Camp Gagnon - Tech Expert Says AI Will Take YOUR Job in 5 Years

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Fashion model and futurist Sinead Bovell talks about how artificial intelligence will steal your job in the next five years (and why that’s okay), how AI like ChatGPT has changed education, and the future of human cloning. WELCOME TO CAMP.Thanks to Morgan & Morgan for sponsoring today's episode!Mark Gagnon is our HostWill Schwartz is our Content Producer and Lead EditorAce Taylor provides Additional EditingSpencer Weinstein is our Community ManagerKostis Zacho is our Clips Editor

Wearables, for example. So if I have like a smart watch or smart glasses that I think most of us know Apple will be coming to market with this year, that is probably what is going to replace the smartphone eventually. So you can imagine a world where maybe you have smart glasses and you just kind of pull up the digital world in front of you as opposed to looking down. Maybe you can kind of tap your shoulder and the chip in your shoulder turns on your music or makes a phone call. But if you see the way technology is trending, so things like chat, GPT, and you kind of imagine that in the, these systems, you start to realize that the things around you, you'll start to interface with more. And you won't need to kind of carry this device that you have to look down at all the time. And that to me is keys to a door that we've never seen anything like. This is Sheneid Beauvel. On the side, she's a professional fashion model, but her main gig is advising companies

how to future-proof their technology. She has spoken to institutions such as the United Nations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cornell University, and now she's talking to me. And today we're going to discuss how ChatGPT has already change schools forever. Why aliens probably exist and why we might be cloning humans in the next five years. Now, enjoy my conversation with Cheneid Beauvel. Welcome to camp. Sheney Beauvel. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm excellent. Thank you so much for sitting with me. You are a futurist and a model. I'm more interested in the former, but we're going to talk about both as they intersect. I guess first off, what is a futurist? I think the word means different things to different

Do you like the word? I think it sounds cooler than it is, or sometimes I can kind of throw people off, and you end up spending more time kind of explaining it in some ways. Yeah. So I'm not totally attached to it, but it just, yeah, I think it nicely kind of summarizes what I do, but I'm, if we ended up changing it, I'm good with that too. You're cool with that all. If there's a rebrand. Yeah, in the futurist industry, you're like, right. Yeah, I'm down with the rebrand.

So what is, what does that word, what does it mean for what you do? mapping out data points and forecasting trends and future scenarios. So that's how I adopt the term or use it and what I spend a lot of my day doing. Right, which is interesting, and that's why I bring up the model thing before, because you wrote a fabulous article for Vogue, basically saying, I'm a model, and I recognize that artificial intelligence will take my job, which is a bold claim for someone that's in the industry. I think most people would be like kind of Luddites and be like,

I don't like this new thing that's going to come for my industry. Why do you believe that artificial intelligence will take your job? I think AI, modeling aside, artificial intelligence is going to impact every single job. And so there really isn't an industry or a lane that I think is immune, modeling included. And when you look at what AI can do, anything that's predictable and repetitive, is really within AI's wheelhouse. And that's one aspect of modeling. So anything kind of e-commerce modeling

is kind of predictable, repetitive movements. You go to like an H&M website. And most of the positioning of the models is kind of similar. Maybe a front shot, maybe a side shot. Right. So AI is really good at that type of predictable design, so to speak. And then when you combine that type of repetition

with technology like generative AI, so you might have seen like deep fakes. And you're like, okay, we can do something predictable with faces and images that look rather human, the intersection of that is fashion modeling. And then there's, of course, aspects of modeling like a cover shoot that seems a little bit more creative. But then we're seeing things like Dolly, where it's designing that type of imagery from scratch. Yeah, are there different types of modeling that you think will be impacted sooner or later? Like, I don't know a ton about modeling, but I imagine that the type of modeling

that is like sitting in like a Land's End catalog with like a sweater is different than like high fashion walking on a runway. So both of those are modeling, but I think they're very different. And I'm curious, do you think AI will impact those two industries at different rates? I do, and for different reasons. I think people are less emotionally attached

to maybe something that they see on an e-commerce site and you're kind of shopping more for convenience. And people, even though there are a lot of incredible skills and minds to make that possible, the outcome and the interface with customers, people are less emotionally tied to it. When you think of somebody on the front page of a high fashion magazine,

that seems to occupy a more sacred area in people's minds. And I think having to interface with like an avatar or something that's not real, I think we'll take a little bit more time. And I think there's also like an interpersonal relationship with it. Like when I see like Bradley Cooper wearing a watch, like over here in Sohood, there's like a famous, like there's a Rolex ad with him wearing a watch.

They are choosing him specifically because he, as a human being, carries social cash-ed. His story. So in that regard, that role and that ad might be taken over by AI at a slower rate because it lacks the inner personality. Yeah, for sure. I think the story of why someone's chosen in sort of a campaign goes with their humanness, but something that doesn't necessarily have that tie to it, there seems less at stake.

And if you've shopped online for clothes, you've probably come across AI models and you just don't even really know it. Oh, you think it's already rolled out? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Really? So there's like German e-commerce brands have been studying how to make deep fake modeling for years. And they have a lot of incredible impressive papers out.

So I think it's already here. Japan has a few companies. I'm not remember. DataGrid, I believe, is the name. Right. And they kind of print out e-commerce style fashion models. And so as a model, are you concerned about this? Does it make you sad? Like, I know there's a lot of ethical concerns that we can get into next, but I'm curious. You personally, are you like, oh, what a shame. I love, you know, modeling, but now that's going to be sideswiped by this emerging industry. Yeah, it's interesting that no one's actually ever asked me that. In a way, yes, because I really enjoy what I get to do as a model and the things I've learned about myself in that. role and so that that's changing is yeah of course I'll have to part with that in some ways but I also

think as someone who exists in the world of technology and futurism I'd much rather be prepared so I can adapt to what's coming and it doesn't necessarily mean that modeling is completely wiped out it just means that it's definitely going to change and have to evolve and if you're on if you have that foresight to kind of be a few steps ahead you don't run the risk of just kind of becoming obsolete Right. And what are the ethical concerns that come along with AI model? I know you've touched on racial issues. And I'm curious about those. And I wonder if there's others that are similar to that. But we can start on that if you like. Well, I think even just with job loss in general, that also is a massive gray ethical kind of conundrum. Anytime you have automation in the line of fire that comes with it some ethical flags. Do you think that actually on that point specifically, do you think there will be a push by brands to be like, hey, all of our models are real models that are real people,

and we are funding and supporting, like, real women of color and things like that in their campaigns in the next few years? Or do you think, like almost like Made in America, Will had brought this up, that like Doves, like, real body campaign, you know, was promoting like real women? Will there be a similar push with AI on the horizon to be like, hey, we're using real women and not artificially created?

Yeah, made by a human. I think that is a conversation happening, in creative worlds in general and art worlds, as AI starts to kind of step into these spaces, will it increase the value of something that's made by a human? And we might, it's hard to know if that, if that will be the case or the cost savings and efficiency are just so good that we're no longer tied to these certain jobs and occupations being filled by a human, but it's definitely possible that once AI becomes a lot more mainstream, if you do see a campaign with a human, It's because that's a really important story and it's even more kind of, you know, the story

just, I guess, means more to people. Right. Yeah, the story part is really interesting to me because I think so much of fashion is built on stories. Like when you buy a brand now, you might just be buying it because it's something that's ubiquitous and everyone knows, but for a way that a brand to become ubiquitous oftentimes is predicated and built on like a story. Like, you know, I am a immigrant that moved here and I want to recapture Americana for me as

what it means to be an immigrant, whatever. And that story is sort of like the little seedling that grows the entire brand. And I think like streetwear does this. And I even think like high fashion brands that are emerging in the last like 10 years will do that. Is it unethical? If you're allowed to just like basically create people

to be the faces of these brands through modeling, is it unethical to create artificial stories to go along with it? Like why are we okay with the people associated with it to be quote artificial, but the stories have to be real? Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah, and I would, how do we know even that with current day, when we have spokespeople or brand ambassadors, that they are really, they really actually stand for that or they are kind of who the campaign says they are, or they're the face of something and maybe they don't actually live by those values. Right. But do we, we tend to hold machines or AI and robots to a higher standard. So I do think people would feel a type of way about a machine that's tied to a story that never actually happened to them. than a human that maybe has some other ethical kind of question marks in their back door. Yeah, yeah. It's just like so fascinating. And then I guess this pivots into the point that you brought up.

Oh, but I will say with that story, there are lines where I think it becomes a lot more clear. And I don't know if you're familiar with like the Avatar Little Michaela. Yeah, of course. Love Little Michaela. Huge fan. Huge fan. Huge fan. Her new song with Little Busy.

I haven't been able to keep up with the music. I made up the person. I don't know if she has a new song. But I know that she does music. She does really great campaigns or who's ever kind of creating her does. And she is an avatar. If you're not familiar, she's an avatar with like 3 million followers last time I checked. And she's done really well.

And I think is kind of the frontier of this new world of technology we're starting to step into. Which is she's quote unquote not a real person. Not a real person. She is an avatar created by a team of real people, computer generating a person. Computer generating a person with fake clothing. And she's not AI. So she's computer-generated imagery. So somebody has to kind of put each outfit on her.

She can't just kind of morph on her own, so to speak. And she's done really well, and I think it's been really interesting watching her. Where it got really gray is she did a story about being sexually assaulted. So, and I think people felt, you know, I didn't see it in real time. I was kind of, you know, when I was researching the topic later, I kind of came across that, that kind of plot line and it wasn't received well by people. Right. Well, why do you think it was not received well? I think if you're using appropriating trauma that never really happened to you and then speaking on behalf of as a victim.

Right. Of an experience you never went through. Right. I think that that gets really not so great. It also just seems so unnecessary. Like, I get using it, I'm sure their intention was, okay, we're going to use this awful thing as a teaching moment in a way to sort of commiserate.

But considering that the entire avatar exists as, like, a tool to make money, I guess, it feels like, oh, you're co-opting trauma to make money. Yeah. It feels very strange. Like, I think it feels in the same way, like, when brands, like, take a social stand that feels unnecessary. Like oftentimes there's social standards that make a lot of sense, but then other times brands will do it and people will be like, why? What does this have to do with chicken noodle soup?

Like, why are you doing this? And I feel like that's why people felt like that. They're like, you are an avatar that like dances and like wears cool clothes and like takes trendy influencer pictures. And now you've been like digitally sexually assaulted. Like why does this exist? Yeah. And I think, I mean, I understand that we may use avatars and AI. to tell stories differently.

And so maybe we do figure out a way to use these digital identities to help us be more open about that type of traumas, for example. I don't know if that was the way, how they went about it. I think it is something that is going to require more of a societal conversation.

What are we comfortable with? How do we share these stories? So, yeah, that was something that got kind of ethically gray and it definitely was not received well by people. And that's what makes it interesting is that in every, so I think human beings generally, like our identities are tied to trauma for better or for worse, just like by virtue of being a human being, you're going to have trauma. So if you're an immigrant, there are, there is a trauma that goes along with that. But if you are a black person in the United States, you have a

different relationship with race than if you're a white person. Given that, if you are an avatar that is black, you have a different perspective on those things. And sometimes, and you pointed this out in your TED Talk, that there will be black avatars that are controlled and dare I say owned, I don't want to saying owned is a very dirty connotation to all of this, but owned by like white people. And it creates this ethical era where it's like, what is happening? So can you explain like a specific instance of this?

You talk about in your TED Talk beautifully, but. Yeah. So, and there's more instance of it coming. I mean kind of popping up when I first started to kind of ring the alarm bells of it, people just didn't even know how to process it. And now we're starting to see it. I still don't know how to process it. For the record, I don't know how to process it. And I'm really either. I'm like, I can't believe this is something that we're actually going through. Yeah. So I guess the easiest story is there is a supermodel, a digital supermodel,

a name Shudu Graham. She's black. I think South Africa is where her owner, creator said she's from. And she's been used to speak on diversity and fashion. She stands for kind of strong woman and empowered women, which is great. And she's been dubbed, you know, the first digital supermodel and has done all sorts of great campaigns, featured in vogue, all of it. But the person who owns and controls her is a white male. Yeah. And to me, I don't think that that is ethically okay. And I know it gets really gray. I'm not saying that people can't experiment with different identities

and technology will provide us these new ways to kind of present our humanity to the world. And that's really great. Where I think I draw the line is if you are intentionally profiting off of an identity that isn't yours. So you're just using that identity to profit off of, or you're speaking on behalf of, a group that you're not a part of.

Like if you picture somebody using a black avatar that isn't black, but using a black avatar in the metaverse, and then speaking in a bunch of black history events in the metaverse as a black avatar. That to me is not okay. I'm not, I think we're going to kind of evolve as a society to have different identities in the metaverse, and I think that there'll be specific use cases

and examples of where it's actually a good thing to maybe try different identities and different experiences. I think that that's okay. When someone is kind of manipulating it for the purpose of profit or to control a narrative of a group that they're not a part of, that to me is like, nah. And this avatar's name, what is the... Shudu Graham.

Shudu Graham. So, and it's created by a white dude. It's created by a white dude. It's owned by a white dude. And he could have created a white woman. And his reasoning was, you know, black women were having a movement at the time or their voices were being more.

more heard and so she represents that and is a part of that. And that actually, to me, it actually just makes it more gray because it's like, oh, well, something's kind of this race is trending in your perspective. Yeah, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said, oh, they're suppressing blind voices. Like, there's not enough diverse. Let me capitalize on this moment. Like, you could have said the opposite and been like, oh, I'm trying to actually create

more inclusion. But instead he was like, oh, no, this shit is popping. Let's get a black girl in the mix. Like, why? Let's just go with that. Yeah, that's not. And do you feel like her brand has benefited? her, obviously as the avatar her, has benefited from her culture,

her again, like AI culture and her race. Like him using that black avatar? Yeah, had he used a white woman or an Asian woman, do you feel like they would have had a lesser response either financially or socially than having like, and she's like this supermodel, we can pull a picture up. She's like a striking, like, West African woman, but just like a beautiful, like African woman.

And it's distinctly like, oh, this is like a beautiful African person. And they have, where he has the accessories on her of specific neck rings and things that are associated with specific experiences and specific cultural groups in Africa. So it gets really, and I label it kind of as robot cultural appropriation. Right. This emerging, I don't even know what it is, this emerging kind of phenomenon that we're going to have to deal with. but I think what is the most important thing for me is that we do think the people behind avatars matter, that we don't just get so lost in it all that any, I think anybody should be able to try a lot of things, but we make sure that who is behind that avatar, powering them,

controlling them, and profiting off of them, it's ethically aligned with where we think humanity should go. And maybe we think this isn't the direction of humanity should go. Maybe we should totally pivot and anyone is kind of anyone and speaks on behalf of people. I have a hunch that probably won't work out well, but I think it's a conversation that we should get in front of. But then I guess you also have to think the people that are emerging in these spaces are probably predominantly like white. So if they're only making avatars of themselves, then all of these avatars are all just going to be white. And then there's going to be a lack of representation. So it's one of these things where it's like, do we want people to just be representing the things that

they, quote, unquote, can, or should they be able to represent things so long as it's in good faith? I'm curious, what do you think of that? Yeah, because access to technology and the ability to create avatars, it isn't neutral. Certain people that have, you know, better access based on different kind of societal, infrastructural, systemic kind of factors at the moment. Hopefully that changes the next five years, but. And yeah, I don't think that, I really don't think that you have to be your exact same self in the Metaverse or in whatever worlds we are we choose to plan. And even if that's a video game, I don't think you have to look like your avatar.

I just specifically think in the instances where you're specifically speaking on top of, on behalf of that group or profiting because of that identity, that's where I draw the right line. Yeah, that's where it gets really weird. That's where it gets weird for me. I don't think I've got to show up and literally look like this mixed half, have Guyanese person and that's it. And there may be specific instances where it's really good for someone to be able to have a different identity in the Metaverse.

Maybe there's something about them that they don't, that they get judged for and they would like to just be freed from that in an avatar form. And I think that that's gonna be so freeing and awesome. Right. Yeah, I wonder about like disabled people where they're like, I have to be in a wheelchair

in the Metaverse. You know what I mean? Like this, I wonder if there's people hearing this thinking that like there is a confinement to, what their identities can be in a digital space where it's like, you know, and obviously we're talking about like privileges and things like that. There's like a beautiful privilege. If you are an attractive person in America, statistically, I would assume, your life is probably going to be on average some percentile better than if you are unattractive. So can I not be attractive,

more attractive in the metaverse? Do I have to be resigned to whatever my actual self is representing in real life? So obviously the racial dynamic makes things super complicated and weird, especially given the recent racial history in America. But I guess when you get into the super tight nuances where it's like, could I be 20% more attractive in my digital self? Well, yeah. And I think people that have mobility aids, not having to use them in the metaverse, like I think that that is could be an empowering or just having the choice of how you want to show up. I think that is great. In terms of things like your attractive level, well, we already do that, right? All of the different face tuning apps. Most people on social media have, I would say a significant portion,

have edited photos. And the more time we spend in digital spaces, the less we have to show up as our full selves. And so we'll have that kind of like identity dysmorphia probably will only expand going forward. And do you, if you think you're like a certain attractive level in the real world do you have to continue to be you know pixel per pixel that same thing i i mean i think we already don't do that i think we're mostly filtered and edited and smoothed over and teeth whitened yeah now i guess this specific case with the african model and the white guy if it was a white guy and you know an asian woman like or i guess if it was inverse would you like do would you sound the alarms to the same degree, or is this case specifically alarming to you because it's

profiting off of, I guess, like African or black stories? Yeah, I think if you're, I think it's directional. So if you're profiting off of marginalized experiences and groups that have already been oppressed, I think you're kind of adding fuel to the fire. Right. But do I think it's okay for me to show up in the metaverse and pretend I'm someone, speak on behalf of them, profit off of it, regardless of what that identity is, I still think that that's quite gray. I still like that isn't something that will work out well for us in the long term. Right. Now, I understand a lot of your work is going and speaking with companies about how to future proof their business. And I'm sure a lot of people specifically with Facebook rebranding

is meta and people talking about quote unquote the metaverse. I think it was more popular a few months ago. of being like, oh, the metaverse is coming, and what is this new reality going to be? I'm curious, what do you tell a lot of these companies and brands about the metaverse? How is it going to manifest and how quickly will it start affecting our day-to-day lives? And how quickly do we need to be thinking about these avatars and how they're going to be interacting with each other? Yeah. So I think when we hear the word metaverse, we tend to think of like second life cartoons, avatars. And, you know, that's no surprise, you know, a pretty big company.

made that stake in that claim that this is what the Metaverse will look like. I don't think, if you look at cartoons and avatars and think I'm not really down with that, I don't think any of us really are. Me kind of looking like a Homer Simpson version of myself, why am I doing that? So I don't think that that's what the future is. And that's certainly not what I tell companies start to get ready to look like a cartoon. What I think the Metaverse is, or what seems much more inevitable, much more inevitable is that the way we interface with technology, things like smartphones,

for example, is going to change. And so a world where our objects and our wearables are connected and are smart that allow us to appear in a digital environment different than we currently do today, that to me is what we should be preparing for. Whether we emerge as cartoons or not, I'm cool if that doesn't happen. Yeah. And I don't spend too much time on that. but I do think that technologies that the Metaverse encompasses

were stepping towards those, and we have been for a long time. And even the companies that own the cell phones and smartphones and present-day technology, they are also taking big steps in a direction of different interfacing technologies. In what way? So how are the technologies moving towards a, quote, metaverse?

And if it's not cartoons interfacing with each other, what is it? So wearables, for example. So if I have like a smart watch or a smart piece of clothing or a piece of glasses that or, you know, smart glasses that I think most of us know Apple will be coming to market with this year. Oh, this year. Mm-hmm. So rumors are it's in the next kind of couple months. They've been working on something. They've been filing patents for smart eyewear for almost a decade.

Wow. They've been, if you look at their acquisition history, who they've been buying, that is probably. what is going to replace the smartphone eventually and smart glasses on the way to context, on the way to bring chips, which we can get into later. But that is the direction of some of the biggest tech players and some of the smaller ones as well. So you can imagine a world where maybe you have smart glasses and hopefully if they're designed by Apple, they're cool. And you just kind of pull up the digital world in front of you as opposed to looking down and kind of interfacing with this screen, so there's going to be a lot less screens, so to speak. Maybe you can kind of

tap your shoulder and the chip in your shoulder turns on your music or makes a phone call, or maybe you interface with your smart speaker. And I think the speakers in our homes, if you have like an Amazon, like they have Echo or would. Those, I think aren't very impressive. And there's a reason why I think most like millennials, Gen Z were not really, those haven't worked out well or as those companies had planned. But if you see the way technology is trending, so things like chat GPT, and you kind of imagine that in these systems,

you start to realize that the things around you you'll start to interface more with, and you won't need to kind of carry this device that you have to look down at all the time. So did you say a chip in your shoulder? Oh, by shoulder I meant like sleeve. Okay. Not like wearable clothing.

So. Wearable clothes? My clothing is wearable. Very true. Not always well. I don't always wear it well, but it is wearable. No, I'm liking the fit right now. It's great.

Wearable in the sense of having chips embedded in it. So it can process information. It's powered by AI. You can maybe talk to it. It's kind of measuring your jumping jackspan and sending that to your fitness coach. Or it's kind of controlling how you call people or maybe taking your blood pressure. all these sorts of wearables, watches. Watches make more sense.

Clothing with chips in it or like tech clothing feels gimmicky to me. Like the idea of like pants that'll check your sweat level and check your heart rate, whatever. That feels like a marketing gimmick that would come out and people would kind of be like, whatever. Or do you think it'll be like one-off pieces of clothing or do you think it'll just be everything that you wear will just have, you know, a chip in it or some other type of tech that can indicate something about you?

I think, I mean, I think glasses for sure. I do think wearables, if you look at the investment streams of a lot of companies, whether that's high fashion companies or tech companies, that is part of the direction. And maybe it's not something that comes in this sweater. Like maybe it's something that you can kind of apply. But I do think smart clothing, like the less we can be distracted, the less distracted we can be from our present life.

And I know this seems counterintuitive. If you have technology all around you, then you're just always plugged in. But I think going like this and just kind of blocking out the world is a lot more out of touch than a world where wearables are just kind of sensing what you do and just on par with you and you don't have to kind of disconnect. So when you think of the metaverse,

you're not thinking of a virtual reality. You're thinking of an augmented reality. Much more augmented reality. And in case anyone does know the difference, what are the difference between those two? So virtual reality, you're in a virtual world, so to speak. So you're probably putting on a headset, you know, from today to the next probably decade, that's what it would involve. And you're in a simulated world, probably as a cartoon of some sort. And you're doing anything from maybe training for surgery, which is like very practical use cases of VR or just kind of playing a video game.

Augmented reality is you're just overlaying the digital world onto the physical one. So maybe you have a pair of smart classes, and I can look out and pull up my computer screen in thin air. Or if I'm trying to look at Google Maps, it's just the directions are coming on the street or they're right in front of me. I don't have to actually take out my phone and look at them. That's augmented reality. And if I had to place a bet on which one, I would go AR. Got you. Augmented.

I think it's very unnatural for humans to, we don't like just from evolution to have our site fully blocked. So the idea of kind of being fully in a virtual reality container, I just think doesn't sit well with people. There are specific instances where it can work well. Right. But it's kind of dangerous. There was a lot of insurance claims, people tripping and falling. So I think it can only be done in certain environments versus AR is just, I think that's much more the future. And that is, yeah, when I think of Metaverse, I think of that.

And I think more of holograms. got you and things and so that's why you bring up clothing because you said something to me before we were talking that I thought was like very pointed that the general trend of technology is smaller and closer to you what do you mean by that yeah so when you tell people for example that smartphones will eventually go away for most people that seems like a complete just like a ludicrous idea everything is in that smartphone yeah and we just got them we kind of just got them yeah and I just couldn't live without it and it is kind of a crisis

if you forget your smartphone on the way to work like the day is done you feel anxious like especially people in my generation like walking around without a smartphone is like it makes it I don't enjoy it I've seen people get off planes and miss the plane because they had left their cell phone and like I guess I have to just miss this flight like that's 100% so the idea would you not do that yeah I would get off the point yeah you say people as if like that's not yeah

people as in literally me as a homoopian I probably have done that okay 100% So yeah, all of us. But then if you look at the history of tech, so if you think, okay, I'm never, I'm not going to not have a smartphone. Do you still have a home phone? Okay. When was the last time you used a pay phone? I've never used a pay phone. So if you look at how the history of phones all the way to trickering hall when Bell released their first kind of magic box of a phone, to where we are today, technology has always gotten smarter, small. and closer to our body. And that graph, that curve has never changed. And so even just in our lifespan,

we've seen pay phones go away, home phones go away. And what makes us think that smartphones wouldn't go away? Like why this, right? And why is this where it ends? Like why did we just suddenly stop evolving? Because we're in it. I think humans do that. Like the concept, could you imagine a world where Instagram is like obsolete?

It's like difficult to imagine the thing when you're in it as ending. as ending. Like, I think people do that with everything. You read about empires falling and you're like, wow, the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Empire, Prussian Empire, whatever. But not us. There's no way to us. It's always other people. Yeah, of course.

And it's always just going to be a different generation. Or that, yeah, they just didn't have, they didn't know how good it can get, but we have it as great as it's going to get. Yeah, exactly. I forget who it was. There was, like, a famous inventor in, like, 1912 that basically tried to, like, close the patent office. Where he was just like, what is the point of a patent office if we've already invented basically everything? And this is like 100 years ago. And he's like, we're good.

Like we don't need all these patents every all the time. Like what else is there to invent? And I feel like people do that now where they're like smartphones. Like how much smaller and closer to me could it be? Mm-hmm. And it will get smaller and closer and less distracting. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick from this amazing conversation with Chenade Beauvel.

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So the goal with technology, and this isn't me trying to be like a techno-optimist, because I think that's a whole different genre and ideology. but the goal of technology is to be much less distracted from the real world. And so anything that kind of takes my attention out of the real world where I have to look down and that to me is a distraction. And I would rather not have to do that. And so if the things that I need digitally could just kind of appear in front of me as I needed them to be and then kind of go away, to me that's kind of a win.

This is aside from, of course, the red flags on surveillance. and data, that's a whole different thing. I mean, smartphones already know pretty much everything about you. Yeah. I mean, that's a surveillance nightmare. We're in a surveillance nightmare. We're literally in a surveillance nightmare. So that aside, I would much rather be able to just maintain being present

as opposed to just getting locked into this thing that's just like notifications and dings and all of that. Okay. So explain to me what happens when I wake up with my Apple glasses in five years. What does that world look? like for me? Like take me through the day? So if you have Apple glasses and say if you have like a few more IOT devices, so maybe you're... What is IOT? Internet of Things. Okay. So Internet of Things. So Internet of Things is systems where objects around you are smart and embedded with internet technology

and they can process data. They can make analyses. Some of it would be embedded with artificial intelligence. So if you think of like a mirror, right now it's just a mirror, but if it was connected to the internet of things, maybe it could take your photo when you look in it, process that your eye color is looking kind of faint or something's changed and you're probably a vitamin deficiency. That's one example of like a pending internet of things. But in a future where you have apple glasses, for example, you wake up, maybe you put them on, you hopefully don't check your email first thing in the morning, but say that's what you do. And how do I check my email?

So you have your glasses on, and maybe it would be something as like a tap, or you'd be a voice command, you know, Siri or whatever is their operating system, you know, pull up email, pull up my daily schedule, and that would just get overlaid on top of the real world. So you could see it if you have your glasses on, and it would look like it's a clear screen in air, but nobody else could see that. and that's where you're kind of seeing your calendar, seeing your email, and you can swipe and touch and tap the way you currently do on a cell phone. And I know that that seems unreal,

but like a touchscreen with something almost unfathomable even 30 years ago, like the idea that you can pinch and minimize, like that was a massive breakthrough in technology. So you're saying I have the glasses on, and then my email is in my field of vision, and I can tap into my field of vision, but not literally onto the thing itself. And I can go, okay, swipe away.

Swipe, yep. Or bring that. back and it will pop up still in my field of vision. Yeah, so that's the goal with AR in entirety. And you can do that with AR functions right now on a phone, but not as attractive. To me, it's much easier if it's just kind of overlaid on the physical world and I don't have to hold things around. But I still have a phone with me? Yeah, I think for this next decade, the phone will kind of be like the hub that is like the intersection point of all of your technologies. So this is like how the computer was the intersection point

for all of our other technologies. You had, like, six years ago, you would have, like, an iPod, and you would have your cell phone, and you would have some of these other devices, and they would all use the computer as, like, a central hub to interface. And now the phone is kind of like

your central where everything is. And then in the future, your phone, as we transition, will be the thing that connects, like, to your smart speaker in your home, your smart house, your smart glasses, but eventually the phone will go away. Gotcha.

So now my glasses will be, interfacing through this internet of things. My clothing will be interfacing through the internet of things. My watch, my mirror. Your glasses would be able to do what your smartphone does. And they kind of would be that just in glasses and can do a lot more than that. But just that's the technology it would ultimately be replacing. So everyone would just be walking around wearing glasses. Interesting. And that's why it matters who designs them. and what brand they're kind of stamped with. And I know people like to say Google tried to do this,

and we're very unsuccessful seven years, maybe eight years ago now, Google lasts. Yeah. And it was kind of just like a laughing nightmare. And I think they were just too early, but they did kind of set the foundation for how it could work. And I think a lot of other companies are now have been learning from that.

And there are people that still believe that, that still believe that there's no way they're going to put on smart glasses. But the consensus on things like AirPods, even just a few years ago, these things are never going to work. They are so ugly. We look like Martians running around. Yeah, I remember the first person I saw wearing AirPods. I was with another guy. He was like an older dude and he just goes up to the kid. He goes, do you have cigarettes in your ears? Because it literally was just like a white stick coming out. We look like R2D2s running around. And now they are arguably the... Yeah, they're biggest jewelry item of all time.

Yeah. So glasses, if you can get the aesthetic right, that's supposed to, will be a part of that wearable thing. And Instagram, YouTube, everything will be interfacing through this thing. And how will I send text messages? The same way. So to send a text message now, I have two thumbs that type on a virtual keyboard, or I guess on a literal keyboard on glass.

So you could have virtual keyboards. All of that could still exist. Oh, through the internet. So it would pop up at the bottom and I would go like this, literally. So instead of this, you're just like more free in your life. Oh, weird. And then we'll do a lot more interfacing through voice commands and just natural language. So if you've kind of seen the wild evolution and artificial intelligence where AI systems are getting better at understanding natural language, you can imagine these types of systems kind of powering our interfaces.

So it's not even as much writing a full email or searching things via text. You're just able to kind of speak and do things. Interesting. And then how do advertisements work in this AR world? Because I imagine any place where there's people's eyeballs, there's going to be brands. So what happens in that regard? Yeah. So there's like surveillance kind of capitalism and a world where when you're walking down the street and it just looks like time square.

all the time. I don't think it's going to work out well for most people, and I hope that that's not what it becomes, but advertisements would be overlaid as well, likely, on top of the physical world, just the way your email would. But there's also a world where AR glasses make us less, make less kind of fake synthetic things around us. And here's what I mean by that. If advertisements now just existed in people's augmented reality glasses. It means we don't need billboards anymore. And billboards and kind of digital signage and all sorts of things, that's not natural either. We're kind of just used to it.

But that's not very aesthetically pleasing either. So we can resort back to more organic kind of natural landscapes, knowing that advertisements would appear over somebody's digital world, would be overlaid on their physical world, as opposed to just this massive billboard. And then there's also with, you know, we talk a lot about augmented reality, but there's also diminished reality. So you can have AR glasses and say you don't want to see a big garbage can on your way to. You could actually have it diminish sites that you don't want to see.

Whoa. What do you mean by that? So instead of overlaying just digital things on my world, I could say I don't like the color green and I don't want to see, green things or you could say I don't like this big dumpster that I have to walk by every day, get rid of that or the Times Square billboards and I just want to walk through Times Square and it looked like what it did maybe 150 years ago. That is wild.

That seems like that would bring up some ethical issues as well. All of it. All of it. And I don't think, I think technology always evolves and challenges ethics and sometimes for the better. Sometimes it really helps push us and advance ethically in our morals. And then, of course, it also comes with a lot of red flags and gray flags. And we also might not want this. Like that's why I like to bring these conversations to light and to the public.

Because we might, if this isn't something that we want to do, let's just not do it. And let's not have six people kind of direct the future. Right. So are you able to diminish sites? Would there be a limit on what you'd be allowed to diminish? So, like, I mean, this is just obviously where my brain goes, right? Like, you diminish dumpsters and people are like, all right, great. But then there's going to be one guy that's like, can we diminish Chinese people?

And you're like, okay, no, no, no, we can't diminish all races of people. But like, is there going to be a limit to what you're allowed to diminish? Let's hope that would be awful. Of course. Like, no one wants to diminish people, but there's racist people out there that want people to be straight of diminished. So how, would there be a limit to what you're allowed to diminish? Yeah, that let's hope that those are.

would be some of the guardrails that people are like, I just, I want to diminish my neighbors or like just won't have them in the line. We're diminishing kids. Yeah. And then how much of those things can you diminish, but like you still need them there? So like no one wants to see a dumpster, but also no one wants to walk into a dumpster. Mm-hmm. So how would it be able to tell, okay, this thing is diminished, but also don't walk that way.

So maybe you get like an arrow as like object, but, or maybe it's just things that are kind of aerial and like in the sky. and so you're kind of just replacing a sign on a building as opposed to taking out things that somebody could walk into. So maybe that becomes a safety issue with diminished reality. And like, okay, we can only do things

that are above eight feet because no one's going to walk into them. Right. So the technology is still very much evolving, but it is very much a part of our future with these kind of augmented and virtual realities. So in this augmented reality, are there, I want to bring it back

to the avatar convoy we're having before. Are there avatars? in that augmented reality as well? So there's a few different ways we show up. So, yes, so maybe we are, you kind of build a digital version of yourself, and anyone who's wearing augmented glasses sees you as the digital version

that you want them to see you in. So maybe, which could be insane, maybe we never take off filters, so to speak, because it's like, okay, anyone who's in these AR glasses that I'm wearing, they are going to see me as I've kind of face tuned my face and done this and smooth that out, and that's kind of how you look.

Will we be more, I think avatars, but photorealistic? So when I say avatars of the future, I'm hoping that they're photorealistic, which most companies are working on, and that just means you look like you. I'm not cartooned. I'm just chnade in augmented reality. But yeah, avatars in that form. And you would be able to adjust things about you? to a limit or would you be able to adjust anything?

And I guess this gets into like the red and gray flag area that we were talking about. And I would also get into like the capabilities of the technology. So maybe it's easier to adjust or edit the close that somebody sees you in, but it's harder to do maybe smaller details, so to speak. Or maybe it is easier to have an augmented reality filter on your face that kind of makes it seem like you always have makeup on when that's not the case. And is this like would, is this where like, digital clothing and like maybe the NFT space could come in where like you could purchase

clothing that's very expensive but doesn't actually exist but only exist through the digital interface. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's actually going to be a big part of what NFTs become or at least kind of if how we'll use that technology, if you buy something like a shirt and you get the digital version that you can apply to your AR glasses that people see you in, your receipt for that would probably be. in NFT form or like a stamp on the clothing piece of clothing itself in the digital reality. Right. I mean, that is wild. Just to try to imagine that reality where it's like, okay,

I walk down the street. I'm seeing advertisements that aren't there. I'm checking, but they are there in this augmented thing. I'm checking an email that isn't there, but is in this augmented thing. And I'm seeing people wearing clothing that they're not actually wearing with facial features that are a little exaggerated because they have some type of filter on that they don't actually possess. I wonder if it'll be like an insult to like take your glasses off in the future. Like how dare you? Like you're talking to someone. It's like how dare you look at who I really am, look at who I'm presenting myself to be?

Like it would be seen as a diss. Like you're at a bar talking to someone and you're like, did you just peek at me and really? See the real me? Yeah. It's like only look at the me that I'm presenting because that's how we're interfacing. Now I guess I'm curious, you know, not everyone has a smart phone. Obviously a lot of people do. the majority of people maybe,

but there are people, specifically a class of people, that it's difficult to have a smartphone. So in this new world where everything is predicated on augmented reality, having this glass, is it something that's issued? Is it just given to people?

Is it like a human right to be able to interface on this new world? I think it, if you think about it as replacing the smartphone, devices don't always get the fundamental human rights status, even though I think that they should. I think if you don't have certain devices, you can't interface with the world and the economy. But things like the internet are like a human right. But you're saying like would AR glasses be a human right?

If that's the way that everything is interfacing. If this is like approaching metaverse and the barrier to entry into the metaverse is 500 bucks or something, not everyone is going to be able to enter the metaverse. And that's going to really restrict people. How do you see that getting legislated? I mean it's a problem right now. What do you mean? Not everybody has access to a smartphone or a computer and therefore they don't have access to a lot of the economy applying for jobs. A lot of that happens through like digital platforms and so people are already kind of cut out. And so making technology economically inclusive, that's already a really important thing that we're not doing very well. And as it just becomes smarter and probably,

probably a bit more expensive, we totally risk locking people out of the future, which I think is like massive red flags and things that we need to be working on. So in Chenade's perfect world, what do we do? Like with the glass situation, if everything is now interfacing through this augmented reality, how do we mitigate that? Yeah, I think if that's something that citizens would need to participate in your society or your economy, that is something I think governments should definitely consider subsidizing in some ways, or even if that's encouraging innovation from companies,

so they can bring down price, get economies of scale, lower financial barriers to access, then I think that that's absolutely worth it. And the internet is, I think, an important example in this one, because when it first came out, it wasn't seen as something that everybody should have. Most people didn't even believe it would work. And now governments are, they do subsidize the internet, because they're like, if my citizens can't access the internet,

they really can't participate in our economy, which is not great for all of us. Interesting. Do you think it'll be a crime to, like, jailbreak your glasses? Like, you know how, like, I can jailbreak my phone to where it's running iOS, but I can also make it run other things, and I can make it do things that a standard iPhone can't do. And I think this was, like, more of a thing back in the day, but, like, you could get free apps and stuff like that, and no one would really prosecute. Like, I guess it would just void you from, like, Apple's repair policy and return policy and stuff like that. But if I have these glasses and now this is a,

major part of the reality that I'm living in. I could jailbreak my glasses to now get access to a lot of features or to get the ability to do or see things that I'm not necessarily privy to seeing. Do you see that as like a criminal issue in the future? The same way hacking exists today. I think it's still, I think it's pretty much just the same. It's just the way we interface with that world is now on our eyes versus kind of in our hands. But yeah, I think if you hacked into a platform, or saw somebody's virtual world that you weren't necessarily a part of or invited to, there could be ramifications and implications for that. Yeah, but I think it's just hacking, but in a different interface.

I think it would be more of a nightmare if my glasses got hacked and someone's like just appearing around me in a hologram or they're like sending my directions the wrong way. And that to me is much more of a nightmare than your phone. but I think it's still kind of in that same realm. Right. So you're not more concerned about it necessarily than your phone getting hacked or something like that. The part that concerns me is the visual.

You get to see my environment. So with my phone, you can kind of hack into where I am and get IP and the website I use. With glasses, you're seeing me at home with my family. That is where it gets. Hacking into like the literal camera. hacking into the camera, seeing what I see, and even things that aren't considered hacking, but are going to be much more invasive, for these technologies to work, whether it's AR or VR,

you need to track eyeballs. That's how you need to be able to be in real time. And so when you start, that data becomes even more intimate than what our smartphones have on us. If you know what colors really light me up, or you know where to put an, add in a way that I'm much more susceptible to it or what type of people I'm drawn to. That's a whole other level of intimate data that companies are going to have access to and they're going to have to have access to it for these to function. So the data area becomes really gray. Yeah, that is fascinating.

And then how do you see AI getting plugged in with all of this? So I know we talked about AI a little bit before. Like how do you see AI getting plugged in with, you know, all of this Internet of things and our wearable glasses, is there a seamless integration that you see? Yeah, I think AI will help us to interface with technology as in send text messages or make phone calls where we get to do much less

because AI can do a lot more of it for me. So maybe that's, you know, respond to my last two work emails, read it, let me know what it says, and respond or draft it. and then I'll let you know if you can send it or not. And so you can imagine like a current chat GPT, but in like 10 years where that technology could be. So I think AI kind of just getting embedded in these technologies,

helping us do and analyze more things because it's attached to AI. So if I have a smart watch that's powered with quite advanced AI, the health metrics I could track, the preventative medical things I could do, is where I see AI being quite helpful and just kind of analyzing data on you, being your maybe assistant, your support worker. That's where I see AI kind of evolving

alongside these devices. Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up chat GPT. This has been something that's come onto the scene that's like I think people are blown away by. And I talked to a buddy mine, Sebastian, and he, I think we had spoken about this also before. I'm kind of curious what you think, though, that the thing that blew my mind the most

about chat GPT, was that basically it's able to, if you haven't used chat GPD, basically you're able to submit a prompt and then within a few seconds, it'll give you the answer to your prompt. Write 100-paid essay, 100-word essay on sharks,

it'll give you 100-word essay on sharks that is completely coherent, cogent, seems like a human being wrote it. It's very bizarre. And that's chat GPT-3. They're coming out soon with chat GPT4, which I've seen graphs and things, but like the amount of data that it was trained on

and it's like 100 times the data, basically implying that it's 100 times more powerful. And the piece of my conversation with Sebastian that blew my mind the most was this, is that you could basically connect chat GPT3 to Dolly. And if you've never used Dolly, basically it is a similar thing to chat GPT, but you type in a prompt

and then it'll give you a couple pictures based on your prompt. So a dog sitting on a bench in Victorian era, it'll give you the dog sitting on a bench looking like a human being made it. Now, if you're able to create, Now, ChatJPT can come up with prompts based off of an initial prompt that goes into Dolly that then spits out an image. And if it's able to spit out one image, it could spit out 1,000 images that then create a movie. So now you're able to type in a prompt to create like an animated film or even like a real film.

And then he related this to customized interpersonal content. So I look at my phone and I'm able to look at pictures of watches or I can watch soccer videos because I really like soccer. Now I'm able to see content that only exists on my phone because it was created through a series of computer generated images that made a video that made a five second piece of content that I enjoy that's never existed before and doesn't exist for anyone else because it specifically fits my thing that I like. Is that a future that you see as possible? Yep. Customized endless media, so to speak. Right. That is crazy to me.

Yep. Can you expound more on this? Yeah, so right now, if you have a chat GPT, if you're interfacing with it, it can maybe write an essay for you. Going forward, it could write an entire book for you. So that's what we're about to step into with chat GPT4, or with the GPT4 model that's supposed to come out in the next couple months, so to speak. And the same goes with images. We can now do text to video in like short form video, but in the first form video. the future we'll be able to do text to entire episode, text to entire series.

And so what could be possible with that? And what you're describing where AI, GBT3 could talk to Dolly is a multimodal AI system. And that will be the future. So right now you kind of have these separate AI systems. You have one for texting, one for images, maybe one for video. In the future, it will just be all one multimodal AI system. But that does mean that I could have endless customizable content that I want to see. So say you were reading a book and you didn't want that book to end, you could ask for a different ending or maybe you subscribe to the Harry Potter series and you pay a monthly fee or a monthly subscription and you get to continue to either create your own ending or ask for another book on top of it with this character or so maybe you get to create a customized version of the series for yourself.

Show me the prequel. Show me this person's backstory and why they are the way they are. Tell me more about this person, yeah. And so you get to, and obviously the author, whoever owns the franchise would need to get a cut or else we're, I know AI copyright is already like a massive issue.

But that's one way I could kind of see things evolving and you could just have stories that never end and stories upon stories. Or you could, if you like a shirt, you know, show me a campaign of how this could look if I was to wear it doing this thing. maybe at Paris Fashion Week or an AI would just kind of create it. Or help me write this movie script and make me the trailer for it or make me the entire movie.

And so what we are stepping into is we're going to be much less kind of creating and more directing, editing, narrating the future. That's wild. So you could be watching a movie. Is this possible? You watch a movie and you go, make the movie an hour longer. And then it could potentially, this maybe is way far in the future. Maybe like an animated film would be something more realistic. But, oh, make this movie another one hour long because I'm really enjoying it and show more of these characters.

Is there a foreseeable future where it could basically generate another hour of a movie that expounds more on one character's backstory? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, of course, animated movies, that's going to be much easier, like, by the end of this year, we'll probably be able to kind of fire out animated movies, at least short films using completely, using AI. And I'm sure next year, maybe the year after, we'll start to see categories of winning and awards that AI is going to be tied to,

and that's going to be a whole other ethical kind of nightmare. But I do think, sure, by the end of this decade, is there a world where we just ask the movie to go on and you pay maybe $20 or whatever subscription you have to your streaming platform or the franchise, the company, and you ask for a different ending or you ask just to keep going and your story just the stories never end.

Yeah, that is just, it's like almost difficult to fathom that it would be as good as a Pixar movie now. You know what I mean? Like, and the other thing that I'm curious about, I know there's like this big boon with AI art and people are looking at it and some people are frustrated saying like,

oh, it's just stealing from other artists which I'm curious what you think my answer to that is like, well, that's kind of what humans do also. Like, if I'm an artist, I'm inspired and influenced by all the art that I've consumed in my life. And that is basically inserting data into an AI that then spits out art. So I'm like, it's sort of what humans do.

I don't see it. I don't see how that's really different. But the thing that I will say is that the reason why people like art, or at least I like art, is that it tells me something about the human experience. That if I look at Michelangelo's David, I look at it and I go, wow, this is such a beautiful piece of art that a human being made. And it's beautiful to me because a human made it. And that says something about what it means to be human.

But when I look at AI art, I go, it's beautiful, but it lacks like a life force. It lacks something human that created it. Therefore, it's not as impactful to me. And I think people probably do this. I forget if I read this or if I made it up. But like showing someone a piece of AI art and telling them an interesting backstory about a person that I made it and something that they overcame and what this represents, they feel moved by it. And then if you actually tell them it's AI,

then they reverse their position. They go, ah, never mind, I actually don't like it as much. So I think there is a human element to art that makes art really powerful and moving. And once you remove the human element, make it AI, it's less moving. So I think there's a few things there. Of course, we are as a species going to be more drawn to

or impressed or maybe inspired by stories that we can relate to and to other humans. But I would want to know, is it, that because it came from another human or the story of another human that you get inspired or emotional or is it how that story resonates in you? And so when you watch a sad movie,

maybe that did or didn't happen to that character or the director, but you feel emotional because based on what it triggers in you or when you see a piece of art that makes you cry, are you crying because a human made it and what they must have gone through to bring that up?

Or are you crying because it just moved you? And that would speak to the story of when an AI, if you don't tell somebody that something was created by an AI, they are just as moved by the art. But when you say it didn't come from a human, then it came from some form of a machine, then people are like. And I also think, you know, AI is not totally new

in terms of the story of technology. If you think about what acting used to be, live plays. And now we do things with CGI. and a significant portion of movies happen in a computer or music. Probably the majority of songs trending right now

in the top 40 chart are stuff that happened in a computer. You maybe had a human record the lyrics, but all of the creation of the beats and the production of it happened in a computer and would we say that those songs are not as good, not as real?

The producers and team aren't as talented? I don't think we would. think things are just kind of changing and the tools we use to communicate stories are changing. But I don't think it's totally different than how technology has evolved in unison with art and artists. Yeah. I don't know. I think that so long as people know and can trust the backstories, if you tell someone, like,

basically if you come up with a prompt and there's going to be some version of Dolly for music where it's write me a song about a breakup and heartbreak. and there's some woman singing beautifully about her heartbreak. Even if it sounds beautiful, if you tell someone one of these is created by AI and the other one is a real person that went through heartbreak and this is the song that they came up with. Assuming that people understand the backstores, I think the authentic human one will resonate more,

at least in the immediate. That's possible for sure. And as we kind of touched on earlier, it might be that made by a human or signed up, off on by a human or based on a human true story, that does what better. And that becomes this kind of elite class of incredible art that we preserve in the future. And it's kind of untouched by technology. I don't know if it'll be better, but I do think for whatever reason, it'll say something about our humanity and humans will resonate with it. Like, I think that AI can create art that is

better than what a human could make. I mean, I guess it's a completely relative term. But like, better than what I could make. However, if I make something after some traumatic event and I say, this is dedicated to my family member that passed away, I think that'll resonate more with people, even if it is objectively a worse creation of art. So here's, okay, so here's where I think we get lost when we say AI art, is that we think a human isn't involved in the process.

And it literally was just an AI that just like out of a box made something up, just spied on humans and made up a story. No, this story is still going to be authored by directed and narrated by humans. So if I'm bringing to light a movie and it's on my life and AI technically made it, I'm interfacing with that AI system asking for this type of story to be told. Or maybe the story didn't happen, but I'm using an AI to help me tell something that's on my mind or if I'm a director or a writer.

There's still humans bringing it to life. We just have a different role with the technology. So maybe you're just directing that piece of art. But it still takes a lot of the human to bring it. bring these projects to life. I think we envision the future as AI just being this separate thing from us that's just inventing and distributing on its own.

And it has no ties to human, but it's just gonna pretend to be one. Versus, no, this is still gonna be initiated and prompted by humans. This is just the assistant we have in helping us create that story. I mean, in the immediate, it'll certainly be prompted by humans,

but I could imagine a derivative future where it's prompted by an AI that's prompted by an AI, that's prompted by an AI, right? I don't think AI would just kind of exist as its own company. A professor that I really admire says, labeled it in a way that really stuck with me, we are the sentient part of AI. So we'll be in unison and in lockstep with these systems.

It's not AI in a lighthouse somewhere that's just like came out of nowhere and it's just designing a bunch of stuff. Stuff will still happen because human, and AI are working together on it. So I don't think, even if it's like let's mass produce a bunch of stories, a company, it just is like, yeah, let's just mass produce a bunch of story books. There's still a human kind of initiating that process.

Is there a world 200 years from now where we're so intertwined with technology and it's like this I robot thing? Who knows? But I think for the most part, any fears of AI just taking over art and it not being something that's controlled by humans, I think are misguided. And I think humans will directing art and narrating art will prove to be maybe even more magical than we can realize because we'll no longer be limited

by the human skill. And so maybe you have a brilliant artistic brain, but you don't have the tools or you don't have this craft to draw it or write it properly, but now you have this tool that can help you do it. Maybe we're about to experience art in a way we can't even imagine. Hmm. So you see it as a tool or it could be a tool in the way that like Photoshop democratized a lot of artists.

That back in the day, if you were an artist, you were confined to, you know, a pencil or a piece of, you know, oil paints and a canvas and you had to interface directly with you and the tools to create art. And then Photoshop comes out and now, oh, I can create art through this digital interface and I can make perfect lines through this digital thing and it can supplement my artistic ability. think at this point, maybe back in the day, but at this point, I don't think people look at Photoshop art and think, oh, that person is not an artist. They might be a different type of artist as a sculptor or an oil painter. But I think most people, most reasonable people would be like, oh, yeah, this is an artist that made this. Do you see it analogous to that progression? Yeah, I think, yeah, Photoshop is a great example, animated movies that we used to kind of draw them frame by frame, and now the stories that we tell via animated movies,

like adults are crying all the time when they watch these animated movies. Or even if you see like a Lord of the Rings, are you thinking, yeah, this is great, but these people aren't as artistically talented because there's so much CGI. They told and even more empowering and inspiring story because of the technology. And so I do think AI is, when it comes to art, will be a tool in many aspects. I still get iffy with like AI is just a tool and you get to decide if it's good or bad. I still think they're not, AI isn't neutral and so there's still problems that go along with it. But in terms of, in the context of art, I think it will largely be something to help us tell better

stories and more stories. There will be jobs displaced. It's not like it's all just roses. It will impact some artist's livelihoods. But I think where we're more likely to see AI art is places where we wouldn't have hired an artist anyways. So maybe I'm a blogger. And with my newsletter now, I have like a weekly image that goes with it. I wouldn't have had the budget to probably put that in my newsletter, but now I do.

Or maybe I change my logo every month based on something that's like trending in the media and I have Dolly do it. I think that's what we'll see like the biggest kind of onslaught of commercialized AI art. And so it's not really replacing anyone. And then in terms of bigger things like movies or kind of famous works of art that gets sold, that would be humans working with AI. and profound humans with incredible creative talent that are gonna tell stories in ways that we just can't imagine yet. So I know that there's a big ethical concern

with AI reflecting the world as it is and not as it quote ought to be. So there's a few examples, I think you brought one up that if you go to Dali and you were to search lawyer, it might show you a bunch of white people. And if you search heart surgeon, it'll show you a bunch of white people. And I'm sure that there's probably a statistical reason

for this that, in the United States, specifically, the majority of heart surgeons are probably white, Asian, Indian, or something like that. And there might be a minority that might be like black or brown. So the question is, should AI and Dali be presenting the world as it statistically is, or should it be present the world as it should be, where we should have more people of all different ethnic and cultural backgrounds performing at high levels of medicine and science and things like that? If we have the ability to make adjustments towards a more desirable state,

I think we should do it. And I know it can get kind of blurry if we need something to be factual and statistics and we're now just kind of tampering and tweaking things. But I don't think, for example, when we first, when Google was quite new on the scene with imagery and you searched CEO, the only female that was shown,

Up until like five years ago would be CEO Barbie. How great is that? That's kind of funny. To CEO Barbie, like you couldn't even give us a human. You couldn't even give us a CEO that was fired. Like you had to just give a CEO Barbie. Yeah. And so making that tweak and Google went in

and kind of addressed the algorithm. And companies still do that today. They'll adjust the algorithm because it's not reflective. It's reflecting the bias in how the internet is. But if that's not how we want the world to be, let's make sure that's not how it is. we can kind of make adjustments. The same would be, for example, Amazon, in 2015,

Amazon built an AI hiring tool, and most companies now use AI hiring. But they built the system, and it was helping them streamline the process and make things a lot faster, quicker, cheaper. And almost immediately, they had to can the algorithm because it was only selecting or bringing forward white males for tech jobs.

And it was actually penalizing resumes that had the word women. on it. So if you had the women's rugby team, it saw that it was like penalizing you. And so what the algorithm, there was nothing wrong with the algorithm or the data set, it was working as it was supposed to. It was just reflecting the hiring bias Amazon had when it comes to tech jobs. So should Amazon continue to use that algorithm because that's how the world is right now? Or would they like to hopefully evolve into a company that's more diverse and adjust that tool to be reflective more aspirational and I think most people would say tweak it.

Yeah, that's like such a tricky ethical area because then you have to have a governing body that says, okay, what should the world be? And there's like very obvious ones where it's like if we're talking about CEOs, yes, there should be, I think it should be representative of the country. That ideally, you know, whatever percentage there are of black people, there should be that percentage or more of CEOs. And I think whatever is represented in the country, I think is fine. But I guess it gets like tricky when you might have a country that's more homogenous.

where, you know, if you're in Sweden or something and you search CEO, does it show you what the percentage should be in the world? Does it show you what it should be in Sweden? Maybe in Sweden that representative is more white and male. Or if you're in Saudi Arabia, does it show you only men and not women for those roles? And I guess once you get into the global politics of it, it becomes really tricky. Yeah, I think at a global level, and that's why we don't have many, like, global systems. But I think a fair standard is being aspirational to the country and who exists in your country and kind of reflecting your systems and your structures to that, I think is fair.

Yeah, at a global level, then it gets crazy. Yeah. And then it's history, this, which country did that? And I guess those aughts would come through, like, ethical boards. And yeah, and there's a lot of subjectivity in that, and I'm sure brings up a lot of conversation in question, but I think showing the world as it ought to be is a much, better future to kind of strive towards than just continuing to reflect the same biases of history. Because the thing is, AI systems is just a reflection of the data it's trained on in history.

And history is usually not something we're trying to repeat. So if we can make the tweaks to the systems so it's not a reflection of the past, but more so aspirational to a future, I think that that's a win. And could also be an asset for how we redesign our systems going forward, giving us that opportunity to look at things differently. Yeah, I could see people being initially annoyed or feel like there is some type of an agenda if they were to search CEO and only women came up. I could see people being like, really? Yeah, I think we can't go crazy. A push to do that. And I'm curious why, like, if there is an antidote to like that, I don't know how to address that feeling. Because I understand the feeling, but I'm also like, I get why people are creating this world as it

ought to be rather than as it is. So I'm curious. like how would you respond to people that type CEO get a bunch of women and be like really well I mean if it like only showed women maybe maybe that deserves some some tweaking so it's just more accurate right of the world but when people start to see like fairness represented a bit more or the pendulum even kind of swung in a different direction entirely I think, I mean, change is always hard for people. And yeah, I don't know what I would tell them personally. What would you tell them? I would just be like, look, they're trying to work it out and they're trying to do what's best

and trust that there isn't like some looming overall agenda to like suppress white dudes. Like this is what I always tell people when they're like, oh, affirmative action, this, blah, blah, blah. Like it's not fair for white guys. I understand the feeling completely. Because especially if you're someone that hasn't had an amazing life in general, like you grow up in a place

that has like an opiate problem and everyone you know is addicted and dying and you don't have an amazing job because all the industry moved out and went overseas and you're a white dude you're like where's my privilege where's my whatever like and now you're looking at this new world that's on the frontier and you feel like all the artificial intelligence and all these things are now working against you i can understand the sense of fear to be like this real life isn't working for me and this new world isn't working for me either i feel like i'm being forgotten and so i understand the fear and I would just say like trust that every correction is an overcorrection and that when people are trying to make the world more equitable oftentimes they can swing too far and make things

exclusionary to like white dudes and just trust that we will find a balance and be optimistic and I think that's the thing that I like most about your approach to futurism is it's generally optimistic is that a fair characterization first of all I think you should also if you ever want to run for office you should just use that last like three minute clip okay cool I'll use that I think I think would be great. And yeah, I think I'm, and I'm not blindly just optimistic or pessimistic. I genuinely believe that the optimistic scenarios are really possible. And that's what inspires me in this work and why I wake up and think it's, you know, the future is something worth fighting for because it could be so great and it could be so dope. Yeah. We just have to steer it.

It's not going to just kind of roll onto that automatically. I'm curious what you think of deep faking. and especially, I know this is something that you talked about, that there's this new wave of deep fake porn that now people can create, they can basically take an adult film or a pornographic film, take a picture of someone that they know personally that's never done that type of content and then put their face onto that person,

either for nefarious malicious means, either for like personal perverted means, and this is happening more and more. And I'm curious, what are your thoughts on this? ethically and why is it a problem? Yeah, deep fake porn is becoming an absolute nightmare. I mean, in general, most deep fakes are of women. I'm sorry, can you explain also what a deep fake is?

Yep, so a deep fake is an AI generated piece of image or imagery of a realistic looking human. So the AI is trained on a bunch of data of humans, of human faces, and then its goal is to generate realistic looking output. And in this case, of human faces and figures and videos. And I think it's like 94% of deep fakes are of women, and most of them are in porn at this point. That seems like how technology always evolves.

Like porn is on the forefront. It's like such a weird thing that our brains are hardwired for that like, like I forget what it was, but like in like the early 2000s, like digital ads. one of like the forefronts of like how we actually use data for digital ads came through porn. Like it just is like this technological forefront because of how many, how much data can be inputted through it at a time. Yeah, it definitely has a close relationship with the evolution of technology and the internet.

I think it though it gets really dark in the deep fake porn aspect of it because most people who's appeared in that type of imagery probably didn't sign up for it. Right. And if that's how your face kind of gets on the internet, that is just like an absolute nightmare. And it's happening to so many people, whether you're a celebrity, a politician, just a regular person that had a not so great breakup

or they just see your face on the internet and want to use it. To me, yeah, deep fake porn is an absolute nightmare. I think legislating against it is kind of the only real thing. We're going to try to play catch up with the technology and this kind of like cat and mouse game of evolving the technology so we can flag. But then the whole thing is that technology will continue to evolve. So that's not necessarily going to be very fruitful.

I think in addition to, of course, tech solutions, we got to legislate that. We can't just have people just their lives ultimately ruined. Why is it different than what we can do now with just like still images? So you could take a photo off the internet and then put it onto any still image you want, whether it be adult or otherwise. And those images obviously exist and there's a weird perversion to it. But it seems like with deep fake porn specifically, people are more averse to it. What do you mean with like imagery?

Like if someone just did that to somebody right now without using AI. Yeah, you take Photoshop, you're able to take someone's face, you take my head and you put it on a naked person and go, this is Mark. And you go, well, that's not me, but it's a photo that someone took of me and then merged together with another photo. I don't know if that's really allowed either. I don't know if that's something that's like in the same using technology to kind of synthetically create. create an image of somebody in a way that's like defaming to their character. I don't know if that would probably, I think AI just makes things like a lot more real and a lot easier. But I assume that that would, if we're going to regulate deep fake porn, hopefully if someone did it in Photoshop,

that's also a problem. Yeah. Yeah, like just because it doesn't look as great. Hopefully that that gets followed. But then there's also people that are so technical with descriptions and things. But yeah, I think we should just, there's no win and not regulating it. it, especially when it's just when it comes to, especially like sexually explicit imagery that has not the person in it didn't consent to it. It's just, it's pretty easy. What do you think of

China? I think China recently passed legislation saying that if you're using deep fake images, it has to be disclosed on the image itself. So, you know, if there's a person doing an advertisement, it's deep fake, and then there's, you know, a watermark or something, and it has to be included on the actual software that's outputting the image. What are your thoughts on that? That might be something that we adopt more broadly. If you are using CHAPGPT to produce an essay, like anything that comes out of AI is maybe watermarked as a way for us to differentiate what was created by the human,

what was created by the system, whether it's imagery, whether it's written literature. That might be something that we adopt as like a safeguard. I think in terms of deep fakes, yeah, I think that there are elements, there are areas where the technology, deep fake technology is going to be really cool and great, and that's making legal entertainment content

where you're not kind of taking somebody's face and applying it to porn without their consent. So maybe that's something that we just allow to happen or you kind of get something signed off. But I think labeling or watermarking artificial intelligence output might prove to be a smart safeguard against having kind of undesirable outcomes of deep fake porn and just political propaganda and all sorts of stuff.

I saw one that was crazy that someone took an excerpt from Joe Rogan's podcast and basically said, like used AI and DeepFake to basically imitate his voice perfectly and to imitate his mouth and how his face actually moves. And it shows him on his show talking about a product that he's never endorsed or talked about before. But it seemed within the realm, I think it was like a jujitsu product. So it was within the realm of something that he would talk. about and it was like a 10-second excerpt of him being like, oh, I love this product. I've been using it for the past three years and it's completely changed how I trained, blah, blah, blah.

And then that company ran it as an ad that popped up for me. And I watched it. And if you watch it one time, it just looks like Joe Rogan's talking about a product that he likes. But then if you watch it again, you realize his mouth is moving a little weird. Something's off. And the voice is a little off. But unless someone points it out to you, you might think, oh, he endorsed his product and that's going to make me buy it. But now you have people running ads on product endorsements that have never happened. And we're starting to see there's been other celebrities that have been their face used or using AI to kind of apply them to a product that they have nothing to do with. That's like an emerging category of AI created harm in falsehoods. And we're going to need to legislate and figure

out that real quick because that is just a nightmare. We're waiting to happen. People advertising or sponsoring things that they never would have. And I actually think the biggest problem with deep fakes and AI created technology in that way, it's not that we believe what's fake. A bigger concern is that we stop believing what's true. And I think that is the biggest threat deep fakes present that we can't trust information at all.

And when you have just distrust and you have no source of factually, trusted information, the instability that can be sparked from that and the skepticism and conspiracy elements that pop up, to me, that's, like, it's, of course, dangerous if somebody is promoting something, like, if my face was on something for, like, steroids, and I just, obviously, that's not my face, but I think if we just, the things that I do stand for, people stop believing it because, like, she was here, she was here, she was there. That, to me, I think, is the bigger threat with deepfakes if we just can't trust information at all. Right. Yeah. And I also think that

there's people like, I was even talking to my parents about this. And my dad was like, well, what if someone, like, wanted to use something against me and there's a video that's leaked of me saying the N-word that I never said, but someone's able to use words that I've said to now insert it. And now there's a video of me saying something heinous. That could really damage and impact my career. And I think until that happens, we're not going to legislate against it. Like, I feel like generally your legislation is reactive. So it's like something bad happens. A bunch of people die in car accidents and now people are like, okay, we need seatbelts. I think that there's going to be an AI situation, probably in like an election. I don't even know when, but someone's going to have videos of them saying things that are untrue or defamatory.

Then they'll find out later where AI. And I wonder if the opposite will happen, where if people will have video of them truly saying something heinous. And then they go, guys, I never said that. That was AI. This is someone that's trying to use this against me. I can prove it to you, blah, blah, blah. Now you have two realities where innocent people are being socially crushed for things that they didn't say, and guilty people are being exonerated for things they did say. I guess the only solution is everything that comes out of this AI machine has to have a watermark. A watermark, a timestamp, some way to kind of identify it. And I will say, I know AI it is different in terms of the magnitude of change that it can inflict.

But propaganda and fake information, it's not necessarily a new problem. Like in the advent of the radio in the 30s and 40s, that was a big fear. You don't know who's actually saying it. And so maybe you just have a mashup of a speech that nobody actually said. And that was a big fear. George Orwell would express that too. You know, this radio thing, it could be this dystopia nightmare. So we're still, they're not fully new conversations, but of course the level of harm.

When you have imagery, sound, it's in 3D. it looks a lot more real. Yeah, it becomes the flag that get, the red flag becomes bigger. But I think, yeah, we'll just, you know, water market or there's some form of time stamp. Luckily now we're still able to kind of flag them. If you like zoom in on a video and you look at somebody's eyes, they're slightly different colors. But like we're, you know, two years into this thing that is going to eventually be so, so good. I wonder if at some point you just make it outright.

It's just illegal or you have to have a license to use it and you have to use like a specific indicator. that is tied to you. And I mean, I think that ties into a greater idea of like internet anonymity in general. I don't know. Have you read about that or researched about that? How we might be required to have, you know, access codes that are tied to our person

and our government ID in order to access the internet? Yeah. So I've, you know, moving away from bots and anonymity that's happening on the internet, which can sometimes be the source of a lot of issues, I think that there's a lot of different ways that it could play out. But yes, is there a future where we maybe should have some form of a,

you can somehow identify the person. And maybe it's not that we still, like our names have to be on our profiles, but if there is harm created, there's a way to trace things back to a human. I think that's an absolute worthwhile conversation and not being fully anonymous on the internet might be a good thing because I think the source of a lot of harm is because people can just be in this cloak on the internet. If it is even a person, maybe it's a bot.

Right. Maybe it's 100 bots. Maybe it's a thousand bucks. And it's coming from Russia. It's coming from wherever. Like, I just look at it where, you know, I have to have a license to operate a car. If a cop comes up to me and I'm in a car and I'm driving, I have to be able to show some proof that I'm allowed to use the car. I don't have to have my name on the outside.

I don't have to have all. I can use a pseudonym still. But once it comes to the authorities and the government, I have to be like, hey, here's who I am. Here's who the car is registered to, et cetera. I even think, do you legally have to carry an ID to a while? walk around in the world? Like if a cop walks up to you and goes, do you have your idea and you say no? I think it's just driving, like if someone's running to the store.

Right. Specifically driving. I think you do. But yeah, no, and it's a really important point. I know it's a really important conversation that's happening right now, especially as it relates to social media. There are specific use cases where being anonymous, maybe you're an undercover journalist, or you're in a very sticky situation that if you do reveal who you are, your life could be on the line. on the line. And I think we'll have to figure out what we do for that in those cases. But I think

largely we're much better off in a world where people aren't anonymous on social media and aren't hiding under kind of bot identities, whether it's for online bullying or kind of influencing elections or sewing disinformation. If you remove just the layer of trouble that being anonymous brings, I think we're in a much better situation. Yeah. And I guess anonymity, I think, Some people are hearing this and they're like, oh, you want me to have my name attached to my Instagram where my name is popping up every time I comment. I don't think that's necessarily what you're implying. No, and like my name could still be online like green tomato. But if it, if it got to a point where I was causing harm and somebody wanted to file a harassment charge,

there is a way that you could eventually maybe through legal, you know, representation, know who I am. Or if a company needed to ban you from a platform, they know who the person is behind that email. Which I guess police could technically do now, but I think it requires probably a lot more like backdoor sleuthing. But even then you can, it can get to a point where you're still not necessarily an identifiable person. So you can still just have a made-up email attached to a made-up location and you're not actually a person on the internet, even though you actually are human. Right. So I think this kind of pseudonyminous, like, or pseudonymous, where you're kind of half-anonymous, but not fully, I think is going to be hopefully a part of it.

of the future. Which I guess is analogous to how we are now, that I'm allowed to drive a car and I can call myself Green Tomato if I want to. But when it comes to people being like, hey, green tomato in that car, you know, hit me, they can pull up my ID and they know my legal name and it's tied to all my other, you know, things that I do in my actual life. And just think of much of a better environment, social media, that's almost like an episode in and in and of itself, but social media, how toxic it can be and how just volatile and violent we are with each other on social media. I think if people's names are tied to their comments,

it could probably be a lot healthier environment. I mean, I know LinkedIn, you're probably there to get a job, so you're not just going to start, like, throwing tomatoes at people's accounts, but you're also not, you can't be anonymous on LinkedIn. Right. So, and I think it definitely speaks

to the health of the environment and the ecosystem. And I think we would do, like a world where Twitter, nobody was anonymous and nobody was a bot, I think would be a lot more, stable. And I'm sure there's people listening like, oh, well, this is just going to contribute to more surveillance, which is probably true. But eventually one day, if someone wanted to create a video against you that is AI created, blah, blah, blah, that deep faked, that's showing you doing

something unsavory that can affect your character and affect your employment and everything like that, or they're doing it to like your children or to your family, like the most unthinkable heinous shit that someone could do, I'm sure you would love to know who that person is and how to stop them from doing it in the future. So before people were like, oh, but the surveillance, blah, blah, blah, I'm like, well, consider something bad happened. Wouldn't you like to know who that is? And then on top of that, you obviously don't want too much surveillance.

Yeah, the surveillance thing can get cloudy, but there's also ways even with blockchain and like zero proof technology where you can, companies and anyone on the internet doesn't know who you are. You can still be mostly anonymous until it's a situation where there's somebody who's getting fired or something like that or getting charged and you need to kind of. of uncover the specific identity, but for the most of it shouldn't change someone's life. If at the very, very back end tale of the information, it says who you are and only certain people can have access to that or you have to have a warrant, that shouldn't change your life.

And if you're really worried about that and you're not like a journalist who needs to protect their identity, what are you up to on the internet? Right. But then that gets into the, you know, like if you have nothing to hide, why are you worried about people looking in the first place? I guess I would say, you know, if you're someone that is a a whistleblower for the police and you're trying to search, you know, like, how can I disclose this? Or there's search history that's showing that you might whistleblow.

That's, well, yeah, I mean, I put that in the category of, like, you're a journalist whose life is at risk if they say who they are. And I think anything in that category, we will have to figure out how do we approach that. Like, there are life or death reasons why some people need to be totally anonymous. Right. And that's something that I think deserves, like a dedicated intentional solution. And how do we protect these people? And is there a world where we can have both? I think that there's definitely a world that's better than what we have now. Right.

And I'm curious, what do you respond to the surveillance people that are like, okay, so my fridge is going to be connected to my toilet, it's going to be connected to my clothing, that's going to be connected to my phone. And if the world should be acting as it ought to and not as it is, should my fridge alert my doctor, oh, they're eating X amount of things, or should my toilet be able to see what I'm eating and be like, oh, doctor, this person has this issue.

And then all of a sudden now there's like a medical warrant out for you to try to like contain you because now you might be creating some virus. Like it feels dystopian and I think people can be very nervous when they realize like, oh, everything in my life is connected to each other. They're talking to each other and they're talking to other people without me. And now instead of these things working for me, they're working against me. And I think for a lot of sort of disaffected people, this, I. idea seems like it's, it is already compounding on a disaffected existence. Like the police are

working against me, you know, the food I eat isn't good for me. So the food is working against me. The government's working against me. The social media platforms are all have a political affiliation and all those things are working against me. And now you're telling me my shoes are going to work against me. Like if you're someone that is disaffected and believe these things are working against you, all of this new stuff seems really intimidating. Yeah, I will say unfortunately or fortunately the information your shoes are going to get on you aren't isn't very different than what your phone you've already given on your through your smartphone but that isn't the problem the problem is you know our smartphone shouldn't be giving off this much data

as it is and so I'm on the on the team of data is the amount of data we give off unintentionally is absolutely unacceptable it's a national security crisis and there's no win and us giving away so much data and companies having so much data. So I am pro, we don't need to be this surveilled and it's unnecessary and it's dangerous. If I'm ordering a piece of clothing, you only need to know my address and my size. Anything outside of that is completely unnecessary

and you don't need to surveil it. So I do think a future where if your fridge talks to your mirror, which talks to this, making sure we only collect information that's needed, it's not passed to any third party without our consent, whether that's a doctor or whether that's a data farm that currently now we're sending all our data to. And our data hygiene is just a lot better. So I, even though I'm excited for a lot of the technologies of the future, I'm on the side of if we, if it's how it is now with surveillance capitalism, I'm not

interested. I don't think it will work out well. Really? But I don't think, I think we're now starting to have a lot more conversations about data, about who's steering tech companies, where things are going. And I think that that's a really good sign. And people are a lot more alert to what the metaverse would mean, for example, for their data or tracking. So I'm optimistic that it doesn't have to be that way in the future. And I've, you know, given talks to insurance companies and, you know, showed this is where technology is evolving to. And this is what you're going to have access to. And I would highly recommend you err on the side of not surveilling people and making life this kind of unlivable digital jail, so to speak.

And that's not something that you would want to be a part of, nor society. So let's not design towards that. I think it's a noble thing to say, but it seems optimistic to me, to be like, yo, company, I know you have a financial interest in doing thing, but it would be against humanity if you did that thing. so don't do it. Ultimately, so long as we live in this capitalist system, companies are going to be motivated to increase the profits for their shareholders. And if that means harvesting all the data, using that data to create the digital prison,

then unfortunately they will, even if they know it's not in their best interest. Yeah, and I think we're starting to see solutions in different ways. So some of it can and is going to be legislation. Europe, for example, is like pumping the gas on data privacy, and they've definitely taken the leadership torch in that world. America, not as much, but Europe is definitely airing on the side of protect citizens' data. There is a world where companies get charged for holding unnecessary data and collecting unnecessary data or taxed for that.

There is a world where blockchain allows us to have a bit more control over what data is captured and what data is shared. And I think at the end of the day when people say things like, data is a nightmare, but I would at least just want to get a cut from it? Or can I at least just get paid from the data that I share? I've heard people say that, but I'm also like, one piece of data isn't valuable. It's not.

And so someone will give you $20? That would be amazing. If we looked at, like, Facebook, if you got paid for Facebook by Facebook for the data you gave, it would end up being like $6 a person a year, not worth it. Yeah. What is not necessarily worth what we give off, but what is a conversation,

I think we should be having is we don't necessarily need to get paid in money, but in value, in the information that's actually being collected. So if I'm doing a 23-and-me test, and you're going to sell those insights to a third party, or you're going to uncover them to figure out some kind of pharmaceutical drug, giving me access to my own health information and those insights that you're actually mining for the sake of advancing profits, I think that's, you know, advancing profits, I think that's a conversation worthwhile. So give me an example of that. That's interesting. So say if a social media company, because they have all access to a bunch of our behaviors and our habits

and what we might be going through, they create profiles of us. This person is on the verge of a divorce. They're going to be swayed by this type of ad. Of course, it's for the unfortunate sake of advertising. But is there a world in which those insights, are shared with researchers or with people. These are traits or tendencies that we noticed in you that you might want to kind of pay attention to.

Or here's something that we think you're on the path to this kind of health disorder. This might be something that you want to look into. Or if I do a test from 23 and me, I'm not just getting my results. I'm getting the kind of future forecast of how that stands against other. people and what is likely to come from it. So I'm just getting as much insight and value from that

information as they are. Interesting. So it's a reciprocity for the value of your data. So it might not be financial, but just access to what they know. That's interesting. Yeah, I think that that's a conversation that's worth having. And it's not, they aren't mutually exclusive. I don't think there's a world where it's like, okay, our data still gets sold to all these data farms. But at least I know that I probably shouldn't sleep on that side because I'll, like, die in seven days if I keep doing that. Right. I think that we still need to have better data protection, absolutely. But I think the question around value and information asymmetry, I think if we are helping

generate those, that insight and that data that companies are using to kind of build and create valuable products from, we should get access to that information as well. We created it. Yeah. I mean, at the very least, that seems completely reasonable. You use that term before data hygiene. How is our current, what are the issues with our current data hygiene? Like what are ways that our current data is not being used effectively?

And what do you even mean by data hygiene? Yeah. So data hygiene is everything from checking sources and where data comes from, how you access information, checking things like titles and making sure you're not falling victim to like fake news and exercising digital discernment skills to also. using different passwords for different sites and making sure you don't, you know, if you can avoid accessing things like public Wi-Fi, if that's available to you. So kind of just your entire data profile and the information you interact with and the trail you leave on the internet

is something that I think we all need to consider. Would you sit at us using VPNs to try to like encrypt or obfuscate your IP or where you're accessing data from, things like that? Yeah, I mean, I think VPNs are really helpful and there's some incredible companies out there. Some people say, you know, it's kind of like choose your own villain because the VPN company obviously is going to get access to everything that you do. But there are reasons why, and specific use cases where I think VPNs are really important. But I also don't think that's the only necessary tool to make sure you have, good data hygiene. Like that's one level that you can take and a step that you can take. But I think

that making sure things like passwords are protected, avoiding public Wi-Fi, being, exercising critical thinking when you come across information online, all of that and not just kind of resharing things without reading it. I think those are all really valuable and important steps. Right. Yeah, that seems, that's not something I do. My data hygiene is atrocious. Like, and I know that there's this big push now, like with TikTok, there's like this big legislative push, like, oh, we should ban this because the data that this app is able to access on our phones ultimately goes back to a Chinese corporation, which is then interconnected with the Chinese government, and people believe that that governmental access could be detrimental to the U.S. So there's, like, currently a big push to try

to ban it. I'm curious what your thoughts are on TikTok specifically as an app. And I know people will bring up other apps like Instagram and stuff like that, but it's like, that's going to the U.S. government, which you would like to believe is working your best interest. Again, that's up for debate. But TikTok specifically, I'm curious. It's a tricky one with TikTok. On the one hand, just the app itself, the innovation that TikTok has brought to the world of social media is pretty much unmatched.

And I think competition and international competition is good. And it just benefits consumers. Like we are all better off in a world where we have a lot of competition and companies competing against one another. And you can just kind of see in the last year how much companies have stepped up their game, existing incumbents in social media because of TikTok.

That aside, where it gets tricky with TikTok versus like Instagram and data being collected, although the U.S. government, for example, could access a person's data if they filed a warrant. Comparing Instagram to TikTok, Instagram, yes, Facebook collects a lot of data on your that is like a problem as it is, but it's a little bit different than if the U.S. government had a stake in Facebook and a seat on the board and an automatic, all of the data that went to Facebook went to the government as well. That, I think, would be, is a different conversation. And that is what is happening or is alleged to be happening with By Dance, their company, TikTok.

And so that I think is a little bit more problematic. And it's not just that a potential adversarial government could be collecting data on citizens. It's also being able to kind of control the narrative on certain international affairs that are happening or global issues that are happening. You could potentially socially engineer a different narrative or a more favorable one for your country. Or you could target a specific group of people in, say, America, maybe it's military personnel with a narrative that would make them less interested or less committed or less proud of their country. And these aren't things that are happening, so to speak,

but these are some of the national security concerned. They're getting brought up with TikTok. It's not just that a government is collecting, a government that there's kind of some adversarial tensions with is collecting data on citizens, U.S. citizens, is that they can also steer algorithmically what the content that most people under the age of 27 are probably going to see.

Right. And so, you know, some people compare that to, I know Tristan Harris, who's a really big voice in just building a better future, with technology kind of compared it to if an adversarial government had access to CNN and Sesame Street and was kind of filtering a narrative that worked for them through those channels. Would we be cool with it? And so again, that's not what's been necessarily proven to be happening. And TikTok stands by the fact that that's not what's happening. But I think it's the national

security concerns are worth investigating. And there is a world. old where TikTok maybe gets banned if it's found to be more problematic. Right. And I think doing the due diligence is really important, not just out of fear and out of spite and just not wanting a competitor. I think that those are all disastrous reasons. But if there is kind of, if the fire is where there's smoke happening, we should think about maybe not having TikTok, isn't it?

Do you think it gets banned outright or do you think it gets maybe like, trust busted and becomes dismembered from the main bite dance company gets acquired by some American company. And so still persists in its own way, but the data is cut off from the parent company. Yeah, I think that that, if it was cut off, then I think that that would be, TikTok would have a future for sure. Yeah. I think it's just the kind of governmental access to the data and controlling the narrative of the tool that is kind of bringing. up America's next generation, I think that's a conversation worth happening. And I am someone who uses TikTok and who's benefited from it, but I would understand if a national security concern was found

to be valid and a conversation to maybe not have it on phones. How can we trust any of the products that come out of some type of like adversarial government, whether it be China or Russia or any other country that we would be concerned with possessing our data. I know, obviously, we've banned like Huawei phones. What if there is this amazing, so one of the pieces of emerging technology you talked about was like a toilet that as you use it, it can give you health data. It says, hey, in your stool, it shows a, you know, vitamin C is lacking. So you should be prescribed this, or you should try to take these supplements to try to offset whatever, you know, biological issue you're having. It sounds really interesting. It's like, oh, wow, in real time, it can be

catching issues that I'm having and telling me how I can best combat those things. Now, if that product is made by a foreign company and someone that might be adversarial, again, that's concerning. So how do we trust any tech that comes out of anything that's not the U.S. or some type of like explicit geopolitical ally? Yeah. When it comes to adversarial, I think there's just a level of technical due diligence that happens. And it happens now, right, with chips. They're kind of taken apart. They're investigated at a federal level and analyzed to make sure that there's no kind of spyware happening. And in instances where the country or U.S. or whichever government feels that there could be some sort of national security concern at risk, it's kind of banned.

So I think we shouldn't just ban things for the sake of it's coming from an adversarial country. I think it's important because trade is important. And so I think taking the due diligence steps to technically investigate and make sure that that is an actual risk and it's not just kind of a verbal political battle. But, yeah, of course there's also some risks with it. And I'm assuming countries would probably want to err on the side of being a bit safer than potentially letting in Trojan horses into people's homes and trying to deal with the repercussions that way. Yeah. And so much of our conversation is predicated on, oh, this should be legislative. effectively. And that to me seems like the only answer for so much of this. Like so much of these security risks, health practices, all this stuff is like, oh, we need to legislate properly.

And that's just like, okay, yeah. And that just seems like a very like easy blanket far away thing to say. And as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, I don't always trust our government's ability to legislate very basic things now. You know, take any, either side of the political spectrum, especially considering like how vitriolic and polarized it is already. Both sides have things where they look at the government, they go, this issue is not being legislated effectively, whether it's immigration, whether it's abortion, both sides have their thing where they're like, everyone's doing everything bad. And as the political nature in the United States gets more polarized, it's difficult to reach across the aisle and find common ground. So I'm skeptical. And then on top of that,

you have the speed of which technology is developing. So, you know, I forget what it is, but it's like that Zimmerman graph, I think is what it's called. I don't remember. But like technology is multiplying 2x every five years or whatever. And so it's truly exponential. So the people in office now are dealing with technological concerns that are 10 years too late. So already there's a distrust in our politician's ability to legislate. And then on top of that, even if they were the most competent people in the world, they're just old for the speed at which technology is developing and needs to be legislated.

And I'm assuming as technology is increasing, the security risks are going to increase also, right? Like the security risk for a smartphone are different than for glasses, which is different for neuralink. So with all of that said, how much do you trust our current politicians on both sides of the aisle, ability to legislate privacy concerns, health concerns, and these expansions in technology? Okay, so there's a lot there, and I'm going to get to each of it. One thing I wanted to say in addition to with the TikTok conversation that I meant to say that I don't know if a lot of people are aware of, the Chinese government, the CPA are not open to American social media platforms and apps in China. So you can't access Facebook, Google, Twitter, Gmail, any of that.

It's banned for the fear of what that type of information could do for citizens. So I think when people have that in perspective, why does one government think it's important to ban it and not another? I think it just adds more context to the conversation. Yeah. Your question about can we trust our political institutions, they're not necessarily hardened against the dynamic nature of technology and its innovative cycles and they can't keep up. So the mistrust, there's always obviously been kind of skepticism of different political parties, but it's been completely exacerbated by social media. So one of the problems and the drivers of the mistrust itself is these social platforms.

They've created massively polarized worlds and echo chambers. And in some instances, you have politicians governing for their Twitter audience and to get retweeted and grandstands on Twitter versus for the people as a whole. And that's why I actually personally think right now in social media is the most dangerous technology because of that. If you have a very divided on the verge of a potential civil war type of country, it's really hard to pass anything and get anything done. Yeah. So I think if we can harden our institutions for the pace of change, so maybe politicians don't use social media is one thing.

Or maybe we don't let algorithmic content get amplified. We do different things to make the social environment a little bit more stable, Hopefully that kind of brings down the level of mistrust. But I also think, and as you stated, technology changes so quickly. And we have systems, our systems and our institutions are designed to move slow. That's how democracy has functioned. That's how education has functioned. And that has been a marker of, the stability has been a marker of progress and allowed us to kind of progress in different ways.

now we're seeing that the pace of technology is no longer our current institutions are no longer functioning at the speed we need them to with technology does that mean we might be on the verge of something like a democracy 2.0 or a new way of kind of governing and I think that that's what the kind of question of our generation will probably become and as you've all know or her he says, you know, how can you have a democracy in a world where, you know, a computer or an algorithm knows you better than you know yourself? And so I think we need to have bigger conversations as to how our systems are working, how our institutions are working, what can we do to harden them so they aren't so susceptible to like volatility and virality on Twitter,

but also how can we use these tools in a way that enhances democracy and maybe changes it in some ways, so to speak. Yeah. And I do think a lot of the massive mistrust and political, just chaos that's been sown is because of these social media tools themselves. Absolutely. And if we can fix that,

we can fix the state of like every election feeling like it's life or death and on the verge of it all being over. I think a lot of that has stemmed from the last 10 years of social media. Absolutely. And there's a lot of interesting research that shows even like when the like button

was added to social media or the comment section, how that continue to just fuel the fire and you just see polarization guffs go like this. And I understand the pessimism with all of this emerging technology. So, you know, like whether it's chat GPT or anything, I think I commiserate with a lot of people

that look at this and they're like, look, as the social media matrix has been created, you now have information that is stuck in people's echo chambers, like all the stuff that people know and talk about. Things are stuck in their echo chambers. headlines are more sensationalized in order to get more attention, to get more clicks to make more money because ultimately that is the purpose of these big multinational corporations, whatever, whatever, increase money for the shareholders.

So things are more sensationalized. They're more echo chambered. There are these pipelines that are radicalizing people in both directions. And as a result, it's created a really hostile situation where both sides think they're negotiating with evil. And then how can you create some type of aisle reach when you're dealing with evil? And then as a result that feeds into politicians where you have more radical politicians that are getting elected based off the information that their constituency is consuming online. And people just go, stop it.

Stop the madness. This is creating just like utter chaos within the country. So why would I trust this new technology to save us if the current technology that's being implemented is causing all these problems at the first place? Yeah. Well, I don't think technology can't save anyone from anything. And I think anybody that has that techno-solutionism kind of ideology, like just throw tech at it, is just adding more fuel to the fire and more tools for things to literally go up in flames. So I don't think there's a technology that can save us. I think it's just our human realization, bringing some of these insights to the forefront and kind of waving the red flag that we are burning from the inside out as a country in many ways because of these tools.

Is there some way we can build them or use them differently? And yeah, in terms of can we trust leaders to do that, when incentives are quarterly or, you know, every two years or every four years in government cycles, we do suffer as a nation and, you know, as a people I'd say largely from presentism. We're stuck in the present. And as a result, kind of sowing our own discord, so to speak. And yeah, I mean, I'm not a. political science major in any way.

And so I don't know exactly what the full solution would be there. But I think we need, I think we've raised the issue of social media and politicians and legislators are starting to realize that this is a national security crisis. It's a crisis internally, globally, and hopefully we're going to see change. And I think we just need to keep being vocal with it. How many ethicists like you are in these spaces and in these rooms, you know, dinging bells and acting as canaries for these big companies that are moving forward at like breakneck speed?

I think not enough, but that's become a conversation that has moved to the forefront. So even things like AI ethics and responsible AI, those weren't terms that the general public was aware of or using. And now it's something that we all seem to be talking about. It's become a lot of, you know, part of mainstream conversation and mainstream discourse. So I think that that's improving and the idea that you can't just have 17 coders building the future. You need to have diverse perspectives and diversity and thought and in background in those rooms. And of course, some of that is somebody that has an ethical kind of training or lens that they can apply.

And I think companies are waking up to that. And they're also seeing the trouble that they can get in by not thinking things through from a social component. So maybe the technology is flawless, but what it does to society on a social level is just disastrous. And they're starting to see, like if you reap what you sow and if you hadn't thought about that and it impacts society in a negative way, there will be fallout. And usually that also is financial. Okay. Just as a last topic that I want to touch on, I'm curious, can you explain to me what the singularity is and how Bruce, Willis is connected to it.

You brought up Bruce Willis in one of your, one of your TikToks with his digital twin. And so I'm curious, like, as people are merged with technology and how they exist in digital spaces, can you sort of paint a picture for me, like how all of those things will work together or how they potentially could work together? Sure. So technological singularity. So that can be separate or can just be part of everything, if everything ends as a result of But technological singularity is the idea that we reach a tipping point with technology, probably

artificial intelligence is what most people are referring to, where the technology is completely outsmarts humanity. We lose all control of it, and it just kind of spells the end or whatever that new beginning is. So that's what technological singularity is. Some people would compare it to superintelligence when AI is just smarter than all humans combine, and there's just no way to control it. I'm not sure if that kind of ties to Bruce Willis.

Bruce Willis, I think there was, he used an AI to create a digital twin of him that could potentially be used in movies and to continue to act on his behalf potentially. So those two things, I mean, I don't think that they're totally related. I think most actors will have digital twins in the future and be able to be in multiple movies at the same time. You know, if you're Leonardo DiCaprio and you're making $50 million on a movie, could you go do like four or five at once? You could if you sent your digital twin. That will probably actually bring down the cost of your per fee, your acting per movie fee if it's kind of made by digital twin.

But I do think that that's going to be a conversation in the acting world and it's already happening. We'll have AI actors. We'll have actors that have digital twins of themselves powered by AI. Do you think the digital twin space will also impact like real life events? I think we will, I think digital twin, the thing that excites me the most, one of the things that excites me the most about technology in the future is healthcare. And digital twins could play a massive role in that. So if you have an AI, if you have a full, your genome has been sequenced, you have everything simulated in an AI system of your whole, of your human body. And you program basically what you tend to eat.

Your genome is all attached to that, what medications you take. You have a simulator that could forecast. an injury that's about to happen before it happens, or a disease you're kind of on the precipice of getting, or a food that's not working well with your system, or maybe you could model out before you take a prescription or have a surgery, this is how your body would probably respond, so maybe you should or shouldn't do that.

That's like one of the aspects of digital twin technology. We'll see it in sports. Some athletes already use it, and you'll see them have kind of like holograms taken, in and so you can kind of zone in on injury or form, but eventually athletes will have digital twins that will allow them to perfect their craft. Like you can see in the computer, this is where your calf muscle is doing that kind of funny thing.

Or this is where you're probably going to get an injury in your Achilles. When it's mixed with artificial intelligence and augmented reality, you can kind of see everything in 3D. So I think that that's a really cool aspect of digital twins. So I think we'll all have digital twins for different reasons. and one of those would be actors having it for movies. Oh, that's so interesting. So you could just run tests, say, hey, this medication, try it on the digital twin,

see how it reacts based off of their user profile, et cetera. Yep, so run the simulation and see how you would do with it. Oh, that's interesting. And even just with like different foods and diet and lifestyle, you could all run that all through the digital twin. Oh, that's fascinating. And I think that that's something that most of us will have. Oh, that's interesting.

We might even start to think, how did we ever just take? take risk and just like eat these things or take this medication or go into surgery with really wide, broad statistics, like you have a 50% chance of maybe dying from this. We could zone that in to five percentage points and know, okay, so yes, you're likely to not do well in this surgery based on your specific genome and body type and injury in the way your body works versus somebody else's. I think it's going to help us have much more precision based. medicine. Is there any emerging technology, either stuff that we've talked about already, but like

use cases that we haven't talked about, or just brand new technology outright that you're really excited about, that you're like a super optimist, like, oh, this is going to be a use or a type of technology that people haven't seen before. It's going to really benefit and impact our lives in a serious way. Yeah, I think synthetic biology will probably have a bigger impact on our world than artificial intelligence. Really? So synthetic biology, you might know some aspects of it like CRISPR, some aspects of it like MRNA, which most people were kind of introduced to those terms

in the last kind of couple years. But synthetic biology is essentially the ability to write and program life. And that to me is keys to a door that we've never seen anything like. So right now we can, edit life in CRISPR, using CRISPR technology, which I think is phenomenal. And, you know, the first case of cancer being cleared as a result of gene editing just

happened. How does that work? So in this case, it's called base editing, where you change just one letter of a DNA sequence. And so say there was a misspelling. So somebody had something like sickle cell anemia. There's a misspelling with the DNA. I'm kind of simplifying it. you could go in and change that letter and correct it to basically edit out that disease.

Or in the case of cancer, it was used to edit somebody's T cells or donor's T cells, which are what go and attack cancer, to basically program those cells to go and specifically harm that cancer and not the cells of the body. And that happened recently. It was a very brave 13-year-old girl that volunteered for that treatment after everything else failed and the family was told to kind of just get her comfortable. This is going to be her last Christmas probably. And she was brave enough to be the first person to do this, use this technology that's only six years old. And her cancer has been cleared.

BBC just ran the story, I think, in December. And so synthetic biology encompasses all that. So that's just editing life. And that's a pretty big deal that you don't have to live with the script you're born with. But what about designing life and bringing it into existence and coding and programming life the way we program computers? That's what we're on the verge of. And I think that that's going to bring disruption in a myriad ways. Some of it's going to be we'll have buildings that we can grow so we can program materials to do things and some of that will be buildings. So, Some of it will be, we'll be able to program optimal fruit or vegetables or things that are designed better for our body type. Programming organisms to degrade plastic and clean up garbage sites and things in the ocean, for example.

But also programming organisms with functions that don't yet exist on Earth. So if you think we've been kind of playing creator as a species, that we're about to take that to an entirely new level. And I think that is the most important and will be the most important technology in the future. Wow. That is crazy. So growing a building, what would that look like? You could grow a building. And so you could, you would program the organisms. So something that's maybe cement like, or I'm definitely not a, like, can make a building if I tried, but concrete-like or whatever it is the, whatever functionality you want. And you program an organic material to kind of embody those functional characteristics. And you could also program it to have a lifespan to maybe the building automatically kind of

degrades when it's time to move on. That's like one element of it. Programming. So basically what we'll do is we'll give an AI system functions that we want a building or a piece of material to hold. So maybe I want something that feels like cotton. I could wear it and it can kind of move because I'm a dancer. But I want it to be able to just compost the way vegetables would in the ground. And you would, AI would come up with a formula for it and design it in the computer. And then we kind of turn that organism into the material that we want. Wow. I mean, that seems like science fiction. It doesn't seem like a thing that. could exist.

I mean, and that already exists. So we can, the first organism where AI and computers where its parents has been born, that that happened. And by born, I don't mean like in a hospital room or anything like that, just small little organisms that didn't exist on Earth aren't a part of evolution and AI designed them in computers. And then we brought them to life using DNA material.

How did that happen? happen? The same process you just described? So yeah, so you would use material that would build DNA and you essentially have AI design. What is the molecular structure or the structure of this organism that I want to have these characteristics? So maybe it kind of grows green and replicates similar to how mold does. AI can kind of give you the formula for that piece of life, what that DNA structure would look like and you have the actual physical chemical compounds that work in a I guess would simply say the term as like a DNA style machine I think of it like a 3D printer

where you're putting in organic material except it's like material of organisms and matter and you're printing out live systems and organisms yeah that's crazy so you could do this for meat for example and we will and we do so synthetic meat is a great example and I do think we'll probably get to a future where we looked back on the era of humans eating meat and farming all of these animals for just this consumption, this crazy consumption. And so right now you can take cells from a chicken, you can put it in a bioreactor, mix it in with like amino acids and all sorts of vitamins that you would want to have in meat that maybe it doesn't organically come with. And in this bioreactor,

it will grow to a chicken breast or the thigh or whatever it is that you like. And it's synthetically created in a lab, so to speak. But it is meat. And it's molecularly the same thing. The exact same thing. Indistinguishable. Completely. You take the two and examine them under a microscope and they're effectively the same thing. And right now it's still a little bit funny with like texture. We still have a bit of a ways to go, ish. But it's, I think it's Singapore might be where it's already being sold and people can go to restaurants and get it. And that will, I think, be the dominant way we eat meat going for it.

Because I do think people try to do the plant thing and vegetarian, but I think plant-based meat, it's different. It's in its own category. Yeah. And it didn't really, it's not the same. Right. It's not like an equitable substitute. It's so long as that meat is cheap.

It's like, why would I go for this other thing? Why would I go for that? And it doesn't taste the same. And it's like, okay, if it's made from soy, it's kind of still a different protein structure, whatever people might feel. But this is meat. It's the same.

There's no way to kind of differentiate it other than it was made in a bioreactor. And so in the future, in the future, we probably won't have a bunch of farms. A city would have like a bioreactor or a restaurant would have the best meat would maybe come from the restaurant with the best bioreactor.

Maybe it's something that we have in our homes going for it. I don't know. But I do think we will look back on the centuries of farming animals and the ethics in that, the climate ethics in that, and be like, wow, remember that era. You could eat people too. So you could technically... You could run like a leg in there that doesn't belong to a person. You could have all sorts of animals that you're interested in eating. You could grow the tissue for that. And I... But that's still a much more human humane way if you wanted to try you know they got to make that illegal snake or you can't eat you can't put people oh my gosh okay i did not i was not when you said we could eat people i just

went into like no i was thinking like if people had exotic animals that kind of came to mind humans you got to make that illegal you can't you can't put but at the same time it's like why not though that has to be illegal i will personally mark on whatever picket line that just cannot be a part of it i wasn't even like i didn't even like think about that but it's also crazy because it's like it's like, why not? Like, there's no ethical reason technically why you couldn't. It doesn't harm people. But at the same time, it's like, but you can't.

But it's like a crazy ethical line because there's no reason not to. I don't know. Yeah, I think let's hope that that's illegal or else we're looking at a crazy Netflix series in the future. Yeah, that is insane. And how many people do you think will be born through, I guess, is this related to like a protein synthesis and like biosynthesis? How many people are born through actual humans and how many people are born in like hatcheries or things of that nature?

Like some type of like artificial womb? What is the research on that? Yeah, I think so artificial rooms and I think people are starting to kind of hear that term and it's like freaking a lot of people out. It's a technology that has been in the works for a long time. Researchers have been probably close to a decade for many different reasons,

but predominantly premature, babies that don't have a good chance of survival at this point. An artificial room would be an incredible alternative for that scenario. But we also might, you know, pregnancy and delivery is very challenging on the human body. Like that is a very intense process and it can be a damaging process. There's a lot that goes that happens to somebody's body. carrying a child and delivering a child. And an artificial womb could be a potential safer alternative to that. And we might find that maybe this is better for all parties involved.

And it's not necessarily that I think artificial rooms are just going to suddenly replace people getting pregnant kind of in current ways. But I think having the optionality, like the thing that states me about all these technologies is the option, right? When you have optionality, you can do what suits you best and what you think can optimize your life. And I think artificial rooms are finally adding new options to childbirth and child delivery, a process that I think has been long overlooked, and not least of which because, you know, it has for the most part been women kind of bearing children. and now we're finally shining a light on the science and the technologies that could be used to

help that process, make it more safe. Yeah, it just has to be an option, though. I guess this is where people get nervous, where they're like, okay, the data shows that when we have an artificial womb, babies are born, you know, with a 1% mortality rate. However, when babies are born from actual wombs, in the best circumstances, there's a 5% mortality rate. So we're going to make it illegal for you to get pregnant. you have to have a baby through this artificial womb and there's a penalty or something that goes

along with getting pregnant naturally, quote unquote. And I guess that's where people immediately go to this like doomsday worst case scenario. Like, well, if the data shows it's better this new technological way, then what chance does the quote unquote natural way have? Yeah, I think how you introduce new technologies is really important. And I think like a lot of the messaging, for example, around MRNA was lost and we ended up having a year of like chaos and different information on it. And so and that's another really important example and one of the most intimate processes to human existence or to just animal existence in

general is pregnancy and kind of evolution in life. So hopefully not taking the option away from people I think is really important. We might also have conversations where we look at the ethics and say, you know, this child has a 90% chance of surviving. and being healthy and living longer born this way versus 50% born this way. The ethics of that conversation are also interesting because it's like, well, you chose the way that maybe led to me having these issues later in life

and that might seem unethical. And so I think what we need to realize is that technology changes ethics. And it always has. IVF used to be seen as one of the most dangerous technologies. They called it, you know, English. It was all over the covers of British magazines as the most dangerous technology since the atomic bomb. And now how many babies have been born through IVF, right? Millions. But it took us a while to get there.

And if you think about, think about the storyline of IVF. Picture in the 50s telling somebody, or like in the 20s, we'll be able to freeze an embryo in or take an egg from this person, freeze it. You could give it to their grandma. They could bear that child. You could have the child frozen and have it in 10 years. years, you could plant it in another person's body and they could have it. Picture how that storyline would have sounded in like the 20s and the 50s. And now we're like, oh, no, it's an incredible technology called IVF that has brought so many people to the world that otherwise couldn't and has given, you know, conception optionality to parents that otherwise would have been locked out for different reasons. And so technology does change our ethics over time. And I think it's always

worth examining the ethics. It doesn't always, it doesn't mean that it always changes them for the better, but it does change them. And so I think how we look at technologies like artificial wombs today will maybe be how we look at things like IVF now versus how it was looked at in the 70s. And maybe not. And maybe we do realize there's a massive kind of intangible thing that's lost when a baby isn't in the womb of the creating parents

or whatever it is. Maybe. And the data shows or the experience shows that that's better. That's an interesting point that technology changes our ethics. It changes our ethics and it always has. I guess my question is what is the point of ethics then if technology makes it malleable?

I think there's a lot of people that like to believe in this moral absolutism where they say things are inherently good and not good and no amount of technology will change this fact from being good or not good. That it is absolute intrinsic to our human existence that this is good and this is bad. And there's like very broad things like murder

where it's like, this is good, this is bad, and no amount of technology will change that. So I think ethics are different than like a constitution, where a constitution is meant to not change and it's not meant to necessarily be kind of tweaked and edited, so to speak, I guess depending on which country you're talking about, but ethics are guiding principles towards, you know, and it also depends on what ethical framework somebody uses,

whether you think it's like Kant or whatever philosopher that you're subscribing to. But it's not necessarily supposed to be something that just sticks on a wall and never, ever changes. It's not something that we write in stone. It's something that we use to make decisions for, with the goal, hopefully, to be in the best interest for the most amount of people, or to bring out the most fairness in people or whatever it is that we use as kind of the guiding light. And it's also a framework to make decisions with. But it isn't something that we write on the wall and say that it can,

can never change. And I think that that's kind of what people confuse with ethics. So based on the information that we have in the present day, how do we make this decision versus this is how somebody viewed ethics 100 years ago and this is how we need to view it today. I think ethics evolve and they should evolve because times change. And why we see a lot of problems is there's often conflicting beliefs between systems that we've subscribed to over hundreds of years and the new ways that we live. Right. And I think people look at some of these new things that you're talking about as, you know,

unethical. And we're just going forward anyway. And it's kind of like that Jurassic Park thing where people are like, you know, people thought could we, but not should we? You know? Well, I think that there's just because you can, it does not mean you should in technology. And I think it's never been more true. going to continue to be even more and more true.

Do you think there are lines that should never be crossed, in the present, at least? Yeah, I think there are lines that shouldn't be crossed. I mean, you would have to give me an example, so to speak. But I think if something's going to lead to somebody's, like, death, that should hopefully be a line that nobody is, like, debating crossing. Yeah, kind of. But then you look at, like, euthanasia and things like that. You're like, all right, well.

Oh, I don't mean in that way. I mean, it's just like, oh, yeah, this is just going to be an error that's going to involve a bunch of people dying. Against their will, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah, youth in the age, I think is a very kind of specific thing. But, yeah, I think technology changes ethics. And in some ways, it's for the better.

Like, in some ways, we look at scenarios. I'm like, thank goodness technology pushed us out of that old framework of thinking. Because now look how many more people are included in this new way or are healthier or have just a fairer and better chance at life. because technology forced us out of this kind of thinking. Yeah. And it's not always great, but I think I, you know, the IVF example I think is an important one, that it was, it conflicted with a lot of people's religious beliefs,

personal beliefs, and it was very uncomfortable, just the science and technology of IVF. And test two babies became something that was kind of a stain and tarnish on their lives. And now if you're discriminating, a child because they were born through IVF, I don't think anyone would not come to your defense if that was a child being bullied.

That would just be unfathomable. Right. But our ethics changed over time and we didn't always feel that way. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm curious about that. I don't know if I'm completely sold on that idea of our, I think that's probably true objectively

that technology changes in ethics. I'm just not sure if it should. And I guess, I don't know, I'm like kind of caught up on that idea. Like, for example, something like cloning people point to or creating like hybridized human, other species hybrids, which I guess like we've seen versions of where you're able to take human DNA and mix it with like bonobos or something like that and create some type of like hybridized human animal like chimera. And it's like is that seems like a line in my opinion that shouldn't really be crossed. So yeah, that all comes under the synthetic biology ethical storm that we're going to we're stepping into.

And maybe that is a line that we don't cross. Like maybe species shouldn't cross mix or they do. But that's a current, very present conversation. Another one in that is bringing back extinct species. We will have the technology to do that over this decade, likely. Right. I mean, that's literally Jurassic Park. So that's Jurassic Park.

I mean, the scientists that are hoping to do that, it's not necessarily for that reason, most of them. It's to restabilize the biodiversity that humans destroy. But then again, I would also understand if we decided not to do that because how do humans get to make something go extinct and then say, oh, well, we're probably going to go extinct because we blew it. And now we need to bring everybody back again. There are massive ethical kind of gray areas in that. But at the same time, we do realize now that biodiversity is key to our survival in this massive ecosystem and bringing back something like a woolly mammoth that helps stomp and do all of this stuff and keep permafrosts in the ground and therefore prevents CO2 from being expelled. That's something that scientists are working on doing.

And if you want to research that more, one of the companies is colossal biosciences, but bringing back existing species. And that might be something that society decides, you know what, no, that's, we, we blew it and we don't deserve to bring these species back. And that's why I think futurism and conversations about emerging technology, we should have as many societal conversations as possible. So people don't feel like they woke up and technology happened to them. They feel like it happened with them. Yeah, but I guess that's where different societies might conflict. Because in America, we might be like, look, we're not going to be doing cloning because it creates too many ethical issues. is that person a human being or are they an extension of my human being?

Do I have the rights over them to say what they should do, even though they're a separate entity that has their own thoughts but comes from the same genetic base? But then another country, I'd be like, no, we're cool cloning. And then what do we do with those people that don't necessarily fit our status of human? Yeah, I think so there's like the geopolitical conversation. Will countries maybe engineer some geostrategic advantage using things like synthetic biology, engineering,

more optimal species, capabilities. Yes, and I think that that's a very big emerging threat, and it's how can we guarantee all countries are going to subscribe to the same systems? We've had conventions where we agree not to use nuclear arms and things like that, but those are technologies you can track and you know how many nuclear arms a country is building because you can see it from space. AI or cloning, we don't have access, visibility to countries, and that's going to be a it could be a bit of a geopolitical nightmare potentially.

But I think there's also a lot of information that people don't look into or they don't think about the full picture. So cloning, you can still kind of clone animals, but we decided that you can't clone humans. And that was obviously the right decision. But people who come down on the cloning side of the ethics and say, we shouldn't do that, A significant portion of gene therapies, which are used to cure or to solve a lot of diseases, became because of Dolly the Sheep. Like a significant portion.

And who's Dolly the Sheep? So Dolly the Sheep was a sheep that was cloned in the 90s, and it created an ethical storm. And rightfully so, like, that was a pretty big change to society to wake up one day in the newspaper and see, oh, my gosh, there was a cloned sheep. And what does that look like? Like it's, I think most people think science fictionity where they're like, sheep goes under like this giant test tube and then another sheep comes out like, and it's like right next to the other sheep. Like is that how it works or how does it actually?

No, so now cloning could happen in terms of things like artificial wounds. But you can also do things like clone embryo and bring it to life in a different species or in the same species but in a different kind of parent. So you just kind of clone it similar to kind of IVF. Right. But you've just cloned the DNA. Oh, and so they're happening simultaneously. So, like, you could have...

You could clone an embryo. And then create an artificial womb or put that cloned embryo into another person, and they give birth around the same time. So if you were to bring back extinct species, some of the process would be you clone... It's a whole thing, but in long story short, you would put the embryo in an artificial womb for a little bit, and then you would put it in...

So if it was the woolly mammoth, you would put it in the Asian elephant is like the closest living relative to it, and that Asian elephant would bring it to term. So that would be part of the cloning process. But Dolly, people freaked out and didn't look at the science of it all and just kind of focused on the emotional aspect of confronting that change that we can now duplicate people and that was the whole thing,

which would have been way more complicated. But the science of what happened as a result of Dolly was quite phenomenal. And a lot of cures have come because of that reason. research. So I think we're quick to kind of come down on technology without getting the full story and just quick to emotionally responding to something without getting the full story. Yeah, I guess there's just a general distrust that as there's emerging technologies, and especially when people see the power of those technologies, that it will be used for good and that it won't be used. Like I could imagine a world. I'm sure there's like science fiction

books written on this topic where it's like, okay, most wars granted are not fought with you know, fighting age men on the ground anymore. But if there is, a country that was like, okay, in the next 20 years, we're going to start this major invasion of this neighboring country, and we need X amount of men they're going to fight the war, let's crank up the machines, get more men, put them into fighting institutions at a young age, and now all of a sudden we have this, quote unquote, disposable part of our, you know, society that we can send into war without concerns for their family and just turn them into fighting machines. And they're people that are cloned from other people that are now going to be doing our fighting

for us. And I'm like, I'm sure there's, there's got to be a book about that because that seems crazy. I mean, I feel like Brave New World kind of vibes on it in some way. So in that regard, I'm like, of course, we're all going to be like, oh, you can't do that, but we know that countries are going to do whatever's in their best interest. So we might all agree to not do it, then everyone's going to secretly just do it anyway. So it's like, what failsafe is there in that regard to just not make, you know, 20,000 automatones that can fight from a young age? That just seems. I mean, up until this point,

countries have agreed not to clone people. And when that came to light, up until this point, it's been agreed, and we haven't seen any cloning issues of people. What is the governing body, the treaties that go through something like that? So this is where it's all no. And so there's different conventions,

the Geneva Convention, there's different conventions that pop up to deal with different technologies. and that's like just kind of countries like volunteering and saying this is what we believe we need to do. We need to all sign on to this. And that's kind of how that comes to be. So there's one with nuclear weapons. There was one with there's one with kind of biological agents that you can't bring to war.

So you can't just bring like a massive disease and kind of just like throw it on your opponents. But we're going to have a whole new fleet of global. agreements, biological ones, and I guess silicon-based ones, AI, that are going to be a lot harder to govern. And if there is an area of concern for me, it's probably that. I mean, there's many, but one that's what is going to be the geopolitical climate as these technologies are kind of being born that's cause for concern. And I think, yes, the future warfare and things, it will be much more from labs and computers and kind of DNA printers

than it might be from physical people on the ground. Is there currently a governing body that focuses on emerging technologies and tries to warn countries and governments and intelligence to pump the brakes? Countries have their own. So pretty much every country would have part of their military

or Department of Defense would be assigned to dealing with emerging technologies. Oh, really? Yeah. most of the U.S. does. What not all countries have, which I believe they should, is like a department that's dedicated entirely to building out the long-term technological strategy.

And so, for example, in the United States, there wasn't really, there's no department that deals with the long-term forecast of what technologies does the U.S. need to win in or to, you know, stay up to par in in order to be, you know, safe from a geopolitical standpoint. And AI, that should have been that, and it wasn't because there was no governing body looking at that. And now artificial intelligence is largely in the hands of the private sector, not the public sector.

And the U.S. is in this interesting case where the companies they're suing because they're too big and using, they have too much power that they're exerting, are the same companies that are being called as the first line of defense when there's some form of digital breach. So that's a conundrum. So you're saying we're asking both things of these companies like, oh, you're too big, we've got to break you up, but at the same time. We need you to design this drone. Help us, protect us, create this thing to flag this. Yeah. And an example of that, there was a big hack that happened.

This would have been about two years ago. And the U.S. Department of Defense, and it was a massive hack, was in the system trying to figure out where this hack is coming from. and then they flagged another kind of active body in the system, and it was Microsoft kind of coming to the defense of the U.S. And the same happens. We're seen even with Ukraine. A lot of the technology that's being sent to help defend is from the private sector,

which I think has been incredible and the way the private sector has kind of stepped up. But it also creates a challenging relationship, too, domestically, if you aren't also investing in the public, sphere of science and technology. And you're just kind of outsourced everything to the private sector. Right. It's fortunate that the private sector stepped up.

At the same time, they could have said, oh, that's too much. We don't really know. And heaven forbid, there's like some conflict of interest. The CEO is a, you know, Russian spy, whatever. Whatever it is. Yeah. And then they're like, oh, actually, we can't get involved. Sorry.

And then now this war is going a different direction because that company in the private sector didn't step up. And that is just by happenstance and good luck, but it could have easily gone the other direction. Yeah, I don't think you want to put all your eggs in the private sector basket. And I think that that's what's happened, unfortunately. And that wasn't the case, you know, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, the public sector was where most science and technology came from, the internet, GPS, all of that comes from the public sector and from government-funded programs and departments and institutions.

and it led to a lot of innovation. It's not the argument that private sector is the only sector where innovation comes from. No, pretty much everything we use. Siri, all of that is originally from the public sector. But having a balance of private public sector, I think, is important, and the U.S. has kind of lost that balance in these last 20 decades. Yeah, I'm curious about that optionality thing

that you were talking about before. Like, ideally we have options to do things. I could easily see a future where it's illegal to kill animals, where, you know, we are able to make synthetic meat at, you know, the same rate, and it's the exact same thing, and it's comparable, so therefore there's no real need to kill animals anymore. And maybe for specific instances with hunting or things like that, but otherwise it's seen as, you know, some version of homicide or whatever. I could see a future where driving is completely illegal on, you know, most major U.S. highways because we have these autonomous driving vehicles, so there's no need to.

to drive and these autonomous vehicles are safer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How do we make sure that those options are working for us and not against us? And is there a way to ensure that from an ethics perspective? Yeah, I mean, having as many different voices in the room and perspectives in the room as possible where these things are being built and designed is pretty critical. Demanding that type of visibility and transparency from the public officials that we elect, I think technology has kind of been left out of the ballot. And we don't, for some reason, discuss visibility and technology and tech evolution when we talk about elections in the future and campaigns, which I think is a big miss.

And so right now in the current state of democracy, that's one way to get change is to vote through it. And so hopefully that's a way that we have systems that are a bit more transparent. But another way is when you have a government that invest in the public sector and they can healthily compete with the private sector. And so both parties are working to be in the best interest to win and hopefully in the best interest of the people that are going to buy or subscribe. Could you see a future where we're no longer governed by people and we're just governed by an artificial intelligence? No, I think because I think AI it isn't some neutral objective thing. it's just a bunch of humans in the past. It's just data from the past, right?

So you would just be governed by the beliefs and thoughts of historical people, and it probably wouldn't work out very well. I also don't think, I think AI is going to be used for leaders to make decisions with. And so you're kind of technically being governed by an AI because you run something through an AI simulator and it said, cut this bill or go forward with this deal. So AI is going to play a massive role in government decisions and it actually already does. AI systems are a big part of big decision making and simulations and things.

But is there just some like AI that we elect? I don't see that happening in the next like 20 years. I know that there's been like mock cities that have been, have said there's an AI on the ballot and things like that. But it's kind of a joke and it's you're just electing a bunch of historical data. And if unless you love the past, like if, if, If you loved what happened, then put the AI in and see how it works out. But if you kind of want a different, want to march in a little bit of different direction, I don't think having it in AI.

And that's where I think people get confused. They think AI is like neutral or just objective because I hear a lot too. Like, what if we just put AI on the jury? And then it's just like nobody has biases. AI is just nothing but biases. And sometimes those biases are good, but that's what AI is. It's not some neutral thing. It's not just a neutral tool.

It's based on the environment it was trained on and the climate at the time. And so, yeah, I don't think maybe. Is there a world in 200 years where AI is made in an entirely different way? Maybe. And that would be like a totally different conversation. But sure. Yeah. So in general, I guess to kind of like wrap up, you are generally optimistic about the approach

and the direction that things are moving in, whether it's, you know, bio, what do they call it? What did you call it before? Synthetic biology. Yeah, synthetic biology. AI, all of these things that are emerging on the horizon that I think people feel a little nervous about your opinion generally as far as like, will this future in the next 10, 50, 100 years work for us or against us, dystopian or utopian? What is your general feeling on that? Okay. So I would say all of the technologies I've talked about I'm really excited about

and I think are going to transform the world in incredible ways. I am concerned about the state of the world and the landscape we're deploying those technologies on. So I think CRISPR, a technology as powerful as CRISPR, that could be incredible. In a very polarized society that's not healthy and can't agree, the messaging, everything kind of gets lost and we lose all of the good from it.

So I think the technologies I'm excited about, I think there's synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, they can change the world in so many amazing ways. We do need to get a hold on the health of our society. And that is actually where I have my biggest concern, I would say lies. But overall, my optimistic and my pessimistic, I think the optimistic scenarios are possible. And I think that there's a lot of empowering and inspiring voices leading.

and we don't always see them, but there are people genuinely just committed to building a future that works for everyone. And those stories need to get told more. But I think, yeah, getting a hold of the health of our society is probably the number one priority. Yeah. So generally, you look at all these technologies just as tools.

You know, like... Not as tools. Like, yes, as tools. Okay, so I think in many ways technology is a tool, but it's not neutral. So if some people use the word tool and they think it's just like a hammer, Right.

I use the word tool as something that can kind of help a process, streamline a process, make something more efficient, but it's not a neutral tool. In what way? Technology is a product of the environment that it was built in. So whether that's the data it was trained on, so AI isn't just a tool, it's not neutral. It's a product of the historical data. It's trained on the people that were in that room. We have a bunch of climate tech right now because our environment, literally our physical environment, but the environment is all about climate. as our planet is kind of suffering and dying.

So technology isn't just this neutral agnostic tool. It's based on the environment it was built in. Maybe there weren't at a time a certain technology came online. A lot of women in that room or part of those types of conversations. And so it's going to have certain biases baked into it. And so I think it's important that we know that going into technology or deploying tools and resources. A tool doesn't mean it's neutral.

Got it. And you view these technologies is inherently different than a ham. or something like that that is truly neutral, that a hammer can either be used to build a house or to hit someone in the head, and it truly depends on who's holding it, but these tools are more complex that they are geared towards a bias

in one way or another, depending on what it was inserted with. Yeah, I mean, a hammer I think can hopefully be a little bit more objective, but then you could take something in a technology like the vehicle, and you could say that that's pretty much neutral. And then you realize the dummies that were used to test crashes, for a vehicle were always like six foot one males. And so females were much more at risk of getting hurt in car accidents. So again, not neutral.

Right. A chainsaw is neutral, but they made her right-handed people. And so left-handed people that usually have more accidents. And so I think that that's just an important lens. And it's not just like shining inclusivity light to everything and just going, it's, this is how it is. And if we can acknowledge that things aren't necessarily neutral, we can mitigate that. We can have safeguards to make sure everyone's kind of equally protected against them.

And we don't go down these kind of dark roads of problems that can be, avoided. But overall, I think that the tools of the future, whether they're applied to health care, education, space, are incredible. And our future could be awesome. It could be incredible. And I really do think that that's possible. I think we need to get a hold on the health of our current society. And I believe that that is also possible. I don't think the problems we're facing right now, they're not matters of physics or biology or evolution. They're human-created problems. They're social feud, social environment, social, they're human problems, which means it's, you know, within us to kind of fix them. Yeah. Do you have any prescriptive thoughts as to like what we can do to try to

maintain or increase the health in society? I know this is like a broad question, like go, fix society. But are there little things? Do you think that comes from like legislating social media? Like, do you think there's a general push that would kind of make things a little bit safer in general. Yeah, I mean, even just adding to education, digital hygiene. And imagine bringing a generation online that is completely, has all of the tools for fake news and for understanding narratives and algorithmic amplification and the incentives for enraging kind of content that is going to go, imagine having a generation that's totally like, yeah, I know what that is. I'm not, I'm not worried about that narrative that's been spun right now on Twitter because I can look deeply and think critically how transformative that could be in terms of how people approach what they see online and on social media.

So something as small is that just being a class that people start at like seven. Right. And then the critical thinking they apply to the information ecosystems in digital environments. That's a pretty big step. And it's not that we even have to do this type of thing from scratch. I think Finland is doing it right now. They start maybe as young as like seven, kind of proofing kids against fake news and misinformation

and all of the different challenges that they're going to face. And it's already been quite successful. And that's not like a massive change. That's not like sending kids to space so they can learn about zero gravity. It's literally just adding a curriculum of like critical thinking with information. Right.

Acknowledge that these technologies are not going to go away and they're not necessarily just going to be tools that are other good people or bad people use that they are here, they are biased, and we need to create a generation of people that are better equipped to deal with those things. Yeah, and I don't think we have to accept all the biases, knowing that they are biased thing is important, but knowing that maybe there are things that we want to change. There's research coming out around, like, maybe we have age limits or starting points for

people that can use social media when they're not in puberty, and brains are a little bit more vulnerable. All sorts of things like that, I think, are pointing in the right direction. Yeah. And so I think if we can keep heading down that direction, the future could be really cool. Like, we're about to step into space in a way that just literally seem like it's something from science fiction. What do you mean? I mean, you know, we're building infrastructure for the moon right now to build homes and research centers and labs.

In the next couple years, we'll start to see those on the moon. If you looked at the Artemis mission from NASA, they've been testing that. rocket, so to speak, and that's to bring the next load of astronauts back to the moon, but for much more of a permanent development. So I think that that's going to be really exciting. You have private sector companies that are looking at office space in space. You have movie studios that will be shooting movies up there, and we're just about to explore this new world in a way. And of course, there's going to be probably a lot sort of issues that come with it. But I think that's a really exciting point in history to be.

Do you think that'll be accessible to average people? Do you think in our lifetime, just regular people will be able to live on some type of interstellar mass, whether it's the moon or some type of man-made structure or something like that? In our lifetime, and I'm thinking like, yeah, I think so. I think right now, obviously the cost is astronomical. It's like $200,000, maybe for someone just to like dip to the edge of low earth orbit. I think that that will hopefully go down because that isn't also sustainable for companies. And so you'll literally have what, like seven people that live in space. So I think the goal is to lower the cost.

And especially when you have things like 3D printing and AI design, it will help bring the cost down. And I do think it will be a lot more accessible. And what would be the purpose of trying to create some type of like habitat on Mars? I know that's Elon Musk's big thing. It's like, oh, let's make Mars, you know, habitable. Why? Yeah.

So I don't know if it makes sense to like terraform Mars and we see some. biological advantage or evolutionary advantage from being there, then let's explore. I think I'm much more on, let's kind of follow the science. And what science does show is that if we're going to do things like 3D print organs in the future, it's much better to do that in zero gravity environments. And so that's a really important use case for space. And so we might find other different health-based or business-based or climate-based solutions

that happened from space. You could do a cancer treatment and if for whatever reason you being in this environment makes it more effective. You're more likely to, you know, your body accept the organ, whatever it is, but we do know.

So NASA has brain organoids right now. Like this little little, like single cell pieces of brain tissue that they bring to space and they kind of see how it develops and evolves. So that research is happening and it's showing that you know, printing organs in zero,

gravity is much better. So those I think, I'm like, let's follow the science. The science used to maybe say if there's overpopulation, maybe going on a different planet is helpful now. I don't think overpopulation is actually going to be a full problem on Earth. I think population lines are actually going down. So things will kind of level out at a certain population amount. I don't know.

It's actually, I don't know even about leveling out. If you look at 2100, the U.S., China, England, Japan. Japan's already quite pointing down. but the birth rates are going down. So we might actually see a bit of a reduction in population count, which is just a whole other thing. But I think if the science makes sense for us to be a species that's also on Mars, then let's try to figure that out.

We obviously know eventually if humans want to continue to live, we'll have to go somewhere else. We can't be in the solar system. Obviously, our sun's going to die. And so I'm assuming that figuring that out isn't going to be something that's like a generational breakthrough. Like, oh, this is how we get to interstellar space at the speed of light. Right.

So we are laying the foundation the same way the technology of space that happened in the 50s and 60s, we're building on top of. This is part of that. And I'm not kind of trying to trumpet the long-termism beliefs when people are like, you should care about humans two million years from now, and that should be the only reason why you make decisions. But I think, you know, science, there's the scientific kind of approach to space travel and that's if it makes sense for humans as a species, then let's do it. And we're just

going to be learning a lot too about Earth from space. And we don't even fully understand this ecosystem. So maybe 50 years from now there's like a research lab that exists on the moon that is creating organs or helping with like a medical treatment or some other type of like science and researchers and things live there. I would say probably 15 years from that. 15? 15? 1.5. Yeah. So I don't think people realize how soon the moon plans are taking place. Like that's in this decade. I don't realize this. Yes. So probably 2028, I think it's like the target, but things always get delayed. But that's like the goal. It's like putting another bathroom on your house. Like you think it's going to be two months and then it turns in eight months and then it's in the shopping cart. The contractor's not calling you back. So it's kind of like that. Yeah. More or less a few extra trillion dollars and some lives on the line. But that's yeah, it's that close.

That just seems wild. And then as far as tourism and things like that, is that just a cost issue? Yeah. So I think in the next couple years we'll also see like the first space hotel already has funders. It's already like underway. So we'll probably maybe we'll definitely see that by probably the end of the decade. Who's going to go there at this point in time? That's probably going to be billionaires only.

But hopefully in time, space tourism becomes something that's much more susceptible. Just measly multi-millionaires can go one day. Right. So just like the emerging millionaire class, the struggling millionaire class. Exactly, yeah, the middle class million. And hopefully get there. Wow. I mean, that is crazy to think.

It's really, yeah, space is something that I don't think people fully realize how close it is. And it's not just like exploratory. There's science research companies. There's businesses. There's all sorts of things that are going to be manufactured in space. Like products and things like that where it's just cheaper or like the creation. of those things is too hazardous to be on earth, so they exist in some other space.

Is that an option? Yeah, I mean, Jeff Bezos had said, send all of the polluting companies to space. To me, I get that. Like, let's just keep Earth. But then I'm like, what are we kicking off in space? I don't have time for a black hole to be on the look. Nobody, we can't do that.

Like, I think that we need to really figure that out. Imagine sending a space cyclone. Just we can't. I just, we can't go there. I mean, it's so funny. I mean, it's likely we'll make the same mistakes that we did on Earth where, you know, we're creating stuff where we're like, oh, all this byproduct that's toxic. We don't want it to be in our drinking water. So let's go dump it somewhere else.

And then it eventually gets into our drinking water indirectly. And now we're going to do the same thing. In a worse way. Then it just comes on the clouds. Right. And now we're going to do the same thing in space where we go, oh, all of our pollution stuff we don't like, let's just go to a different planet. And then we realize, oh, it's planetary pollution that's still coming back to us in some abstract way. Mixed with like debris, space debris. Yeah.

and like solar radiation. Yeah. And we just like fried pollution with solar rays. And it's just like this whole new thing. Yeah. Like, oh, let's just send our garbage to Jupiter. And then we see it coming back. Like meteorite.

Trash asteroid. That's just flying at us. And if we can, honestly, if humans, if we keep acting this way and we can't get it together, maybe that's, if that's what's in our future because we just can't pull it together. Yeah. Maybe that's how we go out. Yeah, that's not a bad way. A garbage asteroid because we just couldn't put the chips in the garbage.

Something poetic about that, honestly. just like a space extinction from our own garbage. Because we just, yeah, like, oh, garbage just turns into magic when it's in space. The same way we used to think it just turns into magic in the ocean. And now there's an island. I think it's bigger than a country. It's bigger than one of the countries. And it's floating in space.

I mean, it's floating into the water in the ocean and it's just plastic. Yeah, yeah. I think it's probably bigger than many countries. I've seen this. And it's an unfathomable amount of garbage that's just like circulated. in some far ocean. And we're just like, yeah, back to business as usual. Yeah, that's crazy.

But somehow launching into space does seem better to me. Like if you're able to create a rocket with hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage and just send it far away. But I mean, no, I think we're already having problems from space debris and space junk now. So there's a bunch of satellites in low Earth orbit and they're crashing into Earth.

They're like, it's polluting our orbit and it's actually a problem. and countries are getting really hostile about it. So I don't think it helps, like, sending, like, a Pepsi bottle up there and just, like, making it worse. I don't think it's helpful. Even into a black hole? What if you could send it into a black hole?

And if you knew, like, if you could be certain that that black hole isn't going to come and be like, yeah, you think that's cool? Well, you think it doesn't until it's just dropping trash into some parallel alternate universe. Yeah. Whatever's on the other side of a black hole, no one knows. The upside down. Yeah, literally.

Who knows? Literally, who knows what it is. It could just be a wormhole or whatever. Or maybe we're in a simulation and... Yeah, right? And then you just have to press exit on the screen. Yeah, yeah, exactly. On your Google glass, you just swipe over.

Yeah, if you just turn off your glasses, you won't succumb to the black hole. Yeah, exactly. That's the best way to do it. Would you go to space? If you had the option, it'd be like, hey, one month stint on the moon, space hotel, are you in? I would... First and foremost, like, I don't need to be there. Send the scientists.

if my ticket can be send a researcher that can actually do something productive first and foremost send them second if we figure out the health issues of space because like the bones decaying and some of that the lifespan impacts and longevity that does concern me a little bit and I know NASA is obviously working on that

because they have tons of astronauts in space and that's like a real problem so I think I would want that kind of figured out and but after that that I think it's so wild to think about. I mean, I'd like to say that I would if it was worthwhile having me on that rocket ship. And what if you know that you age twice as quickly?

And they're like, do wanna come spend a week? And then when you come home, you'll be two weeks older rather than a week older. I think if it's like that two weeks, then that could be worth it. If it's like you could impact your lifespan, like five years. Yeah.

Once there's you're like, oh, radiation, going to the Van Allen belt, I'm good. I'm probably good. And I do think that as technology continues to evolve, we'll just get more and more solutions. So it's not like a problem that we might hopefully, like they'll probably be able to figure that out. We just maybe need a bit more time. Yeah. I mean, and that just sounds super selfish.

Like, I'm waiting until my ticket is this. I think I would just, I also think to send the scientists right now they need to be there. Yeah, let them die, right? No. Like, who cares? No, I mean, send the scientists, because I'm not going to add any value. I'm just going to write like a reflective post online with it. Send somebody who's going to come back and be like, I found the origins of life.

Boom. Yeah, that's probably, that's more. Send them. Like, even some of, like, the billionaires jumping into space right now, I get it that you, like, you built the rocket, but maybe you just give your seat to a scientist, unless you're coming back with info. But if private sector is contributing to this overall thing, and they're like, hey, the tradeoff is that I get to go into low Earth orbit.

Yeah. That's a price that I think, yeah. we're willing to pay. And I think it's important that we're geopolitical reasons that countries at least have a stake in space and if it's because of the private sector. But it's a whole other thing with taxes and why we lost a lot of funding to NASA and this, that and the other. But I think space is, it's a really exciting frontier to be on. And for it to be like what we talked about in movies is like we're doing it. And it will be similar. And for both good and bad, I guess I'm also concerned with the geopolitics

of space of like space wars where it's like, I know China and the U.S. are basically in like an 80s-style space race trying to like get to the moon. Is that true? Like, can you speak to that? I can. I would say, yes, that there are hard economic, it's a hard economic power. So not like a soft power, but a hard power to be in space. If you control like the mining that's going to happen on the moon, especially if we believe

that there were, if lava used to flow there, the potential valuables and goods that could be mined creates an economic advantage. that countries are realizing and fighting to get. There's also the satellites. If you can kind of control people's satellites, you could send GPS to go a wrong way, and then you're sending a military. So there's all sorts of different things

that could happen in space from a geopolitical, militaristic point of view of why countries do need to get a hold of it, and they are, they're realizing that that's like also the next frontier. Yeah. So it's like attack surfaces are all the different points in technology where an attack can happen. And so now it's like phones, your glasses. Right. And there's going to be far more and they're going to be far closer to us.

Yeah, but yes, and I know that that all seems scary. But also we also live in better times than have ever existed before. Right. With the most technology that's ever existed in history exists right now. And here we are. And so I think the future always seems, the unknown always seems really scary until you're there. And then throwing a Steve Jobs quote, it just, it all makes sense when you look back. Yeah.

But in the moment, it just seems like what? I know we have to leave. One last question. Yeah. Where are we out on aliens? On aliens? Yeah. Oh.

Scientifically, we still have a lot of money and investment and not necessarily, and not nothing to show for. it because I think that the science is all really important, but we don't have evidence of other life emotionally. I don't think we're probably alone. Even if that means maybe we're alone right now, I don't think we are that special. And that's also what we're like, there's a lot of research on the origins of life and it's fascinating. And it's going to bring all sorts of things into question if we realize that we are alone or that we're not. A lot of stories we've told herself, all of that changes. But I don't think we're alone. And if you look at even

the elements that make up a human, carbon, they're the things that are most abundant in the universe. So it's not like we're in like the bottom of the periodic table and it was just like a fluke that we are this mixture. We're just like what, just like, what? it's abundant in space and then came humans. And so, and even when you look at aliens, it's a totally different thing, but there's research that has come out recently about the intelligence of the T-Rex and it actually having a very intelligent brain based on what they're able to kind of retroactively or kind of re-engineer and see that in my point being when we think, oh my gosh,

had the dinosaurs not been taken out, we would not have these intelligent creatures and us evolved humans, maybe that's not so true. Maybe evolution has a path to intelligence and like the dinosaurs, some of them seem to be very intelligent, very, very intelligent.

And so it just all starts to bring things into question as to like evolution and, yeah, if there's other things in the world, if we're not as special And if intelligence isn't that special, does that mean life on Earth is that special? I don't know. So that's kind of, and that's not me with like a scientist hat. I'm not an astrobiologist.

I don't know anything about that. But I think the research is getting really interesting. Yeah, you're familiar with like the Fermi paradox? Like that's, where is everyone? Yeah, exactly. Like that's how I feel, I feel like what you're describing. Like, okay, there is no data to show that there's any other. intelligent life out there. Based off of everything that we know that's available to the public,

it doesn't seem like it, but you look at a picture of the Hubble telescope or what is the James Webb telescope, and you look at it and you're like, all of these little dots on this picture of space is a complex solar system galaxy that possesses every single possible element that could create human life. So statistically, it's so likely that there is some other type of life and even more so that it could be intelligent. So how are these two things able to exist simultaneously? And exactly, unless we don't actually understand what life is and we don't understand how it appears and we don't understand what we actually are in this ecosystem, which we don't. So that we don't realize how connected this all is and that our ecosystem is actually a part of this bigger solar system,

which is all attached. And so we don't necessarily maybe understand the full hierarchy of it all. but I think Fermi paradox, where is everyone? Someone somewhere. Like I just don't, it can't just be the 8 billion of us. Right. Just on a personal level, you just kind of believe. On a personal level, there's at least one more person.

Yeah. There's like at least one person somewhere. Somewhere. But if it turns out that we maybe are alone, that's, I think, I think I feel like I understand more that we're not alone than we are. Right. Even just a bug. Like, people talk about intelligent life. A piece of mold. For me, it doesn't even have to be intelligent.

A protein. Yeah. What if it is just a single cell organism that exists in some water on a far-off thing? I'm like, the likelihood of that seems... And that's what we're close to, whether it's the clouds of Venus or Jupiter or we're starting to understand things about Mars. But even then, that's probably from the same life ecosystem. Right, because it's so close to us. But what if life is also something entirely different and that isn't carbon-based and there's just other versions of life in that we don't even understand what we're looking at. And so we don't even know how to spot it.

There's that. Because we also, biously, our quest and search for life is just under the assumptions that it would evolve the same way we did. And even when you have techno signatures that look for technical signs in the universe of, you know, someone sending out a laser or something, that's understanding. under the assumption that all life would evolve to have computers and AI. And maybe life evolves differently. And very intelligent species don't have these types of tools.

They do something different. So we don't even know what we're not looking for. We don't even know what we're not looking for. I mean, yeah, the levels of complexity to try to even figure out. Yeah, because if we're looking for something that's replicate, like that's similar to us, of course we're not going to see it because we're looking, we're measuring the wrong thing. Yeah, we're using our bias.

tools and assuming that we are what evolution looks like everywhere. And that might not be true. But how else can we know what to look for? We don't, right. And so that's just like the counterfactual we don't, we'll never know until maybe we spot something. But I do think that that's also part of like, you know, some of our limits is that we can only, we can only build what we can imagine and we can only imagine what kind of

exists. It's hard. We can't really think outside of that. Yeah. unless AI thinks of things, and I'm not like, oh my gosh, here comes AI running like Braveheart. But the interesting thing about these systems is that they think in ways that humans don't. And so they might be able to, because they process information differently and can analyze millions of variables at any one time, humans, but we can do like 20, that we might start to deploy different approaches to what life could be and therefore how we could look for. And it also means when AI gets better, running simulations in AI right now still isn't like

the technology isn't that great. You're not saving the world through an AI simulation really yet. But say in 15 years, we can simulate how life probably started in the earth. We'll have a better idea of what that could look like in other places with different elements and things. So there's different angles that I think we'll start to understand more about life. Right. I guess it depends on which happens first. If we're able to uncover the genesis of life in some far planet, will that tell us more about us here?

Or if we discover more about ourselves here, will that tell us what to look for somewhere else? And I guess it's difficult to know until it happens. And then do you want to actually make yourself known to another civilization or when you don't really know their capabilities? There's all that element. I don't even have to get into that. Yeah, I've heard people describe that. But like, if other planets treat us the way that we treated, you know, as Europeans went around the world, and were discovering tribes, they didn't necessarily treat them that well.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Even if they thought that they were potentially treating them well, it wasn't well based off what we know now because of the way we understand human rights to work. Yeah, if we have, if, yeah, I think, and I think history has a lot to show for how we've treated people. Yeah. So how can we ensure that some super advanced civilization will treat us the same way? And how do we know that they're not going to, you know, enslave us or whatever other thing?

Or just detonate us with a button. Yeah, just detonate us. Or will we hope that through their technological advancements, they also have an ethical advancement and that they know how to treat other life forms? Greetings, they come in peace. Yeah, like how to treat other life forms. Like, hey, we have the ability to destroy you, but we also know that we shouldn't because we have a heightened ethical code

and our morality is superior to yours and our morality states that we're not going to destroy you. That would be nice. That would be nice. And it would be under the assumption that intelligence also is associated with thought and language. And that's how we could just be dealing with things that are just, yeah, entirely different. Yeah. I have very many more questions to ask you. But for the sake of your life and time, I'm going to let you loose.

Okay. This has been so fun. This has been a lot of fun. I feel like I've learned a lot and I've also unlearned everything that I've ever known. I have way more questions than I do answers. I don't know what the universe is anymore. Is there any final conclusion, any final thought? I'll let you have the last word.

If there's anything that you would like to share, and additionally, you should let people know where they can hear more of your ideas. Yeah, you can hear more of my stuff on social media. I'm pretty public about it all. Chenade Beauvel, my name definitely does not look how it sounds. So maybe you read the description of this. You can find me on YouTube soon,

which I'm excited about. And so I'll have to return the favor and you can come. Yeah, of course. And in terms of any lost words, I think, you know, no matter what you believe to be true about the future,

the best thing we can do is prepare for it. And so kind of avoiding it isn't helpful. And so if you can do your bit in just reading or learning or kind of just staying kind of present in some of the conversations, I think that helps us get the version of the future we want. Cheney Beauvel, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.