"We create these virtual lions that are chasing us all the time and keeping the stress up."

– Ana Melikian, Ph.D.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Neil Redding, a near-futurist and Innovation Architect with 30+ years of experience in unlocking the transformative power of emerging technologies.

We discuss:

• How AI agents are evolving into participants
• The co-creation of reality (and why that’s important)
• How AI could change the way we shape reality 

How AI agents are evolving into participants

AI, at the bottom line, is here to solve problems. But the truth is—more often than not—it can’t solve those problems alone. At least not yet.

“I use the term participant to refer to these technologies, particularly AIs, and particularly when we look to this emerging era of AI agents,” Neil says. “People talk about the agentic era, where AI cannot only respond to prompts, not just be the form of a tool that is waiting for input from a human and then will respond.”

ChatGPT and Co. fall into the category of needing input to perform, including the visual ones—Midjourney and Dall-E, and so on.
“But agents can, of course, as the term suggests, be given a higher level brief or directive and then just go off and take care of it, right?” Neil continues. “An example that's often used is: My kid has a birthday party a month from now, and this is what he likes, and this is his age, and this is how many people, and can you just go plan it?”

This agent, or participant, would then be able to book the venue, procure the food and drink, invite the friends, and take care of any other logistics attached to the event. We can't do that yet, but the technology will be at that level in the near future, with the ability to make real-world reservations and make a real-world physical gathering happen.

Neil adds. “That's very exciting and very dangerous in a lot of ways, but it starts to feel to me like these AIs are becoming participants. They're like peers. If I'm on a team at a company or doing a project that requires a bunch of collaboration with our people, AIs can start to sit alongside us, so to speak, and participate in these ways.”

This prediction may unsettle some people. The concerns around jobs and livelihoods continue to rise around the advancement of AI, but Neil calls for a recognition that technology is more of a helper than a usurper.

The co-creation of reality (and why that’s important)

Reality. The basic belief is that there is only one reality, but the truth is, we create reality together. Everything around us has been constructed in collaboration with standards, laws, rules of nature, and more.

“The current talk that I've been giving is a woven narrative where I try to take the audience on a journey of reflecting on the nature of reality,” Neil says. “That sounds like a very heady philosophical topic for a technologist to be speaking about, but I start with quantum mechanics and how quantum mechanics has been showing quantum theorists over decades that there's the observer effect.”

The observer effect: the certainty that at the elementary particle level and potentially at even larger macro levels, observing or interacting with a system or a particle or an object impacts its state.

“I quote a few quantum theorists in my talk where they say that ‘We live in a participatory universe,’ that our actions and interactions even co-create reality,” Neil says. “When we observe the world, it is not the world as it is, but it's actually a story told by our brains that inputs these sensory data and then creates what neuroscientists will call a story. It's essentially taking that input and weaving it into something that makes sense to us.”

In this line of thinking, the resignation that weighs down much of daily life—it is what it is, that’s how it’s always been done, we can’t do it that way, it’s not possible, etc.—is only a byproduct of prolonged exposure to the norm.

“So many of us live as if reality is just this separate thing that we don't create,” Neil says. “I see across many different domains of human activity, this awakening into the realization that actually what quantum mechanics and what neuroscience and these other realms of human activity and exploration are telling us is that ‘No, we create reality as we go through the world and we co-create it with each other.’”

This mindset leans into the idea that these constraints we imagine exist are mostly co-constructs.

“My intention as a consultant, certainly, if I narrow it down to the work that I'm doing as a near futurist with brands and businesses, is really to get people present to and into this mindset of being freed up to imagine new realities,” Neil continues.

How AI could change the way we shape reality

AI is getting close to being able to declare, in language, a type of reality that “just shows up.” With spatial computing, we could take that ability to type a description of a reality, or a visual scene, and make it happen.

“I use the example of a 30-year-old astronaut exploring some desert scene with a spaceship, that was one of the examples,” Neil says. “But you can take that further, and I showcase an example from Blockade Labs where you can type a prompt that describes a physical building or interior of a building, and then it will create that as a 3D model that you can load into a game engine like Unity or Unreal.”
The path between typing a description and creating an immersive reality is getting shorter and shorter.

“You’ve got this 3D model that you can load into a headset and just be in that space. This really feels to me like creating reality, creating at least the reality of our experience in a way that is very, very direct,” Neil continues. “We're verging on being able to, moment to moment, hour to hour, determine the realities that we experience with our senses.”

Neil believes by making these worlds immersive and 3D, we're going to really shift our consciousness in powerful ways, and expand what’s possible.

“That's really, really important because I feel like without massive mindset shifts, consciousness shifts about what's possible, we're not going to solve the enormous challenges that we have as humans on this planet,” he says.

It’s true; we do have some tough challenges to solve, and freeing ourselves up to imagine beyond what we think is possible could be the answer.

What are your thoughts on co-constructing reality via AI? Have you experimented with visual-based AI?

Be sure to check out Neil’s full episode for further insight into the near future, and learn more at NeilRedding.com!