Transforming Work with Sophie Wade 87: Dan Mapes — General Artificial Intelligence and the Spatial Web at Work
Dan Mapes is the Founder and President of Verses.AI, an advanced artificial general intelligence and spatial web company, and Founder and Director of the Spatial Web Foundation enabling the 3D Internet. He also co-authored the best-selling book, The Spatial Web. Dan explains what globally networked artificial general intelligence can do now, what will become possible soon—especially with AI-run operations—and his vision of our AI-empowered planet in 2100. Dan discusses augmented working capacities, our ongoing caterpiller-like metamorphosis, and how we can all benefit by learning about and leaning into our growing capabilities.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[02:37] Working on his PhD in AI at Berkeley, Dan clearly sees the ultimate goal of creating software that rewrites itself.
[03:36] ChatGPT is a machine rather than a self-evolving system which can learn from its mistakes.
[05:02] The ultimate software interface would be a 3-dimensional environment.
[06:04] Dan creates a lab to do R&D and work across sectors to solve intractable computer problems.
[07:14] The role of game theory in our lives and when developing artificial intelligence.
[08:23] Dan’s lab develops: databases that handle game objects, early capabilities to move images over a network, digital humans.
[10:18] How biological design using an action perception modeling cycle is a game changer in a co-evolutionary process.
[14:16] There are two classes of AI now—(1) content creation (neural nets) and (2) operations.
[16:28] We are at a new inflection point—leaving the industrial age and entering an intelligent globally networked age.
[17:40] Dan shares a practical use case—his company won an EU contract to manage drones in flight.
[20:40] The new AI enabled a universal language of AI – Hyper Space Modeling Language HSML.
[22:46] Dan describes what sharing a co-evolutionary brain worldwide means with collective intelligence rising.
[27:13] How the internet developed into the World Wide Web.
[29:12] The internet was always going to evolve into the Spatial Web once bandwidth increased enough.
[30:43] What the Internet of Everything will look and feel like as the 3D Spatial Web.
[33:25] The worldwide web’s three big flaws are being fixed by identity, security, and location layers.
[37:04] How everyone having self-sovereign identity improves privacy with zero knowledge proofs.
[39:16] The data exchange built into the Spatial Web allows each person to trade their personal data, if desired.
[40:12] Shopping will be a very different experience with AI-enabled mass personalization.
[41:43] The worldwide web aas a prototype—a useful 25-year experiment preparing us for what’s next.
[43:24] Dan anticipates a shift of similar magnitude to when we transitioned to the Industrial Age.
[45:24] When the network IS the economy, workers are location independent nodes on the network.
[46:43] We are transitioning to a planetary civilization, thinking about key problems at a planet level.
[48:50] Transforming education outcomes when AI can assess capabilities and personalize learning.
[51:34] The caterpillar, the butterfly, and the metamorphosis we are currently cocooning through.
[56:20 Dan’s vision of abundance moving beyond the Industrial Age and cooperating at global scale.
[57:09] Understanding the historical and potential trajectory of planetary wealth.
[58:59] What might be possible combining AI and quantum computing?!
[1:00:44] Evolutionary force is driving new developments—such as creating a digital neocortex to augment the human neocortex.
[1:03:57] Earth is an evolutionary planet.
[1:05:40] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: To prepare and start adapting for an AI-powered future — learn more, educate more — read whitepapers, watch relevant videos and interviews — and come from a fundamental position of trust; trust with care. Feel positive about what we are evolving toward while paying attention to possible misuses.
RESOURCES
QUOTES (edited)
“We want what humans are. We don’t download better brains, we learn every day, evolving an interior model of reality. A baby has a small model, a child has a larger model, and an adult has a sophisticated model, so they can make better decisions. So the same thing with software. That’s been the dream of AI for a long time.”
“We are on the cusp of a new civilization that can do things we couldn’t do during the Industrial Age. It looks like another inflection point. We left the Ag (Agricultural) Age and entered the Industrial Age. Now we're leaving the Industrial Age and entering an Intelligent Global Network Age. And we’re the only company in the world doing this.”
“The whole era from 1970 to today is 5% of what the Spatial Web is going to do. Instead of connecting every machine or every document to each other, it's going to connect every building in the world, every car, every boat, every train, every plane, everything. It’s the Internet of Everything.”
“The Spatial Web knows exactly where everything is and the AI functions as its own immune system. It knows where things are. If there’s a bad actor, people report it and the ISP takes it down.”
“I’m a free person and I don’t have to report who I am to everybody. Having self-sovereign identity unlocks a really interesting concept called zero-knowledge proofs.”
“You own your data in the Spatial Web. You have an identity. You’re not being surveilled and sold, so you can sell your data. We built data exchange into the spatial web and we’ll buy from you and sell it for you to the advertisers. But you can choose.”
“The last time we went through such a major shift was when we left the farm and moved to the cities and people had to quit farming. It used to take 80 people to run a farm and once you had mechanization of the farm, it was eight people. So, we say “Oh my God! We’re losing our jobs!” No, no! You move to the city and learn to make tractors.”
“We’re moving toward a planetary civilization. Our climate problems are planet-level, our weapons proliferation problems are planet-level, we think at planet-level. We’re waking up.”
“An average working person [today] at median level income lives better than the King of England did 100, 200 hundred years ago. The king would trade immediately! If you got sick 200 years ago, you’re probably dead. That means that the average person in 2100 may be wealthier than the wealthiest person is today.”
“The caterpillar butterfly model is such a valid model because you could never predict the butterfly from the caterpillar. It’s a little fat worm crawling around on a stick, and then this thing comes out flying for 5,000 miles and has some kind of intrinsic knowledge of where it’s going. So we probably have intrinsic knowledge of where we’re going. The DNA of what we’re about to become is already within us.”
“A turtle will lay eggs on the beach and the little baby turtles will crawl to the water when they hatch, and then they’ll swim for two years in the open ocean, come back to the exact beach where they were born, and lay their eggs. I mean, that is machine intelligence, maximum.”