By Richard Neish, Chief Strategy Officer, Kin + Carta
Looking under the hood of your car gives you one of two experiences: an electric car reveals a void, a vacant frunk devoid of working parts like the vanishing act of an automotive magician, while its internal combustion cousin displays a moulded plastic cover neatly topped with the manufacturer’s logo, politely blocking your path to the engine block.
Both in their own way say, ‘back-off, you don’t understand this’.
For years the technology sector has done the same. Simple outcomes have been hidden behind complex, intimidating naming conventions that put the power with those who ‘get it’. A smoky wall of technical rhetoric born from the cultural influences of those closest to the code, all saying ‘back off, you don’t understand this … but we do’.
It doesn’t need to be this complicated. Let’s look at five interlinked technologies, all with names that will put off a lot of people, in their simplest terms:
Metaverse
The intersection of the Metaverse (mixed reality) and Meta’s role within it are clearest when decoupled. While the early iterations of Mark Z’s legless Second Life gave a name to the momentum, the wheels of mixed reality for enterprise have been turning as businesses find ways to bring physical experience to the online world through virtual and augmented reality.
The Metaverse isn’t a new world, it’s a hugely exciting augmentation of the real world where B2C can drive entertainment and immersion and B2B can augment the workplace, increasing productivity and skills through communication, delegation and buying-back time for the most valuable human tasks.
This practical problem-solving potential means the real value is unlikely to be at Meta’s platform level, but within the application model that solves real enterprise headaches with mixed reality tools and experiences.
Ambient Intelligence
If mixed reality is the intersection of physical and virtual worlds, then Ambient Intelligence (frictionless) is proof that it’s already in your home. Technology that helps you when you need it and fades away when you don’t is the core thought behind your smart speaker. The global voice and speech recognition market is expected to reach $26.8 billion by 2025, according to Meticulous Research in spite of recent layoffs by Amazon’s unprofitable Alexa voice assistant division. It might not be the exciting new technology that is once was, but it still has a role to play.
Conversational AI
Underpinning Ambient Intelligence are advances in Conversational AI (input), where voice is the interface to search across devices, wearables, vehicles and retail kiosks. Speak-through conversion rates are proving higher than click-through rates, but this belies a very simple truth: chatbots are limited. Voice is great for inputting, but as the scripts compute conversational flowcharts, matching patterns and grabbing information from the internet to play back, the output is often underwhelming.
Generative AI
If we take a step from chatbot to the mainstream excitement around ChatGPT, higher quality outputs can be found in Generative AI (output), which is a maker rather than a finder. Picture the reverse of the pattern-matching in earlier machine learning. Generative technology is able to go a step further and make something new that fits that pattern. Using machine learning with access to the breadth of the internet, today’s selfies in spacesuits could be tomorrow’s auto-generated quotes, products, mapping, music and art.
Web3
All these technologies are evolving component parts of Web3 (ownership) where data and content can be secured by encryption and distributed computing (the two key ingredients of blockchain), making them individually ‘ownable’ by a person, artist or business. If the Metaverse is to become the new front-end of the internet, Web3 will be its back-end and real-estate office.
We’re taught that knowledge is power. Preachers, professors, consultants and coders have all sought sanctuary in the safe harbour of complex rhetoric – ‘back off, you don’t understand this’. If we strive for an open internet, then the language that frames it should be accessible, transparent and a catalyst to collaboration, not a barrier to entry.
Demystifying technology increases understanding and adoption, scaling its impact on our world.
So instead of telling people to ‘back-off’, let’s be different and say ‘Come in, you’ve got this.’
Uma Rajagopal has been managing the posting of content for multiple platforms since 2021, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune. Her role ensures that content is published accurately and efficiently across these diverse publications.