• 9 April, 2024
• by Robert Gillespie

Having Inflation Nightmares? XR and AI will help you sleep at night

        As we all stir amidst talk of large policy shifts that have stoked further anxiety in the people and the punditry over a renewed acceleration in inflation, I thought I’d offer you, dear reader, a techno-revolutionary sedative to ease your mind.

        Inflation is indeed a scary and oftentimes ruinous force–not just for the people at the grocery store checkout line, but for businesses.  While very large corporate entities can sometimes leverage it to their benefit, if you’re not amongst the Fortune 50, you’re more likely than not looking at an increase in costs and a cut to profits.

        But how do we fight this menace?  There are a couple fairly well-established ways–but quite a few are rather painful.  Recessions, Depressions and mass unemployment tend to do the trick, but they have some, well, not-so-great downsides, like, I don’t know…mass social unrest.  (Plus, occasionally they put tons of people out of work and don’t lower prices, in the horrible case of episodes of ‘stagflation’)  Rising interest rates can do it–but if you’re borrowing money to buy a house or run a business, those can put your finances in a vyse.

        Is there a win-win way to prevail in the battle against higher prices?

        Yes, there is.  You may have heard of it–or seen it yourself, whether you knew its name or not.  But it doesn’t get enough press.  It’s called ‘productivity’.

        That is, rising labor productivity (i.e., making more stuff using less time/resources) makes things cheaper, without throwing anyone out of work.  If you’re running a business, raising productivity diminishes your costs (i.e., deflates the price of production) and boosts your margins.  Indeed, from a certain point of view, it’s what every business is fundamentally looking to do: win the productivity race.

        And here’s where XR and AI come in.  Oftentimes the aspects of these technologies that get the most attention are the speculative social possibilities they open up–how will they change our culture and social habits?  How will they reorganize society?  Will we all wind up living in virtual worlds, running on treadmills and wearing VR headsets all day, like in Ready Player One?  Will our AI overlords automate everything and consign humanity to live in a bunch of UBI-villes?

        Interesting as those questions are, right now, for you, perhaps the most important facet of the XR-AI revolution is actually how it magnifies the productivity of labor.  And it does so in spades.  

        We see more and more confirmation of this fact every year.  Consider studies like this one, released in late 2024: https://www.ijahci.com/index.php/ijahci/article/view/11

        What’s the secret sauce, when you look at the numbers?  The report’s analysis of its study’s results says it all: “The results indicate that VR interfaces significantly enhance user productivity by providing immersive and intuitive environments that streamline complex tasks, reduce errors, and improve overall task performance.”   

        Paired together, AI and XR technologies act like labor optimizers–they allow people, and companies, to produce more for less.  They snuff out inefficiencies in production, remove barriers of time and space, and improve the ability of workers to remember important information and understand important tasks when they undergo training.  They’re part of a pretty rich tradition, in this sense, that stretches all the way back to the beginning of industry, and arguably the most critical labor optimization engine of all time–the assembly line.

        And that labor optimizing dynamic is why people who work in the AI-XR technology space–and why we here at CoAxiom Services–are so confident that it will continue to grow, and become a more and more integral part of production.

        So, as the specter of rising costs hovers over the landscape of these strange times, turn on the headsets, boot up the virtual sims in your web browsers, call in the services of the latest neural net, and relax: there are few better wards against the ghouls and ghosts of inflation than the tech and software of the XR-AI revolution.

        Not coincidentally, CoAxiom Services can help you get started, in whatever capacity you envision–so get in touch with us and let us know what XR-AI cost-saving, productivity-multiplying solution we can build for you, and feel free to dip into some of our virtual simulations on our projects page.