The Next 30 Digital Years | Kevin Kelly

[Music] good evening I'm Alexander Rosen the executive director here at long now hopefully most of you didn't have to go to SF Gia's before getting rerouted he how many people went to SF Jazz tonight all right yeah so it's really great to be back here at the herps they've renovated it if you haven't checked out the murals they're extra awesome now a couple announcements as you know now the entire back catalogue of the videos of these talks are available on our website and we have a new iPad app to help you enjoy them so please do check that out also I yeah works also on Apple TV also on October 4th we're having our first member summit and so any of you are there any members here nice so yeah on October 4th we're going to the content that we have been generating for you it's now your turn to generate content for us and so we're gonna we've been working with Brady Forrest at ignite to do a series of ignite talks so please check your email there's a link there where you can submit your ideas for ignite talks 5-minute talks or the 20 slides cycle through at 15 seconds each it's pretty it's a really great way to get a lot of ideas out fast so submit your ideas for talks and we'll be curating those and then we'll also just have kind of an unconference style format where people can sign up for topics and tables and really start to get to know each other which we know many of you from around the country as well as just in this area just from judging how many people really want to hang out after these talks and and talk to each other we really want to provide a venue for that so please check that out and tonight's long short a short film that exemplifies long term thinking was suggested by Kevin and these that you will campaign if you remember from from 1993 was both prophetic prophetically right and prophetically wrong at the same time so don't blink this is only a 30-second spot but it gives you an idea of what the inevitable was in 1993 have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away across the country [Music] without stopping for directions [Music] or sent someone a fax from the beach and the company that'll bring it to you AT&T thank you stir brands from a long now foundation a reminder on these question cards Kevin Kelly is not filtering the questions tonight Kevin Kelly isn't answering the questions tonight so Alexander Rose will be peering at these things in the dark in the front row trying to read them legibility counts and briefness counts that's what gets to the stage and I'm up here reading them trying to listen to Kevin at the same time and short and readable is good what happens if you apply the long term thinking to fast-moving digital technology the answer is Kevin Kelley [Music] good evening so I wanted to talk a little bit about where technology is going and a lot of what is coming is really not at all predictable but there's a certain aspect that is and I wanted to dwell on that I think that there is a tilt to technology that comes from the fact that these are physical systems and that there's a bias in the way that the circuits and electrical wires and chips work and that bias makes reoccurring patterns and these patterns form a general direction into things and we can look at these long term directions which are in some senses inevitable but the particulars are not the specifics are not so we would have a kind of large form like a quadruped ed that is inevitable in biology and in mechanical world but the specific zebra is not the the particular species is not as you can think of this as sort of almost like rain falling on a valley coming down in the path of a particular drop as it goes down the valley towards a river that pathway is that all not predictable it's inherently random but the general direction is inevitable which is downward and that kind of a gravity that pull is what I'm talking about and and then so we could say in a certain sense that they're large forms of telephones were inevitable but the iPhone was not or that the internet was inevitable but Twitter was not so there are 12 of these kind of trends that they've kind of managed to bring together but they're kind of braided into each other and those forms or could be the second in many different ways so the twelve are kind of arbitrary in some in some fashion or another and I want to talk about them because they're all kind of interdependent on each other they feed each other they're kind of self-supporting and so I wanted to talk about those twelve as quickly as I can because there's 12 of them first one is is becoming and becoming is the general state that we're all in right now we're all moving from something to something else we're becoming something and that has now been applied to the technological world as well and so the large form shift that we've seen in the past couple decades is this movement from solid things physical things tangible things nouns that are being made soft that they're being there's a move to the D materialized world that there's the world of the soft the world of verbs the world of process and so we're moving from products to services and that's that's been a general shift and that shift to this new world where things are kind of liquid this liquidity is actually something that shapes everything and in some ways and forms all these other trends that I'm talking about so we have we have things that are flowing we have the ability to decentralize things because they're kind of liquid we have the sense that things are always in moving in flux and so that's the general trend that we're all in a certain sense in this new liquid environment where we're biology and technology is much softer more organic so to speak much more like a fluid than before and that means that in certain sense that all of us have to become newbies perpetual newbies because we're always being upgraded we ourselves have to keep upgrading we're always having to learn and unlearn and relearn and that's the permanent state that we're in so this sense in which all the things that we're making or in some sense is becoming is something that will inform these other trends I'm talking about I think the most important of these twelve that I'm talking about now is a something I called cognate I that's the word that's an archaic word that means to make smarter and it's because we don't have any other good words for that likes martini or and to smarten pie so to cognate I means to make smarter it's make things more intelligent to bring to the world of the hard this liquidity of smartness to to make them more like something that learns something that that's something that changes in an in in a very orderly way and so we already course have this we kind of know it also as artificial intelligence it's now president working behind the back room going through x-rays diagnosing them better than a human doctor could going through legal evidence better than a human peril or could and flying our planes when you fly long distance of the human pilots only flying for seven or eight minutes the rest of time the AI is flying and in our cars if you have a modern car today you have a little tiny AI chip in the brakes which is braking better than you are that's what we have right now that's there we don't think of it as AI because generally these are things that AI is basically something we defined is that what we want to do and once we can do it it's called machine learning or something else we now have the example of alphago from Google beating the world's best go master so we had a sense in which this is not just brute force there's something creative here and recently Google was teaching its AI deep mind to learn how to play video games if you're playing a video games these days you're playing against the AI half the time but they taught how to learn how to play a video game which is profoundly different they taught it they by showing you the game and it learned how to play so this meta level of learning how to learn is profoundly different it's artificial smartness is artificial learning and I call it may be artificial smartness because intelligence has a lot of baggage around it to color artificial intelligence we mean lots of different things by it but artificial smartness is something we understand your calculator is smarter than you are in the arithmetic GPS unit is smarter than you are now in spatial navigation Google is smarter than you are in long-term recall and so the point about those kinds of smartness is that they're not human like they're not like they don't think like the way we think and so the reason why we want to put AI into a self-driving car is because it's not driving like us it's not being distracted about worrying about whether it left the stove on it's it's only engineered to really focus on driving and so it's an inhuman like kind of intelligence and it doesn't have consciousness I'm not talking about that in fact they may the fact that it doesn't have consciousness is sort of its benefit we actually may advertise these things as consciousness free okay because that is actually something you don't want in a lot of a is the point is is that our own intelligence has a very poor understanding of what intelligence is we think of intelligence as this as IQ which is just a one single dimension as a single vector a single growing loudness and you start with something that's very small like an intelligent IQ of a mouse of a chimpanzee of a not very smart person of like average person like myself and then a genius and that this is getting louder and louder but in fact this is completely wrong our own intelligence is much more like a symphony of different notes played on different instruments and each of those instruments of cognition is a different type of thinking there's deductive reasoning there's spatial reasoning there's emotional intelligence there's all these different varieties of intelligences which are composed and compromising aggregated into what we call human intelligence and that course can vary from person to person that makes it a little different and then in the animals of course it's a similar case well they have a mixed and they may not have as many they may have some fewer but in some cases those particular notes instruments are actually may exceed ours and loudness they may be louder than ours in certain dimensions a squirrel actually has a long term memory that exceeds ours because it has to remember where it buries all those nuts and so when we engineer the chances and machines we're also going to do likewise where we're going to create many new instruments and we're going to gradually add more and more of them but some of those instruments will again exceed us in particular dimensions and those are the things that we are going to use them for because they are greater than us in certain dimensions and because they think differently than us so it's really kind of a misnomer to say something is smarter than humans because what does that mean it depends on what dimensions you're talking about I think we're going to undergo a Copernican revolution in the idea of intelligence which we imagine right now is serve our intelligence which is mistakenly called a general-purpose intelligence we believe is kind of there with universal general problem-solving intelligence and around us or all these other satellite kind of intelligences but in fact we don't have a general-purpose intelligence our intelligence is very very specific it was evolved for our needs as humanoids on this planet and I think once you begin to populate all the different kinds of intelligences our our will realize that there are many maybe a million different ways of thinking maybe hundreds of thousands of different kinds of minds that we could make artificially and all these different kinds of minds will in fact perform different functions in fact there may be some problems in business and science that are so difficult for us as humans to solve they may exceed our capacity as humans to solve them we may have to solve them with a two-step process where we invent a kind of a mind that can work with us to solve those problems I think in the long term what we discover is that out in the scallop sea of all possible Minds we're way out on the edge we're not at the center we're at the edge we have a very peculiar distinctive kind of intelligence in our job right now in the next century even is to find and discover and invent as many different kinds of thinking as possible so I think of these as alien intelligences because their job is to think differently so the second thing about this cognate I is that it's going to birth basically the second industry revolution the first Industrial Revolution was enabled I would argue by something I would call artificial power which is an ability to take fossil fuels and steam engines and to make a power that far exceeded our ability to use our muscles and animal muscles so anything built in the agriculture area era had to be built with human animal muscle that little is very limiting now with artificial power we could make highway skyscrapers railways factories churning out endless roads refrigerators that's all been enabled because of artificial power and when you drive down the road in your your car you're harnessing effectively 250 horses with the flick of a wrist okay that's the power that we have available and we can actually distribute that power on an electric grid so that every home farmstead factory had access to this power and it was utility a commodity that anybody could purchase just by plugging something in so even a farmer on a homestead could have a great wild idea where you could take something and you could Electrify it you could take like a manual water pump and then instead of using human muscles to pump water hey we'll add electricity to it will Electrify it and then you have the electric pump and you multiply that by a thousand a hundred thousand a million times and that's the Industrial Revolution that's what it was all about was this this huge explosion that we could make all these things that surround us that we could never have done with our own muscles and that speed and scope and scale was now available to anybody who wanted to purchase electrical commodity so now we're gonna do the same thing we're gonna take that electric pump and we're gonna add artificial mine order force intelligence artificial smartness to it and we're gonna have smart pumps and we're gonna multiply that by a thousand a million times and that's this new era where we can take intelligence so in addition to the hunt 250 horses that you have in your car you're now you're going to add 250 minds to it and that 250 minds in 250 horse that is a self-driving car that's the robocar as it goes across and so we can imagine like what would you do if you could have a thousand Minds at your disposal 24 hours a day seven days a week all the time doing something and so this IQ this this AI is when it's flow across the cloud in a grid it's gonna become a commodity a utility and anybody could purchase this AI to do what they wanted to do just like you can purchase electricity okay and so for me the formula for the next 10,000 startups is very easy take X add a I take take the most unlikely thing you could possibly imagine and they add AI to it take like taxicabs at AI uber okay so the more the more unlikely I think the more the more powerful that transformation is going to be so today right this minute right now right after we're done you can log on to Google and you can actually purchase some of Google's AI it's for sale six cents 100 hits it's doing these things like being able to you can query it ask what color the ball is what color dress does a girl have on it'll answer so that's available to anybody right now and when this happens as this is happening there's a concern about our work and what we will do when Gary Kasparov the World Chess Champion lost to deep blue the reigning supercomputer at that time he realized that he was at a disadvantage because he did not have access to the same database of every chess move as deep blue did so he started a chess league where you could play any style he wanted - including playing with AI and he called that Centaurus where you were working next with a eyes in robots and today the best chess players in the world are not a eyes they're not humans they're the team the center of a is humans and the best doctor dargah machines in the world are not Watson sir in AI nor a doctor it's the team of doctors plus AI so we're gonna be basically paid by how well we work with a is next to them again they're their intelligence will be complimentary in many ways to ours and so I think the way I would suggest that we enter is to understand that we're going to be working with these things not rather than against them so that's cognate I this third trend the third force is interacting and basically if things are not interacting we consider them broke in these days so we want and we crave and we're moving towards increase increasing interaction with the things that we make and the ultimate I think is in sense of where we're using gestures or whole bodies in the way that the Tom Cruise character and the merit and Minority Report was conducting data it was no longer just his fingertips there's no longer interacting in a limited way it was this entire body and of course we saw that in Iron Man as well but there's lots of little nano radar chips that can actually read micro gestures on our fingers and then there's the ultimate in Direction VR this is me on the rights in 1989 was jaren when you're trying out virtual reality and I really believed at that time it was really amazing and transformative I thought it was going to happen in five years I was wrong but it was it was really good and the problem was simply that that year cost the equivalent of a million dollars today and what's happened in between that time and now the the technology is not that much better but smartphones have made it three orders of magnitude cheaper so the technology for the VR is the three major components are actually embedded in a smartphone and when they became commodities the location and tracking the gyroscopes the tiny screens which are now in your eyepieces and the video processing that that has now been borrowed by the VR and now you can have something that's almost at the consumer level and if now good enough to improve the thing about VRS is that it will become I think the next platform after smartphones and there's two kinds just to kind of clue you in there's the immersive type which is where you put the goggles on it completely closes you and you're in another world and then there's the mixed version the mixed reality where you have a clear spectacle in looking around and you see inserted into the vision of the room or outside of the office these virtual objects or virtual people that's called mixed reality and mixed reality is actually the more technologically challenging to do if you can do a mixed reality you can actually do virtual reality just by painting the glass black okay and so if you can do one mixed reality can do the other and mixed reality is has tremendous potential in terms of Education where you're understanding how a heart works maybe you're making designing virtual objects you can actually walk around and and handle on or you can have virtual screens and this is Microsoft's vision where you are populating your cubicle with as many screens as you want and also virtual colleagues of course we now know what augmented reality looks like we can see that we don't even need goggles in a certain sense we can actually use a 3d positioning of the phone and so there's going to be many varieties of this idea of mixing in taking the digital world and the physical world and embedding the two together and that's a great example of sort of where we're going with that and the other thing that we've discovered is not just how you see 50% of the experience is coming from your hands your ears your skin the other parts of your body is it's a tactile thing we believe in reality not just because what we see because of what we feel and what this happens and this was a surprise to me as I was trying this out is that when you're in these things you actually feel something you you the the assemblage of the sense that you have something real in front of you or that your you'll place it's not happening in the front of your brain it's happening much deeper behind it deeper in your brain and that when you leave you have the sense of not having seen something but having felt something having experienced something and so I think it moves the currency of the internet from this world of an Internet of information and knowledge to this to this Internet of experiences where the experiences become the currency and and and it's not just dangerous experiences that you couldn't have by yourself but it's it's the idea that there are some experiences like the presence of somebody next to you in in a hospital or seeing a demo right in front of you and being able to to move your hands around to feel it these things change the nature of how we know things and that's the that's what we're getting with it's virtual reality is not the fact that it's looks real if the fact that actually feels real to us and I think that in a sense because when we have virtual presences I was able to try some telepresence --is where actually I felt as if that person was there even though until actually knew they could not be and so I think VR is going to become one of the most social of all the social media it's it's not I mean we're gonna spend a lot of time hanging out sharing experiences downloading experiences creating experiences with other people and we'll be shocked by how how social this is that telepresence is is something that I'm willing to pay for and I think who's gonna be coming fairly soon where you're not just seeing a person like they see on skype but you actually feel as if that person's there and that really enables a whole level of communication that we don't have right now so the social aspect I think is going to be huge the fourth trend I think the fourth force is is this move that once we have this liquidity that flowing of things that we can actually change the nature of how we think we possess them so this was noted by someone else but they noted that uber is the largest taxi cab company in the world does not own any cars Facebook is the world's largest media company it doesn't own any content Alibaba is the world's largest retailer doesn't own any inventory and Airbnb is a world's largest lodging company and owns no real estate so there's something happening about this nature of ownership and I think what's happening is is that oftentimes if things are liquidity and liquid enough if they've can flow fast and immediately then having access to them can often be better than owning them because owning has a whole bunch of responsibilities that are often overwhelming the benefits and so we've moved into an arena where almost very few people buy movies anymore or buy music or buy books or games if you have access to all of them anytime you want it and part of it is having the access to all that's necessary and anytime you want is also very fundamental but there's a general drift in that direction where the benefits of being able to access things Trump's the benefits of owning them and the other advantage of actually seeing what was formerly a product like a car as a service you have access to like transportation is that there are many more ways to turn something into a service than there is to make it into a product that there's sort of a greater fungibility a greater diversity in the ways in which we can turn things into something that you access rather than just something you purchase and so as we think about transportation uber is only one there's five or ten other variations where you could have you could drive people's cars instead of having them drive you you could pull them up you could you could reverse to have a reverse auction for of getting the ride so there are there are many other alternatives that are enabled by the fact that we made something into this service that you access and that's of course is the demand economy it is is that your an infinite number of possibilities to take something and tried to see about what would happen if you moved it from a product into a service so sharing is something we know about I don't want to say too much about it because it's we're filled with it we're surrounded by talk about it but there's several things I wanted to suggest about this a notion that we are increasing the amount of stuff that we share over time and if we looked into 30 years into the future we can imagine us sharing more and more and more what I think is that we're still we didn't hit peak sharing yet we're still at the beginning of the sharing meter in terms of the amount of things that we're going to share the reasons we're gonna share and the ways that we're going to share it and when I say sharing what I really mean is collaborating it's cooperating that's that's the value and that's what this technology is bringing to us we're inventing new ways to collaborate and cooperate at levels and speeds and in dimensions that were never before possible if you think about Facebook 1.5 billion participants yes they're just sharing photos and and and gossip but it's the fact that you have 1.5 billion people collaborating it's some on something together and that's was simply not possible before and will go further from that and so when we talk about sharing it's not just about this idea of like swapping things it's the idea that we're making tools that enable us to cooperate and collaborate in ways that we simply could not before and cooperation is really the whole stepping stone of civilization and human and human innovation in progress it was just increasing the ways in which we can cooperate increasing the complexity so I would say anything that we can imagine that can be collaborated on and cooperating and that's what we're gonna do it will be as we go forward and part of the opportunity that people have is to think about ways in which you could harness eight billion people to do something big and long now maybe do something that took a long time more than a generation to do or we wanted to do it really fast or we want to do it in dimensions that we don't and think about right now so this collaboration on a planetary scale is I think where we're moving to in this sharing dimension and I have to mention a blockchain which is a very complicated thing to explain it means simply that you have a shared ledger a shared way of doing accounting that's not centralized and there are many many things that we could do with that in terms of doing contracts in terms of doing business in terms of distributing trust that was not possible and I only highlight that as a single example of ways in which we're going to figure out how we can share and collaborate and even distribute think things like trust that we had never been able to do before and and that's where we're going with this increasing sharing so um screening you know we have a big screen right here there's little screens in everybody's pockets if you fly there's a screen on the back of every seat there's even in China especially there's buildings have been turned into screens at night and even during the day Times Square I think in the goodness of time almost every flat surface that we make will eventually be covered with some kind of screen because it may be as cheap as paint and there is flexible screens in particularly in the getting thinner and so when people talk about like an e-book we normally think of for something like a Kindle a flat plank but in fact there's no reason why you couldn't have an e-book that was made up of thin pages each of those pages was a screen and that you bound them together into leather binding that was really beautiful and after you finished reading the book you would thump it on your thigh and it would turn into another bucket so you still have all the highly-evolved navigations that we would have from a printed book but they're in a eBook so there's nothing to say that screens have to be flat and rigid they can be on our clothes they could be even floating in air but the point is is that we are moving to the screen and every screen that we look at is looking back at us okay so it's looking at the some of the Samsung Galaxy I think sixes have returned camera that looking at your eye gaze they can tell where you're looking which then can transfer into like a heat map of say a website or a movie or whatever you are staring at and it's telling you where your attention is in fact we can even go further there's a couple companies that have software that can detect your emotion to these 26 or 24 hour emotions and they can tell whether you're distracted whether you're perplexed whether you're frightened whether you're engaged whether you're bored and they can adjust the content to that in many many ways and so it's it's like a it's like talking to a person a little bit in the sense that you're having a conversation you're changing what you say depending on their reaction it's it's - is two-way its conversational and so these screens again will interact with us by looking back at us and they will be part of this larger movement where we have been people of the book the Western culture was basically centered on text so we had the Constitution we had the Bible we had books of law and so this this centering on authors and the same route as Authority was the foundation of basically Western civilization it has produced an incredible blossoming of great stuff but now we were moving away from being people of the book to becoming people of the screen and the screen has a wholly different dynamic it's this liquidity it's this thing where the informations flittering across as pixels they their never-ending streams they're just in ephemeral they're that they're not fixed works are not finished like Wikipedia they are ongoing everything has to be upgraded there is a sense in which things are not closed and they're open-ended and there's all these dimensions where we've again have moved from the fixed precision and the authority of a book and so we when we want to know what was true we went to a book we went to authority and now we were people of the screen and we have screens and things are fluid and they're messy and and the relativistic and they're open and they're subjective and so when we try to find out what's true it's actually a much different process and we have to in some ways assemble the truth ourselves we have to we have to have a networked idea of truth where any fact is you have to so right now the problem on the internet for every fact there's a counter fact for every expert there's a counter experts for every bit of information there's some anti information and so we have to understand the truth is something that's more networked and that you can depend on it because there's other nodes they're all set themselves depending on other nodes that are reliable because they're depending on other nodes are reliable and so there's a very different way of assembling truth and that's one of the many consequences that we have from moving from the authority of books to the fluidity of screens so and as you see part of that is the fact that flows everything is flowing more and more and we're kind of in the Third Age of the computing metaphor so the first one was you know with a desktop and and everything was modeled after the office and so we had files and file folders and and the desktop and and then we moved to the second one which is forget that we have we'll have the web we'll have pages and links and this whole thing is this is spidery amorphous with no edges and that's and that's the model that we understood that but now we're moving into the Third Age this third metaphor and that's the streams and the flows and so we have Facebook streams and streams of music and we have Netflix streams and we've got the streams across the news banners and we've got update streams and everything is streaming across and everything's in ephemeral there serves this is a flow and things are flowing and data is flowing and that's the metaphor the regime that we're in now and so that flowing is also what flows is data and so data is forever flowing and that those flows of data is the new model and that only will increase in this liquid world if everything is flowing if all of all this data is going then we're gonna track it I think anything that can be tracked will be tracked and that's so scary and I want to refer back to the virtual reality virtual Minh a surveillance device that we purchase and carry around voluntarily then VR worlds are total surveillance states that we're gonna enter into by ourselves okay because in order to actually do they are all your emotions have to be tracked and the more sophisticated these VR worlds are reading your micro-expressions so that your avatar in there has the same micro-expressions which is what they're doing right now your total gestures movements so that you have this sign language and you can move things around and your avatar has the same body language they ought to be captured and if they're captured they're tracked and so right now the VR companies are not doing much with that data except trying to make your avatar but eventually they will and so these are totally surveilled world and the kind of tracking that would be very expensive to do in a real world it's gonna be very cheap and easy and inevitably done in the virtual world so just to give you a heads up that's where we're going and I was involved with starting a movement called the quantified self where we were looking at how people would track themselves not just for health reasons but for productivity reasons for memories for [Music] for many reasons the Apple watch is one example of a kind of now commercial quantified self device but the idea is is that you would as these sensors would get cheaper and cheaper you would fill your world your daily life with these kinds of tracking and we would be able to track anything that could be tracked in that somewhere today someone is tracking anything that can be tracked this has not yet reached the mainstream but the potential benefits are immense even for health what you really want to have is kind of a life log where you are tracking all your bio particulars or all the important things about your biology and your health for all of your life so that you would have a normalization you would know what your normal was because it turns out that our normals are not the same your normals now my normal my normal changes depending on time of day time of year the season of life and we had we and all by the way all our body lis functions are all signatures they're all uniquely identifiable including your heartbeat and so we can capture all this and we can use that for many things but among them is this dream of a personalized medicine if you actually know what your normal is you can actually formulate a therapy a treatment that's really specific to you and you know several people have ideas about how that would be done the important thing is is as done by us tracking ourselves but of course it's not just us tracking ourselves we're being tracked by our friends we're tagging us on Facebook we're being tracked by companies as we voluntarily surrender our information and where we are with Pokemon that's all being tracked and I think it's inevitable that we're gonna be tracking more and more I see almost no counter force to the fact that in 50 years from now we will be tracking more of our lives so I think that's pretty inevitable but what's not inevitable is how we shape it the particulars I suggest as it's stance of covalence as one way to domesticate this tracking and that covalence means is that we are tracking the trackers we watch who watches us that there's rather we turn something that's asymmetrical where they are tracking me I don't know what they're tracking I don't know what they're doing with it I don't know if it's correct I don't know whose are sharing with I can't correct it or hold them accountable and I get no benefits that is very very very uncomfortable to us but the other version of that where I know who's tracking me I am tracking them I know what they do with information I know whether it was corrupt I can correct it I can hold him accountable and I get some direct benefit we are familiar with that because we've evolved for a hundred thousand if not a million years just in that state we evolved in very small groups of people work we knew everything about each other so that we know how to do what we want to do is then is restore some of that symmetry to this tracking so that we can if the cops are gonna film us which I think they should we should be filming the cops we should have access to that all both sides and so that sense in which we restore some of the covalence were were mutually surveilling each other we're mutually tracking each other is really to me the way that we can actually make this inevitable tracking more civilized and the second thing I would say about that is that there is a a coupling between to two dimensions of this tracking and the data there's one dimension and I would say it's it's simply a axis where I went in there's your your private and you know your private on the other end you're transparent I guess it's on your screen it's the other way around so transparent and private and so but but that that that that axis of whether you are revealing everything about yourself or not is actually coupled to another axis and that's the axis of personalisation engineer so at one end is you are being treated as a number your there's nothing known about you you're just an average thing you have nothing unique about you and so you get the treatment of just being a number of the other end is is that you are being personalized and you are being treated as a very unique individual with your wants your desires your genetic makeup your background your history the whole thing and so I want people to treat me as an individual I want I want my friends to know about me treat me as individual I want companies to treat me as individual I want my government the treat me is individual to be aware of my situation to to to treat me as individual and in order to do that you basically have to reveal yourself in some capacity the reason why you have friends is you've revealed yourself to them they know you as an individual if you don't want to and I think we should have a choice about this slider then you're going to be treated in a generic way and so the thing is that these two are a couple so if you want to maximize personalization then you kind of have to maximally maximize transparency if you're if you're happy and prefer to be private in that sense of not known then you have to accept a generic treatment and here's the thing that we didn't know about ourselves is that when we give people that choice to move the slider with technology they always push it to that side to the personalization to the transparency side and so the the way I flippantly summarizes is that vanity Trump's privacy okay who knows so that's something we didn't know about ourselves but that seems to be the where we're going now we may change your mind later on when we see the price of it but I think where we're going is is is that the wreath there's a reason why we are tracking allow a lot of the tracking is that we get some benefits from that and those benefits are basically the personalization so we mixing is another long-term drive trend and that has to do with the fact that when things become liquid when they become digital they are now able to be reduced and unbundled into their native elements their native parts and then they can be recombined so if you think of something like a newspaper a newspaper was actually a very complex product that actually had many different components headlines obituaries sports scores news stories classified ads book reviews there was a ton of things into it and when they became digital people could basically unraveled them and unbundle them into Craigslist that took all the they classified and someone else took called the headlines or the sports scores or the gossip and each of those became something into itself that was added to other primitives and then remixed and then later on they were themselves were unbundled and that's not just true for newspapers you could kind of unbundle unbundle all the things that a banked it once you made it more fungible and liquid you would say well the bank is doing many things it has loans is giving interest is forming mortgages and so those could all be unbundled and you can even do it with cars in the sense that there's aspects of cars cars as the product cars as a service that could be unbundled and generally what's happen is is that we're going to we're kind of coming down to to the elements it's like if you want to do chemistry the best thing to do is to understand that everything is an element and be able to reduce things to an element that you could then recombine two different compounds and that's sort of what we're doing with this digital era is is that we're understanding that every product and every services in some ways a complex remix in a recombination and that this digital technology allows us to reduce things to their primitive element and then recombine them and recombination actually turns out to be the central engine of technological progress I mean the progress based on technology the wealth based on technology to economist Brian author and Paul Romer um independently and separately have their own theories about how most of the advances in technological society come from nothing venting new things but recombining the old things in many different ways and that when you try to make a formula or I should say a model of the economy of a modern economy the only way you can account for the fact that it grows is is the fact that you can kind of recombine existing things so the growth that we see in the two hundred years the economic growth is fundamentally due to the fact that we're recombining these and what's happened is that the digitalization has accelerated the ability to reduce things to their elemental primitives and then to recombine them in many many many ways and that will only continue into the future anything that can be unbundling anything can be rebuttal filtering is the other aspect of this which is that we are making so many things so many new things that actually exceeds our ability to pay attention to them and where ever attention flows that's where money goes the took a long time for people to understand that all the attention that was going to the internet was would be where the money went but that's what's happening it's going away from TV and other things towards the internet because that's where the attention is and so we are dealing with the fact that we have an intention economy and it's remarkable that we give our away our attention for nothing to watch to watch a an advertisement and I am suggesting that one of the disruptions I could see coming is that we might actually start to charge for our attention charge to watch an ad charge to read someone's email and that when that does is that you kind of changes the dynamics and takes out the the advertising agencies and other middle people and you have this you have the possibility of kind of a peer to peer whereas what you're doing is you're going to use the influence maps to kind of identify people that have a lot of influence and they may not be necessarily people who are rich or people who are famous they actually could be a girl somewhere who has lots of followers who are following her fashion trend and she has tremendous influence and they would be actually giving her the marketing money directly so that she would influence those rather than going through this idea of advertising your your serve your distributing and appear to peer way that influence and you also could pay people to create ads and they could be rewarded as those ads went virally and and so they're not going to make ads for fortune 500 companies but like Google Adsense they make make ads for people who right now could never afford to make an ad like mom-and-pop Chinese restaurant or something you could have people making ads and those ads went virally and you would get credit back if someone clicked on it or watch it so you could have a way in which you distribute it virally all the ads then they were also being paid the people who made this ads so this is I'm very briefly giving you an idea of the way in which even advertising could be decentralized and made more liquid and distributed with this technology just an example of how we're managing our attention and how we're using these filters to to manage them the second to last one is questioning and you know there's a lot of I think if you want an answer today you ask a machine right you you go to the machines to answer questions it used to be very very expensive to get anything done I it it's very hard for us to even imagine remember 20 years ago if we're that old thirty years ago for that old what life was like when there was no internet you and you had to go to a library to ask a question it was most questions were never asked because it could not be answered now answers are free and what's becoming more valuable or questions because every every time you you ask a question you get an answer every answer serve generates prompts to new questions and if you if you map that out if we if we figure that we're actually in creasing the number of questions exponentially but if every answer generates two new questions then you have something where the questions are being generated faster than the answers and so basically what we're doing is we're expanding ignorance okay but I think that's actually a good thing I think that's an actually good thing because it's in ignorance ignorance is opportunity ignorant is often profit ignorant is where we're going to live in this world of much more uncertainty because we're going faster and faster and I think what happens is that while answers become cheaper and cheaper a good question becomes more and more difficult more and more important more and more productive and machines are really good at answers and humans are going to be really good at questions for a very long time and I think figuring out and being taught how to ask a good question is really going to be what education is about and I think learning the art of questioning is sort of what science is about its what innovation is about it's a way of a what if what if we did what if we try this that those are all questioning explorations the kind of a question what happens what's down here where does this go and so these kinds of things where efficiency is no longer important and we have something that's much more open-ended not as efficient not as certain that's where we're going to be living so good questions a good question something that generates not only a good answer but even more and better questions so it's recursive a little bit like that I think we're just at the beginning of where we're going I think that's word just at the very very start of the first hour of day one I think when people look back to now 2016 they'll be they'll be amazed that we thought we had the internet now because compared to where we're going we don't even have it I think the web which is one of the biggest I think in retrospect will be seen as one of the greatest inventions that we've made and in in the last half century was not even invented 30 years ago that's that's a new thing social media is less than 2,000 days we're just weird we're just we're just really at the beginning of all this and there are no experts in AI or VR or attention technology we there's lots of billions of dollars being spent on AI there's lots of very smart people working on it but compared to where we'll be in 30 years there are no experts VR is the same thing we have no idea how VR works we have no idea what will work in terms of telling a story in VR we're just really really clueless right now in 30 years we'll realize that there are no experts so so we're at this kind of a stage right now where we if we think about the next 25 years or so into say 2040 and the people will look back now though they'll realize though actually I think they're gonna be very envious about us now because they'll realise that that we're at this moment when there's never been easier to do something and yet there were all these tremendous opportunities ahead of us of a I take X and a day I know virtual reality is completely unknown you you all the easy things to find a right before us and we're gonna find them in the next 10 years there's just an incredible opportunity that's opening up and not just us in in this audience but around the world and that opportunity is is all before us and so they though I think they're gonna be envious that they said only if I was alive and well back in 2016 what I could have done so I think that the in that world of 2040 that the greatest products of that error that the ones that will be really dominating their lives haven't even been invented yet today it's they don't exist so that means that you're not wait so thank you [Applause] not lazy yeah by the way you're right on your time try hey long-term thinker 10,000 years what's this about 30 years I think I there was something that I think I coined called the Moscow rope the moths goro point which is that middle-aged people tend to imagine a future that will happen before they die uh-huh and so so that maybe part of it is is that maybe I'm interested in trying to describe something that I could possibly live to but not beyond because it's sort of outside of my experience so younger folks here get to do 50 or 60 years yeah do that okay as I recall you keep track of your actuarial - yes when do you plan to die so so I actually have a little thing on my my computer right at the top and it's a countdown clock to my expiration date and it's it's it I went to the actuarial tables and looked up the statistical likelihood of of how long I would live based on someone born when I was born and where I live and then I turned that into a number of days and I set that into the clock and so it's counting down and it was five thousand seven hundred and seventy days left and so what is that what year was that will it be oh that was I think that was I think it was 72 uh-huh about what you're you planning to die oh okay well so that's I don't know I haven't figured out the number but but the point is taking it down day by day not year by year though it's by day by day so I know how many days and so that's very very focusing for me it's because I have five thousand seven hundred days to do all the stuff that I need to do and want to do and that's not very many days of course if I live longer then that's all bonus that's all gravy right but still who knows and so I'm living I'm counting I'm not counting those days I'm trying to maximize those days and yet you're not frantic no but I think I should be it's just somehow encouraged being relaxed about things that you're not sort of worrying and wondering you've got a date service schedule accordingly yeah I I think I think it's just you know it's just a reminder of your own mortality I think it's good to to have before you and I think it's really good when I get an invitation to do something I can look at that clock right know some questions and eally s will say I want to own or access human intelligence is I think you know looking at sir what's the interaction coming between they are IQ and these others yeah it's it's it's a it's it's a it's a common worry I think there's I think I think it's a the possibility is something we shouldn't it's more than zero but I think it's unlikely and I think it's because I it's I I think some of these kinds of things would be even very hard to program into it and there was if you gave someone the assignment to do that it would actually be very very difficult to achieve and I think it's even harder for it to it kind of happen on its own so I I think there's not much reason for us to want that to happen and and therefore because we're still engineering these things there will be difficult for it to happen on its own you think our own intelligence will as it has before adapted technologies and so what we call human intelligence will actually be itself quite different yes I think that's much more likely is that we change our own intelligences over time because because we've been changing our bodies over time already so you and I are manufactured beings we invented humanity we invented ourselves the reason why we have this tension with technology is because we are both the Masters and the slaves we are both we created humanity and then of course we are they created we are the creators we shape we make the tools the tools shape us and that's inescapable that's in the that's in the very basic nature of humanity is that we will always have that tension in another thousand years will still be wrestling with the fact that we are both masters of this technology in it and we are slaves to it at the same time and so that that will never go away and I think that's cause a lot of our own concerns and hand-wringing and worry about technology is that that we're caught in that in that tooth to face aspect of it is is that we're both the parent and the child at the same time well there's Kotnis is interesting it's in your book you say that you used to upgrade as late as you could yeah because of the nuisance factor of upgrading but then the nuisance factor grew of not upgrading right and so it's this becoming a situation for basically all humanity that nobody gets to opt out yeah do we all have to upgrade mm-hmm yeah so uh the last speaker along now speaker on the stage was George Dyson and I thought he had a really great dichotomy which is that one of the central decisions that we have before us is do we remain one species or many and so there's a view on well I mean I think if mandatory upgrade is part of the the prospect of humanity I think there's a whole Amish contingent that's gonna say it under no way is me or my descendants ever going to to modify our jeans or whatever and so you have you have a separation well they're very selective they use the web and write to questions that kind of relate ELISA asks what does the dominance of access ownership mean for artists and David gross off asks what's your advice to new and future librarians of Congress and so on capture organize all this kind of information how the libraries change how the artist changes yeah the the prospect of ownership I mean I I skated over there very fast because there are some benefits to ownership that maybe will make it worth for some people and of course if we're using things somebody has to own it so you can't have a world where there's no ownership at all so I think in the intellectual property I think the idea of owning ideas is problematic and I think the idea of even owning data is problematic because it's very intangible so I would like to see a second version a second another attempt a tree visioning what an intellectual a real intellectual property system would be based around and the intangibles like ideas and data because I because I think we're very far from it and it's and we don't have a good understanding of it and so the issues of copyright or baked into that but I do I do think that this shift is is will will have an effect on our idea of capitalism which is founded on the idea of ownership and even our status of wealth what we consider well we often attribute to people who own lots of stuff and if they were out of economics is based on scarcity and we're talking about floods right exactly so you have this you have economics around abundance and access rather than ownership that that can change how we view how things work Kirstin be a sort of the mean opposing forces you see impeding the forces you outline so these twelve big driving forces grinding away yeah what are the twelve big don't you go there forces yeah so I I'll get to that but one thing I will say is I I'm by temperament very optimistic and I don't talk a lot about the the downsides of the negatives and and I would say several things about it one is that every the more powerful of technology is the more powerfully it can be abused so powerful technologies like AI will be abused but there will be a criminal underside to these there will be people using these for harm but what's interesting to me is that even those those uses will follow the same general trends and meaning that these these drives is these gravities these forces apply to even when we are abusing him and using him for harm okay so that's one thing the question about what could stop these things what's the counter force that can derail them I think fundamentally like if Moore's law stopped I think that would have a huge impact if this relentless doubling of power and halving of cost every 18 months was to stop if we were to run out of that I think that would have a huge effect on the continuation of these trends because we got to taking that rate of change at constant exactly it's an assumption it's built into this I mean it would be and may I mean we would be like stupefied if if computers actually started to get more expensive and slower every year right and so that's quite a concept well later that unnamed person asked what about the future are you actually worried about yeah it's a little different than counterforce it is it is and I'm not worried about the the robots taking over and killing us but I am worried about other more near term aspects of artificial intelligence and there's there's several what one is I think there's a bunch of groups right now working on trying to put ethics into AI systems particularly its self-driving cars so most of the car companies have groups that are trying to decide that and it turns out that in order to program a self-driving car to have the right Essex and the kinds of problems they have is you're driving down the it's driving me on the road there's a crash and it has to swerve one way or the other if it serves this way it it protects the passenger of a surge this way hits pedestrians and so or vice versa and and so the point is we have to make that decision now and so nor that's an ethical decision it doesn't really have a right answer but we have to kind of figure out what the answer is and in order for us to program in our ethics and morality is we have to have a very clear understanding of them and we don't we actually have very loose vague inconsistent shallow ethics and so in order to do that we actually have to get better at ourselves and I think in the long run the AIS will teach us as we try to teach then we will learn how to be better ethically but that's a challenge that we have is is actually not conveying it but actually figuring out what our ethics are what our morality czar and then the second place of that and we're a little worried about that is is that I I wonder if we have a world in which there are beings that have any kind of embodiment that that are serving us whether treating them if we would treat them as slaves whether or not they're slaves or not just treating them as could be corrosive to us to our spirit and so I I don't have an answer but I but that is something that I worry about is whether we would have we would have all these things and if you've seen the videos of the Boston Dynamics robots the four-legged robots that I showed up there people kicking them as a way to show that they're stable we cringe at that because we feel that and so we might we may have feelings for these things that might there might affect us in ways that we're not really ready for us so I worry a little bit about that - well society sort of learns by mistakes and catastrophes what ones do you see in this thirty years that you're looking at might occur that would be so educational if they don't just give us in iiiiii I think we're at a very dangerous place with cyber war and and they eyes military militarization of AI because we have no rules we have a whole set of rules Geneva Convention about ordinary war it's kind of weird but we have these rules about what's so trade when nuclear war first came along right and then Herman Kahn had to do thinking about the unthinkable and that was the beginning of applying right math and rules to nuclear war and we don't have that right now we don't have what we have any consensus of what's acceptable is it okay to take out the banking system of another country is that permissible or is it okay to disrupt the you know the trains is it okay to disrupt you know maybe just something like the traffic lights you know we don't have any kind of a sense of what's acceptable what's not and right now the US Russia China Iran Israel or are conducting cyber war they're not talking about it because nobody knows the rules but there actually are is conducting defensive offensive attacks and I think there may be some disaster of dam being broken or in a lot of civilians dying before it may take that you actually have people decide well okay that's that's not okay you can't do that and we will I mean being able to verify these things are very difficult so there has to be a whole whole procedure for for being able to verify that this nation state is not doing that I think we're nowhere near that and and and I my worry is that it will take a big disaster before the forces are brought on to make that happen that's kind of international agreements or you know something like the internet engineering those sorts that stuff out I think we need a world government a hush see a little more about that yeah I think if you have planetary problems you need a planetary governance government I think we have not just global climate issues we have immigration issues these are beyond these are planetary scales we need to have you know like even like the recent South Seas you know tussle China like that that's that's an island on an island it's you know so it's like the there we're at the point where any any other civilization in the galaxy would have a world government okay and so and so you know Star Trek right so that's why we need it it's it's it's I think it's an idea that nobody at left likes nobody in their right likes but I think it's a good idea and and I think that I have no idea how that's possible what interests me is is that how is it even possible to have a representative democracy for 8 billion people what's the mechanics of that does that even there's a even conceivable what would how would that possibly work so I have no idea how to do it other than I think that we do need it and I think it would be really helpful in tackling some of the biggest problems we have well I'm gonna Majan if sort of the best efforts that the nation is in these various entities UN and so on mate in relation to climate change don't add up to actually solving the problem that's some kind of that would force the kind of governance entity that you're talking about right your first book was pretty biological out of control and this book is severely digital and there's a Moore's law of biotech going on that some say is faster than Moore's law and more profound they're not just talking about the code of communication and computation the code of life so you know the biotech stuff how do you think it relates to what you see going on in these digital trends that's that's a really good question because I should have made a caveat in the beginning that it my my book and this talk was really focused on the digital not on the not on the biological matter energy not on many other futures that are that are very important and how the the digital will impact well well the kinds of things that by the way you are tracking very well and using current genetic techniques I think would also severely suffer if it wasn't for Moore's law my name is Moore's law stopped all that kind of progress that we see the biologic realm would also halt and so I think they're tied in a sense that it's it's not that there's the same system but the tools that we're using the tools not only of discovery and manipulation but again for me the tools are of collaboration the tool that makes the science work that the tools of peer review and an exchange of information all those things are very instrumental in learning because because we are changing how we know things we're changing how we discover things and those are the the meta tools that are that are mostly being propelled by the digital world so the biological mysteries abound and are profound we don't know how the brain works exactly we don't know how our microbiome works we don't how the immune system works and we care deeply in terms of health and everything else and the code that's running all of that is the world's worst spaghetti code and so try and reverse engineer it it's not it's just you know deep learning data mining yeah yeah and is is that actually working I mean you know shotgun sequencing was way to finally be able to get the human genome and then ancient genomes and so on is that kind of understanding of these previously unknowable but profoundly important to us in all of life systems is that gonna be opening up with these trends do you think III do think I mean going back to the spaghetti code in our own brains I think that what I think one of a is artificial intelligence major roles in the next 20 or 30 years will be as a probe to understand what our own brains do not by opening them up but by trying to model them trying to replicate them in other words the III this is what I call the third way of knowledge so there's the humanities which kind of figure out how things are by by looking at human expression by going in inside themselves by doing what artists do and then there's a scientist the second way the scientists who do who run experiments into probe by by trial and error then there's the third group which is the Nerds technology technologists and the nerd way is that you investigate something by trying to make something new so the way that you investigate intelligence is not to probe it not to to think about it but actually to try to make an artificial intelligence the way you study reality is not by any kind of experiments by trying to make a virtual reality the way that you study democracy is to make a virtual democracy so it says there's this the way the way in which you try and and and in probe the the the basis of this state of being is through making something so that learn by making is the third way and I think that is what AI and and and even the role in biology would be which is as a as a scope as a scope to figure out when telogen is by by trying to make it that many different ways as possible so the maker movement is also with us it's right exactly it's actually the third culture it's actually the third way of knowing it's actually the third and varying growing a very important way in which we actually you render the human condition which is by making things and so it's it's a force for for knowledge for for progress it's not just people you know in the basement with 3d printers is way beyond that this is such a Whole Earth Catalog kind of Owen asks 30 years from now what is the role of nature any so um I added the Afeni yeah right I I take the the proposition that some others share which is that the nature of nature in the wild today on this planet is that every single acre of it has been affected by humans already so it's been altered so so it's already and a gardened state of nature and that what we will will continue to do that will continue to to affect it will continue to bring it together with the the digital the technological realm in some ways so it's it's like we're domesticating it and so that wildness is long long been transformed it's just something that we have a hand in and we'll have more of a hand in and I think that we'll use it to to make it serve both us and the other species and so it's not I think we want to serve all the living species on the planet and to bring some of them back and add more of them and that that is something that we can actually do and so I think the relationship that technology has to nature is is in some ways at this point is to not harm it further and to make it more compatible with our own civilization so I so I so I think it is something that III see technology's a seventh kingdom of life that actually has derived from evolution when the same powers and so it's not antagonistic to life inherently that is inherently compatible then any we there's no invention that we we haven't been able to make greener in a certain sense so we can continue to green our technology to make it even more compatible with the biological world I also let stuff play out in terms of cities yeah I'm repeating Stuart here and I think that urbanization in concentrating people into cities it's actually one of the best things we can do for for the for the green the while the nature part of it and and I see cities as cities army are the most complex technology that we've made even beyond computers that that they are basically a technological invention that we're gonna continue to make them improve them better that will move more people into them and that this digital technology will make them more biological in a certain sense you know the advances like all the driven cars and smart materials all have promised to help us manage this technology of urbanization which will increase and then I think pilot for these you know the early thought was well everybody's just gonna go to a beach somewhere and be online and that's that that didn't work out yeah because I think what we get in cities is opportunities and possibilities and we crave those almost over anything else in the density gives you that just the access to a lot of strange people or what yeah that that's and and the fact that that we have more technology and technology gives us more choice so there's more technology if there's more people and both of those together create more choices and that's what draws people to the city I don't think it's necessarily the bright lights it's the fact that they have choices they did not have back in their beautiful organic Gardens in the beautiful hillsides with their strong families they came because they actually thought that having more choices was more important than those very beautiful things now you travel Asia and the places you travel in Asia are often the places that are the most sort of traditional and ancient and the old village life and so on do you see that eroding because of all this and do you agree for how do you see that yes it is there the villages of Asia are emptying out and they're you know they're leaving behind certain traditions and they're they're getting new ones I'm I am compulsively documenting what they're leaving not with any nostalgia and because I understand why they're going and I would if I was in their shoes I would go to but I am documenting it because it's going to be gone and there's there is there there is a beauty to it I mean there is a beauty to a house that's made out of bamboo sitting there on stilts I would not want to live in it nobody wants to live in it it's drafty is cold I mean it looks beautiful and it would go away everybody there would much prefer to live in a concrete box as waterproof and and and and tight and warm it has running water and so but they are leaving those and so I so I appreciate what it is that they lost but they're moving there because they have more choices they have the choice of education for the children they have the choice of medical care that they don't have in the village a freakin education here it has a question may be useful beginning toward the last one what is the inevitable for education schools in the Universities yeah you know home training like you did yeah what are these things doing to education um I actually came away from my experiments with virtual-reality kind of impressed that that had a huge potential to teach us in a slightly different way again because you seem to be at least I seem to be experiencing things in a different part of my brain and I think when you are moving things with your hands and they feel real that that burns different circuits than just looking at them on a screen and I think being able to learn particularly some people learn you know much better that way and I think that's potentially valuable not just for mechanical skills but even conceptual things that when you have that kind of a 3d and you have an you have a feeling you have you have a whole body involved I think you can learn differently we can learn how to maybe teach things that seem very conceptual right now and intellectual maybe even that way so I so that's one thing that I think is is is going to be used I I think the thing about this inevitable in education is that we will become lifelong learners that's that's the that's the thing is is that it you are gonna need and will be taught the skills of how to learn and keep learning because there will be no alternative really that you just have to you're gonna be lifelong learners since the hopefully that's the skill that you learn and that a lot of it won't take place in school I'm very impressed with the kind of training that the military does the way corporations do it is phenomenal when they you know they train for results and they get them and so maybe a lot of what you're learning is not going to be in school and we kind of know that so so I think what's inevitable is just that that that learning how to learn critical thinking are going to be the things that you learn at school so how does generations play out maybe moving in on this because young come into a world which is you know we've got a lot of these trends going on and it used to be you know they had to grow up before they got to really master the tools are out there now it's the old farts that cannot function I mean I can't type with my thumbs and so I'm totally limited our young going to be increasingly sort of advantaged in this you are not late they're really not late they've got so much stuff not to have to unlearn in order to function yeah I I would suspect so I mean I think you could make a scenario where the youth of the world have an advantage I mean and you think cohorts are identifying themselves more I mean sort of each new tech sharing check that comes along sort of the you know the two years later gang and high school have they're not using Facebook they're using something else so you're like oh you're still using a faithful here yeah exactly yeah and obviously that's yeah you know if all these trends continue that's gonna continue so each cohort has its own sort of version of the digital world that distinguishes them which is great then that they start to own the world but it also separates them and our friend Bruce Sterling wrote this wonderful book holy fire where basically people get to start living really long and then medicine gets to the point where you can take your long life and actually swap it yourself back into a young body and but then the question is can you keep up with the young who are actually young and his answer is no do you see this kind of issue I don't see it in 30 years III think well at last no me not me I mean I I think most like we walk out into the city in 30 years from now this city other cities it's gonna be predominantly the same most of the stuff most of technology that we're surrounding here right now is old stuff old moves very slowly you you have the layers and most of our brains are very old brain its reptilian mammal there's a very thin layer of human consciousness on top but most of our thinking is is old and I think most of the technology that will continue to be old and that the Industrial Revolution was about atoms and it rearranged our world but that's done I think the rearrangements that we'll have even in 30 years it's not going to be fast changes in the cityscape it's going to be in the intangible world and their understanding of how we're connected of who we are what does it mean to be human how we spend our day and so it's it's that flow so we're gonna rearrange the flows of things not the atoms I think you're gonna be pretty much the same so that when we walk out in 30 years from now it'll be look like the city but we'll have a different idea of what a city is well different idea of who we are we'll different idea of how we relate to other people so the new stuff keeps coming but you say the old stuff doesn't go well doesn't go away and that continuity is what gives us a shot exactly that's what old people will always have a role thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 32,785

Keywords: Technology, Future, Wired, Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, Beginning, Late, Inevitable, Trend, Artificial Intelligence, Smartness, Opportunity, Sharing Economy

Id: XhduPAy2bxo

Length: 91min 11sec (5471 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020