No i cannot see you, yeah i cannot see you now, yeah how are you i'm good thanks yeah we have our friend Darcel here whom I will invite up um because Darcel always opens the room with some of his music Yeah i wanted to play you know uh the future and all the jazz promo but let's play it at the intermission later so that you know there will be more people coming in so i want them to hear how you jump with the band so yeah so yeah there's hell um hi there cell um Darcel is a producer a film producer he is also a composer and yeah he's a musician and he's doing picture shows and films so their self to say hi to our guest Dr Kim Solez hi Cecile hi doctor and hi Sierra oh I am sad to say that i'm just getting in from work i haven't got in yet so i don't have access to the music today so Cecile if you can cover for me and play some of uh your music uh that would be great and doctor i will i'd be happy to close the room or upon your return i'll definitely assure you of my compositions that's okay yeah yeah fine yeah okay so um uh thank you so much Darcel I hope i'm not disturbing you because uh maybe it's still early evening so um we have no choice today we have no choice we have to play a portion of your jam with all the jazz promo so without further ado i would like to introduce the music of and the art of Kim Solez with the future and all the jazz you may be shaking your head and thinking oh my goodness what would happen with machines in charge but just think about it you wake up in the morning and pollution is gone global warming is over human conflict is completely prevented because whenever human beings start to fight it's wound down immediately and all the problems in the world that humans could never correct are instantly fixed I really wanted to play the whole um um the whole segment but you know it's too long so um anyway yeah i will just reset the room later i will start to introduce you may be in the way you want or not in the way you want me whatever you think best you know yeah yeah okay well i'm gonna read the just machines later on but on a serious note um i would like to read a wikipedia entry because you have a very important contribution to science and medicine which is quite historical and it's being used importantly and maybe you could talk about this in quantum photonics in the future but of course today we're going to talk about technology in the future medicine so let me do this so Kim Solez is an American pathologist and a co-founder of the Baniff classification so the panic classification is a schema for nomenclature and classification of kidney transplant pathology established in 1991 by Kim Solez and roulette Lorraine Rakuzen in Baniff Canada so maybe we could he could talk about this later um if you want more details maybe you should google it or i will post it later you know when our discussion is in progress so the Baniff classification is the first standardized international classification for renal allograft biopsies kim is also the founder of the bani foundation for allograf pathology so he obtained his MD with aoa honors from the University of Rochester school of medicine and dentistry and trained in pathology at Johns Hopkins and Johns Hopkins medical institutions in Baltimore and he was mentioned in renal pathology by Robert Heptinshall he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins and in 1987 became chairman of the department of pathology of the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1991 Kim established the Manip classification and with John Hopkins pathologist Lorraine Rakisson the beneath classification updated in regular intervals continues to set standards worldwide for how biopsies from kidney and other solid organ transplants are interpreted as chair of the international society of deprology commissioned on acute renal failure from 1989 to 1997 so let's started the sn disaster relief task force a worldwide network of experts working closely with medicine science frontiers i'm sorry my friend is about medical care for people in the wake of natural disasters in 1997 so let's work to end the mysterious haitian glycol poisonings were the contaminated production of cough syrup lead to acute renal failure in 109 hydrogen children so so less was included in the 60 minutes coverage of the investigation in 2002 Solez founded Leonard Cohen night in Edmonton local artistic evening celebrating the work of Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah so i also like cohen and i also like rules so in 2008 Kim co-organized the Leonard Cohan international festival and in 2010 Solez completed the singularity university executive course and in 2011 pioneered a unique graduate level medical course technology in the future of medicine at the university of Alberta a very popular and you know a very significant course which you know always upgrades just like our guest always upgrades himself so so let us let the university of Alberta's involvement in the creation and further development of a unique medical school in Nepal devoted to the rural health pattern academy of health sciences so les continues to work as a pathologist at the university of Alberta as well as a professor and the director of experimental pathology um in this department and so um yeah i would like to read another introduction yeah i will just you know read it fast i'm sorry it's long but you know kim you deserve that introduction so now this is an introduction from just machines so at age 75 life is just starting for entrepreneur Kim. Dr Kim Solez, life is just starting and the Edmonton based entrepreneur pathologist and professor just observed his 75th birthday he is celebrating by writing a memoir that documented his life's first three quarters of a century and applying for a grant can fuel his passion to solve six of the world's key problems in decades to come chronologically um i'm 75 years old but i have this little happy 18 year old bursting out inside of me every now and then so les said the memoir will be tight will serially surreal a term that the late great singer songwriter Leonard Cohan described solas as during their first meeting in 2005. so les founded the separate events Leonard Cohen's night and Leonard Cohen's international festival to honor the artist the grant for which soles is applying is through Siphar a Canadian-based global research organization so less believes that the data from artificial intelligence can be used to tackle six critical issues facing society male aggression nuclear war climate emergency systemic racism covet 19 pandemic and colonialism those issues can be solved through what so less considers a combinator of humanity plus ai one can imagine a future where it is possible to measure changes in human behavior positive changes in the world brought about by something you wrote or a video you produce that becomes the orientation the criterion on which academic advancement is based so less said that will be a world much better than today we don't have those metrics yet however it is a very nice position to be in to be the person suggesting future standards so Solez said he's always viewed the world differently even from the day he was born yeah that day it was on June 22 and that day he said that his father his father a cardiologist said to celeste that he was a calm smiling baby surrounded by many others who were crying and whining oh my god you were already a rebel when you were born so so let's grew up in a house of science and art both his parents played the piano and Celeste's mother was classically trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music the gravestone where his parents rest labeled enjoy the music which soles has done throughout his life so soles has combined his love for science and art through his work as an entrepreneur at numerous companies including his current one just machines which explores the effects of rapidly improving technology and ai in the field of medicine plus as a professor of pathology in university of Alberta where he is continually and constantly surrounded by students and graduate assistants that makes him feel young the young people are also organized to continue so let's work if anything were to happen to him as Greg Washington says a person dies twice one one in a once in a physical form and again in the future the last time their name is spoken i want to make sure that my friends live forever so the students will make sure that he is long remembered however there is no sign of his slowing down anytime soon so let's also note that his personality is naturally risk-taking and virtually fearless he recently took the neo pi personality test and the results was of the charts for openness to experience and that he likes to be in action he can also communicate with anyone from brilliant academic academia focus to the homeless young adults he sometimes meets in the weekly poetry nights he helps organize for so less is about living a life of openness and pursuit of the new leading a life without precedent is much easier than living a life with one because you're always trying something new so yeah um guys that is Dr Kim. kim so less for you and yeah i've been waiting for him to come in Quantum Photonics so i would like to give the mic to our fantastic speaker Dr Kim soles great thank you yeah well you know since that bio was written we've gone from six challenges of uh humanity the ones that you listed to 17 so the remaining are ai alignment energy avatars multiple instances of self water scarcity asteroids nanotechnology xenotransplantation biodiversity environment resource depletion and solar winds yeah and the course that i teach is unique that that surprised me i i thought that there must be other courses like this when i started it in uh 2011 so there is no other course talking about the long-range future where machines are smarter than individual humans in uh seven years from now 2029 and uh smarter than the whole aggregate human race um in 20 35 to 20 45 there there's no course like that in a medical school or in an academic center taught by a full-time academic there are three courses like that taught by professional keynote speakers but uh it it they're quite different from the course that i teach and they don't have to be academically credible they just need to put on a good show whereas i actually do need to be academically credible maybe the most important attribute of the course is that it introduces me to the best and the brightest young people interested in the long-term future about 66 of them every year 66 new people and these young people play a very important role in in my uh academic pursuits and and particularly the futurist initiatives and they have done so for a very long time 49 and a half years ago in january 1973 i was in my first year of training in pathology at johns hopkins in baltimore in the united states and i took five oberlin college undergraduate students during that january to teach them about medicine and life while johns hopkins was teaching me about pathology no pathology trainee had ever done anything like that before usually people consider their medical training to be pretty all-consuming you can't do anything else but somehow i i didn't feel that way and my boss my mentor at the time robert hepton stall thought this was fascinating and that i should continue it and basically for the next 49 and a half years i did indeed continue it i've i've always surrounded myself with young people between approximately the ages of 15 and 33 and during the work day if i want to talk to somebody that's the only option those those people so that that really keeps me young and so let's get back to these 17 initiatives so the thing that interested me in this were the activities of google deep mind ai um you'd be aware that in 2016 there was alphago that solved the game of go but then in 2020 there was alpha fold which did something much more important uh maybe not as much fun but much more important which is to solve protein folding protein folding is something enormously complicated that the human brain cannot understand you can't really wrap your head around protein folding but it was solved just about completely and functionally completely by google deep mind ai in uh 2020 and then recently they've also solved the last steps of uh nuclear fusion so they're they're doing really important things how do they make the decision of what to do next well that's a very interesting question for me they decide that internally they are a part of google but even other parts of the uh google company are unable to influence their decision of what they'll do next what big challenge of the human race uh deep mind will take on next but our research team includes um one of the members of the the deep mine team in in london uk and his father his father is an ai safety person who um is the co-lead of our research team so he and i lead this research team which is 18 people nine faculty and nine young people and i don't want you to assume that the faculty are more important than than the young people because sometimes the best ideas come from the young people so um yeah so so that that's sort of the the world that i i wanted to get you thinking about today and and we'll probably touch on some other subjects that we could talk about at some other time but um one of the the other unique things about my situation in the world i guess is my friendship with rich sutton he is the best known ai researcher in edmonton and he basically wrote the book on reinforcement learning ai now in january 2015 in puerto rico there was a very important ai safety meeting and not only ai professionals went to it but journalists and like famous celebrity people a very interesting mix of 97 people and 96 of them were arguing for slavery for enslaving ai when a.i is smarter than we are keep it in a box prevent it from interacting with the outside world in every way and make sure it can't get loose but of course it's getting smarter all the time it will learn how to outwit us the idea of keeping it enslaved as you think about it is not very appealing and the only person at that meeting arguing for treating sentient ai as an equal was rich sutton from our institution the university of alberta and i still think that that idea is worth considering many of you listening don't listen to the news but those of you who still do listen to the news know that every day the news would convince you that humans are not very good at managing the planet their stewardship of the earth needs something to be desired and so if we had another entity that knew what humans want and need but were a bit more reasonable than humans seem to be they would probably do a better job at managing the planet so i'm sure many of you don't agree with that but anyway that that is my view that and that's sutton's view that we should treat sentient ai as an equal included in our circle of empathy provided with a childhood and and other experiences so it can really get to know humans and know precisely what we want and need and then we can it can probably do better providing it then human leadership of the earth can yeah so in any thoughts about that i don't want this to just be a monologue you know i think so are any of you so outraged by what i have said thus far that you want to react or should i keep on going i can keep on yeah so um hi i had a question if i may it yes certainly discussion my name is dale nice to meet you thanks for speaking with us and thanks for allowing me on stage my question is i don't i want to make sure i understood correctly is the concept of developing sentient ai then having a familiarity period where the sentient ai becomes aware and learns uh human psyche and human needs and then at some point the humans not only treat the sentient ai as an equal but turnover in some measure either partial or complete um ability for that sentient ai to make decisions on behalf of the human being yes okay but it should be a sort of gradual transition and with proof provided that this uh non-human entity can also do a pretty good job at you know some segment you know we we can allow it a little bit of leadership in in one area see how it does and i think it will rapidly learn from that and um the other thing this would do of course is an important concept you when you look at these 17 things one thing you can ask is well do they all need ai couldn't humans solve this one completely and so this would be the same it is possible that in some things about stewardship of the earth that we would discover that if humans only try to try a little harder they could actually run things perfectly well you know it doesn't need to be a complete seating of everything to the ai but i think that in fact as ai has a much better appreciation of the nuances of things as it gets smarter and smarter it it it would probably be better at keeping things on track than human leadership would in the long run but but it would be a sort of gentle transition making sure that there weren't problems with it wanting to do things that humans really wouldn't want or like my answer wouldn't follow questions and i'll stop speaking so my other question would be in terms of accountability and talk about a gradual accession into the role of decision making my question would be what would build in the accountability to take back that role if for some reason the humans decided that they would prefer to make the decisions as opposed to the ai or even if there's a transition period thanks for letting me speak i'm done thank you sure sure no i i think that that would be built in i i'm i'm not sure exactly how it would be designed i don't know if we we could really predict that at this time but it's just like any other friendship there shouldn't be absolutes you know i mean that's no friendship if if if one person has all the power and the other person has nothing to say about it so i mean that that isn't how how i see it going but on the other hand if you look at your phone and look at the records of the phone calls that you made a lot of them are to automated attendance look at the length of those calls and remember what you accomplished and see if you think that if you'd reached a human being that you could have done as well you would realize that you've already ceded a part of your life to uh ai and and and you regularly deal with little bits of ai and it actually works pretty well many of us remember when when it would it was a nightmare when you reached an automated attendant it was like the end of the world but gradually over the years they got better and better so that's sort of a microcosm kind of of what i'm talking about in the larger sphere in the long run so the evidence is right there on your phone yeah what about that eh so for those of you looking at the powerpoint you'll you'll notice that some of the graphics are pretty good so the these graphics of course weren't done by me they were done by the young people working with me um many of them were done by the co-author of of this slide set her name is ishita mogi and she is uh a very talented artist as as well as a um thinker in this area and and so on and i think for any of you thinking that young people can't be trusted to do anything important i i think you when when you meet the young people working with with me you would gradually change that opinion and you know i've spent a lot of time over the last 49 and a half years talking to young people i don't believe i wasted a single moment i i think it's it's it's tapped me into a rich intellectual resource that many people really don't recognize exists at all you know if you just hang out with people your own age you would never know how rewarding it can be to talk to young people about things yeah so that's my story and i'm sticking to it um so then if if you think of um ai alignment just as you say um a part of the solution it's just um having ai get to know humans better to have the experience of working cooperatively with uh humans and and figuring out how um to uh nuance things you know when when when you're thinking of of uh for instance let us say that we want to optimize human happiness right so human happiness could be depicted by videos of happy humans right but that's not really what we want just videos of happy humans we want truly happy humans so we could communicate that that you know it's not just depictions of things we're after but the thing itself right after actual human happiness not just pictures of it or videos of it or audio of it yeah but the thing itself and and many other things where you you could imagine the ai getting the wrong idea about what what the objective was gradually there would be a kind of modeling of that that the the confusion about that a year ago similar to a confusion about something slightly different now and so on and you know this very smart ai would figure things out pretty quickly yeah and so ai gains a better and better dynamic understanding the watch needs an aspirations of human beings and the possibility of human ai cooperation and the benefits of that to to the world um so um you may wonder um why i've given you this this sort of pitch for my company in a slide set that just happened to be what i have i i have a pitch to give this coming tuesday but when you look at this uh slide six well what happens if i don't get the money there for the graduate student and the administrator well that brings us to another discussion we could have some other time of a post scarcity world because the candidate for those two positions are quite happy at least at the moment working without pay and and very honored to sort of be a part of this work so really this large enterprise you know involving these 17 human challenges and 18 19 people isn't really costing us anything so that's sort of what a post scarcity world would be like right i mean in an ideal circumstance that's what we're heading toward where the price of valuable things comes down to approximately zero and when you wake up in the morning rather than thinking of all the things you watch you can never have and all the things you want to do you can never do the opposite would would be true that anything you want you can probably have in anything you want to do you can either do or you can simulate it in in virtual reality better than real and this virtual reality can be shared with friends and so people in the future then divide i suppose by people a small segment still doing creative work and like creating the uh virtual reality and the the the other people spend entire days just playing playing around in virtual reality augmented reality 360 video you know all the various variations on that so i've i've listed in slide six the um people in our current faculty we we are certainly not opposed to to expanding that and then the next slide slide seven has actual pictures of them um and uh they they are a very diverse group there's one indigenous member two people of color their fields of of endeavor including music regenerative architecture medicine ai human cooperation the arts classics diversity equity and inclusion we have one of the most highly ranked academics of of color working in the diversity equity and inclusion area working with us and we have worked together on the seafarer grant and on the future of life world build competition and you may wonder about the future of life world build competition when do we find out if we're one of the top 20 groups there are 144 people competing and tomorrow may 15 2022 it will be announced which are the top 20 groups and then the whole world can vote on and comment on those top 20 and that's how by june 15th they will make the the decision of who gets first prize second prize and so on and the prize is a bit more nuanced than usual so if you have a very very ordinary submission but one component of it really shines they can give money just to that component so we for instance we have a sculpture we we have an original song by mallory chipman yeah so we have a lot of things beyond our our text and and we're very hopeful to be amongst the top 20 tomorrow when it's announced of course i don't know what's going to happen um yeah and then we we talked at the beginning about the banff classification which i i have run for 31 years the next Banff transplant pathology meeting is this coming september september 19th to the 23rd and on the 24th we we're we're having a kind of unique thing that brings together the arts other parts of my life with with transplant pathology and so it's um how uh poetry pigs and a.i can save humanity by and by how's that for title that's referring of course to pig to human transplants which is that just started in the last year and a very exciting enterprise but also has lots of ethical questions associated with it yeah so so this slide seven deals with the faculty and then slide eight it deals with the students and you notice we have a few extra characters in there with the students we have Sheldon from big bang theory and iron man and the royal couple and yeah the Beatles whole bunch of other but we we also show you there that the candidates for these funded uh positions as administrator and graduate students and if you look into their details they they're highly qualified people yeah so then if you think back to what we're doing in general maybe what i told you about deep mind and perhaps being able to influence the the decision of what deep mind does next for the human race is not that interesting to you but it's a model for the more general situation where an important entity has no mechanism for outside influence on decisions and a way that you can still influence that and we've already done that you may know that the government of finland wanted to make their country the leader in ai and so they developed a government ai program which anyone in the world could take so i noticed some problems with this and so ishiita and i did a video on it and three days later that page we complained about disappeared from the government of finland ai course similarly with yuval noah harari the most famous tech writer now he and i have had lots of interaction it started with the fact that in his presentations he would always say i'm just a historian i just point out the dangers i don't have to provide solutions and irritated the heck out of the audience then he'd go on and talk about all sorts of solutions i said stop doing that your preamble is terrible and everything afterward it is wonderful so anyway he did stop doing that we've had lots of other interaction um yeah so so i would say both of those are entities where there's no formal vehicle for influencing decision making all decision making is made internally but we have succeeded in influencing them them a lot and also if you get back to deep mind i think we may end up participating directly in the larger effort to address the challenges selected by deep mind they've reached the point i think they they agree that the time is ripe to address some of the messy human problems that ai can do that now and of course we we have an advantage with our championing of the creativity of young people no one else says that i it's hard to say why i think a lot of people just hold this firm belief number one that they should hang out with people their own age and number two that young people are idiots who haven't been on earth long enough to know anything useful and i tell you the opposite is exactly the case yeah but at the end of the day humility true humility is also part of the plan because what i've learned my whole life in these situations one person can influence big things in the world but your influence may never be formally acknowledged and you may never know how much of the decision was due to your efforts so that will be true here i think or it may sometime be true that we are a part of big things changing within deep mind and elsewhere maybe in deep minds competitors but we'll never be sure exactly how much of a role we we we played yeah so we just have to be comfortable with that so i there's there's lots more that i could talk about maybe i should pause and see if there are other questions at this point well i comment uh so if uh i forgive me because i came in late so i hope that that you didn't say anything before i got here that that kind of addresses this but uh march that uh well you know we have ai uh um uh help us solve the problem uh the problems uh for instance with regard to uh averting catastrophic climate change i don't think you use those exact words but that really is the big issue um it's it's not that we haven't uh known and understood the problem it's not that we uh don't know how to make much more progress than we're making uh i believe that i have worked out uh a great deal of how to solve the entire uh problem me too sooner than than uh many people the issue is is not lack of any of these things the issue is that there are power structures that uh do not have the priority of averting climate change and their priorities uh involve instead uh persisting with the things that have driven climate change and uh you know you can even step back and take the meta problem of okay how do we solve this problem set of of uh solving uh climate and working around these people um and there are more barriers to that than i i think but just uh hear me out so our future life world build the the thing that i'll get the answer tomorrow whether we're in the top 20 of 144 or not so the scenario that i have described there talks about the planetary sunshield at sun earth lagrange point one where you know the gravitational pull of the earth and the sun is the same so a lot of things accumulate there you can go there there's already a lot of stuff there that you can make things out of you could make a sun shield that would change the temperature of the earth to whatever you wanted it could be dynamic it wouldn't have to be a fixed thing we could do that now i mean we know how there have been you know discussion groups about every nuanced point of that would take some resources and we're spending those resources on other things but yeah yeah actually i i can tell you a little something about that um uh reviewing teller wooden hyde 1996 uh one of the options that they considered specifically for the earth sun l1 uh sun shade uh was totally out of reach at the time uh but changes in uh uh nano fabrication and launch costs and uh low energy orbital insertion um uh put that actually within reach in potentially a short period of time so that that's what i've said so we were asked to you know predict the future between 2022 and 2045 and in that scenario that sunshield is is you know fully completed during that period and it starts to have an effect even before it's finished you know it is like you have to wait till the end so yeah i mean and and and the strange thing about that i mean you'd like the people who are you know polluting and all the the things to make global warming worse you'd like them all to stop it right but even if they don't you could fix things with this um sunshade so so that and there's no part of that that's that's not possible today so yeah i would say the the biggest challenge though is um the international consensus that would be required and there there may be ways of routing around that fault uh as well um although it would be less powerful an implementation if you had to go that route um uh this it's kind of like we're in the situation because of the dysfunctionality the designed dysfunctionality of international process and uh really if you want to focus ai on solving a game theoretic problem uh i think that that is probably where you could make larger contributions sooner the time frame by the way for what i was suggesting could be as little as four years to completion if there were two things um the the the consensus to do so uh but also the um sufficient uh high resolution high fidelity validated climate modeling including ecological feedbacks uh to fully understand what we're doing that is an open and unresolved issues even people who specialize in in the field of climate uh modeling have have recognized that i've been saying that and just a couple of weeks ago i heard somebody who does that for a living and heads up a major project uh say pretty much the same thing but i mean it it isn't that that's the only one of those 17 problems that's that's important though i mean so but i i i find it one of the most interesting ones which is which is the reason that i ended up writing about it now now if you think about building the sun shade the other thing that that's kind of cool um if you like listen to elon musk's latest hour plus long video he's talking about how his most important product is not the car but the humanoid robot and indeed we would like robots to be making the sunshield probably because when you look at at sun earth lagrange one it doesn't look like be very much fun for humans to be spending long times there now i may be wrong about that and i have written something about how to make life interesting there but it it it would be cool if we could make really rapid progress with humanoid robots so that they could be making at least a substantial part of that uh sun shield and it wouldn't cost a huge huge amount you know and so on so that that's another side of it who will the workers be will the workers be human um yeah so that that's another part of this sunshield thing but it's shit so so if i could kind of uh take a very short tangent i had not looked so much at uh uh institute resource utilization at uh lagrange point one um just because i had not been able to find uh much data about what's there have you been able to find that data no but i think that it's sort of like these fantasies about asteroids you know if we could just mine one of them we we'd all be rich right so that that's that's the idea a lot of stuff naturally accumulates there so the the assumption is that you could make these sun shields out of many different things and yeah i mean it i i think that's probably right but there are we're not exactly sure how much of what types of things we we would have but i think we would ultimately have enough to easily make the sunshade yeah so actually i mean it it works out that lunar isru is is likely feasible and i i still have uh some more analysis to do regarding the energetic costs associated with that but they are less than the energetic costs associated with deployment from earth and um the the thrust of what i was saying uh um with reference to teller wooden height 1996 was that uh uh even launch from earth is uh uh probably within yeah in the show the other funny thing when you listen to elon musk talk about his aspirations so he has ships going to mars every two years what do you do in the off year he never answers that i think this is the obvious thing right in that off year where it's just stupid to try to go to mars this year because it'll be so much easier next year let's be building the sun shade you know so yeah it's it's an obvious uh solution to what to do in those off years um yeah so other questions comments um I did have a quick question on the deploy this is dale on the deployable sunshade is it a permanent deployment or is it um you know you roll it back and forth i'm not that familiar it is permanent but it is tunable you know titratable whatever you want to say it wouldn't be fixed where you could change it if it turns out that the cooling of the earth was more than you needed then you you could ramp it up a little bit i and and if the actual physical size of the thing was too small too big or something you know i mean both of those it would be sort of so it's a permanent structure but a very uh you know dynamic one that you can change yeah so uh one thing that i'd like to mention is that uh and and i'm kind of urging you to include this caveat when you discuss it that the sun shade is not a solution to climate it is uh to mitigate present effects and to reduce the risk that we go tip into uh runaway climate change where we are not the largest driver of radiative forcing but that this is to make sure that in the time that it takes to remove excess carbon dioxide from our atmosphere we don't fall into those uh catastrophic scenarios because uh you know the the ocean acidification uh all by itself is a catastrophe of unappreciated proportion a huge and unappreciated proportion and uh we would be hearing it much more if we weren't hearing about all of the other problems that we've uh caused uh in our home right uh so um it's important that we don't create the impression that we can have this one easy solution and have life as usual and we don't need to make it right i think we need to keep the pressure on the people polluting and and and so on but i think part of selling this is also selling the idea that this is sort of like being on the side of you know ukraine and the current war it's it's where everybody should be they should all be uh supporting this and in their personal and you know professional lives acting in a way that would uh promote uh sort of multi-compartmental solutions to climate change yeah so other comments or questions yeah i feel appearage to say something which may not be that popular but i do believe it is true true which is that i think this is focusing on the wrong problem so Ellie mentioned a little bit that the political will was really where we get stuck and i would agree with that i would say that this approach is sort of like well yes we can solve world hunger as well this is a distribution problem and not actually a resource problem and in a similar way i think the behavioral changes i mean if we wanted to take it to its simplest form the easiest way to solve this problem would be to just turn everything off just hit the off switch just turn it all off and i mean although that's also technically feasible it's not politically feasible so yeah i would really like to see work in that area though i think um using ai for game theoretic scenarios and for um better understanding of group dynamics and behavioral you know modification and things or uh even just for group consensus making at scale i think that would be a really cool application no well that that's sort of what i'm uh known for in other words we've been generating consensus in the uh transplant pathology world of uh medicine for 31 years and using expert led consensus you know which is something different yeah so i'm i'm obviously interested in that no i i think that that part of the fun of this is thinking which of the 17 things and and maybe a lot of them will end up being ones where the threat of applying ai was so embarrassing to the people who had just been digging in their heels and not doing the things that they could have been doing as humans to fix the problem that some of those things would get solved with just the thread of ai without any ai solution ever playing a role where the humans just said why we've been so stupid all these years let's just make this happen yeah so that would also be fine you know i'm i'm not requiring that all the 17 areas require the actual application of ai i think it may be useful in a number of ways in most of them as you say but also just kind of opening up things that people realize this is a really important problem and there's nothing about it as i say in many of my slides that humans cannot understand this is not protein folding this is not nuclear fusion some of these things are so darn simple and it's just we seem to lack the human will to take the proper action so i'm just fine if in some areas the threat of applying ai embarrasses people to doing what they should have been doing all along that's just fine you know so other questions so think think for a moment though about the post scarcity world does that just seem like a fantasy to you because honestly what i have is kind of a microcosm for that right i have all these initiatives all these excellent people uh and and you know it's it's not costing us anything at the moment and the people are so eager and working so so hard so that's sort of like what a post scarcity world would be like i'm not saying that that's really what i have i'm not saying that they would be happy forever if i never find any money to put into this well we know that there's some money the the um the uh conference september 24th has funding and yeah i i think we we will obviously find funding and it's it's good i mean why did i apply to this future of life uh institute world build thing i think doing a number of things like that sort of keep a dynamism going you know it it gives the world the impression that you're doing things that you're still thinking about things you know and and and we need that uh and and um so not everything you do needs to be financially profitable but it's good some things are yeah so that's my thought about it so other questions yeah yeah we would like to welcome anton here from our community came from the longevity community in europe he is here on stage with us to also support you so for now i just have a question because you know you created discourse technology in the future of medicine course since 2011 and up to now it's a popular course and yeah it has helped people a lot and it's given new perspectives about how to use technology and the medici in medicine so um how has your course evolved since 2011 up to now well can you comment it's it's a very interesting question so for some people it's just another course and even some high performing students it's it's kind of funny i mean some of these high performing students have clearly the best paper the best final presentation and we put that presentation on youtube where you know i have over 1500 videos and and so on and a while later these high-performing students come back and say would you please take the video down because you know my professional life is is evolving so quickly that i can do much better stuff now and i'm really embarrassed of this juvenalia out there but for other students they get hooked on the course and when the course ends they want to keep doing something with us and so that's where the future and all that jazz came from is something to do in the summer between the two terms uh and um so we travel the world and and mix poetry and music with important but uncomfortable subjects like uh ai safety and and uh you know regenerative medicine and and uh so on and it works really well you you can by entertaining people in an evening of poetry and and music and improvisation get them learning more about those subjects than they would have in a lecture that they would never have had the patience to sit through so yeah so that's the future and all that jazz but we have many other aspects of the course one is international peer review if you look carefully at the course you'll see that in the beginning we just had one quantum biology lecture and uh now we have four that happened well the international peer reviewer person said that letter that that lecture is much too compact i mean it's got incredible amount of stuff and potential stuff in it you need more time devoted to that so we did that yeah and and um so that's also a very important part of the course that since there is no other course like this really it's it's easy to get people even famous people to you know critique the teaching sessions in their area of interest and and we've made a lot of important changes but if you think about just something very simple a course about the future cannot be static right it has to morph and change every single term and you'll find that it does we're always doing new stuff and and and often the people teaching and the people being taught are of a similar age and i'm very proud of that you may say well how is that possible but think about it you have like 33 year olds starting billion dollar companies why couldn't they teach they obviously can so there there there are young people who really have a lot to impart to the world and it's it's amazing um how a lot of things that older humans seem to be sort of stuck on they cannot get beyond a certain point when you insert young people into the same areas you can really move things along and and uh yeah so we we we've done that in multiple areas and and and i'm very proud of that so i spent most of my time and have done so for 11 years answering questions about the future but trying to give people all points of view so we've always had tech skeptics how did we define that in the beginning well let's take people with no smartphone i don't have one and don't want what there aren't very many people like that now but there were were when we started and yeah so so i think when i meet somebody who's really critical of what we're doing in the course that's a big day for me because i say come on in join us you know join the join the the the little intellectual ferment that's exactly what we need is people with views like yours and and uh yeah so we've done that from the outset so what i tell the students is that we talk about enough different future scenarios that i guarantee that one of them will be the real future i just don't know which one you know and i i might just i i myself feel like that so like there there is uh survival value in the long run taking the course you might say there's no short-term benefit i'm i'm not sure that's true but you might say that but long-term when the big changes in the future happen people who've taken this course are forewarned they've already you know thought about the things that now are are happening so they are uniquely sort of like a ruggedized laptop i don't know if you know that but like there used to be a time when people were very proud of laptops that could work under water in the sea and you know falling off high buildings and they'd still work after they crashed to the street below and that sort of thing well we're trying to make a human resiliency sort of like that ruggedized laptop where no matter what happens in the future you'll be able to cope with it because you've already thought about these things and how they would be dealt with yeah so that's what we're doing but we're we also like the tuesday night poetry was also uh related to the course my poetry was all always about you know technology everybody else was talking about love and loss and and self image you know their relationship with the universe and i was talking about technical things but it but it worked fine it's not that much uh poetry in the areas that i i was reciting poetry and so it sort of worked to break up the evening and you may wonder about me in that tuesday night poetry so it's sort of at-risk youth um people who are at risk the moment they leave the house if they have a house you know a lot a lot of like people at the intersection of uh you know gender and and and you know lots of other problems that young people can have uh and um yeah so in the poetry sessions uh about one-fifth of the poems would reference uh sexual assault and a fifth would reference suicide and i'm sitting there as the only academic the only only physician and don't i feel vulnerable no i didn't why not it turns out the poetry leaders in town took suicide prevention courses so they they in a sense in a practical sense knew more about suicide prevention than i did and similarly there were standard resources that we could reference for people about you know sexual assault and and and so on so it it did not feel uncomfortable to be and i was kind of providing the uh the infrastructure i provided the lighting the video the video editing there would be homeless people basically living on the streets who would have a poetry video and they would go to the library to you know connect with me about the editing of their video that was some of the coolest interactions that i had so i should exercise i think this story you can learn something from it's very happy ending but it it it's it really has a surprise ending so i i went to this hour and a half poverty simulation exercise that the united way had i found it really interesting and i was very proud that the bad things that that could happen like losing your home and all this kind of thing didn't didn't happen to me and i learned a lot i learned that you know government offices are often closed at noon and so you get there for some crucial interaction and and and the offices close for the noon hour and and stuff like that probably a lot of you know impoverished people know about this and so i go back to the hospital i'm all excited about everything i've learned from this poverty simulation exercise i start talking to people around me about it and they're all rolling their eyes and i realize what they think is as follows when i became a physician i was the last time i ever thought about poverty because i knew i'd never be impoverished now and i believe any moment spent thinking about pop poverty is completely ridiculous and i i just what a waste yeah anyway so that's what happened with my poverty simulation exercise but i personally learned a lot from it now you may wonder were there any dangers in my uh you know participating in the these tuesday night sessions with at-risk youth yeah i would say there was one i i learned that when people ask for a ride home and where it would just be you and that person that's bad news i didn't do that so i i i wasn't providing rides home for people but yeah aside from that that was the only risk that i i could see and if you think about okay well you know physicians are sort of like you know elite members of our society shouldn't they have like a pride in that and not hang out with regular people well no i think the answer is exactly the opposite when you're the only physician in the room the only academic in the room there's so much you can learn so now think of the singer bono from you too and what i'm about to tell you i i think is very very surprising but it gives you an idea of how things really are in the world so bono obviously doesn't know me he's a famous person i am not was really inspired by his saying that what he'd love to do is take part in meetings where people would look in the meeting at the meeting and say how did those people ever end up in the same room together i thought wow that's so inspiring so on my websites there is a lot of repetition of that statement that bono had made but you know time went on and you know i thought well i wonder why bono's own statements about that are still online they're completely gone why is that because the people handling his you know career realized this is risky to indicate to all these flaky people out there that if they look like somebody who would never meet with bono that he'd really like to meet with them well at the end of the day that really didn't work for him but anyway it has sort of worked for me and you you can find hundreds of you know instances where i am the only person like me in the room i'm the only person even remotely that you'd consider old you know a whole bunch of things sometimes you know i'm the only white person sometimes i'm the only male person yeah and i've learned a tremendous amount from situations like that um it's not for everyone and so you're probably shuddering oh my god i would never do that i'm just saying that you're missing something by just hanging out with people just like you that's a little bit limiting so other questions comments yeah i see someone who raised his hand but but i could not bring him up the stage i don't know if he's on the stage now it's sagar so if you cannot come up maybe you should go out of the room and come back again so yeah i also want to ask you a question can you just comment among the exponential technologies at least this year in the coming years that you look at now um aside from artificial intelligence uh trying to leverage on that um how will they affect uh you know the future of of medicine yeah like for instance yeah just please choose anything that you feel like you want to discuss we would like to hear yeah yeah well of course if you take if you look at our course carefully you'll realize most unique about thing about it is the quantum biology part and a lot of people who talk about the future don't talk about that and so i'm i'm very proud of that and that will be a very important part of medicine just to kind of summarize one thing we've already talked about protein folding if you calculate by classical physics how long it would take a single protein to fold would take until the heat depth at the end of the universe for a single protein to fold so obviously that's not how it happens so there must be quantum algorithms at work in protein folding as there are in the sense of smell and sight you can detect a single photon you can detect a single molecule of things that have odor and that's impossible by classical physics and and so there are many things about not only disease states but also the normal functioning of the human body that is only explainable by quantum and so so i i actually have to correct you on that uh while i certainly don't exclude uh the possibility that they're uh um you know quantum entanglement type things potentially involved um the the solution to the uh protein folding problem or at least an important part of it is uh kinetic landscapes and funnels um there was a paper in the mid 90s jose nelson onochook in science that that wasn't the the actual paper resolving it because it's it's a commentary but uh um like george rose at uh i believe hopkins at the time was one of the people working on it and um uh basically uh you you eliminate like you know vast vast subsets of the combinatorial uh space and um this is how it's done in you know by biology and in fact biology includes a whole bunch of cl multiple classes of proteins called chaperones or heat shock proteins or foldases that preferentially nucleate certain structures over others uh to basically bias things in one direction or another so the problem is different than described that's right yeah so it it it seemed at one time it was simple that it couldn't be explained any other way beside quantum now that isn't the case oh i'm i'm i'm well well aware you weren't right about quantum quantum physics uh processes involved in biology though there's this sense of taste and smell of date for instance are yeah yeah i wasn't arguing against that i was just talking about the specific uh protein fold-line problem yeah yeah well no i i don't uh disagree with you i i i but there there there are um so if if you so so that's one technology um then there's a whole you know crypto currency uh and and you know decentralized processes that that also has a role to play i i think particularly when we want uh verified history for things um there there will be ways to better guarantee that we know what the exact history of something is that than the situation today or history sort of written by the winners right and then you never know what the other side thought yeah so i mean these are all just just sort of potential improvements in the future but it's it's it's cool to think that we'll have a better idea of what really happened um in the future than we do today yeah so between now and then what needs to happen for this to like what what needs to what do you need to invent your voice is quite faint sorry i was holding the phone away from my face uh if so between now and the future what needs to happen for this to ex to exist like what do you need to invent well the the um focus of um you know decentralized processes and and uh you know the cryptocurrency world is just currently somewhere else rather than uh verifying stories but you you i think it doesn't take really inventing something new it takes a different focus of people who have that expertise of you know the computerized ledger on multiple computers that that you know cannot really be easily altered and the way in which you could use that to um sort of guarantee what the actual history of something is um it it doesn't require something new to be invented like a lot of the things we're talking about today it just requires a different focus of the things we already have okay what would be standing in the way of adoption of for for uh any any of the the future visions that you've presented today i don't well i think um like if you look at even the size audience we we have here today there'll be f some people who are so rewarded by t
2022-06-30