PassW0rd – 9 October 2024 (Digitally Resonating)

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. In this month’s program, Digitally Resonating,— we examine the online world of life and work in the future and the emergence of the digital twin. It’s a world that we’ve touched on in past episodes. Indeed, most poignantly, we brought you the story of Matt Steen, a terminally ill and disabled youth locked into a special wheelchair with the merest of movements available to him, who unbeknownst to his parents had lived most of his 25-year-old life in a computer game called World of Warcraft. In the game, Mats had two love affairs and was a ponytailed Thor-like figure called Ibelin. It’s an incredibly touching story that now has been made into a film by Netflix called Ibelin, due to be released in 9 days’ time on October 18th. And it’s perhaps one of the most telling examples of what is currently possible with technology in terms of living and working in places other other than the real world. Here’s Robert Stein, Matt’s father, on the family’s discovery after his death that Matt had hundreds of friends worldwide that they had never known about.

Speaker C: Uh, he had passed away 10 days before, and he was 25 years old, so he was rather young. But at his funeral, it turned up a lot of people which I had no idea who was or where they came from. And then it proved that they came from all over Europe.. And they knew my son Mats without actually having met him physically. And this was kind of an eye-opener for me as for the kind of friendships, relationships, love relationships that can be built in the digital world. And from that, as a starting point, I started to dig into what kind of environment, what kind of life he had really been living in front of his computer and his screen. So that’s in a way where it started. And so what did you find out then? What was this life that he was living that meant so much to so many other people? Well, since this is now 4, 4 and a half years ago, it has been, as I said, very much of an eye-opener. First and foremost, I met with a woman. Her name was Anne. She lives in Salisbury outside of London. At the time when I met her at my son’s funeral, she was 62 years old. She was a psychologist, she was an entrepreneur, and she worked as a headhunter in the European Union. She was a gamer and a close friend of my son, who at that time was age 25. And she said to me that if you are the kind of adult which I suspect that you are, and which most people are, you might want to know a little bit more about the life that your son has been a part of. And then she sat down with me for some hours and took me through what they experienced in this gaming world, which is called World of Warcraft. Together. And she said that most of the time we are in a kind of traditional social relationship. It is not about killing each other. It’s not so much about the gaming or the competition as you might believe or think. It is mostly about social relationship. We meet, we talk, we eat turtle soup together, we run around lakes, we have competition, or we just tease each other.. So very much the same thing as we experience in the physical world, but there is one big difference, she told me, and that is your physical appearance doesn’t play any role at all because we can’t see each other, which means that the color of your skin has absolutely no importance. Your makeup doesn’t matter. Your clothes are not visible. So over a long period of time, and we spent between 15,000 and 20,000 hours together over a 10-year period, ‘And when you come into a relationship with a person over such a long period of time, the only thing that remains is what you have in your heart and what you have in your head. So for me,’ she said, ‘being 62 years old from Salisbury, for me, this is purer relationships and purer friendships than the ones I experience in the physical world.’ This is very important for your son too, wasn’t it? Because he didn’t have that mobility in the physical world, you know, to run around a lake. That is true, and I think that that was in a way a blessing in disguise because my son was born with a muscle disease which we discovered when he was 4. This muscle disease is pretty well described, so we knew more or less how his life was going to develop over the next 20 years, which is both kind of terrifying but also good as for putting the practical things in place so that he can live a good life based on his pre-assumptions. So I I think we were kind of liberal when he decided to spend so much time in front of his computer in this gaming world. If he didn’t have this disease, we would probably have taken the traditional approach and taken his time away from the computer. We would have been worried about all this gaming, about all the time spent in front of the computer. We would have limited that. We would have given him an hour or two a day which he was allowed to play and so on and so forth, like most other parents and adults are doing. So as I said, kind of a blessing in disguise. There. What we experienced is that he had something to spend his time on when he, the last 10 years of his life, was more or less bound to his apartment and couldn’t go out with the rest of us. And we thought that this was a good way of occupying his mind. It was kind of a leisure activity which he could do. But we didn’t see beyond that. We didn’t see the real kind of relationships and how he could also set his footprint in the world and actually mean things for others. We were always very fascinated about Mats because, as I said, the last 10 years he almost didn’t get out of his apartment. The last years he had to have a breathing aid, and the last months he could only move his fingers. But he was always happy. He was always curious. He was always forthcoming, and he was never complaining about his situation. And that was in a way something which was, of course, a very good observation but we were always wondering why that was the case. And afterwards, I have been thinking that the reason for why he was always happy was because he had all those important things for a happy life, as you and I have. He had friends, he had someone who was dependent upon him, he had his crushes and his love affairs. So he had all these things which makes us happy in real life, if we are going to use an expression like that. So for him, This made all the difference in the world. And that had nothing to do with his disabilities as such. It could have been a sister who had the same kind of experience who do not have that kind of disease. But he obviously had a very, very powerful character, didn’t he? Because he made so many friends. He obviously had quite an influence on people and it allowed him to express himself. Absolutely, which also proves that we also generalize when we think about and speak about disabled people. He was an extremely extremely verbal person. He was an intelligent person. He was a fun person to talk to and to relate to. But since he was sitting in a wheelchair, people in the physical world treated him as something else.

Speaker B: Robert Steen, the father of Matt Steen, on the incredible online life of his son, a dramatization of which Ibelin can now be seen on Netflix on October the 18th. Now, online is not just a space that allows for stories like those of Matt’s. It is increasingly being seen as a place for work. Just as computers started out as labor-saving tools for work, they are more and more being seen as the place to do work, a process that with the development of the internet has allowed people to begin to work from home. Now, since the lockdown caused by the pandemic, it’s been accepted that remote working will be part of our life. The workstation can be anywhere. Indeed, numerous attempts to force employees back into the office by individuals such as Elon Musk and companies like McKinsey and others appear to have been thwarted. At the start of October 2024, McKinsey said it was going to up the number of days a week employees were expected to be in the office, prompting reports that some 73% of staff were considering their positions. At the beginning of this year, Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon, said employees would be expected to be in work 5 days a week. PricewaterhouseCoopers told UK employees it expected them to spend 60% of their time in the office. Office. An unpopular move because many employees are now selecting potential employers on workplace flexibility and their ethical stance. To many, it’s a stance that the employees can’t win because the end of the pandemic ushered in another trend— the tech company layoffs, which saw significant workforce reductions beginning in 2022 and 2023. This year, we’ve seen more than 130,000 jobs go across 457 companies. According to a website monitoring the trend, layoffs.fyi, companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Though, As with all things, as the legendary investigative journalist Sir Harry Evans said, things are not what they seem on the surface. Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper. In the case of Microsoft, most of its 650 layoffs were in its games division and came 8 months after the gaming division had already faced 1,900 job cuts after it had acquired the games company Activision Blizzard. While a lot of the other layoffs have occurred due to changes the companies were already undergoing as they adopted the new technology practices they have been advocating for others that were accelerated due to the pandemic. Changes that have seen technology replacing workers in jobs that involve simple processes such as moving things around and replacing office workers with automation. It’s a trend one of our guests, the employment expert Richard Skellett, thinks will accelerate. Automation, says Skellett, could eradicate 50% of the jobs that are done today. Digital workers, he says, are going to replace many of the roles we currently perform. Yet Just as with the forced return to the office, seemingly to accept our execution by a robot, according to many we have interviewed, if we ally with the robots, we may be able to save ourselves by developing digital twins. It’s something that Ronan Walsh, the head of high-tech marketing agency Digital Trawler, who is researching for a PhD in technology trends, says is as much of an internet trend as automation.

Speaker D: There’s already some software out there allowing you to build replicas of yourself. There’s a coach in Brighton called Rob Da Costa who’s building an AI version of himself so his clients can go on and ask questions and things like that. That then leads to the kind of theory of, will you be at your own funeral? You know, that’s something that’s been playing on my head is that, you know, Is it going to be a case where I’ll have trained an AI bot and there’ll be visual representation of me and I’ll be able to thank people as they’re walking by? So it’s kind of a mad concept to think that we’re not too far away from that being a reality. It’s very possible that somebody could be still having a conversation with your thoughts and your values and still being portrayed by a visual representation of you, which is kind of an interesting way to think about it. Are employees— there’s, you know, if you hire one employee, you’re now able to multiply them by 10, have them in different places, which means that, you know, you can have a manager in India and Asia or in a factory in the UK, and he can answer multiple questions there and then, you know. So I think that that is That’s the way we’re going to go. And it won’t be necessarily that the line manager will be managing all of the tasks, as you said, on that line. It’s going to be a case of them training an AI bot to be able to answer other questions and multiply it. So, yeah, whose value is going to go up and whose value is going to go down in that scenario? That’s a big question as well. Isn’t really clear at the minute either, you know.

Speaker B: No, it’s not, because it could be that in that scenario that you’re talking about, that something of real value is developed in those interrelationships. And are you going to take that away with you? Yeah, I mean, this is going to be— it could be that you could be in a subcontracted basis, i.e., that you’ve let your data go out. You’ve said, you’ve said, yeah, I agree to my data being used. I agree to my data going out there. And your data, when mixed with somebody else’s data, comes up with some very unique product, then you have your data interest in that.

Speaker D: Yeah. And that is where the Web 2.0 is struggling at the minute. Well, struggling isn’t the word because the Web 2.0, that being Google and Facebook and Amazon. They’ve all done very well out of sharing people’s data and are capitalizing on it. Sharing is maybe not the best word to describe it, but I can see people being very conscious of that now. And there’s a potential to switch towards blockchain to manage your data and kind of have control over it and have exact say over what happens. But as a society where, and this is yet something I’ve only coming up in this conversation, we’re quite open to opting in at high stakes for low value items in terms of if there’s a time element to it or if you’re signed up to Facebook, you’ll happily sign over on the dotted line because you’re not fully aware as to what you’re signing up for. And, you know, that could be something that could end up following us into Web 3.0 if we aren’t careful. And I think that blockchain is something that is going to have to come, whether cryptocurrencies come with it or not, I’m not too sure. But I think that the dataset that we’re going to be creating is going to have to be written into blockchain in order for us to really see a revolution in the technologies that we’re using. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a faster-paced Google and Facebook world as we know it. But there’s also one big thing I think that is something that I’m waiting to see. I can’t see where this happens for, you know, the full realization of Web 3.0 coming to the forefront. But essentially, we’re missing a key element, which is when Web 2.0 started, there was lots of, you know, there was the old PHP forms, and then, you know, people were able to kind of code themselves and explore. At the minute, we just have big players trying to own the metaverse. So we have Facebook changing their changing their name to the metaverse. We have NVIDIA creating their Omniverse version, and there’s so many different moving parts. I don’t know if it is possible for, you know, somebody to create a wordpress.org and next thing everybody has a website that they’re able to develop themselves. I think that at the minute it looks like somebody’s going to try and control this Web 3.0 or the metaverse or whatever you want to call it. And that is until somebody comes through and kind of starts creating something that is essentially a non-government organization that helps manage all of this for free, where they’re not going to be taking a cut, then, you know, essentially we’re going to end up handing over our data to somebody who’s going to be the manager of it. Now, there are, there are a few that seem to be coming through. There was a new one released this year called Lamina One, which is— it’s, it’s going to help in it. Like, there, there is elements of the blockchain, but it’s primarily focused on NFTs. Now, your, your data could be considered an NFT. A lot of people kind of wonder, what are, what are NFTs? And my own view is it’s, you know, it’s— it could be anything from your, your own Facebook profile picture or Instagram profile picture that you have at the minute to something of real value, which is your data essentially. So it’s not just social icons or anything like that, or digital assets in terms of graphics or things like that. It could be much further extended. But again, like I said, the definitions of these aren’t really fully understood. And at the minute, an NFT people assume that there has to be money associated with it, but not necessarily. You know, the few definitions that I’ve come across, they’re not saying that it has to be of monetary value, but there is a blockchain element to it where it’s essentially written as to who owns this, what can be done with the NFT, can it be reused, or is it, you know, assigned to one person? Do they own the copyright of it? Which I think is fantastic for creators. But then on the other side, we have AI, which is making inroads on, on their turf, where it’s basically taking everything created up until now and, you know, putting it out there to essentially be copyrighted or manipulated by AI to create something slightly similar that is, is basically allowing large companies like Adobe or Canva or something like that to replicate their creativity, but in the blockchain. And this is something that is kind of untested at the minute, but if those artists and graphic designers were on the blockchain, you’d have to wonder, would Canva and Adobe be able to do that? Because there’s essentially now a ledger written saying ‘You know, they can only be used by X, Y, and Z, and they can’t be reprinted elsewhere, can’t be used by AI bots crawling your content.’ So that is— they’re the types of questions I’ve been coming across on my research, and there’s a lot of holes that need to be filled, and there’s a lot of technologies. I don’t think all of them are going to be here in 10 years’ time. AI is definitely one that I would be putting money on that that is, but VR headsets, I’m not 100% sure if they’ll be around. I do like the concept of everybody being able to work remotely and having an office. And one thing I found actually about avatars was the connection users have with them. The more real they are to their real life, the more they’re able to relate to them. So it’s more likely somebody will go back and play a game if they’re able to actually manipulate the avatar and make it look a little bit like themselves. But if they can recreate the office that they’re familiar with, they’re more likely to go into that office in a virtual world. So that’s all, as you were saying, there’s going to be replications of it between our own world and the virtual world. And we’re going to have to have digital twins, you know, for, for, I think, us as humans to adapt to that technology. We’re going to have to have things we’re familiar with, but also there’s the added value of somebody being able to drive 10 trucks at one time and make sure that they’re, they’re driving in the right way and just making minor adjustments.

Speaker B: Ronan Walsh, head of the high-tech marketing agency Digital Trawler, on how we may find that the future of work will not be in the factory but in the World Wide Web. And that rather than turning up at the office or the factory, we will be spending our time exploring the internet, performing roles that we have never dreamt about before. Sometimes when we’re not even there. The digital twin is something that Richard Skelett, president of the highly respected business analytics company Bloor Research, has been working on for a while. Not only has Skelett been researching the impact of digitization on the workforce for decades, he has developed a concept known as Digital Me and has built his own digital version of himself. A concept Skelett says that will allow workers to participate in the profits of the new technological world by holding their own data and allowing them to form partnerships in the success of digital ventures. Rather than being employees, workers in the future, says Skelett, will be able to become partners with the companies that they are working with, sharing their personal data, insights, and experience.

Speaker E: A digital twin is an extension of me personally, but digitally captured.

Speaker B: Okay, so you’ve been working on a digital twin. You have a digital twin. What does your digital twin do?

Speaker E: It does everything that I do, or the majority of what I do, and it’s able to do it 50, 60, 80, 100 times faster. Does it do it effectively? Yes, it does it effectively, and I spend quite a bit of time with it personally. And it aids my ability, particularly around programs and being able to convey messaging where there’s interrelationships and interdependencies across people of different skill sets.

Speaker B: Okay, well, look, can you give us an example of this then? Tell us how you talk to your digital twin.

Speaker E: I can talk to it either by voice or by typing, first of all. So I’m able to have a conversation with it. I’m then able to deploy my twin to individuals or into organizations which I’m involved with. So for context purposes, as an example, someone who may be in service who’s designed something new from a service delivery perspective, they would be able to tap into my sales and marketing element of my twin. So as an example, in sales, it’s about getting the attention, getting the interest, getting the desire, and getting the action. And they’re able to incorporate that from their perspective into their service design process to be able to communicate to their audience.

Speaker B: Right. So somebody takes your digital twin and they want to go into a sales meeting, and so they start the sales meeting. You’re in the sales meeting, so therefore it’s highly likely that you’re going to get a sales result in the first place. So how would your digital twin work in that environment?

Speaker E: Well, it’s got my kind of core capabilities. So as an example, in sales, there’s a methodology that I have that is quite unique to me as an individual compared to normal sales methodologies that perhaps you could go off and download from other sources. Let me try and give you some context around that. Being able to look at attention and interest that has a direct relationship to do with conversation and dialogue. So an example would be attention has a direct relationship with conversation. So it’s very important to marry those two things together, as would be when we look at interest in dialogue.

Speaker B: What you appear to be saying then is if you see somebody, that somebody is attentive, If that means that they’re engaged, that means that they’re highly likely to want to take this sales process to the next stage.

Speaker E: Yes, absolutely. It brings structure and methodology to someone who wouldn’t necessarily have these skill sets.

Speaker B: Right. What you seem to be saying there then is that the digital twin could augment a colleague. And so that means that a part of the sales skills that that colleague may be missing is given to them by you.

Speaker E: Correct. And that has great— that has a lot of benefit when it comes back to, let’s say, this colleague wants to be playing something back to me in my role that they want me to buy into. So therefore, my digital twin being alongside them makes this a lot easier because it understands, you know, my drivers. You know, my soul is captured in this, you know, my values, my behaviors, you know, my beliefs, my skill sets, my lens view. You know, I’ve got a lens view which can be shaped, which is shareholder-based, organization-based, functional-based, and individual-based. So all of these things are captured in my digital twin.

Speaker B: When we’re talking about a twin, though, I suppose it’s quite important, isn’t it? Because this is fractal, isn’t it? It’s a digital tool.

Speaker E: Because it’s not all of you. It’s not all of me. It’s not all of me yet. And it’s really, really interesting point. I actually see it as an extension of me. That’s how I view it. I view it as me personally, and when I’m talking to it, I’m talking to me, and I am talking to me because it’s capturing me. So there’s a baseline foundation that’s in place that I add to every single day. So this is growing day by day by day, and it is a direct extension of me.. So as opposed to me going off and buying something which, let’s say, would be a tool from an organization, it would be selling, say, like, I don’t know, like ChatGPT. This goes way beyond ChatGPT because this is actually me. It’s got my values, my behaviors, my lens view, and therefore it’s what I would call, it’s a small specific personal language model. And this, in my small Pacific language model, interfaces into larger language models like ChatGPT or many of the others which are now in the market. So I’m going from me to the large language model, then I’m able to dissect that into what my beliefs and opinions are and so forth. So it helps me to get a much more rational viewpoint.

Speaker B: Richard Skelett, president of the business analysis company Blu Research, on his digital me. And Skelett is not alone with this vision. It’s something he shares with NVIDIA, which, since the start of the AI revolution, has become one of the largest companies in the world. Nvidia’s success is not only built on the chips that are powering the processing of data that AI needs to do. It is also actively building a virtual reality world that workers can become engaged in. Here’s another Richard. Richard Kerris, the vice president and general manager of media and entertainment at Nvidia, speaking in an interview he gave to Password 3 years ago in 2021. Before the company’s latest meteoric share price rise on the world that Nvidia is building.

Speaker F: I think there’ll be 3D virtual worlds that people can go in and out of and really explore foreign locations, or they can do things like go into a world and visualize what a factory might look like and walk around it, or a building that they’re working on. There’s all sorts of types of worlds that we believe will be out there. Some will be 2D experiences off of your screen or your mobile device. Some will be full 3D rich experiences simulating reality. And the idea of what connects all of these things so that there’s some commonality, like what is up and down, what is colors, what is light, what is— all these things need to have some common understanding in order for you to be able to go between these worlds with some sort of continuity.. And so that’s one of the things that we work on around Omniverse is to be the connector of those worlds.

Speaker B: Right. So what you’re saying is that this isn’t one whole model of the world.

Speaker F: It’s a way to move between different data sets, different visualizations, different groups of data. Yeah, absolutely. Different experiences, different types of, you know, there’s simulating reality or subjective reality. There’s all sorts of things that will be out there. You might go Like I said, the example of an architect and a designer walking through a virtual building that they’re looking at constructing and being able to experience it in all its richness, or an entertainment-based thing where you’re in a surreal environment and playing games, communicating with others, meeting new people, or, you know, there’s just all sorts of things. So there’ll be so much more of these worlds out there than what we’re used to experiencing in the real world. You know, we’ve showed a vision of the factory of the future where at our last GTC with BMW, where the entire factory was simulated in our Omniverse world. And why that’s important is when you’re producing 2.5 million cars a year as BMW does, every day matters. So when you’re changing the line for a new vehicle to be constructed, knowing where the machinery is going to go, knowing how the people are going to flow and how the parts are going to come in and go out and all of those things become a very costly exercise if you’re doing it in the physical world. And by simulating that in the digital world, you can make all of these decisions and you can use things like artificial intelligence to help train the robots and train and understand how layout is gonna go and things like that. So that when you make the commitment in the physical world, you’ve actually done all of the testing and validation in the simulated world, which gives you a higher degree of cost savings than you would’ve ever had before. BMW says it’s saving them about 30% in their cost of just running the factory by having digital twins. It is going to be the next big thing for that. That’s another example of where a world in the metaverse is being used in an industrial-like thing.

Speaker B: But then you have plenty of games and things like that, you know, on and on. So a businessman said to me, this is wonderful. This means that if I want to model a business idea and how it will work on people, that I’ll be able to do it.

Speaker F: Is that something that’s possible? Oh, absolutely. If you were building an automobile or you were building, you know, something that somebody would wear, if you were building a, you know, a watch, a monitor or different things like that, you get to really simulate these things in a simulated world and get to take into account all the different variations that might take place without having to do all of that in the physical world. So for example, let’s say you were building a robot for the house, a vacuum robot or some, one of those types of things. When you build it in the physical world, you build it and you plug your computer in, you train it, you give it intelligence and it starts to map out the house and things like that. That’s kind of the traditional way of a model and a robot being constructed. In the future, we’re going to see these things being constructed in a simulated world before they’re committed to in the physical world. Because you can do a lot more. You can train instead of one robot, you could be training hundreds, if not thousands of robots. And by training them in the simulated world, when that intelligence is downloaded to the physical robot, it’s going to be that much smarter and understand so much more. And so things like that, from a personal standpoint on a business idea, many, many different things you need to simulate. And the opportunity of doing that in a synthetic environment is hugely advantageous to the design and the creativity that goes on. But you can expand that out further to businesses, to major industrial things, to city landscapes, all of those things. It’s just, it’s worlds, right? It’s what we do today in the physical world simulated in the digital world.

Speaker B: But the impression that was given in the articles that I’ve read about this and the impression that I was given from this businessman was that he was saying, right, I can take my company idea and I can model it to see whether it will be a success in one of these metaverses. I can see whether consumers will respond to it because data from consumers is going to be emptied into these metaverses.

Speaker F: Is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker G: Oh, sure.

Speaker F: You know, there will be a whole world of commerce that explodes in different worlds that take place in the metaverse. People will buy more things in the digital world than they bought in the physical world. So, you can imagine if you’re building something that you want to share with others and you want to buy a design from an architect for a building that you’re building that will be your home on the web kind of thing, you’ll pay some fee for that. You might have an avatar that you’ll pay to, to close. You might have a digital vehicle to get around in the world, all sorts of things that will start to evolve. There’s so much of the opportunity for commerce to take place, whether it’s a musician that wants to perform live in the, you know, in their world in the metaverse and have people watch and contribute towards that. There’s going to be all sorts of new economic booms that happen in the metaverses.

Speaker B: You’re going to also have to put in additional data, aren’t you? This isn’t just about the data from companies. This is about the data to do with individuals. You’re going to need to put in data about flora and fauna and natural resources, because let’s face it, people eat.

Speaker F: And if you’re making companies to feed people, then you’re modeling that in the metaverse. Sure, sure. Think of the ramifications that it has when you can use AI for these things. Rather than have to reconstruct everything by hand, you can train the systems to understand what flora and other things may be and let them go off and create those environments. We see Many times as car companies are moving closer and closer to autonomous driving, that they’ll synthetically build huge cityscapes and landscapes and things for their cars to train on. Rather than have all these cars driving around on the road with cameras and scanners and things like that, we’re building enough of the data in the different worlds on there that you can use those synthetic worlds to have your autonomous car in a synthetic world learn how to drive, learn how to do things. When it comes into the real world, again, it’s that much smarter.

Speaker B: So there’s countless ways that people will be able to build businesses on these things. Richard Kerris, the Vice President and General Manager of Media and Entertainment at NVIDIA, whose stellar career has included posts at tech giants like Amazon and Apple and household names in entertainment like Lucasfilm, on the world NVIDIA is building to unite all metaverse worlds in an omniverse. The one chip to rule them all. And those metaversal worlds are already very functional. Several decades ago, while at school, I was taken on a rural geography field trip to Ipswich to study the location of offices and work out how it had developed. Go there now and you’ll find the same law and accountancy offices beginning to empty, because a number of companies are now building encrypted spaces in the metaverse that are doubling up as virtual offices. One of the reasons for the decline of the office spaces in the central business districts of many towns like Ipswich in the UK and around the world, and the attendant decline of the cafes, pubs, and restaurants that service them. To find out more about this, we spoke to Frank Joshi, Managing Director of Envine, One of the companies that has been building online offices.

Speaker G: It’s here to stay. With what’s happened over the last few years with regard to the pandemic has obviously accelerated something that was potentially inevitable.

Speaker B: So, and when you say that was inevitable, why is that?

Speaker G: If you look at the history of work, and of course context is extremely important, so we have to make a distinction between people who do manual work. Of course, they always will have to go to the place of work to do it. If you talk about other people working in an office, and given the increase in technology, the ability for you to access your company system from home, it was always inevitable that people would want to work more from home as time progressed. And as we just, as we just mentioned, the challenges of COVID have accelerated that particular movement. Also, one looks at the other trend of people moving out of the city into the suburbs, wanting a better quality of life. There’s always been talk of people working more from home, and again, what’s happened recently with COVID has actually just accelerated something that was on people’s agendas, but they never had the impetus or a drive to, to make it happen.

Speaker B: Well, I suppose it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because what’s really happening is just a recognition that we’re all part of a network. There are these techie arguments about decentralization and centralization, but all that’s happened is that with the technology, we’ve been able to sit at one end of a phone line, for want of a better expression.

Speaker G: Absolutely. In fact, just taking our own personal experience as a business, we had an office in London to stay close to one of our largest clients, only to find that on going to their offices, that we would sit in a room in front of a telephone system and 5 to 10 of their colleagues would dial in. So we actually went virtual 5 years ago before the pandemic took over, realizing that actually a lot of people in professional companies have the ability to work from home successfully.

Speaker B: I mean, that’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because people are talking about the metaverse at the moment. It’s one of those buzzwords. We’re as guilty of it as anybody. And yet the metaverse is much more of a intellectual concept, isn’t it? It’s basically that you have to come to terms with the fact that the virtual office is in a sense in your head.

Speaker G: It’s in those meetings that you’ve just described. Completely. So if we talk about the metaverse as it currently exists, it’s effectively entering into a virtual world where your presence is defined by an avatar, a persona, digital persona. Whether that’s going to take place and run our lives in the future, who knows? That’s for a debate for another day. Time. In principle, we’re already in our own metaverse by, by dint of using products like Zoom and Teams, etc., because we are no longer physically in the same location.

Speaker B: We are virtually talking to each other. Okay, so what are the issues of that? You’re an expert on cybersecurity. What are the issues for cybersecurity of this world?

Speaker G: So it depends again on context of engagement. What is it that you’re doing? What information do you as the employee or worker have to access? And who are you engaging with? If you’re talking to your colleagues, then it’s quite easy nowadays to do what you used to do, which is to pick up the phone. You know the person at the other end, and therefore you transfer knowledge and information to them.

Speaker B: Frank Joshi, Managing Director of the encryption company Envine, one of the architects of the online office. A space that could soon become a compelling version of a real office, except one without cleaners and security guards, because you’ll assert your credentials and your right to be there through Skellett’s digital me. And it’s a space that won’t need cleaning. According to Skellett, one of the compelling benefits of being online is its ability to educate, inform, and entertain. The three core principles of the BBC, set out by its founder Lord Reith in 1922. Something I just looked up on the internet. By being online, education can be continuous and it can be made entertaining. A process Dr. Anneliese Schmitzmann, founder of the online game Elohim, profoundly believes in because Dr. Schmitzmann’s role-playing game is designed to be a developmental space that educates people in the environment and the world. Dr. Smitsman wants to use the digital engagement that made Matt Steen’s life fulfilling to help people to understand about the world, the environment, and the challenges it faces by involving them not in a shoot-them-up exercise disengaged from the reality of what you are doing but by placing them as a digital twin in a world of consequence.

Speaker A: Yes, there’s people creating avatars of themselves in order to have an identity there, even to be able to own things, a digital house, property, real estate. I’m not a big fan of those kind of ways of this kind of escapism into a virtual world, or even going further by people creating metaverse and they believe they eventually can create a digital twin AI of themselves. House. So as a search for some kind of immortality, so that even if after they cease to exist, their digital twin, their representation that represents their collective intelligence, their preferences, maybe their looks, even certain parts of their behavior, that that continues to live on and has representation. Now, of course, there are all kinds of more functional digital twins that we could come up with. It could actually help to reduce carbon emissions if you have a digital twin of yourself that you can send out in a meeting so that where you don’t have to be physically represented at that meeting. But that would then still require some kind of human interfacing that stays intact as well. So we could be sitting here in this recording, for example, and you might be looking at an avatar of me. Just to assure the listeners, I’m not an AI yet. So you are actually speaking with a real-life Anna-Louise. But this, yeah, this does seem to be the direction in which we are, in which we are going. And I think we need to be, there are both benefits to it, but we also need to be cautious.

Speaker B: I mean, that is the point, isn’t it? We do have an offline persona, which we’re evidently very used to controlling, but we are increasingly developing this online presence. And as you quite rightly say, we’re in a meeting. I’m accepting that I’ve met Annalise. You’re accepting that you’re meeting me. There is a suspension of disbelief here which would have existed if we were doing this 200 years ago. People would probably think we were being very odd. So we’ve agreed that we’re in this meeting. It seems a logical thing to do, to develop a persona that goes out and actually works in the digital space. A lot of people have been discussing this. A lot of people have been saying, as you’ve just said, that that digital you can go out and engage in meetings and actually engage in work on your behalf that you are not involved in.

Speaker A: Is that happening? Yeah, I think more and more so. I mean, it’s all also, it’s because we’re giving agency to these digital systems. Anything that you’re giving agency to and autonomy to, will be empowered with decision-making abilities to represent you. And this has, of course, legal implications as well, especially if your digital twin has been part of either steering a decision towards a certain outcome or actually making that decision on your behalf that you later then find out, really, this is not what I meant because you are not part of the contextuality. I think this is very— that’s actually a very dangerous development, especially if you’re looking, for example, at corporate governance and law and corporate governance. As a director, you always have to take responsibility not only for the things that you’re saying in a meeting, but also how your influence on a decision can steer the company in certain directions. So, if you’re doing that through digital twin representation, I think this is a whole new landscape also in terms of the legal landscape of what are the implications of that.

Speaker B: Well, that’s the difficult thing, isn’t it? Because the issue that we’re going to face is how much of us do we allow that digital twin to have? How much of our digital identity do we allow it to have? Because as you say, agency is incredibly important in all of this. Because if I say that digital twin is an exact copy of me, and by the way, I give it responsibility or I give it agency, as you say, then it can go make decisions on my part. And it can involve me in decisions which are legally binding on me.

Speaker A: Exactly. And have implications also for others. So there can be negative consequences coming from that. Plus, you know, remember that a digital twin is fed by your patterns, your preferences, your maybe some of the memories that you’re feeding it to the prompts that you’ve fed it. But when we are making decisions in the moment, there’s a whole lot more that happens even in our consciousness, which is not only about information of the present and the past, but it’s also our sense and our feeling, even our intuition. Sometimes our feeling of something doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe I should be asking another question, or maybe it’s better that I pause. Your digital twin does not have those abilities. And so this is, of course, coming more to the fundamental question: can these digital twins or even AI systems or maybe future AGIs AI systems or ASI systems, artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, would they one day get some form of sentience, of self-awareness? And if so, what is then their awareness of you as a digital twin? And what are they using as capacities of consciousness, of choice-making, of sensing in order to make a decision, to come to a conclusion, and to act in certain ways? And There’s still so much even in the human domain that we don’t understand of how humans are making decisions, because there’s a whole lot more information that is unconscious and that is driving our behaviour. So this is, this is a vast domain to be carefully explored.

Speaker B: Dr. Anneliese Schmitzmann, founder of the educational transformation game Eloin, which is designed to teach people about environmental sustainability on how digital twins would develop from computer games and start to play an increased role in other areas. Dr. Smitzman’s aim of introducing consequences into the online world is an interesting one. In the book that introduced the idea of the robot to the world, Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robots had to have a nervous system introduced into them to stop them putting their limbs into machines and damaging themselves because it had an economic cost. In the online world of the digital twin, limitations can possibly be dispensed with, a point made by many of those Password has interviewed this year who see online as giving us the potential to challenge some limits. From Dr. Max Moore’s desire to live forever and Dr. José Cordeiro’s ambition to banish death, digital existences, they claim, mean that we can break boundaries and limitations that are imposed on us in our offline worlds. A potential proved by Matt Steen and one championed by Richard Skellett, who is a fervent believer in ongoing digital replication. Why stop at twins, says Skellett, a phrase reminiscent of Buzz Lightyear’s “To infinity and beyond” catchline in the 1995 film Toy Story. Yet it’s a world that, like NVIDIA’s KERES, that MIT-educated Dr. Mona Nia, Global Director for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Solutions at Dubai-based TechnoTree, says that the technology community is working towards.

Speaker H: I think we’re trying to build the virtual world and bypass limitations that we have. And we can present— I mean, the individuals now craft unique online identities that may differ from the real world. So they can introduce themselves, persons can introduce themselves, the personas that they want, and it can be different across the platform. Platforms. So the people, and often differ from the real world life. So it’s influenced by the digital environments they engage with. So we’ll see that this sort of the digital identity that’s creating by the human utilizing and using the AI and other digital platforms to actually fulfill their desired persona. Not what they’re forced to be with this limitation of the location and time. And if I, for example, was born in this country with these parents, I’m limited with that. How about if I move to digital world, I will be free to be whoever, whatever I want to be. So that will give me the options of using technology to unlimited and boundless my presence in the world.

Speaker B: So it’s not— I mean, some people have been talking about this being a digital twin. It’s not, is it? Because this, this, as you’ve just said, it can allow you to be whatever you want to be. You can, if you are disabled, you can escape that disablement. If you want to be somebody who is remarkably beautiful, you could be that. But the one thing that will tie you down is your identity, won’t it?

Speaker H: It is. So I think we will have different type of personas and the data that people’s creating, creating another world. So data even, it will be the data-driven persona. So the personal data gathered from the online activities activities used to create a personalized digital experience, sometimes crafting a version of the user that reflects their habits and behavior. So the, the data-nality, that it’s a term I would like to use. So the data that you create within your own personas in your location, things, it’s come to the virtual world and we will have the data-driven of personas in the digital world.

Speaker B: Or I can say maybe started from metaverse. And that’s the key, isn’t it? Because the behavior, the personality that you are in the offline world will be what will be driving that personality in the online world, because that is what’s determined your personality to begin with.

Speaker H: And it will, yes, and it will last longer. So if you go back to generations, a grand-grandfather who remember that person, he’ll remember your grand-grandfather. But if he presents in digital world, you can stay alive forever.

Speaker B: There’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because some people have been, uh, in fact, some people have already embarked on building graveyards in the internet where people put together all of the artifacts, all of the things that they feel make up their lives. They put together recordings of themselves and videos of themselves, but that sort of entity can continue indefinitely, can’t it?

Speaker H: It is. I think the combination of AI and our machine will take over the traditional way of living and even, I can say, presence in the world. We think when we— our life, maybe it’s always— so there is no presence of that person physically in this world. While if the AI copy the mind mindset and the way the person’s thinking and how it behaves and things and create the persona out of that in the virtual world, it lasts forever. So that person’s like Imagine that we have Einstein’s way of thinking with us in the virtual world forever. And the person like Einstein, so they will stay with us forever.

Speaker B: The accomplished academic Dr. Mona Nia, head of AI at TechnoTree and author of 10 international publications and conference presentations, including contributions to prestigious institutions like Oxford at university. Presentations that in future that she may be able to make simultaneously in a lot more places if those we interviewed for this program are right, because rather than working in the future, we should be collaborating on the development of our future. Well, we will see, but to end on an optimistic note, To infinity and beyond. You’ve been listening to Password on Resonance FM, written and presented by me, Peter Warren, and produced by Blue Buffery. To listen to further podcasts and find other material on the topic from Future Intelligence, please go to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Password is a future intelligence program.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening.

Speaker H: 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.