NAB
We’re on the cusp of an era that will be a fundamental change to
civilization itself, according to game pioneer and entrepreneur Jon Radoff.
article here
It will be a battle for digital identity and self-expression.
“The next
battleground on the internet will be between centralized AI services, and
decentralized AI you could run on your own device,” he said during a
presentation to the MIT Media Lab.
Radoff explained that to date our digital identities have been expressed
through online game personas, social media and avatars. This has evolved toward
expressing ourselves creatively such as through virtual worlds and platforms
like Minecraft and Roblox.
The third era — which we are at the very beginning of, he thinks — is
about empowerment through artificial intelligence, where autonomous AI agents
carry out our will. But there are obvious dangers over loss of control that lie
ahead.
Radoff began his presentation by asking that we should view games as the
proto-metaverses.
“Games are abstractions of reality,” he says. “They have elements of
storytelling, there’s some kind of shared imaginary space that has to take
place to play a game.”
While most
games are constrained by rules, some are not, and this potential is what
excites Radoff. He identifies role playing game Dungeons & Dragons as
the first to combine rules with the freedom of its players to create their own
stories to expand the scope of the game.
“It is a shared imaginative space, shared place for creativity, a place
you get to take on different roles. And there’s enormous emergent play. It’s
emergent because you can’t fully predict the outcome.”
The metaverse takes this concept of emergence into digital form and
allows participants “to cross time and spatial barriers,” Radoff says. “The
metaverse give us a place where we can go through similar imaginative
experiences without having to necessarily meet in person.”
Online
multi-player games like World of Warcraft or world-building
platforms like Roblox and Minecraft are inherently social, Radoff argues. It is
the social connections that players are forming here that gives us clues as to
how the metaverse will grow.
Just as the number of social interactions are essentially infinite so
the emergent nature of these virtual worlds is infinite and infinitely
unpredictable by design. It is something not possible with the closed
HTML-based websites of the 2D internet but the seeds of how we will navigate
its 3D successor are already here.
And this has individual digital identities at its core.
“Most people are participating in online games, or in social media,
maybe you’re an eSports, maybe you’ve done online dating, maybe you’ve
participated as a viewer, or even [participated in] live streaming. Maybe
you’ve done some cryptocurrency. Maybe like me, you’re capturing your
biometrics 24 hours a day and uploading it to the internet, where AI figures
out how to tell me how to live a better life,” Radoff explains.
“The key idea is that our identities are now very much comprised not
only of who we are physically, but who we are digitally. And that’s changing a
lot of the trajectory of human civilization.”
If the current phase of our online ID is a presence on Twitter or
Facebook, then the next step is our expression. It’s about what we put out
online as digital beings.
Again, the first steps of this journey are already being taken in the
form of digital twins. Radoff notes that just as we’re projecting our personas
into digital space, we’re starting to take physical things with us into the
digital space too.
“We’re going to have more and more digital twins of objects in the real
world that you can scale up [online]. If you can do it in a factory, you could
do an entire city. Why stop at a Smart City, when you can do a twin Earth?”
As we digitize more of the physical world replete, so the virtual world
will impact the real world in what Radoff imagines will be a virtuous feedback
loop.
“The idea of shaping worlds and exposing ourselves to them and allowing
us to shape experiences that then affect us as well, such as creating an avatar
online wearing it in real life. We’re starting to blur the distinction of like
who we are with our digital personas online.”
But there’s yet another phase and it involves AI. Generative AI will
amplify the whole virtual/real crossover and multiply the speed at which it is
built. The question then becomes can we as individual humans retain agency over
our own identities? Radoff thinks we can.
His solution lies in providing a framework for humans to retain agency —
the power — to change and control AI. In this respect Radoff seems to agree
with Web3 advocates who envision the next generation of the internet as the
last chance for society to build a more equitable distribution of labor and
reward.
“When I talk about projecting our will onto the online world through
intelligent agents, I’m also thinking about our own agency about interpreting
the online world. Right now, in the centralized version of the world [aka
Web2], it’s really governed by algorithms whose objective function is revenue
and EBITA for an organization. It’s totally fine. I’m a capitalist, so I get
it. But I personally want to live in a world where it’s my online experience
that is optimized around the objective function that I set,” he says.
“For instance, if my intelligent agent wants to let me know that it
discovered a product or service that I ought to consider paying for, because
it’s looked at all the information available, and its pattern match that based
on my criteria to what I want.”
While not necessarily convinced of current iterations of blockchain or
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), he does think these are examples
of ways to create new governance systems that work for everybody.
“We could debate the pros and cons of whether that makes sense in all or
in particular cases but nevertheless, DAOs are a social system, an emergent
social structure, which I think is interesting to look at. So it’s interesting
to think about what happens with the agents that represent us online? And then
how do we form governments around that?”
Such theorizing becomes urgent when you consider the amount of deepfake content circulating online with few guardrails in place for people to detect fiction.
An article
in Wired by Thor Benson titled ”This Disinformation Is Just for You”
worries that generative AI won’t just flood the internet with more lies — it
may also create convincing disinformation that’s targeted at groups or even
individuals.
Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of
California, Berkeley, tells Benson this kind of customized disinformation is
going to be “everywhere.” Though bad actors will probably target people by
groups when waging a large-scale disinformation campaign, they could also use
generative AI to target individuals.
“You could say something like, ‘Here’s a bunch of tweets from this user.
Please write me something that will be engaging to them.’ That’ll get
automated. I think that’s probably coming,” Farid says.
In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, Facebook’s algorithm — itself a
form of AI — will likely be recommending some AI-generated posts instead of
only pushing content created entirely by human actors. We’ve reached the point
where AI will be used to create disinformation that another AI then recommends
to you.
“We’ve been pretty well tricked by very low-quality content,” Kate
Starbird, associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design &
Engineering at the University of Washington tells Benson. “We are entering a
period where we’re going to get higher-quality disinformation and propaganda.
It’s going to be much easier to produce content that’s tailored for specific
audiences than it ever was before. I think we’re just going to have to be aware
that that’s here now.”
While recognizing the dangers inherent in unrestrained AI, Radoff is
concerned that rampant regulation might stifle innovation.
“There are, of course, real safety issues that are of concern but I also
don’t want to throw out the potential for all of society, including
civilizational improvement effects, that will be a huge net benefit to us.”
He continues, “We already have a deep fake problem… We’ll have to have
first defensive technologies. This knowing the authenticity of content and who
it came from, is going to be very important.
“The fear [about AI] is real and palpable, and it will drive politicians
towards reacting to that potentially in a way that isn’t productive for
innovation, and may even be a net worsening of safety. The rush to regulation
worries me a lot.”
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