This week’s episode goes all the way back to last year’s Curiosity Camp, when Alan shared a ride with Unity Lab’s 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. Alan: In a very special episode of the XR for Business Podcast, we’re driving in a car with Timoni West, head of XR… Research? Timoni: Director of XR in Unity Labs. Alan: Director of XR at Unity Labs, and Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO. So we’re driving on our way up to Curiosity Camp through these beautiful winding roads, and we decided that we would record a podcast, because Cole, in his incredible company building the infrastructure of cloud computing, they built an AR app to help service that. And I thought, what a cool way to use this technology and this time on this beautiful drive. Wow. Look at the size of those trees. Timoni: They are enormous. Alan: Oh, my God. Wow. Well, anyway. Timoni, how are you doing? Timoni: Excellently. And I’m also enjoying the view. Yeah. Yeah, actually, Cole, I’m really interested to hear more about why you chose to go with that, and what the process was like. My team is working on tools for mixed reality. So for Unity itself, that’s used to make, I think, 90 percent of all Hololens applications right now. Century is using Unity for that. But the tools that we’re making today are allowing, I think, for you to more easily make robust, distributed applications that can work across various devices and for various users. Cole: And that’s very needed. First off, Alan, I just want to say, you sound like you should be a podcast DJ. Timoni: So it’s cool that you are. Cole: Well done. But yeah, I mean, the issue for us when we started down this journey was very much a question of, how robust can we make an experience, about how widely could we make that experience? And the vertical integrated solutions that you had to choose from in the early days of AR/VR, I think, are primed for disruption. I’m super glad to hear that Unity is working on the open APIs, etc., needed to bring this technology to more users, as I’ll quote — maybe a little cliché being where we are and where we’re going — but– Timoni: Yeah, I want to hear it. What is the problem you company solves? Cole: Yeah. So we have to think about not four, but 40,000 different data centers; we’re an edge computing/edge data center infrastructure company. And with that means you can’t Mechanical Turk what was originally done in data centers. It works with four buildings. It doesn’t work with 40,000. So we had to build autonomy into every aspect of our business, in every aspect of the infrastructure. And that means building really simple interfaces for what would otherwise be really complex problems. And at scale, from a logistics supply chain — remote hand, smart hands, all the things that you do in data centers — what that means is your FedEx guy, your U.P.S. guy, a contracting company that otherwise would need specialized training, now it’s visually assisted capabilities for what would otherwise be a job that you would train for and then go work in a data center. We simplify that. Alan: So basically what you’re saying is that you’ve given real-time tools to anybody to be an expert on the field, in the field. Cole: It’s fair to say that the software is the exper, and what you need are opposable thumbs,. Alan: Haha! Which democratizes the whole need for training. Timoni: You know, it’s funny; I was just getting drinks with someone from Open AI. He is wo...