Podcasts

NB: First of all, I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about your research journey, how you ended up in philosophy and why you chose that. If you fell into it by accident, or did you always want to do that as a subject?  

NM: No, it didn't always want to do it. I thought I was going when I left school, I thought I was going to drama school, and I took a year break, to first work in a camera shop and sell cameras for a living, but then to travel for a year. I found myself in Hong Kong and lost my passport on the bus, and I had to go to the British Council as part of the replace your passport thing. And I found the prospectuses in the library while I was waiting and I thought, yeah, I'm supposed to be applying for going to do something. I found the University of Glasgow one and went through. I was on my way to look for psychology, which starts with a P and an S, as you might know, and found P and H before it in the alphabet again, as many people know. And it said, ‘have you ever wondered?’ And it had this list of questions like ‘what is a number?’ ‘Do other people experience colours like you do?’ ‘On whose authority does a government, any government that you didn't vote for ever get to tell you what to do?’ And so on. And these are questions that I had been nagging my parents about since I was about two years old. And it just seemed extremely obvious that this was a subject I should add on to the other ones I was going to do. And then when I got to university, it was like being at home. When I was hearing what Immanuel Kant said about morals, about them being this thing about your intentions, not the outcomes, it felt like it was articulating my very own thoughts, just better than I ever could. So it never it was completely obvious to me (that) I was at home.  

NB: So you're interested in the 'whys' of things.  

NM: Always have been, yes. And I mean, I equally have (a) strong desire to understand them and the kind of scientific mode of answering questions too. But my questions don't stop where the sciences do. And that's where philosophy picks up.  

NB: But you've obviously got quite a scientific way of thinking as well. You've got a scientific brain, if that's a thing.  

NM: Maybe. So I think analytic philosophy is scientific. It's just got terrible data, right. So where the sciences get to find, to measure things out in the world and build their theories out of concrete data points, we need to build our theories with much poorer data points about intuitions, about concepts as they've been used over time. It’s much fuzzier data but then we do roughly the same thing with it. We try and build consistent theories. Occam's razor is something you'll hear cited in the sciences as a philosophical concept about the neatness or the explanatory power of theories. And that's what we take ourselves to be doing as well. So we're just like, I think we're doing science with bad data. So yeah, I think my mind is scientific in that way. Analytical as I think of it.  

NB: And your research nowadays is very much in the technology realm, with VR, XR, things like that. Is this as much of a departure from philosophy as it seems, because they would seem to me at first glance to be two very different subjects. But obviously they are linked.  

NM: There is a linkage. There are some parts of my life that have nothing to do with philosophy anymore. When I'm doing particularly economic development projects around these XR technologies and when I'm up to my knees in the technical details of how do you get these objects to be scanned in the right way so they look as beautiful as they can and so on. There, there’s no philosophy in my day at that point. However, in my path there was, first of all, when I said before I did sales as my first job out of school, I became a salesperson in a 3D graphics company between my undergraduate and Master's for three years and I came to understand the technology very well. So I was a technology specialist and a client specialist at the time when VR and AR started to really kick in for this latest phase of them, and I was doing that as a consultancy while I was doing my PhD. So it became the second life that I had. Now, over time, the two of them moved closer together rather than I moved from one into the other. Um, and the way that happened is a very famous philosopher called David Chalmers wrote some quite confronting things frankly about VR, claiming it was genuinely real and genuinely valuable. And a bit of philosophy that I wrote my PhD on is about what exists, the way the world is. And that means he was talking about my domain and saying things about it I disagreed with. So that gave me a way into thinking about VR wearing my philosophy hat. I don't often think about philosophy wearing my VR hat as it were, but the two do overlap because there are significant questions that touch the law actually about what exists and when we should treat it as existing in the digital realm, VR or otherwise. And that's where my two worlds most neatly collide.  

NB: Okay. Your research, as you say, asks whether virtual entities are genuinely real and genuinely valuable. What implications do you think that has on things like ethics?  

NM: Yeah. I am a little less sure about the impact it has on ethics. There's a really good young philosopher called Alex Fisher who's almost persuaded me we don't need to answer the first  ‘does it exist’ problem to do good in our ethical reasoning about it. I'm not completely convinced, but that's in there. Um, I don't think that virtual entities are genuinely real. I think they're not. I think they are part of a broader fiction that we engage with, with really good props on the screen, right? Uh, or on the headsets. So they're very compelling props that help us play a game of make believe is what I think is going on. Games of make believe can be very valuable. So, while I think the answer to the question is, are they real? No. Are they valuable? Yes. And that isn't a contradiction. Although some areas in the law would treat it as a contradiction because they treat the things that can be stolen, the things they call ‘goods’ as needing to be things that exist or are tangible according to the Dutch law specifically. And so certain cases that fall out of that are if it's not real, it can't be valuable, therefore it can't be stolen. It seems like the wrong reasoning path to me about how the real-world reasons around this. And it starts with the reality question, the metaphysics, the philosophy question of ‘is it real?’ And I've written about that. And I think that's a really interesting case of where you see these questions really touch the world outside. The other connection is my PhD was on causation about what it is for one thing to cause another. Under what circumstances is it true to say one thing caused another and that connects to the ‘is it real’ causation that you see in virtual scenarios. And ‘no’ is my answer to that. David Chalmers says yes, I say no. Um, but in saying no, that has implications. So one of the implications is that you can teach with VR but not pay the causal cost that would normally be associated with, say, cutting a patient open or traveling to the bottom of the sea, or shrinking yourself inside a body. That would be bad for both you and the patient, I imagine. So by understanding that this is not real causation, that unlocks the possibilities that you can use it for in, for example, education. And that was one of the first major projects we got grant funding for called Project Mobius. And more recently I've been thinking about, um, if it's not real and we're playing this game of make believe around it, how should we think about things like Bitcoin or NFTs? Well, I think they're the same category. I think they're not real, but I think they're valuable. Right? I think they're valuable precisely because we treat them as such, or at least some of us treat them as such. But NFTs are a really interesting case because clearly NFTs have bombed, right, as a concept. Um, but I think they had something in them which was about an attempt to track digital ownership. That's a real challenge for a world that allows us to copy paste things furiously around the world. How do you trace who owns the original asset and is getting appropriate payment for it? So NFTs were trying to answer that genuine problem. They just weren't, you know, compelling a solution to it. But for museums in the metaverse, the second major project we got funded, it was that core insight about digital ownership that we thought unlocked the possibilities in the museum sector.  

NB: You mentioned museums in the metaverse. How did that come about and what is it exactly?  

NM: Yeah. So, uh, there's two origin stories. One is that we were thinking about, um, how could we use VR things in the context of closed museums, The Burrell when it was closed for a period of time. Um, so I'd been thinking about that with Maria Economou some years ago, 2017 or thereby. Then, a little later in lockdown, we had to with our education project, Project Mobius, we were having to kind of convey things over Zoom and Teams, which was very challenging using a concept we call VR by proxy. And one of our colleagues, Pauline MacKay, had proposed an event and a lesson around Burns, Robert Burns and Auld Alloway Kirk around Tam O'Shanter. And she delivered this in VR. So she'd done this sort of VR Land of Burns portion. And when you saw these two ideas close together, it seemed obvious to me that the value was there in the cultural heritage domain for virtualising things, because we don't always have them, we can't always touch them, they're sometimes locked away, even when they're on display, they're behind a glass, they're in a country you can't get to, COVID happens, all these restrictions of things that VR can help us get past, and the cultural heritage sector looked ripe for it. And then along came an opportunity with money attached, the Levelling Up Innovation Accelerators program. And that was about creating economic growth in Glasgow. And, and we thought that there was an economic play to be made around cultural heritage and XR that we were well placed to develop. And that's where it came from. What we've then built is a platform that aims to make building virtual museums cheaper and faster and easier for museum collections and allow them to make money from that so that they can afford to keep making it and so they can afford to get more revenue into a system that is continually short of cash. And what the end users get, the visitors, are spectacular experiences, beautiful virtual experiences, but with an intimacy with the objects from collections you would never be able to get otherwise. We can bring objects together that you couldn't see side by side any other way, and we can share that all over the world. So there's a multifaceted benefit to this, but it was really born of the economic impetus for the cultural heritage sector to let them make money off of digital assets and reach a global audience.  

NB: What's the end goal for that kind of thing? Is it to replace physical museums?  

NM: No, certainly not. Um, no ambition to replace them whatsoever. And museums have got about ninety percent, maybe ninety five percent of their objects in storage, and they only reach maybe one percent of their global audience. So what we see here is a massive opportunity for museums to grow their income and grow their reach. And that doesn't have to touch in any way that one percent or less that can actually get physically to the museum. So certainly no replacement strategy at all. And the purpose of the funding, levelling up funding was economic benefit to Glasgow. So that's the goal. We're spinning into a company that should aim to achieve that and will be incorporated here. And we're going to try and create sort of global platform. We have created the platform, we're going to try and make it global and its adoption and based it in Glasgow to generate jobs and economic growth here for the company, as well as bringing money back into the museums. If we do it right, we become the platform for virtual museums, and I think they've got a good chance.  

NB: Does that involve collaboration with non-university partners?  

NM: It certainly does. Initially our partners on the project were Historic Environment Scotland, National Museums Scotland, our own Hunterian, of course, and our technology partner, Edify, the company that grew out of Project Mobius, the education project that we ran. In the foundation of the company, it will be, the university side, so the founders from the project - myself and Pauline Mackay most centrally and with Murray Pittock and Maria Economou having a continuing role too. But on the other side, we've got the technology partner Edify. So they are the other, if you like, half of the spin out company.  

NB: What's it like working with an external partner as an academic?  

NM: I really love working with external partners. I feel very comfortable in the world of SMEs. They move quickly. I understand the challenges they've got - almost always cashflow related. They'll be very flexible and sort of buy in to your mission quite a lot in a way that is very difficult to get big organisations to do things like that. Too many more stakeholders to deal with and, and people to keep happy. Um, and I love the benefits that we can have for SMEs around us. We are the big whale, right? As an institution, this university. And we can be this sort of way by which we can, we can feed a lot of feed a lot of mouths with the sort of work that we do and the benefit that it can have to the ecosystem around us. So I really enjoy all of those dimensions to it. Slight complicating factor with our founding of a company is my brother is involved in the other side. So that has that has complications, yeah. (Laughs).  

NB: You're also chair of the ARC-XR Operations Board. What cross-disciplinary partnerships are exciting you most about that role at the moment?  

NM: Yeah. So ARC-XR Ops Board really runs not just the ARC-XR lab space that we have here in the Advanced Research Centre, but also our teaching labs in Partick Burgh Hall. Now, the teaching labs there are used by thousands of students, and they're great. In the lab itself, I really love the two major projects besides museums and the metaverse that are being hosted there. One is fusion by Julie Williamson in Computer Science. She is a co-director of our centre, Realities and Immersion Glasgow, and her project and her team are working on social XR. So how do people socialize and engage with each other, gesture communicate in XR? How does that differ from how they do when they're not wearing these headsets? And what can we learn from that to make things better? I really love that project, and probably our biggest client project in that space, though, is TRANSiT with David Flynn's team. That's a huge project with digital twinning, and that's about creating digital twins of our critical infrastructure, be it energy or transport, particularly when those two things come together and the complexities of decision making and stakeholder engagement around that. If you can do that with 3D assets and make things visually salient to people using these technologies, then you can get decisions quicker, buy-in quicker, design iterations quicker. You can do lots of things better under those circumstances, and I'm really excited about the work that they're doing too. So that's just two. But there are so many things that pass our desk.  

NB: A digital twin being a digital representation of a city or an infrastructure.  

NM: Yeah, so I should explain that. So a 3D model of a thing you could call a digital twin. But when people talk about digital twins, they usually mean something that's kind of updated live. So it's kind of taking live sensor data from various different sources and building that into a sort of holistic picture of some system or other. And you can do it with big chunks of land. You can do it for whole cities. And in this case, they're looking at the digital twins of energy and transport infrastructure coming together. There's critical infrastructure of cities. But yeah, it's this live updated-ness about it that makes it really, really powerful, but equally extremely difficult sort of data bandwidth to turn into something digestible for you, me, stakeholders, anybody really. Um, and therefore this translation into a sort of visually salient model, like a kind of Sims-like game in front of you or something, uh, is a way of communicating that really well. As I say, it's really exciting. 

NB: And it has to be usable by people who aren't necessarily experts.  

NM: It needs to be consumable by them. Usable might kind of blend the consumption of seeing what you're being shown and control over what is shown. I think there's a lot of technical challenge in the kind of, um, in the setup and the display part of that that is really important. And I value those skill sets greatly. Uh, but yeah, anyone should be able to sort of pop on the headset, see what it is showing and understand better than they did before. So yeah, there's very much a sort of end user experience and user interaction consideration there. That's really challenging and not really, if you think about it, what, what we as academics were sort of trained to do. So it is a bit of a departure for us, but this is where your SMEs, your stakeholders, this is where your experience in projects like MiM (Museums in the Metaverse) and fusion and all the rest of it all come together to kind of, uh, almost an ecosystem of expertise around how to do that.  

NB: I'm just wondering about you as an individual. Do you think that your past experience with the job that you mentioned earlier between […] your undergraduate and your masters, you worked for a 3D printing company, I think  

NM: Not 3D printing, a 3D visualization company.  

NB: A 3D visualization company. Do you think that kind of thing went into your skill set in terms of explaining complex concepts to people, interacting with people, public engagement, that kind of thing?  

NM: Yes, to the first bit. So I'm less sure about the public engagement stuff. I think when I had to do sales and that was for camera shops and all the rest of it, and I said before I thought I was going into drama at some point, I've always been comfortable in the presentation side of things and got kind of good engagement when I present and teach and such like. So I think that wasn't changed much, maybe honed slightly in the sales capacity. But certainly I think that, you know, being a, you know, the commercial lead basically for a small company for a period of years taught me a lot about how companies worked and about how to try and find the things that your stakeholders really need, so your customer needs when you're selling. That sort of mode of switching into what is somebody else asking for or needing out of this equation is something I think I learned most potently doing sales roles, and that was the biggest one I did. And to really inhabit that space. So yeah, I think there's no question that my sort of comfort with spreadsheets, financial projections, modelling of financial performance, quantified sales pipelines, and all the rest of it feed directly into a lot of the work I end up doing here, not necessarily the work I would file under research, exactly, more management. But yeah, I think it feeds indirectly.  

NB: There's so much other stuff that goes on as well that requires additional skill set other than the research.  

NM: Yeah.  

NB: Realities and Immersion Glasgow – RIG - is a network that brings together arts, humanities, engineering. How does that interdisciplinary mix change the way that your projects work? Does it present unique challenges, unique opportunities?  

NM: I certainly unique opportunities. I haven't noticed unique challenges yet, but again, I sit in an interdisciplinary space anytime I do anything with VR, right? So I think the examples of the positivity from it really comes - the most obvious one is from Pauline Mackay, one of the co-directors and Julie Williamson, who I mentioned before as well, one of the other co-directors. And they're bringing their skill sets together to look at how we might take certain intangible cultural heritage and try and sort of promote it, study it, understand it, share it more broadly using these technologies. What that's doing is it's bringing the kind of cultural heritage expertise from Pauline Mackay’s side of things; she's director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. And our particular understanding of the Burns supper as a social phenomenon and as a case of intangible cultural heritage. Together with Julie Williamson's understanding and expertise around social XR. Because Burns supper is a social thing, right? So how could you replicate this intangible cultural heritage moment in XR and try and get the socialization of it right, such that you could have virtual Burns suppers? And in trying to achieve something like that, you need that interdisciplinarity. And I don't think that would have happened if we didn't have the interdisciplinary space that the Advanced Research Centre gives us in general, and this sort of lens on that, that we've created with Realities and Immersion Glasgow. And going forward, what RIG allows us to do is to be a sort of catching mitt, or as sometimes I say, a lightning rod for funding that can come in and blast through us to benefit the surrounding ecosystem, be that the other institutions in the city, we work closely with City of Glasgow College and Glasgow School of Art, and we're doing a project with the Conservatoire as well at the moment, but also to those SMEs, right? Whether they are film and TV or they're graphics or 3D SMEs. And I think that's what this lightning rod-cum-catching mitt of RIG allows us to do because we can be, and we can face any disciplinary funder with this in a way that if I was a philosopher turning up, it's very difficult to, for example, apply for funding from the EPSRC, for example.  

NB: And how does the network come about? Is it just one person sticking their head above the parapet and saying, hey, I spot an opportunity here for us to join forces? 

NM: No, it’s sizeably more strategic than that. I wish it had been that simple. So RIG is technically a Centre within the university. We treat it as this sort of networking list, this hub of people coming in. It's technically a Centre and there's a whole process to having a Centre approved in the institution these days. I don't think it was always thus, but it's a long form process, you've got to sort of articulate why the university should allow yourself to stick your head above the parapet and call yourself a thing. But we had consciously wanted to create a sort of umbrella unit that could wrap around ARC-XR, the lab in the Advanced Research Centre and Partick Burgh Hall, the labs over there, and the additional things we wanted to add to that, this content creation dimension that we want to add to what is available to colleagues around the university. And we needed one umbrella around that, rather than several different silos that were independently funded in different mechanisms. We needed to unify all of that. And RIG was our mechanism for unifying it and to be the entity that could catch funding to sustain these resources that we've got, the physical resources and the human resources that we've got around these activities, which have grown hugely. So if you take the hosted projects that we've had through what we'll now call RIG, but was at the time, these separate labs and functions, you're looking at about sixty-six million pounds worth of funded projects that have been underpinned by us having these facilities and resources. So there's a strong draw of cash to something that can do what these facilities can do. We just needed to unify it. And that's what RIG was, this unifying moment for that. And that going forward is how we're going to create a sustaining mechanism to pay for the labs, to pay for the content creation, to commercialize elements of it, but to, to cross bill to, to research projects, other elements of it, and to really help that build out. So yeah, it was, it was a lot of strategizing, long-term thinking and we’ve probably been building towards RIG for six or seven years. And it's been established nearly a year exactly. It's our one-year anniversary next Friday.  

NB: I just want to go back and ask you a bit of a philosophical question. Do you think AR will ever become indistinguishable from reality? And if it did, what would that mean for us? What should we prepare for?  

NM: Yeah. So I think it certainly will. Um, how soon, I've actually needed to take a bit of a telling. There's Steve Holmes, formerly of the relevant project teams inside meta, but an alumnus of ours and a supporter of the university, reckons we’re further away than I have previously claimed. But let's say a decade from now, I think augmented reality that layers on virtual things to the world around you through wearable technology like glasses, you won’t know that what you've seen wasn't really there. Uh, it will be indistinguishable from reality. I think that is definitely coming. What are the consequences of that? I think in many cases the consequences will be very positive. You won't need to think twice about what the weather will be outside. You'll have just looked at a window, and it'll have had a symbol on it. And that'll have told you just like glancing at a clock or something, you you'll just accept the information around you in this convenient way in which it's displayed. So that'll be positive. There are scary scenarios there, of course. So anything that's a deepfake worry is a worry x10 in this case, I think, because we are not as of today, prepared to question everything we see in that way. I think in the early internet, we weren't primed to second guess everything we saw. But anything you see today, you'll second guess. You kind of know the AI is in the air, that deepfakes are in the air and echo chambers are in the air, such that you won't take everything on face value in a way, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, you might have taken it more at face value online. Transition that to the real world with AR, I think you'll start to have to second guess things a lot more frequently than we second guess what our eyes are telling us here. So when I look over your shoulder at a whiteboard with some text on it, I have no reason whatsoever today to second guess that is really there. But in the age of the indistinguishable AR glasses, I should come the end of the day report to my partner. Oh, I saw such and such today and be prepared for a ‘did you though? Did you really?’ Now that, I think is hugely undermining. It's undermining not just when you've been hoodwinked and they've shown you something that wasn't really there, but I think it's seriously undermining for every aspect of your life, because you've got to take your credence in what your eyes and ears were telling you, and discount all of it systematically across the board. That should make us less sure of everything we think we know from our eyes and our ears. And that, to me, is seriously worrying. I think there's a way out of that worry. I think there's a way past it.  

NB: What is it?  

NM: Where we don't accept, um, we don't accept untagged, indistinguishable AR. We simply don't accept AR and we don't wear a device that shows us AR and doesn't tell us it's showing us AR at the time. So a really blunt thing would be to kind of put a big red outline around the fake bits, right? Okay, that's going to be too clunky and unpleasant that people would rail against it. But there are far subtler things we could do. A wee shine, a wee glammer about it. A slight glitch to it. Like, I don't know, like projections in Star Wars or something. There are various different design approaches that could be taken to subconsciously signal to us that that's the case. I think we've built up that sort of subconscious recognition for like adverts online. They get more sophisticated but you kind of, you or I might know about where our parents or grandparents might struggle that that's an advert in the middle of your newspaper article. There's something about the design sensibilities of it (that) just code advert to you. I think we're going to need something similarly coded to us that does not functionally get in the way. And I think that the design challenge for that is the design challenge we should impose very strongly on the tech organisations as a safety catch, a safety mechanism for this undistinguishable AR. Slight side-story that is quite funny, is that when we gave Tim Cook his honorary doctorate here, I met with him. I told him this kind of worry. I told him this kind of case back then, and I said, I think Apple are the ones to do it. Apple are the ones to design us something subtle enough that you can detect that it's AR, but not so in-your-face that it gets in the way of the function. It's a design challenge, and I think Apple should deal with it. He did tell me they were thinking about that, but I'm not sure they were. 

NB: Isn't it also a governance challenge? Like we're seeing with AI now, the technology has gone beyond where we are with our policy and how we govern the use of it. So […] we're seeing examples of AI that's fairly indistinguishable from real life and there doesn't seem to be a clear route towards how we differentiate those things. So the technology is moving so fast that I'm confused by like, I have no idea who's keeping their eye on the ball in terms of what's going to be allowed and what's not and how are we going to make sure that we're able to tell? Who's going to enforce those rules? Because we can't just put our trust into designers and product manufacturers to put in those guardrails. Can we?  

NM: No, I don't think we can. I don't think we can trust them to have our interests at heart, let's put it that way. I think what you can trust is that they'll act in their own self-interests. And so what we've got to do is we've got to create the mechanisms by which it serves their best interests, to have our interests at heart in these respects. I think we've failed to do that on social media, and I hope we're learning the lessons from it. I think you've seen a lot of backlash through European law, and certainly things like GDPR are a step in the direction of trying to deal with the sort of overreaches of one type and not the AI type. Um, but I'm always worried that governance is the first thing we think, but the last thing we should probably rely on. Governance can't solve the things we wish it could solve is my pessimistic take. I think that governance tries to play whack-a-mole with a more dynamic, faster, slicker operation, and it won't whack the moles fast enough to catch them all. Instead, I think what we've got to do is understand that self-interest is the motivating factor for those organizations and that we as a consumer populace are weak willed. We continue to use social media despite knowing of the harms that it does. We continue to give data when we know that that will probably be weaponized against us in some direction or other, whether it's consumer or otherwise. We've shown weakness of will here. It's our weakness of will that means governance isn't something to rely on, because there isn't a stronger willed thing outside of us in a democracy to go and do it for us because our will was weak. I think we've got to cultivate our understanding of the dangers and create demands on companies like Apple to give us something that fits with their brand identity. Apple's brand identity is in large part, trust. That's why I think Apple are the company to do the thing in AR that I was asking for, not because they're pure as the driven snow or positively reliable on for their good character or something. But because they are so invested in being the trusted one that I think that that's what we should rely on. And once Apple or somebody breaks ranks and gives us something that walks the line properly for giving us something that's acceptable, doesn't functionally interrupt, and keeps us safe, then they then set the requirements that everyone else subsequently has to meet, or we will just reject them on sight. And that's why I hope that Apple will break ranks in that for their own self-interest. That then happily aligns with ours. But I'm pessimistic about any route of attempting governance on these things.  

NB: Are you pessimistic about the outlook as a whole, or how do you feel about where you think we're actually heading in regard to these technologies?  

NM: I am worried. Um, I think I'm less worried than others. So I think in the grand scheme of humanity, I'm not at the pessimistic part of the bell curve and I'm more optimistic in some of the elements of this. And I'm wary of moral panic, the likes of which I saw with computer games and the internet when I was growing up, and thought was outlandish at the time and I think subsequently has proven to be for the most part. But, but I'm really concerned about some elements of it, and I don't have ready solutions for what we do. And I certainly am concerned about the economic shift that we're going to need to make for AI coming in quite the way that it is. I think it is so profoundly useful in its little niches that it is, that it isn't something that we're going to be able to decide whether to take or to leave or something we're going to be able to rely upon governance to protect us from. I think it will render a great many jobs either less valuable or redundant and I am slightly odd in welcoming that because I don't want every person on earth to have to work morning, noon and night. I think it's an accident of a recent history that we've got to this point. Um, and I think it was Nye Bevan, forgive me if I've got the wrong person, I think it was Nye Bevan around 1930, wrote a piece predicting in 2030 (that) we wouldn't need as much labour as we needed in 1930 to keep our basic needs met, and that at some point prior to that point, we would need to come to a reckoning about our way of viewing value in society in the world that wasn't linked to having a job and working. And therefore, if we are moving to that point with AI, I welcome that part of it, because I don't think we should grade people by their economic contribution to the world around them. I would like us to move on to better things. So I've got that little shard of positivism in there. Um, but to say that I think that's really what AI will end up doing, I'm a bit too pessimistic about economic models, how our world in fact works to be too hopeful in it. But yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a mixed bag and I think I'm less pessimistic than most and still quite pessimistic and worried.  

NB: Understandable. To wrap up, what developments in XR are you excited about in the next five to ten years?  

NM: Yeah, a huge number of things that have always excited me in XR about the things that it will allow us to do. And of course, I've got this museums project in the foreground in my mind, the access to cultural heritage that it permits is fantastic. The really exciting bit, though, is the nuts and bolts of the technology itself. Its capacity to make things look extraordinary is already there, but its format, and therefore the accessibility to the wider populace is not. It's not as easy as slipping on a pair of sunglasses to be able to enjoy an experience like this. And that's the thing I'm really excited about. The form factor improving, more people getting access to it. And that's a clear trajectory for all the companies involved. You can see Meta doing this thing with their AI wearable glasses that are about AI first and foremost, but that's where the synthesis of all of their other work with the VR headsets and augmented reality R&D projects in the background are going to come to fruition, such that joe public can wear one all day, and that's very close. In the next five to ten years, that'll be possible. Caveating the downsides about data and sharing, and the problems you might anticipate coming with that - putting them just to one side, the exciting bit about this is that the great upsides of this spatial computing technology will be available to many more people for much more of their day, and it will start to create huge improvements in teaching and learning and education and entertainment and any number of other fields. I'm excited about that expansion of the franchise.  

NB: I'm curious as well, just before we say goodbye, do you have any reading recommendations?  

NM: Interesting. Perhaps one. Jaron Lanier is the chap who is credited with coming up with the term ‘Virtual Reality’. He wrote a book recently called The Dawn of The New Everything. Very humble title. But he's talking about the advent of these technologies in a positive but sort of moderated way. He's writing before the sort of AI panic layer, which I find useful. And he has some absolutely staggering anecdotes in there about his family background, about his own sort of neuro atypicality and about his childhood, his parents and all the rest weaved through a really remarkable story that I think was truth-telling about the nature of the technology and its future path. Without scaremongering, without putting too much of a gloss on it, and I really enjoyed that book and I think most people would. It's not too techie, not too specific.  

NB: Thank you very much.  

NM: Welcome. Thanks, thanks. Nice talking to you.  

NB: Thanks, Neil.