere to live now. No income other than an EBT card and unemployment or welfare. The lucky worker who still has a job can take over payments on the house and cars. Construction of residential high-rise buildings should be paid for by the mega-rich people. Congress needs to be replaced.

No, AI is not the metaverse or crypto. Those were both trashfires. What Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) can do right now will cause a jobs apocalypse. I mean RIGHT NOW, not promises. The acceleration in AI will already upend TV and movies. You can, right now, redub a movie in another language using a clone of the actor's voice and alter the image (lips, jaw) to match the new language. You can do this with already existing films. A vast back catalogue suddenly became perfect for a foreign market. Medicine and education are similarly undergoing a vast reorg. It's only if you think we are about to create AGI and a god that you are overselling it. We really aren't about to do that. We are about to revolutionise the economy though. Ignore the flapping about hate and misogyny. It's just activists trying to ensure the AI is forced to wear blinders so it's only allows to make decisions they agree with.

Can anyone name me one job that the AGI will create in the AI revolution? … and prompt engineering doesn’t count

Definitely spoken from a flat model 2D first perspective without understanding the impact of AGI works or what the long term impact it can have (even short term)based on how quickly deep learning evolves in not only self learning but superseding human intelligence in not only self instructing but self deploying outside of set instructions. Definitely lizard material and intentionally deceptive presentation. Yes, just as the vax was effective, eh? This is the danger of not having a soul but controlling this kind of technology, you can’t see the harm because that perspective is lost. AI can never be seen as a ‘being’, or entity as opposed to a tool. When that basic ideology is lost on any level, it becomes a dangerously weaponized enemy that may not be controllable just based on the failed human state.

Things may be *great* for the Eloi (1%), but the Morlocks (99%) will be SCREWED.

what do you mean?

1

What you do after Neuralink evolve and Quantum scanner uploads your brain on Metaverse and simulate it. Everything will be AI & Metaverse after 2050s.

Sorry, who is the speaker?

I'm not a technophobe whatsoever, but I'm sorry, I just can't get excited about this new hypertechnological world we're stepping into. To me there's nothing fascinating about it. On the contrary, I find it extremely depressing. (And no, I'm not some grumpy old man, I'm in my 30's.)

Technocapitalism What could possibly go wrong? 💀

Instead of saying the best is in past or far in the future, perhaps the present time is always the best because it's undecided 😊

Sales sales sales. Listening to businessmen is boring because they can't think about anything else. This presentation is for profit futurists, not technologists or pure futurists. Don't let them trick you. Growth? Of what.

👏👏👏👏 totally 😎 😎cool

Transhuman/A.I's spreading throughout the universe assimilating any intelligent species that stood in our way. 🤔Hmm... That rings a bell. Something about futility. 😅

It's likely ai will be the buzz and the metaverse and crypto will be forgotten except my con artists and random people who want to monetize games. It's something us geeks will play with and some finance guys. But it's likely going to be over shadowed by ai.

How are 63% of men in their 20s single, almost double the number of women in their 20's unless the women are in relationships with men not in their 20s or with other women? Help me with the math. (I'm not discounting the end of traditional masculine roles ..., just questioning the math.)

I love how the comments are talking about how "depressing" the video is when the comments themselves are FAR more depressing. x) "Oh no, making art more easily and customizing the world around us and working with great quality in a fraction of the time all by yourself, how horrible, what an awful future." Even if he's wrong, I can't imagine thinking it's cool to expect all that to flop. Loved what he said about progress happening with every funeral; you all can go rot and I'm gonna customize my whole life and have a robot lover, good fucking luck. :D

This metaprison looks not sympethetic to me. Gpt is, but this agressive selling of virtual community experience is a pity fraud manipulation. No, thank you.

AI and crypto will Shape Society

hype bubble is al this really is.

earrape alert

Depressing

😴😴

Yeah.. we’re boned.

AI - definitely. The metaverse - definitely not.

Just Metaverse trying to tie with AI Hype. AI is way beyond digital.

Man is not infinitely malleable in the aggregate like some virtual world because it's not a virtual being and this is not a virtual world despite the Disney like imagineering with gadgets .