In this month’s PassW0rd, ‘Digitally Resonating’, we tackle living and working in the Artificial Intelligence world of the 21st century and examine the rapidly developing digital twins that will be our presence in the online world.
Twins that, according to some, will either rob us of our jobs or give us new roles that will free us from the constraints of the old offline world.
The programme explores these contradictory claims of wholesale redundancy and those of a new world of work with interviews from leading industry figures from the worlds of AI and employment. And tries to piece together whether the world of technology will be one of unremitting gloom, or one where we will carry out tasks that actually give us, a stake in the future.
A new work world from digital twins
Among others, we spoke to Nvidia’s leading virtual world technologist, Richard Kerris, top AI scientist Mona Nia of Tecnotree, Ott Velsberg, Estonia’s Chief Data Officer, business transformation and employment guru Richard Skellett, and computer games and AI ethicist Anneloes Smitsman to try to work out whether work is actually a word we will use for what we do in the future, or whether it is something we will nurse fond memories of from the past.
We also feature one of the most uplifting recent stories of the internet. The poignant life story of Mats Steen, whose tragically short life has been made into an award-winning film, called Ibelin, by Benjamin Rees for Netflix, due for release on October 25th.
In an interview with Mat’s father Robert, he lays out the life of his chronically disabled and terminally ill son, who was confined to a wheelchair and only capable of the merest of movements at the end of his life.
A virtual life well-loved and lived
Yet those were movements he made the most of, to create a character in World of Warcraft that allowed Mats to have an alternative existence as Ibelin. A pony-tailed, Thor like man who ranged through the role-playing game in such a way that he made hundreds of friends.
A fact Robert Steen only discovered ten days after Mats died in 2014 at the age of 25, when he was shocked to find that many of those Mats had met as Ibelin had made their way across Europe to be at his funeral in Oslo in Norway.
People with whom he had very real relationships.
According to Steen, one who he met at the funeral was Anne, a 62-year-old entrepreneur and psychologist from Salisbury in the UK, who worked as a headhunter in Europe. Anne told Steen about the social life his son enjoyed as an avatar in the game.
Free from real world physical constraints
Talking, eating, virtually of course, running around lakes. Competing and teasing each other.
“She said that most of the time we are in a kind of traditional social relationship. It is not about killing each other. It’s a life very much the same as we experience in the physical world, but there is one big difference. That is, that your physical appearance doesn’t play any role at all, because we can’t see each other.
“Which means that the colour of your skin has absolutely no importance. Your makeup, the clothes, are not visible. So over a long period of time, and we spent between 15 and 20,000 hours together over a 10-year period. When you come into a relationship with a person over such a long period of time. The only thing that remains is what you have in your heart and what you have in your head,” Steen said Anne told him.
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