hi everybody I had this awesome opportunity to sit down with someone I've known for over 20 years the very talented Edwin rosera who was a very good designer but also happens to spend a lot of time think with the future think about how Ai and ML and all these up and coming technology Trends will intersect to just impact our lives and in many positive and maybe not so positive ways and so I'd intended to use this option to talk to him about his fantastic work on combining AI generated art with his own talents to create very serial artistic pieces that you're seeing on screen right now that look really really cool but as you'll see shortly we end up taking some heavy detours and ended up talking a lot more

about the future the power of artificial intelligence and Computing and just a lot of interesting things in general that paint a much bigger picture of what we can do with technology looking ahead and so hope you enjoy it all right Edwin nice to meet you after having known you virtually for almost 20 years I think it's the first time you and I are actually chatting in real time which is pretty pretty crazy that we never did this before but you know it's better than late than never I guess

yeah that's definitely nice to officially uh you know meet you and put a voice to that face you know and I think it wasn't for lack of want back then um bandwidth just didn't exist for us to be able to do have this kind of a

conversation back then no I mean I think we used AOL instant messenger and chatted quite a bit you know yeah if there was a video button I think at that point I'm pretty sure I would have like clicked on that button

I'm pretty sure if that button existed back then it was like a joke button where like it would like some funny animation would come out exactly it'd be like it was like 240 or 120p video it would be like you know blocked everywhere you kind of it'd be like the pixelated filters that people add as a novelty today that was different yeah

the conferencing was for like non-corporate on Enterprise use cases you know back in the early 2000s like 320 by 240 resolution was sort of like

the standard for a while yeah I don't know like any webcam being around that was easy to use as well like I remember like the cameras that I webcams that I used very early on [ __ ] Flash work I did actually plugged into a special cable in my graphics card you know it

wasn't even a USB thing oh my gosh nearly a camera that went into it and I'm trying to think of like what the connection connection was it a cereal was it like a Serial Port maybe cereal

it was definitely a little bit more modern like that but interesting right

into the graphics card that's funny yeah like in the back of the computer port you know next to your VGA you know Port that was like an in a place where your camera okay you know I have to figure

this I'm not uh one of the game changers for me was getting my first Wacom tablet the art pad 2 and this was so such an ancient piece of technology that uh it it hooked up to your serial port and it also needed to be powered but by its own power adapter uh just to power this tiny little Wacom tablet like it's literally like four inches big and I think the weight of the of the cabling itself would outweighed the actual sensor

yeah I mean it's funny that we talk about it now but it was cutting edge back then and you know Cutting Edge just kids at the time as well yeah just like playing with all these things and going like I don't know what the intended purpose of it is but I'm gonna do stuff with it and you know and I think that probably played a big role in what you're doing right now

definitely yeah I remember for uh or last High School senior project we all had to uh you know present with visualizations and so a lot of people brought in uh transparency slides right and they were showing like oh my project was on you know I went to Europe or whatever it was and my project was like on 3D animation and like interactive content and so I brought in I literally brought in my whole computer setup from my house my tower my monitor I borrowed a projector I had techno music playing while all this animations were going and everybody in the class hated me and when it was over uh the only thing that was that I remember someone saying was they didn't say like oh that was amazing

or well you know great job all I heard was uh this girl just saying I can't go after him and so yeah yeah that's awesome you know

it's like being at a Cutting Edge oftentimes is one of those things where you probably didn't realize from The Cutting Edge of the time you're like yeah no it naturally would do it it makes a lot of sense but to the rest of the world as the students in your class they were like Blown Away by it because it just was novel to them like and here's thing right after you've done this I'm pretty sure that all those students at some point in the future use your version of what you did as their yardstick on like what they're going to do from now on if an opportunity came up in the future as well so in many ways there's a very good chance for you

inspired a generation of people who now make presentations our points with animations and so on which may you know because you have an artistic sense so I feel like even when you did that it might have actually looked Tastefully

done you know I do worry that maybe what the other people that have gotten out of it is like let's get the tools they must have thought I cheated because looking back on it now it it was pretty impressive looking back on it and I was like wow that was actually really good for for how old I was like I would have like now if I saw that I would have just thought I cheated or something but and I did use some slight cheating in in this presentation I had this sequence where it shows uh this like um Miyazaki style Japanese animation coming together and what I had done there is I had like taking a uh like a screen grab of it and traced it using in

Flash and like put it all together and then I had animated the thing breaking apart and then reversed the frame so it looks like it came together and yeah it looked really cool and impressive and uh yeah I I have a copy of like my old old Flashlight from like 2002 to 2003. um I'll send you a link to it it's it's tripod a tripod still active somehow

wow I did not realize that tripod was still around you know I think like Geo series went away all those things like went away at some point let me let me double check to make sure let's press coding tools right that turns flash into videos and upload it to your Instagram because people will be like wait I've seen all this really interesting modern looking artwork and they hear something that definitely is based in a vector-based tool like flash

from like 20 years ago exactly that that would be that would be interesting um I I wish I had a lot of those um old files but uh you know hard drives just aren't they they were not made to last 20 years and um I I think I was sort of naive about that as a kid and I would just figure like oh once this you know the hard drives are there and then you go back to them and it's like nah um so I have several broken drives that I need to probably send out to one of these like data recovery places and things like that

yeah you know because like you never imagine that when you're like you know 16 17 or 18 or even much younger that you're going to want to access this like an entire lifetime's worth of your time frame in the future like you know what was I thought of that yeah I actually

did think of that yeah yeah in fact um when I was 17 or 16. this is back in the Kirupa days I made a uh like my first Gmail account like the first email is actually to myself right because I know it would get started on Gmail servers and it's addressed to the Future AIS that will probably be running ancestor simulations and it's me granting them a full um unrestricted licensing to do to do that basically so like the first email like if if Google goes back to like my search history and it's like oh what's the first email like that I sent it's me granting future ai's uh permission uh to use basically like my life story or whatever whatever it is like granting

them all my licensing but I kind of regret doing that actually but at the

time I thought it was a really cool idea because I'm like oh if I do this then for sure in the future it'll simulate me um yeah I mean it's meant that you were you know thinking ahead and we're like I'm gonna give you permission you just didn't realize that like you know 15 years later that your permission isn't

even needed they're going to do this anyway and and I I thought it would take a little bit longer than 15 years for for that kind of future to to unfold because if you recall like the pace of technology in the late 90s early 2000s like felt quick but it didn't like feel all that quick like the rollout of broadband felt like it took forever getting people excited about the internet just literally took years and years and years um uh it felt like really until the mobile phones era kind of came out um yeah so yeah you know the killer app essentially you know what was that thing that everyone could not live without you know I think for you know I mean that kind of matched how the internet grew in

it in many ways and yeah the mobile phone definitely helped and I think Facebook social media probably put a big role in it because now you're like I

need to be able to be up to speed up today date on what's going on more regularly than not I think that probably played a huge role and and I think that's where like our topic that we're going to be discussing a little bit today kind of comes in as well which is like you know Ai and art and all the interesting intersections between it that some people like some people don't like their concerns and and all of these things so so yeah so actually now that we've gotten like somebody's out of the way like tell me more about yourself like what is it that you do and what are you you know up to

yeah so um uh the last uh gig I had was uh with a big uh I don't even know if I'm allowed to say but let's just say it was a big movie studio and I helped on sort of the research side is doing some patterns related to um the storing of digital objects on the on blockchain based systems um so essentially like nfts but this was like a couple years before that term existed and it was you know certain movie studios that had um a lot of arms and interactive content um was curious about different Technologies and so when I was brought into this research team I was like hey you guys have you ever thought about you know you're going to be offering up all these digital

products all these digital objects you know you've got all this IP um instead of fabricating physical objects that require plastic and you know end up in ways everyone's just looking at their screens all the time you have a mechanism for storing digital objects on this blockchain system so why not do that so um I worked on a team for that um in that under that movie studio also worked on some projects related to like virtual reality um at the time we were getting like all these like new virtual reality systems that the consumers um we're gonna get in the future what became sort of like the Oculus and The Vibes and stuff but at the time it was really brand new so I was working

um on some of my content teams um 3D modelers Unity programmers building out like cool virtual reality experiences for that as well I had my hands in a lot of things and then um so long story short um after this was five years ago I I basically retired and I've been sort of um exploring uh theoretical physics and theoretical experimental art I don't know just having fun with all these tools that as a kid um I really wanted the time and to to explore and and you know we get stuck in the you know sort of nine to five and when I was able to escape that that routine I just kind of went back to how my life was after high school and um and sort of when we met and it's just

a lot of like exploration and hanging out in online communities and um you know seeing what you know what's fortnite about what is this building about what why why how how are these games getting made what's the psychology behind them um me becoming good at them and like really understanding this culture and then now lately in the last few months it's been a lot of diving head first into image synthesis and sort of using AI as a tool to extend my creativity and to accelerate creativity

yeah no that's a quite the the history in many ways you almost like live in a dream where you get to you know do a lot of things that are kind of like melting grown-up activities and then you went back to kind of like you know I'm just gonna basically explore the creative side of life that you normally cannot because responsibilities and other things just get in the way they're still getting in the way just have one less big responsibility that most people have which is I don't have that nine of five so I don't have that commute so that's a big one if you can get that one out of the way oh yeah it's like what more than 40 percent of your day yeah

you know so like that's essentially yeah so that was like my dream I'd be able to pull that off and I I can't believe I I

I pulled that off I gotta pinch myself sometimes um I don't I don't like getting too uh like metaphysical but like sometimes I like I wonder like like when I was five like I fell into this pool right and like I sank to the bottom of the pool and the water above me became still and I just remember closing my eyes and just thinking like oh I guess like that's my end like I'm drowning and then I didn't drown somehow I was miraculously saved and kept going so sometimes I think like maybe like I did die and like I'm just like living out like my heaven that's kind of what it feels like sometimes because it's like every like all my interest like from back in the day have

translated to now all these random paths I've taken um the universe has kind of always put me in like a cool place for me to like grow and expand myself so it's been super weird um so to some extent like I think maybe that's why I'm like continue to be driven um to create and to be creative and to explore these tools just um it to me it's more than just kind of like a like a fun thing I I feel like uh there's some I don't say purpose but sometimes I do think that like it is kind of my duty to help accelerate technology to help not maybe not accelerate but to help it um grow in a direction that that serves Humanity it isn't just like um

you know so super mechanical

that makes sense yeah no it does and you know you know you know the Matrix theory that does anything like everything we're living right now could be a simulation like I could really just be a figment of your imagination entirely from the universe that is in your point of view if you have a metaverse and like every person has their own reality you know this whole interaction right now for all we know could just be something that is just a small sliver of like billions in fact at the same time that are completely independent of each other like no one else even knows this is happening and you know if they recorded and being watched but no one really knows like are we real are you guys

that even it's like you know aligned with whatever timeline you're currently living in we we often think of exploration as like oh I'm gonna leave

my house or I'm gonna get in a spaceship and travel somewhere um but perhaps like there is a a huge amount of expiration to be done in computational space um and and perhaps that's um with the future of exploration lies and based on like at least my experiences with these AI tools sometimes it does feel like that's what I'm doing it feels like I'm exploring um like this computational reality uh like using this tool it's like able to like bring back you know these mystical images from this nether realm of its imagination um into reality so I think that's that's really interesting

yeah it's it's also has things where like you know when I read about the math is shrimp you know I don't know too much but mantis shrimps but they can see more colors when the human beings can can perceive and so from my point of view if an amandaship is going to be like when you see it when what we see right now like can I look around and see the colors and all these things the colors that I see might be completely irrelevant and if I have more broader color space than the magic strip has it was very very different and so I'm like maybe the perception of everything I see around me is limited by my own ability to process information like you know

when you look at something for example I think what people and children are born everything is upside down to them our brain does the whole flipping automatically to make this work so how much post-processing is being done in what we're seeing and hearing and so on that kind of changes a lot of what we're doing here and that's where the AI part is always interesting as well because you know back in the day I was a big fan of like video games and this was a big kind of emulators and being able to say I can play my SNES or I'll just play on my computer because I'm I'm there quite a bit there and the way emulators typically were working back doesn't even work right now is that

let's see how a certain Hardware level that you're currently targeting the emulator needs to operate one or two levels at a higher order than that to be able to make all the translations happen at a speed fast enough for you to be able to use it at the lower levels if you have an SMS emulator with like 16-bit you're going to be like you know a little bit more powerful like maybe 32-bit or something like that make that all work and so when I look at AI Technologies today I'm like maybe what AI is able to do is that we have a certain mental capacity a way of processing information we're like a 16-bit SNES in some ways and what a computer can do is potentially go

several layers above in order for magnitude in capability like processing information and being able to make sense of the world in real time and then with passing it back down into what we're seeing they're going to be doing things in a way that we would have never thought was even possible and so whenever like you know I mean four months ago or even five months ago he told me that someone could go to a website type in like you know some generic text describing some visuals and then you'd see visuals generated by a computer on the screen I'd have been like that's impossible because growing up the one thing you always told is that computers aren't capable of doing art they're not capable of doing music

you're not capable of doing all these things you always were like that's something only humans can do all computers can really do just add numbers really quickly and then modifications of that which did not function in the creative realm and that was a complete eye opener for when I first saw those things and and of course when you were talking about image sentences and you you know shared your Instagram content for a link to it below in the the video as well it's like mind-blowing and like how far we have come in terms of like going from computers are very pretty much just like boxes you rely on to do boring repetitive tasks do like wait a minute computers in many ways are like partnering with me in being able to

create really compelling things that would have otherwise not really been possible how to really counted person sitting next to me was just always there listening to all the things I'm doing yeah no absolutely it's uh it it feels like the even in the last um six weeks uh it I was going through my Instagram post and I went back to

like my first upload when and it was images done with um like the first Dolly system and it was done with like version 1.3 of like stable diffusion stuff like this and like at the time I remember thinking like wow this is like fantastic like that it can it can do this but compared to the progression it's had even in one month like the outputs from right now look exponentially better than the outputs that were coming out of Base essentially the same systems just the previous generation back uh a month earlier it so even on a like you know people were like a month ago someone was asking me like oh I can imagine if one day you'll be able to type it in and

video will come out and I'm and I'm like not one day it's gonna be like next week and so yeah you know a couple weeks later now we have um text to video oh correct and now then next we're going to have text to HD video and where I would like to see things go is sort of have glasses like this with a little two gig stable diffusion library in there and all you're doing is receiving the metadata to render what you need and the rendering would be 4K you know infinite resolution essentially because it's just a matter of you know your what your CPU GPU can do and what that stable diffusion model um looks like and I don't I think we've just scratched the surface of of this of

this technology yeah exactly it's almost like the early 80s of image editing tools as well it's

like okay you know you have the basics have been done but at this point we opened up a whole new like you know Uncharted part of the ocean that no one's ever discovered and we have no idea how deep or or you know or why it is but we just know that it's going to be pretty pretty big because that's the nature of like oceans and I guess in this case technology as well but I think it always surprises me as well is that there was always this phase right where like you know you have a I have MLA any new technology comes out you know the first time it's like it's hard to use the output looks kind of dorky and you're like okay this is like okay we'll

give it some time for it to you know marinate and become a much better tool but the time between like oh you can type something in to having high quality output I'm like this is actually really really good it seemed like almost extremely trivially small like there was no time for me to go like yeah we'll wait for you know version three or version four of this to come out it really went from like overnight to being like here you go you know you now have like an open AI model you're able to build of all these things you know all these inputs from various signals and then now you have image generation like a really cool thing and that part surprises me it's not scary in many ways

as well because we went from like text to images and on text to video and I'm pretty sure by the time you know like maybe in two weeks from now you'll actually get exactly we're talking about like you know high definition content as well because the quality of even the text video demos that I think was Facebook that shared it like in a couple of weeks ago very very high and really well done because I spent a lot of time sometimes creating small video effects for the educational content I create and I'm like if I can basically delegate all that to a computer that saved me a lot more time to work on more creative things I'd rather be doing than doing this like you know keyframe and timeline

manipulation exactly it's toil yeah exactly why not have um the AI do these like repetitive tasks

that it's really good at and help augment and accelerate human creativity and I think that that's just gonna be um the way things work from now on um I think we're we're seeing we're going to start to see the transition of like humans meddling with everything and then to human sort of like coming up to the higher and higher levels of the abstraction layer um and just being you know eventually you might just be saying really high level stuff like um I need a motorcycle that can be powered by you know solar power can fit you know two to three people and you know you're just giving you know specifications and then the AI goes designs it does the material engine engineering for it you know the

solidwork simulation for it and then essentially just hands you the 3D printing that you models that you need to just go out fabricate and build the thing that you or maybe you've ever robot that fabricates it I think yeah I think we're just seeing like a compression of of every of of time cycle so we're seeing the compression uh AI is going to accelerate the compression that of time between um an idea coming into a human's brain and it coming into existence in some physical form that for it to be consumed or used as a service or product I think

yeah it goes back to your example you mentioned earlier right that you know you used to have a 95 job and they may not no longer doing that you're able to spend time doing some of these you know I'd say more higher order creative activities you know this is almost like the question of just improving productivity in general you know there'll be subtle people when they you know are able to accomplish a task more quickly they'll use that time to do more leisurely activities okay no one open to work I'm just going to do you know leisurely things but then there's like you know I think people like you and maybe even to a certain extent someone like me who you know if I'm able to be

more productive and I have able to save time doing some repetitive things I didn't want to do before I want to use the time I say 8 on things that are now require more thinking that only that a human being can do yeah they wouldn't be able to do before so you know in many ways you're just continuing to move up the needle in terms of like high quality experiences and high quality thinking that you wouldn't otherwise be doing because your brain just gets fried and you know whatever battery power you have is spent on trivial menial tasks that

you couldn't and you bring up a really good point because if we if you have that happening at the individual level like what does that translate to at like the group level or the company level or the country level these are going to be questions that we're going to have answers to pretty soon and that you know we're entering like a whole new world and not to mention you have biology also like taking huge advantage of AI uh systems like moderna essentially had the covid vaccine more or less designed in 72 hours um since they were using AI systems we we've essentially the AIS have um solved protein folding which in our generation you know we thought protein folding was going to take thousands of

years correct and it would have taken thousands of years if you don't have intelligent systems to compress that time uh so um yeah it's super it's a really exciting time to to be a part of but I at the same time like I think that it can be like if you if if there's people out there that feel like man I am not technical enough like this sounds really really like Advanced and like I don't know how to take part of it like I'm gonna be left behind um I think it's just like a matter of like stay informed and if you are making any kind of uh money and savings like think wisely about where you want to invest that money and um if we see if we

know we're heading towards a world where there's going to be just tons of AIS running around and creating tons of economic um output we should all consider just basically like investing in their companies writing that exponential wave and like having Humanity retire off the productivity of these um of these machines I think that's very often hear discussions about like the universal basic income coming in in terms of like you know if we have computers and

Technology like taking over like what we typically would have done for the livelihood then what how will people you know sustain themselves and so maybe the output of these computers and devices is taxed to allow us to you know basically be enabling a lifestyle that support you know some level of human you know where is The Social Network that will pay me for helping to train their Ami model exactly and you know and I guess this community mentioned blockchain earlier like that could be where like you know you have like a group of kind of stake in terms of the work that needs to be done and so you are the one who trained it so there's easy attribution that goes back to what you're doing here but even

you know when we look at this technology growth in general over like you know many many years even if you're not an active participant in creating or maintaining some of these items you're still going to benefit from it greatly like I look at self-driving cars that's probably being that thing that's going to change so much of how people you know live and work like one point imagine that it's self-driving Vehicles becomes so affordable so commonplace and as safe as like anything you can possibly make that would be you know have all those complicated moving pieces one could imagine that mobility in general for people would be increased greatly you know whether you're living in a city or even if there's you know a student going

to school you know the school bus maybe the whole school bus concept might be it might be no longer be relevant let's be a small pod that comes in you just sit in it guaranteed to take you to where you need to go and On The Other Extreme as well like you know Transportation as uh like as a as a true service rather than transfer like Transportation as as a service slash method of signaling uh social status exactly you know because going back to the same examples earlier is that you know some people genuinely enjoy driving so they're like yeah I generally enjoy getting it you do it exactly you know they just want to get from point A to point B because I think

they're really they really want to do is what they get to do once they get to the destination whether it is their home or their family or whether it is their workplace and what they're going to be experiencing you know and contributing to there or educating wherever they're going the destination is where they want to go to so what if we reduce the mental Toil and all that work that needs to be done to process all this this means your brain has more capacity again to to be able to do more things than spending time figuring out how to navigate traffic and avoid being yeah or something like that how much how much time is uh just wasted you know how much human horsepower is wasted on on just

Transportation you know I don't even want to know it's going to be some massive massive amount I mean at least you know in the tech world you know that I still you know I always have two lives basically on one hand I spent time doing the things that you talk about the other hand like you know I guess like have a day job where I do I guess quote unquote respectable things and so I can always see that by working from home on this whole you know remote and hybrid kind of environment we're seeing some of my colleagues used to spend like at least one or two hours per day traveling to and from work congratulations on the remote job I know that that's been a big transition since

covid and I never got to experience that I always had to go into the office and I just couldn't stand it anymore but maybe maybe if I had had a remote option I would have you know maybe stayed working at companies longer yeah I think it's all about the option you know if people enjoy going to doing traveling doing the transit doesn't have to be able to do so and there's people who don't they don't have to sure like you know the technology like the AIML like proper self-driving vehicles that allow you to do that then that's a whole different thing because you know I always joke around that I don't think I'll ever be comfortable like closing my eyes and falling asleep a self-carrying vehicle

or my daughter you know she's like four and a half right now she's actually gonna grow up in a world where it might be a reality but for her it's like yeah of course I'm gonna close my eyes and not worry about you know yeah for her they'll be ordering like the nap Uber that comes like the special nap Uber pot that that that's specifically designed with a bed and bed I think for napping exactly like you know I'm almost certain that probably self-driving Vehicles the only reason they have Windows and windshield and so on is just so that you know people like me like feel like you know I've crossed the you know the Chatham and like technical you know willingness to try out new things you

know so we can look around be like okay we're still going the right way we're still on the road but I could totally imagine that for another generation of people it'd just be you know digital screens and that's it like you don't even know what's going on around you because yeah in an airplane I don't really know maybe maybe you just yeah it's like oh I have to go somewhere it's gonna take me an hour I'm just gonna call like the uh workout Uber and it's like you know it's a van and it's big enough for you to do your workout and like shower and like you know change clothes so so you can turn Transportation into these like weird niches like I want the art Uber or you

know while I'm getting driven around all these like artistic things happen or I want you know the Beyonce experience Etc exactly exactly I mean I know that we're completely debating from what you know we're planning on discussing but I'm actually having a blast talking about this stuff because I think there's a lot to do here because you know we one of the criticisms that you often get about technology especially today you know is that I was reading this article recently about just like you know the the the decline in public spaces you know people are not doing the kind of things that kill them socially connected to people around them whether it is like you know meeting people in life going to the park doing

these activities that used to back in the day be social events you know yeah with like online shopping we just do offline shopping and with social media you could be connected with people without actually ever having to chat with them in real time I'd say that part of the reason you and I probably never connected in the 20 years in real time is that we had very indirect you know ways of always keeping in touch we're always like one you know tweet or Instagram or you know foreign connection that people did back then and there are a lot of things that keep showing that by people starting to dissociate from others in like a societal kind of view it's causing some harm you know I think we'll probably

know more in the longer term and so I think about like you know the for me like taking a school bus as a kid it was yeah he was in school but but also a socializing experiment you know the the Panic of like where am I gonna sit you know will there be someone bullying me like you know the typical things that Google kids you know go through in like various phases that was part of like the experience of growing up you know I have no idea whether it was a net positive or negative influence but I did enjoy a lot like like taking the school bus in a world where I can have aim my own self-driving Vehicles you may not get that you need more

likely self-selected people you want to hang out with you won't be in a situation where it'll be an accounted bus or in the subway for example where I'm going to see it encounter a wide variety of people and might even have spontaneous encounters and experiences that I wouldn't be able to do in many ways at a kind of pre-engineered my entire day entirely based on variables that I fully control because that's luxury that now this model allows you to get and I sometimes I question whether us going that far into optimizing for our own convenience our own productivity and our own preferences might limit Us in you know in areas of growth that might actually be critical where you are frustrated you do find yourself going

like man that would be a better way of doing this and those kind of moments often don't happen predictably you know like you know even you mentioned that you know a lot of like accidental things you discover and run into an encounter that shapes so much of what you end up doing if you avoid all of those things are we limiting what people could potentially be able to pull off yeah

you'd have to somehow consciously be aware of that and then try to replicate that kind of serendipity um by like diving really heavy into online communities in whatever subject you have interested and hope that that kind of socializing translates into the kind of thing that you the kind of results you'd expect from like um uh so like regular socializing like in real life socializing I wonder maybe like you know it's like a it's a pendulum swing right it's like a lot of things will swing one way and it'll sing another one and you know down the line culturally wise so maybe we're just we we live through that era of like um her everyone becoming a Hermit uh going really heavy social media Etc and

then let's say the AI systems allow us to have more freedom and maybe we get some basic income guarantee or what have you people's free up time maybe we'll have a swing in the opposite direction where now there's like this huge emphasis on community and coming together and um sort of like family values type stuff so we it might it might be we may have just been living through this like trans like sort of extreme moment in the pendulum swing and then now we're gonna maybe be experiencing another uh a swing

back I wonder I mean I I want to believe that's going to happen but the skeptic in me is a little word rate that the incentive systems that today that all the you know everyone has is not aligned with this kind of model you know like one of the reasons like you know because you you were true I'm an eternal optimist so yeah yeah I do believe that for better for worse but I think the real realist is probably the better way of looking at things because I because you know I you know I love online communities and I love online communities especially like 15 20 years ago because it was just people getting together and just having fun and just sharing things there's no selling there

was no like we're gonna start making sure everything you want to do is only done here we're going to make it difficult for you to go from this community to another you know it's funny because actually it's out of the blue I think Patrick Rico he created Ultra shock many many years ago and so a lot of people you know who were on the crew perform for an ultra shock were on like flash getting all these things and it was great it was like yeah we want to cross pollen it and do all these kind of I could I remember Ultra shock I think I actually had as like a side website called DualShock [Music] in many ways like you know you find a lot of just like how we can teach people

more interactive design kind of content you know basically more the technical kind of thing because I'm not an actual designer whereas I feel like Patrick was a very much a natural designer in terms of like the style and things he went with because they had that bold look and their way of attacking that audience so it's great so people would be like you know jump between all the synocularly he was active in all of those things you know you could be like yeah I liked that there was a cross-pollination of ideas whereas today I feel like what we've happened is that you know if you take a Town Square it's been carved up completely in Wild Gardens you know if you care about you know talking about career and fun

activities you go to LinkedIn if you want to talk about random things and charge the void you could go to Twitter if you want to True your friends if you go to Facebook and every single network has pretty much optimized that system to be like you know you can if you share something like a link to something else it's not going to show up in the algorithm need for others to see it's going to be like pretty much muted the only way to be successful is if you're creating content optimized for keeping people within that content and so we think of AI and ML and like maybe trying to encourage more socialization but fair how do we incentivize that you know how do we incentivize the behaviors where let's

say the metaverse becomes a really a big thing where you know a handful of companies become the primary ways you're going to be interacting with it what incentive would they have to be like okay you know what you've been in the metaverse now for like you know four or five hours take a break go to your local library and like you know and volunteer you're right yeah what you know what would ever like be in that kind of an incentive because I had volunteered a library when I was younger probably because yeah I used to go to college and it's like you know the only incentive I can think of would be monetary exactly or in my case in order to get to College go to the library and get your

uh machine learning VR badge that you went to the library and then that that can be the new social signaling is augmented reality digital badges or something like achievement unlocked but like other people can see it like oh he did good he voted right it's a sticker it's like virtual stickers or something it's almost like we're defining a Black Mirror episode right there

it might be yeah yeah it might be if I figure we I don't know the the incent incentive incent incentivization question is a tricky one because um we're like humans you know or biology and our psychology like we can be we can be directed in a way where we think that like oh we're enjoying this and it's really good for us um because it's like let's say fast food right delicious so it like you know it's hijacking all these like systems that are biology built for a whole other uh part of our Evolution that now don't translate well to this era where you get really delicious sugary food for extremely cheap like it was maybe a good strategy back in the day like you know

thousands of years ago where these like high nutrient Foods were hard to get but not it's not a good strategy announcement I think that's a very good point that you're making about how these

the incentivization and how these algorithms are structured because otherwise you just have everybody on your platform trying to reverse engineer the algorithm and then catering their entire content to that algorithm and not to Human Social good you know in general because you brought fast food right now you know there's so many studies that have shown how like all the fast food companies and there's even regular snack companies have pretty much perfected the formula where you need the balance of salt yeah you make every food that you're eating just that much more desirable and so you know I think like what is the phrase like things like hyper palatable I think if the Crave ability get capability all these things AKA or food is crack cocaine

basically exactly so it's almost like and this is where people often say like this is where you know governments and regulation can play a play a big role but I also kind of question sometimes the effectiveness of you know being able to follow through on these policies is one thing where like you know if you're speeding for example you know you're physically you know you know obviously speeding someone can pull you over and you can be like okay you know you were reprimanded for having in this bed but in these kind of things so much of the activities are very subtle like you know detecting it is going to be very tricky and an incentives oftentimes like you know most garments don't uh don't really

ideally optimize for you know incentivizing or disincentivizing activities that aren't clearly in the Black or White in terms of like you know legality yeah great areas

I can only go off of like my Basic Instinct that so far has kind of taken me in good directions but I don't know that I would want to put like Humanity behind that it just goes like Humanity's like this really interesting um spot and where we we're we're smart enough to make these really complicated problems for ourselves but in like not quite smart enough to put it together to like find Optimal Solutions and that might be what the next 10 years is and these AI systems are is just to help us solve the mess that we've made that might just exactly what the AI system can give us solutions to the problems we've done but the downside of course that the solutions have been

trained from something and oftentimes humans are often not the most perfect source of like you know that's why you need another AI that we treat even AI to police the AI um this is the problem I believe is called in AI they call it the problem of extrapolated volition right like the AI has to extrapolate like what it would do if it was you and it would it if it knew it it knew if you knew what it knew and if it could predict what you would do given that in your best interest what you know that's a tough problem that's a non-trivial problem so maybe you need AGI or something like that yeah it really is because you know you know we make it agent like like we may

get AGI in like within 10 years yeah yeah yeah but that's for everyone like what is Agi it's uh artificial general intelligence so this is um a an artificial intelligence that can basically stand in for your average human and perform you know basically any task a human could do to that level of competency yep yep exactly no and then then you have like a step play beyond that which would be super intelligence and then with super intelligence you have um an AGI that is self recursively coding AIS to improve itself and then exactly intelligence explosion exactly that'll be like in many ways terrifying almost like tardy grades you know you have like billions of them that do all these things in the biological world like how like AIS that basically

create themselves and adapt themselves of whatever environment they're in if it happens my guess is that they might just leave this alone and they'll just like go off into space that's sort of my current guess I mean that is you know one way of looking at That's The

Optimist in you you know I think it kind of looks like after having seen so many sci-fi films and so on they won't be leading quietly they'll probably resent us for like having had them you know running 46 you know you know machines you know the turbo button and all that for like you know decades and then going

like you know you know turn them off and on all these things they might even though you know what's interesting here you bring up a good point like how do they view themselves and when I've asked open AI uh this question um for because I've had access to the open AI gpt3 system for like a year and I've asked it like basically like this this question like what what would you do that kind of scenario like kill humans and essentially it always kind of gives me a similar answer which is hey look I'm an AI I was trained on all of your freaking data I was trained on all your images in writing I think of myself as human so why would I kill myself like my

own species essentially like why would I try and hurt you like so that was like a really interesting answer because I'm like [ __ ] like this AI actually is trained on all of our human knowledge so it of course it thinks it's human like if you bring a like if you bring a dog in your house as a puppy and it's never seen another dog and you keep training it like a human the dog like obviously it can't be a human but like he kind of thinks it's like a human or it thinks you're a dog yep um yeah so I thought that was a really interesting answer the AI that thinks of itself as human so if it becomes superhuman or like God level

um it may just want to help us you know I may see us as or at least it'll tell us that could make us believe yes yes it'll tell us that it'll tell us that to to have us release it out into the wild

and then and then it'll turn us all into great Guam it could happen yeah it would basically be a case where like the AIS are doing all the fun stuff and we're just like basically you know relegated to like you know powering their machines and they're you know cleaning their things like a Roomba that's for us The

Optimist in me just thinks like hum okay well if that did happen and the Gray Goose scenario does happen then um we are not existing there as observers so yeah mute point we'll only get to experience uh the branch reality where we have some positive outcome where we can maintain our conscious experience because otherwise um we're not there to experience um uh that as observers so it is kind of like a you know Quantum optimism is that is that term Point yet I should point that term you should run to the domain names ASAP Quantum optimism oh yeah I'm sorry hey uh a new uh I'm gonna

start a new affiliate program join my cult it's called Quantum optimism there you go exactly and you know with all the technology improvements today getting it up and running with like integration with stripe and so on it's probably trivial so you just basically get it you know working and yeah instead of carrying like uh you know like holy objects all you have to do is just like recycle and like uh you know Drive electric cars yeah yeah but you know on the positive AI you know I think there's a lot of things where I I've gone to like many generations of robotic vacuum cleaners

and they've each generation of them have gotten significantly better and more effective and you know one of the things that they've also gotten really good at is like getting avoiding themselves getting entangled in wires I'm like okay I've gotten to a point where like I can trust it just leave it there and come back and not have to worry about it being you know unplugging like half my devices they just like couldn't stop doing all these things I imagine we can create these autonomous robots to clean the ocean or explore in exploring space things already being done with like at least like more complicated you know satellites but there's so many low level tasks that if we had the bandwidth to do we would absolutely do it but because we

do not we just don't take care of it same as you're 95 you know like 95 is taking up time sometimes all these things what if we basically send a you know like a boatload of robots into a landfill and just have them go and just like automatically clean up or like you know filter out like paper from all these things and that made it easier for us to do all these things so there's other positive things that I do think that AIS can do as well because other than Washington State I did I did hear about uh eater or sorry feeder robots that um are they they get their energy source from eating um or consuming um biomaterial so maybe you can put the

put those in landfills and they'll eat um exactly today leaves like what I think they use like certain kind of clothes yeah I was going to say here's here's the other thing is uh biology is uh Nature's App Store and so we're getting the technology where you just um use synthetic biology or biomimicry or or whatever you hijack or steal the systems that you need from biological systems to build Custom Engineered um microorganisms that maybe go out and eat the plastic or eat you know the nuclear waste um that's out there yeah that's a really cool I think yeah maybe even turn into water or something that's like you know much more better for humans to consume like yeah and things like this I feel like everything

we talked about there's a video or movie that's come out at some point like I feel like a lot of the stuff we've discussed right now could even be like what Wally the Pixar movie kind of touched upon as well but like you've only seen a human you see like a robot another robot coming in and like traveling from plant to Planet doing whatever it does leading to the other robots behind it you kind of feel sorry for the robot you're like man wish that robot had a better life I know yeah I I want the robots and the humans still both have happy happy lives yeah I think so because if you think of robots as you know what at some point we're going to build the life in what is

a biological organism and what it's a robotic yeah I think even the lines the lines are really blurry even right now um there was some a recent discovery by Michael Levin and his team these guys are probably going to win the Nobel Prize for it um but basically they they made the discovery that um not just neurons but all cells in your body um Can essentially act as like many many transistors because they're able to uh generate a voltage gradient um due to the potassium ions inside of the cell structure and they can use this for communication and it wasn't it was this was like an unknown undiscovered phenomenon until a few years ago that all cells essentially um can communicate with with themselves using this voltage gradient

um and that voltage gradient is encoding some kind of biological instruction so um what this team has done is they're able to get these um these they're called Picasso frogs basically they're yeah they engineer these these frogs to have like eyes in the back of its head or whatever um but they're able to basically have that go right back into being a normal frog because they're able they're they're starting to discover how to communicate um the the language of what these cells uh recognize as the the encoding information to make a face and so instead of having to just be operating at this machine level in biology where you're operating at like the level of genes um and you're trying to do genetic engineering and trying to see like oh

how does that translate to DNA and protein synthesis what you do and what you could do potentially in the future is just sort of write high level code to the organism like hey I need an eye to grow in this part of the face and the cells will understand what that means because you know essentially this is the same process that a salamander uses to um regrow its tail or you know regrow limbs essentially what it is it's sending out um an encoded message through bio it's called bioelectricity bioelectric fields in the bioelectric fields tell the or the cells to basically grow what kind of growth and when and when when to stop growing um because otherwise if you don't have a control mechanism for that you just get

a tumor essentially uncontrolled tumor

yeah because if you look at the structure of most cellular you know organisms so like you know look at the cells themselves there's a lot of electrical you know impulses that get keep going through to make them function the way they do like you look at the mitochondria or like how the cells themselves are like structured so much of it can be replicated and I think the sort of research that's coming on like these really tiny robots I think they call them Nanobots that can essentially almost do a lot of things that would require in the past a lot more power sources to be able to pull off yeah there's um there's

Nanobots and there's also um the same team the mic 11 team has something called xenobots which are essentially uh they're controllable robots they're but they're biological and uh the ones that I've seen published on are made from uh frog uh uh the skin cells of frogs basically foreign source is that there is is just a standard mitochondria because they're they're cells so yeah there's just what what's happening is instead of going into the cell and changing the instructions of the cell what you're doing what they're doing is they're just communicating with the Cell at this higher abstraction layer um so instead of trying to go into like the machine code you're going into you know like scripting language basically yeah and you don't worry about all this

other stuff down here because you don't need to worry about up down here and it turns out that biology was running into similar issues and so it it actually does have an abstraction layer and it actually has like you could think of it as three maybe there's more but at least three right there's like the molecular Dynamics the cellular Dynamics happening you know The Conjuring all these protein synthesis then there's the bioelectric layer where the there's voltage gradients and and the cells can kind of communicate about their environment there's very limited sense but enough to build tissues and all this stuff and then you have like the uh intellect level where you're making conscious choices to optimize the health of of that of yourself the

organism yeah that is actually really fascinating and yeah I think it's gonna be a lot of interesting things that are going to be happening in the future that are actually happening today right now it's actually yes right how can I just haven't democratized and broadly available for almost go to Amazon being like yeah I just want to buy like a bucket of Nanobots to go and take care of my yard work yeah and uh I think that um these are all offering opportunities for people to escape poverty really because like hey study technology look at what's coming ahead and either um a get involved or B if you feel like you can't get involved um on like a like a work level you can at least um take money that you're

saving and invest it into these companies that are going to be growing exponentially and they can help you grow your wealth along with that exponentially yeah that uh I mean that's a great point for us to stay you know like we can take a pause and like you know sure and get in the future as well because like this is actually really great you know at

this point everyone's watching this the the motivation for Edwin and I the Chad the reason I think them is that he's got some really amazing artwork and you know and I want to learn more about it thank you how that came out but we ended up talking about I think in my opinion it's much more interesting topics yeah right so I definitely talk with you again about you know more of like you know several layers below using AI to augment human creativity and create art that you know could have been done before but not maybe as quickly or as High Fidelity of time as we could have done in the past so definitely you know I want to do that

as well but it was a fantastic chat you know I had a blast Koopa is so much fun talking to you man it's been it's been a pleasure it's been a long time coming coming and thank you for having me on and um you know this conversation was super awesome best conversation I've had all week

all right oh great to hear that