Amy Webb on Crypto, Assistive Reality and Emotional AI
Interview with Amy Webb
Exponential advances in technology are changing our world at a rapid pace, and for most of us, predicting what comes next feels a little like gazing into a cloudy crystal ball.
Enter this week’s very special guest, Amy Webb. A world-renowned futurist, Amy’s expertise in the realm of emerging technologies is second to none. She’s the CEO and founder of the Future Today Institute, which advises some of the world’s biggest companies, and a professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
In this episode, we cover crypto, assistive reality, ‘The You of Things’, emotional AI and robots-as-a-service.
Transcript
Douglas Nicol:
Hello, I’m Douglas Nickel, and welcome to Smart Dust, the podcast that likes to tune into the trending topics and news in the world of technology, data and innovation. As always, I am joined by fellow digital aficionados, Mr. Nick Abrahams.
Nick Abrahams:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Douglas.
Douglas Nicol:
And in this episode, I think, Nick, it’s fair to say that we’re pretty excited to be joined again by one of our favorite guests, Amy Webb. Amy, as many of you will remember, is a quantitative futurist, and she has many strings to her bow. She’s a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, where she developed and teaches the MBA Course on Strategic Foresight and Future Forecasting. She’s also the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, which researches emerging technology at the fringes and tracks them as they move towards our mainstream. And because of all that, she ends up advising some of the senior executives at some of the top corporations around the world about planning for the future. She’s also rather endearingly a huge science fiction fan, which I suspect is the perfect pastime for a futurist.
Douglas Nicol:
Amy is probably best known for her Rockstar Tech and Science Trends Report, which the industry looks forward to early in each year, and this year she’s published the 14th edition of her report. And this year, the trend is upwards in terms of trends. I think there are some 500 trends in this year’s report, which is up 22% versus the previous year. In fact, there is so much disruption and so many trends happening that the report’s been divided into 12 sub reports for easy reading. This report is the Bible for so many people in our world from forward looking CEOs through to young entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Amy, welcome back to Smart Dust.
Amy Webb:
Thank you so much. It’s great to be back.
Douglas Nicol:
Now, Amy, you spend a lot of time monitoring trends from the fringes. Do you ever get surprised? Are there things in this year’s report that you maybe didn’t expect?
Amy Webb:
Well, it’s my job not to be surprised.
Nick Abrahams:
A futurist is never surprised. So, Amy, we’ve seen a lot of activity in crypto markets recently, both incredible ups and very, very sharp downward trends, but what we’ve been seeing is real uses for crypto coming out. So in the decentralized finance or DEFI world and things like NFTs, where do you see the future of crypto and its more expanded uses going?
Amy Webb:
So earlier this year, I don’t know this person, his name is Rob Paone, who goes by Crypto Bobby on Twitter, I think summarized it in a very good way what is currently happening with regard to crypto, and I will quote for you what he posted on Twitter. “You did the right thing, memorized the intelligent investor at age 15, undergrad at Harvard, first job at Goldman Sachs, got your CFA, MBA from Wharton, opened up your own fund after finely tuning your craft. And then you were liquidated by a coalition of chicken tender eating high school dropouts,” which I think pretty much summarizes what’s happening. So listen, we’re talking about what is essentially a get rich quick scheme, which in any other circumstance we know wouldn’t work out. The problem is that you’ve got people who are sitting at home, who have a little bit of cash to spare, and you’ve got new investment vehicles coming through new means that are a little confusing, but that have a lot of hype, and so this NFT market exploded now.
Amy Webb:
Now here’s the interesting thing. It’s not new. So I mentioned CryptoKitties earlier. This is not a brand new concept. The difference this time around is how quickly things are moving and people don’t understand that they’re not buying an asset. They’re basically buying a digital equivalent of a lithograph. And sometimes not even a signed lithograph.
Nick Abrahams:
Exactly [inaudible 00:04:48] millions of times.
Amy Webb:
Right. Now, if you juxtapose that against crypto that does exist, that is tangible, that you can use to spend and create transactions around, that’s actually really, really hard. So, for me, it’s interesting. There’s a contradiction between how easy it is for people to screw around with NFTs and how hard it is to use actual cryptocurrency. I mean, it’s hard. The average person’s not going to set up a wallet and the average person doesn’t even know where you could go to spend crypto. I was in, what country was I in the Nordics, I’m going to say Norway. I’m trying to remember where we were. I was somewhere in a Nordic country I guess just before the shutdown, and there was a super modern looking storefront where you could go in and it was like a human ATM machine.
Nick Abrahams:
Oh right, yeah.
Amy Webb:
You go in and give them cash and walk out with crypto that is great, but then you can’t spend it anywhere.
Nick Abrahams:
Right.
Amy Webb:
Here’s why I’m saying that. There is a lot of interesting happening, but it’s not at the consumer level. Most of the interesting changes that are happening are happening at a country level. So China moving into a Fiat backed digital currency. Singapore has been investigating this and experimenting for a while.
Douglas Nicol:
Amy, one of the themes in this year’s report that I’ve heard you talk about quite a bit is the concept of assistive reality. We’ve had virtual reality, augmented reality, which are being used in lots of great ways, but I’m interested to hear more about what assistive reality is.
Amy Webb:
Well, I mean, we use assistive reality all the time. So if you’ve got a voice enabled GPS device in your vehicle, for example, that’s one example. We’re talking about a technology that makes it easier for you to do something, but we’re finding them now in new formats. In the United States last June, the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees regulating food and drugs, it officially certified and cleared and approved a medical grade video game. So this is a video game that is immersive, that is intended to help deal with depression and anxiety and OCD, but that requires a prescription to play. You can’t even get access to it without a script, and the game learns with you as you go. So this is an example of what we’re talking about and it’s all the different ways in which technologies make your life a little bit easier, but in ways that are quite unexpected.
Douglas Nicol:
And tell me about the mosquito machine and how that is another example of assisted reality.
Amy Webb:
Yeah, so that’s an interesting one. You’re talking about the mosquito machine that has to do with teenagers?
Douglas Nicol:
Yes.
Amy Webb:
Yeah. So this is actually slightly older technology, but in Philly, in Philadelphia, teenagers were gathering outside and, and I’m sure just being teenagers, but probably causing a ruckus for non teenagers. And these community centers had a hard time getting the kids to not gather there.
Amy Webb:
Now, if they were skateboarding, they would probably put up little spikes and little barriers in the pavements and the sidewalks and little benches to prevent kids from skateboarding. It’s a little harder to prevent kids from gathering. So they used an acoustic device that emits a very, very high pitched sound that you can’t hear if you’re my age, but if you’re a kid it’s like ear shattering. And it worked, the kids stopped gathering because it was a really horrible sound that they could hear just standing in that spot.
Nick Abrahams:
This is a perfect tool for a parent, I think. It should be made available for [inaudible 00:09:16]. And the idea of my kids not being able to play my Minecraft without a prescription, I think that’s splendid.
Nick Abrahams:
And I saw you recently posted something in relation to the monkey that played Pong directly from its brain without having to use it’s limbs. Can you talk a little bit about that human-machine interface and where you see that headed and timeframe as well?
Amy Webb:
Yeah. Well, timeframe is a rough one, I’ll come to that at the end. So, in the brain computer interface or brain machine interface arena, there’s been quite a bit of work happening over the past several years. There’s a professor at Duke University, or was at Duke University who was experimenting with primates. And this was years ago, connecting primates to a game on a little car almost, like a cart with wheels. And if they solved problems, again, not by moving, but simply by thinking then they would get to a treat. It was an orange juice. It turns out these monkeys love orange juice. So it gets the orange juice faster.
Amy Webb:
And even before that, this is now going back more than 10 years at the University of Washington, researchers connected two people on opposite ends of the campus, each wearing a little device on their heads. And one person sent a thought to the other person over the internet, which resulted in that person involuntarily typing a letter on a keyboard.
Amy Webb:
Okay. So, where are we today? Today, we’re not quite at Neuralink as much as Elon Musk might want us to be, but instead, we’re getting a little bit closer to sending the code that is inside of our brains in a digital format so that some type of action can result. And so, very recently, some researchers had a monkey play Pong, which is a fairly simplistic video game, I’m sure some of you remember.
Nick Abrahams:
Sure.
Amy Webb:
But here’s the challenge. The challenge is that we still know very little about the brain and how and why we think. So there are mechanical parts that we can connect, which is really where this research is intended. It’s intended to facilitate memory, physical memory and real world kinetic action.
Amy Webb:
So, a lot of the research is, if you’ve had a stroke, most of the time the problem isn’t your physical body, it’s just your brain has forgotten to send the signal. So the idea is, can we connect a healthy brain to a stroke victim’s brain and remind the brain that it knows how to do this, sort of flip that switch back on. That’s that’s where a lot of this brain machine interface research is intended. It’s not so much intended for you to send emails simply by thinking. And God help us if the day comes and we can send our thoughts over the internet, we are still using email.
Nick Abrahams:
Imagine the spam.
Amy Webb:
Oh my God. Oh my God. I get enough spam for myself, through the form of intrusive thoughts.
Nick Abrahams:
Imagine if you just thought about something, and they figured out you’d been thinking about it and immediately a spam popped up.
Amy Webb:
Can I give you a little sidebar?
Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.
Amy Webb:
There is actually something interesting happening. So, genetic sequencing has become super fast and easy, this is you spitting into a tube or submitting blood and getting your DNA and your genetic sequence or parts of it back. There’s a lot happening too with commercial companies offering to sequence your microbiome. There’s a company, I’m forgetting the name of it, in the UK, they will tell you what your ancestry is and whatever handful of genetic markers, but it’s actually being used to generate sales leads for a grocery store.
Amy Webb:
So you submit your DNA and then this grocery store company starts telling you what to eat and sends you reminders based on your DNA, and then facilitates online ordering and automated delivery. Which, if you’re hearing me say this and you think that’s really cool, it is not cool, there’s nothing cool about that.
Nick Abrahams:
There’s personalized medicine, which is cool. But personalized grocery shopping, that seems…
Amy Webb:
It’s not just that, it’s like, man, now you’re marketing directly to my DNA. Where does it end?
Douglas Nicol:
Yeah, I’m not sure my DNA’s going to indicate whether I like baked beans or not.
Nick Abrahams:
You never know.
Douglas Nicol:
Amy, I have to thank you, actually, because one of the things you talked about recently was your use of brown noise in order to, as a sort of light form of assistive reality, to play brown noise while you’re studying or trying to write something or really focused. So I’ve tried doing it on a basis of what you said, and I love it. I don’t know if it’s just psychological, but it really works for me. Is that a real thing or is it just imagination.
Amy Webb:
Is it a real thing? Yeah. So, it’s actually Brownian noise, which is from physics. So if you’re familiar with white noise, which sounds like static, there’s actually a spectrum of sound that ranges from lower wave forms and amplitudes to higher ones. And everybody is wired a little differently.
Amy Webb:
In my case, a much lower and deeper and wider wave form, it facilitates focus for me. And there’s a ton of very interesting research on sound, but if you’ve ever used noise canceling headphones, you’re actually already using a version of this. Noise canceling headphones, they actually play a sound, it’s sort of an anti wave of the wave of the general noise outside of you. So it kind of has a noise canceling effect versus a noise blocking effect. And for me, I listen to Brownian noise basically all day long, unless I’m talking to people in a meeting, because it facilitates focus. And I don’t know, it’s like Adderall, which I don’t take, but I would assume… I think that’s what it would be like. I just get into a deep, deep focus. I get into a flow state. It’s amazing. And then at night when I sleep, I listened to pink noise, which is a different spectrum of noise. It’s a little bit higher. And again, there’s some data showing that it helps facilitate more deep sleep and REM cycles to help your brain defrag and reorganize itself while you’re asleep.
Nick Abrahams:
That’s fantastic. Just talking about… It sounds like that’s using technology very much in your day-to-day living. And you talk about, I guess, the home of things or the you of things. And we’ve always [crosstalk 00:17:02].
Amy Webb:
Ask me about my bed next?
Nick Abrahams:
Well, if you are offering [crosstalk 00:17:06] What’s happening? What sort of technology? Now we can leave the bed out, but what’s happening, what’s going to happen in our homes? Is the Roomba last year’s news?
Amy Webb:
I don’t know. I’ve never been super excited about the Roomba. I’m actually not kidding about my bed. So I sleep in a super high tech bed that is connected also. So my bed, I’ve experimented with a couple of different products. The one that I’m using right now… So picture of fitted bed sheet that has conduit running through it, but it’s padded, so you can’t really feel the wires. And that’s connected to a machine underneath the bed that has water in it. And it chills the temperature of the water or raises the temperature, depending on how you’ve got it set.
Amy Webb:
So again, this body of research showing that if you can withstand a much colder temperature at night, I don’t know what the Celsius version of this is, but it’s 55 degrees Fahrenheit, so pretty chilly. So if you can withstand that, again, it just helps repair. It helps your heart rate variability. It helps your respiration rate. And you’re supposed to have a much deeper, better sleep with more REM cycles. And then when you wake up, you can set it to raise the temperature. Basically cooks you awake. So it goes from 55 to 115, and you wake up naturally without an alarm clock.
Amy Webb:
Here’s what I will say because there’s something profound about giving myself over the way that I do to technology that is making autonomous decisions for me while I’m asleep. My sleep buds that I sleep with are going on and off, depending on how I’m sleeping, with the pink noise. My bed is chilling and warming my body, depending on what type of sleep I’m getting. And this information is being recorded in a way that I can quantify and understand it later on.
Amy Webb:
That’s a pretty big shift from where we were 10 years ago, but also from how we think about wellness and health. I’m no longer… right? So I’m not taking medications or drugs or micro dosing, which I know is cool. I’m not cool. But if I was cool, I’d probably be micro dosing. [crosstalk 00:19:43] instead, I’m in a self-chilling bed, sleeping underneath a 20 pound blanket. And I will tell you, I’m sleeping better than I’ve probably ever slept in my life.
Nick Abrahams:
Wow [crosstalk 00:19:56].
Amy Webb:
I used to have horrible insomnia. I would toss and I would turn. And so again, I would categorize these as assistive technologies. These are certainly part of what we would call the you of things, which is a constellation of devices that you will be soon wearing or embedding, versus the internet of things, which is a bunch of devices that are connected, but not necessarily connected to you. So we’re looking at as a near term future that facilitates data transfer between your body and a device or a constellation of devices and potentially a third party, that either adjusts those data and therefore how the devices are working in real time, or gives you feedback at some point.
Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.
Douglas Nicol:
One of the things I found very interesting in this year’s report was the evolution of emotional AI, to allow more nuanced interactions between humans and AI itself, because previous iterations of AI often [VNLP 00:21:04] and it’s all a bit clunky and not very nuanced. And emotionally, AI seems to be the fix, the thing that will allow really natural interactions with computation. So do you think we’re reaching a point where emotional AI is becoming more of a mainstream thing?
Amy Webb:
Well, funny you should ask because literally moments ago, Affectiva, which is probably one of the biggest players in this space, got acquired. And they weren’t acquired because they were losing business. This was one of these, they got a sweet deal because the work they’re doing is so profound.
Amy Webb:
So yeah, we are clearly inching toward systems that don’t just recognize who we are, but what we are, in any given moment. And there’s a lot of companies working on research in this space, from Microsoft using voice plus machine reading comprehension, to Amazon’s full complement of emotion detection systems that are low-code and no-code in the cloud, but also, they launched that Halo wristband about a year ago, which is touted as a fitness device, but also recognizes your emotion, your stress. It’s listening all the time.
Douglas Nicol:
And do you have a view on whether voice or facial recognition is the optimal way to detect someone’s emotion? Is there a prevailing view on what’s the most accurate way of understanding emotion?
Amy Webb:
Well, I really think it depends on the system and the corpus and the training. So there’s not an easy answer to that question because a lot of this depends on how those systems were determined, how they were trained, where they were trained, on what people they were trained. And I speak very, very emphatically when I’m talking to other people. When I’m just by myself and communicating with one other person or sometimes with a device, I don’t emote at all. So, my data would really screw up an algorithm that was attempting to learn how to recognize accurately somebody’s emotional spectrum.
Douglas Nicol:
Okay. Okay.
Nick Abrahams:
I guess on that theme, which is… So the machines are getting better at recognizing our emotional state, and indeed being able to respond to that, so that the Turing test and so forth, that all becomes a bit closer in reality. Where do you see our relationship with machines developing? We’ve got concepts like robots as a service, and also some governments considering granting legal status to electronic persons. How do you see the machines as they become sort of significantly more like us, and much harder to detect whether we’re actually dealing with a machine?
Amy Webb:
Yeah. I think that’s a good question. This is the heart of a lot of questions, right?
Douglas Nicol:
Yeah.
Amy Webb:
Which is who are we? What are machines? Are we becoming… Is the Venn diagram of our very near future one in which what we think of as being human and what we think of as being machines start to overlap? Right?
Douglas Nicol:
Yeah.
Amy Webb:
And I think the complication here is that we tend to anthropomorphize machines. I’ve always had a problem with the term artificial intelligence because it assumes that we are creators building something that mimics ourselves. We don’t know very much about how the brain works. So we can make systems capable of making incredible decisions that function in the reality as we have built it and we know it. But is that thinking like us? I don’t think it is.
Amy Webb:
And so when we… This becomes a regulatory challenge, or at least it should, because there are lots of countries around the world that are attempting to regulate thinking machines or non-thinking mechanical machines that automate human work as though they are humans. And, again, I have to… I understand why that’s what we’re doing, but I also think this is a complex future that demands a much more sophisticated approach to how we think about how we think and how computers think, and what it means to work alongside a machine.
Douglas Nicol:
You are, I believe, a big science fiction fan and avid reader. And is this an advantage or a disadvantage as a futurist?
Amy Webb:
That’s a good question. I have this desire to always be pushing people and challenging people to think things they haven’t thought before. Most of my job is about re-perception, right? All I’m doing is asking you to look at the signals around you with a fresh perspective, to see if you can identify new patterns, new areas of confluence, contradictions, inflections, things like that.
Amy Webb:
So there’s a part of me that loves watching science fiction, because it’s a sandbox, it’s like a play space that I can be inside of. But there’s also a part of me that’s like, “Oh no, if I watch another black mirror episode, am I going to accidentally black mirror one of my clients?” You know? I don’t want to be repetitive, but I love science fiction.
Douglas Nicol:
Amy, I think we all know someone in our lives who believes that we’re living in a SIM, and we’re trying to unravel this mystery and apply some sort of intelligent thinking around it. Do you feel that this hypothesis is a credible hypothesis?
Amy Webb:
So I think this is where it’s important to talk about nuance. So are we living in a SIM that is like a video game? No, I don’t think we are. I do think however, that reality is what we perceive, and physics is a wild, weird space that we’re still learning a lot about. So if we define reality mathematically, are we living in simulation or is a multi-verse really possible? I think so. Yeah.
Amy Webb:
But I also know that I dropped out of the advanced cosmology class that I took in college, because thinking in four dimensional quadrant space… Like the math was at some point, I just… It hurt my head and it hurt my soul. I did not feel good thinking those thoughts. So I guess to answer your question, is it a SIM the way I hear people talking about it? No, I don’t think so. Are we potentially misinterpreting or misunderstanding what our existence is? Yeah, totally. I think so.
Douglas Nicol:
And it is interesting is that physics, the deeper we get into it, the more complicated it makes those questions. Is where you sort of start to move from us not being particle based, but being wave based and energy based. And Elon Musk, his view of being as one in a billionth chance. This is a base reality, whatever that even means, because-
Amy Webb:
I think he’s being pretty reductive, but I will say I made the mistake of… There’s this amazing magazine called Quanta, which is about math. It’s totally approachable. I made the mistake of reading a quick story about black holes, and for some reason it just… Like right before I went to bed, I was like, “Shit. Black holes. Machines.”
Amy Webb:
And I was so disturbed by this idea that it shifted my understanding of space time to the point where my husband and I… My husband’s very patient, but I was really struggling for hours. Could not get to bed, forced him to talk to me about it. So my answer is just maybe don’t think about it.
Douglas Nicol:
Yeah. It’s easier to just avoid the discussion and enjoy life.
Amy Webb:
Yeah. Enjoy life, slash Elon Musk is being super reductive when he talks about this.
Douglas Nicol:
Fair enough. Amy, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Do you think South by Southwest will be a live event next year? What do you reckon?
Amy Webb:
I absolutely think it’ll be back in person, and I absolutely cannot wait to see everybody there.
Douglas Nicol:
Amy, thank you so much for your time and insights. And if you want to read more about Amy’s work or indeed get in contact, visit the Future Today Institute website. It’s been an absolute pleasure as always. Thank you for joining us on Smart Dust, Amy.
Amy Webb:
Thank you so much. It’s been fun.
Douglas Nicol:
And that wraps it up for this episode. As usual, there are some links and notes to peruse for this episode in the iTunes program notes. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please rate us on your podcast platform of choice. And indeed go crazy and subscribe to Smart Dust for me, Douglas Nicol.
Nick Abrahams:
And me, Nick Abrahams.
Douglas Nicol:
Goodbye.
Nick Abrahams:
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:
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