| Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week I spoke with Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Nvidia’s Omniverse and simulation technology responsible for the “digital twins” revolutionizing industrial operations globally. We discussed how he shifted his vision of the metaverse from a space for entertainment to a space for work and utility, his astonishment at how quickly people have accepted driverless cars, and the most underrated William Gibson novel. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? I've been at Nvidia 23 years, but before then I worked in Hollywood in visual effects, writing software to do rendering for films. I came to Nvidia to do the same kind of thing but in real time, and apply those same ideas and principles to video games. So I've spent most of my life working on building and simulating virtual worlds. For most of that time, we've applied that to building fantasy worlds, but in the last 10 years, I’ve switched to applying the same technologies to the inverse of it, which is to take the real world and try to represent it inside a computer. We try to simulate the real world as accurately and faithfully as possible so that we can apply these amazing new technologies to how we build the world around us. But I think the most underrated technology has been simulation of the real world, because it’s generally less sexy than building cool, fantastical virtual worlds for us to escape into. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? All technologies are overrated when they're first brought into the zeitgeist. No technology is ultimately overhyped, it just may be overhyped for that moment in time. If we look back 10 years ago, there was a lot of hype about self-driving cars and robotaxis. You can say it was overhyped then, but I was just in Phoenix, Arizona, at the airport and I saw five Waymos pick people up like it was just a normal thing. The question is when is it actually going to happen, and we can never actually know that at the point in time when we're getting excited about it. What book most shaped your conception of the future? The first was “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. He wrote it in 1984 on a manual typewriter, and he imagined a world that was interconnected with artificial intelligences living in cyberspace and humans interconnected with computers through neural links. The whole cyberpunk genre came from that. He published another book called “The Difference Engine” with Bruce Sterling, which in some ways I think was even profound. It was a thought experiment about what if Charles Babbage, the grandfather of computer science, actually finished building the machines that he was planning on building. The information age would have shown up around the time we had the steam engine, 100-plus years earlier. What would the world have looked like if computing happened before we had semiconductors and electronics? What I took away from that one was that technology and the rate of progress is not inevitable. You don’t just jump on that train, we actually guide it. There was a pivotal moment in history where computing could have happened 100 years earlier if there was the will from the people involved to go do it. Every decision we make today affects when these things will unfold. It can happen now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, it’s all up to us. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? I'm not an expert in these matters; I'm an engineer. But, from my perspective, some of the greatest things the U.S. government has done for technology are these kind of grand projects, grand challenges or moonshot projects, largely through DARPA . If we go back 15 years, we had the grand challenge for self-driving cars and roads. Waymo is a direct consequence of DARPA creating that grand challenge. The biggest impact AI is going to have is on our physical world around us. It would be amazing for the government to create a similar challenge to incentivize the ecosystem to form around robotics, to build robots that are going to address the demographic challenges to our economy and our productivity. You can imagine something like a grand challenge to build a factory of the future, or a whole supply chain that has an accurate digital twin that you can optimize and operate completely. What has surprised you the most this year? We were talking about Waymo, and I knew it was coming all along. We've been working on this for over a decade. We're a big part of it. It's our computers that run inside those Waymo vehicles. But when I was at the airport and I saw them pull up and people just get into them like they're normal, it was surprising to me how quickly it went from sci-fi to mundane. That cycle has gotten faster. It was like that the first time people had access to the mobile internet, but the period of time when it’s “amazing” is diminishing because the pace at which we're doing new things is increasing so quickly.
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