CRISPR, AI & Brain-Machine Interface: The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Peter Diamandis

please welcome Peter Diamandis Thank You Ellen so first of all good morning everybody it's awesome to be back here again thank you to to to Jeff and Elliott and Ellen and the entire summit community for allowing this conversation it's an honor and a pleasure to be here and I love this community's sense of of action and participation so I I want to talk about the world we're living in too but I want to talk about it from a perspective of a hopeful future I want to talk about it from a perspective of the empowerment that you have so I think and I hope at the end of this you'll agree we're living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history and thank you for that yes and this is why this is why it used to be if you wanted to solve a problem the best you could do was go and petition the king or the queen or the Pharaoh or you know the overlord of your lands the best you could do and as the head of a nation the best you could do is deploy your troops or change monetary policy today we're living in a day and age where any one of us who truly want to solve a problem can I just want to I want to let that sink in a little bit we're more empowered as individuals in any time ever in human history all of us have access to more capital than ever before we're living in a time of all-time capital highs in every single sector we're living in a time where we all have access to more computational power I mean literally quantum computing capabilities on the cloud for free I mean how freaky can that be so it's do you want to solve the problem do you care do you have your mind and your heart enabled in such a way that you refuse to give up before the problem is solved because don't make some excuse that the money's not there the technology is not there it's there it's are you do the will and the heart and the mind and the perseverance it might take you a decade but it's not a matter of it can't be done so that's the world that we're living in and I want to give for the next 18 minutes we can start this clock I appreciate you guys holding on 50 minutes for me that's awesome it means I get a little bit extra I want to start and give a little bit of overview of some of the technologies to start the conversation but then we're gonna get into a conversation around a little bit on the morals and ethics right so here's another point that we're living a time where I think none of us truly understand how fast the world is changing that the rate at which technology is getting faster is itself accelerating and so this is the world today faster cheaper computers are the oxygen in the room the foundation that we're building on and all these other technologies are progressing in speed and capability the reducing and price there are increasing in reach and it used to be that you could be an expert any one of these sensors networks AI robotics 3d printing synthetic biology a RvR blockchain all of these technologies you could build a business on but now that's not enough it's the combination of two three or four of these that are changing and building new business models so I want to hit a few highlights of where we are and then I'm going to sort of you know toss up some of the conversation so robots are coming in fast this is Atlas is from Boston Dynamics this is owned by masses on Softbank all right so this is last last few mantra systems Atlas learning it's just not better mechanics or better motors or better materials it's machine learning it's AI being able to allow this robot to do what it needs to now one of the challenges is will these robots yeah will these robots take our jobs and they may take those jobs that are dirty that are dull that are dangerous but these kinds of robots are also going to allow people to stay in their homes and not go into old nursing homes people go into old nursing homes because they can't get out of bed or go to the bathroom by themselves or go and make their meals but can robots give us dignity to stay where we live and be assisted right in places like Japan which doesn't have a replacement generation and soon in China as well in the decades ahead these kinds of robots will help provide the labor that's required now if we could just bring the volume down list a little bit this is coming out of Google brain and these robots are each experimenting picking things up and this is machine learning or neural networks in process every time a machine is able to go and pick something up successfully that neural pathway is reinforced and says yes this works when it doesn't work it's you know not reinforced and what these robots are demonstrating is that every time that one of those robots learns how to pick something up successfully every robot learns so it's like literally if you were an eighth grade learning algebra and and the girl in the front row learn algebra first then all 30 of you in the in the classroom learned it at the same time right this is sort of shirred learning at a at a robot operating system this is from sundar the CEO of Google he says artificial intelligence could have more profound implications for Humanity than electricity or fire and I believe that's true and it's this next decade these next 20 years Ray Kurzweil my co-founder at singularity talks about the notion that by 2029 what does that you know ten years from now we're gonna have human-level AI the next year AI is more advanced than humans what is that going to mean I want to show you a short video so that you can see this and understand it this is from this is from a division of Google called deep mind and this is deep Minds program called alphago zero showing how advanced it is in gameplay now alphago won against Lisa Dahl in South Korean go champion a few years ago and won in the game of go this is an AI winning the game ago a whole decade ahead of before was predicted and then a year later a new program called alphago zero blows away the old program of alphago just listen I want you to remember the conversation that takes place with the guys who were running deep mind [Music] when we played against Lisa doll we actually had a system that had been trained on on human data on all of the millions of games that have been played by human experts we eventually found a new algorithm a much more elegant approach to the whole system instead of learning from human data it learned from its own games and that became a project which we called alpha zero zero meaning having zero human knowledge in the loop the next stage it was to make it more general so that it could play any two-player game not just go but things like chess and shogi which was Japanese chess and in fact any kind of to play perfect formation game what we discovered was that actually this exceeded all of our expectations an alpha zero could start in the morning playing completely randomly and then by TB superhuman level by dinner it would be the strongest and chess entity there's ever been after about eight or nine hours it was strong enough to be able to go out and defeat stockfish the incumbent world champion a program which was vastly stronger than deep blue the program which had previously defeated Kasparov I love that quote right start in the morning playing completely randomly and by TB they get a strongest you know superhuman player that ever existed and this is a program that has a set of rules and it plays within those rules and it is playing against itself and every time a version of it advances the next one plays against it advances further so the question is what else in our world is game what else is game play is real estate game play is stock market game play is curing disease game play is getting the the right diagnostic analysis of a chest x-ray or an MRI gameplay that all games in some way shape or form and so AI is going to enter our lives and the question is how are we going to deal with it what are the moral morals the ethics we'll talk about that in our QA one thing that is true today is that if you take an AI against an AI plus a human the a on human collaborative pair will always win and so it's really ultimately how do we see AI as a tool that enables us to solve the world's because problems we still have problems out there in the planet and matter is how do you partner with these technologies to go and slay those problems to make the world a better place as I teach in my abundance community and singularity the world's biggest problems the world's biggest business opportunities one of come a billionaire help a billion people these are the technologies that help you reach scale to help a billion people another technology that we'll talk about there's a whole realm of CRISPR and gene therapy so CRISPR is gene editing being able to go in there and edit specifically a sequence or a particular nucleotide all of us are made up of 3.2 billion letters 80 CS and G's we got from our mom and from our dad and in our genome is our medical future gene therapy is the ability to take a virus and use it as sort of a little robot to deliver into specific cells in your body your liver cells your kidney cells your bone marrow cells whatever it is a particular snippet of of a genome a particular code and insert it and replace it or add it in and this is nothing short of extraordinary then the programming languages of the future is not going to be C++ or whatever it might be it is going to be genetic code so let's look at some of the headlines coming out of this just in this past year right so it's CRISPR could be used to fight cancer we have cancer trials going on right now CRISPR could correct 89% of genetic disease so I'm incredibly amazed by the notion that we don't think of this but genetic elements from thalassemia a sickle cell anemia whatever it might be it's a coding error and genetic you know CRISPR technologies can cure potentially 89% of those so one of the conversations we're going to have is ethically it may be immoral not to treat your child right we're going to have a conversation where at some point if we can cure all these diseases is that ethically proper to let it occur or to say no we have to cure these diseases all right so what else we're seeing we're seeing CRISPR can cure HIV and seeing crisper can be used as the next antibiotic we're seeing gene therapy could lead to anti-aging therapies and gene therapy could also cure HIV and sickle cell so this is extraordinary we're going from evolution by natural selection which is Darwinism to evolution by human direction and I think none of us understand how rapidly we're going to be evolving ourselves over the course of the decades ahead and I'll hit this now because I think it's really important to realize our ethics and our morals change over time and it's important for us to look at these technologies and ask the question is it moral or ethical to use it in what context I'll give you an example if I went back in history a thousand years ago to my great great great great great great grandfather an ancient Athens for example and said listen you've got this cardiomyopathy you're going to die in the next year this guy just died from being you know gored by a by a bull and I take his heart out of him and put it into you right a thousand years ago that would have been the work of the devil today it's a miracle the same thing with in vitro fertilization and a multitude of things so what is once immoral unethical the work of the devil may soon be something that is absolutely moral and ethical and must be done and these are the conversations we need to have and I think it's critically important and I don't think these conversations are going on anywhere in any sufficient form we're doing it at SU we're doing it at XPrize I'm sure it's happening it is happening right here in this room here at Summit here's another area that's coming online and this is how do we connect your brain to the cloud so everything we've ever known everything we've ever learned every emotion every concept is in the hundred billion neurons in our brain which are connected with a hundred trillion synaptic connections and that brain of ours holds everything in our memories our thoughts our emotions it turns out that we can't grow more brain tissue our brains are landlocked by the size of the birth canal literally that is a limiting factor in how big our brains can be and our brains a few million years ago underwent these neural folds to increase the surface area in the neural cortex to increase the amount and our frontal lobes came into existence a couple of years a couple of two million years ago for appreciation of concepts and and empathy and art and other ideas but the same way that you know my cell phone if it is a complex thing to do it's not calculated on my phone it goes from my phone out to the edge of the cloud and the calculations occur there and the answer comes back so the question is can we in fact connect our neocortex of our brain to the cloud and there are a multitude of companies working on this there is probably over a billion dollars a year going and being invested into connecting our brains to the cloud if you think about it the single most powerful thing that we could have for a country or a company or you know is intelligence of our of our people there's nothing more important than the intelligence of our employees and our people and that's why in countries which have you know dietary restrictions and micronutrient failures for pregnant moms and kids that is a complete and total decimation of the intelligence of that nation because you don't get those IQ points back if your child is malnourished in utero and the early years but what about increasing your memory and your computational power buying being able to think and Google by being able to you know increase your cognitive capacity a thousand fold or a million fold so I don't know if any of you saw when Ilan and the team at neural link did an announcement about about two and a half months ago all right so Nora link is in primates right now and plans to be in humans at the end of 2020 you know a year from now extraordinary in being able to connect using their neural link chips into the neocortex of the brain and being able to give you the ability to sense at a distance or manip late motors controls at a distance so originally what they're gonna do this for is people who've got a cervical break they're locked in they can't move they can't feel they can't speak they can't do anything but imagine if you could bypass all of the normal pathways and go straight to the brain go to the homunculus of the sensory or motor cortex of your brain and be able to get sensory information directly in and being able to say I want to control that robotic arm to pick up an apple and feed me whatever it might be now the numbers if you do the calculations their expectation is that they'll be able to to do two gigabits per second of connectivity from the neocortex to the cloud and that's just the beginning so Ray Kurzweil talks about this concept of brain computer interface and his prediction was not 2045 which was a number of conversations his prediction is that by 2035 we're going to be connecting your neocortex to the cloud so what's it like when you can know anything where if you're connected and I'm connected I can know your thoughts and feelings and emotions is it gonna make us more empathic to each other is it gonna say hey listen I want you to succeed when you succeed I succeed because we're all part of the same meta intelligence right do we think about the fact that we are all a collection of 30 to 50 trillion cells that make us human right you're not a single living organism you're 30 trillion organisms working together collaboratively and so I think these kinds of technologies are BCI are gonna create a collection of eight billion people I'm a huge Star Trek fan my only problem with the Roddenberry universe as they made the Borg evil if it made the Borg friendly that had been much better but so how when we connect and I can I can see a sunrise through the eyes of someone in Japan or I can feel the pain or I can share my thoughts and my feelings with individuals is that a world that's going to be more peaceful I think it is it's a world that's more that's more you know awake and we talk about doing this through plant medicine we talk about doing through meditation there is a technological solution as well that is coming online we'll see where it goes all right we're seeing increasing abundance as well these are the charts from the World Bank and you can see over the last few years is continued movement we're taking more and more people out of extreme poverty and moving them into middle class or to poverty into middle class let's also talk about that these technologies are enabling small teams to solve huge problems I'm very proud of the work that my team does at the XPrize Foundation and this was our first XPrize a 10 million dollar prize for private spaceflight 26 teams spent 10 infants spend 100 million dollars going after that 10 million dollar prize and the winning technology spaceship one is hanging in the Smithsonian and of course Virgin Galactic just announced it's going it's gone public and of course we're now focusing on what other problems in the world do we want to solve so I serve as executive chairman I have an amazing amazing woman a CEO Anusha I'm sorry who funded our first XPrize she had just exited for 1.3 billion dollars was a passion about space grew up in Taylor on dreaming about spaceflight and when I approached her to fund the first 10 million dollar prize she and Amir and Hameed say yes we have awarded or launched about two hundred million dollars of prizes thus far another two hundred million dollars are under development let me give you a quick overview because these are the kinds of things that are enabling small teams powered by these technologies to solve problems so we had this 15 million dollar prize funded by Elon Musk to build software that could teach a child in the middle of no place reading writing and numeracy on their own we did the experiment with 2,500 kids in Tanzania in the bush where there was nothing sundar gave us 5,000 tablets Android tablets we ran the competition 300 million dollars spent by all the teams to win this 15 million dollar prize the winning software one hour of tablet use a day was equivalent to that kid being in full-time school down and in in the capital of Tanzania I love this prize this is an X Prize for mapping the ocean floor the estimate was 300 years to map the ocean floor at 4,000 meters depth the winning technology took it from 300 years down to ten years time all right this is an X PRIZE that was one two years ago called the water abundance XPrize we talk about water Wars and water scarcity we fight over half a percent of the water on the planet in the rivers and the lakes but it turns out there are quadrillions of leaders in the atmosphere and the biosphere and so this was an XPrize challenging teams to pull the water out of the atmosphere for two cents per liter a thousand liters from day per day for all renewable energy source and that was one again about 18 months ago so where are we going next the environment is calling loud and clear so where are we we have a rainforest XPrize we're about to announce can you can you measure the biodiversity in an acre of rainforest so you value the rainforest not for timber or not for plantable land but by the biodiversity you can't you can't impact what you can't measure you can't value what you can't measure this isn't XPrize thank you for that this is an X Prize that we're getting ready to launch very shortly being funded out of Abu Dhabi this is an X Prize for cellular agriculture can you grow stakes that are healthier cheaper and better for you from stem cells in downtown nairobi downtown LA wherever it might be right so that we stop decimating the planet by just literally 1/3 non ice land mass of planet Earth is for livestock and as people become more abundant financially they all want higher versions of protein we can't continue to do that we have to reinvent how we take sunlight and produce it into protein molecules that we consume this is one of those ways I'm super excited about this prize we are decimating and acidifying our oceans and the coral reefs and so this is a coral restoration XPrize this is a prize we're looking for a sponsor for if you know anybody who wants to do this so this is for rapid restoration can we replant coral reefs ten times faster than we're losing 100 times faster than we're losing them this is another XPrize that we're working on this is can we demonstrate super low-cost scalable co2 removal of you know ten Giga tons by 2050 this is our largest prize I love this prize there are three trillion trees on planet Earth if we could plant an additional trillion trees we could bring back two co2 levels of our atmosphere at a pre-industrial age so this is can we design the technology for rapid plantation and rapid growth of trees to get a trillion trees in a decade's time one personally important to me and this drives me nuts we haven't reinvented how we fight wildfires in decades so here's my thesis I believe it should be possible to detect the Wildfire at the moment it starts if it's bigger than two meters or if it's moving put it out minutes later stop waiting for it to become this raging forest fire put it out at the very inception so this is one that we have two amazing people dick Merck and dr. dick Merkin and and Scott painter who've underwritten the beginning of this we're looking to raise the capital to launch this prize I think this being you know terrorized by wildfires is insane let's actually reinvent how we detect them and put them out ten minutes later so I'll close on a couple of thoughts we'll go to Q&A the first is a negative mind will never give you a positive life right this is an amazing time to be alive the second is that we are you know the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities and as I said in the very beginning we're living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history if you'd like these slides if you send an email two slides in Diamandis calm my server we'll send you back a stack of slides so if we could get the lights up a little bit I'd love to have a conversation we have 30 minutes for Q&A thank you [Applause] wait my extensions here or so people can line up that either the mics and there are a few things to keep in mind for your questions don't introduce yourself one sentence for your question no follow up questions and keep your mouth close to the mic so that everybody can hear you and this is the fun part so the morals the ethics the challenge is where we're going what we should be doing who should be thinking about it please let's start over here yeah okay my first question is I guess my only question is do you see technologies like neural link causing acceleration economic disparity of economic disparity yes sir great question so let me let me discuss this concept of the rich-poor gap I think it's a really important conversation to be had because I want to reframe how we think about this for all of human history there was the king and the queen on the hilltop and everyone else in abject squalor right with me there yes that was the way it was and we're heading towards a world where it was used to be the haves and the have-nots and we're heading towards a world of haves and Su perhaps my mission at the XPrize at singularity and abundance 360 all that I do is how do we uplift everybody to a world where every man woman and child has access to everything they need yes the wealth gap will increase but as long as the floor has reached a level where people have a life of potential not a life of luxury but life of potential I'm okay with that so please think about the rich-poor gap as not being the most relevant thing it's where is the floor does that make sense thank you please Thanks I'm curious what you think about the application of AI to our music and particularly visual art what's possible what we might see in our lifetimes and the ethics behind it a great question so one of the conversations I have with audiences all the time is you know do you believe so I mean actually can we get lights up even a little bit more is that possible I don't take a little poll how many folks here believe that ai ai artists will be as good and indistinguishable from human artists can I see your hands go up okay that is the VAT it's actually a higher majority than I normally get how many folks here think that a eyes will be writing incredible novels and feature films that you didn't know was a human or AI raise your hands please so one of the things I think about is we're going to discover what is truly human in the next 20 years we're gonna find out what is it that a human can do that an AI cannot do and that's going to be an interesting conversation to say the least but I do believe we're going to head towards a point in which a eyes are creating music and art and story and creative and humor that are as good or better than humans now the question is again is it going to be an AI human collaboration I'm not passing judgment on this I just think that as going to happen and maybe it's gonna be maybe people will value the AR the human created element more but I think if we if we don't see that this is a potential and we fool ourselves I mean one of the things I think about importantly is a different part it which is the application medicine that I think there will be a time for example where it is immoral or it is it is illegal not to have an AI do the diagnostic that it is what do you call it it's malpractice if you don't have an AI actually do the diagnostic on the MRI or the pathology slide because it is able to do it at a higher level in the human these the kinds of conversations were gonna we're going to need to interpret we'll find out obviously I don't know the answers but please yeah I'm really curious to hear how you think some of these technologies could address mental health issues so I think met the brain is one of the great frontiers that we have this next decade and we are just beginning to understand how we read and how we measure and how we understand how the brain works and operates the neural chemistry the physiology of the and so I think one we're gonna learn a lot second we're gonna be able to use these technologies to catch mental health issues much earlier than ever before so we're all going to eventually have a version of Jarvis Marin man remember Jarvis from Iron Man that AI software shell that that he has and we're seeing that with early versions of Alexa and Google home and so forth that it's listening and so imagine if it's able to detect challenges and problems for individuals early at the beginning and get them health when they need it are we going to start - so it's early detection are we going to start to understand the neural chemistry and understand the physiology of how we support it I think that the like I said there's nothing more valuable for a country or a company or a group than then some element of human intelligence which can include empathy and in all versions of intelligence that exists so I think that were were at a just at the beginning of the inflection point of understanding brain science and so I would just leave it I would leave it at that for now but thank you thank you please thank you for the very helpful lecture I also want to point out in addition to all the positive trends you mentioned that there are many negative trends that are accelerating also exponentially including population growth energy and resource consumption importantly co2 consumption and so what we fundamentally have is a temporal issue between the acceleration of the positive and then the impact of the negative and I wanted to ask your thoughts on those two lines and great so thank you for that so let's let's jump into the first I saw a population do you know there's great - - great TED Talks by Bill Gates and population you know there are two things that reduce population growth rate pressures what are they education and health you make a city a country healthier and better educated the number of children per family rapidly decrease I know these numbers I've looked at them the the replacement rate for a nation is 2.1 children per family okay globally we used to be at an average of around five to six children per family were massively reducing over the last 50 years we're about 2.4 2 children per family today in the United States we're at 1.7 something we're below the replacement rate right so the challenge in the future may not be over a population of planet Earth it may well be under population of planet Earth that we will peak at nine nine and a half billion dollar billion dollars billion people and have a very rapid decrease after that energy one of the things that gives me great amount of hope is that we are bathed in a squander abundance of energy we're bathed in 6,000 times more energy from the Sun than we consume as a species in a year and if you look at the rate at which we are so energy is not scarce it's just not in a usable form yet and if you think about it we used to go and kill whales on the on the ocean to get whale oil to light our nights that was an energy source then we ravaged mountainsides then we started drilling kilometers underground and then fracking but the potential for solar and for renewables is extraordinary the numbers are extraordinary too last year we were at at 2.1 cents and in two cents per kilowatt hour without subsidies in Mexico today in Brazil we're at one point seventy five cents per kilowatt hour will be low will be below a penny per kilowatt hour from solar within the next decade and then we have amazing breakthroughs on storage that are going on right now so I believe that we're heading towards an energy revolution that will unfortunately destabilize Venezuela and Russia and parts of the Middle East but we're heading towards a period of squander abundance of energy and if you think about the world's poorest countries on the planet of the world's sunniest countries on the planet now co2 yes it's not a climate it's not a problem it is a crisis right and it is a crisis that we now have better and better tools to solve we heard about quantum supremacy from Google last month one of the most valuable things that quantum computers are going to give us is the ability for new material sciences perhaps it's you know how do we better extract Co you from the atmosphere again the tools we have to solve problems are themselves getting in better and better and that you know and I would rather count than entrepreneurs to solve these problems empowered by these tools and governments so I'll leave it on that thought please mm-hmm I lost my voice by talking so much this weekend how do you think about accountability and responsibility systems for technology like neural link yeah so that is a a really important question and the question is do we citizens or whatever nation do you depend on your government to make it happen right so I remember when I was at MIT I was doing my molecular genetics degree and it was at a time when recombinant DNA the earliest versions of slicing and dicing DNA was happening and there was a large amount of deliberation and discussion about is it ethically morally gonna have you know cloned babies Hitler Youth all of the all of the negative x concepts or coming out of that and there was a series of conferences that were called the Asilomar conferences that all of the gene jockeys all the genetic engineers went to and they they created a set of self regulations right they didn't depend on I mean honestly I I have a hard time believing that our Congress or Senate is going to make up set of rules that I'm gonna believe is safe for the future of this stuff I don't know about you guys I I would rather have you know sort of a that kind of an Asilomar conference event of scientists coming together and and with the right theologians and ethicists and so forth and creating a set of rules here's the challenge and here's a challenge for all of us the rate at which these technologies are accelerating and are accelerating themselves and it used to be that there was enough time to adapt to these the biggest concern I have is that the rate of adaptation is much slower and what our governments governments are stabilization factors religious institutions are stabilization factors none of us want to wake up in the morning and that the world is different from last night we like having things not changed as much as we might think about that of wanting change and so it is a challenge and the cotton these kinds of conversations are not going on enough that's why for me I'm on the stage like this is happening this is not a matter of if or and or when it's happening I remember I was we have an exponential Families program at singularity and it was successful families with their next generation or third generation and this this young man who's about 19 asked me said you know Peter is is faster change better why should we have it this way I said it's not if it's better or if we should it is happening whether we like it or not it's how do we think about adapting to it using it how do we how do we what are we measuring and how we surfacing these things and so those are you know super important conversations and they're not happening anywhere near enough thank you please so that you briefly touched on the subject of plant medicine and I've been really fascinated with this reframe on AI so instead of artificial intelligence ancient intelligence really looking at the ancient wisdom of the earth itself the consciousness of the earth and how we can use these plants as sort of an umbilical cord that connects our consciousness to that that plugs us back in right and and into our AI essentially our innate intelligence to what degree is is that a resource of information being used in the exploration of you know machine learning and everything you're talking about so let me answer a slightly different question because I don't have an answer to what you're what you're asking but I do think that as we are becoming when I see what I see plant medicine that I have used in I've experienced it's about dissolution of the ego it's about connecting yourself to the world and understanding your role and position and the connection and so I I think that there are two separate issues but if our leaders and our entrepreneur are able to be driven by a higher level of desire and concern and connectedness versus ego and wealth creation that's a better world to be in so I'm not sure I do like ancient intelligence that's a great comment it's a great a great name for it but thank you please hi so many of the XPrize is focus on sort of finding a fundamental technological breakthrough to solve a problem which is absolutely necessary but there's many cases where we already have a solution to a problem and we just lack the ability to implement that solution to that problem our political systems our bureaucratic systems don't facilitate that have you looked at creating sort of like a meta-level prize that focuses on actual like implementation breakthroughs er like patterns of like political like solution making so great point and you're a hundred percent correct a lot of times it's not just making the widget it is the implementation of the widget into the world and having it actually solve the problem and so we've changed a lot of the work that we're doing at the XPrize to we say when a prize gets one it's the beginning right of how do we actually drive implementation into the world so for example that global learning XPrize the software that the competition at Elon funded that we had in Tanzania that software as powerful as it is was in Swahili alone so we're now working with philanthropists around the world to recode it into Hindi and Spanish and multitude of languages and getting it out there it's open source now in the world but our mission is is you know sending a very clear measurable objective goal inspiring entrepreneurs and now you know getting it out there into the world so we have a lot of work to do there but it is very much our focus but you're spot-on in terms of don't build a widget just to have a widget exist it's how do you actually solve the world's problems thank you hi how will humans adapt to a coming technological singularity to ensure that we're not left behind by AI yeah so interpret your question here the technological singularity is defined is a moment in time where the speed of technology is happening so fast that we poor humans can't keep up with it and and we can't I mean if you think about the notion that we have something called cognitive biases our brain cannot cannot actually process all the information we have coming in right so we take these shortcuts our shortcuts mean we have a recency bias we tend to believe knowledge that we just learned more than knowledge we knew in the past we have a negativity bias we tend to give credence to negative information or we have a similarity bias we tend to give value to someone stated by someone who looks like us versus different and these biases are for us to be able to process information and you know I think the only way that we as humans end up living in this world is by merging with that world it really is it's what you know what Elon and many others speak about I do as well is how do we actually become merged with so I'll give you an analogy it's a for me it's a beautiful analogy of life on this planet Earth four billion years ago when life first began it began is what's called prokaryotic life-forms very simple life forms cellular Baga cytoplasm and some free-floating DNA that life then became complex life forms eukaryotic life forms incorporating mitochondria and nuclear membranes and that plasmic reticulum and technology for processing information and processing energy better and then we became multicellular life forms and then eventually tissues and organs and all of us here 30 trillion cells collaborating together but it was one of increasing complexity and collaboration and so the potential is for us to you know we are in the midst of does anybody here not have their cell phone with them I'm curious anybody anybody nobody ok so this is I mean this is part of you right I'll go 50,000 people without having someone not have their cell phone and I remember last time I said where is it me said I lost in the over that morning so this is this is becoming incorporated into us right we're in the next decade implantables and wearables and all of that we're merging with technology and and you can choose not to right this is not no one's forcing you to have access to these technologies to use email to use FaceTime to use all of these capabilities it makes our lives better in some way but the world's going to become automatic and magical at close to an automatical world around us and we're going to Co evolve we're going to evolve into the next level of what it means to be human here's the key point I don't think this is a hundred years from now or 50 years from now or 40 years now I think it's the next 30 years we're in the highest level of the game right now the rate you know if we truly have human-level AI in ten years and raise got like an 87 percent accuracy rate launch predictions so let's say it's off by a few years so we have brain computer interface and BCI at high bandwidth and 15 years hell that the iPhone is only you know SEP 12 years ago so what's it like when we are connected at the neocortex level with AI and with each other and where we have all the energy we want and were able to genetically engineer and so forth all of these things the world's going to be changing not just slightly we're reinventing what it means to be human and the most important thing for me is it needs to be done with intention it needs to be done with a vision of where we're going used to be done with a with a heart and a soul and not just randomly so these are the conversations and you may say it's [ __ ] I don't agree it's not gonna be happening you're way too optimistic you're a technical topia I don't care at the end of the day these technologies are moving faster and faster and more and more capable and we're heading towards a world of where we used to have half the world connected 3.7 billion people were connected digitally two years ago in the next six years we're about to connect eight billion people four billion new minds are coming online in the next six years right from StarLink and 5g and one web and couper and Google loon all these things are connecting everybody not like I came online at 9600 baud an AOL right they're all coming online at gigabit connection speeds with access to AI and quantum computing in the cloud if you thought things were slowing down they're about to kick into high gear as more people start inventing and desiring and commuting and all these things so these are the conversations that we need to be having thank you hey hey Peter hey Jim do you think humans or AI will be the first to unravel the deep code of human consciousness and what is the implications for artificial computer consciousness give you the answer yes thank you think I mean too much right so listen I have no friggin idea right you know after you do you know five dmt your entire vision of consciousness changes so some plant medicine yeah we'll find out but I just I find it fascinating I mean guys we are so lucky to be alive now right I want you to be I want you to be imbued by the sense of like awe and inspiration and empowerment of the time that we're alive that we can start to have these kinds of conversations even ask that question is insane right and to be able to say to believe that there could be an answer and there will be what is consciousness will there be artificial consciousness will I merge with consciousness right there conversations going on right now for a head transplant right I mean literally they're being planned head transplants and animals and then there will one being human and is that person you know I don't know I mean these are amazing things and so you know the question should ask me is are we living in a virtual existence is this real or is this is this or is this an entire you know virtual existence then will that we'll start talking please hi Peter so I want to talk about diversity and you know thinking about the future of germline gene editing where parents have the ability straight and they brought the the brain computer interface how are we going to ensure all together working these technologies bring about and preserve the sense of diversity that's been the main survival series so absolutely that strategy of our species so that's a really critically important question so first of all I just want to hit on a couple of things I want us all to remember when we are looking at these questions how quickly the world has changed and how far we have come in such a short time right a hundred years ago depending on where you were born determined everything in your life right the language you spoke whether your village had a school whether you're a woman you know what color or creed you were determined to everything in your life and you're stuck 100 years ago not that long ago a hundred years ago you were stuck and today we're heading toward the world of potential we're independent of all that there is something you could do someplace you could go to really become fully who you are that's a beautiful thing now are we going to if we become this meta intelligence if we're connected what happens to my individuality are we part of the Borg the collective and so forth I don't know I don't know I do believe I can imagine a world in which if I plug into this meta intelligence which is the world I'd call it I close my next book the futures faster you think on this exact conversation if I plug in and all of a sudden I'm able to know the thoughts and the feelings and the knowledge of the world and I feel so connected to everybody right where it's not you or me we are one and your success is my success right that's such a sense of beautiful connection if I ever unplugged from that I would feel so lonely right so there's an interesting alternate view all of these things all these moral and ethical conversations have flipped the use right do you do gene editing to your child's germline to your germline is that moral or ethical there may be a point in the future where it is immoral and unethical not to do that how could you not have corrected these genetic ailments that your child has how immoral are you how unethical I use a parent did not do that you know we all are doing this kind of genetic selection when we pick our spouse right on you know are they beautiful are they handsome are they smart are they wealthy about the intelligent and so forth you know you do it when you when you send your kid to the best school or get the best clothing or the best books the best tutors why do you not want to consider starting with the best genetics oh my god you can't do that but these things change over time but these are the conversations we need to be having for sure thank you please hi Peter are there any AI systems in existence or under development that have the ability to counterbalance logic and efficiency with ethical and moral so acceleration so that's a great conversation I think about members say we're all gonna have a version of Jarvis and AI software shell that you're going to give permission to read your emails listen to your conversations look at your blood blood markers because that AI makes your life better and an automatical right AI so I think you will be a time in which your AI is able to you're able to say listen can you tell me if I'm being biased can you tell me if I'm not seeing all the data because we can't we just have such a limited IO capability there's no way we can possibly look at all the point of views we have Dunbar's number right of 150 people that are in our inner circle and those 150 people is again these are cognitive biases and limitations they eyes don't have that will we have a world in which you say listen I want to swap out those 150 people depending on where I am I want the 150 people I know here to be in my Dunbar's number and I want that you know to be sort of shape-shifted depending or so I feel Ithaca Lee I feel empathic to you and that are connected to you but I think that we're gonna merge with AI in one shape form or another and the question is do we do we allow that to make us more empathic right do we allow that to to make us see the other side of the conversation do we allow that to help us cut the [ __ ] from reality in terms of actual science the whole conversation around fake news right I don't think that's going to be solved by by humans I think that's gonna have to be solved by algorithms and it's gonna be a constant white hat black hat battle but again these are the conversations are not happening enough I don't know if you're having the conversations please do but thank you for that maybe given the changes in connectivity you're talking about and these solutions in the next 20 or 30 years let's go 50 years in the future what's the future of desire so are we all going to become Waldo sitting on a couch you mean in that regard or if everything's taken care of there's no disease I can yeah take the knowledge from everyone there's no difference what's my desire yeah so it's a so again I want to put us in context today for all of human history our mission was survival it was [ __ ] survival right it was like I have no food my there's a plague right this was the reality of 500 years ago a thousand years ago as homo sapiens a caveman was a hundred thousand years ago right it's not it's a pretty recent time we had we live to survive that was sir I mean dude that was life it was we're dying you know the average lifespan was early 30s and then a hundred years ago it grew to like you know 40 that was a big deal and so it's just now they can have these conversations about purpose and mission and what I want to do and what do I desire and so maybe these technologies and capable allow us to have greater dreams to go and and do what we want to do or maybe it's about taking a break from survival and having some joy and happiness I don't know but I would rather not have it be about continuous survival now I can apply my mind your mind our treasures our tech whatever to solving more and more problems my mission is to help everybody understand how powerful we are to solve problems right the world's biggest problem is the world's biggest business opportunity to see a problem to unsolvable problems stop complaining about problems solve the problems so if that's a level of consciousness that we can get to that's my hope what makes you so confident in your view rather than the catastrophic risk view we're genetically engineered pandemics nuclear proliferation environmental destruction cyber warfare fair question I won't joke about it we first of all would you forward you go there we we've survived thus far and if you look at the data the world on almost every single level has been getting better and better in a multitude of ways the empowerment of the individual to find a problem solve a problem is increasing I believe and I'm curious how you feel that on the whole humans are good and it's that that bent between people being good and desiring to make the world a better place versus the black hats in the world that that tilt is what enables us to do better we're also heading towards a world of radical transparency a world where doing stuff in hiding is harder and harder and harder right so you point a TV camera at a despot and they stop abusing women and children you put cameras on a dashboard of a police car and there are consequences if they do something one of the Foundations I've support in the past the Lindbergh Foundation will fly drones over packs of elephants and rhinoceroses and when the drones are watching the poachers stay away and so we're heading towards a world of by 2020 next year twenty billion connected devices a trillion sensors right so what am i trillion sensors thousands of satellites imaging millions of drones imaging every autonomous car with a lidar is generating 750 megabytes of data per second as it's going down the road looking at it forward-looking augmented reality glasses everything is being imaged and seen all the time and so in that world I have to teach my to it your old boys you know be careful what you do what you say or what you what you post because it's there for the rest of your life all right thank God it wasn't that way when I was a kid but so that radical transparency I think people behave differently when they're being watched and that also gives me a great deal hope so it's empowerment of the individual to solve and fix problem and this sense of radical transparency looks right at time aren't we yeah sorry okay take a last question and we'll go thank you you mentioned the you know you you mentioned people and changing your behavior when you're being watched as we can see by our president right sometimes that isn't always effective right watching somebody and calling them out for their behavior sometimes doesn't change it so we mentioned also government regulation and trusting entrepreneurs instead of governments once you recognize bad behavior right non altruistic behavior doesn't government give us the authority to then go and change that isn't government kind of an error correction for human behavior it's supposed to be so I think that we're heading towards a world of more and more individual empowerment and and connectedness I think again it used to be that we lived in a world where the nation-state controlled the gas line the one TV station the electricity and you were screwed we're heading towards a world of massive dematerialization d monetization and democratization and empowerment of individuals and that's a world that I feel much greater hope for right democracy was designed for a very different world it was designed for a representative democracy where the where the Pony Express was the means of transportation we're gonna probably hopefully begin to see experimentation in governance systems probably in virtual worlds and virtual communities and then eventually off world but again I will close on this one on this one thought which is probably the single most important thing for me which is we're living in a day and age where instead of complaining about problems we are more empowered ever before to solve them the tools that we have the capital we have the data that we have the connections that we have are extraordinary I wish you an amazing rest of the day thank you all very much you know ladies gentlemen peers you know minta is ready to jump fantastic thank you

Channel: Summit

Views: 104,181

Rating: 4.8498659 out of 5

Keywords: summit, conference, ideas, talks, performances, gathering, community

Id: cRvzrg02gmc

Length: 58min 55sec (3535 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021

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[u/LoneCretin]

Recorded at Summit LA19 before the great tech crash of 2020/21. Nothing to see here.