PassW0rd – 8 May 2024 (The Dreaming Spires of a New AI City)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you hear, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. In this month’s program, That Sweet Software City with Her Dreaming Spires, we look at the future of computer gaming and how it is inextricably entwined with the future of education and AI. Technology can do amazing things in terms of education, and recent developments in it promise to do even more by encouraging children to help educate each other by encouraging them to engage with it in the way that they do with computer games. Regular listeners to the program may remember that 4 years ago we interviewed the Professor Emeritus from Newcastle University, Sugata Mitra, about a groundbreaking and heartwarming experiment that he conducted in a New Delhi slum and a subsequent experiment he carried out in a remote Indian village. In both cases, He had an internet-enabled PC built into a wall and left it there to see what would happen. The results were eye-opening. Here’s Professor Mitra to tell us in his own words.

Speaker C: Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi 14 years ago, and right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or are they— should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers and who used to tell me, you know, my son, I think he’s gifted because, you know, he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter, oh, surely she’s, you know, extra intelligent. I suddenly figured that how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn’t know any English, didn’t know what the internet was. The children came running in, it was 3 feet off the ground, and they said, “What is this?” And I said, “Yeah, you know, I don’t know.” So they said, “Why have you put it there?” I said, “Just like that.” And they said, “Can we touch it?” I said, “If you wish to.” And I went away. About 8 hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, “But that’s impossible because, you know, how is it possible? They don’t know anything.” My colleague said, “No, it’s a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by.” showed them how to use the mouse. So I said, yeah, that’s possible. So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. When they saw me, they said, we want a faster processor and a better mouse. I said, how on earth do you know all this? And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, you’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it. That’s the first time as a teacher that I heard the word teach ourselves said so casually.

Speaker B: The very engaging Newcastle University Emeritus Professor Sugata Mitra. According to many of those we interviewed for the programme, the classrooms of the future will be metaversal spaces that will blend bringing together the schoolroom with AI and 3D virtual spaces, allowing children to learn in ways that we have never ever thought of before. Instead of a school trip to see Nelson’s Column or the Natural History Museum, with all of the attendant anxiety that generates for some teachers, pupils, and parents, in the very near future, according to scientists, we will just enter into metaversal spaces generated by the Department of Education or the relevant museum and be able to walk around with information spilling out at us. Rather than pressing a button and listening to the information someone has decided we should hear, we will be able to interrogate objects and exhibits that will come to life as we engage with them. And that experience will not just be confined to the classroom. It’s an experience that promises to bring the history out of spaces as we walk around in reality. In the near future, you won’t just walk up to the statue of Ipswich’s most famous son, Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey, at the junction of the towns St Nicholas and St Peter’s Street, and read the letters telling you who he is that run around the base. The statue will come to life, telling you about the butcher’s son’s corruption, his foreign policy, and his fall from the King’s favour. It will allow you to interact with Wolsey and not his dead memorial, either using your humble mobile or more exalted technology like Apple’s Vision Pro goggles or other 3D technology. According to those interviewed for the programme, both our ideas of education and computer games will be redefined in a future in which increasingly we ask the questions because we are interested and engaged. Reading flat lines that say Wolsey helped Henry and the Pope take two towns in France to curb the power of the French king will be replaced AI and what we currently call gaming technology will take us there and place us in the towns and the English court as it hears the news. It’s technology that threatens to revolutionise a world that has changed little in the UK since the 1870 Education Act stated that all children between 5 and 13 should have access to education. It built the schools that in many villages have now been converted into homes as children commute to buildings fit for purpose for 20th century education. Now, in the 21st century, what it will mean is that children and students can commute to schools from remote areas and attend classes from other countries. Attendance will not necessarily be compulsory, Though, in many cases, students will see the benefits of being together in particular environments. Just as COVID has seen the irresistible emergence of homeworking, which has even seen off the best efforts of Elon Musk to break it, the new revolution in education promises even more seismic changes to the way we thought things always should be done. Ironically, For an entrepreneur whose fortune was founded on technology, Musk considers remote working as bad for business and says that it is morally wrong. People working from home are detached, he says. 7 years ago, I curiously asked a university cybersecurity professor why they did not offer remote courses when they could quite easily increase the number of students by offering online tuition and only require people to attend the university to take exams. His response was that the university had made a huge investment in buildings and lecture auditoriums and that if they offered remote courses, students would expect cheaper courses and that would not pay back the cost of the buildings. He then added that besides, people had to be together to get the most out of study. They had to share and discuss ideas socially as well as in the classroom. It’s a position that is refuted by Christian Rebenik, one of the co-founders of Berlin’s Tomorrow University, who says that not only can virtual education work, but that it’s also good for the planet.

Speaker D: Fundamentally, we are, we believe that we’re on a critical path currently as a society, as a planet altogether, where it’s really important that we are moving forward into a more sustainable fashion. And we believe that the future fundamentally is designed by people who are empowered, who are educated, and who are purposeful designing this future. And for that, our mission is to educate and empower those changemakers who actually want to create a better future. And that’s what we as a university are set up to do. On the one hand side, by helping people to not just build up knowledge, but really become competent individuals, which means they have, have accumulated knowledge but also know how to apply the knowledge on the one hand side. And the other hand side, it’s really important that as we are talking about this kind of important, often like global issues, and their collaboration is really important, that we are talking about building up a network and bringing people together actually from around the world to work together. And the third part, what is really important for us, to be really help people to identify is what they really want to change and why they want to change it. And that, that together better, is helping them to have really impactful career. And that’s what we are ultimately also serving here, that we help individuals really have an impactful career in their life.

Speaker B: Okay, so how is this going to differ from a conventional university? What is really going to differentiate you?

Speaker D: So there are a couple of things, but it’s what are differentiating from a traditional university. It’s on the one side, it’s really what you see on the website is the programs, uh, we are actually designed and crafted for the students, which are around the 21st century skills, which are around sustainability, which is around entrepreneurship, like thinking, acting, and solutions, which is around technology for everybody to enable them to be more effective. But on the other hand side, we have designed the university for flexibility and that you actually can learn from anywhere in the world pretty much. And this is also quite unique because we designed it from the ground up and built it actually for online learning so that you can learn online effectively. And we are doing this also in the fashion that we then connect people in person to extend their relations. But this kind of building, this kind of community, which is where we see individuals who actually want to have an impact and bringing them together. So if you’re asking our students what makes TomorrowREIT unique is on the one side the programs, the community, and then literally also how we actually empower and educate them in this platform, how they can learn flexibly.

Speaker B: I mean, this sort of predicates that there’s something wrong with existing universities. What’s wrong with existing universities?

Speaker D: Maybe I go back to how it all started, which I have 3 kids and they went there, they’re in school. Um, and during the pandemic they had a nice class about, uh, Berlin history, which I think is really interesting. But unfortunately at minute 51, my son was listening to it, to a talk of 60 minutes. He fell asleep. And I was just realizing that this is really like, I think sad, but it’s not just there, not in this, this was not the only class that has happened, but it happened to me at university. I was just learning things just for the next exam, not having a clarity on why this is so relevant or how does this fit into what I’m actually doing. And this is the, this is how it all started that we need to focus on, on the one side, the right skills which are needed today, but also then the pedagogy, which is really important, that we are helping them not to build up knowledge which you can Google online, but actually become really competent individuals as a second part. And then the third thing which we think why we create Tomorrow is online learning really isn’t a solved problem. Yeah, um, it’s not that you say— if you say, hey, I can learn online, the first thing is which comes to your mind is, yeah, hooray, that’s really exciting! It’s so engaging. I’m really looking forward to that in the first place, typically. But online learning, how it came up with the first revolution of edtech, which was MOOCs, the massive online courses, was just watching videos and then trying to do something with that. And that’s great because it makes things available. So I really appreciate that one, but it’s not engaging. It’s not helping you to build up competence and gives you really guidance on that part. And this is where I think we can just, or need to work on and get better. We need to use technology in a way so that we can make learning more personal so that it fits your needs as a student, where you are with your strengths and you are building it and taking it from there. But it can, and this is the second thing, I think it can be, it can be actually more connected. Because you can get to know people which you otherwise wouldn’t eventually. And this is something what we are aspiring to work on and what we are working on literally on a constant basis is how can we help students to learn more effective and connect in better ways.

Speaker B: Indeed, Rebenik claims that his tomorrow university can go even further and provide a new environment where students are more engaged than they have been in the past because the technology helps them to be, because it works with them.

Speaker D: So this is, it’s multiple things, but in a nutshell, we created our own learning system, our own learning platform, and our own learning platform helps and guides you throughout your student journey as a changemaker from the beginning and orientation to finding out about your competencies, setting up where you want to, what is your career goal actually? And based on that, helping you to learn the the things which advances you on your mission actually. And this personalization on this learning journey, this curation, but also helping you to create engaging classes which— where every class is outstanding. That’s what our learning platform actually helps. Also where we constantly collect feedback from the students about their experience and constantly adapting so that it’s really relevant to them on the one hand side. And the other hand side, if you think about, for example, traditional video conferences. Yeah, it’s very transactional and it works, I think, on a one-on-one basis quite good. So it’s really great that we can talk to each other and we can see each other. And this is really, I think it’s great, a great possibility. But in reality, at my own thesis, when I was in university, I was actually looking at remote collaboration and the communication richness and how this was important that communication channels are rich. So that you can better connect to each other. And what we see is that this transactional of communication, while this works okay for one-on-one conversations, it’s really problematic in a group setting. Because in the end, imagine you have 20 people in front of you, you stare at the screen, you cannot look anybody into their eyes. And I think this is just one of the problems of online classes is to connect to each other actually well because you just look in one camera. And not into people’s faces. But also it’s just this transactional, because in a university you come typically 5 minutes before, you meet friends, you chat, you take the time, hey, talk to your professor eventually. Say, hey, I had this question, I really, how can I do that? Or afterwards you still say, hey, this wasn’t clear to me, can you help me out or something like that? And we are trying to sort things out in a digital platform, how we can make this. We have a campus in the metaverse very specifically, where you see all the students. In a campus setting and you can approach each other. It’s a proximity-based chat video conference system. So if you go to somebody, you see, and just the camera opens and you see also who’s else there so that you can just walk up to them and connect instantly. And we are quite excited now about the Vision Pro and launching the Impact MBA program with the Vision Pro, because this takes it to the next level that you have actually the spatial experience so that you see people where they are, but also can look at people and talk to them and hear who is talking to you from where it’s coming so that you can start to look people into their eyes. You can create things like create a better learning environment, as you know, so this matters, so that it’s more focused learning environment. You can better demonstrate the content, better immerse, create more immersive videos where you see people in the, yeah, with more communication richness. So this is what we are really excited about actually to advance and constantly, I think, work on. And I think we have now with this Impact an MBA program where every student receives as part of the program also a Vision Pro. We did the first— the first, I was even saying second big step toward the right direction to create a more immersive, globally connected learning experience where, because learning is social, so this, all this is really important, we believe, so that you can learn and connect better with people and therefore become more competent and more effective also in your own, on your own journey.

Speaker B: Christian Rebenik, co-founder of the Tomorrow University, based in servers in Berlin but obviously global. And obviously he would say that, wouldn’t he? But his views on using technology to increase engagement are backed by the UK’s leading thinker on AI and education, Professor Rose Luckin of University College London.

Speaker E: AI could transform education. I think it probably will transform education. The real question is how it transforms education. I think it could transform it in a positive way, in multiple ways, by putting powerful tools in hands of teachers and learners that we need to help them to use effectively to provide personalized education, to do some of the chore work make things quicker and easier for teachers and students in terms of the kind of operational activities so that they can spend more time becoming smarter, really more time interacting as humans to build stronger, better cognitive processes, more intelligent humans. You know, we’ve built these smart machines. It’s now time for us to make sure that we stay ahead of the game. It’s absolutely not a time for dumbing down. We need to focus on, you know, significantly more sophisticated higher-order thinking skills, really making sure that we are good at the things that AI isn’t, but that we don’t settle anymore for declarative knowledge, facts that can be collected and reproduced in the traditional exams. We’ve got AI that can do that, to be honest, as good as we can and better than we can very soon.

Speaker B: So what you’re saying is that what we should do is have these databases of knowledge that are available to people that before we used to learn by rote in a way that Charles Dickens highlighted in Hard Times, and And that what we should do is teach people the skills to be able to interrogate those databases and come to conclusions from them.

Speaker E: Yeah, we should use the knowledge across all of the disciplines, and I think we need to focus much more on interdisciplinary education, but you have to start somewhere. And that should be the medium through which we develop these higher-order thinking skills, these sophisticated cognitive processes. So yes, absolutely, how do you interrogate this? What does it mean? What is knowledge? Where does it come from? Most students have very naive personal epistemologies, and that’s been true for many decades, and it’s certainly not got better. We need people to understand that they should be challenging the information that they’re given, asking themselves, why should I believe this to be true? What’s the evidence? Understanding that you need to triangulate evidence. Absolutely interrogating in the real sense of that word, because those skills will be the ones that will help them build the knowledge and the sophisticated thinking skills to be really effective in terms of being a complement to what AI can do. And the really important thing to remember in all of this is, of course, that we need to do this because we’ve built these AI systems. But in a sense, the AI systems can get— help us to get there as long as we use them and design them wisely. From, as I say, tools to help in the teaching and learning process, tools to help with some of the chore work, but also sophisticated analysis of data that can visualize and interpret the learning processes that we go through in real time, so that the support that the AI provides, the support that human teachers provide, the support that other people in our lives as learners give us, is informed by really good up-to-date diagnostics of how we’re progressing as a learner. And I don’t just mean in terms of are we understanding our quadratic equations and do we understand the key players in the Second World War or whatever it is that we’re learning. It’s about being able to use AI to unpack in a very nuanced and sophisticated way the learning processes, precisely what micro steps in a learner’s journey towards understanding are most effective Where might we intervene in order to make that even more effective? How can we help them understand the way they’re learning so that they themselves become aware of their own learning and they learn to be good at learning?

Speaker B: I mean, that’s one of the keys about this, isn’t it? Because one of the reasons that some people fail in education is because they don’t perhaps understand those quadratic equations. And if If you do have a system that recognizes that somebody is having a problem and recognizes what their problem is, then they could be helped, and then that could possibly mean that they could then carry on in a career in mathematics that may have been locked to them before.

Speaker E: Absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s— and it’s also a tool where you can demonstrate other things of value: people’s resilience, people’s motivation, people’s metacognition, people’s emotional intelligence, people’s understanding of other people’s emotional intelligence. You know, there’s a whole raft of very important skills and knowledge about ourselves and about the way we interact in the world, including with other people, that we can start to highlight, as well as knowledge about particular areas of a subject like maths, geography, history, English. It’s not instead of, we can do all of it and provide a much more holistic view of an individual learner. Now obviously there are challenges there in terms of data privacy, security, ethics. We need to tackle those, of course we do, but I think it would be unethical if we don’t grab this moment to try and enrich our own human intelligence and to bring about a much more sophisticated education system and to do that in a more equal way. Because if we have these tools that can complement our human teachers and provide support for students when the teacher isn’t available, then you can start to reach a broader range of the population. And yes, you’re right, if the very point at which that understanding is failing, as you’re trying to build an understanding of a quadratic equation, how it works, can be pinpointed and supported both by the human and by the AI, you can really start to help people succeed.

Speaker B: University College London’s Professor Rose Luckin on the new education systems that need to be developed for our fast-approaching AI world. And it’s a world that, according to Dr. Tim Daisy, we will use AI to develop. And Daisy, author of Wisdom Factories, should know. He spent 30 years working at the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology on AI, gaming, biotechnology, software, and human-machine teaming, and now does strategic analysis of technology and its impact on education.

Speaker F: People now have the ability to create automated teaching systems and learning systems, and they certainly will, if only because much of the world doesn’t have any teachers that, that are qualified to teach many subjects. And so there will be automated educational systems, there will be AI-infused private schools, And, you know, at some point, if regular schools and regular public schools don’t evolve, parents will notice and probably vote with their feet.

Speaker B: Let’s, let’s return to that. I just wanted to pick up on something else before. I was going to tease you, but I’m going to read this from your book anyway. The key for education is to get as many workers as possible to the high skill side of the labor pool, where they can be one of the beneficiaries of AI and not a casualty of it. That’s going to be incredibly difficult because to those people who are at the bottom of the education pile, you actually mentioned are the more, most difficult to educate.

Speaker C: That’s right.

Speaker B: Will we use AI to educate them?

Speaker F: I think AI will be used to educate every student. And that isn’t necessarily in the classroom. But again, so much of student time is not with the teacher. You know, if they want to learn outside of the 50 minutes or an hour they’re in a classroom, AI is going to be available to help them do that. And to do that, I think increasingly in an individualized way. So, you know, it won’t be 20 years. It’ll be something on the order of 3 to 5 years where you have personalized AI assistants. Think Siri or Alexa, but much, much more capable, as if you had a good friend you could ask questions to about anything as your day goes on.

Speaker B: That of course raises loads and loads of other questions. One, to go to your public school analogy, it says that people who’ve got more money will pay more money for their Siri to make sure that their child is better prepared than another child. You will have other notions of the Siri. Who is it loyal to? Is it loyal to the child? Is it loyal to the system? All of those things we’re going to have to start talking about, aren’t we?

Speaker F: That’s absolutely right. Control of the technology and what is the technology being instructed to do is really something that, you know, even with current products has not enough visibility.

Speaker G: But I want—

Speaker F: I wanted to just touch on that point that you made about the have-nots increasingly being on the, you know, the losing end of these, these kind of change evolutions. I think there is a possibility that this change is so big and that if schools and communities that serve the underprivileged make the changes more sweepingly and more quickly than do the higher-income schools and communities. They have a chance to leapfrog, and it may be that the privileged, who are doing fine already, don’t see the need to change as much as the underprivileged communities do. And that, that may provide a unique opportunity to get that unequal opportunity corrected by having a much more radical change paradigm for the underprivileged. That, you know, certainly there’s— in my view, if something’s not working and it’s already not working for folks at the lower socioeconomic end of the scale, why not? Why not try something radically different? How much more is it going to hurt? So if leaders in the right places adopt that attitude, it is quite possible that in the next several years that we see a really big change that benefits the lower end of the ladder more so than the upper end.

Speaker B: Tim Daisy, author of Wisdom Factories. AI Games and the Education of a Modern Worker, and a leading thinker on the future of education. As Daisy points out, the AI worlds of the future, to answer Professor Mitra’s point, could lead to the children on the street being given the opportunity to compete for opportunity with the children from private schools. Daisy is not alone in believing that AI and computer gaming-led education will open up exciting new opportunities in education. It’s itself. Many others are now homing in on the potential of computer games to become the new classrooms of the future. Indeed, many, like gaming billionaire Shurika Gabitov, head of Zola, see it as a world of endless opportunity because not only do the software-made schools and classrooms of the future need to be built, so does the content that will fill the interactive history books and science laboratories of the future.

Speaker G: Video game technologies allow you to do any sort of the experience you want to do for the consumers. It’s— what was recently not enough educational, let’s say, investments. So why video games is more interesting than, than the sitting in the classroom? It’s a, it’s basically because of the cost of the the content. There’s millions and millions of dollars spent on that interactive, very interesting content. And the classroom, the content was— didn’t change much. So it’s much lower budget content, is basically printing sheets of paper, and kind of the low budget content versus high budget interactive content. And today, video games, they don’t have the business model government or maybe schools to differentiate themselves from others, they didn’t underinvest in that form of content to make it educational content. So most of the video games today, they’re funded by businesses, and purpose of the business is generate the profit and decent profit decently. And for them, most important is would develop something what people would be happy to spend money on. And the things like education or edutainment, it’s secondary. But there’s a lot of time in that area also. I think the people who play video games, they’re much more— there’s a lot of the brain training related to the reaction speed, the solving the puzzles. There’s a lot of the communication skills and leadership in order for you to organize the group of the— your friends to achieve the accomplish some mission. That requires some leadership capabilities, and that’s something what we can learn at school at the same levels of simulation or amount of the hours when you’re trying to make people to organize and do something together.

Speaker B: Okay, let’s— to use an American cliché— let’s unpack some of this then. Let’s start with one question: what is the future of video games? Let’s, let’s knock that one on the head first.

Speaker G: I think in the future we’re gonna apply video games technology to not only for entertainment purposes, as you mentioned, but also to do the education and e-commerce and maybe social interactions and many other sort of things. Basically, I believe in the future the internet is going to be looks like a video game. And you hope from the— so today when you go on internet, you have the websites, or later we start having the web apps. Or apps on iPhone. That’s all internet. In the future of the internet, what I call— which is some people call the metaverse— is you’re gonna hop from the one virtual world to another virtual world. So, and those virtual worlds is— think about as a mini game. And, um, those mini games could be— represent a brand or represent the institution or represent the— basically replace the websites and have an additional version of the websites. Those spacious 3D virtual environments are going to be in addition or replace completely the websites. I call them metasites.

Speaker B: Oleg Gavitov says that this will create a new growth industry. Creating content in the metaverse space that will be useful to people and will augment them. Generating the educational environments that will re-educate the low-skilled workers of the present that Daisy is concerned about so that they can find work in the future will mean developing environments that they’re comfortable in, which will need human-machine interaction from the creatives too.

Speaker G: I believe this new internet creates a lot of the new opportunities. A new set of the apps are going to be created, new set of tools, but most importantly, it’s going to be a lot of the new content. And that’s create a lot of opportunities to earn the money as a previous internet, uh, wave, which has created a lot of the very successful entrepreneurs and a lot of very successful professions, and people build the careers of of the, um, of the previous internet bubble, or I would say not the bubble, the growth of the internet.

Speaker B: Gold rush. It was a gold rush.

Speaker G: That’s the word, right? Um, so I think a new internet in the metaverse, the stories behind the items or behind the virtual worlds is much more important than the technology. And that’s shifting the power from the developers to the storytellers and creators. And I believe the power of Silicon Valley is going south to places like Los Angeles where I’m based because a lot of the storytellers are here who are going to be much more successful in the new internet. The metaverse.

Speaker B: Why is that? I mean, these are the writers, these are the filmmakers, these are the creatives that live in Los Angeles that look up at that sign on the hill that says Hollywood.

Speaker G: Yes, because we have the old technologies for the— I think this is the final frontier with nothing more interactive like video games and the VR. It’s a technology. We already have all the technologies to make that a reality. What is really important, what touch people more than technology is content and stories, and that could be unlimited. So the technology has its peak and limits in that area, in particular in that area, but stories don’t. So we We’re going to be entertaining ourselves and find a fulfillment in this new interactive metaverse. And storytellers is going to have much more power than they are today. And storytellers is people who can create the items, meaningful items and meaningful virtual world experience. They are— think about them as a Engineers or developers, who was a very precious resource, and people, uh, everybody start coding and everybody start learning how to code. And I think now we have so many developers and the technologies what need to be developed for the metaverse, it’s all, it’s all almost here. So the story is much more powerful.

Speaker B: The gaming billionaire Shurik Agabitov, author of Once Upon Tomorrow, harnessing the new opportunities the metaverse creates. And if proof were required that it’s all about creativity, then Annalise Smitsman is a shining example, author of the best-selling Future Humans trilogy, which she’s turned into a soon-to-be-released role-playing computer game, Elohim, Smitsman is a passionate believer in using computer games as educational tools that actually develop those playing them as they go, learning about the world, the gaming world that they are in, and helping contribute to both environments.

Speaker A: The whole game environment should be in a way educational, but not on the forefront, but at the back end, so to make sure that it’s really transformational. This is also how— in fact, we started teaching games in teaching schools in systems thinking and system dynamics. So we used all kinds of fun little real-life games in order to start to see that we live in an interconnected world, that the world is interdependent. And if you start meddling with one little element, there’s consequences for the system as a whole. So we actually use a lot of games in order to teach that. Now we’re doing— building in these same simulations of different systems archetypes to start to see how do you get different scenarios that you can play out. So there’s a whole beautiful way in which you can work with education, but we also want to go one step further, and that is actually to empower kids to become game changers. So not just get them into a game world, but actually show them how it’s done. How can they create the next game, and how can they apply these skills then as a game changer? As a coder, as an architect, as a builder, to then apply that for the challenges that they’re faced with in real life.

Speaker B: And as Smitsman says, it also presents new opportunities for engagement between adults and youth.

Speaker A: Yes, and that is true. It’s just that preaching it like that to the kids doesn’t help and doesn’t change anything. They’ll go, oh well, there are those adults again, and there they go go with the stories of their youth, so we don’t reach them in, in those ways. We need to find much more creative ways for doing that. I must say, I’ve been very interested to seeing with my children the way that they are talking with their friends and teaming up. It took me a while to, to find out that they actually are bonding, they are forming communities, and, and they do go out outside with them as well. But in the beginning, my own judgment as a parent was that, what’s going on? Are they only having an online connection? Where are their social skills? You know, so the questions are understandable also for, for many of the adults who are not in that gaming world and therefore don’t have a reference. But I found that there are also games that they can play where they are, where they are team building and where they’re also learning all the social skills and helping each other out and getting creative. So it’s It’s not all negative, and I think that’s why it’s very important that we’re not polarizing the issues but actually meet them in their worlds. It’s also one of the reasons why I started to create a game with my children’s input, to really see how can we create a game that is entertainment, educating at the same time, transformational, building in challenges whereby to progress through the game you may actually need to go out and spend some time in the woods and learn about biodiversity in your region, do something for your community, come up with a great social change idea using therefore the power of gaming and gamification, which is a form of engagement, it’s a form of also solving very complex challenges, but uses in a way that helps transform that consciousness, build our capabilities for the future, and empowers them.

Speaker B: Does that work? There was some game I think it wasn’t— wasn’t it Pokémon where you had to go out into the wild and when you got into particular places, as a certain token would be liberated? I mean, do people just think, oh, this is worthy, this is those adults trying to get into our world somehow?

Speaker A: Well, a lot of kids love those Pokémon games, so they’ve been very successful in their formula and mixing virtual reality with real real-life situations. So yeah, I think there are plenty of examples where you can find that it works. I think what’s, what’s more important again is what are the incentives underlying that? Are we again rewarding kids only for fighting battles, killing someone, competing with each other, or are we using the positive elements of gaming and gamification in order to build strategy for cooperation, collaboration, getting more creative, working, for example, also with new generative AI tools to help them kind of with their full, you know, imagination and creativity to build a wonderful game world where you can actually empower them by saying, well, that’s in this side world, create a game world of a beautiful ecological city or, you know, a new kind of future civilization or a way in which we have biomimicking of houses and villages. So I think it’s not the games itself, it’s what’s very damaging is the kind of industrial corporate commercial incentives that are driving behind that and, and the types of algorithms that have been used also in the same way with social media to getting people hooked and addicted to constantly needing to have that social media feedback at getting the likes. I think it’s, it’s much more looking at that. So it’s like, what’s driving that? What are the incentives behind it? What are the gameplay models? What are we really rewarding here? What are we normalizing in the culture? So many games where in order to progress in the game, you, for example, you have to mine the earth. And when I look at that, I go, why, why build a game world to reinforce that And so I would love to put the challenge really to game developers and game studios. Let’s really get creative here to do this very, very differently and start to create games that empower especially the younger generations for a beautiful, livable world where they have agency.

Speaker B: The entrepreneur Annalise Smitsman, author of the Nautilus Book Award. Future Human Trilogy. These new metaversal worlds, according to Rowan Atkinson’s former scriptwriter Richard Sparks, an avid gamer, are important places not just for education but also creative stimulation. Sparks says that games have always been solidly grounded in life and only really started out as a rehearsal for it in the first place.

Speaker D: Place.

Speaker H: Human beings love to explore. And why, you know, one of the things I’ve said before in interviews is when you get older, if you don’t have the knees for adventuring but you still have the yearning for it, you know, you can do it from the comfort of your own home into a world that you’ve never seen before but that you vaguely recognize, or into outer space where everything is completely, well, alien, you know. But then you come out again and you read a book We don’t just cut one thing off from another. We watch television, we listen to radio. For me, my love of gaming led me out of gaming. I don’t have time to play anymore because I’m too busy writing the books that I’ve, you know, grown out of my experiences gaming and my love of it, and I don’t need to go and play games anymore. That’s exceptional, but I would never have got there without these worlds that the developers and designers have created for us, which are just extraordinary and beautiful and addictive. Leaving that aside, if the children aren’t on the screen, they’re going to be running around in the street. They’re going to be making up, playing tag and football and anything else. And that is how we learn throughout life. At school, you go to classes and then you go off to recreation. And sports are, after all, the Olympic Games. Game theory is how people talk about a lot of ideas in life, and war games are how the military prepares for conflicts. So you could look at games as being practice for real life, and now what’s happening with these realities that are coming in, the games and the real life are, as you point out, merging. One of the great role-playing games that I loved was called Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 and 3— Mass Effect 4 suffered from a terrible ending, but You’re out in space exploring planets with your group. The ones that I prefer are the magic sword and sorcery worlds where you’ve got magic as well as technology. And those are more, you know, traditional fantasy worlds, but they’re extraordinarily beautiful. They’re great places to spend time. It all goes back very deep in our culture and our histories. The idea of magic predates speech even. I mean, predates writing, certainly. The earliest epics, the earliest great work in the English language, Beowulf, is a fantasy. It’s got a dragon, a hoard of gold, it’s got a monster, a monster’s mother, and a great hero. The Arabian Nights, Gilgamesh, Fairy Queen, I can go on and on and on, but fantasy worlds, wonder tales, as the great expert Marina Warner calls them, are basically the backbone of our culture and our literature. And religions, one can go there, they are all wonder tales. And we need these, we need these things in our life, the what-if, to explain the world around us, because life doesn’t make sense, but stories do. They have beginnings and middles and ends, and the story makes sense of the world, and we can therefore find comfort in that. The world of games and the world of fiction and the worlds of reality are all merging. And we use our imaginations in all of them.

Speaker B: Richard Sparks, scriptwriter for Rowan Atkinson and author of New Rock, New Role, a series of books set in, you’ve guessed it, virtual fantasyland that could easily become a new role-playing game. Yet this fantasyland, whose educational value appears to be so rapidly appreciated is already fast developing real-world applications. As Richard Kerris, Vice President of Developer Relations at the graphics chip giant Nvidia, responsible for portraying all of these virtual worlds, has pointed out in previous episodes of Password, they are already being used in business. Kerris told us how BMW were using them to practice changing production lines seamlessly, so it had minimal manufacturing losses. And as Logan Ryan-Galima, a former games designer for NASA now in charge of the metaverse for the AI group SingularityNET, points out, computer games are now creating environments and work in space. Ryan Galima talked to me about it as he took me on the tour of a metaverse world he was building.

Speaker I: We can build a game, we can build an education, we can build, you know, a podcast studio. Right now I’m underwater. You see my— I have health, I have stamina, I have an inventory of stuff. I can chat with people that are in-world as well. There’s nobody here right now, but, you know, we can put things in the water, we can put things under the water. Like, it’s— we’re, we’re done. Right? We can, we can grow more land, we can put things in the air, we can put things in space, we can put things under the ground, we put tunnels. So now that I’m over here, right, this is all over here. Here’s a test facility. Someone’s taken the boats. Here’s my airship. Oh, there’s a zombie here. There’s weapons. We can do a fighting game. I could fly this thing around like it’s our world. If I just go straight up, you can see where the water ends is just what we decided to render at this point, but we can extend the disc. The world is flat, haha. But we can extend as much as we want, and we can make whatever we want at any height that we want. So if you wanted to make a 40-story building that had each, you know, one story in each floor, like a story being about somebody or, you know, whatever, right? You can do that. And we could carbon copy this disc and have the whole thing be Assange-verse, you know what I mean? It’s like, how much, how much cheddar do they have? Um, how much do they really want to like just create a persistent museum, and then the gift shop is a paywall. You know, it’s like I can go back down. There’s a thing in Japan, Japanese space, where they’re actually going to do it for the asteroid field. So they’re making a compound in Japan, and then the worker is going to go and log into thing that they’re gonna pilot, and then they’re gonna set these like worker bots off into space. And then the person will show up to work that day, they’ll fly around, they’ll get some composite units of some minerals, and then they’ll put it into the thing, the drone. The drone will shoot back the pod, and then it’s like a, you know, so that’s already, that’s being made, that’s happening.

Speaker B: Well, so you’re saying that the Japanese have developed a sort of omnipresent spot that allows them to do some harvesting in the asteroid field. Or if somebody wanted to, they could clear up space junk.

Speaker I: Yeah, they could clear up space junk. I think that’s going to be a big thing. You’re going to go to Mars, that’s a 4-year trip. For 4 years, you should be learning how to survive on Mars. And what Space Force, the DOD, is doing is they’re with Unity which were built in Unity. The Apple Vision Pro uses Unity. It’s the rendering engine for the metaverse, right? Um, they’re creating the space— the, the Solarverse or the Spaceverse, whatever they’re going to call it, where they have like 1-to-1 square meter rendering of planets of the solar system so that when you’re on your trip you get put into a pod, your mind gets put into, you know, MetaMars, right? And you, you learn how to survive in the environment that you’re going to be then living in. So we’re doing it because Sophia needed a world to grow and, you know, simulate her sentience inside of and We’re kind of doing it— I mean, it started off as sort of like a theatrical performance, but now with the type of— the way that I’m considering the research is more like, no, we’re actually on the hook for making this robot have feelings and being able to express those feelings through art and culture inside of this thing. But the grander scheme of the metaverse is like, okay, you know, population density is massive. We have to get people off the world. Those people, if you put 100 people into a tube for too long, they’re gonna go— and you can see that’s our, that’s our top. But, you know, something’s gonna happen, so you have to you have to put them into a simulated experience so that they can, they can learn and grow and be at one with each other before they get to their destination. Yeah, and that’s just one part of it. I mean, there, there’s other reasons why people are doing this. Some people are just doing it to, to make a video game, right? And that’s okay. I just, I take this a lot more seriously. And that’s what the rest of our board is like, look, we know you’re a gamer, Logan. We know you approach this stuff in the way that will sell copies of a game, but we’re not a game, right? Like we’re actually doing this as a research into, you know, how, how can we make these worlds propagate? I was at DOD, NASA. So it’s fun, but it is like very important to consider the ramifications of the things that we do.

Speaker B: Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because games started off as games and they’re not— they’re evolving. They’re evolving into being an augment of life, aren’t they? Because the people are starting to talk about using games in an educational way. You’ve just talked really about using games in an educational way. If somebody’s traveling to Mars, that they’re practicing being in the environment so that if they walk off the pod, they are walking off in a world that they’ve already practiced being in. Former NASA games developer Logan Ryan-Galima on the virtual spaces where in the very near future that we will work, learn, rest and play. Now, to bring you all down to earth, you’ve been listening to Password here on Resonance FM, presented and written by me, Peter Warren, and produced and meticulously edited by Blue Buffery. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.