Presence, social connection and AI's impact on human development

what is the piece of that that you feel most interested in that you keep coming back to in your mind this has the frustrating property to develop that the sense of presence is almost like when you're designing something that that's sort of trying to artificially deliver it you're delivering an illusion to a person and more than any one thing that provides a sense of presence

it's actually more the case that any one thing done wrong breaks the sense of presence you kind of know that you're interacting with technology but it's so convincing that um

that you just kind of go along with it. You're like, okay, yeah, no, this person feels like they're there. When I did that ping pong demo, at the end of it, I dropped the ping pong paddle on the virtual table and it shattered. So that was not the best for our internal development. But that's winning in our development. When you feel like something is kind of so realistic that you're just convinced that it's there,

now and there are a lot of things that can break that right so i think a a field of view that's too low right so something feels real but then you turn your head and it's not there um latency right physics that don't behave like realistic physics it also is interesting in some ways what people can accept as physically real even though it's not right so like we've done a ton of work on avatars we we have this whole work stream on kodak avatars to do these photorealistic avatars and it's

I think it's going to be incredibly compelling and people are going to love it. But one of the things that I found interesting is the ability to mix photorealistic and expressive kind of the cartoony avatars with photorealistic worlds and kind of more cartoony computer game type worlds. So you can have a codec kind of photorealistic avatar of a person in what is clearly like a video game or cartoon world. And people are generally pretty fine with that. It's like, okay, that feels pretty good.

And similarly, having a photorealistic world, but good, increasingly good kind of cartoon avatars, as long as the avatars move in a way that feels authentic to the person you're interacting with, it actually feels pretty good. When you look at a 2D still frame of it, some of the stuff can look a little bit silly, and we've certainly had our share of memes around that. But when you're in there, and you've played around with a lot of the stuff,

it feels realistic because it's basically mimicking the kind of authentic mannerisms of, of a person that you're interacting with. And even if it's not a codec, but a realistic avatar, if it's kind of a more cartoony expressive one. So I think that that's, it's, it's very interesting to see kind of which pieces you need to unlock and what, where you just need to be like very technically excellent and consistent. But it's, this isn't a space where it's like you deliver one thing and it's good. This is like, there's a wide breadth of things that you need to nail and,

and then have it all come together. And that's why these are 10 year projects. It seems like an interesting way to learn about the human brain and what we actually care about with respect to what feels real. I was wondering about, there was this moment in an interview that you did with Lex Friedman. You quoted research that says that the average American has fewer friends now than they did 15 years ago. Yeah. And

I was so interested in that because it seems like if we want to get to a world where there's more human connection, this is the trend that we're going to have to grapple with. And just to give some data on this, in the American Time Use Survey, over the last 20 years, the amount of time American adults spend socializing in person has dropped by nearly 30%. For ages 15 to 24, according to the Surgeon General, it's nearly 70%.

And I look at that data and I think to myself, well, maybe if we're all socializing digitally, that doesn't matter so much. Maybe there's a future where that's actually fine. But there's also data that suggests that we're struggling somewhat. The number of Americans who say that they don't have a single close friend, that share has jumped from 3% to 12% in the last 30 years. It feels to me like with all the tools that we've built for human connection, we're

struggling to connect. And I'm curious, why do you think that's happening? I mean, there's a lot going on to unpack there. A lot has changed sort of economically and socially during that period. And a lot of those trends go back before a lot of the modern technology. So, I mean, this is something that a lot of academics and folks have studied. But

it is an interesting lens to look at this though because i think whenever you're talking about building digital types of connection one of the first questions that you get is is that going to replace the physical connection and my answer to that especially in the case of something like this is that no because

people already don't have as much connection as they would like to have it's not like this is replacing some sort of better physical connection that they would have otherwise had it's that the average person would like to have 10 friends and they have two right or three and there's just more demand to socialize than what people are able to do given the current construct and

and giving people the ability to be present with people who are in other places physically just seems like it will unlock more. It's not going to make it. So if I have glasses, it's not gonna make it that I spend less time with my wife. It's going to make it so that I spend more time with, you know, my sister who lives across the country. And, um, that's, I think that that's, that's good. And I think people need that. Um, as, as for the rest, I think we could probably spend a multi-hour podcast just going into all of the different, um,

kind of socio economic political dynamics that are going on but um none of the trends that i've seen does it seem like the primary thing that's going on is that because people are interacting online they're now not interacting with their with people um physically it's um now certainly i think you um you

I do interact with people online who I also like to interact with physically, and I think that that's kind of like a combination, like more combined, richer relationship that you have overall. But I think that there's a lot going on with the loss of kind of social capital and connections that really predates a lot of the modern technology. The goal of what I'm trying most to learn about is how we can structure

the technologies that we use in the future to get toward this future I think you're imagining of more human connection in more ways. I'm curious, you brought up the other big pillar of AI. And in some of your conversations, I'm thinking of a conversation with Tim Ferriss in particular, you talked about a lot of different use cases of AI. And they seem to me to fall on somewhat of a spectrum. Like, for example, you mentioned

automatic real-time translation. It's like basically the Star Trek translator, universal translator. I think we're pretty much there. Yeah. And that's one example on one end of the spectrum where some people might argue that there is

a chance that someone is less likely, for example, to learn a language because we can all speak to each other in real time in different languages. I think nobody would really argue that, therefore, we shouldn't have that kind of universal translator, right? Also, a lot of people still learn Latin and Greek. Right, exactly. And so I think that end of the spectrum is something like technologies that really measurably unlock our humanity because they remove a struggle between people. And then on the other end of the spectrum,

there are a lot of educational things, for example, where the struggle is kind of the point. It's like building a muscle. I can think of so many times in my life where the reason why I was doing something was not the output. It was the fact that I was trying so hard to do it. There's one example in the Tim Ferriss interview where you talked about your kids struggling to articulate themselves emotionally. And adults very much have the same problem. And you talked about AI as a way to help them articulate those emotions. And

I thought about all of the many times in my life where I have struggled to articulate my emotions and how I really could have used some help in those moments. And I also find myself thinking about the times when that was really building a muscle where like the act of struggling to communicate with someone and understand what they wanted from me was important to my development. And so my question is, if you think about that as a spectrum between things that are really important to our humanity and the struggle being removed is helpful,

versus things where the struggle is the point and it unlocks something about our humanity and is important to preserve, like building a muscle. How do you draw the line between those things and how do we ensure that the muscles that we're building for this future are stronger and not weaker? That's interesting. Hi, my name is Dot Lung. I'm a global social media strategist working with companies around the world. Most people have the misconception... I think we're always going to find new things to struggle with.

And I mean, you can always get better at communicating with other people and kind of expressing yourself and understanding other people. So having a tool that can help you do that better isn't going to mean that like, oh, now we perfectly understand every, you know, it's, I mean, and I mean, I think the, maybe one of the most functional aspects of this, you're already seeing a lot of these AI models really help people with coding, right? Like a generation ago, before I was getting started, a lot of coding was like,

really low-level system software. And then by the time that I got into it, there was a little bit of that. But you can make websites pretty easily, make apps pretty easily. And I think in 20 years or a lot sooner than that, you're going to basically be in a world where kids will be able to just describe the things that they want and build incredibly complex pieces of software. So in that world, are kids going to be not struggling?

i don't think so i think that they're going to be just um expressing their creativity and it'll it'll be this kind of constant iterative feedback loop around like okay like yeah i you know took a few minutes to describe this thing and like yeah this whole like amazing virtual world was created that i can now see on my glasses or whatever but like

these things are not exactly what I want them to be so now I need to like go back and edit them I just I don't know I think that there's always more another way to get at this that's one of the things that makes people so good it just there's always more to do we'll always find the struggle yeah another way to get at this is if you play this out to make the tools even better in like 10 years let's say your kids are in high school are there ways that you would want them using AI because you think it would accelerate them intellectually

and ways that you would advocate for them not to use it or things that you would have concerns about. I mean, I think that there are some things that you need to be able to do yourself. I think that that's a lot of the basic fear that people have around this is that while we're building these amazing tools, we get away from this self-confidence and ability of being able to do like this basic stuff yourself. So it's like, all right, you have a calculator, but

It's still good to be able to do kind of basic math in your head because there are a lot of things that come up throughout the day that you just want to have a general numeracy around. Often they're not expressed in numerical terms, but just in terms of understanding trends or understanding arguments that people are making, you kind of need to understand the shape of how numbers come together and

so I think one of the big debates is like should we still teach our kids to program computers even though you're going to have these tools in the future that are just so much more powerful than anything that we have now to produce incredibly complicated pieces of software I think the answer to that is probably yes because I think teaching someone how to code is teaching them a way to think rigorously and that

even if they're not doing most of the code production, I think it's important that you kind of have the ability to think in that way. And I think it's going to just make you generally a better thinker and better person. So yeah, maybe that's like this generation's version of calculators. It's like, so you'll, you'll want to, you want to use the calculator, but you'll also want to be able to generally do without it. Other ones like language. I don't know. I mean, different people can come out. I mean, I think this is one of the interesting questions about,

parenting these days is like, um, is, is just kind of like what, what's important to, to teach your, your kids and in an era where so much is going to change over the time that they're even in school language. I think you can make similar arguments. I know there's a lot of, it's like, it's probably going to be less functionally relevant in the future to learn multiple languages, but it sort of helps you think in different ways. Um,

you know, I've found from the languages that I've studied that a lot of it, yeah, you learn about the structure of your own language. You, you can, you know, you also learn about the culture, right? Because so much of how things are expressed in different places is tied to the nuance and the history of, of kind of what, how, how, so I think like you, that's all valuable and interesting stuff to get into. But then, I don't know, at the same time, we only have so many hours in the day. So people need to prioritize what they're going to learn. And it may be that, okay, in a world with perfect translation, which,

by the way, we basically just announced on the Ray-Ban Metas that now you're going to be able to, you know, just like you go to different countries. We're starting out. Yeah, we're starting out with just a few languages, but we'll roll it out to more. And, you know, you could be traveling anywhere and you have your glasses and they just translate in real time in your ear. So it's wild. Yeah, so I think people are going to need to choose what they want to focus on going forward. How do the developments that we've been talking about in AI intersect with social media and the platform?