Foreword: You are here.
This document could not have been written without the inspiration and memetic contributions of:
Terence McKenna Richard Dawkins Naval Ravikant Alastair Reynolds Neal Stephenson David Smith Satoshi Nakamoto
Are we at war? In 2025, America’s largest tech companies are projected to spend as much on AI infrastructure alone as Europe spends on defense, even in the midst of the Russo-Ukranian War. It seems that we are mobilizing. What may be the greatest concentration of capital, talent and resources in human history is now being directed towards the training of artificial intelligence.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, long nights and weekends are frantically spent on getting an edge on what many believe will be the most consequential and lucrative technological opportunity since the very dawn of our civilization.
In an interview with Lex Fridman in 2024, Elon Musk was asked what it would take to win the AI race. He answered that you’ll need two things: the best compute and the best data.
At the time he had already spent over 400 million USD on his new “gigafactory of compute”, Project Colossus, and it will likely cost over a billion dollars - which is miniscule compared to hundreds of billions being planned as part of Project Stargate, an AI infrastructure project spearheaded by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.
But what about the best data? In the interview, Elon explained that the major frontier models have essentially already scraped and consumed the entirety of the internet and humanity’s cumulative digital data - and it wasn’t enough. “But reality scales”, he continued.
As meteorically successful as AI has been to date, it is clear to see that the revolution has only just begun, because AI is still confined to the internet, unable to perceive or interact with the real world.
Expanding on this point, Jensen Huang took to the CES 2025 main stage to proclaim that the era of generative AI was upon us, and that we were quickly approaching the next great era of agentic AI capable of independent goal-oriented work in the service of humanity.
But, he continued - the next and final frontier of artificial intelligence is physical AI, capable of understanding space and physics. Only then can we deploy AI to its full potential, embodied in robots, working alongside humanity to address the 70% of human productivity still tied to the physical world.
The challenge is helping digital devices understand and navigate the physical world. But how?
Underneath the public pageantry of compute spending, there’s a more sophisticated, silent and high-stakes battle taking place between the tech giants: spatial computing. It’s the tech stack that enables everything from augmented reality to robots folding laundry.
Spatial computing is a prerequisite for the future of robotics, physical AI, the metaverse, and smart cities.
No expense is spared. The barriers between the digital and physical realm are being torn down. Instead of humans disappearing into digital worlds, we are summoning the digital into our own.
Spatial computing will allow robots and artificial intelligence to operate together with humanity in the real world.
But there is a dark underbelly to this arms race, one that puts our very cognitive liberty at stake. Enormous amounts of sensor data are needed to build the spatial bridge, captured from a growing amount of cameras in our public spaces, places of business, our homes, our robots - and our faces.
In their fervor to digitize the physical world, the tech giants are moving fast and breaking sacred things. A recent update to Meta’s smart glasses made it impossible to opt out of the AI listening to your conversations, and a slew of new smart glasses startups are offering you the opportunity to monetize your attention by wearing always-on camera glasses that record your every move.
Meanwhile, the robot companies are salivating at the opportunity to place autonomous mobile cameras in your home. Companies like 1X plan to offer teleoperated robots in your home, so that they can collect the biggest dataset of everyday human life, and Elon confidently concluded his answer to Lex Fridman’s question “how will you win?” by stating that Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus will be the greatest source of data in the world.
The spatial computing industry is creating a massive surveillance apparatus that will be able to see every aspect of our lives, through our smart homes, robots, and through our very eyes. Whoever wins the arms race will be in a position of almost unimaginable power to monitor and modify our very thoughts.
But there is hope. The nascent decentralization movement and the invention of cryptographic currency has created a small window for the people, and the power of the free market, to compete with tech oligarchy.
Civilization is at a crossroads, where our collective action will determine what future humanity will inherit. This is the decade. This is the arena. You are here.
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