It Was The Best of Times, It Was The Worst of Times
AI + Spatial Computing Promise Utopia and Dystopia All At Once
I’m trying to catch my breath, and not in a good way, so the best I can do is look to our past with a nod to Charles Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities as I try to wrap my head around our new tech-driven realities and the future that awaits. I can only come to one conclusion after watching countless videos of Apple Vision Bros driving Cybertrucks for social media clout while, at the same time, witnessing extraordinary spatial computing use cases related to modern medicine—the future is both bright and bleak, all at the same time.
Let’s first dig into the bleak a bit, and there’s a really good reason for this emphasis. Do not believe the pundits and thought leaders who position these incredibly powerful emerging technologies. as like nothing we’ve seen before—in fact, we have two past technologies that the world is still grappling with to provide us with insights as to how our brains are still trying to catch up with them, and that is the 1-2 combination punch of social media combined with portable supercomputers (phones). Ask any teacher what it is like to teach a classroom of kids whose entire world is social apps enabled by their mobile phones, and they will tell you. Getting through to kids who are immersed in these technologies is nearly impossible.
Studies are still gathering data points on the dopamine loops connected with the algorithms provided by social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Still, one only needs to watch all the signs around us to form an opinion on how engrossing these technologies are and how dependent we’ve become on them. I often share how I rode a motorcycle (without incident) for over 15 years. The big reason I gave up riding was noticing the changes around me. As a rider, you operate with heightened awareness and vulnerability. Since you don’t have a car surrounding you, what would be a fender bender in any other accident could literally end your life or worse while riding a motorcycle.
So, as a result—you become hyper-aware of what drivers are doing. In my last few years of riding, I noticed a disturbing trend… nearly half of the drivers I was watching had phones in their hands and were engrossed in doing something on their phones vs. driving. I decided that I did not want to ride in a world where drivers are more interested in watching YouTube videos than they are in driving.
So, I changed my behavior due to the changing behavior around me.
The challenge here is that our brains are being re-wired, and they can’t keep pace with the profound technological advancements. We’ve created new terms—“doom scrolling,” “clout chasing,” “influencer marketing,” and “digital detox” to describe these new realities of our digital lives. Humans are amazingly adaptive and resilient—but we’re really being pushed to our limits.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the opportunities that are going to be created as a result of the ongoing tech acceleration:
Last week, my newsfeeds were flooded with examples of AI-generated videos from Open AI’s “Sora.” The examples are breathtaking and demonstrate the incredible progress of AI-generated videos in the past year. This achievement took me to another milestone in my life, which will probably date me—the debut of Pixar’s first fully CGI animated short, Luxo Jr.
For anyone familiar with CGI, computer graphics, 3D rendering, etc.—Luxo Jr. signaled the beginning of a new era, that we were going to see full feature-length films in our lifetimes without live actors on screen, but instead, lifelike CGI characters generated by computers in eye-popping 3D. The rest is history, as they say—an entire industry was created, and today, CGI effects in films are a given and baked into the film creation process. Luxo Jr. came out in my lifetime and played a key role in my decision to attend Pratt while majoring in “Computer Graphics”—I could sense that the way we designed things was going to transform profoundly, and I wanted to be a part of it.
Sora is today’s Luxo Jr. moment…
With Sora, we will watch the steady and accelerated transformation of the film making process. AI will eventually replace CGI itself, and the economics of expensive on-site and studio shoots will gradually be upended. None of this will happen overnight, but if you look at the years it took to go from Luxo Jr. to Toy Story—you can probably cut that time in half. AI-generated films will be disruptive—yet it will also be a Renaissance.
Make no mistake: The technological acceleration we’re living through is breathtaking, and we’re still adapting to the previous tech revolutions. I often think of my sons who grew up with mobile and social platforms—one of them has deleted several apps like Instagram because he feels down after seeing post after post of friends portraying perfect lives. My other son laments the toxic nature of dating apps. New advances in the tech world will be similar to the promises of previous advances—a more connected world will be a better one—in some ways, it is, and in some ways, it isn’t.
David, I think if I saw someone driving a cybertruck wearing Vison Pro googles, I would run them off the road. That may actually be legal in Louisiana and Texas.
One of your best articles, David!