Keiichi Matsuda, AI Visionary: The End of Smartphones, Apps & Interfaces

00:00:03: What comes after the smartphone?

00:00:04: What comes after these screens and devices, touch screens or whatever that we use today?

00:00:09: Because obviously there will be something after that, right?

00:00:12: And I was thinking for a long time about those affordances and how you can create something that feels very natural and easy to use.

00:00:19: Because every time we've made technology easier to use, it's come with huge benefits or huge changes within what becomes possible with those technologies.

00:00:28: Getting away from that metaphor of keys and sliders and getting away from the metaphor of scrolling through paper and moving to a world where we think of our applications as almost like people.

00:00:51: Hello, welcome of a new episode of The World Beyond.

00:00:54: I'm Michael Mark and I'm very happy to welcome you today from a very special place.

00:00:59: We're sitting here in the Europa-Pike, more precisely at the Hotel Colosseo in the Bellarista Suite, which used to be when we built the hotel my former home.

00:01:10: So I'm kind of back in my own living room.

00:01:14: And that's not the only thing today.

00:01:17: We are having the Aurea Award, as you know, in the eighth edition.

00:01:21: And we thought, let's do a podcast again with our international guests.

00:01:26: I'm so happy, actually, to have with me today.

00:01:30: I hope I pronounced that right.

00:01:32: Kaichi, okay, Matsuda, sorry.

00:01:35: Very

00:01:36: good, yeah.

00:01:36: Kaichi Matsuda, yeah.

00:01:37: Thank you very much for having

00:01:38: me.

00:01:39: Excellent.

00:01:40: As I learned you the first time here in Ruse, so maybe give us a quick introduction.

00:01:47: Was it filling your expectations or do you still?

00:01:50: So you're a lonely planet under Europe, I can hold a what?

00:01:53: Oh, it's fantastic.

00:01:54: Yeah, it's completely beyond my expectation, actually, the scale of it and the kind of experimentation and innovation.

00:02:02: For someone like me who's been thinking about interaction and how it co-exists with environments, it's kind of an amazing playground here to be able to try lots of new things.

00:02:12: Thank you.

00:02:15: To get to know you a little bit better, I have some notes on my paper here.

00:02:19: You are the founder of Liquid City, which is a studio focused on AI and XR driven spatial experiences.

00:02:29: My mom wouldn't understand that what you really do, but before that, you led the mixed reality development at Microsoft and now you're the vice president of design at Leap Motion.

00:02:40: Can you give it the listeners or the watchers like a quick run through of your life, more understandable than those techy words.

00:02:52: Well, my background is actually in architecture.

00:02:54: So I got very interested in how we create spaces and what new spaces are going to be possible in the future that haven't been possible before.

00:03:02: I was very interested in consumer technology and how we use technology to understand the world.

00:03:07: And when I discovered about augmented reality and virtual reality, it was very exciting for me because it allowed me to be able to think about space and spatial design in a new way.

00:03:18: But now, of course, since AI has arrived and changed the way we think about the future, I'm very interested in trying to produce new visions of how we can live together with AI in a peaceful and productive way.

00:03:32: Excellent.

00:03:32: Did you recall when was the first time you heard about that new technology and what triggered you, what moment triggered you or even what headset triggered you or what hardware triggered you?

00:03:43: to say, I want to be a part of that new world.

00:03:46: Yeah, I think, you know, I'm a big fan of science fiction.

00:03:49: So the idea of virtual reality or the ability to be able to move outside of your body or be able to be transported to different worlds has been interesting for a long time.

00:03:59: But when I started working for Leap Motion in twenty seventeen hours, I think that twenty sixteen maybe there was the first time I was able to try beyond and be able to to use a full six-dough tracking environment where you can move around and really feel like you're in the space.

00:04:17: The first application I remember really hitting me was Tilt Brush.

00:04:20: It's a painting application that you can create three-dimensional drawings and paintings within the space, and that ability to be able to sketch in three-D.

00:04:29: basically sold me on that technology.

00:04:31: But since then, I've been trying to think about how that affects the world.

00:04:34: And I started to make these films that were trying to see what it would look like in the future if this technology was everywhere.

00:04:41: And I tried to bring some of the critique of the current day technology into those films and create those pieces that are, you know, sort of sitting between a dystopian or utopian world and try to make you, the viewer, think a little bit more about what kind of future you want to live in.

00:04:59: Excellent.

00:05:00: Before we go deeper into technology, I'd like to ask you four quick-fire questions, actually.

00:05:07: The fire is not on, but just to get you know a little bit better.

00:05:11: Are you ready?

00:05:12: Yes, let's go.

00:05:13: What was your nickname as a child?

00:05:16: K.

00:05:17: Okay.

00:05:18: Is there a movie that inspired you?

00:05:21: Yes, so many.

00:05:22: You know, Blade Runner, I guess.

00:05:24: Okay.

00:05:26: What's always in your fridge?

00:05:29: Siracha.

00:05:30: OK.

00:05:31: Four.

00:05:32: What do you love to do?

00:05:35: I think, yeah, spend time with my family, my boy.

00:05:38: Yeah, we play lots of games together.

00:05:40: So, yeah, I enjoy seeing the world through his eyes.

00:05:44: Great.

00:05:44: So you have to bring him for sure here to your rubber bike.

00:05:47: He's going to be so angry that he didn't get the invite.

00:05:49: What's his age?

00:05:51: He's eight years old.

00:05:52: OK, perfect for roller coasters.

00:05:57: On your website, I read the quote, everything is becoming science fiction.

00:06:02: From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the twenty century.

00:06:11: Can you explain what you mean with that?

00:06:14: Oh, actually, I don't know if that's my quote.

00:06:15: I think I must have stolen that from somebody else, maybe J.G.

00:06:18: Ballard.

00:06:19: I'm not sure.

00:06:20: But I think what he's trying to say is that you know, the future is constantly being invented and transitioning into the present.

00:06:27: So the things that we think of as futuristic today will just be, you know, kind of wallpaper for our children.

00:06:34: So, you know, the future is always this kind of moving target.

00:06:37: And, you know, we're kind of constantly inventing new ways to think about how we should adapt our technology and our society to work together.

00:06:47: My question which pops into my mind is like, of course, an artist always wants to distribute his art or his content the most widely possible.

00:06:59: Talking about technology and as we've been ahead of the curve with VR headset with our VR coaster company.

00:07:07: Do you really feel that the technology is really woven into our everyday life?

00:07:12: I mean, there are a couple of examples like the meta with Oakley or other glasses which are now slowly getting into the market.

00:07:20: I know you are carrying a Snapchat glasses with you, but is it already out there to really experience the stuff you want to show to the people?

00:07:32: Yeah, I think.

00:07:33: when you're developing for these new type of devices, then thinking about the audience and the scale of the audience is always a problem because you can't invest a huge amount of money to develop for a device that not so many people have.

00:07:44: But I believe it's very important to be able to take these new technologies and try out what's possible with them.

00:07:51: When I started off, I was making videos that received tens of millions of views.

00:07:55: And then recently now, we're more working on prototyping, where the audience size is not as important as what we can learn and discover by building.

00:08:03: I started actually building with the technology.

00:08:05: I had a lot of assumptions about what kind of content would work, what kind of interaction would work.

00:08:11: But when you start building, you realize actually that all of those assumptions are wrong.

00:08:16: So it was very challenging for me to go in as a designer and be specifying how the thing should work and then to find out that when we use it, it doesn't work at all.

00:08:26: So really, I shifted my approach a lot from thinking about the concept first and then build the thing to a much more engaged process of prototyping where you're always continually refreshing and thinking those new things.

00:08:42: At a very high level, I would probably say that the biggest learning is that I don't know anything.

00:08:49: But, you know, we start to develop processes to find out.

00:08:53: Let's talk about one of your project, Hyper Reality, the movie which you did, especially your creative work.

00:09:03: And I think it's a good place to start.

00:09:05: Hyper Reality came out in two thousand sixteen, if I'm rightly informed.

00:09:09: Yeah,

00:09:09: ten years ago.

00:09:11: Amazing.

00:09:12: At that time, it felt extreme digital content constantly in our field of vision as pop-ups, messages and ads.

00:09:19: It's like a smartphone, but right in front of your eyes today with AR glasses becoming real.

00:09:24: That vision doesn't seem so far off anymore.

00:09:28: Would you do it differently?

00:09:29: the movie during the ten years later.

00:09:31: and what was your learning back then?

00:09:34: Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:35: I mean, I think at that time I was looking at what was happening in all of these research labs.

00:09:39: What were the new technologies that were not yet mainstream, but there was lots of investment going into them.

00:09:45: And I wanted to see what would the world look like.

00:09:47: if all of these things happen, just to speculate if everybody's wearing those things and if we have autonomous vehicles and smart cities and wearable technology and we have a continued rise of social media and surveillance and all of these different things that were soft signals at the time that now have become much bigger part of our culture.

00:10:10: But one thing I didn't anticipate at all was the rise of generative AI.

00:10:13: So actually, After we started playing with building agents, then my understanding of the future of this technology completely changed.

00:10:24: So I made a follow-up film, kind of follow-up film, I guess, in twenty twenty two called Agents, which replaces all of those pop-ups and panels and a whole world of information with characters.

00:10:38: I think of them as these small gods with this kind of embodied intelligence.

00:10:43: And we can meet with them and talk to them instead of using apps on our phone.

00:10:48: So I started to think in a very different way and tried to paint a picture of an AI native operating system that will potentially change the way that we communicate with technology.

00:10:58: Thinking about entertainment and the entertainment factor, I mean, we're talking about way of storytelling.

00:11:04: We're talking about immersiveness.

00:11:06: Where do you see us standing at the year twenty six?

00:11:10: not talking about AI which certainly changed a lot of the things but in terms of hardware interaction with the things you're doing.

00:11:18: I mean if I'm walking the park I don't see many people wearing AI headsets.

00:11:23: I don't see people bringing their VR headsets to the park.

00:11:29: What is your take on that?

00:11:30: I mean, obviously, neat hardware to distribute great ideas and new technology, but it's not yet.

00:11:35: I mean, Mita just recently closed a big part of their activities in developing this stuff.

00:11:42: What is your take on that and how do people consume in the future?

00:11:47: Is it only via their phones or do you think there's technology which brings the throughput and the breakthrough?

00:11:56: Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, to talk about meta, they invested an enormous amount of money into developing these technologies and some people are talking about what's happening now as more of a correction rather than a rowing back.

00:12:09: But it's true to say that the adoption of these new headsets.

00:12:14: it's not enough to be able to rely on people to bring their own device or things like that.

00:12:18: So really, the way I didn't try to think about it is this is just one device to be able to access this other world of agents and content.

00:12:26: But you could access this through many different type of device.

00:12:29: The idea that we replace our apps with AI agent means that they don't.

00:12:34: live in a device, in any one device anymore.

00:12:37: But actually you could call them, you could message them, you could meet them online through XR or any other different interface.

00:12:45: So I think that there's a possibility for thinking beyond any individual technology and trying to think of what it means when our world is inhabited by these virtual beings.

00:12:58: So how is the world then for you and your perception of the next five to ten years?

00:13:04: You have a Tamagotchi living in the digital world, which you speak to in the morning you wake up, or what's the new world and the interaction with those guys?

00:13:12: Yeah, I mean, I guess my background is in interaction design.

00:13:16: I was very interested always to think about what comes after the smartphone, what comes after these screens and devices, touch screens or whatever that we use today.

00:13:24: Because obviously there will be something after that, right?

00:13:27: And I was thinking for a long time about those affordances and how you can create something that feels very natural and easy to use.

00:13:34: Because every time we've made technology easier to use, it's come with huge benefits or huge changes within what becomes possible with those technologies.

00:13:43: So I think my getting away from that metaphor of keys and sliders and getting away from the metaphor of scrolling through paper and moving to a world where we think of our applications as almost like people.

00:13:59: These intelligent beings are agents that you can talk to.

00:14:02: So let's say instead of you want to open your Maps app and you want to go somewhere, instead of opening that and seeing a screen with buttons on that you can click on things, you're actually going to just ask your agent here and they're going to take you.

00:14:14: And you can say, actually, I'd like to get a coffee on the way and they'll show you that direction.

00:14:17: And maybe you turn around and there's your bank and you can ask your bank questions as well.

00:14:21: So I think we're going to move from operating devices, operating machines and start really working with this network of virtual creatures that can live in our society amongst other people as well.

00:14:33: So what would be your preferred device right now?

00:14:37: How to interact with those agents and what do you believe in the future will be your point of of contact to your agent.

00:14:46: Yeah, I mean, so we've built several agents for different types of device.

00:14:49: One of the ones that we've built is an interviewer.

00:14:53: Basically, it's with you all the time, and you can talk to it.

00:14:56: It will just ask you questions.

00:14:58: You don't have to think of something to talk about.

00:15:00: It will ask you things directly.

00:15:02: Then by talking to it, you can start to record memories from your life, and it will write them up as stories that are all written in your own words.

00:15:10: That just exists as a mobile application with just simple text on the screen.

00:15:14: So it's really, really easy to use, very approachable, and much easier to use than a normal smartphone application.

00:15:21: But of course, we're also building experiences for these new type of device where you can actually visualize those agent in front of you as a character.

00:15:28: And we've been building all kind of system to be able to keep those characters consistent, allow them to emote or move around the scene to have a spatial understanding.

00:15:38: And for me, that's where the future is, when these agents stop being just a line of text and they start existing in our world, being able to perceive the environment and make decisions to help you with what you want to do.

00:15:50: So coming back to the question, so right at the moment, because you didn't answer it completely, the device question would be.

00:15:57: I'm

00:15:57: sorry, yes.

00:15:57: So I guess for the short term, I think that you have to go with what devices people have.

00:16:03: So I think that smartphones are fantastic if you want to be able to just send things out to lots of people.

00:16:08: But maybe there are spaces like this in Europa Park where there's more possibilities for innovation because you have complete control over that environment.

00:16:15: So you can almost simulate what life could be like in the future when people will have technology embedded into the environment or particular devices that connect with each other.

00:16:26: So I guess I will still use a smartphone at home.

00:16:29: But when I come to somewhere like this, I want to be using whatever latest VR we have.

00:16:34: And I am a fan of this Snap Spectacles.

00:16:37: We've done some work with Snap to build some different applications.

00:16:40: But for my unbiased opinion, these are the best AR glass on the market.

00:16:47: Don't you get insane by wearing those all the time?

00:16:49: I mean having constantly an information overflow.

00:16:53: Well, these are not used, you know, obviously all the time most of the time we're thinking about Experiences which are around, you know five to fifteen minutes and also we're really trying to think about how you use augmented reality in a compelling and immersive way because we still have the problems of a slightly limited field of view.

00:17:10: so often you have content that clips out and the way that we've dealt with that in some of our games is to create agents that are very tiny.

00:17:17: They're not super realistic humans or anything like that.

00:17:19: They're more like little fish that swim around and you can talk to.

00:17:23: So we're trying to use the advantage of the technology not to overwhelm you, but just to put one tiny thing in your space.

00:17:29: And we find that with the good sound design and the good agent design allows you to feel very immersed in the experience even without putting a lot of stuff in the scene.

00:17:38: When I come back to your past, you told me that you got inspired by drawing in VR.

00:17:45: When I'm looking at your movies, you're done.

00:17:47: Are you more on the tech side of things or are you more a creator who wants to create stories and emotions?

00:17:54: Yeah, I guess my design discipline is really around more creative process.

00:18:01: But I find that technology sometimes helps you to be creative in ways that you might not have imagined before.

00:18:08: And Creativity also is, I believe that the space requires creativity, right?

00:18:13: To be able to become something that everybody wants to use, we really need to have people working creatively within that space.

00:18:22: And I'm lucky enough to have a team around me now with very high sophistication of using these different systems.

00:18:28: So yeah, my personal background is more creative, but I found that the more you learn about the technology, the more you can do with it.

00:18:36: What is your goal?

00:18:37: What do you want to achieve in your life by living with that technology?

00:18:42: How do you want to make the world better by your contributed?

00:18:46: I think I'd like to subvert the narrative that we have to do what the tech companies make for us.

00:18:54: and we have to live within the systems that are built by these platforms.

00:18:59: We're just a small studio, but there are many small studios and many individual creators who are building new things with technology all of the time.

00:19:06: So I think for me, I would like to be able to create a new vision of how we can live with technology in a way that really benefits people rather than exploiting them.

00:19:18: Is there European identity when it comes to that?

00:19:21: or do you think like the game is over?

00:19:23: We're just using China and American technology.

00:19:26: Well, I mean a lot of these things we're talking about for example large language models.

00:19:31: Now there are available, you know very sophisticated open weight or open source models that we can use.

00:19:37: you know at no cost We can run them on our computers or whatever.

00:19:39: so really In the systems when we're building brains, we're using many different LLMs or small models as well, vision models, and we can just swap between providers very, very easily.

00:19:50: So I feel like the whole space is very commodified, actually, and it doesn't really matter who we get our AI from, whether it's Google or OpenAI or whoever.

00:19:58: The point is what story you're trying to tell and how do you guide the person through that experience.

00:20:03: So I don't feel frustrated about scale.

00:20:09: The time is perfect now for individual creators or small teams to be able to create the experiences which end up defining the future.

00:20:17: So when I was looking at, I mean, the reality at the moment is that we are mostly in interaction with big American tech companies.

00:20:25: I mean, you have Apple, you have Snapchat, you have Meta.

00:20:28: Why would people need services?

00:20:30: I mean, I obviously downloaded your storytelling app this morning.

00:20:35: And it felt for me a little bit like I'm talking to Chet Gbidi, because most of the people do talk to Chet Gbidi.

00:20:41: I don't know of any other software around where people do talk to.

00:20:45: What is the difference?

00:20:46: Why should they do download your app?

00:20:49: Well, the one you're talking about is an application which is trying to unlock your memory and help you go back to places in your life.

00:20:57: Could be a small event from last night or a big momentous thing that happened twenty years ago.

00:21:02: Maybe we don't have photographs for all of those things, but they all live up here.

00:21:06: I thought was that.

00:21:07: If we can get those thoughts out, those memories out, it's going to help us to reflect, to be able to look back and maybe understand ourselves better or maybe connect with people with similar experiences.

00:21:17: So in this case, the AI isn't used to be able to construct story.

00:21:21: It's just used to be able to ask you the right questions.

00:21:24: We can of course do this with a system prompt straight into chat GPT.

00:21:28: But we found that after a few minutes, the conversation completely derails and there's no way to be able to close it back in and end up with the result that we want.

00:21:37: So our systems are using a similar type of LLM at the core.

00:21:42: But we put a lot of things around that to be able to do the things that you're doing now as an interviewer.

00:21:48: You want to put your subject at ease.

00:21:50: You want to try and figure out what's the story.

00:21:52: You maybe have five different topics, but you're going to focus on one.

00:21:55: And then once you get that story, you want to think about, OK, do we have enough detail?

00:21:58: Do we understand the setting?

00:22:00: Do we understand enough about the characters and what to keep and what to throw away?

00:22:04: So I think there's a lot of nuance that goes into an interviewing process.

00:22:07: And we actually spent a very long time to try and make the user satisfaction score higher and higher.

00:22:13: Yeah.

00:22:13: So it's like literally a European version of an LLM being much more precise because you do have notebook LLM.

00:22:21: You do have like great tools out there and like great companies investing a lot of money.

00:22:26: And I'm, forgive me of asking again.

00:22:28: No, it's

00:22:28: not just trying to, to, to understand your USB.

00:22:31: Why should I use your app?

00:22:33: Yeah, we're not building foundational models or anything like that.

00:22:36: We use open AI, we use Gemini, we use Llama.

00:22:40: So it's not a matter of trying to compete with those companies.

00:22:44: What we're trying to do is create a use case specific application.

00:22:47: So rather than thinking of this as a replacement for chat GPT, think of it like a photo album for stories in your life, a way of recording or memories and sharing them with others.

00:22:57: It just happens to use AI as an interviewer, but it's not supposed to be competing on those levels.

00:23:03: Obviously, when you bring AI into an application, you can do much more than you could do just within the chat GPT app or website.

00:23:10: For example, within Wisp, this experience, you're going to meet a character who can see into your world and will set you some challenges.

00:23:19: There's some gameplay mechanics where you have to go around and scan different physical objects in your house or wherever you're playing to be able to complete the challenges.

00:23:29: The LLM is not just outputting what to say next.

00:23:32: but it's also outputting the emotions or how it moves within the space or where it takes you.

00:23:38: It makes decisions on... Have we spent enough time here?

00:23:40: Should we move on to the next area?

00:23:42: We built in a lot of additional kind of senses that our brains have, but an LLM doesn't have by default.

00:23:49: So really what we're trying to do is bring those LLM models into our physical world so that they can perceive the world with us and we can create much deeper and richer experiences with LLMs at the center.

00:24:01: Are you afraid of this technology that in ten years from now people just going to talk to an agent rather than their own wife?

00:24:09: Well, I mean, people may be scrolling their phone instead of talking to their wife, so I'm not sure we'll solve that problem.

00:24:15: But I'm not concerned that our interaction model changes from pressing buttons to talking.

00:24:22: For me, that's much smoother, easier, and unlocks much more powerful interactions because you don't have to be thinking about how to control every single thing.

00:24:31: You can have agents that are acting on your behalf.

00:24:34: Of course, as we start to personify these agents and start to form relationships with them, then we do start to come into the sphere of thinking about these things as maybe friends or companions in a way that we might not do with a smartphone.

00:24:48: But for me, I think this is a much more positive path forward where we can create our own agents, we can share them with each other, we can distribute them in different ways, rather than everyone becoming a consumer of a large tech company product.

00:25:01: When you look at your Robert Pike, do you think ThemePikes?

00:25:03: will survive without agents in the future?

00:25:06: Without agents?

00:25:07: Yes.

00:25:07: Yeah, I mean, Theme Parks will survive because people want physical experiences.

00:25:12: They want to get together and have fun.

00:25:13: And I think Theme Park gives you an experience that you cannot really easily replicate in any other way.

00:25:19: It's not about... survival.

00:25:21: For me, it's more about opportunity.

00:25:23: Obviously, theme parks are kind of inextricably linked with characters, with storytelling.

00:25:28: And I think LLMs have enormous potential to be able to elevate or transform the way that we engage with those characters and those locations.

00:25:37: So what is your future outlook?

00:25:40: Do you want to do more movies?

00:25:41: Are you concentrating on spatial experiences in LBEs?

00:25:47: What are the next five years for you?

00:25:48: What do you want to stand from a business perspective.

00:25:52: Yeah, well, it's a great question.

00:25:53: I mean, it was ten years since I made a hyper reality.

00:25:56: So there is a part of me that thinks maybe it would be nice to do a follow up.

00:26:00: But I think now we have so much of the technology around us and we're able to build it and prototype it for real.

00:26:06: I'm just very excited to be able to work in different industries and different verticals and see how we can apply our technology to those different use cases.

00:26:16: So another film.

00:26:19: Yeah, film, you know, Interactive experiences, prototyping, robots.

00:26:26: This is a big thing we're working on at the moment, robots and toys.

00:26:30: There are many different new verticals that are emerging where we can start to make things kind of intelligent and start to give them a sense of life.

00:26:37: So you're thinking about real robots or robots in a spatial world?

00:26:42: Yeah, real robots.

00:26:43: You know, the agent itself, it drives the body and sometimes that could be a virtual body, but actually it could also be a robotic physical body as well.

00:26:51: The agent doesn't know the difference.

00:26:53: So I can imagine that we'll be living in a society that's filled with people, but also virtual agents and also physical agents that are embodied with robots.

00:27:02: And our future will be not about screens everywhere as I showed in Hyper Reality, but a much more social shared world where we live together with AI.

00:27:11: Is there anything on the horizon coming up as a robot company you've been looking into?

00:27:16: I mean, obviously we have this little dog walking around from a Chinese company and then you have an American company like Boston Dynamica, I think it was.

00:27:26: Do you know any other on the market who's coming up?

00:27:30: Yeah, I mean, you can see lots of new humanoid consumer robots being announced or launched or trialled in different ways.

00:27:37: So I think this is a very interesting space where we're going to start to really get into the problem of what is it to have robots in our space and how should we relate to them?

00:27:46: How should we think about them?

00:27:47: Should we think of them as machines with buttons?

00:27:49: Should we think of them as living souls?

00:27:52: Is there some way that we can conceptualize that in a way that makes them easy and pleasant to be able to use and be around?

00:28:00: So you see the future rather bright than you're afraid of.

00:28:04: If you look at my twenty sixteen film Hyper Reality, you might think that I'm very negative about technology.

00:28:10: That film was made in a time when people were so wide eyed, starry eyed about the possibilities of social media or the internet in general connected culture as being able to transform our world for the better.

00:28:24: But I feel like now in twenty twenty six, the view of technology and how it impacts the world has changed a lot.

00:28:31: People are very concerned about that because they think that maybe they're going to be replaced somehow or there's no point to learn something because AI will be able to do it better in a couple of years.

00:28:42: So I feel like there's a big danger there that we just start to disengage and feel like the future is already planned.

00:28:48: So for me now, I'm much more I guess positive as a reaction to that because I want to show people that there are other alternatives to this future and it's up to people who are at this event and hopefully listen to this podcast, who are going to be the ones who are creating that.

00:29:05: So from a creative point, last question on that one, what soul do you want to give the future AI?

00:29:11: For me, technology always have a soul even though it's difficult to understand and to grasp.

00:29:17: What would be the future ideal situation?

00:29:22: How human beings interact with agents?

00:29:27: In my view, I believe that this technology should be created by anybody.

00:29:31: I don't think that it should be protected and only a certain company of a certain size should be able to make agents.

00:29:38: In the film, agents, it opens with a character who's... a non-expert who's building their own agent as well.

00:29:45: So the idea of how do we put the soul in those agents, how do we apply values, I would like to see a multitude of different agents with.

00:29:54: things that reflect the people who have made them, and maybe those then can be shared.

00:29:58: If you think about the way that App Store works today, you have many different applications with different purposes.

00:30:04: Maybe some of them have the same purpose, but they have a different style.

00:30:08: I think the same will be true of agents that we won't just have one all-powerful master AI, but we'll actually have a huge multitude of different agents for different purposes with different values, different ways of thinking.

00:30:21: So I would like to see.

00:30:22: diversity, I think, is the answer.

00:30:26: To wrap our talk up, I think I could go on and on forever.

00:30:31: What is storytelling and the whole thing?

00:30:32: I think there's such beautiful things to still discover.

00:30:36: But what is your perception seven years from now?

00:30:42: Is it still science fiction for us or is a virtual space reality just as normal as a mobile phone today?

00:30:51: How do you see the future in seven years?

00:30:53: Seven years.

00:30:53: It's a long time, isn't it, in technology?

00:30:56: I mean, if you listen to some people, you will think that there will be more humanoid robots than humans on the planet by then.

00:31:02: And we'll be walking around with robots everywhere.

00:31:08: I can definitely see that there will be much more... technology within our life, not just within a screen format, but within many other formats as well.

00:31:17: I can see a lot of interoperability between devices, so we start to think about environmental computing as well, robots as well as rooms.

00:31:26: But, you know, my intent is not really to predict the future.

00:31:31: Maybe you can think of that by seeing the films, but really what I'm trying to do is just record what we're doing now.

00:31:36: I just try to see what are people building, what are the possibilities of the technology, and then just extrapolate that moment.

00:31:42: So, you know, I think, I don't know who said that, it's another quote, but, you know, a lot of science fiction is really about the present, not about the future.

00:31:51: That's true.

00:31:51: So, a quick shout out to everybody.

00:31:54: Where can we see your movies and why should people come and approach you?

00:31:58: Yeah, so, I mean, you can search up my name, Keiichi Matsuda.

00:32:00: You can find my films, Hyper Reality, Agents, and you can see my studio site at liquid.city.

00:32:08: We're producing lots of different types of experience and, yeah, very happy to talk to anybody.

00:32:13: Yeah.

00:32:13: Excellent.

00:32:14: So, the founder of Liquid City and True Visionary, when it comes to immersive technology, Keiichi Matsuda, thank you very much for being here in Roos and on my talk today.

00:32:23: Thank you so much.

00:32:28: The world beyond.

00:32:30: The emotion

00:32:31: is of tomorrow.

00:32:35: A Mac One production.