This is the presentation I gave at the MIT Media Lab (for course MAS.S61) as part of on "Digital Identity and the Evolution of Creativity." We are entering into the third era of digital identity. The first was about projecting ourselves online; the second--dominated by social media and sandbox environments like Minecraft--was about expressing our creativity in virtual spaces. The third is going to be about projecting our will through autonomous AI agents.

1. Digital Identity and
the Evolution of
Creativity
Jon Radoff
Presented for MAS.S61
April 20, 2:45PM EDT

2. Perspective
• Formative years spent playing D&D
and computer programming
• Built one of the first Internet online
games, Legends of Future Past
• Launched a website creation platform
(Eprise)
• Created an ad network (GamerDNA)
• Made games based on Game of
Thrones and Star Trek
• Operating Beamable, a platform for
building games and immersive
applications
Throughout my career I’ve always tried
to understand technology through the
lens of humanity and culture.

3. Meta-metaverse
Lots of things that are
not quite the same
1958: LISP keyboard, “Meta” key
~330 BCE
Aristotle
~1920
Metamathematics
1967
Metaprogramming
1979
Meta-everything Metaverse
Source: Jon Radoff, “Metaverse Definition”
https://bit.ly/metaverse_definition

4. People usually mean one of these:
AR/VR Embodied Experience Virtual World Platform Something Something Blockchain

5. What do you do with
the metaverse?
• Shared Imagination & storytelling
• Explore other planes of existence
• Real-time activities
• Transform reality

6. Why do we have a
metaverse?

7. Proto-metaverses
Games can be abstractions of
reality: part storytelling, part
simulation—a shared imaginary
space with another person

8. Dungeons & Dragons
Shared
Imagination
Shared
Creativity
Emergent Play

9. Videogames
We began
digitizing the
experiences
found inside
games

10. Consider how much of life is
defined by who are you are
online compared to >20 years
ago:
Online games, social media,
esports, online dating, live
streaming, “personal
branding,” cryptocurrencies,
biometrics

11. Avatars

12. Extension of the Self
Who
Digital
Identity
Self
Expression
Empowerment
What How

13. We project
ourselves into
digital space—and
now we’re taking
objects with us…

14. Reality Capture
Source: https://tiktok.com/@metavert
“NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis”, Mildenhall et al
We’ve been capturing reality for years (sound
recordings, photos). Photogrammetry gave us a
means of doing it in 3D, but was labor and
computationally expensive.
Now we can do it with a sparse number of photos
using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF).

15. Digital Twins
Capturing all the
real-time physical
properties about
an object into a
digital simulation
Glaessgen asn Stargel, “The Digital Twin Paradigm for Future NASA and U.S. Air Force Vehicle”

16. Smart Cities
Digital twin at the scale of an
entire city

17. Twin Earth
(Earth-2)
Source: NVIDIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTiqV3akBIE

18. Enriching the
Physical World
with Information

19. As we project ourselves into digital space,
the digital is also reshaping physical spaces
Digital
Augmented
Reality
Smart Cities
Autonomous
Vehicle
Highways
Media Rooms
Remote-Work

20. Emergence and
Self-Expression
Penrose Snowflakes https://processing.org/

21. Emergent
Properties
• Game of Life is creative because the
player can set the starting conditions.
• It expresses emergent properties:
behaviors that are hard to predict from
the initial state.
• It is Turing-Complete: you can actually
create computers inside it. (Rendell,
“Turing machine universality of the game
of life”)

22. What is Creativity?
Searching through Infinity
In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a
creature was faced with several possible courses of
action, it took them all, thereby creating many
distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of
the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence
of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and
each was constantly faced with many possible
courses, and the combinations of all their courses
were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes
exfoliated from every moment of every temporal
sequence in this cosmos.
—Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon

23. How many pieces of
music are there?
• Bach’s Suite No. 1 is 40 bars of 16th notes, so using that
as one example—given an instrument with 3 octave
range, there are 36^640 possible melodies. In practical
human terms, that may as well be infinity.*
• The number goes up much higher when you increase by
all the possible lyrics, songs, voices, sounds,
combinations, compositions, etc.
• Creativity is about finding the good music in all of these
infinite combinations
* Eran Egozy, https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/is-there-a-finite-number-of-musical-combinations-that-can-be-made-before-all-new-music-is-exhausted/

24. Creativity is an
“Efficient Search”
AI meets efficiency: from Tenachi, “Deep
symbolic regression for physics guided by
units constraints: toward the automated
discovery of physical laws“

25. Emergence
through Social
Interaction
The Corrupted Blood” incident
in World of Warcraft is a well-
document example of
emergent gameplay: not only
due to the propagation of the
in-game disease—but for the
social interactions is generate
(helpful vs. griefing emergent
behaviors)
•
Image Source: Corrupted Blood and coronavirus: what World of Warcraft can tell us about the spread of disease

26. From Identity to Self-Expression
Midjourney v5: “Creativity in the
Metaverse”
Minecraft: Mattupolis by Matias

27. Virtual Worlds with Creative Emergence

28. Emergence in
Minecraft
Minecraft can feature complex
societies when people play
together within persistent
worlds.
Like Game of Life, Minecraft is
Turing-Complete. People have
built computers inside it.
Recently, someone built a
convolutional neural network!
Video: https://youtu.be/xnnrk_6k480

29. User Generated
Content
Every game can become
programmable, extensible,
social…
Each game is
its own app store?

30. Generative AI + Virtual Worlds

31. Structured UGC with Generative AI
Million on Mars + Scenario

32. Reskinning Reality
• Reality
Capture
• ControlNet
• EbSynth
Source: Bilawal Sidhu - https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1627872696112480257

33. Emergence in
Language
Models
Much of this qualitative
improvement in our
experience of using products
like ChatGPT is due
to quantitative improvements
that resulted from scaling-up
the number of parameters
present in language models.
Jason Wei: 137 emergent capabilities of large language
models

34. Conversational AI is
a new type of
media: new forms
of game narrative
are one application

35. Diplomacy / CICERO
Source: https://ai.facebook.com/research/cicero/diplomacy/

36. VPT with
Minecraft
Video PreTraining: AI trained
to play Minecraft by
watching YouTube videos of
people playing Minecraft.
Source: Source: https://openai.com/research/vpt

37. Lucy playing Minecraft with Code Miko

38. Generative
Agents
Characters in a simulated world
interact with each other, using
conversational AI (GPT) and express
emergent behavior within their
virtual societies.
Park et al, “Generative Agents: Interactive
Simulacra of Human Behavior”

39. From
Expression to
Empowerment

40. Autonomous
Agent AIs
These use GPT to take a
directive, formulate plans,
perform actions (like accessing
websites or placing online
orders).
Examples include: babyagi,
AutoGPT, Godmode

41. Extension of the Self
•“Direct from Imagination” creativity
• Carrying out our goals in digital space
• Exploring new planes of existence
Whether we maximize agency for individuals
over organizations remains an open question…
Who
Digital
Identity
Self
Expression
Empowerment
What How

42. Centralized AI Decentralized AI
The next internet battleground

43. Thank you
All Content by Jon Radoff in this presentation is
licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Jon Radoff
https://meditations.metavert.io/
https://twitter.com/jradoff
https://linkedin.com/in/jonradoff