248 Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, The Metaverse & AI’s Impact on The Future of Work with Louis Rosenberg, AR/VR Pioneer & CEO Unanimous AI | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Louis Rosenberg, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. Thanks for

[00:00:06] Louis Rosenberg: having me.

[00:00:07] Mahan Tavakoli: You are a pioneer in virtual and augmented reality, have started up so many businesses, so you know, both about the to9echnology part of it and also the business part of it.

And right now, leading unanimous. Ai, you're doing fascinating things there that can be applicaggggÿvvghuut7tssble to a lot of organizational decision making. But before q to any of that, Louis, whereabouts you grew up and how your upbringing impacted the kind of person you've become.

[00:00:38] Louis Rosenberg: So I grew up in New York on Long Island. I I grew up in a suburb. Of Manhattan wasn't a very technology focused place at all especially back then in the 1970s and eighties. In fact, I don't think I ever even met an engineer my entire upbringing.

because I was dyslexic. And actually had a really big impact on me. So I was dyslexic. I would reverse things, reverse words, reverse numbers. And just by chance in school, I got introduced to 

the very first 

personal computers barely com

ing out in the early eighties."

 And because I was dyslexic, it was actually really interesting to me because if you typed in, if I was learning to program a little bit and you typed in something wrong, like you made a syntax error, it would just tell you, if you wrote something backwards it would just immediately tell you and it'd be like, oh, like I get instant feedback and I can fix it.

And so actually, because I was dyslexic, I became very interested in computer programming    early when I was, 12 years old, which is not that strange now. But 40 years ago it was , by the time I was 15, 16, I was  % didn't grow up in that atmosphere at all. And it also helped me learn better.  I went struggling as a student to doing really well by the time I was, in high school. So I ended up coming out to California to go to Stanford. And Stanford is where I got first exposed to the fact that, hey, there's this place called Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship and things.

 So that, pushed me in this other direction. And I ended up really interested in technology and entrepreneurship. I founded a number of companies, but all of the companies and all the work that I did really focused very much on the boundaries between technology and human perception, which again, I think goes back to being dyslexic because when you're dyslexic you're always dealing with these perception issues. And what I've found over the years is that, I meet people who end up interested in virtual reality, augmented reality who are dyslexic. Maybe for similar reasons. I meet people who are interested in filmmaking and other forms of media or maybe also cuz they're dyslexic.

And so it's definitely had to my mind very positive impact on the direction of my life. Although, people struggle with all kinds of different learning disabilities and issues, but I think if they learn to adapt and cope, it ends up being a strength for them. What a

[00:02:57] Mahan Tavakoli: beautiful example of anti-fragility Lewis.

I love Nasim Taleb's writing and he talks about how sometimes breakage or setbacks some systems bounce back to the way they were before some become even better. Dyslexia, you, because of that, were able to find a passion and a love, and I find in a lot of your work, you are also able to connect with the humanity as well as the technology in part, maybe because of that experie.

[00:03:33] Louis Rosenberg: My interest has really been on this boundary between people and technology, really from the start, and it's guided everything that I've done. I did my undergraduate at Stanford and then I stayed there and I did a PhD at Stanford really focusing in human computer interaction and how to enhance human performance using technology.

And then I founded a number of companies and it's always on this boundary between people and technology and, personally, I think it's one of the most interesting topics because you can go, and we'll talk about a variety of things from virtuality to artificial intelligence.

But you can always go too far on one side, there's dangers of virtuality, the metaverse is it gonna dehumanize people? And I worry about that a lot. I also think it's a very humanizing technology on the artificial intelligence side.

 Same thing, artificial intelligence, it's inspired by understanding how humans work, really, it's about trying to replace or understand how humans think and humans make decisions, and then allow computers to do it. And yet there's also this danger of replacing humans.

That's something that I worry a lot about. I actually feel like the biggest flaw in the world of AI is that most people don't appreciate how smart humans are , right? Like we , we have far greater skills than we give ourselves credit for. And my work in artificial intelligence in a lot of ways always keeps coming back and telling me, wow, people are pretty amazing.

Look, we're getting closer. We're getting better with ai, but it still should be showing us how powerful the human brain is, how much knowledge and information is in the human brain. And I think we just take it for granted.

[00:05:17] Mahan Tavakoli: I love the fact that you see it as an augmentation of human intelligence rather than a replacement of human intelligence.

So it becomes a tool. Now, you also worked on the very first and developed the first augmented reality system for the US Air Force. How did that come about and what was that like back

[00:05:41] Louis Rosenberg: then? , so I got involved in this field of immersive technologies, virtual reality back in 1991 when I was a grad student at Stanford working on my PhD.

And while I was doing that, I was lucky enough to also get a, part-time opportunity working at NASA in their virtual reality lab. This is the early days of virtual reality. I was working on virtual reality vision systems. The big really clunky systems that you may see in the old pictures.

And I was working on how to work in software and model the distance between your eyes to optimize depth percept. Those are the types of issues, really basic issues that were being worked on, back, this was over 30 years ago. And I was immediately captivated and amazed by the power of virtual reality, the ability to put people into this immersive world, that feels real and looks real.

And while I was doing this research at Stanford and NASA I also felt really uncomfortable using virtual reality. Because it cuts you off from your surroundings. I wanted all the power of these virtual worlds, but not feel isolated from just my direct surroundings feel isolated from my workplace.

And I felt like what I really wished that I could do is take , these amazing, virtual things and. Splash them all around the real world. And so I pitched, that to the US Air Force and I was fortunate enough to get a fellowship and go out to Wright Patterson Air Force Base and build a system.

It was called a virtual fixtures platform. It was called virtual fixtures because the goal was to say, Hey could I show that people could perform tasks, manual tasks in the real world with these virtual fixtures, virtual things around them that would guide. What they see and what they hear and what they feel to enhance their performance.

With the idea that we could basically bring, a virtual tool into your real workspace and allow you to perform better. And so I spent a number of years working on this system called a virtual fixtures platform. And ran experiments and tests and showed that, yeah, you could actually combine the real world and the virtual world into a single perceptual reality.

That was so convincing that people really couldn't, they really didn't think about what was real, what was virtual. They were just thinking about performing a task. And the task that I worked on, again, it was just to prove that this was possible. People, grabbing a metal peg and moving it from one hole to another hole and showing that, I could bring in these virtual fixtures and allow them to perform faster.

And it worked. And it was the first time that Anyone had created this mixed reality where people could see and hear and feel and perform better. And the most impactful thing for me about it was that I had to do a lot of testing with humans, I would bring in human subjects, it was a crazy system.

They'd climb into this exoskeleton and perform the test and every single one of them would do the tests. And they'd never heard about virtual reality. They certainly didn't even hear about augmented reality, cuz that word didn't even exist. . But they climb out and they would say, one day this is how we're gonna interact with, computing.

It's gonna be just around us. It's not gonna be On a flat screen. And they were, so excited about it. And I believed them . One of the things that I learned is that, when you test things with people and they tell you something, you believe them. And right after my work was done at the Air Force I founded an early virtual reality company, a company called Immersion Corporation in Palo Alto in 1993.

Because I was convinced that this technology was gonna be everywhere within 10 years. And it's taken more than 10 years . It's now, over 30 years. But we're now actually, I feel pretty close to virtual reality and augmented reality really impacting the lives of almost everybody in industrialized nations.

 I feel like we're within. Five to 10 years of it really being a significant transformation. It's three times longer than I thought it would take, but I do think that it's real this time. It's gonna impact everybody's lives. I think there's great things about it, and I also think that there's dangerous things about it and I work on both

[00:09:52] Mahan Tavakoli: Louis, I love a quote from Ernest Hemingway the. Character is asked about how he went bankrupt. He says gradually. Then suddenly, I think with a lot of these things, including technologies, it's gradually then suddenly, and this seems to be the point that suddenly is starting to happen for all of us, all around us.

Now you mentioned. Augmented reality, virtual reality. And then there's the term thrown around metaverse that a lot of people talk about most, especially since Facebook changed its name to meta and is betting all on meta. What is the difference and what do you see will be more likely scenario that we will face over the coming years and the potential opportunities for organizations.

[00:10:46] Louis Rosenberg: So there's a lot of words that get confusing and they get used sometimes used wrong , it's a confusing space. This space started out with a single word, virtual reality . And virtual reality really means an immersive simulation that you experience in the first person.

 Generally you put on a headset to block out your view of the world. You'll have maybe 3D audio, you could have tactile feedback, haptic feedback. But the idea of a virtual reality is to replace the input to all your senses and allow you to experience a fully simulated world in the first person.

 It's really powerful and it's really compelling, and there's amazing things you could do with virtual reality from simulation and training, to education, to entertainment. When we use the word, metaverse we really are talking about virtual worlds at an augmented world, which I'll come back to in a second.

But we're adding one other piece, which is that it is a shared environment with other people, and generally when you think of a metaverse, you're thinking that there's gonna be, large groups of people in this immersive world, and they're gonna interact. For all kinds of interesting things from collaboration, classrooms, shopping, commerce and it's really, that simple of what the Metaverse. Is now augmented reality is if you think of a virtual reality as a world that's completely simulated, augmented reality is saying, Hey, let's not replace the real world, let's augment the real world. Let's bring realistic immersive 3D elements into your real world. Sometimes this is also called mixed reality.

The difference between the words augmented reality and mixed reality are blurred. But generally as people have realized that you can really have very realistic virtual experiences in the real world. People started talking about it more as mixed reality. It's more of a marketing term.

It was really pushed first by Microsoft they had really the. Commercial product that did this called the Hollow Lens. Now there's many other devices that are enabling these mixed reality experiences from meta and from H T C and actually very soon from Apple.

Apple has made it pretty clear that in June they will be unveiling a mixed reality headset that probably will start shipping the end of this year. It's my personal view that the real metaverse, meaning the metaverse, that could really transform our lives will be an augmented reality, mixed reality experience and not strictly just fully simulated worlds.

And I say that because if you enter a fully simulated world, it's great for entertainment, for education. But after an hour, maybe two hours. You really feel uncomfortable being cut off from your surroundings. And so I don't see people spending their whole day in these virtual worlds like this, dystopian vision that, you put on this headset and you don't see the real world for the rest of your life.

I really don't think that will happen because people don't feel comfortable that way. It's like when you watch a movie you're comfortable watching a movie. 90 minutes. An hour. People used to watch movies for three hours and they don't anymore because we don't like to be cut off from our world's too busy, right?

And so I really think that these purely virtual worlds will be very much like how we deal with video games and movies and TV today, short duration activities that people use to escape the real world, but the metaverse that we interact. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep I do think we'll be augmented reality.

And I say that because what augmented reality really is going to be is the evolution of the mobile phone, like right now, the mobile phone is the primary way we interact with the digital world. It's the thing we keep with us from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep.

It's the thing that when we're walking down the street, we look at to get information about our world. Augmented reality is basically gonna take those power and capability that we get from the mobile phone, our digital lives, and put them into lightweight glasses so that when you're walking down the street, content is not on a flat screen.

It's just all around us. The information is spatially registered to the real world. It's placed in a location where it's most useful. , is there anything for sale in the store that you're walking past? As you walk by?

It'll just pop out of the store as you walk by and my view is that 10 years from now in the 2030s augmented reality glasses will start to become common. And we'll start to really rival and replace mobile phones to the point where during the 2030s, we will eventually have a complete transition where you will wear eyewear.

To access your digital content. And we as a society will look back at old movies from the 2020s where you see people walking down the street, staring at a phone, bumping into telephone poles and stuff. We'll look at that as ridiculous. We'll say they used to look at these little screens to get information.

 Information should just be around you. It should just be in your space. And so I really believe that there's a lot of people who ask what's the killer app? What's the reason for that? And my answer is actually much simpler. I think there's a lot of killer apps, but my answer is that augmented reality, mixed reality, this idea of putting content into our space like it's in our dna. And I say that because the reason it will happen is that the human perceptual system was evolved to perceive our world spatially. It evolved to understand and experience and interact. We get empathy when interacting with other people from having face-to-face 3D interactions.

We remember things spatially. The people who have the greatest memories in the world, they do something called a memory palace where they think of things. Our memories are spatial. Our understanding is spatial. We think spatial, and yet, since the dawn of computing digital content has been flat. It's been flat, and you look through a window at digital content, it works. It's great. It's powerful, but it's not what our brain wants. Our brain wants spatial content, and because of that, , it's inevitable. It's inevitable that this metaverse happens. And I personally think it's inevitable that it's a mixed reality because we also don't like to be cut off from our surroundings.

 There's this phrase called situational awareness. Our brain always has a full sense of what's all around us. When you're in a virtual world, you feel uncomfortable, fully virtual because your brain still knows you're sitting in a room, but you've lost your situational awareness.

When you have mixed reality you maintain your situational awareness, but you can still have these amazing virtual experiences all around you.  I do think it's coming. I do think it's real this time, and I do think that over the next five to 10 years, it's gonna really accelerate and happen in a big way.

And it's no longer even a question that it's gonna happen. It's just, is it gonna happen more on the five year side or longer on the 10 year side.

[00:17:51] Mahan Tavakoli: I can definitely see and understand that Louis, even looking at my girls, I have a 13 and 16 year old.

They enjoy playing Roblox for half an hour, 45 minutes going into the nightclub, dancing as their avatars, but. that is, as you said, a very different experience than the interaction now they have with their phones and the ability to interact actively, physically with their friends and everyone else around them while they're still holding their phones.

So that lends itself to that augmented reality that you're talking about. So from a world of work and how businesses will be transformed, where do you. This has the greatest potential, this augmented reality, in addition to the fact that we as individuals will have more easy access to content and information based on our glasses.

How will the world of work change in

[00:18:51] Louis Rosenberg: your view? So I think it's gonna impact almost every profession. And you can think about professions, so you could think in terms of vertical markets, like different vertical professions. And you can also think about just how it's gonna impact mainstream consumers in daily consumer lives.

 One. vertical that always is a little bit ahead of the others is the medical space and only because the medical space usually afford slightly more expensive hardware than some other markets. And so think about how, mixed reality, augment reality will affect the medical space. I've spent a long time working in medical, virtual reality and medical augment reality. And so I stay on top of it and I had an opportunity to really review all the latest things happening late last year. And there's now technologies out there where a patient takes a CT scan or an mri.

 It's a 3D scan. And right now, What that means is that a doctor, whether it's a radiologist or another doctor that needs to look at the information, is gonna look at a flat screen and then look at their patient and look at the flat screen and look at their patient and try to imagine how, whatever they're looking at, whether it's a lesion or a tumor how that fits inside that person's body.

What will be common. Five to 10 years from now is that instead the doctor will just be wearing a, mixed reality headset and they'll have x-ray vision basically, meaning they'll look at the patient and that m r i is gonna be correlated with their body and they'll be able to just look and see in the exact location of that patient where that lesion is, where that tumor is.

And it saves time, it saves effort. We don't really think about it, but when doctors have to look back and forth from a flat image to a patient, they're doing these mental gymnastics and they're very good at it , but they're not perfect. But with augment reality headset, they'll be perfect.

They'll be able to see exactly where it is in that patient. So that's already happening today. It's already being tested in different labs around the world like that will become commonplace in medicine now, think of the same exact thing, same exact technology for different vertical.

Construction. In construction, it was something similar. You're building a building you're trying to look at a set of flat drawings. You're trying to see, where is the cables gonna be routed, where is the ducting gonna be routed. People, on site in construction just gonna put on a mixed reality headset and they're just gonna see the 3D model of their building right there mixed with the building while it's being.

and so they can just see, okay, this is exactly where you can see precisely , where, you know this duct is gonna go in this, half buil building that you just built. It's same thing's gonna be for, if you're a plumber or an electrician and you're going to, just going into somebody's house to repair a pipe,

that's how inexpensive , these tools will be. Yeah, like you can go and have a stud finder or try to, hope that behind this wall there's a pipe where you think it is augment reality glasses will give them x-ray vision and it'll just be able to like, essentially look through the wall at the drawings, at the schematics.

Yeah, so that's really just one example of a capability X-ray vision it will impact everything from medicine to construction to plumbing. But the same types of verticals will, impact almost every profession. You can think about, just training,

if I'm, going to train somebody to repair An aircraft engine. You know what, how are they training to? They're probably looking at a manual looking at the engine, looking at the manual, looking at the, and again, augment reality will just put the content right there around the real engine.

 And that will be a capability for professionals, but it will also be a capability for consumers. Consumers will be walking down the street and they'll see a tree and they'll wonder, what kind of tree is that? And, It'll just pop up annotated oh, that's a California oak.

 And so , it allows us to bring the power of computing just into our real world. And so the possibilities are, essentially endless. And the biggest companies in the world are working hard to roll out technologies to make. Possible. Meta has gotten the most hype around it because they came out first and changed their name.

But, apple Google Microsoft and just about every major technology company sees mixed reality as, essential part of the future.

[00:23:22] Mahan Tavakoli: I think about all the opportunities including with education Louis, where kids can interact with the models as they are learning, there's the opportunity to have access to that information, both in education, which will require a transformation of how we educate our kids and in the workforce. One of the concerns around that, and maybe. It would've been better for Facebook not to have rebranded as meta because they have lost credibility with a lot of people in how they have monetized their users.

One of the concerns is when we are living in this augmented world, We're living in a real world and we are seeing, as you said, this is this kind of tree and this is the kind of information and that shop I want to buy such and such. And they have the information is accessible in front of you. This also allows for.

Manipulation, not just at the level that has existed with social media, but to an extreme. So how can this augmented reality be developed in a way that leads to the betterment of humanity?

[00:24:38] Louis Rosenberg: So it's a really important point and it's an issue that I spend a lot of time speaking about and writing about, and we're working with different organizations about, and really I spend a lot of time trying to educate policy makers about the issue because the solution, I think, ultimately is policy.

The danger is that the metaverse virtual reality, augmented reality, Has the potential to give large corporations extreme control and influence over individuals. I could say that about almost every major technology. But it is significantly worse than the problems that we've seen with social media, which are significantly worse than the problems we saw.

Traditional mass media, like radio and television, like radio and television had its issues and policymakers felt oh, they understood how, people advertising radio and television policymakers felt like they understood how to deal with that. And so when social media came out and said, oh, we're just gonna have an advertising business model.

Policymaker said, okay, we have that covered. We know advertising. And they didn't realize that social media was fundamentally different than radio and television in other forms of media. And the difference is that social media is a bidirectional medium. It's a bidirectional medium where it doesn't just give you advertising, but it also can profile your behaviors over time and target you.

In individual ways. And so what happened was this shift from traditional advertising to target advertising means the social media platforms, they basically became masters of tracking , their user base. Profiling their user base and then using the profile to segment populations and target them in segmented ways.

And so again, you had this utopian technology that everyone expected would be amazing, and it became dystopian because this simple choice of business model meant that people were seeing different content. And so it was segmenting popul. Driving different types of content to different groups which drove polarization of communities.

It drove distrust between different groups. It incentivized driving misinformation and disinformation. And it created all these problems that nobody expected. And so now policymakers are finally saying, oh, we have to try to fix social media. The metaverse. Makes it different than social media, cuz the Metaverse is also a bidirectional medium, but it's a realtime bidirectional medium, which means that in the Metaverse all of these things that maybe happen slowly over time In social media can happen instantly.

Meaning they can detect what you're doing and change the world around you in real time and actually influence you. And to give you an example of what would be possible in the metaverse, imagine I'm walking down the street. In a virtual or augmented world the first thing that we have to understand is that the platforms can be able to track everything I'm doing.

They're gonna track where I am, they can track who I'm with. When I look in a store window, they know what store window I'm looking in. They know how long I look in a certain area. They know where I slow down and speed up. So they're collecting everything. These metaverse platforms are also track.

Your facial expressions and your vocal inflections they're potentially even tracking your blood pressure and pupil dilation. So they're doing that to infer your emotions. So now these platforms, as I'm walking down the street platforms, know everywhere I am exactly what I'm doing and exactly how I feel while I'm doing it.

that. A lot more extensive tracking than social media, which is tracking just where did I click and who are my friends? And so they could track a lot. And at the same time, they can then target you with content right now on social media. Target you, targeting you with content means, a pop-up ad, or a video or a piece of news in the Metaverse, which is an immersive world.

Targeting you with content means. Putting things into your world, I'm walking down the street in a metaverse and they can put virtual product placements into my world that look like just as real as everything else. They can put virtual people into my world that look just as real.

So what we're saying here is that a Metaverse platform has the ability to track everything you do exactly how you feel while doing it. Profile you over time. and then change the world around you as a form of influence. That sounds dangerous, right? , . That sounds dangerous, and that's why policymakers need to realize that this is pretty different than what we've seen.

With social media. And so I could be, for example, let's say I'm walking down the street in the Metaverse and they've tracked me, they profiled me. They know everything about me, and they know that I'm on the market for a new car, for example. And while I'm walking down, I just happen to be walking behind another couple, a young couple in the Metaverse.

And it could be a real world, it could be augmented, but I'm walking behind a young couple and they're just having a conversation. They're talking to each other about how they just bought this new Tesla and how much they loved it and how great the gas mileage is.

And I just hear this conversation as I'm walking behind them and after 20 seconds our paths diverged and I walk on and I think, oh, like people must really like this new Tesla. And when I don't realize no, that was a virtual product placement that was put into my world. It looks real. I maybe have no way to even know that it wasn't authentic people.

And it was put there as a targeted product placement only I saw that couple, somebody else might have seen something else and the conversation that they were having was custom generated for me. So they profiled me. They know my interests, they know my personality, they know my values.

And so they were talking about this car in a way that was specifically targeted so that it would be appealing to me. And as we've all seen with chat G p T and its ability, your large language models like. if I told you this a year ago, and I did tell people like this a year ago, they said, oh, that's far in the future before, no.

You could do that today, you can do that now. But it actually gets even scarier. Okay. . And it gets scarier because the metaverse is real time. And so while I'm walking behind this couple, hearing this conversation that's generated by a large language model based on my interests, so it's very, it's gonna be very persuasive.

They're also monitoring my blood pressure, my pupil dilation. So if one of the people in this realtime virtual conversation is, if they start talking about the horsepower of a Tesla and how fast it goes from zero to 60, and my pupils dilate for a second. They say, oh, like that.

That had a real impact. And so they will now adjust their tactics in real time, their conversation. This conversational ai, this conversational advertisement, will adjust its tactics in real time based on my physiological reactions, , and so the idea that you could turn the metaverse into this ultimate tool of persuasion unless there's regulation, unless there's policy that will happen, like that's exactly what's possible.

And the thing is I don't believe that these metaverse companies, I don't believe that they to make their business model to be how to create the ultimate tool of persuasion. But if there's no regulation, As soon as the first company starts saying we can sell better advertisements by tracking your pupil dilation and adjusting conversations in real time, and we'll have better impact and better sell through.

As soon as the first company starts doing it, then another company has to do it and it will become this arms race. And we saw this arms race before in social media all these companies started out with Utopian. And instead they became these ultimate machines of driving misinformation.

The metaverse without regulation. Will become this ultimate machine of persuasion, of targeted persuasion. And it won't just be to sell Teslas, it will be to sell propaganda. It could be used by state actors to to control populations. And all the reasons that make the Metaverse this amazing tool for education and entertainment also make it really.

As a tool of persuasion, unless there's policy and that says, you know what? You can't do that. You can't build this immersive advertisement. That is adaptive based on the physiological reactions of a person who's just overhearing the conversation, you can't do that.

And in fact, you shouldn't even be allowed to put this virtual couple into this world in a way where, I can't tell that it's an advertisement, in the metaverse an advertisement, a product placement, a virtual person could look indistinguishable from everybody. and so I could very easily not know what's promotional and what's authentic unless there's regulation.

It says no. If you put promotional content into somebody's world, a targeted, product placement, it has to look different. If it has to look different, has to be visually distinct as promotional. At least I know that when I'm overhearing this conversation that it's not authentic, it's targeted, and I can be skeptical

and if they can't have it adapt itself to my physiological reactions, I'm less likely to be, persuaded in these crazy ways. But the important thing is for people to realize that. The Metaverse isn't just social media in 3d. And I talk to policymakers who say that to me, who say, yeah, we're still trying to figure out how to solve social media.

And this is just social media in 3d. It's no, this is not just social media in 3D . This is a real-time immersive world where a platform can track everything you do and then change everything and hear and feel like that's a big deal.

[00:34:42] Mahan Tavakoli: That is really important. Louis, I have quite a few policy makers who also listen in the podcast and these conversations in that the potential for the metaverse is huge.

However, we do need to put in those guardrails, which we didn't think through with social media in that the potential positive is huge as long as we have the guardrails, so it won't end up. Off track. Now I do want to also highlight you did a great TEDx talk, which I'm gonna link to in the show notes, which also connects with the company you are running right now, unanimous AI and the swarm technology.

Because part of what you say in that TEDx talk that I want to underline before finding out more about swarm is that you say there's an alien coming toward Earth, and this alien will be smarter than we are as humans. And Louis, I have to tell you, you're terrified me in that talk. However, It's also talk with a lot of hope because you say, and you show that with swarm intelligence, we can be smarter than that.

Super intelligent ai. What is swarm and what are you doing at unanimous AI with

[00:36:08] Louis Rosenberg: swarm? At the highest level, when you think of AI technologies, and especially AI technologies when it comes to, issues like decision making and forecasting. What most AI researchers are working on is looking at how can we replace people with AI technologies that can make really good decisions, replace people with AI technologies that can make really good forecasts and those technologies.

Have their place. These pure AI models have their place, but they underestimate the power and potential of humans. Because when you take humans out of the loop, you're taking away from this process human values, human emotions, human intuition human wisdom. and so at unanimous ai, we founded the company eight years ago on this premise of, Hey, we wanna use AI not to replace people, but to make people smarter and in particular to allow groups of people to come together and make better decisions and better predictions and better forecasts. And we said, is there a way to use AI that actually keeps humans in the loop and allows these better decisions and forecasts without replacing us?

And like a lot of technologies, we look to Mother Nature to say you. , is there something we can learn from, hundreds of millions of years of evolution? And it turns out that there is, which is many different species have evolved methods where large groups can make decisions that are much smarter than any one of the individuals can make.

You can think of a school of fish. School of fish can have thousands of individuals. Nobody's in charge. There's no leaders, there's no followers, and yet working together as a system, they can navigate the ocean and make decisions that keep their species alive for hundreds of millions of years.

Same thing happens with swarms of bees. Same things happens with flocks of birds. Biologists call this swarm intelligence and again and again. Again, it shows that large groups, when they work together in systems can be smarter than individuals. And so we built a piece of software called Swarm and a technology called Swarm AI that allows groups of people anywhere in the world to connect together as a system.

And make decisions and forecast and diagnoses and predictions and estimations. And they do it and it looks graphically like they're a school of fish or a swarm. But there's AI algorithms that watch what everybody's doing and it allows 'em to converge on decisions. And again, it was built on this premise of hey,

this works in nature. It makes birds and bees and fish smarter. I bet it'll make people smarter and it turns out it does. And when a group of people come into swarm, it almost looks like a Ouija board. There's this glass puck and each person controls a little magnet. And there's ai algorithms watching what everybody's doing with their mouse or their touchscreen, but they can make significantly smarter decisions.

For example we did a study with m i t where we had groups of financial traders who would came into swarm and they would predict the price of gold, the price of oil, and the s and p 500. Every week for I think it was 25 consecutive weeks. And they either did these forecasts alone.

They did it by just taking a vote, which some people might call the wisdom of crowds, or they did it as a swarm intelligence using our software. And when they did it as a swarm, they were 26% more accurate than when they did it using traditional methods. They made more accurate predictions of, is gold gonna go up or down?

Oil s and. And those were groups of about 20 people. We then did a large study with Stanford Medical School, with even smaller groups, with just groups of doctors who were just four or five doctors, and we had them diagnose chest x-rays and they would either diagnose alone, diagnose by taking a vote or diagnose as this real-time system using swarm.

And when they use swarm, they reduced their diagnostic errors by over 30%. Wow. They had over 30% fewer error. When they answered together as a swarm, and these were already, radiologists who were. They were experts in themselves, but working together as a swarm intelligence, they became a super expert.

We've seen the same thing at predicting sports, beating the world's best sports handicaps working together as swarms. And we work with Fortune 500 companies that use it for predicting if marketing messages will resonate with populations predicting sales predicting the sales of a new product

and the thing that's interesting when you talk about. Why is this relevant to business? . Sometimes, companies will come to us and they'll say, we tried to use AI to predict how our product was gonna do in the upcoming holiday season. And we did it the traditional way.

We had all this data about previous holiday seasons. We did machine learning on the data, and then we have this new product and we said how is it gonna sell? And we were completely. and I say you weren't completely wrong, but you did what everybody does, which was use the data you had, which was the data from last year and the year before.

So what all you really did was you predicted exactly how your new product would've done last year. , you were, you had a very good estimate, . And that's the problem of most AI systems is that the data is not up to date. But the thing is, the human brain, People we're data collection machines.

And I say you have a team of sales representatives or a team of marketing folks who know what's trendy this season. You know what you're hearing from stores and from industry. What we wanna do is tap the database that's in their heads, not the database from last year.

and that's what Swarm does. We can connect a group of salespeople together or connect a group of marketing people together and have them work together as a swarm, and they will accurately predict how the product will do this season. The biggest difference is the data.

We're capturing the data that's in people's heads. Which again, we as humans, we don't value it. We think, oh, like you want data, go look in this database of all these statistics that we have the human brain can store more data than I think it can still exceed more than the entire library of Netflix.

We don't appreciate, like how much information is in our heads. And how much intuition that we have about what, even with small amounts of data, we can make really good forecasts. And AI needs lots of data and it needs data that's up to date. And most businesses don't have that. Not about what's gonna happen this holiday season, but they have people.

And so our philosophy is people are smart. We can use AI to make them smarter instead of trying to replace them with algorithms that are just looking at data that it doesn't really understand what it means. I

[00:42:53] Mahan Tavakoli: absolutely love it, Lewis, and it marries the best of AI with human intelligence.

Roger Martin, who is one of my favorite strategists, talks about the fact that most organizations make a mistake in thinking through their strategy. They try to come up with strategy for the future based on data from the past, and I totally agree because that's a lot of times the biggest mistake.

Much of the strategic planning conversations I have been involved with make. What you are doing in essence is using the ai not to just build on the data of the. To forecast the future, but to build on the intelligence of the group so we could talk for hours just on swarm. And I encourage the audience to watch your TEDx talk will

linked to it in the show notes as well as look into swarm. Typically Louis, I ask the guests for resources, but with you, you have a lot of your own resources. For people to understand whether it is augmented reality and metaverse or artificial intelligence, and your swarm technology at unanimous ai, where would you send them to?

[00:44:13] Louis Rosenberg: For unanimous ai our website is just unanimous.ai and we have lots of information there about how we can enable groups of people, teams, really you could think about it as if you have a team of people who have knowledge about something and you wanna make them smart. We show how that can be done. It can be small groups, it can be large groups, and they can be anywhere in the world. One of our customers is the United Nations, and they use swarm to forecast famines around the world, and they'll bring to together a group of 20 people. And those 20 people are probably all in different countries.

They're different continents, and they'll come together and they'll forecast the likelihood of famines in different places. And so resources on unanimous ai for issues around the metaverse augment reality, virtual reality. I write about that a lot. I write about it for Venture Beat.

I write about it for big think. You could follow me on LinkedIn cuz I usually post my articles there. And I'm always happy to answer questions about, especially about the dangers of Metaverse and how policy makers can help make a difference. Because, my feeling about the Metaverse is that, the most important thing we learned about social media is that we waited 10 years too long to try to put regulation in place.

And you can't put regulation in place after the fact because these large companies built their whole business models around tracking and profiling and targeting users. And you can't then come in and say, okay, you have to abandon your whole business. But if you put regulation in place early, then the companies will adopt a business model that doesn't compete on, who can create the most persuasive advertisement they can compete on.

Who creates the most amazing experience. And so it would guide the industry in a way that would be good for everyone. And I'm always interested in, passing information along to people about, why it's actually good for the industry. to have guardrails in place so that we don't create this arms race to turn what could be a utopian technology into another, dystopian technology.

[00:46:15] Mahan Tavakoli: You've got a lot of great articles, including in Big Think Metaverse could be far worse than social media in that there is tremendous. You have been a pioneer, have over 300 patents, which is incredible, Lewis. So you have been a pioneer in the space and as a pioneer in the space, you are saying there is tremendous potential to humanity if we just make sure we put the right guardrails around it.

So really appreciate you taking your time to share your insights with the partnering leadership community. Thank you so much, Louis Rose.

[00:46:53] Louis Rosenberg: Thanks. It was fun.