Chat between Ma and Zuckerberg offers glimpse of our ‘virtual’ future

Jack Ma identified this era as “the most painful period for China’s economy”.

“The past 30 years, China has had a wonderful time. But for the wonderful time, we have to pay the price. For the terrible time, we also have to pay the price. So, I think, for the next two to three years, we have to focus on three issues: Consumption, service, and high technology. People see that China’s economy is declining, yes. But we don’t have the job problems yet.”

Zuckerberg added: “Going forward, most of the jobs that we see around the world, not only in the US or China, are increasingly technical. These are, in a lot of places, the highest-paying jobs. ... In general, we see huge constraint around the world on the number of good engineers graduating from universities, and this is something that China has got really right by emphasising it for a long time.”

Technology married with innovation offers powerful ways of solving problems, noted Ma. Zuckerberg echoed the point, saying  innovation would deliver progress in leaps and bounds for the next 10 years or more.

The conversation moved to the historic leap achieved last month when a computer program called AlphaGo won a Go match against professional Korean master Lee See-dol. Ma commented that machines might be cleverer, but they still couldn’t match human beings in terms of awareness.

“I think machines will be stronger than human beings, machines will be smarter than human beings, but machines can never be as wise as human beings,” Ma said. 

“Wisdom, soul and heart are what human beings have. A machine can never enjoy the feelings of success, friendship and love. We should use machines in innovative ways to solve human problems.”

Zuckerberg then mentioned the Augmented Reality (AR) headsets that Facebook is producing and suggested that Alibaba.com could help sell around the world.

While AlphaGo is an interesting innovation for Zuckerberg and Jack Ma, AR glasses likely rank in the category of Next Big Thing for these giants of our digital age.

At a recent TED Conference in Vancouver, the message was loud and clear: The era of the computer screen is ending. Making the point was Microsoft’s Alex Kipman, who appeared on stage along with holographic mushrooms and a Nasa scientist on Mars.

Kipman was demonstrating Microsoft’s Hololens – augmented-reality glasses that let their wearer see and interact with holograms. “We’re like cave people in computer terms,” he announced. “We’ve barely discovered charcoal and started drawing stick figures in our caves.”

Another company in this field is start-up Meta, whose CEO Meron Gribetz unveiled its AR glasses by conducting a 3D phone call and nudging a holographic brain around. He declared: “The ability to move holograms around like Ironman just became real.”

I have been warned by experts not to lump virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality together. Yes, both of them may abandon the two-dimensional screen for something that appears to be right in front of or around you. But there is a huge difference between the two: AR gives you the chance to interact with holograms but remain in the real world while VR immerses you completely in a computer-generated world.

Two people wearing Meta’s AR glasses can make eye contact and pass holograms to each other directly. That’s a whole new way of communicating between humans.

Meanwhile among the many uses being suggested for VR is as a storytelling tool for journalism. The New York Times last year shipped Google Cardboard virtual-reality viewers to its subscribers so they could experience the world of a Syrian refugee camp through their smartphones.

Naturally, when I was shown how VR could be “the last medium” in storytelling, I was excited. It has also been dubbed “an empathy machine”.

As a journalist in search of a new storytelling tools, I can’t wait for the day when AR and VR glasses become part of our daily lives.