5 questions for XRA’s Liz Hyman

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Programming Note: We’ll be off this Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day but will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday, January 16.

LAS VEGAS — Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Future In Five Questions coming live to you from CES 2024 — where I spoke with Liz Hyman, president and CEO of the XR Association. It’s the leading trade organization for what it calls “immersive tech” (you might know it as virtual reality, or mixed or augmented reality, or the metaverse). Despite pronouncements of the metaverse’s doom, the sector rallied at CES with a VR-heavy keynote address from Siemens’ CEO and a mountain of new VR gadgets on the show floor.

Hyman and I discussed why she thinks (naturally) those counting the metaverse out are mistaken, the lengthy time frame of tech innovation, and her surprise at the ever accelerating pace of tech world hype cycles. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows:

What’s one underrated big idea?

Well, I would be guilty of malpractice not to say immersive technology. That’s both good and bad for the industry, as it gives us an opportunity to put our heads down and really work to create great experiences, whether in the consumer, enterprise or industrial spaces. The idea that the metaverse is dead is vastly overrated. The fact that Siemens came here and talked about the industrial metaverse as the principal piece of their keynote speech, I think, is very indicative of the fact that this is coming, and in many ways it’s here, as we’re seeing use cases in manufacturing, health care and education.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?

I was going to say to you that I think cryptocurrency is a bit overrated, and then the Securities and Exchange Commission approved Bitcoin ETFs. This is how I think about it: About 20 percent of the U.S. public actually uses cryptocurrency, and it’s been around since 2009. I think a lot of consumers are reticent to actually engage with it, but what the SEC did this week will test how overhyped it is.

Still, I do make a distinction between cryptocurrency and blockchain. Blockchain has really interesting implications for immersive technologies when it comes to interoperability, when it comes to digital assets, and when it comes to the economics of the metaverse.

What book most shaped your conception of the future?

I love history, and particularly when you can consume history through compelling biographies. Several years back I read Walter Isaacson‘s “The Innovators,” and I was really touched by it. It’s heartening to me when I look at the immersive technology industry to realize that computing started in the 19th century with Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine, which was based on loom technology of the day.

To think that’s the span, the arc of time, over which technology develops — I’m not saying I think that’s where we are with immersive tech, we’re well past that, but that was really interesting to me. Also it captures the role that women play in computing, which is often overlooked. It includes the idea that the arts and humanities need to be a part of what we do in the technology field, to make it more accessible and more interesting. And finally that it’s a collaborative process. It’s sort of become a trite expression, but it’s not just some lone guy in the garage, it’s all of us, whether you’re in government or in the private sector.

What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t?

Well, I would love to get a federal data privacy law, that’d be great. But I do feel like the recommendations in our competitiveness paper are things that I would love to move this year. That’s funding CHIPS and Science, it’s coordinating government support for this emerging technology that I think will be revolutionary, that will be the next computing platform. The digital twins piece I also think is really important to the workforce. Every time I talk about immersive tech, the issue of workforce training comes up and I just think there’s a huge role for government to play in seeding that, whether it’s workforce investment boards, community colleges, or elsewhere.

Right now it takes some resources to use immersive technology, but it’s an additive conversation [for workers], it extends the career paths of plumbers, mechanics, and doctors.

What has surprised you the most this year?

I never personally lived through these technology hype cycles before. The rapidity with which hype cycles now rotate is fascinating, because it impacts so many people. The minute the attention comes off of the metaverse and goes to generative AI, it impacts a lot of small companies and businesses. It impacts policy development in terms of where that energy and attention goes. It impacts so much, and I don’t know if it’s always been this way, but I find it fascinating.

ai in 2024

Yesterday afternoon just after DFD’s pub time, back-to-back panels featuring government and industry experts crystallized the push-and-pull between the two forces at this year’s CES.

Delivering opening remarks, Assistant Secretary of Commerce (and administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Association) Alan Davidson gravely compared the importance of this stage of AI development to the beginning of the nuclear era, setting the stakes sky-high for the dueling panels of government and tech-world officials that followed.

“We are far more engaged in this project than we have ever been before for a new technology,” Davidson said of the Biden administration’s efforts in concert with the industry on AI. “The potential for technology to promote human progress has never been greater, but the risks in many ways have never been higher.”

The first panel featured a discussion with technologists at the Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission, who each described how they’re preparing their agencies to meet the mission of the White House’s executive order on AI.

“The first thing is getting the right people in the room,” said Stephanie Nguyen, the chief technology officer of the FTC. “Sometimes we’re in the room with opposing counsel to act as translators on technically complex matters, so having folks who work on a number of different matters is incredibly important.”

The tech-world conversation that followed provided a fascinating split screen, as representatives from giants like Microsoft and Google and smaller companies (well, relatively) like the California software maker Xperi pleaded for more explicit regulation from the government, if for no other reason than to streamline the business environment and avoid a morass of state and local-level legislation — especially after federal efforts on privacy law foundered.

“Privacy is completely intermingled with this AI discussion,” said Xperi’s VP of marketing David McIntyre. “Most of our AI products will be smaller things that you don’t think of as threatening and changing the future of the world, recommendation engines, things like that… privacy becomes the dominant concern.”

guerillas and the nist

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published guidance for the AI community on “adversarial machine learning,” i.e., the practice of “jailbreaking” AI systems.

The authors, a group of researchers from government, academia and the private sector, warn that “the spectrum of effective attacks against ML [machine learning] is wide, rapidly evolving, and covers all phases of the ML lifecycle,” including “data poisoning” in AI training sets, “model poisoning,” or attacking the system’s parameters, and even simply violating the privacy protections of an AI model to learn more about it.

NIST computer scientist and co-author Apostol Vassilev noted in a statement: “We also describe current mitigation strategies reported in the literature but these available defenses currently lack robust assurances that they fully mitigate the risks,” and that NIST is “encouraging the community to come up with better defenses.”

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CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect Liz Hyman’s correct answers to the first two questions, which were originally and erroneously swapped.