- 20 hours ago
Star Trek, the original TV series from the late 1960s, provided a positive vision of the future. Energy that is too cheap to meter. On demand manufacturing of complex parts. Instant diagnostic and healing of disease. Highly skilled and well-educated humans collaborating across race, gender, nationality. With our rapidly advancing technological capabilities, what can we build today as entrepreneurs and governments to work towards this vision?
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TechTranscript
00:05Hello everyone, I am very excited to talk to you today about building a Star
00:14Trek future and this has two names on it, my own and that of Gigi Danziger, my
00:20wife, the love of my life, and much of this is about work that we're doing
00:24together. So in 1957 there was this beautiful ad that showed a family in a
00:34self-driving car enjoying themselves I assume on their way to vacation and then
00:41in 2024 this is Gigi and I in the back of a Waymo so the future is here we all
00:51live
00:52in the future. In fact this is us in our brand-new 2026 Model Y that is actually
01:00fully self-driving after 10 years of promises by Elon Musk it is actually
01:04here. Hard to believe it takes us from our place in Manhattan to upstate New York
01:09two hours 15 minutes without us touching the steering wheel. Why is this happening?
01:17it is happening because we have an exponential, truly exponential, explosion
01:23of AI capability. This is one of many charts I could show. This is a chart that
01:28shows how long a model can go and write code on its own and be right roughly half
01:35the time and you can see that for a few years that chart was totally flat and now
01:40it's in an exponential explosion of how long a model can code without making a
01:44mistake. This is why we truly live in the future. So then the question is in 1957 we
01:54had this beautiful vision of the future what is our vision of the future now? Do
02:00we imagine that we will wind up living in a Blade Runner type world with a few
02:04megacorps Tyrell corporation dominating the world and building replicants or do we
02:12envision living in a matrix world where we are in pods believing that we live the
02:19real life when we're just living in a simulation or a little more colorful but
02:26still equally depressing do we believe we live in the WALL-E world where the
02:32robots will take care of everything and then we'll just have our big gulp drinks
02:37having been robbed in all other ways of our autonomy and our ability to go do
02:42things. Well these are all quite dystopian and depressing ways to think about the
02:47future. So where will we find a kind of positive vision of the future? Well like at
02:55the beginning let's go back to the past. Hence the name of the talk. Let's go back to
03:02Star Trek. Star Trek the original series. We're talking the late 60s, 67, 68, 69 and
03:12what do you see? You see men and women working together, people from all
03:16ethnicities working together, even a token alien, actual alien with Spock. It was a
03:24beautiful vision of the future. It included many amazing things in the late 60s. It included the
03:34idea of global connectivity. You could tap the communicator, talk to anybody else in
03:37Starfleet. It had a computer with vast knowledge that you could talk to via a voice
03:44interface. It allowed for instant diagnosis and healing via the tricorder. You could get
03:51a meal by pushing a button through the replicator. It was a world of energy
03:56abundance. And of course it was a world of space. The final frontier. Now it turns out
04:06we actually have a lot of those things. Global connectivity, pull out your phone, talk to
04:12anybody in the world. Computer you want to talk to? We've got ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral,
04:19maybe. Instant diagnosis. We're making a lot of progress. We've got MRIs. We've got mRNA to go
04:26treat things. On-demand production. We've got 3D printers. Energy abundance. We have an
04:35explosion of solar energy and we're finally getting back to building more nuclear energy. And we are doing
04:41space. I mean, SpaceX at least is. And so there's a lot happening along this vision. There's also an
04:50abundance of startup opportunities. Like in any of these areas today, there's extraordinary
04:56opportunity to build startups. Take energy storage. Europe last year curtailed a shocking
05:034 terawatt hours of electricity, of renewables. Curtailed meaning its electricity got produced but
05:09it wasn't used. So there's a huge opportunity to build storage. There's a huge opportunity
05:14to completely renew manufacturing and bring manufacturing back to Europe, bring it back
05:18to the US. There are opportunities in personalized medicine. You can now sequence your full genome
05:25for $100 on your desktop. So not only do we have a bunch of things already working, but we also
05:34have
05:34this huge set of entrepreneurial opportunities. So then there's kind of a strange question, which is,
05:44why are so many people actually pessimistic about the future? There's not a huge amount of optimism about
05:51the future we're heading to. There's a lot of belief that we will wind up in one of these dystopian
05:58outcomes. And there are reasons for that. There are real problems that we're struggling with. There's the
06:11climate crisis. In Europe, there's a distinct sense of energy scarcity. A lot of people feel completely powerless.
06:19They just feel like tech is this huge force. There's absolutely nothing they can do other than just let it
06:26wash over
06:26them. There's a global loneliness epidemic. And there's war again. I mean, even war in Europe. I just want to
06:36talk about
06:36one of these very briefly. Climate crisis is not super popular to talk about these days, but that chart hasn't
06:43changed.
06:44We have more CO2 in the atmosphere than in a very, very long time. And the net results of this
06:49are it's getting hotter and hotter.
06:51In fact, as you know, we're going to have 30 plus degrees for the next five days here in Paris
06:56again. And this chart just shows
06:58over the last hundred years how much hotter it's gotten right here in Paris. So how do we really build
07:04the
07:05Star Trek future? Well, in order to do that, we need to understand why we're not actually building it at
07:11the
07:11moment, despite all this activity that's happening. And the first is that we're confused about what is
07:17scarce. We still think that capital is scarce, but capital is sufficient. And by capital here, I mean
07:23physical capital. This is China. China can build entire cities in no time at all. You look at
07:30SpaceX, they can blow up a Starship. And then a few weeks later, they blow up another one. So capital
07:36is not
07:37actually the thing that's holding us back. It's not the thing that is scarce. The thing that is scarce is
07:43attention. What is it that we're paying attention to? Individually, as communities, as societies, as
07:52humanity. And why is it that attention is scarce? Attention is scarce because the very mechanism, the
08:02very mechanism that gave us all the capital, which is the market system and prices, that mechanism does not
08:10work for allocating attention. The most important things that we need to be paying attention to cannot and will
08:18not have prices. Ever. And so what does that mean? It means, and if you want to read more about
08:26these ideas, where
08:27these ideas come from, this book is available for free on the web. But what it means is that we
08:33really need to do work to
08:35free up attention. We need to free up attention to focus on the important things. Too much attention
08:41is on very, very unimportant things. It's on social feeds, it's on consumption, it's on doing jobs that
08:47machines can do better already. So how do we extract all that attention from those places and give it towards
08:54building the actual Star Trek future? So there are three freedoms here. The first is something called
09:00economic freedom. And economic freedom is figuring out some way to create some form of universal basic income.
09:08Gigi and I have our own pilot in the city of Hudson. It's called Hudson Up. There's 128 people there
09:16who receive
09:16$500 a month guaranteed, no strings attached, for five years. We need many more such experiments so that people, not
09:27in order to
09:27provide more data, the data is uniformly positive, but so that more people can experience what it feels like to
09:33live in that future, what it feels like now to live in the Star Trek future, where you don't have
09:37to work just to survive.
09:40We're also doing a lot on simulating in the here and now what very cheap capital would look like in
09:46the future.
09:47So if we have robots building lots of things, then things become very cheap. How can we simulate that in
09:52the here and now?
09:53Well, people who do have capital can make things available for cheap or free to others. So for example, we
10:01have an affordable housing project
10:02where we have built and renovated the buildings, but the rent only needs to cover the taxes and the insurance
10:08and the maintenance. So there are ways of simulating this economic freedom that robots will bring us here.
10:14It's not enough to just talk about how a robot future will be great for everybody if people can't imagine
10:20it.
10:21And they can't imagine it if they can't see it. And these are ways of seeing it today.
10:26There's a second freedom we need. And that's a way where we each have an AI that is loyal to
10:33us.
10:35Princess Leia only survived because R2-D2 was loyal to Princess Leia and not to the Empire.
10:40We all need our own AI that represents us. And there is a beginning of work here happening with personal
10:48agents.
10:50Lots of startup opportunities here. But it is very important that these agents have some kind of,
10:57that we have some kind of right to be represented by one of those agents vis-a-vis Google, Facebook,
11:05the government, our bank, etc. All of whom are using AI, and they're using AI to increase their profit,
11:10not using AI to make our lives better. Then there's a question of values.
11:18So Gigi and I, we have funded something called the Values Lab at Columbia,
11:23because how do we ensure that agents that represent us actually have our well-being in mind?
11:30So there's important work around what should these values be.
11:34There's also important technical work. How do we get models to have deeply embedded values?
11:41And then there is a final freedom. And this freedom we refer to as psychological freedom.
11:52So our brains evolved at a time period where when you saw a cat that was an actual cat.
12:01Your stream can now produce an infinity of cat pictures. And so we are in many ways exploitable,
12:10easily exploitable by the attention hacking that's going on.
12:14So there's a couple of ways that we can get around this. One way is actually a local Paris-based
12:21company called Opal.
12:23And they don't just make this very fun sticker. They make a piece of software that you can put on
12:27your phone
12:28so that you can sort of put one little step between you and the feed.
12:34One little step where it's like, just take a deep breath. Do you really need to scroll right now?
12:44Or maybe should you be doing something else? And often that one deep breath is enough to decide, no, actually
12:51I have more important things to do.
12:55And then what might these more important things be? So Gigi and I, we have built a community center in
13:02the city of Hudson.
13:03One of the most important things to be doing is to get out there, to meet up with other people,
13:09to get out from behind the screen,
13:13and actually interact with other human beings. And maybe to discover something that you're really deeply passionate about.
13:21So if we can manage to free up our attention, free it up economically by not absolutely having to work.
13:29If we can free up informationally by having bots that represent us.
13:34And if we can free it up psychologically by saying, what are the things that I actually deeply care about?
13:40Then we can start to really work towards that Star Trek future.
13:49So if you want to learn more about the work that we're doing, you can go to Utopia Global, and
13:54in the words of Captain Picard, make it so.
13:57Thank you all.
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