Pablos Holman | Automating Ourselves | Global Summit 2018 | Singularity University

[Music] well I think you know where this is going see if you can find yourself on this chart that's the history of humans on planet Earth so not very many of us 160 thousand years ago get the first Homo sapiens but then it's only like thousands hundreds of thousands millions but not until the last 200 years did we hit that hockey stick growth curve and go from millions to billions almost overnight so what happened well we solved hard technical problems that kept humans from thriving how do you feed all these people give them jobs give them homes eradicate the disease that's killing them off you know 400 million people died of smallpox 400 million of these people not those people all right so every time faced with a challenge our job is to invent new technology bring it into the world to solve that problem it wasn't government policy it wasn't religion wasn't some charity or an election every time new technology that we invented but there's anything all these extra humans are good for it's making more problems so our job literally our job in this room is to figure out how are we going to invent on that scale that's the job so I'm an inventor which isn't like a real career choice anybody here have a business card that says inventor yeah your parents didn't tell you grow up and be an inventor but when you're inventing there's different ways to go about it I'm gonna tell you about my way my way is I try to collect at the output of basic research of scientific discovery I try to understand every new discovery I can and I collect these super powers and I clicked the output of the scientific community for me since I'm a computer hacker it's a lot about computers every new chip every new algorithm every new sensor I try to cram that into my brain and then on the other side I try to cram in the problems and ask myself does this change anything humans have ever done can we do it better faster cheaper in a more humane fashion right you also need a garage with crazy hair and a DeLorean like those are the ingredients but this is where it starts and without this you don't get any new technologies nobody's ever invented a new technology by reading the directions all right you have to do this process before you do that one all right and we have a lot of things going on that you can see where we mix that up we've got companies built on a invention created by an entrepreneur it doesn't move the needle might make a good business might make a lot of money but there's no new technology there so we're not getting that multiplier when you invent a new technology you get a new variable to add into the equation that's where your exponents come from all right we invented this thing scientists had figured out a way to manipulate waves electromagnetic waves using what they called metamaterials but they were just like doing party tricks for physicists hadn't quite figured out anything useful to do physicists mostly argued and said oh yeah that's gonna be useless but we thought you know maybe that's a new superpower for us so we invented a whole bunch of technologies based on that it's an antenna we have them in the roofs of cars an antenna can electronically steer a holographic beam so it tracks satellites this car drives coast to coast stream in 4k video uncompressed office satellites both ways using the same thing we invented a low-power radar you can stick it it's not much bigger than a cell phone you stick it on a phone on a drone you can see barbed wire fences miles away and do collision avoidance get rid of the spinning laser that Google uses and put it in a bumper of a car all right we invented technology that can do live video like Google Earth but over the entire planet live video instead of just stills we invented another version of this where we can put it on cell towers cell towers we're all sharing a cell tower right now that's why your phone is slow all right but I can aim spotlight and each user we can get gigabit wireless to everyone on the planet this way it's my garage yeah we basically just bought one of every tool in the world hired one of every kind of scientist a few deranged hackers and inventors and started going after the biggest problems that we could find because what we believed was that nobody was funding invention we looked around and said okay well scientific research gets funded on this end entrepreneurs get funded on that end who's funding inventors delorean sales right so I work for Nathan Myhrvold at what's called the intellectual Ventures lab we created funds we call invention capital funds and we use those to invest in inventing new technologies so this is what I call the conjoined triangles of tech now I'll explain to you how that works at one end you've got what we call deep tech anybody heard a deep tech that's kind of a new term mostly Europeans are using I think to describe the harder stuff but if you have deep tech at one end well what do you call the stuff at the other end you know what I'm talking about yeah what did Ober invent what new technology comes from air B&B if Mark Zuckerberg had never been born do you think we'd still have something like Facebook these are not tech companies okay these are the logical extension of what you get when you invent new technologies internet wireless data mobile phones right that's where these things really come from I'm not saying they're bad products they could be good businesses they might even be good investments who knows but don't fool yourself all right at some point if you don't invent a new technology you are not getting that multiplier we invented this thing we think of it as really deep tech it's a new type of nuclear reactor it's powered by nuclear waste this is a stockpile in Kentucky 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium left over from making bombs reactors with this one stockpile and our reactors we can power the entire planet including growth for about the next thousand years we don't even need to mine uranium we can do better but we got a try and in a lot of cases we're actually not trying see if you can find yourself on this chart and the red part of the blue part either way if you're in the bottom 99% in America you're still in the top 14% globally that's not so bad it's like being a lottery winner I mean one one lottery by getting to be human which is pretty awesome nothing's coming after you one another lottery by being an American I know we have some guests here too you know but on your worst day lost your job girlfriend left you iPhone battery is dead you're still the top 14 percent a lot of people trying to live like they're gonna win that third lottery and at some point I think what it means what I think it means is the world kind of over invested in me more money was spent on me more energy was spent on me more education so I need to do what I'm uniquely good for which is probably not you know digging coal or delivering pizza this is an awfully defensive she's a female mosquito carrying malaria in sub-saharan Africa and this is the most dangerous animal on earth not sharks not snakes not spiders not robots actually the person sitting next to you is pretty scary to watch out for those got ya by the numbers when you're inventor you always try to invent something using lasers because lasers are cool so we thought yeah and then we laughed about it and then I hired hacker six weeks later she's not coming back here we vaporized your wing off it's very satisfying work if you can get it the rule in the lab is just don't kill anything cute you know if it's cute like bunny rabbits don't kill it but mosquitoes you can kill as many as you want not even PETA comes to save them you could be in Africa your whole career working on malaria not know about lasers and machine vision right oh whoops subliminal marketing okay here's a game we're gonna play this is the malaria parasite living inside of a red blood cell which one is it you get twenty minutes to find it it's like finding a marble in a football field most countries are lucky to have a single technician that's actually good at this and then they probably go stir-crazy after a couple of years from staring at dots it's hard we do a billion tests a year that way to find people on malaria and it's not enough with malaria you have asymptomatic carriers traveling around spreading it to places you already got rid of it malaria is taken right now over half of half of half a million lives a year most of them are kids under five years old all right this is the low-hanging fruit in global health we invented this thing you guys are all getting excited about machine vision right starting a decade ago welcome to club we started working using machine vision in an automated microscope to find the malaria in the parasites like seven microns this is really hard thing you do that thing now outperforms the best humans on earth we could make a lot more of them a lot faster than we can train humans right we can do better but we got to try if you have an iPhone in your pocket the cost of that thing is equivalent to the global median income I'm not trying to make you feel bad I got piles of these things right mostly disassembled what I think it means is that you should buy an iPhone and you should drive a Tesla too for that matter but then understand the job isn't done just because we made a product for rich people we're just getting started the job is can I go take on a problem I don't have can I solve a problem that a billion people have that's harder it's a lot harder all right you got to go there and find the problems we're kind of running out of problems all right I know what your problems are my problems are like iPhone battery doesn't last all day and then relationship problems not existential problems right I'll have malaria here's an example this woman's packing $25,000 worth of vaccines into his shitty $2 styrofoam cooler she's gonna truck him out into the bush start injecting kids and half of these vaccinations are gonna fail because they didn't stay cold no detection for that we just inject kids anyway quarter million kids a year died of something they were vaccinated against now you and I don't have this problem we have refrigerators that powers out 4 to 16 hours a day most of the places in Africa we have this problem so we invented this thing it's just a kind of a super thermos stick vaccines in there stick it in the sunshine in the Sahara come back a couple months later and your vaccines will still be cold it's no power cord can't even plug it in this is literally the deployment scenario thank you we're lucky you know we do all these projects with Bill Gates so we're using Bill's money to solve people's problems but I actually think that's great but this wasn't that hard I mean I you know the team working on it did awesome work congratulations guys but for us it's pretty easy comparatively easy compared to this guy I got a whole lab full of geniuses and PhDs and biologists and chemists and I got everything I need to make something like that it's comparatively easy for me but I had to go there we had to go there we had to go sit on it I found out a clinic in Africa is like a tree with for some shade with a doctor and this thing under it like that's what that's the front lines of vaccinations that's how we eradicated infectious disease steering anybody ever heard of cypherpunks I come from this tiny little community of fringe wackos on the internet from the early 90s and what we believed was that as the internet grew we would need to design freedom for its users into the protocols we believed we could embody our values into the protocols of the Internet and specifically our values were that nobody should get an asymmetric advantage on the network all right that means I get the same access as you do you don't get to decide what I do and I don't get to decide what you do and we found in the crypto toolkit the ability to do some of that kind of thing privacy is something you don't want the whole world to know secrecy is something you don't want anybody to know those are different but it turns out it's real hard to get privacy after the fact once something's out it's hard to take it back we have to design our values into the protocols anybody remember this I don't know what that guy's running away from kind of running away from a walled garden AOL was a service walled garden and it lost it was huge it was massive actually meaning and for the day but tcp/ip one because it wasn't a service it was a protocol a decentralized protocol nobody could keep you off the internet all you had to do is find somebody it was connected who would let you connect to them that's it protocol the thing what happened we got online and ran into a big wall garden right service there's a difference between building services and building protocols and right now we're living in a world where we chose to join up with a bunch of services and we're living with the ramifications of that we've figured out that some of our values aren't being upheld by the services but if we create protocols instead then everybody can come and bring their own values with them cypherpunks have a few success stories in the 90s crypto was classified as a munition by the US government just like you nuclear bombs you couldn't export it gave the government a lot of and we won that's why you have encryption in your web browser it's controversial but cypherpunks created the dark web this is a way for everybody to surf the web anonymously to get back that freedom so no one can track you you can do what you want to do different jurisdictions have different ideas about what you should be allowed to do online we don't think that's how it should be you should get to decide that's what tor browsers for sorry for Punk's create a bit torrent some industries really hate BitTorrent but they couldn't shut it down you know why it's a protocol not a service Napster was a service BitTorrent it's protocol cypherpunks created Bitcoin - this is our hits list all right bitcoin is a protocol it's a way to make transactions possible where nobody else gets to control your transaction it's a way to have a currency issued where nobody gets to screw with the value of the currency unlike every other currency in human history we can embody our values into the future of the internet of everything that we do but we have to build protocols not just services so for the entire history of humans we've had this kind of interesting innovation methodology called biological evolution that's how you got opposable thumbs and two eyes and that ability to appreciate music all right but something happened along the way you used to just have to die to innovate through successive generations of sex and gamma-rays you get variations and mutations and then with survival of the fittest you kill off the ones that don't work as well that's how you got here it worked really well right but then something happened once we got to the top of the food chain once we became the dominant thing in the world we killed off the very mechanism that got us here used to have to die to innovate now you have to innovate or die the biological evolution that got us here no longer exists humans don't evolve that way anymore really we have to use our brains this is an unproven methodology we don't even know if it's gonna work but we have no choice we have to use our brains to make good decisions about our future for almost the entire history everybody had to work just to keep us going but at some point probably with the Industrial Revolution we got a little more effective more efficient now you kind of got to ask yourself you know do we need all these extra humans now don't get me wrong I'm not gonna tell you which ones are extra and if you want that job probably you should be the first one to go yeah no it's actually an amazing and beautiful thing possibly the most incredible thing humans have ever done we chose the sanctity of human life we chose to let everybody live regardless of their fitness right I think it's the right choice it's beautiful and it's amazing it's not the only choice we could have made we've chosen that right but it doesn't come without a cost right along the way we got so efficient that not everybody had to work all the time you got a little bit of free time now we didn't squander it we were very resourceful and we invented the entertainment industry books movies music video games elections everything that we do to fill our free time right but at some point I think we hit peak entertainment alright and now this really important thing is starting to happen a robot is coming to do a whole bunch of the work that you do and you kind of got to figure out well what is it I'm supposed to be doing here watching more Netflix I mean I know you all want to watch more Netflix this is Maslow's hierarchy of needs it's a way of thinking about what humans need to feel fulfilled look at the bottom of this pyramid these are physical needs you know the basic stuff you need to be alive think about where technology is helping breathing food warmth we have technologies for that you know heaters sex we have condoms and vibrators go low higher employment health we have all kinds of technology for health this is what I call quantity of life issues these are the kinds of problems that we're trying to solve with technology and we're really good at it in fact we're gonna solve all of them but keep going friendship family there's no app for that whereas technology helping sexual intimacy using technology for that you're probably doing it wrong self-esteem confidence achievement in Silicon Valley I think a lot of times we're a little disingenuous about this we act like we're gonna solve every problem in the world were not these are what I call quality of life issues and from the front lines of inventing new technology I'm here to tell you we don't know what the hell to do about that stuff not saying technology will never help but right now Maslow's highest level is called self-actualization meaning and life creativity problem-solving I don't have any tech for that and you think about you look around you people aren't any happier I've got all kinds of amazing to get new apps on their iPhone there's unlimited cats available on Instagram and it's not just cats people are still hurting why is that these are the happiest people I know there are orphans in Ethiopia who never heard of overcrowding this is their classroom look at this guy you know anybody happier than him I don't I live here on the west coast I got everything I could possibly want more but I got to tell you that kids got something I don't have right I mean and I got pretty good he knows exactly where he fits in when he wakes up in the morning he doesn't know he's doomed on the bottom half of that pyramid but his sense of community he's got it right don't pity these kids they got something you don't have we got something to learn from them robots can only do what we teach them how to do and right now we are terrible role models for robots right thanks this is my daughter she came from that orphanage in Ethiopia now I immediately started raising her with a bunch of American problems so for example we had this robot in our kitchen called Alexa you guys know Alexa yeah I noticed the way she talks to Alexa she's kind of bossy Alexa tell me a joke you know I said I mean she talks to Alexa like I talked to her to be honest I said I said you know there's gonna be a lot more robots coming you might want to be a little nicer to Alexa there probably could use some friends and she actually liked this idea so she started saying you know like Alexa please tell me a joke which really confused Alexa because I guess she wasn't trained on data where you know people were treating her respectfully so that didn't work for a while look I never got this one you pride in either right there's a lot of work to do robots are taking over a lot of it even if we don't invent any new technology for the rest of our lives there's so much work to be done with the amazing powers we have now from machine learning and other things we can spend the rest of our lives deploying that to solve problems and not be finished I think there's plenty of jobs another way of looking at that first slide I showed population growth humans made about 3 billion jobs in the last 200 years I think we can make a few more when a robot takes your job what I hope is that you will rejoice and help us write that manual help us figure out the hard unsolved problem that computers can't do of how do you take care of humans how do you solve for the psychological well-being of a human how do you solve for happiness Computers can't do that right only we can do that my daughter is in a spent most of her you know childhood in a public elementary school she had 30 kids in her class most of the time one teacher she's not like the problem kids so you know she kind of falls through the cracks she comes home bored sometimes it's heartbreaking all right from school all of her teachers have been good but she's they're outnumbered I would trade any of her teachers for a displaced truck driver and a one-to-one student-teacher ratio you don't need a very good teacher if you only have one student all right these are not technology problems these are human values problems we have to decide what is it we want to do with all these technologies we've created and exact our values into the world if it all goes to and becomes gray goo or robots turn you into paperclips you don't get to blame the technology you get to blame humans for doing the wrong thing with the technology a hammer is a tool I can build you a home I can smash your head artificial intelligence is no different it's your job to figure out what to do with the hammer thank you [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Singularity University

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Rating: 4.8771453 out of 5

Keywords: Singularity University, Singularity Hub, Education, Science, leadership, technology, learning, designing thinking, future forecasting, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, SingularityHub, 3D printing, AI, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality, automation, biotechnology, blockchain, computing, CRISPR, entrepreneurship, future, futurist, futurism, future of work, future of learning, genetics, health, healthtech, medtech, fintech, nanotechnology, robotics, talks, Global Summit

Id: NH-lMUBh9lA

Length: 32min 57sec (1977 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 16 2018