Alice talks about how the series, Being Digital When Human, was born out of the Atlantic community's exploration of the use of augmented and virtual realities and the ethical issues that raises. As Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead, Alice is concerned with how emerging technologies can strengthen the Atlantic community's collective work of addressing root causes of systemic inequities as well as how the Atlantic community can work together, while physically apart, to become a force for social good.
TRANSCRIPT
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F Sweeney: Hello and welcome to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.
Today, I’m joined by Alice Wroe, the Atlantic Institute’s Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead. Alice talks about how the series, Being Human When Digital, was born out of the Atlantic community's exploration of the use of augmented and virtual realities and the ethical issues that raises. As Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead, Alice is concerned with how emerging technologies can strengthen the Atlantic community's collective work of addressing root causes of systemic inequities as well as how the Atlantic community can work together, while physically apart, to become a force for social good.
I first asked Alice to describe the difference between augmented and virtual reality.
A Wroe: I am so glad you asked that question, because it feels to me that, so often, terminology, particularly acronyms, are such a barrier to enabling people to feel they can participate and be part of the tech industry, particularly with augmented and virtual realities. In a nutshell, AR stands for augmented reality, and VR stands for virtual reality, and, often, when you hear AR or VR, you’ll think of these headsets, and we look very space age when we’re wearing them. Virtual reality is when you put on the headset, and you can’t see anything else apart from the digital world that you are in. Augmented reality is like the sister of virtual reality. When you put on an augmented reality headset, you can see the world that you’re physically present in, and the digital content is laid on top - so the digital world and your physical world blended into one, and it’s also quite a special experience, but different to VR.
When we think about phone-based augmented reality, that’s a whole different thing entirely, which I find quite exciting because it’s more accessible than having to have a headset. So, with phone-based augmented reality, you lift up your phone and you can see digital content in your real world, but through the screen of your phone. So, in this series, we’re going to be exploring headset virtual reality, headset augmented reality, and phone-based augmented reality. But the most important thing to stress is that we have to ask each other what these terms mean.
F Sweeney: This technology is very fast-moving, fast developing. Why should the Atlantic Fellows global community be interested in this sort of emerging technology?
A Wroe: You’re so right, it is moving fast, and that’s one of the things that’s most exciting about this idea that we’re leaning into the future as it unfolds. I love that Evie O’Brien describes this journey that we’re on with augmented and virtual realities as not enabling Atlantic Fellowship to become a passive recipient of new technology, but that we’re being a social conscience and a driving force. We’re really thinking about how can augmented and virtual realities strengthen our collective work to address the root causes of systemic inequities, and how can we, as a community of thoughtful leaders, activists, community-builders, become a force for good in a discourse that desperately, in my opinion, needs our help.
So, it’s vital that we’re part of this thinking conversation around this technology and how we can prevent the power structures of the past being perpetuated into the future through the very fabric of this tech. We’re having our eyes wide open so that we can see its potential, but we can also see how can we critique it, how can we make sure that it’s a force for good rather than something that’s quite damaging and perpetuates inequities. The other aspect of it is thinking about climate change. In our future, there is a real need to travel less. We’re a global fellowship of people that need to think about how we can be meaningfully together whilst we’re apart, and so it’s vital that we put research into thinking how AR and VR can enable us to do that.
F Sweeney: I suppose a lot of the controversy about this emerging technology, augmented and virtual reality, has been about the intersectionality of being human and the digital aspect of this. Can you tell us something about the series Being Human When Digital?
A Wroe: Yes. In my experience, so often, when big tech companies are developing innovation, they completely leave behind the humanity of the user, they don’t think about elevating our humanity, and, often, potentially without necessarily meaning to, this sort of technology can actually dehumanise us and alienate us from our sense of ourself and from our sense of each other. I think it is vital, as we begin this journey with augmented and virtual realities, we do the complete opposite, that we absolutely cherish our humanity and we think about how can technology elevate us, bring us closer together and make us feel more human. And so, as we think about what makes this community of leaders special, what makes this community able to do the work that they do, I think it is their humanity, and so it’s about absolutely centring that at the very core of this investigation and of this series, Being Human When Digital.
F Sweeney: Four episodes in this series, four key themes – narrative shift, virtual space, health, and indigenous approaches. Tell us a little bit about each session.
A Wroe: We decided to take four different themes so that we can think about the breadth of this medium and how the different uses of the technology could apply to the different contexts of our fellowship.
So, the first one is narrative change, and we’re going to join filmmaker, Dylan Valley, who’s also Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. He’s going to be in conversation with Nonny de la Peña, who is known as the godmother of VR. And they’re going to explore together how VR filmmaking and immersive journalism can make space for productive political action and can really shift narrative change.
The second one is virtual space, and we’re going to bring Cedric Brown, who’s an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, into conversation with Sundance New Frontier’s chief curator, Shari Frilot. They’re going to really interrogate virtual space, to think about the creative potential of virtual space, but also what would be the social impact as we continue to exist virtually on our sense of ourselves and our sense of relationship with each other.
And then we’re going to move on to health, with Deepa Mann-Kler, who’s a specialist in immersive healthcare, along with Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity, Jeremy Lim. They’re going to discuss the future of virtual healthcare, and this is one industry where there is so much happening with virtual realities. So, we’re going to think about how we could augment the operating table, how this technology is increasingly used for therapeutic benefits, for training empathy, and see it fizz right throughout that industry.
And then, finally, we’re going to think about indigenous approaches and bring Shane Webster, who’s an Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity, into conversation with Mikaela Jade, the founder of Australia’s first indigenous edutech company. So, they’re going to consider how we can close the digital divide between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in relation to AR and VR, and to think about how this sort of tech could honour stories of the past, present and the future.
And so I’m so excited, across this quite long series, to really think quite specifically about different use cases and weave it together in this kind of patchwork that will enable us to really think how can this tech serve our mission, and how can we become part of this discourse.
F Sweeney: When we talked earlier about the controversy sometimes surrounding this emerging technology, we’re really talking about ethics, in a sense, where the human interacts or intersects with the digital, and there is a focus on ethics in each of these sessions. Why is that so important, and can you speak a little about that?
A Wroe: Yes. I am so delighted to be joined by Wilneida Negron, who is going to support us in our interrogation of the ethics, but link to every single theme. It is absolutely vital that we, as a community, are inspired by the work of Dylan, and Cedric, and Shane, and Deepa, that we are really inspired by what Jeremy says, but, at the same time, we have to go into this field with our eyes wide open. It is an incredibly inequitable field, and there is a high risk, as I’ve mentioned before, of the power structures of the past finding their way into our future through this technology. So, whilst we’re being inspired, we have to also ask questions like is it responsible to invest activist time and work in shifting narrative when very, very few people have access to a headset and to experience the sort of films that Dylan and Nonny will be describing?
Is it really moral to think about the fact that we are committed to a decolonising approach when the hardware that we’re using has been created by huge, big tech companies? We’ve got to think about our relationship with ourselves from a gender perspective, from a feminist perspective, as we are increasingly showing up as hyper-stylised avatars. And so it’s about really weaving in these ethical provocations and thinking, “OK, how do we be human when we’re digital? How can we make sure we do this right with our eyes wide open, not only champion this tech, but critique it?”
F Sweeney: Because, essentially, the technology is here now, so we have to find a way to interact with it?
A Wroe: Yeah. I think it’s exciting, because we’re at a point where we can influence it. This stuff isn’t set in stone. If you have powerful, kind, caring voices entering the discourse at this point, I have a hopeful optimism that we could impact this discourse and we could be a positive force for good. But, at the same time, it is about using the technology, exploring it, really leaning into it and working out how we feel through using, rather than just being a kind of external critic. And so, it’s a real balance between being hopeful and optimistic, and, also, being brave, and being critical, and having our eyes wide open as a community.
F Sweeney: So, a chance or an opportunity to influence the direction of this emerging technology. What else should a Fellow hope to gain from the series?
A Wroe: So, one of the people that inspires me the most is an artist called Stephanie Dinkins, and she uses artificial intelligence to think about race, and gender, and future histories. She talks about herself using AI in her artwork as an accidental technologist. That is somebody who falls into the tech industry by chance through some different avenue, but they stay there because they realise their voice is needed and they need to become part of this industry, without necessarily a formal background in it. I consider myself an accidental technologist, and I hope that, through this series, we can become a community of accidental technologists where we all feel our voice is necessary and we can engage confidently and playfully in this discourse, use this technology for good, and be able to impact the discourse right back.
F Sweeney: You say we’re going into it with excitement, among other things, but, really, what comes across as you speak is your passion for this work. Where does that come from, this passion for this role that you’ve taken as Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead at the Institute, and for the community?
A Wroe: When I saw this job description, I almost had a little cry, because what was being described is futurist thinking that I had never, ever, ever seen in a social justice context. This sort of thinking is often foregrounded in a commercial context and a capitalist context, where they try and look into the future to make money, whereas what this job represents is that we are looking into the future to build community, to become a positive force for good, to think about how we can be together meaningfully when we’re apart. And I was completely flummoxed that there was an organisation that recognised that this sort of technology needs to be interrogated now, needs to be championed now, so we can build a better sustainable future for this exceptional community.
So, in a nutshell, in the job description, it said ‘we need to become not a passive recipient of new technologies, but a social conscience’, and it is absolutely my privilege to join this exceptional group of thinkers, and leaders, and community activists, of doctors and lawyers, of writers and artists, to think about how we can become a community that can really shape this industry and that can benefit from it, and that can harness this technology not out of fear, but out of excitement and hope.
F Sweeney: And that was Alice Wroe, Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead at the Atlantic Institute. Please join us next time when we discuss the use of AR and VR to effect narrative change.
You’ve been listening to Atlantic Fellows Conversations, I’m Fionnuala Sweeney. To find out more, visit our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.
MUSIC Outro sting – Rovador for AudioJungle, Fantasy Cinematic
ENDS | Duration: 12’ 43
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