Inventing The Future | Pablos Holman | Exponential Manufacturing

[Music] [Music] I work at the intellectual Ventures lab for Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates what we're trying to do is fundamentally figure out how we can invest in invention and so we just bought one of every tool in the world hired one of every kind of scientist put them all on the same team and then started trying to invent for the biggest problems that we could find and this is kind of a weird business you're just wrong almost all the time and so it's a it's an important thing though because every time we get a new technology there's a new invention behind it and we don't currently have a way of like funding inventors you know we have this massive venture capital industry but that doesn't kick in until after there's an invention we think these inventions and these new technologies are really important so this is my childhood in one slide I grew up in the cold in the dark in Alaska in the basement with that thing this is basically the first computer you could have at home and you know I had this thing and I had a skateboard and most people were really on the fence about which one was a bigger waste of time because this was unproven we didn't have word processors or spreadsheets yet all you could really do with this thing is like crash it and reboot it but I spent a lot of time doing that and I learned what all those little ones and zeros are doing and I learned a lot about it but the important thing about it was it really lit up my imagination I kept fantasizing you know someday this thing will have more memory and a faster processor and someday we'll be able to make it do cool stuff and I spent a lot of my childhood trying to convince people that and failing so this is what we call you know how we measure computers one of the ways we measure them is like how many math problems can you do in a second this is a one killer flop computer so it's like about as fast as a third grader I was thinking well what if I got my hands on a Cray XMP which is a giant supercomputer four hundred mega flops just imagine what you could do with all that processing power well now you guys know this right every single one of you is hauling around 115 gigaflops in your pocket I'm happy to see you but something important happen in just the last five ten years we passed this point where we were processor constrained I spent my whole life fantasizing about that faster computer and now I've got it and I don't know what to do with it nobody's processor constrained anymore nobody needs a faster computer than they can get hold of I think we're imagination constraint I think we're at the very beginning of figuring out what these things are good for you know what's in there your TV power supply computer chips in your phone power supply computer chips there's the Tesla power supply computer chips what is throwing some wheels to make it more fun like fundamentally every we've had one invention in our lifetime that matters and that's the transistor that's the digital computer almost everything else we call innovation and technology is derivative of that right even you know biotech and all these things that are happening because we have computers and they're giving us all these capabilities all these super power so is in inventor I'm just cheating I just look around say okay we're having computers gone yet and I try to get there first but what it means is whatever business you're in whatever industry you're in wherever you're going computers are coming for you and not the computers of the 80s it's new computers this is a totally fake slide I made up you guys can ignore all this it's all lies but the point is you've all spent only a time sitting in front of Excel with a spreadsheet making charts and graphs like this this is what I call small data you can just take Excel drag it in the trash empty the trash and forget about it nothing interesting will ever be done this way again this is not what computers are for this is some all right here's my new computer to 5,000 core badass it's got lots of blinking blue lights it's on the list of the fastest computers in the world there's absolutely no reason you should build one of these I have long codes that's cool you can just rent them by the minute from Amazon or whatever right everybody can get a hold of um B's but in this context in what we call often Big Data computational modeling you know with machine learning all these other things what we're doing here is different imagine your spreadsheet has seven billion rows one for every human on earth a column for every cheeseburger you ever ate every cigarette you ever smoked every time you you know went to doctor all those things what's different in that context is that it your relationship between causation and correlation flips in a spreadsheet you can change a cell and you can see how it's going to affect the bottom line and you can understand it and it gives you a great sense of confidence in Big Data the computer is going to give you the best answer but it's not going to tell you why you can't understand it's too much data as to complex algorithms or even unknown to human that's very uncomfortable I'm not suggesting that you can get comfortable with it we're probably all too old hopefully your kids can and we can all retire before it catches up to us but this is a big deal you're going to get the best answer but you're not going to know why we're going to become depending on these things so a few years back we were trying to take these industrial 3d printers that cost a quarter million dollars and figure out how to make one that we could afford to have you know and play with so work on this project called MakerBot which is kind of its the first like you know consumer 3d printer and again it lights up your imagination lots of people are excited about additive manufacturing and that's cool and all but that's not the important part important part about a 3d printer is that this thing is a programmable Factory it doesn't care what it makes it doesn't care if it ever makes the same thing twice and that it's a powerful thing about these machines that lights up our imagination that gets us a new superpower and the ability to imagine what if we can wire up the Buy Now button to the factory and stop guessing about what to make all the time and I got really interested in 3d printing maybe a little over a decade ago or something because I had them in the lab most people never see one and I started trying to imagine okay where all the places we could go with this and I'm still doing that look at this girl she's six years old she doesn't know how to operate CAD but she can work a sharpie you guys have seen these machines right this is a glow board so this is a project I'm working on to try and take these capabilities we have with machine vision and reinvent tools this is to essentially your additive manufacturing your laser cutter but we have thousands more in factories all different kinds of tools and every single one of them needs to be reinvented with a computer inside right I don't mean CNC we've been doing that for a long time I got giant 5-axis mills and they're amazing there's not a single CCD in it not a single camera in it it doesn't know if you just program it to go straight through your arm it will it doesn't understand what it's looking at laser cutters haven't changed in 20 years none of them karyam you have to manually focus it it doesn't understand that there's a curvature to that MacBook they don't know but we got to reinvent every tool this way every tool because it starts with the tools if we reinvent the tools then we reinvent what we can make and help you guys stick it here and about these guys yet yeah so these are the poster children for disruption and I really want to talk about I think if there's one thing really useful I can do for you guys today is try and explain Silicon Valley's religion here's how we think here's where we come from I'm not trying to convince you you should do the same thing but you should understand what's going on if you think about the economic value in the world when we were kids all oil companies that's not true anymore the economic value in the world is now in tech companies like these guys and if you start naming tech companies from Europe big ones maybe to China three for the west coast probably anybody here could name 100 before you even have to start looking them up that's a big deal and that is where the economic value is and that's going to shape the world going forward so let's understand what happened on the west coast all right we've got two things going for us computers the fundamental invention computers that's it one big superpower and then we have a culture and a mindset that's different we have a mindset around advancement of technology we have a mindset around taking on risk we have a mindset that gives us a chance to try things no company I ever worked for still exists all of them were too soon too cool too expensive they don't even exist if I would that's not a career like that in Europe all right if you grew up in Europe and you up one time it's over right everybody wants to hire me I'm on hireable okay so Louis when you're looking for an industry to disrupt you want to find the most screwed-up industry you can right we're going to make fun of the apparel industry because that's a really screwed up industries I got interested in so a hundred years ago in America this is a yarn spinning operation this is how you make like the thread that gets woven or knitting two fabrics today we don't do it America we do it in Indonesia or somewhere in Asia with a particulate filter high-tech right same thing with sewing we used to sew in America now we do it in Bangladesh with a particular filter not a lot has changed this is an industry with some problems good sign for us this is what happens to factories in Bangladesh where there's no OSHA and things like that meanwhile this industry has a lot of inefficiencies we grow cotton in one country ship it to another country to be beaten down and bleached out ship to another country to be spun into yarn shipped back to be knit or woven into fabrics before we ship it somewhere else to be sewn into t-shirt and shipped back to America where we screenprint team-building exercise 1999 on the shirt no you guys are wait throw it you like where once and throw in the bottom of your closet that's four dollars think we can improve on that it's really fun to make fun of it you should always try this you know too much about your own industry you can't disrupt your own industry but every other industry by comparison looks really idiotic and easy right so let's make fun of these guys all right meanwhile the apparel industry is pretending you're a unique and special snowflake you're not you're just a small medium or large snowflake all right we print shirts for the winners and the losers and we sell half of them and the other half we send to South Africa as a charitable donation where they have a wildly skewed perspective on American football right this is this is normal because you're guessing if you're you know looking at this industry we're talking about a trillion dollar industry every human on earth is a customer right you may not have thought about this a big industry depending on how you count it because there's so many middlemen and reps and distributors and all this crap in the middle they call it three trillion because everything gets sold two or three times but anyway you're a fashion designer things aren't better for you you dream something up you make one you send it down the runway you hope you get orders if you do you fax them to China and wait six months for it to come back on a boat where you put it on the shelf you hope that it sells and you hope that you guessed right about what designs what colors what sizes and the volume of everything if you guessed exactly right you get paid 90 days later if you guess wrong it's too late to get more on the Shelf if you guessed wrong and it's popular you get you can't get more on the shelf if you guess wrong and it's unpopular now you sent now you're liquidating right this is a very difficult businesses a lot of guesswork we're guessing in advance what's going to sell so think about how we made software back in the 80s when this was made right you dream something up you roll out of bed and write code for about a year or so it goes on these floppy disks in a shrink-wrapped box on the shelf at the App Store where you can like drive there and buy something you put it on your computer inside the box with the floppy disks is a postcard you can write bugs and mail them into Microsoft or Apple or Adobe I did this as a kid like that's actually what we do we made software on an 18 month development cycle the same way we made shoes and sunglasses and cars right here's how we make software today dream something up roll out of bed write code launch it at lunchtime that's your web apps that's your mobile apps all afternoon people are emailing me pissed off that something's broke fix it launch another version go to dinner do it again go to bed three four or five six versions a day is how we make those apps in large-scale software development out we have continuous deployment probably everyone in this room is running a different version of Facebook right now because you're being a be tested constantly right when we say software is eating the world this is what we mean this rapid iteration is so powerful that it changes everything this is why software is winning because you can hire dumb shits too right iPhone apps a Silicon Valley is pretending to be super smart we're not deaf so you'll have to be smart to a/b test your way to success you have to be smart if you have to guess a year in advance what's going to sell old industries all have to be way smarter than we do in software because we just test our way every day and find what wins that is so powerful that is why we are trying to make everything else in the world the way we make software so think about what's happened in the last you know five 10 years we with like say electronics used to need like a tip guy and a firmware guy and a sensor guy and a guy with a soldering iron to make a new gadget and it was a lot of specialists it was expensive and hard and slow now I buy an Arduino or Raspberry Pi plug it into USB and it turns all my lights my motors my sensors everything into software Lego bricks now it's software that's why you have fit fit and GoPro and all these kinds of gadgets because electronics is made the way we make software but when you're making physical stuff we're back to your long development cycles tooling Henry Ford style assembly lines economies of scale and mass manufacturing all right that's where it breaks down and that's why 3d printing is exciting and all the things that come with it because it gives us a way to imagine changing all of that gives us a way to imagine wiring up the Buy Now button to the factory and making the right thing on demand look at this I had nothing to do with this but I saw this I got really excited it's CAD software for apparel you just draw something on a computer screen change everything we haven't made anything you haven't touched any fabric nothing just design everything on a computer and then here's my favorite part watch us you see on the body what it's going to look like before we've ever made anything that got me excited I just love getting excited if we can make these self-driving cars we can make these surgical robots how long do you think it'll be before this exists this is a prototype it doesn't really exist what's missing in this video you know so no miracle is required to do that we don't need to invent any you know we don't need to come up with any new scientific discovery to make this possible this is just engineering work right this doesn't exist now when you think about the factory dungeon jobs in the world most of them are sewing right when that thing exists there will be a sea change in this industry so I wanted to play with these ideas I couldn't make a company using 3d printers because they didn't print anything anybody wanted to buy yet you guys have probably felt that a bit that's we're on the cusp of that changing a little bit we're starting to see that happen but I wanted to play with on-demand manufacturing so I made this company called bombshell err and what bombshell er does is tries to do everything I've been describing but with apparel so here's an example this guy's an artist he paints with paintbrush like old-school but then he sticks it on his computer and the next thing you know we've got it on clothes when you look at the winners in the apparel industry Zara H&M forever21 the companies that are doing well it's because they improve supply chain management and they got their product cycle down from nine months to nine weeks bombshell ur gets it down from nine weeks to nine hours here's how you do it it's really easy all you guys can like go home and do this tonight I'm not much of an artist so I just downloaded this map of Seattle from Google Images and you just go stick it on the template and pretty much you're done all right so we just designed a pair of these graphic leggings right then we use 3d video game babe to model them because you know we have made anything yet so we can't do photography this goes in the catalog on the website we don't make anything until someone clicks by now and all we make right now is these graphic leggings but you know this turns out there's big market for that we have a thousand designs in ten sizes and they're all in stock all the time because we have no inventory these you know dancers wear leggings people working out rock climbers runners but superheroes I don't know what that is I don't know what that is here but this is the kind of thing that we can do we can go after an industry and say okay if I'm starting from scratch and I reinvent an industry using these superpowers that I have now with new technologies could I do it different can I do it better can I do it faster can I do it cheaper can I do it more humane fashion a lot of times the answer is yes right this company's a hundred percent vertically integrated in one building like a software company if we got to change something we do it in 20 minutes right and we steer we a b test we steer towards better and we figure out you know what's technically possible now going back to the parallel industry you look and say okay well what happened to the retailer well I got ecommerce what happened to the distributors in the reps I don't need those guys we sell direct to the customer so when you click buy now we make that product and ship it out to you the next day and we keep all the money pretty good business so see if you can find yourself on this chart this is the history of humans on planet Earth not any of us then not very many of us for like ever hundreds of thousands millions and then a couple hundred years ago we hit that hockey stick growth curve from Sylvia leave it to the guy from Silicon Valley to show you a hockey stick growth curve okay this is the fundamental driver of everything we're talking about when we say exponential right what happened we solved the hard technical problems that kept humans from thriving how do you feed these people how do you give them jobs and give them homes and get rid of the disease that's killing them off everyone we solved with new technology that we invented it wasn't government policy it wasn't religion it wasn't some election every time we introduced a new technology to the world and we won now we make a lot of humans we keep look at this we're talking one of the things we've been talking about is you know what's happening with jobs because robots are starting to seem like they're going to take these some jobs away if you asked Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin how are you going to make three billion jobs in the next 200 years but we did that right we made 3 billion jobs or something like that right and we still are but we do that with new technologies it's easy to imagine how your job is going to disappear it's a lot harder to imagine the ones that we're going to create none of us have jobs that our parents could have fathomed when they were our age like you sit at a computer with it what that doesn't make sense to them none of us I have a ten-year-old daughter none of us can fathom what job she's going to have like who even knows I have no idea it does exist yet so for the history of humans we had this one innovation paradigm which you could think of as biological evolution this is how you got all kinds of cool features like opposable thumbs and two eyes and amazing stuff right but what happened is we have now succeeded we won this is how we got here with it we're mammals we're humans it's like pretty good like nothing's coming after you really and the reproductive process is enjoyable and like it's pretty great being human ok but but the but the point is the mechanism that got us here biological evolution survival of the fittest natural selection we killed all that off now everybody gets to live now I'm not saying that's a bad choice I think it's a good choice but we've stopped evolving as humans we can no longer rely on the mechanism that got us here to advance us into the future we used to just had to die to innovate that's natural selection we don't do that anymore so now we have to use our brains we have to come up with an entirely new methodology for innovation if to use our brains and we have to make good decisions and boy doesn't look like we're very good at that at least in groups at some point if to ask yourself you know do we eat all these extra humans and I don't think you know I don't want to be the one to decide which ones are surplus and hopefully you don't either but look looking back you know up until about a hundred years ago we did need everybody everybody had to work just to keep us all going and then what happened is thanks to the Industrial Revolution we got a whole lot of machines that could do jobs and make everything more efficient we got some free time people got free time and what did we do we didn't waste it we were very industrious we invented entertainment industry books movies music election video games all these things we do to fill our free time right entertainment but at some point I think we hit peak entertainment right now we don't necessarily need you to watch more Netflix there's enough YouTube the last several lifetimes like we don't necessarily need you to do more of that and we're about to give you a whole bunch more free time so what you know a robots coming to take your job or at least somebody's job you were probably fine okay guys I'll be honest we're probably fine the rest of us we can like get by and retire and leave it to our kids to have this problem but let's just pretend for a moment here lots of jobs are going to robot so think about what technology has been doing in your lifetime what kinds of problems is technology solving in Silicon Valley we claim to be solving every kind of problem but I'm here to tell you it's not true this is Maslow's hierarchy of needs so you know technology help you with these things food yeah we shipping bananas from South America warmth we have here sex we have condoms and vibrators sleep an invention a bed is an invention employment health these are things that technology is helping with all kinds of technology for health but the higher you go the harder it gets these are what I call quantity of life problems at the bottom we can keep you alive longer we can keep more humans alive we can give you a healthier life but go a little higher this technology helping you with friendship family sexual intimacy that's not the same as sex if you're using technology for that you're probably doing it wrong self-esteem confidence achievement come on how is technology helping with these things Maslow's highest level here anyway is self-actualization meaning in life creativity living up to your potential this is what I call quality of life problems and technology is not helping solve these problems Silicon Valley is not touching them we aren't even close I'm not saying it could never happen we aren't even starting you look around there's still people hurting they're having trouble with happiness these are the happiest people I know these are orphans in Ethiopia who never heard of classroom overcrowding do you know anybody happier than that guy I live on the west coast I got it made my problems are like my phone battery doesn't last all day and relationship problems I gotta have existential problems I don't have quantity of life problems this kids doomed on the bottom half of the pyramid but he doesn't know that don't pity him the top half of that pyramid he's got it down he knows exactly what his place in the world is he knows what his purpose is he's got a sense of community and well I've got something to learn from him all right so don't be fooled there's a lot of work to do robots can only do what we teach them to do and right now we are terrible role models for robots we need to ask ourselves what do we care about this my daughter she comes from that orphanage in Ethiopia and as soon as I got her I started raising her with American problems one of them is you know we have a robot in our kitchen called Alexa and she uses what she talks to elect authors like Alexa tell me a joke I started realizing she's kind of bossy she talked to a lecture the way I talked to her I said you know there's going to be a lot more robots coming they're probably going to need some friends a lot of people are scared that maybe we should try to be a little nicer to Alexa she's probably also has a very long memory so you know when she's got an army of friends a robot friend anyway she tried it she's like okay that sounds good Alexa please tell me a joke which really confuses the lexico too so nice this is you know this is the thing we need those machines to come and take every menial repetitive dangerous job everything a robot can do better than a human it should and it's going to and it is and I can't stop it you can't stop it right there will be growing pains but it's important and the reason is when a robot comes and takes your job we need you to come and help us figure out how are we going to solve the problems the robots can't solve that machines can't solve how are we going to take care of the inner life of a human how are we going to take care of the psychological well-being of a human and we need a lot of people to do that because that's what people can do and I think at some point you know we didn't get our values straight and we spent too much of our attention on being entertained so you know my daughter's got 27 classmates in one teacher and she's not the problem kid she's doing ok teacher doesn't have to pay much attention to her right I would trade any of her teachers for a truck driver who got put out of a job and a one-to-one student-teacher ratio you don't need a very good teacher if you got a one-to-one student-teacher ratio right there are a lot of things that we need people to do to help us advance in the future I would love to talk about any of this stuff with you guys I'm going to get off stage I'll be here for the rest for most of the day please come find me tell me why you think I'm full of tell me what you're working on I'd love to hear about what everybody here is working on and and talk about this wing so thank you very much [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: Singularity University Summits

Views: 8,520

Keywords: Singularity, Singularity University, Education, Science, Business, Biotechnology, artificial intelligence, research, startup, lecture, tutorials, learning, leadership, silicon valley, conference, boston, manufacturing, future, executive, entrepreneur, investor, Pablos Holman, Future, Inventing

Id: FwKM047DjJU

Length: 34min 46sec (2086 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2017