you
[Music]
seems EOC is one of my favorite Greek
words I love it and we’re living in a
state of symbiosis with technology you
see the arrow of time points in only one
direction it only goes forward and just
like that technology progress only moves
forward think of old ideas or all
technologies they don’t get lost they
never die they don’t go away
rather they combine and recombine to
form networks of interdependent ideas
that push us always forward that’s what
technology is as a species we’ve moved
from the industrial revolution to the
Information Age now where everything is
moving even faster so today I want to do
two things
first I want to talk about some of the
positive impacts of our symbiotic
relationship with technology but second
I also want to raise a few questions
that as a society we should grapple with
in this state of continuous acceleration
starting from big to small starting from
macro to micro at the highest level the
cosmic level if you will there’s no
higher danger than extinction for the
human species we have no backup we have
one planet right now this is it we’re
staying on it we’re living on it so at
the highest level how can we as a
species deal with the biggest kind of
risks like an asteroid hitting the earth
or nuclear war starting by some regime
well we’re investors in SpaceX that lead
the race towards trying to establish a
colony on Mars all the things they’ve
done the usability of the rockets the
satellite launches everything that
they’ve done are just steps towards the
final mission which is to allow humans
to have a backup on another planet and
that’s happening right now only slightly
smaller in scope going from the other
planets to around we have to keep it
clean
we can all you know disagree on whether
climate change is a hundred percent
anthropogenic or not but there’s no
disagreement that it’s happening and
there’s also no disagreement that we
should try to do a better job of
reducing greenhouse gas emissions well
technology to the rescue again between
clean technology generation and even
more importantly distributed energy
storage the state of technology in that
field is getting now close enough where
can be cost-competitive without
requiring government subsidies or other
market distortions I believe that in our
lifetime we will see the end of the
internal combustion engine where I live
in Silicon Valley already there’s a very
high proportion of cars that are
electric on the road I think within 20
years if not less most of the passenger
vehicles on our streets will be powered
by electricity which will have a huge
impact in cleaning up our planet animal
related emissions is another big
category the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations
estimates that something like 15 percent
fourteen and a half percent to be exact
of all anthropogenic emissions are due
to animal farming animal raising and
it’s actually more than half of all the
agriculture related emissions and by way
that’s even higher than transportation
so as raising cattle is an especially
inefficient way of using resources feed
water let alone the pollution that they
caused land obviously I know this looks
scary the idea that we will be creating
meat in labs but it’s happening we
invested in a company called Memphis
meats that were very proud of and
there’s a number of others that are all
working towards this vision of creating
clean meat I’m not talking genetically
modified I’m not talking about feeding
cattle some chemical or anything like
that I’m talking about clean
indistinguishable protein fiber that can
be created to begin with in a lab but
hopefully eventually in a much larger
industrial fashion and between that and
other agricultural
technological innovations could we see
the end of world hunger so if we have
the planet to live on that’s clean and
we have food then we have to worry about
disease the intersection of Life
Sciences with information technology is
one of the most interesting areas for
investment for us right now you see it
used to be that every hypothesis had to
be tested by humans in laboratories
using test tubes but now because of
parallelization because of robotic
automation and most importantly because
we can model a lot of these questions
completely in computers we can ask a lot
of those questions in silico not in vivo
or in vitro but in silicon and the
reason why that’s important is because
when you’re doing experiments in labs
with humans
you can only scale that so much but if
you can model some of these problems in
a computer then you can take advantage
of the exponentially rising power of
computation so you could be testing
hundreds thousands millions of questions
all at once couple that with the fact
that genetic the delay decoding of our
genome the cost of doing that has come
down even faster than Moore’s law this
is a logarithmic scale so a straight
line is actually exponential and the
cost of decoding genetic information is
falling even faster than that we’re
starting to understand our life software
we’re starting to understand how this
machinery is running and by doing that
we can start understanding how we can
fix the bugs in our software how we can
change different things in it to
potentially eliminate disease may be
starting with cancer there’s so much
research going on in cancer right now
I’m very hopeful that they’ll be big
breakthroughs in the next five or ten
years moving on from disease accidents
is another big cause of death around the
world technology again to the rescue
between autonomous vehicles and
self-driving capabilities and other
safety features we can make a real dent
in reducing fatalities from accidents
couple that with rethinking
transportation all together
obviously these are renderings these are
artists renderings there is no tunnel
for all those who you haven’t been to
the Golden Gate
there is no tunnel like that don’t
expect it if you go there okay there’s
no pictures gonna look like that but
something like that could be coming
whether it be next to a bridge or
underground rethinking transportation to
make it both efficient and safe can
reduce again fatalities from one of the
leading causes of death around the world
let’s go from the macro to the micro
from the general to the individual we
don’t have to go far look around right
we’re being live-streamed right now in
your pockets you have access to all the
world’s knowledge the biggest
encyclopedias you have say music YouTube
videos entertainment access to
educational materials in all of them
practically for almost free who would
have thought 20 years ago that there
would be business models that would
allow all of us to have access to these
information local maps to everywhere in
your pocket for practically free
and yet these business models exists
these are not companies that are losing
money these are companies that are doing
very well and yet we have the wealth of
this information provided to us coupled
well with what’s coming there’s some
virtual reality head gear out there this
is going to be especially important as
we think about the importance of
training retraining our workforce and in
learning new skills through things like
virtual reality take it to
self-expression between Twitter YouTube
stars between blog platforms photography
sharing what have you all of you budding
artists journalists are photographers
writers thinkers you have an
unprecedented access to new audiences
for what you want to put out there you
see if you take it all together Maslow
back in 1943 created this pyramid it’s a
well known pyramid that tried to
describe what drives human motivation
and at the bottom of the pyramid you
have things like the physiological needs
you know nourishment
need for food etc and then on top of
that you have things like safety and
love and belonging and what have you and
some of the examples I brought up all
have to do with bring in more food
creating a clean planet so technology is
having an impact all across the pyramid
education makes it easier for people to
feel better about themselves
self-expression makes people get self
actualized but what not a lot of people
know is that Maslow later in his life
added a piece to that pyramid then he
talked about something that he called
self transcendence and that’s the
ability of the self to think beyond the
self to think about things like nature
the cosmos the species others altruism
things like that so how’s technology
doing in our quest towards the self
transcendence well I would say it’s
unclear whether technology is actually
helping or hurting think about the
resurgence of populism around the world
in governments in the developed world
right here in Greece in the United
States where I live that’s not a very
good sign and there’s a paradox with
more choice and more control there’s a
paradox in that maybe we have too much
technology because it’s allowing us to
close ourselves up in comfy digital
bubbles where we just these hyper
personalized feeds of information that
we get if anything enhance amplify
biases or prejudices we may have because
we only get fed the news that we click
on it’s more of the same and more of the
same and more of the same so that brings
me well I should say one more thing
which is income inequality is an
elephant in the room right if we think
technology is accelerating and there’s
some people that can get on that train
they can board this you know rapidly
moving train of great fantastic
technology innovations and others can’t
how is that gonna look from a
distribution of income perspective and
perceived inequality and unfairness it’s
a societal issue so I’m not sure I have
answers to what it is that we should be
doing for all that but I’d like to pose
at least a couple of questions and I
start with this first question that I
know will
later on today as well which is what
will work be like 20-30 years from now
see the idea of the 40-hour week is a
relatively recent phenomenon in the US
it was legislated in the 40s you know
back thousands of years ago there was
the distinction between work and not
work was very blurry at best right the
farmers the hunter-gatherers they worked
around the clock as long as they needed
to the farmers their time was governed
by time of day or time of season in
terms of what their animals in the land
required this idea of a 40-hour week was
only created with the Industrial
Revolution when the tasks became more
uniform and therefore more repetitive
and could be measured in terms of hours
how is that going to be in the future
when work might be less about repetitive
tasks and more about exception handling
because if you got a bunch of robots
that are doing the repetitive tasks then
the humans are there to handle the
exceptions and what is the role of a
welfare state in such a society where
it’s not about giving people job a job
that’s measured in hours but it’s about
creating an experience that can fit with
what society needs at that point when
workforce adaptability and continuously
training is necessary what is there all
of the state I believe we’re going to
need something like a broad safety net
something like a universal basic income
which is an idea that’s getting some
support in the states that should be
considered very seriously around the
developed world over the next 10 20
years
related to that first question the
second one has to do with how we think
about measuring progress as we move up
as a species this Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs what are the statistics that we
should be using to measure how we’re
doing
does GDP a Kasai restoration EcoPro yawn
does gdp make sense in a world where
you’ve got plentiful food and goods to
go around is that what it’s about if
they do quantitative metrics of stuff
matter as much does life expectancy
matter if you’ve conquered most of
diseases is it does but what what was
going to be important so how can a
society measure that kind of product
well there’s likes right alike
is a pretty crude measure but it is a
measure of a digital touch of the
positive impact through a digital touch
that someone has on someone else but
it’s very crude so I don’t think it’s
gonna be likes but it might be something
that’s closer to how we think about the
impact of academic research right we
think about number of citations we think
about journal impact factors where that
research gets published so maybe it’s
gonna be something like that and
obviously the open questions are what
are the weights what are the things you
measure and how you combine it all
together and more importantly which
brings me to my last question who
decides about all this stuff anyway
governance is a very interesting
question I used to be four years it’s
been it’s been determined geographically
and there’s a there’s a reason why it’s
been determined geographically is
because the factors of production are
mostly geographically linked land labor
mostly labor a little less oh but labour
still primarily tied to certain
geographies but in the mid 20th century
as capital started becoming a bigger
thing and as capital flows started
extending beyond geographic boundaries
you started seeing the emergence of
supra national organizations like the
United Nations or the World Bank to help
regulate the flows and help deal with
things like poverty around the world and
inequality due to capital flows so in a
world where the factor of production
weights shift in favor of
entrepreneurship in favor of new ideas
who decides and what are the kind of
organizations that play there all of
these supranational organizations to
make sure that their rents or the return
that goes to entrepreneurship somehow
gets regulated or spread around and also
speaking for us as humans as we become
bigger and bigger members of these
digital tribes as we start defining
ourselves as belonging to not just one
country but part of ways of thing
King that again transcend national
national boundaries how do we vote and
what are the opinions that we have and
about what and how do they get
aggregated I think these are all very
important questions let alone the whole
question you’re going to hear about
which is how do you make sure that you
have access to unbiased information and
news so as I said unfortunately I don’t
have I don’t have a lot of answers okay
I know we’re living in this symbiotic
relationship with technology and I also
know that everything is moving faster
because we’re in the Information Age and
everything is speeding up at exponential
pace in terms of technology there are
some tough questions in our continued
quest towards transcendence that we’re
gonna have to as a society grapple with
and it’s not going to be easy but
optimism matters right it’s easy to be
pessimistic and to find flaws being
optimistic is what’s going to allow us
to use technology to find the solutions
to the problems that technology itself
creates and I for one choose to be
optimistic that our future is going to
be better than our past thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
you
[Music]
[Music]
seems EOC is one of my favorite Greek
words I love it and we’re living in a
state of symbiosis with technology you
see the arrow of time points in only one
direction it only goes forward and just
like that technology progress only moves
forward think of old ideas or all
technologies they don’t get lost they
never die they don’t go away
rather they combine and recombine to
form networks of interdependent ideas
that push us always forward that’s what
technology is as a species we’ve moved
from the industrial revolution to the
Information Age now where everything is
moving even faster so today I want to do
two things
first I want to talk about some of the
positive impacts of our symbiotic
relationship with technology but second
I also want to raise a few questions
that as a society we should grapple with
in this state of continuous acceleration
starting from big to small starting from
macro to micro at the highest level the
cosmic level if you will there’s no
higher danger than extinction for the
human species we have no backup we have
one planet right now this is it we’re
staying on it we’re living on it so at
the highest level how can we as a
species deal with the biggest kind of
risks like an asteroid hitting the earth
or nuclear war starting by some regime
well we’re investors in SpaceX that lead
the race towards trying to establish a
colony on Mars all the things they’ve
done the usability of the rockets the
satellite launches everything that
they’ve done are just steps towards the
final mission which is to allow humans
to have a backup on another planet and
that’s happening right now only slightly
smaller in scope going from the other
planets to around we have to keep it
clean
we can all you know disagree on whether
climate change is a hundred percent
anthropogenic or not but there’s no
disagreement that it’s happening and
there’s also no disagreement that we
should try to do a better job of
reducing greenhouse gas emissions well
technology to the rescue again between
clean technology generation and even
more importantly distributed energy
storage the state of technology in that
field is getting now close enough where
can be cost-competitive without
requiring government subsidies or other
market distortions I believe that in our
lifetime we will see the end of the
internal combustion engine where I live
in Silicon Valley already there’s a very
high proportion of cars that are
electric on the road I think within 20
years if not less most of the passenger
vehicles on our streets will be powered
by electricity which will have a huge
impact in cleaning up our planet animal
related emissions is another big
category the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations
estimates that something like 15 percent
fourteen and a half percent to be exact
of all anthropogenic emissions are due
to animal farming animal raising and
it’s actually more than half of all the
agriculture related emissions and by way
that’s even higher than transportation
so as raising cattle is an especially
inefficient way of using resources feed
water let alone the pollution that they
caused land obviously I know this looks
scary the idea that we will be creating
meat in labs but it’s happening we
invested in a company called Memphis
meats that were very proud of and
there’s a number of others that are all
working towards this vision of creating
clean meat I’m not talking genetically
modified I’m not talking about feeding
cattle some chemical or anything like
that I’m talking about clean
indistinguishable protein fiber that can
be created to begin with in a lab but
hopefully eventually in a much larger
industrial fashion and between that and
other agricultural
technological innovations could we see
the end of world hunger so if we have
the planet to live on that’s clean and
we have food then we have to worry about
disease the intersection of Life
Sciences with information technology is
one of the most interesting areas for
investment for us right now you see it
used to be that every hypothesis had to
be tested by humans in laboratories
using test tubes but now because of
parallelization because of robotic
automation and most importantly because
we can model a lot of these questions
completely in computers we can ask a lot
of those questions in silico not in vivo
or in vitro but in silicon and the
reason why that’s important is because
when you’re doing experiments in labs
with humans
you can only scale that so much but if
you can model some of these problems in
a computer then you can take advantage
of the exponentially rising power of
computation so you could be testing
hundreds thousands millions of questions
all at once couple that with the fact
that genetic the delay decoding of our
genome the cost of doing that has come
down even faster than Moore’s law this
is a logarithmic scale so a straight
line is actually exponential and the
cost of decoding genetic information is
falling even faster than that we’re
starting to understand our life software
we’re starting to understand how this
machinery is running and by doing that
we can start understanding how we can
fix the bugs in our software how we can
change different things in it to
potentially eliminate disease may be
starting with cancer there’s so much
research going on in cancer right now
I’m very hopeful that they’ll be big
breakthroughs in the next five or ten
years moving on from disease accidents
is another big cause of death around the
world technology again to the rescue
between autonomous vehicles and
self-driving capabilities and other
safety features we can make a real dent
in reducing fatalities from accidents
couple that with rethinking
transportation all together
obviously these are renderings these are
artists renderings there is no tunnel
for all those who you haven’t been to
the Golden Gate
there is no tunnel like that don’t
expect it if you go there okay there’s
no pictures gonna look like that but
something like that could be coming
whether it be next to a bridge or
underground rethinking transportation to
make it both efficient and safe can
reduce again fatalities from one of the
leading causes of death around the world
let’s go from the macro to the micro
from the general to the individual we
don’t have to go far look around right
we’re being live-streamed right now in
your pockets you have access to all the
world’s knowledge the biggest
encyclopedias you have say music YouTube
videos entertainment access to
educational materials in all of them
practically for almost free who would
have thought 20 years ago that there
would be business models that would
allow all of us to have access to these
information local maps to everywhere in
your pocket for practically free
and yet these business models exists
these are not companies that are losing
money these are companies that are doing
very well and yet we have the wealth of
this information provided to us coupled
well with what’s coming there’s some
virtual reality head gear out there this
is going to be especially important as
we think about the importance of
training retraining our workforce and in
learning new skills through things like
virtual reality take it to
self-expression between Twitter YouTube
stars between blog platforms photography
sharing what have you all of you budding
artists journalists are photographers
writers thinkers you have an
unprecedented access to new audiences
for what you want to put out there you
see if you take it all together Maslow
back in 1943 created this pyramid it’s a
well known pyramid that tried to
describe what drives human motivation
and at the bottom of the pyramid you
have things like the physiological needs
you know nourishment
need for food etc and then on top of
that you have things like safety and
love and belonging and what have you and
some of the examples I brought up all
have to do with bring in more food
creating a clean planet so technology is
having an impact all across the pyramid
education makes it easier for people to
feel better about themselves
self-expression makes people get self
actualized but what not a lot of people
know is that Maslow later in his life
added a piece to that pyramid then he
talked about something that he called
self transcendence and that’s the
ability of the self to think beyond the
self to think about things like nature
the cosmos the species others altruism
things like that so how’s technology
doing in our quest towards the self
transcendence well I would say it’s
unclear whether technology is actually
helping or hurting think about the
resurgence of populism around the world
in governments in the developed world
right here in Greece in the United
States where I live that’s not a very
good sign and there’s a paradox with
more choice and more control there’s a
paradox in that maybe we have too much
technology because it’s allowing us to
close ourselves up in comfy digital
bubbles where we just these hyper
personalized feeds of information that
we get if anything enhance amplify
biases or prejudices we may have because
we only get fed the news that we click
on it’s more of the same and more of the
same and more of the same so that brings
me well I should say one more thing
which is income inequality is an
elephant in the room right if we think
technology is accelerating and there’s
some people that can get on that train
they can board this you know rapidly
moving train of great fantastic
technology innovations and others can’t
how is that gonna look from a
distribution of income perspective and
perceived inequality and unfairness it’s
a societal issue so I’m not sure I have
answers to what it is that we should be
doing for all that but I’d like to pose
at least a couple of questions and I
start with this first question that I
know will
later on today as well which is what
will work be like 20-30 years from now
see the idea of the 40-hour week is a
relatively recent phenomenon in the US
it was legislated in the 40s you know
back thousands of years ago there was
the distinction between work and not
work was very blurry at best right the
farmers the hunter-gatherers they worked
around the clock as long as they needed
to the farmers their time was governed
by time of day or time of season in
terms of what their animals in the land
required this idea of a 40-hour week was
only created with the Industrial
Revolution when the tasks became more
uniform and therefore more repetitive
and could be measured in terms of hours
how is that going to be in the future
when work might be less about repetitive
tasks and more about exception handling
because if you got a bunch of robots
that are doing the repetitive tasks then
the humans are there to handle the
exceptions and what is the role of a
welfare state in such a society where
it’s not about giving people job a job
that’s measured in hours but it’s about
creating an experience that can fit with
what society needs at that point when
workforce adaptability and continuously
training is necessary what is there all
of the state I believe we’re going to
need something like a broad safety net
something like a universal basic income
which is an idea that’s getting some
support in the states that should be
considered very seriously around the
developed world over the next 10 20
years
related to that first question the
second one has to do with how we think
about measuring progress as we move up
as a species this Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs what are the statistics that we
should be using to measure how we’re
doing
does GDP a Kasai restoration EcoPro yawn
does gdp make sense in a world where
you’ve got plentiful food and goods to
go around is that what it’s about if
they do quantitative metrics of stuff
matter as much does life expectancy
matter if you’ve conquered most of
diseases is it does but what what was
going to be important so how can a
society measure that kind of product
well there’s likes right alike
is a pretty crude measure but it is a
measure of a digital touch of the
positive impact through a digital touch
that someone has on someone else but
it’s very crude so I don’t think it’s
gonna be likes but it might be something
that’s closer to how we think about the
impact of academic research right we
think about number of citations we think
about journal impact factors where that
research gets published so maybe it’s
gonna be something like that and
obviously the open questions are what
are the weights what are the things you
measure and how you combine it all
together and more importantly which
brings me to my last question who
decides about all this stuff anyway
governance is a very interesting
question I used to be four years it’s
been it’s been determined geographically
and there’s a there’s a reason why it’s
been determined geographically is
because the factors of production are
mostly geographically linked land labor
mostly labor a little less oh but labour
still primarily tied to certain
geographies but in the mid 20th century
as capital started becoming a bigger
thing and as capital flows started
extending beyond geographic boundaries
you started seeing the emergence of
supra national organizations like the
United Nations or the World Bank to help
regulate the flows and help deal with
things like poverty around the world and
inequality due to capital flows so in a
world where the factor of production
weights shift in favor of
entrepreneurship in favor of new ideas
who decides and what are the kind of
organizations that play there all of
these supranational organizations to
make sure that their rents or the return
that goes to entrepreneurship somehow
gets regulated or spread around and also
speaking for us as humans as we become
bigger and bigger members of these
digital tribes as we start defining
ourselves as belonging to not just one
country but part of ways of thing
King that again transcend national
national boundaries how do we vote and
what are the opinions that we have and
about what and how do they get
aggregated I think these are all very
important questions let alone the whole
question you’re going to hear about
which is how do you make sure that you
have access to unbiased information and
news so as I said unfortunately I don’t
have I don’t have a lot of answers okay
I know we’re living in this symbiotic
relationship with technology and I also
know that everything is moving faster
because we’re in the Information Age and
everything is speeding up at exponential
pace in terms of technology there are
some tough questions in our continued
quest towards transcendence that we’re
gonna have to as a society grapple with
and it’s not going to be easy but
optimism matters right it’s easy to be
pessimistic and to find flaws being
optimistic is what’s going to allow us
to use technology to find the solutions
to the problems that technology itself
creates and I for one choose to be
optimistic that our future is going to
be better than our past thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
you
[Music]
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