Taming technology, from stone tools to artificial intelligence

Are you an early riser or a night owl?  

I am a night owl.  

What was it that brought you to the University of Arizona? 

I originally came here for undergraduate study. I graduated from the Haury School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and returned to work here when I reached that point in life. 

What made you decide to take that path at that time? 

My background is that I'm primarily a technologist, so I got my break back in the mid-90s. I have been working in web development and database development since that “.com” boom.   

It was about 2004, and I remember having a long weekend — like a Memorial Day weekend — and I thought to myself ‘The internet is capable of delivering anything, this is here to stay for sure.’ You can make wealth, it could make fame, like anybody or anything you want from it. I remember asking myself, ‘Well, what do you want from it?’ What I figured out was that I mostly wanted to know stuff. I realized that all my life, I had a passion for understanding the human past. I decided to study that academically because I had the technology thing in the bag at that point. 

What is it about the human past that intrigues you, or, at the time, intrigued you? 

That's a fascinating question. It starts with we all want to know what the origin story is. How and why did all this happen? What I mean by that is that reality is happening, and your life is unfolding. With me, you must ask at some point ‘How did it start?’ I feel like that question is kind of fundamental, and to me, it’s also philosophical. It could be a spiritual question, but it has very tangible roots, in terms of if you find something in the ground, somebody likely put it there 10,000 years ago. That tells you something forensically about how we got here. I just found that question to be fascinating.   

I later figured out that I'm just fascinated with processes of change, so it's not just the past. It's also extrapolating into the future and things like that. But if I had a superpower, or if I was lucky, I would be able to sit on A mountain and watch stuff evolve over millions of years. 

I never even thought about doing something like that, but now that you mention it, I can picture that in my mind and how awesome that would be. Your center is located within the BIO5 Institute, and that's what brought you to BIO5. Is that correct? 

Yeah, it’s called the Institute for Computation and Data-enabled Insight at the University of Arizona, or ICDI. 

I’ve been with ICDI since about December 2023. I was at the Eller College of Management before that, and then sometime before that, I was with the Global Campus at the University of Arizona. 

What do you do at the University of Arizona Institute for Computation and Data-Enabled Insight? 

I direct artificial intelligence and industry, and for that, I'm talking to our public and private sector partners across Arizona mostly about workforce development. It’s either bringing them into the university to sponsor projects like hackathons or the AI core program.  

The main work I'm doing right now is the AI Core program, which runs year-round. The staff is about 16 developers right now, and we develop artificial intelligence-based solutions for university researchers or industry partners who contribute to the program. It's extremely contemporary. It's all technologies that are evolving out of industry like right now and we try to stay as close to the cutting edge as possible. We call it the wild west. If it doesn't work, that's good because it means that you're first to get to it.  

The point of the AI Core program is support. It's developing AI-based solutions for researchers and partners. The really neat thing about it is that it swells to a much larger size in the summer, for summer boot camp. For students, it’s a cool startup experience that’s hidden within the university, operating like a business. 

Do you connect the degrees you've earned with your profession at all?  

It doesn't connect directly in terms of the kinds of work that we take on the projects, but the social sciences background and particularly the study of anthropology, human nature, and culture has profoundly opened up the way that I look at technology.  

I tend to take a very long view of technology. Working in AI is fascinating, because it started with stone tools, right? There's a connectivity to that and if you could explore that for a second, it's a weird thing about human nature. But we have this instinctive built-in desire to not work.   

The first humans are chipping rocks together, and you can almost imagine that they're sitting there thinking, ‘You know, it'd be awesome if I had like a little robot that could come out and do this for me.’ Or if you're a farmer, it's a scarecrow, right? We have a natural desire to offload our work, which is weird, because now it’s hitting a fever pitch with AI. After all, now we have the potential to automate virtually a wide, very wide range of human behaviors.  

We mentioned XR earlier. What does that mean? 

It stands for extended reality, and what it is an acronym that the technology culture is hoping will encapsulate the other acronyms, because we've had VR and AR, and we have things called mixed reality. We have a lot of these different kinds of technologies, and what they all fundamentally are is a spatialized type of computing.   

The internet is based on a sort of a two-dimensional, book-oriented view of the world. You go to a website as if it were like a location in a library. We're comfortable with screens, but the XR technologies with space, spatial, or immersive computing are about wearing or finding ourselves in a physical environment. It's a different paradigm. Instead of a book, it's a world or place, but we call it XR right now. It'll continue to evolve, unfortunately, but it's another acronym. 

And how are AI and XR connected? 

They're connected in some interesting ways. First of all, they're not directly related in terms of technology. So, it's easy for a technologist to say ‘XR, I work over here, AI people are over here.’ They're two different worlds. But the reality is that XR and AI are happening at the same time, and they're both very game-changing.  

We know about artificial intelligence and that it's permeating most domains, the evolution of this new Metaverse, VR, and XR. I think that the intersection is that people are fatigued with all of this, right? What we see is that intelligence is everywhere. We see that holograms are now reality, and there's all these weird bending of rules. I feel that, on a cultural level, the intersection is imminent, that people will throw up their hands and say, ‘All right, I get it. We're living in a new reality’ and then let that go.  

There’s a tie-in on the back end, which is that they enable one another, but the other tie-in is that AI makes XR a lot easier to develop and to deploy, so they're happening at the same time.  

What’s also interesting is that AI can be trained in spatial environments, which is very strange, but I can give an example of what that means: Imagine this tabletop we're sitting at here, and you can model it in a 3D program. You can model it very well so that we know exactly what happens when something falls off the edge. Well, it turns out what you can do is you can put AI models into virtual reality, and they can learn how to navigate the table 10,000 times so they don't have the robot step around the chair or step or get up on the table. It can do it in XR. Then once it translates to the real world, it has mastered that. We could build a highly accurate model, a digital twin of the building here, and a robot could be trained to go through every tiny bit, and then when you deploy the robot, it will be sharp. 

Do you find yourself interested mainly in the creative aspects of technology or the helpful aspects that can alleviate work from humans? 

I mentioned before about the innate desire to not work, right? I think that's a double-edged sword. Or it's problematic. The first thought is ‘What could we automate away?’ And my next thought is, ‘Are you sure you don't like doing that?’ I'm not sure about the automation.  

On a personal level, I'm all about creative potential. That's what motivates me. There are tons of opportunities in automation and in getting it to do human work. That's where there's economic incentive. But I find the creative potential of AI to be much less of a double-edged sword. It's a lot more fun. 

What was it that inspired you to begin teaching? 

I was working in web development in the 1990s. I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I had contracts with the Santa Fe Public School System teaching HTML website development.  

What happened is that there was a student in that class who walked up to the instructor who had started the class, and he said something like ‘This just saved my life.’ I think he meant saved because these were at-risk youth, and something about web development lit him up. That was the first time that I'd ever heard that in relation to my work. I'd heard something like, ‘Oh, good job.’ Or like, ‘Wow, you set up that printer well.’ But the first time that I heard somebody say that it had changed their life, and that was the beginning of it.  

I had a great experience in the late 1990s and early 2000s at a large, successful technology training school in Indonesia. I got hired as the director in technology, but I ended up creating the classes and teaching, and that's when I realized that I could teach, not in a formal classroom sense, but that's when I learned about teaching with one-on-one interaction and mentoring. It opened my mind.  

If you're asking about how I got started at the U of A 15 years later, I was hired as an IT professional, but I had that teaching experience in the back of my mind. I saw the student body, and I thought ‘We need to let them do the work, instead of us trying to do the work.’ That's when I started on this experiential learning path, which is the main work that I do now. 

What specific ways do you use AI and XR for teaching? 

Most importantly, students must drive it. The first thing that you're doing with that technology is learning how to prompt, learning how to train models, learning how to build completion requests, which is what you do when you get a chatbot built. Basically, learning how to get an object rendered in 3D and then put it into a headset. It's always deeply experiential and throwing students into the deep end. 

Do you use both AI and XR together? Or does each technology have its specific use? 

AI is broadly applicable to almost all problems, and XR is a little bit more of a niche, but yes, use them together as much as possible. 

What is your favorite part of the work that you do? 

The best part is throwing one of the students into an impromptu live demo in front of a bunch of people because they pull it off every time. They're so talented. Something interesting about working in education is that when you’re working with undergraduates, you're usually working with people who are in their early 20s. There's an incredible growth and maturation that happens right before your eyes. That doesn't happen so much as we get older. We all know that our colleagues get fixed, and we all get set in a way, but the talent that can emerge in an instant.  

I passionately feel there is a reason to hope because there's this incredible transformation of our society, mostly driven by technology. The technology layer is what's flipping everything forward into a new paradigm.  

I've been working closely with students since 2015, and every year the incoming freshman population has this exponential growth. Technologically, something is happening. Something is happening at an evolutionary level, where young people understand technology in a way that's outclassing even the people who are just a few more years older than them.  

It's like an innate, known thing, and it gives me hope, because even though technology keeps coming at us in this big rush, the young people are more than capable of absorbing it, and that should give us all hope. 

Do you have a mentor that has impacted your life in any fashion?  

Somebody who's inspired me a lot is Alan Watts, a philosopher who wrote many books on the nature of being. I also love the way his life turned out. He ended up going on radio in Berkeley in the 60s and talking and getting a following with people. I feel like I can relate. It's a little bit unexpected. I'm a musician, so I've spent a fair amount of time in my life understanding and studying the musician Malcolm Young from AC/DC. Anybody out there who understands AC/DC will understand what I'm about to say: the approach to guitar is the beauty of simplicity and childlike elegance. That’s something that inspires me.  

Has there ever been a pivotal moment in your career that sort of helped to change or did change the trajectory in some way?  

I would say the one unexpected break that I got that had a big impact on me was back in 2004. I was recruited to work with an economist. He had a business, and what turned out to be a big data project. He had a big mathematical modeling thing, and he saw something in me. He said ‘You're talented. I'll take you.’ I ended up working in databases extensively from 2004 to 2009, and he was very patient, intelligent, and interesting because he could think mathematically. It did change my way of thinking about the world. 

What is your ‘why’? Why do you get up in the morning and do what you do to keep you going? 

My particular motivation is that I want to know how things work. I'm a science-philosophy type of person, which I think is why I'm happy in the university context because I'm surrounded by people who also generally have that drive. 

Right now, my reason for getting up and going to work is the artificial intelligence phenomenon. It’s the culmination of humans, fascination with tool use, and technology. As far as I can tell, we've reached a point where we can now have tools that build themselves. It's been a long journey. We called it history, but it's now reached a point where it's post-historical. I grapple with this routinely. It's awesome that we're present for this. You accidentally happen to be alive at the moment that intelligence decouples from biology in the lifespan of the universe. That's profound.  

We're alive for something wild. I believe in young people, and so it's not difficult to come into this university setting where there are a lot of young minds that are ready to take charge. I can't think of anything more important, at least from my point of view, than there's this small army or this crew of young people who are completely willing to embrace this technology and figure out how to tame it.