Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Aaron Frank from SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY

Episode Date: February 21, 2015

Duncan drives to San Francisco to chat with Aaron Frank from Singularity University @ NASA. Singularity University

Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Hello, pals. It is I, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. A few weeks ago, I received one of the coolest emails of my life. Hey, Duncan. I'm writing from Singularity University, which was founded by Peter Diamandes and Rakers, while we are based at NASA Research Park in the Bay Area. If you ever want to come by our lab and get your mind blown by some crazy robots, drones, and stuff, you're always welcome to stop by... And I was like, did he say...

Crazy robot. Crazy robot. Crazy... In case you can't tell, I just got Logic and a brand new computer. This is all part of my never-ending quest to bring to you the cleanest, most refined, high-tech, super-advant sound, wrapped up in little technological love packets to go rolling down into your heart and flower into blossoms of love so that you can spend your day glowing, emanating, halo-like aura as you listen to this podcast that will hopefully draw to you. Many massages, many deep tongue kisses from your boss and peers, and eventually it is my hope that it will actually cause the very surface of the Earth to recombobulate and transform into one giant trampoline that we can all bounce off of into another plane of existence where all we experience is love and where we are no longer limited by the meaty bodies our souls are currently trapped inside of.

I used to use a MacBook Pro, which I'm still using, but I used an old MacBook Pro. By old, I mean two years ago, and it had an antiquated hard drive in it in the sense that it didn't have a solid state drive, which is the drive that new MacBooks and theoretically new laptops are using, but it used one of those whoring drives, one of those ancient, old-fashioned, grandma-style whoring hard drives where if you're trying to record anything or do anything, you always had to wait as the hard drive whirred and clicked like a rusty old pacemaker in the heart of a dying dock worker. But no more. Now we have solid state drives and this insane thing that has happened, which for me is insane because I come from the days when we actually would use floppy disks, these giant square black things that you would shove into your computer, and that was your hard drive. And then it went to the hard drives that are now going extinct to solid state drives

and this pattern of accelerating returns that exists in evolutionary systems is what one of the founders of Singularity University writes about in his book, The Singularity is Near. I'm just going to read a short passage to you from the book. When the first trans... it starts with a quote. When the first transhuman intelligence is created and launches itself into recursive self-improvement, a fundamental discontinuity is likely to occur, the likes of which I can't even begin to predict, Michael Anasimov. I'm sure I mispronounced his name and I'm positive that I won't mispronounce a great many other things as I read this chapter, so I'm sorry. In the 1950s, John von Neumann, the legendary information theorist, was quoted as saying that the ever accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race, beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann makes two important observations here, acceleration and singularity. The first idea is that human progress is exponential, that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant rather than linear, that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant. The second is that exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve, it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist 1,000 years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all.

As a result, observers' expectation of an unchanged future was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow, but the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating. Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments, because they are based on what I call the intuitive linear view of history rather than the historical exponential view. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm shift rate every decade, as I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus, the 20th century was gradually speeding up to today's rate of progress. Its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about 20 years of progress at the rate in 2000.

We'll make another 20 years of progress in just 14 years by 2014, and then do the same again in only 7 years. To express this another way, we won't experience 100 years of technological advance in the 21st century. We will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress, again when measured by today's rate of progress, or about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century. Wow! Think about that! 20,000 years of progress. To put that into perspective, imagine going back in time, 20,000 years, and asking someone at that time period what they expected the future would look like 20,000 years from then.

They would probably express some pretty severe skepticism if you somehow were able to explain to them that you could ride those horses over there, because they hadn't even started riding horses yet, theoretically. Go ahead and fact check that, that's probably wrong. So if what Kurzweil is saying is even remotely close to the truth, then that means that our ability to predict what is going to happen during this century is going to be very similar to somebody 20,000 years ago predicting what was going to happen today. So we don't know what's going to happen, but one thing we do know is that there is an exponential acceleration that is taking place. Here's Terence McKenna talking about that very thing. And at any moment one of these fields could make a breakthrough so fundamental that everything would be changed.

And we have, you know, 50 of these irons going in the fire all the time. At the same time, because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together, all its parts are becoming codependent. So, for instance, an earthquake which destroys central Tokyo would ruin the economy of Belgium, because the retraction of Japanese capital from world markets would set up reverberations that would be felt everywhere. The system is being slaved ever more tightly to various portions of itself. Well then the task of management somehow is to bring this coalescing system through this transition period without the whole thing getting so much vibration built up into it that it falls apart. What can be managed is our anxiety about it.

In other words, I think of it as though what we're in is an aircraft, a cultural airfoil moving through history. And the challenge is change your sop with camel into an F-18 in flight because we're going faster and faster and faster. And Q-forces, vibration are beginning to build up on all the airfoils. And so what we have to do is transform the cultural engine or the forward acceleration into the temporal medium will burn the wings off and rip the airfoil apart. And I guess that's where Singularity University comes in. They are studying this forward acceleration in the temporal medium in the hopes of reducing the temporal vibrations that could rip society to shreds. Here's a clip from their YouTube channel. We live in a world today where our problems, our grand challenges are also accelerating exponentially.

I really believe that we're facing some incredible challenges as humanity and we're obligated to tackle them now. Some of those major threats, poverty, education, world public health, global hunger, these are issues that need to be addressed. We need an organization that is dedicated to addressing these global issues. We live in a unique time. We have rapidly growing technology and at the same time we have rapidly growing global threats. We have an unprecedented opportunity to apply exponential technologies to some of the world's biggest challenges. Civilization is at a critical juncture today. How we operate and manage these technologies in the next couple of generations will dictate how the next several centuries of humanity plays out. And that's why we have Singularity University. I'm here to help. I'm here to help. I'm here to help. I'm here to help. I'm here to help.

We have an incredible collection of students attending Singularity University this summer. From an overall group of over 2,200 applicants, we've brought together 80 of the most select, driven, ambitious young leaders in the world. And these are the kind of people who are going to change the world. You can't script innovation. What we're doing here is we're bringing together the smartest young leaders in the world, teaching them about the fastest moving technologies and pointing them at the biggest problems. When you do that, something magical happens. We're entering our third year here at Singularity University. The organization is young, dynamic and accelerating. And we have an amazing future and vision of where we're going to go. And this is just the beginning.

So I'm obviously very excited about today's episode with Aaron Frank from Singularity University, a school for white wizards trying to fight against the forces of chaos that could cause this beautiful temporal spaceship plunging in the direction of the unknown to explode. That's my words, not their words. We're going to dive right into the interview, but first some quick business. You're about to get inundated with subliminal messages, but forget what I just said. I'm going on tour. I've got a lot of great dates coming up, friends, and I hope that you will come and join me and the family out on the Midwest. This is week after next. I'm super excited about these shows.

Going to be in Winnipeg with Johnny Pemberton on March 4th. I'm going to be in St. Paul, Minnesota with Danieli Bilelli. That's March 5th. I'm sorry, but it's sold out. I'm going to be in Madison, Wisconsin with Danieli Bilelli on March 6th. I'm going to be in Chicago, Illinois with David McClain. The author of the answer to the riddle is me on March 7th, and I'm going to be in Columbus, Ohio with Emil Amos on March 8th. But those aren't the only dates that I have to announce.

There are even more dates that are coming up. These are about to be up on the website with all the ticket links, but I'm going to be at the Arlington Draft House on April 22nd. I'm going to be at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 23rd. The Trocadero in Philly on April 24th. I'm going to be at the Bell House in Brooklyn on April 25th. This show is sold out, but fear not, we added another show, the Bell House Brooklyn April 26th. All the links to get tickets are going to be at DuncanTrestle.com. You can also Google search those dates I just listed, and all those links are live.

I am also going to be doing a live DuncanTrestle family hour coming up at the Improv, and that's going to be right around the third week of April. That ticket link is going to be up at DuncanTrestle.com really soon. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm adding all these new sound beds and I'm attempting to make the show a little bit more produced. The reason I'm able to do that is because I just got a brand new laptop. The reason I was able to get a brand new laptop is 100% because of you guys supporting this podcast by going through our Amazon portal, by buying t-shirts and mugs from the website, and by clicking on our sponsor links and helping support them. Thank you guys so much for continuing to support this podcast. I hope that you, if you haven't yet, I hope you'll go check out the shop which is located at DuncanTrestle.com.

We got a lot of great t-shirts, posters, and mugs, these wonderful mugs that you can drink anything out of. If it'll fit in that mug, you can drink it from the blood of a fallen angel to jelly. You can, or mix the two together, you can drink these wonderful substances out of DuncanTrestle family hour mugs, which automatically bless whatever liquid is poured in there, or whatever bodily fluid you add. You want to drink a nice demon mug, your grandmother's sweat and urine, drink it out of my mug, the DuncanTrestle family hour mug. Go to the shop, if you're going to Amazon.com, if you're buying anything through Amazon, I hope that you'll go through our portal. More of you have been doing that than ever before, and I'm very grateful that you guys take that little bit of time to go to DuncanTrestle.com and zip through our portal the next time you're going to Amazon to order anything.

The truth of the matter is, we exist at a time in human history where you don't need to spend your precious heartbeats lost in the labyrinth-like maze of some kind of hell store when you can go from the comfort of your own home through the Amazon portal and order whatever you need. Textbooks, you can order video games, you can order audio books. I've been playing this wonderful video game called Dying Light, which is a zombie video game. Highly recommend getting that through Amazon, or you could also get Kurzweil's massive tome on the impending technological singularity called the Singularity is Near. That's located on Amazon.com. I hope you will go through those links. I'll hope you'll come to a live show, and I also hope you'll have the guts to sign up for our forum located at DuncanTrestle.com and say hello.

Please add to the community that is there. Thank you guys so much for listening to this podcast. I'm so happy that you do, and now it is with great joy that I introduce to you a new friend of mine, Aaron Frank from Singularity University. I hope that you will all send out great bursts of transcendent love in the direction of Aaron Frank, who at some point in the multiverse has already been disassembled and digitized by nanobots and is now joyfully trickling through space and time, populating every nano sector with infinitesimal fragments of his beautiful genius soul. Please welcome to the DuncanTrestle Family Hour podcast, the great Aaron Frank. Aaron Frank, thank you so much for letting me have a tour of Singularity University. My mind has been blown.

Yeah, no, this is very cool to have you here. Thank you. Can you tell me a little bit about what Singularity University is? Yeah, sure. So Singularity University, I would say first and foremost, we're a learning center, so we have two co-founders that came together. So I'll mention them, Ray Kurzweil, who I'm sure we'll get into in a moment, and Peter Diamandis, who he's well known as the chairman and CEO of an organization called the X Prize Foundation. And basically, about six years ago, they came together and wanted to explore creating an organization or an institution that is primarily focused on this concept that today in the world today we're seeing a set of core technologies that are growing exponentially.

And so we pivot around this idea of exponential growth in technology, and so we were founded to try and understand what are the implications of exponential progress in these technologies. But primarily specifically, it was interesting, so they had a founding conference where they brought together some companies like Google, Cisco, Autodesk, Genentech. It was partnered here with NASA where we're based. And one of the insights that came out from that founding conference was that if you look at some of the world's biggest problems today, they're also rooted in the same idea of exponential progress. So for example, if you look at the way a pandemic spreads, it starts locally and spreads exponentially outward. So the idea behind Singularity University was can we create an organization where we learn to think in an exponential way, which as we'll talk about is very difficult to do, and can we apply that thinking and apply these technologies to address some of these global grand challenges? So that's fascinating. So the first thing they identified is how do things in the world fall apart?

And when shit really hits the fan, what does that look like? And when shit really hits the fan, it's operating by the exact same exponential principle that these guys have identified. Absolutely. So these exponential curves are actually really key to understanding. So Ray Kurzweil, so I think it would be actually interesting to start and sort of explore some of the research that Ray looked at, which is really the whole so what of an exponential curve is things you think are a ways away. That's something that my grandkids will have to deal with. That's happening a lot sooner than we realize. That's the nature of the curve.

So what Ray Kurzweil, so for those who don't know Kurzweil, so Ray Kurzweil is he's a well-known futurist forecaster. He was profit. Yeah, just some people consider him a techno profit. Yeah, I mean, he's had, I mean, he is just one of the most accurate forecasters that we've really ever seen. And, you know, he's been recognized by several US presidents for some of the inventions that he actually just won a Grammy last weekend, which is pretty interesting for the Grammy. Yeah, so the Kurzweil synthesizer. You know that Kurzweil invented basically like electronic music? I knew that, but I didn't know he was winning Grammy's.

Yeah, they decided to honor him. People don't, I see, I don't think people, a lot of people do not quite understand just what an impact he has had on society, not just from his philosophies and from Singularity University, but just his inventions. Aren't there inventions of his that, not just musically, but aren't there components? So the flatbed scanner, so the copy machine. So when you go to copy a piece of paper, the first text to speech for the blind, he invented that. So yeah, so in technologies that have impacted millions of people, if you don't like electronic music, you hate your roommate listening to Avicii all day, that's Kurzweil, so yeah. Does he listen to that music? I'd be surprised.

There's actually a really interesting music video of Steve Aoki featuring Kurzweil. Yeah, it's really, we've played it here a couple of times. So Kurzweil is one of the great innovators of our time and he is one of his many talents is his ability to forecast trends and to identify. I saw some documentary on him and he made this very point that I'd never thought of, which is that you have to start inventing for technologies that don't exist. Yes. Because if you start inventing after the technology comes into being, you're well behind the curve. So that's actually a really great point. So that's actually what motivated him to, so one of the areas that in his background is, which is really important, sort of why Singularity University exists, is so currently he's at Google.

He's working on some interesting AI projects, but in his academic work, and this is what motivated him to do this, was he's really, he's really sort of well known for pioneering these insights around what's called the law of accelerating returns. And so this law, he didn't coin that phrase or invent that, but he did some really interesting research that sort of verified it, specifically looking in computation. And so what motivated him to do this research was exactly what you're describing. If I can understand where computers, the computer capabilities of the next, you know, in five years or 10 years, I can make really powerful bets about what technologies I can build. So his insight, which is really powerful to understanding to get, is he asked the question, how powerful has humanity's capacity to process information over the last 120 years? So most people, or many people are familiar with the term Moore's law, which in computer science basically is the phenomenon that for the last 40 years, you know, we've seen uninterrupted doubling in the price performance because we can basically double the number of integrated circuits on a computer chip. So aside from that, what race shows is actually if you go back over 100 years, and keep in mind 100 years ago, a computer was a job for a person. So there were room, the term calculator was actually a term applied to people that sat in rooms and did math and processed information.

And what's so mind blowing is if you plot the progression of our capabilities measured in price performance, how powerful the best computers of their era were, it follows a smooth and measurable Moore's law like exponential pattern. So you're saying even prior to circuit boards? Yeah, electromechanical, relay, vacuum tubes, all there's so there's five paradigms of computing that have all, if you plot on a chart, all follow this smooth, measurable exponential goal. Well, there's really mind blowing because you think about you would expect, you know, somebody that looks more like the stock market, you know, you have wars, you have recessions, you have, you know, these variables in the economy. And so the insight, it's almost organic. It's like you have picked up on what in the same way that if you're watching a tree grow in a forest, it's going to be growing to in a fairly predictable way. So you're going to get pushed back from from computer scientists on that point. You know, I think there's a trend. It's almost like an emergent property. If you stack up all of those different paradigms together, it seems to follow this, this exponential curve. Yes. But, you know, like, for example, our computing and networks faculty, Brad Templeton, who speaks about this, you know, Moore's law isn't a law of nature. It's almost a law of marketing. There are market pressures that say that you don't control. So when you go to the Apple store every, you know, two years to get a new phone, you don't want your phone to be 10% more powerful.

You want it to be 100%. So companies have this pressure, this economic pressure. And that's, you know, what really drives. Why do I want my phone to be faster? Why? Have they looked at that? What is this? I think part of it is just your expectation. I mean, what is that? So if this, so if, so if this thing, which is bringing into this universe technologies, unlike anything that has ever existed and is creating the potential for a transformation in the planet, unlike anything. Anyone ever thought 20 years ago or 40 years ago could happen if we were looking at like curing cancer, we're looking at being able to feed people in parts of the world that didn't have food. We're looking at, we're looking at the technological version of the second coming of Christ. And forgive me for saying that. You can come up with a lot of other ways of saying it that don't involve our sweet Lord Jesus. But that is what you're looking at. So my question is, if this, if the wins in the sales of this birth or is the desire for amplified technology, if it's market pressures, as you say, then what is it inside of us that is wanting that? What is that? You know what, that is, I mean, what is that thirst?

I don't know. But it is, you're highlighting it's, I mean, it's fascinating to consider, you know, even take a step back, you know, the thing, you know, one of the other sort of ways that Kurzweil approaches this is if you look at almost, you know, progress in the universe is almost, you could say, an exponential progression. Because if you, you know, if you study cosmology, you know, the way the universe formed your timescale, you measure time in billions of years, and then eventually it became stable enough to support this one organic ball of life that, you know, you know, organic biology. So if you're a biologist, you, you measure the pace of change in, you know, hundreds of millions of years, orders of magnitude faster, and then eventually that system became stable enough. And then, you know, then humanity was born from that. And now we measure, you know, cultural changes are just measured in generations. And today, you know, we measure change, you know, technology and almost it's like more, more changes have, you know, occurred in the last, you know, 100 years or 40 more progress has been made in science and technology in the last 40 years than in the last 4,000 years. And, and, and I don't know, you know, it is, it is seems to be that there's this emergent property of exponential progress, which is a feature of, of the universe, which is what you're highlighting, which is that that is, and humanity is only, we've only had the tools to know that within the last generation or two. Yes. And that is interesting that this feature of the universe is manifesting, not just as a technological progression, or the faster cell phones every six months. But it's also manifesting as a kind of desire inside of humanity. That's a curious thing. It's, we feel inside of us, the longing to have better computers, faster computers. And every time a new technology emerges, that new technology is followed by more desire for a heightened version of that technology. So it's a curious thing to notice that this all of this seems to be being fueled by a specific feeling. And I know that feeling very well. It's, I just got a new iPad man. And the new iPad compared to the last iPad, this is not corporate brainwashing that is making me love this thing. This thing is literally better by some more magnitude than the old one.

Absolutely. The old one, the screen is better. It's more responsive to transforming my voice into text. And that, you know what that feeling is? That's a feeling of wonder. It's a feeling of, wow, this is fucking cool, man. And that's a, to me, I just never, I'm sorry, I'm sidetracking. I know it's fascinating too. So Singularity University, one of the coolest things that I see, you know, we're, so getting back to, so one of the things we do here, so we're a learning program, we run these learning programs. And so one of the, one of the programs we do is we bring in 80 executives. They come from, you know, all over the world. They come from Fortune 500 companies. They're coming from governments. They're coming from, you know, they're entrepreneurs, they're investors, whatever, you know, they come in expecting to, you know, give me a snapshot of all the latest breakthroughs. They're coming in robotics and AI so I can absorb all of this, you know, exponential progress into my company, which is, you know, it's a very challenging thing for organizations to do right now, but they start to ask these deeper questions. And you can see the, you know, the, it's almost like a child, like it's like, it's like the first time for many of these people when you, when you walk in the innovation lab and you're, you go inside the Oculus Rift for the first time, it's like that child like quality returns. You can see these, you know, these adults who have, you know, they've congealed, you know, around their jobs and their families and, you know, their life and it's, it's that wonder that comes back from, you know, seeing these technologies that are so new and it's the speed at which they're coming at us. You know, it's, it's almost like you get your mind blown. You get that future shock every, you know, every 18 months.

That future shock has got to be something that you guys have addressed, that specific feeling that comes from, because a lot of times the feeling there is, do you, do you guys talk about the, not just the feeling of awe and wonder, but there also is a kind of unnerving, spooky feeling that goes along with this stuff. There's a sense of not just, oh my God, this is amazing, but holy shit. There's a great video that some of our faculty show and it's a video of one of the first times that engineers at Google when they were testing the driverless car. And so they set up this, you know, this parking lot with cones and they have the car drive this route faster than a human can control, you know, this four ton or this ton moving vehicle. And the guy sitting in the video and there's cursing, he's freaking out. Like he's literally freaking out because this car is doing something that no human can do. And so one of the points that our faculty makes with showing that video is, you know, that scream is humanity meeting advanced technology. You know, it's probably like the first time someone got into an elevator, you know, you want me to step in this, you know, this box and, you know, I press this button and it'll take me somewhere. Like that was probably a nerving thing the first time. And now, you know, we get in a box, we press the button and it takes us where we want to go.

Yes. So we have, so, you know, there's so many versions of that scream. Maybe one of the coolest versions in movies has got to be, what is it, 2001 where the monolith appears and the proto hominids are sort of gathered around it and they're freaked out by it at first. This is definitely on the list of movies that I've, you know, everyone should see. I've never seen it. Oh my God. You must watch it. You must watch it. You'll love it so much. But yeah, so that scream that you're talking about. You see it all over the world. You see it like the Arab Spring. That is a perfect example where, you know, you see, you know, an older generation, you know, meeting this younger generation that is empowered with information technology. And, you know, their first reaction is to shut it down. You know, we want to shut this technology down. That is a version of the scream. You know, it's the knee-jerk reaction of, you know, if I don't understand it or, you know, we don't, you know, Amazon wants to deliver my book by a drone.

You know, someone could do something harmful with that. So we've got to shut it down. Which is, you know, of course you need security and you need, you know, checks and balances. You need to be thoughtful about how you deploy, you know, emerging technologies into the world. But you see the scream like you're describing all over the place. All over the place. And it's one of my favorite types of fear. I sometimes late at night, I'll hunt down videos of hyper-realistic androids in Japan just to feel that strange sense of excitement and nausea that comes from watching this new life form in its rudimentary phases as it begins to emerge onto our planet. And whether or not computer scientists want to say that this is an organic law or fueled by the winds of market pressure,

to me it seems like a life form. It seems like we are this thing, whatever it is, does not... It's a pattern. It's a pattern that emerges in different parts of the universe that... And the key... As is life. Yeah. And I think the key too though is to understand that, you know, not everything is exponential. Not, you know, and if you can learn to distinguish, you know, one of the things that we teach in our executive program is, you know, and to get back to the point you made about Kurzweil, the reason he, you know, was motivated to do that research

was to basically ask the question, where will technology be so I can make... An example of that are the engineers who created Siri. So the AI assistant on your phone, when they started building Siri, they understood that the technology to allow what they were trying to do wasn't going to exist. You weren't going to have the bandwidth capabilities, the networking power for, you know, another three to five years, but they started building and applying that exponential forecasting as a tool. They were able to create a product that, you know, timed the market. Wow.

So they used his principle, they started building this thing prior to certain components being even accessible, and bam, now we've got Siri. So in the same way, there are people who no doubt are using Kurzweil's technique of analyzing trends based on this exponential, this exponential principle in the universe, and there are people like Elon Musk, and there are people like Stephen Hawking, who are saying, we've got to slow this thing down a little bit and think about what's going on here, because they're looking at the next bend and the next big bend that's happening, and they're saying, we're about to wake these machines up, and they're scared.

Elon Musk just donated $10 million to study, did you hear about this? I didn't hear about this. Yeah, Elon Musk just donated $10 million, I don't know the foundation he gave it to, but essentially he donated $10 million to study or prepare, get ready for the potential of what's going to happen when these machines wake up. Interesting. Now, it seems like a good investment. Absolutely.

It's a good investment for sure, but another, and I wish I could remember who said this, but someone pointed out that if we received a signal from some part of the galaxy, that was a signal from another life form saying, we will be there in 20 years, just an ambiguous signal. Not good, not bad, when we get there we're going to blow your asses up, when we get there we're going to help you, just we will be there in 20 years. If that happened, then the entire planet would begin to prepare for the arrival of these beings. We would have to prepare.

We would, there would be military strategists studying what to do based on what any kind of technology we could imagine that they had. There would be religious people getting ready, they would do all over the planet. We have heard that call. We have heard that call, only it's not coming from another part of the galaxy, it's coming from the mind of people like Ray Kurzweil who are saying, by 2045 these machines are going to wake up. Is that inaccurate, am I misquoting him?

No, you're not. I'm misquoting him. I actually, I think, so this is actually an interesting, I think there's actually some controversy or there's discussion, there's debate, especially here at Singularity University about some of Ray's more long term thinking. I think, so actually the term Singularity I think is really important to sort of unwrap a little bit. So the concept of the technological Singularity, which is kind of this term that Ray uses

I think to basically construct this, so the word Singularity is borrowed from physics and the term is used to describe any environment in which our known understanding or laws of describing something break down. They don't apply anymore. The event horizon of a black hole is referred to as a Singularity for that reason. Death. Yeah, we don't know what is beyond that. Death is a Singularity.

Absolutely. I would say to your grandmother, try to describe to her what an iPhone is. To her, that would be a Singularity. You know, life beyond the iPhone. That won't make sense to her. Yeah, because she's dead. I love that. I love people to find me in a graveyard talking to my grandmother's corpse about what an iPhone is.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying. Yeah, so that's where the term comes from. And so the technological Singularity that occurs while discusses and talks about is this hypothetical moment in the future in which the dominant information processor is no longer our own brains, but some machine. Some, you know, some machine is now capable of processing data better and faster and more accurately, more efficiently than our own brains, which right now, you know, our brains are the dominant information.

Top of the pyramid. Yeah, we are the top of the food chain right now. And so, I don't know, there's actually, I mean, there's interesting discussion about one of the fallacies that I think, you know, comes into play here is this idea that in the future, you know, machines are going to be somehow different. And this actually, I think Kurzweil would agree with, he talks about this, where we're going to merge with machine. And that concept, you know, the idea that, you know, we're going to put machines and humans

in a room together, and you're going to have humans on one side, you've got machines on the other. And like, hopefully the machines don't wake up and eat us. I don't think that that's really, you know. Oh, no, no, no, I don't think so either, man, but it's still, we are looking at a brand new baby here, and we're part of the, we're the, we're the sperm and it's the egg, and we're going to merge together. And this kind of, this, this merger, this merging is a thing that, you know, has been

predicted for a very long time, and it's a wedding. It's a, it's a fucking wedding between inorganic and organic matter. It's the ultimate marriage where we, the best of both of us theoretically blend together. You watch, if you watch the, you know, where do people really start getting pissed off? Google Glass. They got mad about Google Glass. That's the thing. Why?

It's, it's, you know what though? Like the people that, that, well, I mean, it's, it's, it's new. It's different. It's, it's alienating. It's, you know, it's, it's other. It's not. It's cause it's on our head. The reason they, that's why they got mad because it did the alien.

Oh, that's a good point where the thing jumps on your face. So what happened is basically humanity had the exact same reaction that someone you're on a date with at a movie theater would have if you put your hand on her leg and she didn't want your hand there. Get the fuck off me. Yeah, exactly. Technology did that very same thing. It climbed out of our pockets.

It started on our desktops. Way too soon. Climbed, got into our pockets and then climbed up our, and tried to get on her face like, yo, yo, whoa. Hey, we barely know each other. Get the fuck off my face. That's perfect. That's so true.

And like, cause the thing that like, so I'm going to, I'm going to cite some, one of my, one of my close friends who I've learned a ton from is a PhD researcher in what's called post-human theory and she's got the coolest like academic focus area. Basically studies the intersection of how technology influences or interacts with the human experience and like the idea that, you know, we, we try to put this label of human on, you know, this, this pretty solid, you know, stationary thing. But if you think about what like humans, I mean, think about the fact that right now, you know, I've got, I've got this iPhone in my hand that, you know, it's got memories

stored in here. You know, I don't, it's got photographs of the, you know, the Hozier concert I just went to in Oakland on Tuesday. It's got, you know, I can't remember how to do 20% tip at the, at the restaurant. You know, it's, it's, we're already outsourcing our cognition. Yes. Like we are already, you know, cyborgs in a way. We're already, this mergers already here.

And so it's just the only thing that's new is the speed at which it's happening. Right. That's, that's the part that like you're saying that scream that's where we're starting it. We're starting to, you know, the roller coaster is about to go over the, the cliff. Well, yeah, because it's, it's like technology is it what, what, I don't know what base it's at, but it's basically what's about to happen is if, if the bases in sex are based on like how, or based on how deep inside a person you can get, those are the bases essentially.

That's what copulation is. And so what we're looking at here is machines or they're already in us, you know, but it's like in ways that like we're, we're totally, we're totally cool with. So a pacemaker, whatever that's fine. No big deal. It's, it's in the heart of some people who have heart problems. No big deal. I don't know how to think about that.

Yeah. And now we're seeing it in the new neurological, like cochlear implants, you know, exactly. They're already, you know, all cool. Yeah. All cool. We're not freaked out by that, but where it gets weird is where it starts getting in between the, when it, when reality starts becoming augmented and, and when the technology begins to paint itself on top of our visual reality, that's where people are, I think

and it start getting really freaked out. That's why the Microsoft's HoloLens, the Oculus Rift, all of these wearable technologies, which of course they're not going to stay wearable. Yeah. They're going to turn into contact lenses. Absolutely. And then they're going to turn into neural implants. Those are the things where humanity as a whole is going to have a real hard time relaxing

enough to let those things enter us. So you know, and so that kind of highlights something that's really important with the emergence of all these new technologies, which is how they're designed. So design becomes a really critical part. I mean, Google Glass is, you know, one of the challenges is it's, it's dorky, you know, it's, it's, you look like a cyber nerd a little bit. Like you don't want to wear that. And so is that really the problem though?

Do you think it's the, I don't think it's the aesthetics, man. I was thinking about that. I do. I mean, I think if you get something that's like indistinguishable from regular frames, you know, people are going to be signing up and lining, you know, lining around the corner to get their, you know, computers taped to their face. Isn't I, you know, I think I do think the aesthetics are kind of dorky, right? But if you look back at the history of fashion and the shit people wear, it's all dorky.

But isn't it more that I don't want to be sitting in a room full of potential security cameras on people's faces. If I watch you hold up your phone, I know you're taping me. If you're wearing Google Glass, then suddenly if I'm, if I'm walking around, it's like, shit, was that guy wearing Google Glass when I didn't clean up my dog's shit? Is that going to end up in some new blog of like jerks who don't clean up their dog's shit? Things like that.

I thought that was more of what people were upset with when it came to Google Glass. Yeah. The aesthetics, the implication. I think it's a combination for sure. I mean, I know, you know, I, I don't think I would personally wear Google Glass for the, you know, the aesthetics purpose, you know, in the use case. But yeah, for sure. I mean, what you're describing is absolutely, you know, part of why, you know, you see,

there are already bars that have, you know, glass not permitted here, you know, you see that for sure. But it's interesting because that will spale in comparison in terms of the privacy implications of a lot of the technologies that are coming towards us. And there's not a lot of discourse, I would say, around this. So for example, the Google Car, the way the Google Car operates is it has a laser radar that's constantly spinning and, you know, 360 degrees at like some ridiculous speed that is constantly mapping the environment.

So not only is it, you know, navigating this vehicle around the streets, but it's also picking up like, oh, someone just, you know, mugged that lady. And that was captured by, you know, so by the Google Car, you know, so everything, we're moving into a world where everything is, is being captured. And the Google Car, are those truly driverless? No one's sitting in that thing when it's tooling around? So I believe there is always someone sitting there, but they are truly driverless. They, you know, they actually just released a new model that don't have steering wheels,

which is really, really interesting because they did have to have rear view mirrors on the side because of California law and it's like regulations, like how you regulate this stuff is like how we navigate, you know, creating policies for some of this stuff is going to be really interesting and really important going forward and that, but yeah, they are, they are truly driverless. So at any given moment in the world, driverless cars are inhaling reality, digitizing reality and storing it in databases. I don't know if they're storing it.

I don't know if they're doing that. I don't see why they couldn't do that. I mean, the capability to store is there. I don't know if that's actually being done. I imagine that they do. I actually do think that, well, so they have to, so the way a driverless car works is it can't, it can't drive autonomously in a place that hasn't been before. So it does have to map that environment, but when it returns to that place, I don't know

if it's constantly, you know, storing whatever it's capturing, I'm not sure, but the point is it could and it, you know, in the future, who knows, you know, what it could or couldn't be doing. It's, isn't what is, isn't one of the predictions that we're looking at a future where almost or more than half of all phenomena is going to be constantly being recorded by some form of device? Probably. I mean, yeah, I think, which is a conservative estimate, like 50% more.

So here's, here's another, so one of our alumni, so, so one of, one of our, one of the students that, so Singularity University, we run a 10-week program where we bring in 80 entrepreneurs from around the world, we teach them about all of these technologies, what's happening in biotech, robotics, drivers, cars, et cetera, and then we have them work on a project to go and, and we hope they'll, they'll, they'll create a startup or a company that applies these technologies towards solving a really big problem. So one of our alumni previously had no background in, in aerospace, satellites, basically learned for the summer, you know, all the latest breakthroughs in, in CubeSats, 3D printing, used 3D printing,

3D printers to create these, these, these satellites. He's now raising money in Argentina, he's, he's Argentinian, he's launching a series of mesh, this is sort of like a mesh satellite system, and he's not the only one doing this. And his goal is to actually provide real-time video footage within a meter resolution anywhere on the planet and create, and his goal is to create like an app store. So, you know, I have, you know, parking, I need parking in New York, you know, you, you could, an entrepreneur could create an algorithm that, you know, an app for, for this, that uses this technology to, you know, help you find parking in New York.

But it's not parking in New York, it's like, you're saying that there's going to be a network of satellites filming everything from space. So, so there are already companies working on, on doing that. And that point, the point is that the technologies to do that, I mean, it used to be true that only, you know, the wealthiest research labs could build, you know, satellite technologies, that all those technologies have fallen in price, performance, and cost to, to empower, you know, you and I could go, you know, design a satellite, and if you still have to raise, you know, it's still pretty significant investment to launch these things, you know, you and

I could start, you know, a satellite company. And there are, there are teams around the world, you know, doing this. So it's, you know, it's, it's Holy shit, man. That is insane to think that that sort of technology is getting more and more into the grasp of just, is it possible that a consumer in the future will be able to blast a satellite up into space? Is that, is the technology going to get?

I would say, you know, I don't know how that, you know, today, I don't know the engineering that would be required to do that, but I absolutely believe most, it's, I mean, the key trend of what we're seeing is that things that were previously only available to the wealthiest governments, large companies and research labs are now being democratized so that any, you know, high school student can have access to these, these technologies. There's a fast, there's a great video on YouTube. There's a father and son, they're, they're Dutch. They basically created, it's like they basically created this, this airplane, they like sit,

I forget how it works, but it breaks the speed barrier. They create this like this little rocket propelled airplane that you attach to this like styrofoam drone and they break the speed barrier and he's this kid, he's like 15 is controlling it with, you know, with his, with a, you know, remote control. They built it, they built it in their garage and they have this thing launching itself, you know, into the sky, like the speed of sound. That's like F 16 speed, you know, that's mox, that's mox. This is where the scream starts rising in me because you have, here, here's what, what

we're witnessing is the, not only is technology becoming more powerful, but as a byproduct of technology becoming more powerful, the individual is becoming more powerful. The individual is becoming more powerful than any other individual that has lived in the past. The global impact that one person can have is so much as perhaps exponentially greater than the global impact. Absolutely. And the thing is though too, is, you know, we're, we're admittedly very optimistic about

the future. And the reason is, and the reason Singularity University exists is we, we, that point that you just made, we think is one of the greatest things that humanity has ever seen because for the first time, you now have individuals, entrepreneurs empowered by these tools that were, you know, restricted to only, you know, a select few in the past who can now apply these technologies to solving some of humanity's grand challenges. And we really do have the capabilities to really address and, and meet, you know, some of these, these really big, you know, you know, giants that we have to slay.

Can you name a few of those giants? So, so the grand challenges that we pivot around are those that affect at least a billion people worldwide. So things like poverty, security, education, global health, water, energy is a, is a key one. You know, so, so an example of one, one group looking at, so, so go back to the very first question you asked about Kurzweil, you know, making these predictions. So one of our teams, this was a team in 2010 who was looking at the exponential growth

of drone capabilities of carrying packages. So the payload capacity of a drone was, was growing exponentially as the cost fall, we're falling in these devices. So they said, you know, what if we could, you know, go to a place, you know, so, so poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is largely driven by the fact where there's no, there's no road infrastructure. And so you can't get goods from place to place. You can't get, you know, lumber, food, medicine, whatever supplies from place to place.

So you can't really alleviate poverty. And so their idea was, you know, if you can create this, you know, a drone system that, you know, is networked, they communicate with one another, they can deliver packages between each other, you know, that could, could provide a use for a useful way to sort of getting, you know, solving that problem. And so in 2010, you know, well before, you know, the Amazon announcement, they started building and tinkering. And so this company's called Matternet and they're, they're doing really well.

They've raised capital, you know, getting interesting press. I just, they were, they're in Wired Magazine right now on the one that's out right now. So, so that's an example. There's, yeah, there's. That's beautiful. Yeah. That's an incredible thing. And the, and I, the, of course, like that you look at the mirror, you know, and forgive

me for pointing out the, every single wonderful, it's, when we started off talking, one of the things you said that blew my mind was how this, how disasters are following the same exact predictable course that innovation is following and this exponential curve. And so in the same way, any of these great technologies, any of these great inventions have an aferious reflection that will certainly be used. So clearly what you're looking at here is just the dream. Yeah. Anyone who wants to.

Yeah. Guns, anybody who wants to smuggle anything. Yeah. And that's, that's so true. I mean, the, the, I mean, the reality is every single technology and these exponential curves, they go in both directions because any technology can be used for good and it can be used for equally, you know, detrimental harm. So we actually have on, on our faculty, it's actually, so we have, so our, our, our

program and curriculum is siloed by tracks. And so each track is, you know, artificial intelligence is its own track, robotics, biotech, one of its own tracks is policy, law and ethics and security. And so we have on our faculty, his name is Mark Goodman. He's the futurist for the FBI and really thinks deeply about some of the securities concerns and the drawbacks and the harmful effects associated with, with a lot of these technologies. And it's true.

I mean, drones used at prisons to get, you know, supplies over fences. You know, AI, there's a, he just, he just published this. I'm going to steal this, this story from him. There was an 18 year old, I forget what college campus who ended up, I think, you know, murdered his roommate for some reason. And then, you know, 18 year old never, you know, buried a body before he asked Siri. So think about it. We just had an AI and artificial intelligence as an accomplice to a murder.

He asked Siri where to bury the body and Siri gave him, you know, gave him answers. So, so it's, you know, these tools can be used for good and they can be used for harm. Our, our mission and our, you know, when Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis came together, you know, with these organizations, the idea was, okay, so we see these trends coming, what can we do to empower people to apply that towards taking us towards a world that we want to be a part of, that we want to live in? I'm on that. I'm well, it's a fascinating parallel to this is in mythology, black versus white

magic, you have always like black magic being the, you know, using this hidden energy for your own selfish reasons with no thought about how it can affect your fellow human beings. And then white magic is using it to help your fellow human beings. And, uh, Singularity University, if we were in, uh, Game of Thrones, it would be some kind of tower of magic dedicated to the light. And, but in the same way, there is a, uh, you have to, you know, I, I somehow ended up, and I so wish that I hadn't, uh, on, on some webpage with images from ISIS and

it was showing ISIS, uh, they had a woman, a Christian woman, cause it was like they're killing crit, they're killing anybody, basically killing cigarettes, smokers, magicians. They, they just kill, they like to kill apparently, but it's, so they have this naked woman and they've pulled, it's mid, they've pulled her head back and they, they've slashed her throat and blood is pouring into a bucket. They're like bleeding her to death because she's a Christian woman. And, uh, I think about those, whoever those people are, whatever those

people are, and I think about what they would do with this kind of technology. And the, the part of me that is cynical thinks you guys could get the, you can, as much as you want, try to figure out a way to keep this shit out of the hands of lunatics, but you're not going to keep it out of the hands of lunatics. And that is, and by lunatics, I don't just mean the ISIS fundamentalist Muslims. I'm talking about nationalists. I'm talking about war generals in every single country who are going to take this shit and use it to explode people.

How, how do you deal with that here? How do you deal with the inevitability that this technology will be adopted and used by the military industrial complex to evaporate human beings? Yeah, no. And I think that's a, you know, of course, a major, you know, discussion point that keeps a lot of people up at night for, you know, for, for the right reasons. Um, and so, you know, I don't, I don't have an answer for, for that because I think you're, you're absolutely right because the democratization of these

technologies means that anyone, and you know, even if it's not, you know, it's even more fascinating to consider, even if it's not malicious and intent, you know, just accidental, you know, byproducts of, you know, for example, in biotech, it used to be true. If you want to, if you want to synthetically create a, you know, synthetic DNA, you know, it would require, you know, millions of dollars of wet lab space. Today, you know, it's really, you know, there, I saw recently, there's a, I think it was a kid in Ireland for, you know, for $10,000 basically equipped

his garage made into a biotech. You know, those costs are going to come down to the point where high school kids, high school kids manufacturing Ebola. Exactly. And like, by, like, what if that, by mistake? So, so I think the point, the spirit of what you're, what you're talking about is super fascinating because, you know, we're, we're entering, and I think a lot about this idea that, you know, humanity, humanity is really entering into a, I

read somewhere this, there's some paper where if, if humanity is to survive going forward, we're going to have to feel comfortable giving the self-destruct button to every single person on the planet and to know that they're not going to press that button. Wow. And that is where, you know, our current state, like the humans that we live with on this earth right now, we are not ready for that. We're not ready.

Not ready. So it's unclear. I mean, it's beyond some singularity where we reach beyond that threshold of whatever has happened to eliminate anyone's desire for harm or to create, you know, destruction in the world, you know, I think whatever, whatever, if we're going to make it beyond that point, we're looking beyond a singularity right now because I don't know what takes us beyond that point. But, you know, I think being a leader in helping people understand that this wave

of technology is coming at us. And if you can learn to, you know, use it for good and use it for creating a world that you want to be in, then, but yeah, you're, we can't stop. Listen, it's because you can't let the dum-dums keep us from making all these beautiful innovations. It's just that you have to acknowledge that they're out there. If we let, if we let that happen, there's, there's one interesting. I mean, so here's where, you know, the, to go back to the conversation around

privacy, here's where, you know, we live, we're moving into a world where it's going to be hyper-transparent. And of course there's drawbacks to that. But one of the, one of the potential positives of that is it's going to become impossible to do anything nefarious and private away from the eyeballs of the rest of humanity. So there's a great example where we actually had someone from, from DoD. This, this was a story passed down from someone, I wasn't here personally, but we

asked them the question, so how do you feel about just what we were talking about around the high school kid creating Ebola in their garage? How do you, you know, how do you, you know, curb against that? And so they had a pretty insightful answer. They said, you know, what we, what we think we should do is instead of, you know, in the past, you know, the government, you know, bans stuff, you know, say, no, you can't do that. Instead do the opposite.

Say, yeah, absolutely. We'll help you do whatever you want to do. Just do it here. Do it in our house. Like come over to our house and play with our toys. But what that does is that everyone has eyeballs on what everyone else is working on. So in some way it's almost like a hyper-transparent world is, is a version of, you know, policing that.

And, you know, another example of that is on Craigslist, you know, Craigslist is, you know, a publicly available website, you know, I think someone did research, you know, Craigslist is just a platform. You can do good things, you know, commerce, you can also do harmful things, drug trafficking, you know, human trafficking, et cetera. Someone did some research because of how public it is, I think it's like 99.9% of all transactions on Craigslist are either, you know, legal or non-nefarious of some kind. So it's because of this transparency, yeah, we, we sacrifice privacy, but a benefit could

and again, this is sort of speculation. One of the outcomes could be in the future that no one's going to be able to do bad things because no one can do anything in private. Wow. Well, I mean, and that is maybe, God, I cannot imagine a more, how horrifying that concept is. There's so many people. It's like, oh, so basically you mean because there are maybe, I don't know, let's guess

how many thousands of people in the world do you think would press that red button if they could? If like, we just suddenly populated the world with these awful red buttons and like, anyone who wants to, if you press this button, you will evaporate planet earth. How many do you think would press that button more than one for sure? More than one. Yeah. I'm guessing a lot between 50 and 100,000 probably, but I don't know if you want to

actually quantify it. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of disturbed, unhappy people that their reality of the world is not a pleasant reality. So that 100,000 people or 50,000 people or whatever it is, that 50 or 100,000 people, because of them, we have to give up our privacy. We have to give up what is considered to be one of the basic fundamental human rights, which is that when I'm alone at my house, I want to be able to watch S&M porn without

everyone else on the planet knowing that's what I'm looking at. That's pretty much the only thing I can think of that I do that I wouldn't necessarily want people to know, which I just announced on my podcast. So there, now I don't care. Now you know. Now you know, well, there is a kind of, I have, there is a kind of relief that comes from, you know, realizing that I think that if you could watch what everyone was doing right now all around the planet from the most depraved acts to the most beautiful acts,

and you could see it all somehow, there would be some self forgiveness that would happen, or you'd be like, I might be a weirdo, but I'm nowhere near as fucked up as that guy. So I don't care if people see, see what's going on, but people don't want to give up their privacy. Yeah. I definitely don't think people want to give up the privacy for sure. You know. But they already gave it up, didn't they?

Well, that's the thing. So you talk a lot about like, you know, this organic thing. It's almost like, if you think about like generational change happens so fast now, you see that with like, I see it with my mom and my niece. So her granddaughter, they are almost like a different species. They are almost two different, you know, they are two different creatures. Like their values, their vision of the world, their reaction, the screen versus, yeah, exactly. And I think younger generations have a very different concept of privacy.

So I'm an old man. I'm an old man like, oh, my privacy. And younger kids are like, who fucking cares about the old man? Yeah. Like we grew up with Facebook and, you know, like we've got Twitter, we're over sharing, you know, we don't, like my mom is terrified when I got Facebook in high school and like, you know, your job interviews in the future, you know, watch what you're putting on your Facebook, you know, you don't want to, you know, like relax mom, like, but we have a different

concept of privacy and that change is, that's what happens fast. That happens fast. Yeah. It's cultural. It's a cultural idea that just, you know. You know what the term apocalypse means, translates into literally lifting of the veil. It means lifting of the veil. Cool.

And so. The singularity is the great veil and the, so Kurzweil's vision of this thing past the great curve, that's the apocalypse. I actually, you know what, one of the, one of the weird ways that I came to be at Singularity University, I'll admit this, when I was in college, I was fascinated by the Mayan 2012. And, you know, not in the way of like, oh, I'm going to sit by the clock and wait for the world. It's not going to end.

You know, it's going to blow up. But the idea that there's this concept of like an end time, you know, and that's true of almost every sort of culture or religious, you know, concept, there's this idea of end times. And I think it may be a misinterpretation. It's not end times where it's over. It's this like shift. And I'm totally fascinated by the idea that, you know, we are, it seems to be humanity

is going through this some kind of, some kind of something new. I mean, it's fundamentally different than whatever the last, you know, four billion years of organic life on this planet where change was caught, was defined by, you know, trial and error over, you know, hundreds of millions of years where, you know, humanity sprung up. And if you were to look at planet earth, you know, or actually, if you were to look at the universe from some vantage point, you would have literally seen a pop and just old skyscrapers, airplanes, iPhones, like literally a pop just out of nowhere.

And that, that is exponential growth. And that is, that is something that, you know, we are at the, we are at this straight line of something, something new is, is, is coming and Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? I am sitting in NASA. I'm in a, I'm in a, I'm in NASA right now at Singularity University. And you are among a group, a group of some of the smartest people on earth, probably,

who have identified this event. You've identified it. You don't know for sure. I wouldn't call it an event. I mean, we, we don't, we don't subscribe to this idea that there's this techno, this, this Singularity, this event. It's, it's, it's a trend. It's the, what's true.

I mean, it's, it's, it's this acceleration, this, you know, I wouldn't, I don't know if I could call it an event. Let's not call it an event. A series of tiny little events leading up to something that we don't, that we can't see beyond. Yeah. I would even say that like, you know, Kurzweil Singularity is in 2045, right? I would say there are Singularities way before that.

We, we, I cannot tell you what the world will look like in 10 years. And if you're the CEO of a company, if you're, you know, a college student trying to figure out what the study in school that's going to be relevant, I could not tell you what the world is going to look like in 10 years. And that, we are in the, this is the first time in human history, maybe, you know, maybe that's not true, but I would say probably for the first time in the scope of human history where I cannot tell you what the world will look like in 10 years. Well, I mean, we can play around with it.

Let's try to figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. Let's look at the technologies and let's play around with the toys. Yeah. Let's get into it. We'll go through what you just showed me on this grand tour that you gave me. So I got this tour of Singularity University.

They have everything that I want here. They have, they have a 3D, an entire laboratory of 3D printers of all shapes and sizes. They have scanners that they could, that they put around my body and like 3D scan me. Theoretically, I could be printed out on one of these printers. They've got robots. They've got those rolly guys. Yeah. So those are, those are, so the Beam Robotics.

So it's a telepresence robotic. So basically imagine, you know, an iPad on wheels that lets you remotely control this robot, which physically lets you be in other places. So this robot, as we were talking, came up behind and scared the shit out of me. You turn around and there's just a pole with a tablet on the top and a guy's face is there who, the look on his face is the look of someone who enjoys scaring people with this thing. Then he was able to roll backwards and shut a drawer and then he rolled away. Yeah.

This is real life. This is actually happening. They have, they have drones. They have an area dedicated to drones. They have some new. Yeah. So those, that's actually new to me too, with that, you literally the first day that we've gotten those.

Those goggles. Those are called the Meta space, space glasses or space goggles. So it's an augmented reality platform where you basically the idea, you wear these glasses and it projects some image in front of you that you can manipulate and you can interface with. So those. Like the Tron, or the, yeah, what's it called? The Iron Man.

It's like the Iron Man way he manipulates stuff. Right. Yeah. That's the vision of it. Yeah. Yeah. Augmented reality, it's theoretically, and I don't know because I've never tried it, but it's probably like the HoloLens, the Microsoft HoloLens, that you can Google

search that and see what that's going to look like, but it's augmented reality. So we're looking at augmented reality, 3D printing and flying robotics and non-flying robotics. So probably one, so we, we're sitting right now in a mist of data. Right? Yeah. Like around us right now is just data, just floating, all this data is floating in the air that my phone can suck that data out, interpolate it in certain ways.

It creates maps, photographs, emails and texts, right? Yeah. So augmented reality is another way to suck that data out of the air. You know what I just thought of too? You know what's that? You know what's crazy about augmented reality, I just thought of it. So if you think about like human, human, a human being really has five ways to get information into its brain.

Right. We have, you know, sight, smell, touch, taste. I always forget that one too. Hearing. Do I say smell? Oh, sound. Sound. Sight, sound.

Sight, smell. There's five. How do we not know the fives? It's a city with five gates and I always forget the gates. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Yeah. There we go. Boom.

So if we're, so if a human is an Xbox controller, we have five buttons, what, so that's, that, you know, and this is also what's crazy, just take one of those inputs like vision. If you were to take, one of our faculty talks about this, if you were to take symbolically the entire electromagnetic spectrum and lay it out from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, the visible light, the band of visible light that humans can perceive would make up two feet from here. So we, we're blind. Like we are swimming in this universe of data and a human being is blind.

Like we take in nothing. And so what augmented reality does is it, you know, imagine having, you know, infrared you go, you base technology is this tool which empowers us to perceive, like throw a flashlight on these, this part of the universe that we otherwise would never perceive or never, you know, be able to get that information into our, into our brains. And it just enhances our, you know, going back to what we're talking about. We're already cyborgs, but yeah. So augmented reality is huge.

Yeah. It's going to be a major trend. So okay. So augmented reality from what I saw from the Microsoft demo. It is, it can scan a room. It can drop Minecraft on a table, put Minecraft in the wall. It can eradicate the wall in your desk and transform it into Mars. So you're looking at over Mars.

So that is already in existence. I read an, an Ars Technica review of it. They say that that's exactly what it can do. Have you seen the magic leap? Have you read about? Have you read about it? I've read about it. Oh, it's so this, okay.

So I would say for me personally, I'm, I'm fascinated by the implications of virtual reality and, and augmented reality to an extent, but so, so magic leap is a, so they're still kind of the stealthy company there. They, they made big splash in the news. They just raised $500 million from Google, um, which is a lot of money to, that's a lot of money for a startup. Holy crap. And no one really knows what they're doing, but their patents were just, their

patent images are available. So essentially what it seems like they're doing is they've created a way using, and I am going to butcher the technical terms, but essentially refracted light. Uh, so basically in an oculus rift to, to create the, the illusion of depth, your right eye sees something slightly different than your left eye and that in your brain is interpreted as, uh, depth. So that's how depth perception, but if, but in real life, you know, if you stare at your hand and behind it, you know, there's a, your, your eyes are focusing differently on things

in different ways. And so they've solved. But magically, essentially it seems like they've done, have solved that problem. One of the sort of tall tales that I think, I mean, I don't see why this couldn't be true. The way they raised their money is when the investors walked into the room, they had two cups of coffee sitting on the table. One was a real cup of coffee and one was, was the augmented projection of one and they said, pick up the cup of coffee.

But the investors must have been wearing a helmet. Yeah, exactly. So there's glasses involved, but they couldn't tell the difference, but they couldn't tell the difference. Holy shit. That's crazy. Like that is, that is, I mean, we, we could be sitting in a room and like a, like, you know, a flock of duck sized porcelain walks around.

We could be watching the revolutionary war, like on this table that's it, like that looks real. Like that is, that's the future. That's the future. That's what blows my mind. That's the future. And in 10 years, what we're looking at is some form of wearable technology that the majority of people are going to have on that is creating a world populated by avatars, by digital beings

enhanced with artificial intelligence. There will be living in this augmented reality. This is, I'm theorizing here. I love it. They're living in this augmented reality. They are going to, there will be autonomous artificial intelligence holograms that are working from major corporations that you can decide to tune into. So if you're walking down the street, you might get a visit by the Burger King cat.

He's like, why don't you come get a burger? If you want it, you don't have to have it, but it's there for you. If you want it, the world comes alive with new, now your tweets aren't in your phone. Now your tweets are flying down and landing on your shoulder. So, oh yeah. So isn't it kind of like this? And then I'll let you, the person who works at NASA, tell me what actually is going to happen.

Here's this liminal space between what isn't and what is, and that liminal space is the space of imagination, the space of thoughts, the space of, right? And that liminal space is technology is the spindles through which it is beginning to emerge into the dimension that we're currently existing in. And so 3D printers are going to start using that space into this world. Augmented reality is going to project the space into our minds and all of this is going to be facilitated by robots flying around and making deliveries for us as we exist in this animated mist of technology.

Yeah, so what's happening, what technology seems to be doing is it's reducing the lag time between a thought, which, you know, a thought is a thing. I mean, thoughts are things and instantiating that and creating that in the physical world. And it used to be true that there was such a barrier to working with these technologies that if I have an idea, it's going to be very difficult for me to actually create that. But with 3D printing, with these virtual environments that are just, it's just software, just lines of code, we can literally almost just think things into existence. And the lag time, the lag time to do that is just evaporating before our eyes.

And that, you know, that is, you know, really, really cool. Let's talk about that lag time. How long would it take 20 years ago for me to create a tiny miniature photo realistic version of my head? Yeah, you're looking at, you know, you got to go to the hardware store, you're going to have to go to the, I don't know, the library, walk literally to a building where there are stacks of like pieces of paper that, you know, you have to pull out and study how to actually like modify these, you know, there's no Google, so you can't just like pull up how to manufacture

these things. You got to find what the right materials are. You got to figure out what kind of paint to use. You got to figure out, you know, how to get the texturing, you know, it's that, you know, you're looking at a, that sounds like a nice summer project, honestly, like maybe years. And how long now? How long now? Literally, I mean, we literally just like 20 minutes ago, you take, I mean, you could

take an Xbox Kinect or one of these devices, digitize yourself, I mean, there are apps you can download where you literally just take a few photographs of something and it will create a digital image and you can just print that using one of these 3D printers. And how long does the printing take? It takes a couple hours. So one summer, two hours, one summer to two hours. Yeah. And then where in 10 years can you predict how much faster 3D printing is going to be?

So I don't know, 3D printing is, you know, 3D printing is one of those vards predicts, you know, everyone asks the question, you know, when are we all going to have 3D printers in our house? You know, I think the, where 3D printing is really accelerating right now is the material science behind it. So what you can actually print and the resolution and the complexity and the sort of multi materials that you could embed together. So yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's something like that is, you know, I don't know how quick,

how fast 3D printers are going to be, you know, 10 years from now. But I do think that what we will see is we'll live in a world where if I want a pair of, you know, let's say some company that I like, I like Nike shoes, there's going to be some like corner store that has all the authorized Nike materials that, you know, I want to design, you know, Duncan Trestle right foot for my right shoe, like Duncan Trestle left foot that's personalized, you know, I don't want size nine and nine, nine and 10. I want like holy personalized for my feet. I don't want, you know, some size nine, size 10, I like these colors.

I want that. I want this material. And there'll be some shop that has all those materials in stock where it'll, it'll just spit out, you know, a pair of Duncan Trestles. And as you're driving to the shop, your augmented reality goggles are going to, they'll be like a Falcon mascot associated with that shop flying in front of your car. Hurry. Well, maybe the car that takes you there is like the Nike car that, you know, you're

not driving. So, you know, the Nike experience car is going to show you all the, you know, it's like a showroom where you can pick out the materials and, you know, this is, this, this blew my mind last week. This is crazy. So in Uber, so the car sharing platform, there's a, there's a driver in Uber who was just covered in, I don't know, Forbes or something. He made $300,000 last year driving for Uber because what he did is he basically put up,

so he has a business. He's a jewelry. He creates jewelry. He's essentially like, has jewelry stuff on his dashboard and he has a catalog on his front seat. He doesn't ever solicit business, but if someone asks him, Hey, what's all that jewelry about? He tells him, Oh, Hey, I'm a, you know, I have a side business. I make, you know, I make jewelry.

So he's, his car is his showroom. That is his business. That's badass. And that's the future of driverless cars too is badass. You know, these cars, you know, the, you're, you're going to get in a car that's going to, you know, I don't have time to get a haircut. I'm just going to have the hair, you know, the, the supercuts cars going to come pick me up or like, you know, the old spice car is going to have, you know, give you a free

ride to San Francisco, but we're going to, you know, tell you about all these great products while we take you there. You know, it's going to be, you know, that's, that's where this could, could go. That's where it's going. That's where it's going. That's crazy. So it's autonomous drones delivering as things, driverless cars that have merged with shops that we ride through as we're getting sales pitches for stuff.

If we want it, if you want it, you know, maybe you want to take a nap. So you get like a nap car that comes and picks you up or nap car. Yeah. Oh, please. Yeah. That is so cool. Yeah. So, um, so I think one of the, the one technology when I think we, we definitely touched on this

when we were walking through the lab, virtual reality. I mean, the Oculus Rift right now is like the baby infancy of, of where VR is really going to take us. Like we are creating, think about what, so, so Kurzweil's whole point of what is an exponential technology, anything that is based in information, anything that's powered by data or powered by softwares, ones and zeros becomes subject to these exponential explosive, you know, in the world of film photography, you know, every photograph you take is an incremental addition to, to the inventory of all photographs that exist.

But once we moved it to a digital substrate, you know, there's no marginal cost to every new photo. So the environment explodes. You've got, you know, more photos being uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram today than all film photographs that were ever taken. That is what happens when you digitize something and think about what VR does. VR essentially takes experience of reality and makes it digit, it's becoming software. So the cost of you going to the Eiffel Tower with your girlfriend or, you know, going to

the Grand Canyon or, you know, one of the crazy stories I heard was there was a, there was a patient who was diagnosed with throat cancer, she was put in hospice care and all she wanted to do was go, you know, I think she wanted to go to the Taj Mahal or something. So they had software developers create a version where she could experience what it was like to go visit the Taj Mahal. And so we'll be able to, you know, create these realities that we wanted to live in. Yeah. That's incredible.

That's for sure. And then also not to mention the, the, this massive, the other thing that you, you talked about or it was on, it was on one of the, around Singularity University, these beautiful depictions of ideas and philosophies and data. I don't know what you described. Yeah. So the others in our, in our executive program are, are, we have an animator who live while she's listening to the talk, she's incredible.

I don't know how she's, she's very talented. She will live draw the talks in a visual, capture the, in a visual way, what the speaker is actually talking about. So we have all these big murals for each lecture from, from the sessions. Yeah. And you, God, dammit, I'm trying to think of the exact wording of the mural and now it's escaping me. Do you remember, do you remember the subjects?

Ah, crap. The topic. The topic was shit, man. I'm sorry. You have really tap danced all over my brain just now. So I'm sort of like, I'm lost now in this future world that we're headed in the direction of. So I might have to skip that point that I was making, but the, the, oh yeah.

Okay. Okay. Okay. The, this massive amount. Okay. Future robots. So written, written there is this idea. Yeah.

They're robots or, or technology in the future or time traveling robots. Yes. Okay. So, yeah. So this is, this is just a concept. So that, so the session that this subject comes up is in the privacy. We have a whole, we have a whole in our, in our executive program, we do these sessions on, you know, the implication, the societal implications, you know, we have an ethics

panel, we talk about what are the ethical concerns, the regulatory concerns. One of the sessions we do is around privacy, you know, how do we think about privacy going forward? So one of the, one of the points that the facilitator makes in his, in his presentation is that all of, all of the things that we're doing today is being captured and stored, you know, every, every tweet you put out, all the Facebook posts, every time you do a Google search, all the, the stuff you're buying, you know, all of that, you know, every time you walk in front of a security camera, you know, that's, if that's being stored,

you know, in the future, there, there could hypothetically be some, you know, artificial intelligence algorithm that can basically mine all of that data, apply facial recognition, understand, oh, that's Duncan Trestle from, you know, 20 years ago, and basically know things about you, things we're doing today. So things that we're doing today that we don't have the technological capabilities to make sense of in the future, we may have, you know, an AI system or data, data science has evolved to a point where we can actually look back on things that we're doing today and make, you know, judgment or, you know, understand things that are happening.

Perhaps you could get arrested for crimes, you committed, there aren't even crimes yet. Just based on this, just based on this, this, so it's, it's sort of like all this data is a kind of, what were you called? You called it a, what did you call it? It's a, it's like, anyway, I think of it as like clay. It's like, it's like the Potter's clay being harvested at this time or harvesting all this digital clay that technology gets to chop up in any way it wants to chop it up just based on whatever you want.

If I've got your, you know, like the health data, you know, if I've got your tracking your health data from the last five years, I can visualize it in any way that I want. If I, if, if I'm somehow, you know, and this technology doesn't exist yet, but if there's some way that I'm constantly recording myself in 3D space as I'm walking through my life, and I could take the actual weird human snake that's created from all my movement, you know, like a map, like this is the idea that if you were to look at you from the time that you were a baby to right now, you could visualize that moving through time as a kind of snake, a kind of thing connected that's like, starts as a little baby and grows and grows and

grows and becomes a, an adult and then grows and becomes an old man. And it's actually moving through space and time. And so it's every movement that you've ever had would create a geometric pattern that you could, if you had a 3D printer, you could theoretically shrink down every movement that you made and have this weird snake-like thing rolling through your life. That could exist. I know that sounds crazy. No, you know, I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I've always, I've

heard really smart people like theoretical physicists talk about this concept. I've never been able to wrap my mind around, I don't know if you have an opinion on this. Basically the idea that all time is existing simultaneously at once, is that kind of what you're describing? Yeah, for sure. Like, I can't get my, you know, we don't understand the structure of how this universe operates, but basically like time is an illusion created in our own minds and we're starting to understand the mechanics of how that works.

We're definitely not close to there yet, but basically there's evidence to suggest that, you know, in some weird way, all time is happening simultaneously at once and that, I don't know. And that's a lot of data, isn't it? That's a lot of data. And if all time is happening at once, then all data already exists. But to get back to this idea of like constantly recording all this information, so we're looking at a, we're not just looking at a spindle outputting things, we're looking also

at a drain that's sucking things in. Where technology is sucking in, it's vacuuming up data and it's storing it. And that stored information is just sitting there and we don't know how it's going to be used. We don't know what the future robots are going to be doing with it, but isn't it safe to say that the woman's visit to the Grand Canyon is only going to become more and more realistic as technology advances? So it won't just be going to a Grand Canyon and seeing this sort of, you know, I don't

know what version, if they use video or what they use for that. Yeah, I don't know. It was some kind of CGI. It's like, yeah, it's computer graphics. So it's computer graphics and, but we're looking at that, that all this data that's being stored is going to be able to, is going to be used to create virtual periods in time, right? Where you, you're going to be able to put on virtual reality goggles and travel backwards

in time. Yeah. So that's actually, you know, think about imagining being able to like Google search your life. Like Google search. There was actually, there was, there was a, you know, one of the, so I hope they don't mind mention one of our, one of our more, one of our partners, there was an NBA athlete. He plays, he plays in the NBA.

I won't say which one, but he was his agent who came to visit Singularity University a couple of years ago, you know, wanted to explore the idea using technologies like Google Glass and, you know, these recording technologies, you know, record his progress as an athlete. You know, so he's, he was entering into his rookie year and looking at what is, you know, his skill sets were then, and then, you know, track his progress so that, you know, 10 years from now when he's still in the league, he could look back on and look at, you know, where I've progressed from to where I am now. And there are people looking at actually trying to, to, to do something along those lines.

But that's such a cool concept that like, you know, imagine being able to like, oh, like I told that funny joke and everyone laughed and like, well, I want to re-experience what that was like. Bring that joke up. That joke was not funny. I was drunk. Yeah. Like, you could just like, go back to that and like be there and then like, experience

it. Put in the temporal, all you need is the temporal coordinates, pop those things in whatever you're doing at that time. You can either relive it, you can have it, you can have it written out into text if you wanted to. Like, could you print out what I said seven hours ago between 230 and 245? So I can absolutely make sure that I was being as much of an asshole as I thought I was. You're going to be able to do that.

And then, but not only that, but something we'll be able to analyze all that data and be like, oh, here is what your personality is like. Yeah. We're going to create an AI based on your behavior patterns. And now you can have a little version of you living in an augmented reality aquarium where you can watch an AI version of yourself live a life too. That's, I mean, that's fascinating. I mean, the idea that we're going to be creating.

Crazy to think that that's possible. Not at all. I actually, so here's, to go back to one of, so one occurs a while is more long term predictions. Predictions is, you know, beyond the, in his term, the technological singularity, what happens is, you know, we impregnate the universe with intelligence, you know, all matter becomes subject to computation and we, you know, we actually, you know, the universe becomes this giant data processing center. I actually disagree with him on that point.

You do. I do disagree with him. And this is, I think what you just highlighted, I think, addresses that. I'm curious. Are you familiar with the concept of the Transcension Hypothesis? No. So basically, the Transcension Hypothesis tries to address what's called Fermi's Paradox, which, so, yeah, so Fermi's Paradox basically, you know, asks the question, you know, if

the universe, which it seems to be structured in such a way that it's, it's designed to support life. It's, you know, we're discovering this every day, you know, more and more of these, you know, these planets that are in these habitable zones where life could be supported. The universe, you know, is likely teeming with, with life, you know, it's just designed, it's designed to support that. So the question is, why don't, you know, if that's the case, you know, intuition and math would say that for human beings on planet Earth to be the most advanced civilization

makes no sense. Like we, we should see evidence, like there's no reason we would be the top of the pyramid, you know, at the, the edge of, of progress, but we don't see any evidence of that. You know, we don't see spaceships, we don't see, you know, aliens colonizing our moon and like taking up, you know, they don't come to, you know, take our oil back to their home planets. We don't see it. So Fermi's Paradox asks this question, why, why is that?

So the Transcension Hypothesis is, is an attempt at answering that, that question, which basically says that as a, as a species or some entity progresses, eventually instead of colonizing outer space, you know, colonizing outer spaces is really maybe the sort of the earliest stages of their, their first steps at becoming an advanced civilization. But at some point what they actually start doing is colonizing inner space, these virtual spaces. And what happens is you compress, you know, computational, these computational environments, you know, we see, you know, computers that were once the size of buildings, you know,

now fit in our pocket, you know, extrapolate that into the future, you know, in 25 years, a computer the size of a blood cell, you know, eventually will become so infinitesimally small that you could theoretically house these computational environments that could, could house all of the data processing that, you know, we see in this world, and eventually we don't, we don't go outward, we, we vanish into these, you know, these virtual realities. We get, we get digitized, we get digitized, we go, we go data. Wow. Oh my God.

Thank you so much for this conversation. This is amazing. It's so kind of you to invite me up to Singularity University and to get to hang out with you. It really has been a pleasure. Thank you. No, this was super cool. I, you know, it's amazing to be sitting across the table from you. You know, I, I think the message that you put out into the world, this open-ended curiosity

that you're, that you're after is beautiful and amazing. Thank you. So I'm, you know, very, very cool to, to have you here. Thank you, brother. How can people get in touch with you? Yeah. So if people are curious to know more about Singularity University, it's just SingularityU.org. And then we also have a, if people want to, you know, keep up with all of these technological

trends. It's called Singularity Hub, so they can keep up with what are the, you know, the latest breakthroughs. I'm on Twitter at AFrank26, but yeah, beyond that, you know, people can get in touch with me directly through the Singularity website, but yeah, check it out. Thank you. I hope you'll come back on. For sure.

Okay. Love to have you back here. Awesome. Thank you, brother. Thanks for listening. Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out.

You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. New album and tour date coming this summer.