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NVIDIA made a series of announcements and presentations this week at its latest GTC event (the keynote is worth watching).
I had a chance to briefly chat with one of my favorite people, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who clued me in on what could be an even stronger blended strategy.
The announcements and demonstrations had to do with being able to use computer vision real-time to alter your appearance and language in calls, create an avatar that could be trained to take your place in meetings and online collaboration efforts, the advancements of NVIDIA’s robotic initiatives, and the photorealistic creation and presentation of the digital twin of their headquarters office with active robots as the only occupants.
What if you blended that all together with the idea of creating a company that was fully resistant to employee risk events? The employees not only don’t have to travel, they’d have digital replacements that could work in a metaverse creation of an office building that may or may not have a physical twin.
What I am imagining is a future that is reversed, where the digital twin is the sustaining element, and the physical twin is optional.
Let’s explore that topic.
See more: NVIDIA and the Move to a Virtual AI Future
The office of the future may be fully digital
That is the promise of the metaverse as not only a place that can simulate the real world to create better autonomous machines, architectural designs and the like, but as eventually being able to eliminate much of the physical structures to create a livable virtual world, instead.
What Huang chatted with me about is the concept of creating a digital representation of you that would be like a web page is today. People would be able to go there, ask questions and potentially even have conversations with your digital twin that would then report back to you what happened.
If you couldn’t make a meeting, you could link your avatar to the meeting, and it could attend in your stead. It would be able to answer questions that pertained to information it had on your opinions and unique knowledge and ask questions based on what it defines as gaps in its ability to report on the event. You would then get a summary.
But if we draw in the robots, you have the potential to take control of that robot or piggyback on it to visit parts of a remote site physically. But what if the site no longer were just remote? What if it were virtual? Could you not only drive your avatar through the remote site interacting with the other remote workers, but also have your avatar stand in for you remotely?
As your avatar gains capability, in the future it might be created for you in grade school. It should be able to do an increasing number of tasks as if you were doing them. And it could either drive a virtual version of you or a robot that would interface with the real world on your behalf.
The future company, and its digital twin, could be made up of a mix of humans and AIs representing humans either in avatar or robotic form.
See more: Why NVIDIA Has Become a Leader in the AI Market
Wrapping up
While connecting all these dots will take 10 to 15 years, some elements will come online in three to five years, including the ability to build avatar proxies for you and the potential to have an unlimited number of these proxies working on your behalf in a variety of roles in your company or potentially in a variety of companies, simultaneously.
In fact, you have become a manager of your proxies. And, you can imagine a future where the fees you collected from approving and helping train these proxies could sustain you by changing you from a single worker into a manager over a team of virtual proxies.
Physical labor would require robots, but given the close coupling of digital twin sites with their physical twins, this shouldn’t be a problem.
At GTC this year, NVIDIA talked about a level of potential business disruption that is unprecedented in modern times, but if it keeps me off planes and creates a better retirement for me, I am all in.
