We Are Not In a Computer Sim. Get Real.

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The Turing test, devised by British code-breaking genius and AI pioneer Alan Turing, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Some people are seriously suggesting that we should be applying a sort of inverse Turing test to ourselves. Are now we now and haven’t we always been avatars in a giant game played by extra-terrestrial beings?

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It’s the sort of existential argument that writer Douglas Adams satirized in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts). You’d think that would be the end of it, but all this talk of the metaverse is apparently pushing the sanity of some theoreticians over the edge.

One of them is Rizwan Virk, who has the credentials of founding MIT startup incubator Play Labs. He’s also written books, one of them called The Simulation Hypothesis, published in 2019.

In the book he argued that humanity would reach the “Simulation Point,” a sort of collective transcendence where we won’t be able to distinguish our virtual worlds from the physical world, or AI characters that live in those virtual worlds from real humans.

Now that the metaverse has taken off (in print at least) he’s written an article in Scientific American essentially saying he was right, only that the timeframe for it to happen had been jumped forward from a hundred years hence to today.

This kind of argument is so absurd in its apparent face-value seriousness that it’s actually fun — and disturbing.

In his 2019 book, Virk says he concluded that if our civilization could reach this Simulation Point, “then some advanced civilization elsewhere in the real universe had probably already done so, and that we are already inside one of their Matrix-like virtual worlds.”

Yes, really. We are according to Virk already trapped, just like the Ryan Reynolds character in Free Guy, only we’ve yet to wake up to that fact.

The metaverse has moved beyond science fiction, he now writes, to become a “technosocial imaginary,” a collective vision of the future held by those with the power to turn that vision into reality.

By those in power he means Zuckerberg, of course, and also Microsoft, which just spent $69 billion buying massively multiplayer online games developer Activision Blizzard.

Virk is no outlier in his thought process. Philosopher David Chalmers has been getting a lot of attention and some flack for his popular science book Reality+, in which he also seems to think that the odds on us all being in a giant computer sim are pretty high.

Chalmers also believes that eventually we will all be spending so much time online wrapped in immersive VR that we won’t be able to distinguish — or frankly care — what’s physically real and what’s computer generated. To get there he talks about brain machine interfaces (BCIs) replacing VR headgear over the next century.

“BCIs will eventually allow us to not only control our avatars via brain waves, but eventually, to beam signals from the metaverse directly into our brains, further muddying the waters of what is real and what is virtual,” Virk says.

“If Silicon Valley continues its obsession with building the metaverse…[therefore jumping mankind to this ‘Simulation Point’ much faster] then it’s likely that a more advanced civilization (imagine one that is hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us) already got there,” he adds. “They would then create billions of simulated worlds with billions of simulated beings who do not realize they are in a simulation.”

Founded in 1845, Scientific American is an esteemed publication and claims to be the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It has published articles by more than 200 Nobel Prize winners. What it is doing airing this nonsense — without any counter to the argument — is beyond me.

Virk doubles down: “As we get closer to building out the full technosocial imaginary of the metaverse, we will be proving not only that [this] is possible, but also that it is likely.

To be clear, he is saying that we are all right now puppets in a computer game, one of a billion such games being played by some god? Super-alien AI? mice?

“While some of us might be players from the ‘outside’ world, trapped in the metaverse playing characters in this virtual reality, like in the Matrix, most of us, statistically speaking, would be simulated AI characters in a simulated virtual world, thinking that we are actually in the ‘real world.

 Like Chalmers, Virk seems to suggest that in which case we have no agency. That there is no point worrying about climate change or poverty or politics. Red pill or blue, we’re all locked in a sim from which there’s no escape.

This is disturbing on many levels, not least of which right now a democratic country and its citizens are being torn apart by a dictator. That’s real, it is happening, people are dying. Get offline and do something about it because you know what? We can.

 

How Decentralized Networks Can Pose the Biggest Threat to Big Tech

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Exponents of the creator economy believe Facebook, Google, and TikTok have sown the seeds of their own downfall. What’s more, their reversal of fortune has already begun in 2022, the start of a sea change in online behavior that will see the workers finally rise to the top.

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There are only a few vocal enthusiasts for the “creator economy” like Li Jin, co-founder at Variant Fund and founder of Atelier Ventures.

“Imagine a world in which Facebook is owned and operated by its users,” prompts Jin in an op-ed for The Economist. According to her, it isn’t hard to do. “The next step is for creators to build, operate and own the products and platforms they rely on.”

Jin says the cultural impact a creator has is already surpassing that of traditional media. She cites Ryan’s World, a YouTube channel for children that creates “unboxing” videos of toys, which “has over 30 million subscribers, and its most popular video has had more than two billion views.” To show a contrast, fewer than a million people watch CNN in prime time.

What she terms as “the stark imbalance of power between proprietary platforms and the creators who use them” is on the verge of being upended, finally freeing workers from the tyranny of capitalist monopoly.

“Despite directly contributing to the value of platforms by uploading content that engages users, creators resemble an underclass of workers, lacking the benefits and protections of employees or the share options that would let them benefit from platforms’ success.

“Historically, advances in workers’ rights were driven by collective bargaining through unions,” she continues. The most effective means for today’s creative workers to gain greater reward for their efforts is by taking control of the platform itself. Not Meta, but new platforms built on co-operative ownership. Examples include Stocksy, a stock photography library that shares profits between its members, who also vote on Stocksy’s policies.

What gives this utopian idea legs is the simultaneous advance of new technologies, principally the decentralized networks, like those that underpin cryptocurrencies. This allows ownership to be distributed via tokens that are earned for contributions to the network and often confer governance rights.

“It may sound futuristic and abstract, but it is already happening,” says Jin. She references Axie Infinity, a pet-battle game in which users earn tokens they can sell and convert into income, that now has 1.7 million daily users who have traded more than $2 billion-worth of game assets. Another example is SuperRare, a digital-art marketplace which also gives users a say in the platform’s future via digital tokens.

“In 2022 new, decentralized networks serving the creator economy will reach a tipping-point. The democratization of wealth-building assets through token distribution is an appealing prospect,” Jin writes. “For innovators, rewarding users with ownership can help attract the enormous user bases that will enable these new platforms to outcompete existing, centralized ones.”

According to Jin, “creator ownership eliminates the conflict between platforms and participants and ensures that growth benefits all stakeholders.” Starting in 2022, she predicts more content creators “will realize and harness their power, leading to the birth of a new set of platforms that confer ownership and control — and treat creators as first-class citizens.”

It’s not as if Meta, Google, Snapchat, or others are blind to this potential undermining of their own business model. It will be interesting to see how they respond. Potentially, they’ll begin buying decentralized platforms, altering their terms and conditions, or even offering tokenized ownership.

 

 

The Influencers Who Believe the Metaverse Is Already a Thing

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Think the metaverse is years away? Not according to social media influencers, more than half of whom already believe they are active within it.

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That’s according to a new survey by influencer-marketing firm IZEA, and it’s not the only surprising finding to emerge. For instance, 70% of influencers believe social media will be replaced by the metaverse.

To be fair, IZEA didn’t define what it meant by metaverse “because the concept is still very nebulous,” IZEA CEO Ted Murphy told Business Insider, so respondents could interpret it in their own way.

The IZEA survey took in the views of 1,000 people, asking them about their behavior and expectations around the metaverse. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they were regular social media users, while 23% identified as “influencers” and 15% said they don’t use social media.

The survey found that 56% of influencers say they currently participate in the Metaverse but only 11% of regular social media users said they were. Top activities of those looking to participate in the metaverse include gaming (68%), exercising (53%), and watching media (48%).

Over half of influencers are actively considering ways to make money in the metaverse and 21% say they already are making doing so.

Making money as a creator in the metaverse could mean a host of things, such as creating experiences that feature brands, wearing or using branded objects, hosting virtual events like concerts or parties, and co-creating and promoting NFTs, IZEA suggests.

Crypto is leading the way for preferred payment options in the metaverse. 49% would like to be paid in Bitcoin if they earned money in the metaverse; another 9% of influencers said they’d like to be paid in Ethereum, and 5% would accept another cryptocurrency. Only 31% of influencers said they’d rather be paid in US dollars.

But it may take at least a decade for this to become a reality, Murphy said. The first step toward this, he added, is making the tech more affordable, as VR headsets currently cost up to $800 dollars.

When asked what is holding consumers back from joining the metaverse, 20% said they are waiting for VR technology to become more affordable and another 12% are waiting for VR tech to improve. 66% of consumers looking to join the metaverse expect to purchase a VR device in the next three years.

Murphy added, “Our research shows that influencers are early adopters of these new platforms and share our excitement around the opportunities available in the rapidly developing metaverse.”

 

Smaller, Smarter Data Needed to Train and Scale AI

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The current way to train successful AI models is to throw massive data sets at it, but that hits a snag with video. The processing power and bandwidth required to crunch video at sufficient volumes in current neural networks is holding back developments in computer vision.

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That could change if smaller, higher quality “data-centric AI” were employed, allowing it to scale much more quickly than today’s current rate.

Data scientist and businessman Andrew Ng says that “small data” solutions can solve big issues in AI, including model efficiency, accuracy, and bias.

“Data-centric AI is the discipline of systematically engineering the data needed to successfully build an AI system,” he explains in an interview with IEEE Spectrum.

Ng has form, which is why IEEE is interested in what he has to say. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s; he cofounded Google Brain in 2011; and then served for three years as chief scientist for Baidu, where he helped build the Chinese tech giant’s AI group.

 “I’m excited about the potential of building foundation models in computer vision,” he says. “I think there’s lots of signal to still be exploited in video: We have not been able to build foundation models yet for video because of compute bandwidth and the cost of processing video, as opposed to tokenized text.”

The compute power needed to process the large volume of images for video is significant, which is why foundation models have emerged first in audio and text contexts like Neural Language Processing. Ng is confident that advances in the power of semiconductors could see foundation models developed in computer vision.

“Architectures built for hundreds of millions of images don’t work with only 50 images,” he says. “But it turns out, if you have 50 really good examples, you can build something valuable. In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn.”

He says the difficulty in being able to scale AI models is a problem in just about every industry. Using health care as an example, he says, “Every hospital has its own slightly different format for electronic health records. How can every hospital train its own custom AI model? Expecting every hospital’s IT personnel to invent new neural-network architectures is unrealistic.

“The only way out of this dilemma is to build tools that empower the customers to build their own models by giving them tools to engineer the data and express their domain knowledge.”

That’s what Ng’s new company, Landing AI, is executing in computer vision.

“In the last decade, the biggest shift in AI was a shift to deep learning. I think it’s quite possible that in this decade the biggest shift will be to data-centric AI. With the maturity of today’s neural network architectures, I think for a lot of the practical applications the bottleneck will be whether we can efficiently get the data we need to develop systems that work well. The data-centric AI movement has tremendous energy and momentum across the whole community. I hope more researchers and developers will jump in and work on it.”

 

CTV Requires Converged Content Protection

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The macro convergence of streaming with linear TV requires content security to merge, according to a new report.

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Intertrust’s “2022 Secure Streaming & Broadcast Workflows” report reveals broadcast TV will continue to be viable for the foreseeable future, despite the growth of streaming, and suggests the video industry will evolve to a hybrid approach, where linear broadcasting coexists alongside VOD content and live streaming.

“Our research shows that the convergence of streaming and linear broadcast media delivery has evolved to the point that consumers primarily care about what and where they watch, not whose OTT or Pay TV service that they are using,” said Tim Siglin, the survey report’s author.

As broadcasting and streaming are increasingly blending into a single, unified user experience to support this hybrid approach, user interfaces based on Connected TV (CTV) and operator apps will be key, replacing traditional electronic program guides (EPG) for content discovery and navigation. As a result, a converged security solution with layered protection will become the industry norm.

Report sponsor, the security and anti-piracy services developer Intertrust, highlighted the need for a multi-DRM approach to protect premium content, and that “a comprehensive, layered anti-piracy solution is also vital to protect service providers’ revenue.”

This approach calls for not only geo-blocking and DRM but also proactive application shielding and content web monitoring.

The report also found that, despite dire industry warnings, respondents — 63% of whom work in the streaming industry — indicated live-linear and broadcast TV isn’t going away anytime soon. Responding to a question about their vision of TV’s future, 42% of respondents see significant value in converged services that use both streaming and broadcast delivery via standards such as HbbTV and ATSC 3.0.

When respondents were asked about their vision of broadcast’s future, the top answer overall was “Smart TVs will offer converged solutions (broadcast TV and streaming) using HbbTV or ATSC 3.0.”

This is in keeping with the streaming industry’s belief that smart televisions will take on more and more of the converged media consumption workload, perhaps through the integration of live-event streaming and live broadcast events in a consolidated EPG.

This converged approach is perhaps a bit brighter than the alternate reality: no broadcast television. Slightly more than a third of respondents chose “Broadcast TV has no future; streaming to smart TVs or OTT devices will replace it” as more aligned with their vision of broadcast’s future.

Interestingly, despite all the mainstream press about Sky Glass and the Comcast XClass TV, only around 16% of respondents chose the option of cable set-top boxes being replaced by streaming-only smart TVs as aligning with their vision of the future.

 

Your Business in 2025 is Data-Driven, Right? (Right?)

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By 2025, smart workflows and “seamless” interactions among humans and machines will likely be as standard as the corporate balance sheet, and most employees will use data to optimize nearly every aspect of their work.

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Wait — that’s less than three years away. Is your business anywhere near becoming data-driven?

Analysts at McKinsey have created a guide the forecaster thinks that most, if not all companies — including telcos and broadcasters — should be implementing.

Notable technologies include AI and cloud computing to speed data processing and analytics.

Companies already seeing 20% of their earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) contributed by AI, for example, are far more likely to engage in data practices that underpin these characteristics, it finds.

By 2025, data will be embedded in every decision, interaction, and process, McKinsey predicts.

“Organizations are [in 2025] capable of better decision making as well as automating basic day-to-day activities and regularly occurring decisions. Employees are free to focus on more ‘human’ domains, such as innovation, collaboration, and communication.”

The data-driven culture fosters “continuous performance improvement” to create what the analyst calls “truly differentiated customer and employee experiences,” as well as enabling the growth of sophisticated new applications that aren’t widely available today.

Right now, only a fraction of data from connected devices is ingested, processed and analyzed in real time due to the limits of legacy technology and the high computational demands of intensive, real-time processing.

Three years from now, vast networks of connected devices will gather and transmit data and insights, often in real time. It’s not spelled out, but presumably this is dependent on the rollout of 5G networks and wider deployment of cloud infrastructure.

“Even the most sophisticated advanced analytics are reasonably available to all organizations as the cost of cloud computing continues to decline.”

We can also look forward to leveraging more flexible ways of organizing data, particularly unstructured and semi-structured data. This accelerates the discovery of new relationships in the data to drive innovation, McKinsey says. “This enables sophisticated simulations and what-if scenarios using traditional ML capabilities or more-advanced techniques such as reinforcement learning.”

There will be a bigger role for the chief data officer in organizations. Their responsibilities will widen from tracking compliance to a fully fledged Profit & Loss division.

“The unit is responsible for ideating new ways to use data, developing a holistic enterprise data strategy (and embedding it as part of a business strategy), and incubating new sources of revenue by monetizing data services and data sharing.”

None of this can happen if data remains siloed and inaccessible to sharing. By 2025, data-driven companies will actively participate in a data economy that facilitates the pooling of data to create more valuable insights for all members

 “Data marketplaces enable the exchange, sharing, and supplementation of data. Altogether, barriers to the exchange and combining of data are greatly reduced, bringing together various data sources in such a way that the value generated is much greater than the sum of its parts.”

McKinsey’s final note is around data protection. It forecasts that organizations will have fully shifted toward treating data privacy, ethics, and security as areas of required competency (driven by legislation such as GDPR, and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Automated, near-constant backup procedures ensure data resiliency; faster recovery procedures rapidly establish and recover the “last good copy” of data in minutes, rather than days or weeks, thus minimizing risks when technological glitches occur.

Also, AI tools will become more effective at data management — for example, by automating the identification, correction, and remediation of data-quality issues.

“Altogether, these efforts enable organizations to build greater trust in both the data and how it’s managed, ultimately accelerating adoption of new data-driven services.”

 

Where the Metaverse Is Moving: 5G, AI, NFTs and Social Audio

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Rather than a singular, encompassing metaverse, we may see many “verses” in the future, according to ETC@USC, the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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ETC has rounded up key trends from the CES show in Vegas at the start of the year into a new CES 2022 Report. It suggests that AR is poised for wider consumer adoption, and that NFTs could potentially become “a backbone of CRM and understanding for commercial, marketing, and experiences.”

Perhaps the most intriguing trend, which ETC is not alone in spotting, is that of “social audio.”

Its feedback matters since the ETC is supported by the major studios — Universal, Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. — and other entertainment industry stakeholders including Epic Games, Google, Microsoft and Technicolor.

Social Audio

ETC suggests that the human voice could be described as the original mass media and, as social audio, it is now the latest trend.

United Talent Agency executive director of audio Kristin Myers moderated a CES 2022 panel discussion on the topic with Clubhouse head of community and creators Stephanie Simon and Audio Collective co-founder Toni Thai Sterrett, who offered up the definition of social media as “live group audio,” adding, “the key is the sense of participation and interactivity.”

At the show, German R&D powerhouse Fraunhofer demonstrated a capability that consumers have craved for years, the ability to adjust the volume of dialog separately from music and background audio. The MPEG-H Audio technology will allow consumers to choose from presets or create their own settings for both broadcast and streaming audio. It is now possible, for example, to switch between different languages, adjust the volume of a sports commentator, enhance the dialogue, and choose from several audio description option.

 The ABCs of NFTs

CES held its first-ever panel discussion on NFTs — non-fungible tokens, for the uninitiated — with two experts who have grown up with the nascent industry sector. United Talent Agency head of digital assets Lesley Silverman noted that her company established the new division in March 2021. Her guest was Art Blocks founder and CEO Erick Calderon, who first got involved with NFTs in 2017 by following a thread on Reddit.

Both had advice for newbies: Don’t let the jargon intimidate you and store your seed phrase in a cold storage device.

“The moment you register that seed phrase, you enter a new phase of your life, and you have to treat it like the valuable asset you have,” warned Calderon. “And be careful with your private keys. This is still the Wild West.”

Calderon noted that, because a smart contract is operated by computer, “it’s also the most ruthless contract in the world.” He pointed out that it’s the secondary market for NFTs that allow artists to participate in their own success. “OpenSea is the largest market for the secondary market, with creator royalties built into their contracts,” he said. “We hope that as other marketplaces pop up, they also respect that.”

5G, the Metaverse and AI

Going into 2022, 5G will be the connective tissue, said Steve Koenig, VP of research at the Consumer Technology Association. He noted that standards group 3GPP will publish protocols and requirements for industrial IoT applications, which will open the floodgates to new case studies.

5G emerges as the “Edge of Everything” solution for smart device delivery, writes ETC correspondent Paula Parisi. She quotes Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire, who did tours at Intel, NBC Universal and Dell, as saying that 5G is “pervasive… this unifying connectivity fabric.”

Koenig pointed to the metaverse as another trend that is “closer than you think.”

“All the building blocks are already present and in play — cloud, 5G, haptics, volumetric video,” he said. “Now it’s about assembling them into an experience. The metaverse is the next generation Internet that will provide immersive digital experiences which will become inextricably linked with our physical reality. For now, it’s an evolving story.”

The framework for what ETC calls the Multiverse has been growing steadily for decades. While there is no single definition for the Multiverse, it encompasses the confluence of many formerly disconnected aspects of media and entertainment combined with advancing technologies and a cultural shift from passive consumption of entertainment to active participation and immersion.

VR and AR markets are expected to grow to nearly $600 billion by 2025, according to industry research quoted by ETC, and announcements of new products from big-name companies like Sony, Lenovo, HTC, Panasonic and others at CES suggest robust consumer demand for “reality-altering” products.

“Commercial applications have gained acceptance, eyewear is vastly improved, and several products suggested that eyeglass and contact lenses are around the corner,” ETC says.

Another “key ingredient technology” for 2022, said Koenig, will be AI. This will impact all sectors.

Among consumer applications for AI is that of computational photography. The Cinematic mode on the new iPhone 13 series, for example, points to what might be possible if we rethink these ideas as automated camera mount systems did just a decade ago.

“For a creator or one-man band, these tools are getting close to a prosumer level solution that features a range of near professional capabilities of capture, cinematic art, instant production and delivery,” observes ETC.