The Great Debate: ORIGINS OF THE FUTURE (OFFICIAL) - (Part 1/2)

you good okay now for something completely different sort of one of the things that Origen thinks about is the future the origins of the future now I am highly suspicious of people who call themselves futurists because they're always wrong and I am making a personal policy not to predict the future for any period less than two trillion years from now so this isn't going to be talking about that it's the future as being created today by people who are thinking about the forefronts of Science and Technology and some of the exciting some of the most exciting science that's going on and and so we have a panel and each of them can speak in and will do the same thing we're going to have a little questioning among ourselves you're going to be prepared with wonderful questions non-anonymous wonderful questions and and then we'll take them so let's let's see if that goes now we're going to begin with my colleague George post who is Regents professor in Delhi Webb chair in health innovation and that chief scientist for our new complex adaptive systems initiative here at ASU but in fact George did something else a number of things that are wonderful besides being the before coming here the chief scientist of GlaxoSmithKline he came in and created the Biodesign Institute and I remember actually when I was being recruited to ASU that was a had a huge impact on me because I talked to Michael Crowe and heard some wonderful things but I'm naturally suspicious of university presidents and and not of this one anymore I have to say that but just seeing what had been possible in seven years to create that remarkable Institute from literally nothing what convinced me that this institution could do great things and and so in a sense George is at least responsible for my being here and he's going to talk about well synthetic biology so George and where is the clicker it's probably I see it over here oh here you have it oh I didn't okay I found it yeah likely story so okay so the first cultural difference you'll see is the fact we use slides ah so the Darwin said one very important thing about every living form on the planet he referred to them by this remarkable phase endless forms most beautiful and at that time and still to an extent today what we do is to look at the form and the function but what we're going to be talking about tonight is going beyond form and function to understand what are the codes the remarkable codes that give rise to that diversity and it is the fact that is an extraordinary economy in biological design insofar as the genetic code is identical in terms of its composition DNA for every life form on the planet another that we then essentially have a huge molecular Lego machine that that codes for different motifs as they're called they're what you put together to produce hundreds of thousands of different proteins in you and I those get put together into these molecular machines that then form networks that build this hierarchical order from a single cell up to tissues to organs to organisms and so it is beginning to map the information that gives rise to all of those so it's it from bits so it is the genetic code of each one of us the three billion base pairs that make up this rather unusual individual before us the other issue of course the relevance of this to medicine is the fact that we begin to understand not only the superb biological organization that most of us are privileged to have namely health but what goes wrong so when you have there on the top Boesel villi like fingers in the colon what goes wrong in the dysregulation of those biological networks give rise to a colon cancer that then spreads to the liver as shown there but much more futuristically now by understanding these codes the underline each of the 326 different cell types that exist in your body how do we begin to understand how to drive cells into particular settings and in short engineer novel constructs so basically what I and my colleague Craig Venters are going to be talking about is synthetic biology how do we actually take this new information about how biological systems code for this extraordinary diversity and functional capability either to reprogram existing networks or more futuristically explore bio space namely the dimensions of genetic expression which have not never been sampled in evolution to give rise to novel life-forms and also the capacity to combine the inorganic the abiotic with the biotic and so biology for the first time now begins to link with precision engineering shown in the top two categories they're moving all the way in macro engineering down to angstrom level design all the way now to be able to do similar things with this in the biological domain right now it's limited to micro organisms they have the simplest genomes their remarkable organized organisms they're the most abundant life form on the planet but in terms of genetic engineering they have the simplest genomes for us to be able to modify and there's already a new industry emerging to be able to produce things more effectively more economically by modifying genetic organisms but also to get the bugs to produce things we can't do chemically and then in the context of the fact that we are not alone each of you not exactly a cocktail party fact has 10 more times but bacteria living on you than you have living cells in your body the overall issue now is what goes wrong with those in health and disease and can they in fact be modified much more futuristically we now have large programs begin to look at how do we begin to think about this constellation of how this impacts on the overall question of can we reproduce organ functions so in the bottom you have work which has been done in creating synthetic bladders from living tissue for reimplantation into children who do not have a bladder of that kind the next one up of course is can you produce whole organs then extending the ink inkjet printer analogy can you actually print cells to create composite 3-dimensional tissues and the answer is yes that has already started so what we've got is a convergence synthetic biology is digital biology all biology at the level of DNA is digital so what we're doing is to converge nature billions of years old with its remarkable capacity the code with convergence with software which is 60 to 70 years old so we can use silicon namely artificial programming to make DNA that make something for which there is no evolutionary counterpart and we can encode digital T and a for transfer to any location and so it's that the matter net that we can now think about transmitting information across the internet digital omics such that that can be transmitted to any point on the planet for synthesis and that's a logical point for me to hand over to my colleague Craig as he paraphrases it we can now send biology at the speed of light over over the Internet great well thank you thank you for for that introduction now I'm now Craig is going to carry a carry on with this and it's hard to know how to introduce craig venter without hyperbole but maybe he'll give me the hyperbole so ah he is known perhaps as the man who sequenced the human genome and should be known that way he's the man if I had to think of one person that is more than anyone else I know turning the future into the presence at the speed of light it's craig Venter he's the CEO of the I guess it's called the J craig Venter Institute and he is doing every week you will read new and wonderful things that he's attempting to do from but as some people have argued create the first synthetic life form in the laboratory to creating algae that may produce gasoline and he's going to talk about I have no idea well thank you Lawrence I wasn't sure either so but I think George gave an excellent introduction about the digital world and I described that we've been digitizing biology for the last 30 or 35 years and when we read the genetic code were converting the four-letter code into the ones and zeros in the computer we've been scaling this up faster and faster in 1995 my team sequence the first genome of a living organism 15 years ago we did the first draft of the human genome and we just recently announced we're now scaling up to try and do 100,000 human genomes a year so what took an entire year and 100 million dollars 15 years ago now we can with even smaller teams fewer instruments do things at a totally different scale and this is going to be the real start of digitized medicine and preventive medicine the first thing that will happen within the next decade of you going to any clinical Center if your genome hasn't been sequenced it will be a requirement at the Moores Cancer Center at UCSD we're actually starting with every patient that comes to the Cancer Center will have their genome done and also will do the complete genome on the tumor if they have one as well severally the hospital groups have been already signing up where we have on the order of a million genomes in queue already waiting for the start of new medicine the databases the handling of all this digital information is one of the biggest challenges we're just on the verge of making this possible the sequencing machines are now the easy part of this Illumina and others have made tremendous strides in the last 15 years the computer world is just on the verge of being able to handle this and you'll hear some of that from from our colleagues here but we started to go the other way we asked the question with all this digital information could we start with that in recapitulate biology and that's what we spent part of the last 15 years doing starting with the ones and zeros in the computer as George described with synthetic DNA actually writing the genetic code starting with four bottles of chemicals we can recreate genomes right now of microbes you just heard a team that sequentially replaced a little bit of a time of a yeast chromosome until they had replaced the entire yeast chromosome with synthetic DNA it's going to be a major effort we're working on tools to rewrite the genetic code of stem cells so writing the genetic code is going to go through the same evolution that sequencing DNA did it's starting out slow it's certainly not expensive it was a big deal for us to write 1 million letters of genetic code to get the first synthetic cell in theory design should be very simple except one of the quotes that's been out there from me for about 20 years on the internet is we don't know about biology and we still don't even though many of the panelists here tried to change that so that when we try to design a species of from scratch it's taken us about 5 years to do this because in every genome about 10 to 20 percent of the genes or of unknown function and even our minimal cell that we've been designing and trying to build about 20 to 40 genes or of unknown function so it's kind of hard to design something from scratch when you don't know what they do my uncle was a designer of the 767 and I said I was up in Seattle talking up there when my book came out and I said imagine of designing a Boeing aircraft they didn't know what 20% of the parts did and he said that's exactly how we did it so biology is just catching up with engineering and hopefully can surpass it we're very close to the first cell completely designed in the computer it won't resemble any other cell but it's taken a long time because we're trying to learn these design components and this interchange between the digital world and the biological world is as George alluded to we have a biological teleporter down we have a sending unit we recently tried this out in the Mojave Desert with NASA taking samples sequencing them on-site and sending the data up to the cloud and we have a receiving unit that we call a digital biological converter you know there's a lot of other names for it but that's that's our in-house name for it that takes a digital signal and converts four bottles of chemicals back into the genetic code of whatever that digital signal was right now we can send viruses through the internet that's been happening for a long time but these viruses are a little bit different because we can send you the form of the flu virus that's actually a vaccine we're actually sending this around the world now and we have a digital biological converter that Novartis site in North Carolina that all we have to do is email them the sequence of the latest outbreak in flu and it gets made within 12 hours by our robot and starts in vaccine production this is not science fiction that's not hypothetical when h7n9 outbreaks in China started a group of Chinese scientists sequenced the virus isolated from the patients posted on the internet we downloaded it on the other side of the world and in 12 hours made the 7/9 virus in fact for a very long time our synthetic virus was the only source that the CDC US government and Novartis had because it was very hard to work out all the conditions for shipping the virus out of China to the US and now for the very first time in history we have stockpiled in the u.s. vaccine against h7n9 before the first case has ever occurred in this country this is just the beginning this is just the beginning because now if we build lots of these digital biological converters and they're spaced throughout the world we should be able to completely eliminate future pandemics before they start by within hours making the vaccine sending it in less than a fraction of a second to some distant remote site where they can make it where they have a handful of patients and immediately start vaccination we can send cells this is going to be very important as our friend Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars sending digital biological information to Mars is going to be the most effective way to get things there also it's the most effective way to get things back it as little as you know a tiny fraction of the time that it would take a rocket they'll come back to Earth with samples taken on Mars if we just have a robotic sequence there it could sequence the DNA and send it back in this little 4.3 minutes I said we could remake the Martians in a p4 facility and and therefore unless you like science fiction like Andromeda Strain you'll you know it's a it's very possible so you can download insulin from the internet with our system you can send biology in two directions anywhere in the world and the biggest question is what's going to be the main application for this there's actually spreadsheets that make personal computers really as a viable industry we're trying to get groups at twelve and thirteen-year-olds to tell us what's the most important thing that download from the internet biologically so we know what the future is going to be but it's going to be digital and you can get biology from a converter right in your home in a short period of time thank you Thank You Craig that's so well that's going to despite thank you I was particularly happy that Craig had returned because Craig was also one of our charter members and was here in the 2009 symposium and as I was listening to you I was thinking about the difference between five years ago when he talked about some of these possibilities and today and it's really remarkable how quickly things are changing another person that I'm happy to introduce and I've had the occasion introduced numerous times here a friend and charter member of our origins project is my colleague and friend Richard Dawkins who is perhaps the most famous scientist in the world the best scientific writer in the world in my opinion and in fact inspired the first fan letter that I have a road which he didn't respond to but that's okay he is associated in it went in around the world with the notion of evolution he's explained it better than anyone starting with The Selfish Gene and I think think it's appropriate when one's talking about evolution one of the questions that often happened and Richard Nye as many of you know I've been going around the world together is about the future of evolution and so we thought it'd be appropriate for Richard to talk about that thank you Laura it is indeed the most common question that I get from audiences what's the future of human evolution evolutionists are very reluctant to predict the future if somebody had asked dinosaur when you go extinct when the meteorite hits what do predicts going to happen it would have been impossible to predict that the mammals would produce a range of species which would have looked kind of like the range that the dinosaurs represented and in fact that happened not just once but several times over in Australia in South America in Africa and so on so there is a kind of predictability in evolution but it's not the kind of predictability that were enabled one to say for any particular species like humans what is going to happen statistically the most likely thing to happen to humans is that will go extinct because that's been the fate of the great majority of them enormous majority of species however I think that humans are so unique in all sorts of ways that this may they we might be the one species where you can predict that perhaps we won't go extinct because we have the technology to overcome most of the possible extinction factors possibly even the kind of thing that drove the dinosaurs extinct and it's one of the things that people are thinking about maybe in the future humanity should be working out ways to try to avoid the catastrophe that hit the dinosaurs when a comet or meteorite hit the earth we don't have the ability to do that yet we probably do have the ability to survive as a species even if we do get a catastrophe like that however if we do manage to escape extinction is it possible to predict the kind of future evolution that might happen one of the things that you notice if you look back in human evolution if you look back say three million years the most salient thing you see is that the brain has expanded rather dramatically so might attend a trend like that continue on into the future well in order for that to happen it's necessary that there should be genetic variants in braininess there has to have been genetic variants in braininess or the evolutionary swelling of the brain couldn't have happened it's rather politically unfashionable to suggest that there is genetic variants in braininess but at least it used to be so it must have been and it probably still is but in order for the evolutionary trend to continue it's necessary that the brainiest individuals are the ones who have the most children and and moreover that that would that would have to be sustained for a substantial number of hundreds of thousands of years to have the sort of impact that we're that we're now talking about and that doesn't seem very likely it's if there if there is a selection pressure of a sort of dramatic kind going on at the moment it might be something like selection in favor of incompetence at using contraceptives but again again that's only going to have an evolutionary impact if it's sustained for a very large amount of time and that seems unlikely because what it takes to be incompetent using contraceptives is going to be changing because of the immense repertory of cultural evolution in the vet in the very distant future it seems unlikely that we could diverge into two separate species unless we achieve the sort of geographical isolation that's necessary for speciation to occur and now that we live in a global village with travel all over the place that doesn't seem likely on this one planet if we seed colonies of people on say Mars then I suppose there might be a possibility of speciation because the writ of gene flow between the two planets would be sufficiently slow the other kind of human evolution that we can foresee would be the kind of thing that's inspired by people like Craig and George there might be engineered evolution well we've been engineering evolution for a while in the form of artificial selection for some centuries in the form of artificial selection of agricultural species domestic dogs and so on oddly enough we almost haven't done that with humans I'm glad to say but it's a rather strange thing that we've selected cows and dogs and cabbages and roses but not humans the other half of the day in an equation the mutation half is something that geneticists like craig Venter can do and may well do in the future and who knows what the harvest of that might be thanks Richard okay thanks thank you moving on the topic of evolution our next speaker is my newest colleague Randy Nessie who's the foundation professor of life science and director of the Center for Education medicine and public health at Arizona State University randy is um the the well he's actually was practice medicine for 30 years 40 years only ten or so okay and and he couldn't get it right so he know anyway he he actually has founded what is probably one of the most important areas of medicine right now which is the field of evolutionary medicine it is kind of remarkable when you think about it that evolution which is the basis of biology was not the basis of medicine and it and to his credit Randy has spearheaded that and in fact here it asks you to continue that and we thought I'd ask him to talk about the future of evolutionary medicine or whatever he wants to talk about evolutionary medicine it is Lawrence and I too is here on this stage five years ago and I found it kind of inspiring actually to be with all of those other scientists I hadn't realized before that I was doing origins but I gradually realized that I have been doing origins I'd been trying to do the origins of disease and you have to realize how awkward this is because we all know that evolution makes things that work very well like the eye on their wrists and the heart and everything else but the question I wanted to ask was why didn't natural selection make us better first two years of medical school you see the kidney and if you're not odd you're not paying attention you see the eye you see the heart it never takes a break for five minutes it just keep going and going and going and then you get to the second half of the medical school and you start off with hemorrhoids and you know you move you move on to wisdom teeth and then you're into breast cancer and heart attacks and all the rest and you wonder who designed this thing somebody really was not paying attention or drinking too much or something so I'm hoping to learn from Lawrence and origins to build the field of evolutionary medicine and ASU has helped enormous lis first of all how many of you here already know what evolution medicine is see that see that proves my point this is why it's so important if you don't already know what it is we all should be doing evolutionary medicine there shouldn't be any need for this field all doctors all researchers should already learn all the relevant points of evolution before they get into practice but they don't what is it it's just applying a basic science to medicine so why is it needed because doctors don't learn it they don't even learn the simplest aspects of evolution that are relevant to medicine but we are making progress finally we had we just did a survey of 50 Dean's of medical schools in North America and found out that the number of class hours allocated to evolution is up by about 30 percent in last 10 years but the model number of professors in a medical school who are evolutionary biologists is zero so I guess we have quite a lot of work to do still there are now about 10 books published in the topic you can take a course at most universities but we are still just barely getting started and ASU has really taken the lead with making a larger investment than anyplace else if you come to ASU they use this jargon a word all the time they say Nancy how is evolution going to transform medicine and my response is could you guys give me a break I've only been here a couple of months and besides if you talk about transformation to doctors they're rightly suspicious because physicians have heard so much hype and so many overstated claims they don't want to hear any of it they want the data they want evidence-based the stat and the other thing nonetheless being here and being inspired bro this makes me bold first of all I'm going to give you three things one easy one new and one controversial the easy one and maybe these slides are going still now the first one is practical applications did anybody see Newsweek last week cover story about new approaches to cancer needed and what kind of new approach was the whole story about the whole stories about evolutionary approaches to cancer with the fundamental realization that the cells in the tumor are different from each other and they're revolving and the worst ones are taking over evolutionary biologists are approaching new ways of creating antibiotics that don't result in resistance and we're realizing that most of the disorders in modern hospitals like multiple sclerosis and breast cancer and heart disease simply were not present for our ancestors the second new idea is that we should be asking not only why one person gets a disease but why all members of the species share traits that make us vulnerable to disease and this is somewhat surprising evolution can explain maladaptation as well as an apt ation so why do we have wisdom teeth why do we have the appendix why is the birth canal so narrow really this is what women really want to know why are the coronary arteries so narrow wire is multiple sclerosis epidemic now why has diabetes 10 times more frequent than it was just 40 years ago why has Crohn's disease so much more common I'm not going to try to answer those up here right now but those are the kind of questions everybody is after and they're a different category of question that's been asked before every vertical textbook needs an extra section about every disease not just what the cause is about what if one person gets the disease and other doesn't but with an explanation for why we all get vulnerable to these diseases the third is the most controversial it's not supposed to be controversial I'm going to try to not make it controversial but the big transformation previously in medicine the giantest one was getting rid of vitalism people used to think that bodies are fundamentally different from machines because they have some mysterious sale on Vittal some kind of force in them that's different from anything else in machines and that was a very useful advance it made us start thinking about the mechanisms of the body but now I think we can go beyond that and have a proper evolutionary view of the body and realize that the body is not in fact a machine it was not designed it was shaped by natural selection and it's fundamentally different machines were designed bodies were evolved machines have blueprints as one master print bodies have genomes and by the way there is no one normal genome there are just genes that create genomes machines are for human purposes bodies are for maximum reproduction but machines have discrete parts bodies have parts of em go into each other and especially there's massive redundancy quick example organic complexity is my theme here is fundamentally different from the complexity and machines this is what we all memorize a medical school about the clotting cascade really nice but the reality of it is this I'm so glad we don't have to memorize that but we should be showing our students that that's the reality this is organic complexity and a conclusion is very simple evolution is a crucial basic science for medicine we're just getting started for those of us who would like to join there's lots of information at evolutionary medicine org Thanks thank you Thank You Randy that's one of the for me the great things about being at ASU is is watching great people come here and I'm really excited about this and it's been it's been it just continues to go on I was very excited a few years ago when I was fortunate enough at the World Science Festival to share a panel with with Eric Horvitz who's sitting next to me and I was amazed at what I saw and you're going to see and interestingly so Eric is the distinguished scientist and managing director at Microsoft Research Lab you've probably heard of Microsoft and he has been working on machine intelligence as we move from from the future of humans the future machines it's really appropriate to go to Eric there's something I found up today about his history that makes it even more appropriate he did a joint PhD MD at Stanford PhD MD but his PhD know when you do a PhD MD it's always in bio physics biology biochemistry bio something he asked to do his PhD in computer science so most people who do an MD are interested in operating on people he clearly had other interests Eric thanks very so so people have have long sought to understand the nature of mind the seat of the soul the foundations of human intelligence and I believe that the answers will come from studies of computational intelligence exploring the foundations of mind that come with computation understanding the computational basis now we can take hints from biology and I often like to look at biology at origins in fact at the earliest nervous systems which were quite simple they basically linked perceptions to actions typically but with the buffeting of of evolutionary pressure and that swelling we heard about we have new capability to representation action between the perception action loop and rich richer perception and artificial intelligence research machine intelligence directions are exploring each of these areas taking hints often from biology for example we're building rich perceptual systems that link vision acoustics speech and other modalities for learning and reasoning I've been amazed by some leaps in the ability of systems for our new algorithms we have to learn multi-level representations for example in this case we're looking at levels of abstraction of attributes in imagery learn from thousands of photos and thousands of classes and these representations are actually leverage they're used to to recognize objects almost a human level now and reflection in my earlier work I was fascinated to learn that one we pushed on decision-making systems under time balance and memory bounds even hard problems the mathematics implied the evolution in our labs of a meta-level reasoning system systems did better when they could reflect about the base level reasoning even at the expense of the time they had to do the reasoning and this had implications for reflection in people so we've woven these kinds of things together in a variety of ways I and other colleagues and teams to create new kinds of systems that could for example have social intelligence understand situations attention intention the flow of a conversation I'll just do a player video now which is which captures a working system or set of systems that you'd see if he came to visit me at Microsoft Research where you're greeted by a robotic system that gives directions using a language model the system actually understands almost anything about the the building rooms people and so on and it gestures with its hands generates from a map directions as to how to get for example in this case to my room using some of those myths they talked about hi I was expecting you the robot told me you were coming are you here for the five o'clock meeting with Eric no I'm sorry I thought you were here for that meeting could you please swipe your badge Eric is not here at the moment let me look at his calendar to see if I can tell where he is his calendar says he should be at a meeting in his office now so I'm actually not sure where he is he will probably be back in around 15 minutes or so would you like to leave him a note or maybe come back later well come back later okay you could try sending him an email message I expect him to look at his email in around 10 minutes guess I'll see you later then bye bye thank you hi hi Eric two people stopped by to see you I said you'd be back in around 15 minutes right catch you later bye bye Thanks now I've come to rely on Monica Daley I'm not gonna fire Jill just yet but she's fabulous and she's actually reasoning I'm calling her she and her reasoning about multiple distinctions learn from data from over a decade of watching my comings and goings when I went on that show up when I'll next read email where I might be at the moment she might get confused at times for example now the future of machine intelligence I believe is a really deep symbiosis with human intellect like we call this complimentary computing and it's being applied in a variety of ways right now we've been working very closely with astronomers for example to use the best of machine perception looking at galaxies a million of them are so in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and people volunteers to look at and help tag galaxies for example make new discoveries and find planets for example in supernovae well turns out that we don't have to use people for everything and we've built systems that learn when best to call upon people people's cognition is our scarce resource right now and we can do a great deal of work at a fraction of the human resources you can imagine in the future a variety of ways to mesh machine reasoning and decision making and learning with human decision-making as in this trauma care scene here somewhere thinking cap that's actually me back during graduate school days let me just say that now we're seeing new high stakes applications now now the da Vinci system many of you are familiar with is now being used for quite a few robotic surgeries many surgeries are becoming robotic by robotic typically this means the direct connection but a group at Johns Hopkins close colleagues of ours has been looking at robotic systems of the future that can recognize different gestures and surgery for example and then come up with a mixed initiative manual mode with signaling and the system taking over in a back and forth kind of a tango a dance between human and machine intellect and this is the future of I think real precision surgery you want to have your surgeon but maybe wouldn't mind some help from a fabulous fabulous machine machine intelligent system that's learned too quite a bit from thousands of cases across the world for example now let me just summarize by saying back to what this swelling we heard about I have to sibling Nova systems up here the medicinal leech nervous system and the human nervous system they're actually very closely related from the point of view of the biology and it's amazing how little we know about even the simplest system is the one on the left here working with colleagues at San Diego that use fluorescent dyes they can almost light up all neurons as this medicinal leeches thinking about what to do next now we built tools that can analyze that data it's quite a lot of data to start to infer circuitry to start to gain insight at what's going on we know very little and for all the brain science going on we almost know nothing about cognition in terms of the foundational substrate what's really going on from the point of view of machine intelligence the reflection representation for example the inference and this is this is actually me being looked at at a Caltech study I volunteered well as visiting down there giving a talk they put me into the chamber and they were studying look at they were looking at ambiguity so I was making decisions and they're looking at where the ambiguity was like where they saw a blood flow in regions that showed differences in how I deal with ambiguity or uncertainty or generally and college at CMU are now looking at that leech better be quiet it's popping up there are looking at how words are represented through fMRI studies words never seen before I never tested before by the system in this case how they represented across the brain where you the CMU colleagues can actually predict the patterns at which the brain is lighting up when it when a word that's never been tried before is looked at given words that it knows about from the past so moving forward it's pretty clear to me that machine intelligence will not only be partners in doing science in helping people in a variety of ways both explicitly like that my virtual avatar Monica implicitly as well as really understanding the foundations of mind which might be one of the last bastions of mystery and spirits thanks thank you okay the future the next speaker is actually someone I've been trying to get here since the beginning and she kept saying no so we had to get her father it's a replacement one year but finally Esther Dyson managed her incredibly hectic schedule Esther is sort of one of the early as we're thinking about moving for people to machines some people have speculated that the Internet itself is going to be a an organism and and and I saw I've begun to think about who I would like to think about talking in general about these issues and Esther came to mind because she's very thoughtful in fact one of the early internet theorists so successful as an Internet theorists that she became an active Internet investor which made her rich enough to become a cosmonaut as some of you know it's a high price tag and and Esther trained to be a cosmonaut and fly up but unfortunately was a backup cosmonaut so while she did all the training she didn't go up there but happily not not yet not yet you still have okay did you have to put a deposit down I'm waiting okay to retire on Mars but not yet okay but lately in the context of thinking about the internet and communities esther's has decided to move on to a question which relates to what we've heard about which is the issue of health and communities so to talk about all those things Esther Dyson great thank you yeah to to set the scene I am NOT a scientist my parents both are and I was smart enough not to try to compete so I went into business got interested in the Internet and ultimately as an investor got tired of people approaching me with apps to find friends to go to concerts with I thought there have to be some more interesting problems so I got more and more interested in health and as you heard this session is about transcending our origins our origins have produced people that really love and salt and sugar who when the food is available eat too much of it who are short-term thinkers they grab things while they can and that's really useful in the past but now we live in a time where there's too much of everything in abundance and unfortunately we're getting better and better at creating short-term things that are actually destroying our lives by making us unhealthy and I won't go into that in great detail but what I'm about to do the immediate future on Thursday is the launch of wellville which is a contest modeled on the XPrize five years five metrics five communities competing to become dramatically healthier and so how many of you have these quantified self devices just raise your hands wave your weight not a very quantified group that anyway market a niche the theory is not that we're going to give quantified self devices to everybody they're going to get on social networks and resist temptation the theory is actually that we need to change the environment fundamentally that's really difficult as Mayor Bloomberg proved to do in a large city let alone a country so we're looking for five small communities to be the experiment the rest of the United States is going to be the control and over five years these places are going to change their school lunches they're going to do employer wellness programs at Wazzu they're going to improve their health care system they're going to figure out how to reduce smoking and on their behalf we're going to talk to food companies and say we have five Demilitarized Zone places where you can test your healthy foods that your PR people tell us you would really like to sell to everybody but your shareholders near competition won't let you so yeah thank you now this is not going to be easy either for us or especially for the five communities but we have to believe that we know what to do we know that diets work we know that exercise helps we know all this stuff but all these interventions have been like pouring cups of coffee into a swimming pool they sort of vanish yes you can see a little difference if you do a regression analysis you can see the people who walk to transit are ten percent more likely not to get obese than people who drive in their cars but you don't you don't see it in the real world so we're going to be pouring putts of pots of coffee into bathtubs and that our hope is after five years it'll become easier to make those changes on a big scale because people will have both the evidence and the inspiration that it works thank you thank you so um mark your calendar for five years from now yeah you'll be back uh well we're not we're in Year Zero yeah this year zero okay so thank you little table through the math yeah okay I'll be back well our last speaker I was again privileged to be on a panel with in Chicago recently and it overcame my natural skepticism of of well of in general as I told to have skepticism about people who call themselves sutures some science fiction writers call themselves futurists but the really good ones don't write and Kim Stanley Robinson is perhaps one of the world's best-known science fiction writers he's won every major award in science fiction Hugo nebula galaxy supercluster black hole all the Dewar's I don't know what they're all named but he's won them all and and I discovered when we chatted a and concrete thinker about the present and its implications for the future and I thought it would be an interesting complement to what we had here to ask him to come and and speak to us Thank You Lawrence well we are a relatively new species you can say roughly a hundred to two hundred thousand years and you can say roughly about three thousand generations and that's good on the shorter end of this because we've got about three thousand seats in this theater so you can imagine looking around that if each one of you was a generation and we represent the whole of human history here and imagine the person on your left is your parent and the person on your right as a child and it goes on and on like about a century every four people thousands upon thousands of years and I think this conference has been missed titled to say can we transcend our origins I think it we should say can we live up to our origins because those generations were great they were courageous resilient resourceful adaptable brilliant they were scientists they were teachers without writing word of mouth oral teachers which is why we are so good at following stories why we're addicted to stories and a big part of our brain is expert at listening to stories and at telling stories because that's how knowledge was transmitted over an enormous amount of time with a great stability and even growth of a high tech society that was just using stone bone leather and plant materials so um were we violent then well it was the same genome as now and were violent now so we probably were violent then but the idea that we were more violent then I don't think there's the evidence to support that at all the truth is only the first couple rows here would have writing and only the first part of the row here would actually have a sense of the earth as a global civilization of all the people on earth together the global village which is a transformative awareness but all the generations before that what we can say is that we have always been capable of all behaviors from good to bad in a mix that we choose at every point now we can also say that when we're under stress when we're scared when we're angry then we tend to get more violent and we're about to enter a very stressful century so there's a reason to be concerned and there's reason to discuss what we've discussed today it's a strange moment in history and when you look forward like a science fiction writer which we all do all the time the the spread of possible futures is so wide that it's a little disorienting and destabilizing to try to think about it you can tell a couple different kinds of stories and now it becomes really important what kind of story we tell ourselves about what kind of creatures we are and what we could become there's one story that is simply the story of the collapse and maybe some of you came to this conference that lawrence organized about climate change as part of this origin project so and i don't want to spend more than a second outlining the collapse scenario because we all kind of know it already but if we don't control carbon if we underpriced the environment consistently and ruin natural resources if we don't stabilize our population and if we don't come to global solutions and and and stay in the nation state system then there can be a collapse that would be a mass extinction event and the human population would drop and at that after that would be a post-traumatic stress disorder civilization very bad on the other hand a utopian possibility is possible where 7 billion people could live on this planet with adequate food water shelter clothing health care education and all of the ecosystems healthy all the other big mammals of doing well that is actually achievable and this is another scientific question is that really achievable well you look at the data and you can find that yes it is achievable so since we I my feeling is since we can do it we should do it and that's why I'm a utopian science fiction writer what in essence we pick a stop a positive story for the history to come and then we enact it so this is not an abnormal activity individuals do it all the time I can't tell you how many scientists have said to me well I write science fiction - it's called a grant proposal and they're right about that because there's a Futurity in a grant proposal there's speculation there's saying it will be this way and college students going to college are telling us a utopian story I'll go to college it will give me the expertise to get a good job I'll live a good life a utopian science fiction story that we then tried to enact globally can we do it as a civilization it's an open question about I think we have to try it so very quickly utopian science fiction stories out of my tradition Edward Bellamy wrote a book called looking backward from the year 2000 this is in the late 19th century and Bellamy clubs sprang up all over the nation and people talked about the ideas in this utopian book and the progressive movement in American politics at the turn of the last century was in fact influenced by Bellamy and so a American American utopian novel in influenced American history HG Wells he said he wrote utopias from 1905 to 1945 so one of the worst set of decades in human history he kept writing hopeful stories about how things could be better scientific meritocracy people taking care of each other in 1945 when they reconstructed the world order they were using HG Wells's ideas about social welfare about justice and technocracy so there's a science fiction writer that influenced world history last one my favorite will because really one of the best American science fiction writers it's a very short story that government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth that's future tense future imperative it's telling us what we ought to do it's a story that people have died for and so we can't give up on that story in this generation because there should be rooms and rooms of human generations to come that we have to pass that particular story along to so it's going to be a very tough century but we have to tell this positive story and enacted it will be kind of crazy like a circus act where we're like on a bicycle on a tightrope and we're all together like the flying Wallenda brothers on this bicycle trying to keep balance so we don't fall off into the Grand Canyon and there's people jumping on our balancing being I'm saying and well I don't believe in this we're actually on the ground and other people jumping on the other side saying well I'm going to fly up to heaven so I don't care what you do and yet we still have to keep our focus we have to keep our focus we have to keep our balance and we have to get to the global sustainable permaculture utopian civilization that is out there waiting for us well if that hasn't provoked some questions this what we've just heard I don't know what will so we're going to do the same thing I hope you've been getting them ready and bring them down now

Channel: ShirleyFilms

Views: 108,542

Rating: 4.8445091 out of 5

Keywords: ASU, ORIGINS, ASU Origins, Initiative, Project, 5 year, anniversary, Great Debate, Transcending our Origins, Violence, Humanity, The Future, Lawrence M. Krauss (Author), Richard Dawkins (Author), Steven Pinker (Author), richard wrangham, Erica Chenoweth, Adrian Raine, John Mueller, Sarah Methew, Craig Venter (Author), Kim Stanley Robinson, Esther Dyson (Author), Eric Horvitz, George Poste, Randolgh Nesse, Black Chalk Productions

Id: 8q1t8jeG8hc

Length: 56min 35sec (3395 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 15 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/SexyJanitor]

I started watching this not expecting much but the topics that the subject matter experts talked about kept me really engaged and excited for the future! Thank you for sharing this.

[u/awFirestarter]

From the Origins Project site:

The second panel, The Future: From Medicine and Synthetic Biology to Machine Intelligence, will feature scientists and notable experts Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Esther Dyson, Eric Horvitz, George Poste and Randolph Nesse discussing the future of new biomedical and robotic technologies and their impact on humanity.

Part 2