-
Hello.
-
My name is Herman,
-
and I've always been struck
by how the most important, impactful,
-
tsunami-like changes
to our culture and our society
-
always come from those things
-
that we least think
are going to have that impact.
-
I mean, as a computer scientist,
-
I remember when Facebook
was just image-sharing in dorm rooms,
-
and depending upon who you ask,
-
it's now involved in toppling elections.
-
I remember when cryptocurrency
or automated trading
-
were sort of ideas by a few renegades
-
in the financial institutions
in the world for automated trading,
-
or online, for cryptocurrency,
-
and they're now coming to quickly shape
the way that we operate.
-
And I think each of you
can recall that moment
-
where one of these ideas felt
like some ignorable, derisive thing,
-
and suddenly, oh, crap,
the price of Bitcoin is what it is.
-
Or, oh, crap, guess who's been elected.
-
The reality is that, you know,
from my perspective,
-
I think that we're about
to encounter that again.
-
And I think one of the biggest,
-
most impactful changes
in the way we live our lives,
-
to the ways we're educated,
-
probably even to how we end up
making an income,
-
is about to come not from AI,
-
not from space travel or biotech --
-
these are all very important
future inventions --
-
but in the next five years,
-
I think it's going to come
from video games.
-
So that's a bold claim, OK.
-
I see some skeptical faces
in the audience.
-
But if we take a moment
-
to try to look at what video games
are already becoming in our lives today,
-
and what just a little bit
of technological advancement
-
is about to create,
-
it starts to become
more of an inevitability.
-
And I think the possibilities
are quite electrifying.
-
So let's just take a moment
to think about scale.
-
I mean, there's already
2.6 billion people who play games.
-
And the reality is that's a billion more
than five years ago.
-
A billion more people in that time.
-
No religion, no media,
nothing has spread like that.
-
And there's likely to be a billion more
-
when Africa and India
gain the infrastructure
-
to sort of fully realize
the possibilities of gaming.
-
But what I find really special is --
and this often shocks a lot of people --
-
is that the average age of a gamer,
like, have a guess, think about it.
-
It's not six, it's not 18, it's not 12.
-
It's 34.
-
[Average age of an American gamer]
-
It's older than me.
-
And that tells us something,
-
that this isn't entertainment
for children anymore.
-
This is already a medium
like literature or anything else
-
that's becoming a fundamental
part of our lives.
-
One stat I like is that people
who generally picked up gaming
-
in the last sort of 15, 20 years
-
generally don't stop.
-
Something changed in the way
that this medium is organized.
-
And more than that,
it's not just play anymore, right?
-
You've heard some examples today,
-
but people are earning
an income playing games.
-
And not in the obvious ways.
-
Yes, there's e-sports, there's prizes,
-
there's the opportunity to make money
in a competitive way.
-
But there's also people earning incomes
modding games, building content in them,
-
doing art in them.
-
I mean, there's something at a scale
akin to the Florentine Renaissance,
-
happening on your kid's iPhone
in your living room.
-
And it's being ignored.
-
Now, what's even more exciting for me
is what's about to happen.
-
And when you think about gaming,
-
you're probably already imagining
-
that it features these massive,
infinite worlds,
-
but the truth is,
-
games have been deeply limited
for a very long time
-
in a way that kind of we in the industry
-
have tried very hard to cover up
with as much trickery as possible.
-
The metaphor I like to use,
if you'd let me geek out for a moment,
-
is the notion of a theater.
-
For the last 10 years,
-
games have massively advanced
the visual effects,
-
the physical immersion,
the front end of games.
-
But behind the scenes,
-
the actual experiential reality
of a game world
-
has remained woefully limited.
-
I'll put that in perspective for a moment.
-
I could leave this theater right now,
-
I could do some graffiti,
get in a fight, fall in love.
-
I might actually do
all of those things after this,
-
but the point is that all of that
would have consequence.
-
It would ripple through reality --
-
all of you could interact with that
at the same time.
-
It would be persistent.
-
And those are very important qualities
to what makes the real world real.
-
Now, behind the scenes in games,
-
we've had a limit for a very long time.
-
And the limit is, behind the visuals,
-
the actual information being exchanged
between players or entities
-
in a single game world
-
has been deeply bounded
-
by the fact that games
mostly take place on a single server
-
or a single machine.
-
Even The World of Warcraft
is actually thousands of smaller worlds.
-
When you hear about concerts in Fortnite,
-
you're actually hearing
about thousands of small concerts.
-
You know, individual,
as was said earlier today,
-
campfires or couches.
-
There isn't really this possibility
to bring it all together.
-
Let's take a moment to just
really understand what that means.
-
When you look at a game,
you might see this, beautiful visuals,
-
all of these things
happening in front of you.
-
But behind the scenes in an online game,
-
this is what it looks like.
-
To a computer scientist,
-
all you see is just
a little bit of information
-
being exchanged by a tiny handful
of meaningful entities or objects.
-
You might be thinking,
"I've played in an infinite world."
-
Well it's more that you've played
on a treadmill.
-
As you've been walking through that world,
-
we've been cleverly causing the parts
of it that you're not in to vanish,
-
and the parts of it
in front of you to appear.
-
A good trick, but not the basis
for the revolution
-
that I promised you
in the beginning of this talk.
-
But the reality is, for those of you
that are passionate gamers
-
and might be excited about this,
-
and for those of you
that are afraid and may not be,
-
all of that is about to change.
-
Because finally,
the technology is in place
-
to go well beyond the limits
that we've previously seen.
-
I've dedicated my career to this,
-
there are many others
working on the problem --
-
I'd hardly take credit for it myself,
-
but we're at the point now
where we can finally
-
do this impossible hard thing
-
of weaving together thousands
of disparate machines
-
into single simulations
-
that are convenient enough
to not be one-offs,
-
but to be buildable by anybody.
-
And to be at the point
-
where we can start to experience
those things that we can't yet fathom.
-
Let's just take a moment
to visualize that.
-
I'm talking about not individual
little simulations
-
but a massive possibility
of huge networks of interaction.
-
Massive global events
that can happen inside that.
-
Things that even in the real world
-
become challenging to produce
at that kind of scale.
-
And I know some of you are gamers,
-
so I'm going to show you
some footage of some things
-
that I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to do,
from some of our partners.
-
TED and me had a back-and-forth on this.
-
These are a few things
that not many people have seen before,
-
some new experiences
powered by this type of technology.
-
I'll just [take] a moment
to show you some of this stuff.
-
This is a single game world
-
with thousands of simultaneous
people participating in a conflict.
-
It also has its own ecosystem,
-
its own sense of predator and prey.
-
Every single object you see here
is simulated in some way.
-
This is a game being built by one
of the biggest companies in the world,
-
NetEase, a huge Chinese company.
-
And they've made
an assistant creative simulation
-
where groups of players
can cocreate together,
-
across multiple devices,
-
in a world that doesn't vanish
when you're done.
-
It's a place to tell stories
and have adventures.
-
Even the weather is simulated.
-
And that's kind of awesome.
-
And this is my personal favorite.
-
This is a group of people,
pioneers in Berlin,
-
a group called Klang Games,
-
and they're completely insane,
and they'll love me for saying that.
-
And they found a way to model,
basically, an entire planet.
-
They're going to have a simulation
with millions of non-player characters
-
and players engaging.
-
They actually grabbed Lawrence Lessig
-
to help understand
the political ramifications
-
of the world they're creating.
-
This is the sort of astounding
set of experiences,
-
well beyond what we might have imagined,
-
that are now going to be possible.
-
And that's just the first step
in this technology.
-
So if we step beyond that, what happens?
-
Well, computer science
tends to be all exponential,
-
once we crack the really hard problems.
-
And I'm pretty sure that very soon,
-
we're going to be in a place
where we can make
-
this type of computational power
look like nothing.
-
And when that happens,
the opportunities ...
-
It's worth taking a moment to try
to imagine what I'm talking about here.
-
Hundreds of thousands
or millions of people
-
being able to coinhabit the same space.
-
The last time any of us as a species
-
had the opportunity
to build or do something together
-
with that may people was in antiquity.
-
And the circumstances
were less than optimal, shall we say.
-
Mostly conflicts or building pyramids.
-
Not necessarily the best thing for us
to be spending our time doing.
-
But if you bring together
that many people,
-
the kind of shared experience
that can create ...
-
I think it exercises a social muscle in us
-
that we've lost and forgotten.
-
Going even beyond that,
-
I want to take a moment
to think about what it means
-
for relationships, for identity.
-
If we can give each other worlds,
experiences at scale
-
where we can spend
a meaningful amount of our time,
-
we can change what it means
to be an individual.
-
We can go beyond a single identity
-
to a diverse set of personal identities.
-
The gender, the race,
the personality traits you were born with
-
might be something you want
to experiment differently with.
-
You might be someone
that wants to be more than one person.
-
We all are, inside, multiple people.
-
We rarely get
the opportunity to flex that.
-
It's also about empathy.
-
I have a grandmother
-
who I have literally
nothing in common with.
-
I love her to bits,
-
but every story she has begins in 1940
and ends sometime in 1950.
-
And every story I have
is like 50 years later.
-
But if we could coinhabit,
-
co-experience things together,
-
that undiminished by physical frailty
or by lack of context,
-
create opportunities together,
-
that changes things,
that bonds people in different ways.
-
I'm struck by how social media
has amplified our many differences,
-
and really made us more who we are
in the presence of other people.
-
I think games could really start to create
-
an opportunity for us to empathize again.
-
To have shared adversity,
shared opportunity.
-
I mean, statistically,
at this moment in time,
-
there are people who are
on the opposite sides of a conflict,
-
who have been matchmade
together into a game
-
and don't even know it.
-
That's an incredible opportunity
to change the way we look at things.
-
Finally, for those of you who perhaps are
more cynical about all of this,
-
who maybe don't think that virtual worlds
and games are your cup of tea.
-
There's a reality you have to accept,
-
and that is that the economic impact
of what I'm talking about
-
will be profound.
-
Right now, thousands of people
have full-time jobs in gaming.
-
Soon, it will be millions of people.
-
Wherever there's a mobile phone,
there will be a job.
-
An opportunity for something
that is creative and rich
-
and gives you an income,
no matter what country you're in,
-
no matter what skills or opportunities
you might think you have.
-
Probably the first dollar
most kids born today make
-
might be in a game.
-
That will be the new paper route,
-
that will be the new
opportunity for an income
-
at the earliest time in your life.
-
So I kind of want to end
with almost a plea,
-
really, more than thoughts.
-
A sense of, I think, how we need
to face this new opportunity
-
a little differently
to some we have in the past.
-
It's so hypocritical
for yet another technologist
-
to stand up on stage and say,
-
"The future will be great,
technology will fix it."
-
And the reality is,
this is going to have downsides.
-
But those downsides will only be amplified
-
if we approach, once again,
with cynicism and derision,
-
the opportunities that this presents.
-
The worst thing that we could possibly do
-
is let the same four or five companies
-
end up dominating
yet another adjacent space.
-
(Applause)
-
Because they're not just going to define
how and who makes money from this.
-
The reality is, we're now talking
about defining how we think,
-
what the rules are
around identity and collaboration,
-
the rules of the world we live in.
-
This has got to be something we all own,
-
we all cocreate.
-
So, my final plea
is really to those engineers,
-
those scientists, those artists
in the audience today.
-
Maybe some of you dreamed
of working on space travel.
-
The reality is, there are worlds
you can build right here, right now,
-
that can transform people's lives.
-
There are still huge
technological frontiers
-
that need to be overcome here,
-
akin to those we faced
when building the early internet.
-
All the technology
behind virtual worlds is different.
-
So, my plea to you is this.
-
Let's engage, let's all engage,
-
let's actually try to make this something
that we shape in a positive way,
-
rather than once again have be done to us.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
Yasushi Aoki
6:37
And they've made
an assistant creative simulation
# an assistant -> a persistent