Talking AI and Future of Work in XR In a Truck with Timoni West and Cole Crawford

Published: Feb. 4, 2020, 10 a.m.

This week\u2019s episode goes all the way back to last year\u2019s Curiosity Camp, when Alan shared a ride with Unity Lab\u2019s Timoni West and Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford, recording a podcast along the way. The three discuss the challenges that will arise as AI begins to replace human workers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: In a very special episode\nof the XR for Business Podcast, we\u2019re driving in a car with Timoni\nWest, head of XR\u2026 Research?\n\n\n\nTimoni: Director of XR in Unity\nLabs.\n\n\n\nAlan: Director of XR at Unity\nLabs, and Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO. So we\u2019re driving on our way\nup to Curiosity Camp through these beautiful winding roads, and we\ndecided that we would record a podcast, because Cole, in his\nincredible company building the infrastructure of cloud computing,\nthey built an AR app to help service that. And I thought, what a cool\nway to use this technology and this time on this beautiful drive.\nWow. Look at the size of those trees. \n\n\n\n\nTimoni: They are enormous.\n\n\n\nAlan: Oh, my God. Wow. Well,\nanyway. Timoni, how are you doing?\n\n\n\nTimoni: Excellently. And I\u2019m\nalso enjoying the view. Yeah. Yeah, actually, Cole, I\u2019m really\ninterested to hear more about why you chose to go with that, and what\nthe process was like. My team is working on tools for mixed reality.\nSo for Unity itself, that\u2019s used to make, I think, 90 percent of all\nHololens applications right now. Century is using Unity for that. But\nthe tools that we\u2019re making today are allowing, I think, for you to\nmore easily make robust, distributed applications that can work\nacross various devices and for various users.\n\n\n\nCole: And that\u2019s very needed.\nFirst off, Alan, I just want to say, you sound like you should be a\npodcast DJ.\n\n\n\nTimoni: So it\u2019s cool that you\nare.\n\n\n\nCole: Well done. But yeah, I\nmean, the issue for us when we started down this journey was very\nmuch a question of, how robust can we make an experience, about how\nwidely could we make that experience? And the vertical integrated\nsolutions that you had to choose from in the early days of AR/VR, I\nthink, are primed for disruption. I\u2019m super glad to hear that Unity\nis working on the open APIs, etc., needed to bring this technology to\nmore users, as I\u2019ll quote \u2014 maybe a little clich\xe9 being where we\nare and where we\u2019re going \u2014 but\u2013\n\n\n\nTimoni: Yeah, I want to hear it.\nWhat is the problem you company solves?\n\n\n\nCole: Yeah. So we have to think\nabout not four, but 40,000 different data centers; we\u2019re an edge\ncomputing/edge data center infrastructure company. And with that\nmeans you can\u2019t Mechanical Turk what was originally done in data\ncenters. It works with four buildings. It doesn\u2019t work with 40,000.\nSo we had to build autonomy into every aspect of our business, in\nevery aspect of the infrastructure. And that means building really\nsimple interfaces for what would otherwise be really complex\nproblems. And at scale, from a logistics supply chain \u2014 remote hand,\nsmart hands, all the things that you do in data centers \u2014 what that\nmeans is your FedEx guy, your U.P.S. guy, a contracting company that\notherwise would need specialized training, now it\u2019s visually assisted\ncapabilities for what would otherwise be a job that you would train\nfor and then go work in a data center. We simplify that.\n\n\n\nAlan: So basically what you\u2019re\nsaying is that you\u2019ve given real-time tools to anybody to be an\nexpert on the field, in the field.\n\n\n\nCole: It\u2019s fair to say that the\nsoftware is the exper, and what you need are opposable thumbs,. \n\n\n\n\nAlan: Haha! Which democratizes\nthe