In 2025, Remember: There Is No Finish Line in Technology

I spent most the the holiday break working on the outline for my forthcoming book, "The Spatial Race." January 1 was my first official writing day, and in only a short period of time, I've managed to cover a decent amount of ground and circle back around to a profound idea -- in tech, as in running, there really is no finish line.

As a distance runner, this seems almost counter-intuitive. Of course there is a finish line -- you do the miles or the time, you cross it, and someone gives you a medal and a snack. But the issue is that for many runners, that finish line is only the start. More than once, I've finished a race, eaten my banana, gotten in the car or on the train to go home, and opened my phone and registered for another race. There's always something else to run. The finish line is only when you cannot physically move anymore.

In technology, everyone seems to want a finish line, despite the fact that it simply doesn't exist. Bloggers LOVE to say tech has failed because it wasn't adopted fast enough, or it made mistakes, or didn't solve their exact problem. Waymo gets in an accident and people talk about banning it; a human driver mows down a massive crowd on Bourbon Street and only a few days later the street has been hosed down and reopened and no one has said anything about outlawing cars. ChatGPT returns an incorrect result and people call for Sam Altman's head; turn on any cable news show and someone will cheerfully spread lies while the panel nods along.

That's because we seem to have this huge desire for things to be done and finished and set, despite that never being the case. It took sixteen years from the introduction of the Macintosh for over half of households to have computers. And over those years, and the 25 following, computers evolved and changed and grew. The same can be said for phones, or headsets, or chatbots, or any other device.

And when exactly is a technology considered finished? Many of us are used to Zoom calls, but my friend who just bought a new house is wasting an entire day driving to her bank because they only do in person closings for...reasons? I guess they just shut down during Covid? So is video calling dead because a certain group of dinosaurs won't use it? What exactly is the benchmark here?

This is a roundabout way of saying that in 2025, I hope we all resolve to forget the idea of linear timelines and starts and ends in technology. I taped a podcast recently where the host called Google Glass a failure -- but versions of that exact technology are being released to great fanfare now. Sales of the Vision Pro have been slow initially -- but who knows what the device will become in the future. AI is getting better and smarter every day and will continue to evolve.

Transparently, I'm as guilty of this as anyone, at least in my own life. I've always tended to disregard what was in front of me for the next thing, dutifully climbing the mountain and racking up the honors and awards in hopes of some nebulous future state. But this year, I resolve to be more present and not worry so much about where the next thing will get me -- I'd rather stop looking for the finish line and just enjoy the run.

And With That, the 2024 Season Comes to a Close

Well, that was a (mostly) fun one.

Sure, I'd be happier if everyone was working from a Vision Pro and if the Meta Orion glasses were stocking ready for the holidays, rather than a few years away. And I'd be elated if all the companies building these headsets would commit in a real, sustainable way to funding content creators, rather than launching and killing funds. But 2024 did see several tentpole moments in the XR space, with the Vision Pro coming to market earlier this year, Pico releasing quality headsets in the fall; Meta announcing Orion at Connect; and Google and Samsung closing the year with a new headset launch. The fact that all these companies continue to invest in new hardware at least is a sign that they are taking the market seriously and believe that it has room for growth.

On the AI front, there were insane advances, but the market got super frothy (not everything is an AI company, folks) and there's still a huge delta between what AI can actually do and what people think it can do. I will say I'm using ChatGPT as a search engine at this point, pretty much entirely replacing Google, but there's still a long way to go. It's useful for brainstorming and first drafts and iterating on creative work, but you still need someone to know how to prompt the machine and come up with the ideas in the first place. Still, it's coming, and it's up to us to make sure that we use it to benefit humanity and create better and safer working conditions.

For me personally, 2024 was pretty excellent. Every year I create a spreadsheet of goals and objectives and make sure my actions and how I spend my time aligns around those. I'm certainly not perfect (Netflix happens, as does having to smile and nod and tolerate people who are not acting in highest and best) but overall I've managed to stay on target. I'll miss a few (yet another year where I don't magically turn into Alison Roman in the kitchen), but generally I'm pretty happy with things.

A few highlights:

JFK Memento went on an INSANE award streak, racking up 26 awards and nominations this year! It won Best Art or Film at the Auggies, Best Heritage Experience at the European XR Awards for at Stereopsia, Best in the World at the QLD XR Festival, and of course, was a finalist for an Emmy. So proud to have been an executive producer on this piece and what a ride it was!

Another piece I executive produced, Masters of Light, won the Crystal Owl for Best Single-Player Game at the European XR Awards and was nominated for the Unity Awards for the Best Social Impact Project.

Working with Virti, I led workshops and directed VR pieces for Amazon, Houston Methodist, GLP Learning, Intermountain Health, Frontier Communications, and the Calgary Flames, among others. I also spoke at several conferences, including SXSW, the Scandinavian Creative AI Summit, Learning Technologies, and Augmented World Expo.

I continued teaching with CalTech, New Mexico State University, and the Fast Future Executive, and co-authored a chapter in the Fast Future Blur book, which was released on Wiley this spring.

In non-work related goals, I ran five marathons and one ultra-marathon, visited eight new countries, read 87 books, saw lots of art and ate at a ton of great restaurants. I spent lots of time with friends enjoying everything the New York has to offer.

So what's on tap for 2025? Hopefully, more of the same -- I'm always looking for projects to advise and produce and new clients for Virti to help. I'm also looking for speaking gigs, teaching opportunities, and I think might be the year I finally turn that book proposal I've been noodling on forever into something real.

I'd love to hear what your highlights were, personally, professionally, and in terms of headsets, immersive content, and bots. Happy holidays, happy new year, and here's to an exciting 2025!

Can AI Help Us Finally Focus?

Back in the day, many people followed the same career trajectory -- finish formal schooling, get a job at a company, and move up through the ranks, eventually retiring with a gold watch and pension. But nowadays, with the exception of a few industries, our career paths include zigs and zags and detours and upskilling and reskilling and even switching industries. And for many of us, there are no guides to how to get ahead and get to a place of security.

What this looks like, at least for some of us, is trying to do everything. I feel like I've thrown so much spaghetti at various walls that I could feed a major Italian city for a week, and while some of it has stuck, plenty of it hasn't -- and that leaves me frustrated and tired and on the verge of burnout at times. The other major issue is that many industries operate on a scarcity model, and people gatekeep information about how they rose through the ranks and just give vague advice to new folks.

The system is clearly broken, and all of the spreadsheets to organize our goals can't save us. But can AI? Imagine if you could feed five profiles into an AI and have it spit back a step by step look where you are falling short and give you a guide to catching up. Want a certain role or opportunity? AI could tell you not just where to look but exactly who to target.

Right now, many of us are operating on a "spray and pray" model. We try to do everything and reach everyone just to give ourselves a sense of forward movement. But when you really look at it, most of it adds up to nothing but busywork. Not to mention the amount of busywork most of us are already doing that takes us out of our zones of genius -- and this goes double for many women, who have to not just do all their work-related busywork but also remember Aunt Sue's birthday and little Timmy's dentist appointment.

But can smart new models solve this? An AI could scrape my calendar and put together a list of possible cards and gifts for Aunt Sue -- all I have to do is hit "accept" and type a quick personalized message. AI could control my schedule and just send me a calendar note to make sure to take the kids to the dentist -- and AI could also monitor if my partner is splitting the work with me.

And rather than having fifty meetings, forty-nine of which go nowhere, AI can help me target exactly who to speak with, and how to reach them. Buyers won't be spammed with useless offers and sellers will have more success.

We live in an age of information overload, and what we really need to simplify and strip things down. If AI can help us laser in, that will leave us all better off.

Are Human Powered Robots The Solution We've Been Searching For?

Every time someone presents a humanoid robot prototype, one of the first comments is almost always something to the effect of "it's just a robot powered by a human in a VR headset!" But while this is normally presented as a "gotcha!" the concept is actually extremely powerful, and could solve a whole host of problems while creating new jobs at scale.

Here in the US, for example, copious amounts of digital ink has been spilled about the issues many young men are having gaining and keeping employment. Traditionally "male" jobs have been outsourced, and for reasons far too complicated to enumerate here, men have not gone to work in female-coded fields. So what is left is a swathe of the population left adrift and angry. But if there's anything that is a common thread among many of them, it's that many of them are tech-savvy and especially interested in video games. Hence, a solution.

These new robots, powered by humans, can create jobs that can be done anywhere -- a huge boon for people in rural areas with limited job opportunities. The user could power a robot delivery vehicle, for instance -- there are already food delivery robots in LA, and they could be scaled to any dense urban area. The robots could be programmed to only go a certain speed and stay on sidewalks (unlike IRL delivery drivers in NYC) and if a robot gets hit by a bus, it's a little bit of a bummer, but obviously nowhere near as awful as a human getting hit.

Robots can clean houses and office buildings as well -- humans who had those jobs can now work from a comfy chair in a home or office space, as opposed to putting stress and strain on their actual bodies. Robots can pick shelves in warehouses and pack and load trucks, all powered by people.

This model can even be the full realization of gig work -- a college student with a few hours in between classes can pop on a headset and make some deliveries and a few extra bucks. The current labor shortage we face will be solved because these tasks can be done by someone anywhere in the world, allowing people in underserved countries to earn a living and rise into the middle class.

We are a ways off from this becoming a reality, but it could be here sooner than you think. And as weird as it might be at first, eventually we'll all be working alongside human powered robots.

What the Oprah AI Special Got Right

In 1995, Bill Gates went on the David Letterman show to explain the concept of the internet and spin out this vision as to why it would shape the future. It's a fascinating and funny clip to rewatch almost thirty years on, but what is truly amazing is just how much Gates got right, even when the vast majority of the tech was so nascent it seemed to exist in the realm of science fiction.

I thought about this clip when I watched Gates on the Oprah Winfrey special about AI that aired last week. I have no doubt we will watch the show in ten years and it will feel like a quaint time capsule, capturing a time before a shift happened, when no one was quite sure what exactly was going on. Standing on stark contrast to the Jon Stewart story on AI that I ripped apart a few months ago, the Oprah piece was fair, balanced, and nuanced -- there was no fearmongering, but there were smart and legitimate questions about the need for regulation and oversight.

In the first interview, Sam Altman stated that AI is "the future of the internet," and he's right. This technology is already powering and will continue to power the way we live our digital lives, and done correctly, will make them better. We can offload administrative work that's not the best use of our time (I have to file expenses later today and am frankly dreading it); we can get smarter and better results, and we can co-create content. AI won't be a bogeyman; it will just be the thing that helps you write a meeting summary more quickly so you can get on with your day.

AI misinformation and scams were also raised as topics, but there are two points to consider. In an age when a vice-presidential candidate can make up racist stories out of whole cloth and share them on social media, it seems a bit rich to freak out about AI. After all, we can just spread the lies ourselves. And on the subject of AI spam calls, Congress and phone companies could fix that easily - but the telemarketing lobby has poured millions into making sure that doesn't happen. Eventually there will be enough of an incentive to solve this problem, but inaction isn't the fault of AI, it's the fault of people who choose not to act.

My biggest takeaway from all this is that for those of us who believe in this technology, we need to start telling better stories. I spoke at the Scandinavian Creative AI Summit last week, and was totally blown away by Nick Law's presentation on how the pendulum in tech has swung so far towards the technical and almost entirely away from creative. This was the secret sauce of Apple back in the day, and OpenAI and other platforms should pay attention. AI powered tools for law enforcement could be seen as scary -- or they could make our cities safer and raise enough revenue to keep libraries and community centers open. It's all down to how we talk about it.

Ten years from now, when my AI has finished all my boring work and I've spent time doing what I like, it'll be fun to knock off for the day, pop on my leisure headset, and give this a re-watch.

AI, Spatial Computing, Intrinsic Motivation, and the Future of Work

In his keynote at the KPMG Tech and Innovation Summit, Jason Calacanis shared a slide about millennials, gen z, and their love of gambling. These are the kids who sit at a basketball game but have their eyes glued to their phones the entire time, making bet after bet; they're the kids in the basement trading memestocks for lulz. When secure jobs are a joke and the housing market is out of reach, why not just embrace nihilism and bet the farm?

It's a dark take, but not necessarily an incorrect one. Despite proclamations about the strength of the economy, I know tons of people who are out of work right now -- and they all have top tier educations and glowing resumes. And if someone with an Ivy degree and a shelf full of honors is out in the cold right now, how can a regular person get ahead? Add to that growing concerns about mass displacement due to technology, and it's no wonder that the vibes are off.

The event featured a lot of excitement and optimism about emerging technology, and that's a stance I tend to agree with -- but my excitement is starting to become tempered. It has nothing to do with the tech, and everything to do with the fact that lots of humans are going to go through radical changes in the next decades -- and many simply won't accept them.

I was at a family wedding over the weekend, chatting with a guest, and asked what she was up to recently. She'd lost her job recently, and rather than looking for a new one, or retraining, or upskilling, or going to the gym, or finding a new hobby, she's just...hanging out and watching Netflix. Her husband works and can support them, but it was a wake up call for me, an almost psychotically driven person -- most people, at the end of the day, just aren't that motivated to learn and change.

Unfortunately, the future is all about learning and changing and growing. They key skill we need to start teaching kids and retraining adults on has nothing to do with math or coding or emotional intelligence -- it's the need to make sure people curious and intrinsically motivated. That's a trait often found more in developing markets, and as the economy becomes ever more global, people in the US and Europe are going to fall behind.

We need to train a generation of new workers who look at a headset and think about all the ways it can solve problems and improve their work. We need to train a new generation to look at AI and ask themselves "how can I be better than this machine?" We need to train a new generation to realize that education doesn't stop when you finish school, and that continuous learning is the path forward. And we need to do it now.

Much of the toxicity in our current political climate has roots in the fact that people weren't upskilled and retrained early enough. When car factories started closing in the seventies, unions fought for people to be paid to do nothing, not to retrain or relocate. When timber industries shut down in the Pacific Northwest, it was convenient to blame spotted owls, rather than the timber companies that wanted a cheaper labor force in Brazil.

AI and spatial computing can solve so many of these challenges, from helping people learn more quickly to providing paths to new work. It's up to those of us working in the space to tie all this together and help the next generation of workers before it's too late.

Reality Bites at Meta -- But It's Not Too Late to Change It

As I read through this new Yahoo Finance piece about the challenges at Reality Labs, I couldn't help but nod along. I had flashbacks to the time I working with Meta, meeting people working on VR projects who had never put on a headset, or who didn't understand that basics of content (I'm not talking narrative choices here; I'm talking "don't swing the 360 camera around").

I heard from one person whose project had been funded by Meta that in order to get into the App Lab, never mind the Store, he had to call a C-level executive who just happened to also be a distant family friend. Another piece was funded to the tune of seven figures and continues to collect awards but is still stuck in the App Lab. An employee at a major state university got on a call to enquire about buying headsets only to be insulted about her institution and get a lecture on how the salesperson went to an Ivy. And so on.

Meta has alienated developers by announcing big funds and partnerships, handing out money for a few months, and then pivoting. The App Store remains a walled garden where the only way to get in is to make friends with an employee (who might be gone in a few months, given the churn). The headsets are quite good and the market share is huge, but they're succeeding despite themselves, not because of anything they're doing.

Listen, I want Meta (and Apple, and Pico, and HTC etc) to succeed. VR benefits from having an open and robust market with lots of competition. But Meta has also consistently alienated longtime creators and experts in the space and created an environment of instability that hinders growth.

The first thing Meta needs to do is start bringing in experts. People who know VR, who have track records, who understand what an APK is. They need to mend fences with the creator community and open up the App Store just like Apple and Android -- content obviously needs to meet some basic guidelines, but beyond that, let people put stuff out there.

The one thing I hear consistently is that people buy headsets, enjoy using them for a bit, and then run out of content and get bored. All our devices are just chunks of plastic and chips without good things to look at and play with, and given how many headsets are just gathering dust, there is a huge opportunity to revive them.

The second thing Meta needs to do is empower every day people to create content. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are only as good as the content people share -- but users don't really share content in headset. Horizon Worlds got part of the way and then petered out, but teaching people how to make 360 content and share it would be massive. My current work is all about empowering everyday creators -- and while I focus on enterprise and education, the same principles apply for everyone.

A rising tide lifts all boats in the space, and improvements at Meta will mean a better market for everyone. But they need to act fast in order to turn the ship around.