Technology + Society
i'm tony bernardo dean of ucla anderson and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the ucla anderson eastern technology management center's tech and society conference it goes without saying that today's business environment is rapidly changing and increasingly complex shifting and creating multiple opportunities and challenges as you might expect from the nation's number one public university with our mission to serve the greater good one of the fundamentals we are focusing on here at anderson is the role of business and society a core question we explore with our students is how can businesses serve multiple stakeholders not just shareholders and customers but employees communities and society at large to ensure shared value issues such as climate change inequality and changes in the future of work all demand leaders who can build organizations products and services that effectively serve multiple stakeholders achieving broader aspirations and in minimizing unintended consequences technology is one of the biggest factors in this discussion technology can be a huge source of gains in areas such as health care transportation and education offering better outcomes at lower costs but it can also be a driver of issues such as workforce disruptions inequality and challenges to privacy and other rights as individuals is against this backdrop that our easton center is delivering its second annual tekken society conference the goal is to further understanding of these issues opportunities and importantly the role of business and its leaders i'm especially excited to hear from our kickoff keynote speaker juan enriquez a futurist investor entrepreneur and thought leader who i'm certain will bring new insights into the relationship between technology and ethics i also want to take just a minute to express my gratitude to our centers at anderson who are supporting this event our centers at anderson act as a hub for leadership insights faculty research student and alumni engagement and service to our communities and society they operate in such areas as finance real estate entrepreneurship technology media and entertainment marketing analytics and global issues that transcend borders i hope that throughout this tekken society conference today and tomorrow you will engage learn and advance your own journey as a leader we appreciate you being here now i'd like to introduce professor terry kramer faculty director of ucla anderson's technology management center and the moderator for today's program so let me welcome all of you here my name's terry kramer i'm the faculty director of the easton technology management center and i wanted to welcome you to the first day of our tech and society conference now to give you a little bit of backdrop here we as every day goes by live more and more in an interconnected world interconnected across domains interconnected across geographies across disciplines and most broadly interconnected between business and society and that was a lot of the rationale behind the foundation of this conference specifically we have three goals in this conference the first goal is to better understand the role of technology and whether that be artificial intelligence cloud computing and edge computing high-speed mobile networks internet of things the role the technology plays in addressing areas of societal need so health care education financial services etc the second goal of the conference is to look at the growing tech lash and what are all the areas of tech lash that are most prominent today and whether that's andy trust whether that's data privacy concerns whether that's future of work digital divide global divide etc and it's interesting if you just look over the last few weeks the increased number of issues that are tech lash oriented are increasing so the hearings in washington regarding facebook and concerns about management of their platform and misinformation and disinformation actions that the chinese government is taking against its own chinese tech companies with notable actions breaking up companies data privacy fines suspended ipos etc so understanding all of that tech lash is the second goal of the conference and then the third goal of the conference is to understand the leadership imperative how do leaders look at all of the issues that are going on and say what direction do i want to head on here how do i get the best of technology and mitigate the negative aspects of technology so i hope you'll find that this conference is helpful in all of these areas now we're going to kick off the program this evening with my key keynote fireside discussion with juan enriquez who's the author of right wrong and how technology transforms our ethics he's also the managing director of excel venture management and then we're going to do a virtual networking session right after this one then tomorrow for our second day of the conference and that's going to run from 9 00 a.m to 1 p.m we're going to open up that discussion with a fireside chat with john kelly john kelly is the father of ibm watson so executive vice president of cognitive solutions and research at ibm that's going to be moderated by heather caruso who's ucla anderson's own assistant dean of equity diversity and inclusion and that session is going to get into ai for good and then we'll have two other discussion themes after that one one is on global technology innovation so all the innovation going on across the world and in many cases we see leapfrog innovation and then a final panel on green tech how technology can help in areas of climate change and sustainability so i hope you'll enjoy all of those uh all of those elements again tomorrow 9 a.m to uh 1 p.m pacific so as i mentioned this whole opportunity of looking at technology for good against the negative externalities all of this raises this fundamental question about ethics in the tech sector how does technology impact ethics and this is juan's book and a lot of the work that he's done now many of you may have thought that i reversed that reference many of you may have thought it really is how does ethics affect technology juan's got some very interesting views about that not necessarily being the right way to uh to look at it a little bit about juan's background and it is just fascinating and aspirational when we talk about interdisciplinary cross-boundary um juan's background is probably one of the best that i've seen at really manifesting on that so several elements of his background he was the founding director of harvard business school's life sciences project and a research affiliate at mit synthetic neurobiology lab he's a chairman and ceo of bioteconomy which is a life sciences research and investment firm after he got his mba at harvard business school he became an angel investor and then he founded excel venture management he's basically been a business leader an advisor and a speaker he advises a variety of ceos from a number of fortune 50 companies he advises a variety of heads of state all about how to adapt to a world where the dominant language is shifting from the digital towards the language of life he's written a whole slew of best-selling books he wrote as the future catches you how genomics will change your life work health and wealth he wrote the united states of america polarization fracturing and our future he wrote evolving ourselves redesigning humanity one gene at a time and then the book that we'll talk about the most tonight right wrong and how technology transforms our ethics really interesting um read he's a ted all-star with nine ted talks on a variety of topics uh serves on a variety of for-profit boards non-profit boards the non-profit boards that he's involved with include the national academy of sciences the american academy of arts and sciences wgbh the boston science museum harvard medical school and harvard's david rockefeller center he graduated from harvard with both a bachelor's and an mba both with honors now in terms of the form that we're going to use tonight i'm going to ask juan a variety of questions to really get at some of these important issues in his views and then we will go to slido for a moderated q a so if you've got a question you'd like to post go to slido.com slido.com and enter in the event code tnsje so for technology and society one enriquez tnsje you can either enter your own question or you can upvote an existing one and all endeavor to pose the most uh popular questions so one first of all a big welcome it's great to have you with us well thank you so much i have don't have anything to say after that introduction wonderful well you know i looked at the number of questions i've got in my own mind and this could have been an eight-hour session so my biggest challenge is to get this all in less than an hour and i want to start because we're on tech in society to start with genomics um you know you've been very involved in the human genome project you wrote the book as the future catches you how genomics and other forces change life work health and wealth um tell us about the human genome project tell us about the opportunities here both for individuals societies uh etc so i wrote that book in 1995 and not everybody was familiar with the word genomics as they are today and not everybody was as familiar with dna back then so it seemed like an absolute obscure subject um but it turns out to be one of these things that people like to focus on more and more every year and i guess the way i'd explain it i i missed the boat when i was in college because i had a couple of classmates who were working on this you know strange ability to string together ones and zeros and what they were saying is um you know you can collapse every word written and spoken in english in the ones and zeros and you can collapse every image and you can collapse every bit of music and this is going to be really powerful and of course because i was focused on mexico and politics and changing mexico and cleaning it up and making it less violent less corrupt i paid no attention to science i paid no attention to this digital stuff and if i paid attention to it you know those two guys were steve ballmer and bill gates and they ended up making some difference in the world so once i realized i missed the boat on that then i started meeting a series of people who looked a little bit like walmart gates except they were scientists and the argument that we're making is all life is based on four letters of dna and if you string those letters in particular orders they will execute life code and so let's let me put that in very simplistic terms imagine for a second that you're holding an orange in your hand and the orange drops to the ground and and it begins to execute code but it's not like ones and zero code it's a a t c a a g and that means make me a little root and then gtca make me a little stem and then gca make me some leaves make me some flowers and then make me some more oranges and so what you've got is every orange has seeds in it that are a little bit like computer programs except that they make orange trees and the fascinating thing about this code is just as you can edit the sounds in english or you can edit a bit of music you can edit that orange and substitute aac a for tcga y g and and that will make an orange a grapefruit or if you put in gca it'll make that orange a lemon or a lime and and it's the same thing with human beings everybody listening to us today um differs from everybody else by about one in a thousand letters so if you shift 1000 letters then you become somebody else just be very careful who that is so what are the opportunities you see in this what are the implications what are the opportunities what will it do for individuals in society so i think this is a particularly important topic for a business school because you know if somebody had said the biggest company in the world is going to be a minute subcontractor of what at that point was the dominant tech company ibm people said what are you talking about right i mean there's there's no way that ibm is going to be overtaken but you know microsoft stock went up by about 214 000 from when it launched and ibm did okay but you know it was in the hundreds percent not in the hundreds of thousands percent and so the argument that i'm making is that how we make things and where we make things is going to shift fundamentally and between the time that you and i were in college and today we went from almost no digital code to 98 99 of the information in the world being digital code and something very similar is going to happen in the future you're going to start using life code to make almost everything else and there's one great big difference with digital code and that is this software makes its own hardware so no matter how you program you know one of these silly things next to your bed you're not going to have a billion of these things in the morning but if you program bacteria then you'll have a billion or 10 billion and let me make that anecdote a little bit more specific for our audience if i were to ask you who is the most public what is the most published book across all history and all time in all languages you know depending on where you are you get different answers there are some audiences that will tell you the bible there are some audiences that will tell you the quran there might be some audiences that would say fifty shades of grey and they would all be wrong the most published book across time is a book by harvard medical school professor called george church and it's called regenesis and the reason why is because in the same way as you can take any word that we are saying and put it into ones and zeros you can take the four letters of dna and put them into ones and zeros so if you say a equals zero zero t equals one one g equals one zero and c equals one one you can tie any letter in digital code to life code and so what george did is he wrote his book into a bacteria and the bacteria reproduced a billion times so his first addition was a billion copies and and you can literally hold the entire library of congress in about a teaspoon of dna and so this stuff really scales and and makes stuff in in a way which is very hard to understand and where what applications do you see here disease eradication what do you see as the art of the possible as an outcome here we'll see as soon as you know how life code operates you can begin to design it so the the first vaccines against codewood were designed in about nine days and the rest of it was testing and the rest of it was making sure it was the right code making sure you could scale it making sure you go through regulatory approvals but but the ability to to write life code for vaccines we're beginning to build on that you know i helped found a company that's now called codex which basically is a desktop laser printer except it prints living things it prints cells that are programmed to do stuff and so we're not that far away from having the gene code for every known fluke bird pig human whatever and being able to plug that into a printer that will print a vaccine as an airplane is flying so it will land with a mate vaccine or it will fax a vaccine to your house and it'll print the vaccine and and that stuff what ventricles biology at the speed of light is is not that far off and that's just the first stage of this where another company that i helped start is now programming algae to make fuels but there's no reason why that algae can't be programmed to make proteins or to make oils and so what you can do is you can cut the agricultural footprint of oil producing plants or of protein producing plants by 100 fold or more and you know you could give back half the amazon and produce the same as everything that you cut down and burn um so you can make textiles of this stuff you can store information in this stuff you can think of it as a second industrial revolution except it's living machines making whatever the hell machines make today yep and i assume it goes without saying that there are risks if this is misused misapplied etc but the gains as you've just given a couple of examples are massive and far outweigh the risk because is that fair to say that in that in that way so you know it it used to cost you know billion dollars to sequence the human genome that costs about 400 these cost curves are moving faster than moore's law means we cannot build computers fast enough to store the information in triage which means one of the biggest single drivers of it scaling today is life sciences and and so as you're thinking about the stuff and thinking about the implications of this stuff we're in this period where we are distributing the power to understand life read life map life edit life and scale life and in you know strictly scientific terms that's called sometimes a bfd this this this is something that changes a lot of stuff and and so as you're thinking about that the ethics and the distribution of this stuff it becomes really important not to get into fights with people who have a lot less to lose than you do it becomes really important not to leave huge swaths of the world behind and angry it becomes really important not to polarize each other and spend a couple of billion dollars convincing 51 that the other 49 are hideous creatures that you never want to associate with that is a very destructive thing to a country to a society and possibly to our own life styles excellent excellent let me uh drill down on a related topic here about synthetic life forms so you did a tech talk in 2019 about the age of genetic wonder and you talked about the first synthetic life form tell us what that entails and again implications on this short term long term etc so if you take this notion that life is code seriously then what you want to do is you want to build the first chips the first transistors and so one night after a great italian meal in virginia and a few scotches four of us started really thinking seriously about could we ever build a cell and take the entire gene code out of that cell and insert a new gene code and make that cell of different species in other words could you take all the code out of something and reboot it as something else and you know it took us about 30 million dollars and almost a decade but we got it done and that was science discovery of the year that was a cover of science and nature and the economist and the wall street journal and yada yada and it you know it's it's a classic case of amaro's law every new technology tends to be overestimated to begin with and underestimated in the long term and you know when somebody built the first transistor you know it was important but didn't look that big when somebody built the first ships it was important but it didn't change our lives and and now of course you know ships are everything i mean just try to talk to an industry that can't get a shipment of chips cars um something very similar is happening in life but it's happening a lot faster so we can now build the chips we can now program the chips they're living and they scale and it's not quite at your neighborhood drugstore yet but uh pretty much everybody who's listening is going to have their industry overturned by the ability to program life code and i don't say that lightly actually what what is the implication of that maybe give us the best of and worst of that well i mean the best of is you know it gets very complicated because once once you can print stuff like chemicals or or once you can print cells or once you can print biotech and i want to stress we're not there yet but once we get there it changes everything and let me put in terms of you know those of us who are getting a little bit older and have a little bit of white hair occasionally we worry about our bodies and our bodies falling apart and you know the solution is you go and you get a titanium knee or you get you know some sort of screws because you broke whatever the fascinating thing about the human body is there's big chunks of the human body that are programmed to regenerate so if you burn your skin you know all right fair enough it hurts but you regrow your skin if you break a bone you know younger ages especially it just regrows if you you know lose part of your stomach your stomach's constantly remaking itself because of the acid so here's the part that's really interesting each of your 10 trillion cells contains your entire gene code with the exception of some blood cells and and what that means is the full human genome code to make every part of your body is in every cell in your body it's in your hands it's in your muscles it's in your stomach it's in your eyes it's in your throat and and what we're learning how to do is not just to read the human genome code we're learning how to execute the genome code this happens when you're a child you are born with no teeth you grow a full set of teeth you lose all those teeth you give them a tooth fairy and then you regrow a set of teeth now the fascinating thing about that is huh so your body knows how to make a full set of teeth it's done so twice why do most of us not regrow teeth unless if we become lawyers or sharks right and and if you know how to do it twice why can't you do it a third time and the answer is you can so if you go to the harvard school industry or you know schools of dentistry near you you're going to find that there's a whole series of people working on taking your cells and regrowing your own teeth you're going to find that there's a whole series of people working on regrowing your tracheas or regrowing parts of your heart and we're not at the stage where the complex organs are being implanted but we're getting damn close on tracheas cartilage um bladders you know all those things are starting to get implanted and and so if you project that forward 10 years what's going to start happening is just the same way as you redo your house and you redo the windows in your house or you redo the living room or you put in a new fridge you're going to start doing that with your knee and eventually you're going to do it with your heart and with your lungs and your stomach and and you know how to do that because you've already built two knees you've already built two kidneys right so there's no reason why your body if given the right instruction shouldn't be able to do it again and so this is just a really interesting time yeah what are the implications one is this immortality kind of taking it to its full conclusion so it's not immortality so the reason why i switched to synthetic neurobiology research six years ago out of genomics after you know a few decades is because that's where the that's where the barriers so i'm pretty sure that we're going to be able to remake all of our body parts in the next few decades you know you want a new heart okay we'll do it you want a new liver fortunately we'll do it you can keep having reunions um the part that's the limitation is the brain because until you can remake the brain and implant the brain and download the memories all these people who are telling you that human longevity is going to increase massively no they're not right you've got a life span limit of 120 130 years really stretch it maybe 140 maybe 150. but until you can remake the brain and the way you can remake your the other organs in your body and download the memories there's a limit on longevity and immortality then you get into some really weird questions right and the experiments get gruesome and very strange very fast imagine for a second that you have mickey mouse and minnie mouse and you swap the heads so you put minnie mouse's head on mickey mouse right you know gruesome experiment but the questions that you could answer are really interesting questions and they're questions that aren't dissimilar to the first heart transplants where some of the surgeons would bring the wife or kids of the donor into the room and ask the recipient of the heart transplant do you recognize these people do you feel anything for these people and the reason was because for you know tens of thousands of years i gave her my heart she took my heart he broke my heart i lost my heart i gave my heart so so as human beings what we've done is we we've taken this muscle and we told each other that emotion was transmitted with that muscle that love was transmitted that muscle and it turned out not to be true okay now ask the same question about these two mice does minnie mouse still recognize and love mickey mouse does that mouse still remember how to navigate a maze does that mouse know what it's afraid of does that mouse know what it likes and if the answer is you can take these memories from this body and put them on this body that has absolutely massive implications because it means that memories can be transplanted from one body to another and then the second part of that thing which is really complicated is is the only input output system for those memories a body and then things get very weird very fast right um and you know there's all kinds of stuff going on right now in brain research that is just at the bleeding edge and and that's why i shifted careers because i think that's where the most interesting stuff is these days yeah fascinating fascinating let me get to some other topics here because each of these is kind of spawning more questions we've got a whole bunch of questions already from the audience let me get into the area of technology and ethics one of your latest uh books and one of the comments and i'm going to ask you a couple of questions here but one is explain your broad view about technology and ethics and what affects what and then you make a comment in your book about um ethics are not static they're not absolutist they're dynamic in nature say a bit more on that as well so let me if there's a whole lot of people who were taught you know by religion or by government or by their parents or by people they res they most respect that there's a right and a wrong and it's almost like a white statue it's pristine it's marble it never changes every time you look at it it's the same statue and that is a bunch of molars and and so we are a very adaptable species and and we kid ourselves on how often right and wrong changes so i'll give you a couple examples it used to be normal natural legal and expected in fact the survival of the society depended on sacrificing a lot of human beings because otherwise the rain wouldn't come otherwise the sun wouldn't shine otherwise the society wouldn't survive and we look at that today and we say who were these savages okay fast forward that it wasn't that long ago before the state and the dominant religion used to torture people as long as possible and then burn them in town squares because they differed from our faith or they questioned our faith and you know these were public acts in you know the plazas of madrid and we look at that we kind of go who were these people i mean how dare you do that fast forward a little bit main you know plazas in paris used to hold public executions with guillotines and hold up the heads to children as part of the rule of law as part of showing what you do to bad people as part of what you do with bad government and we look at that again and we say who were these people but of course it was normal natural part of the rule of law at that stage and expected the point of all this is a lot of stuff that was legal and expected and right in commas is today looked at and we kind of go what were you think where it gets complicated is it's not just that ethics change it's the technology is becoming a bigger and bigger change agent in ethics becoming 180 degrees different and so if you believe ethics changes over time if you believe that technology can change ethics and if you believe that technology is moving at ever faster speeds the logical conclusion of that is what we think is right and wrong is going to flip 180 degrees more and more and let me bring a couple examples home again to people who are a little bit older on this call imagine a time machine that brings your grandparents back they're 21 years old you're having a glass of wine with them and you're talking about the birds and the beast and of course it's an uncomfortable conversation it's you know it's grandpa grandma you know they're hot 21 year olds and they're happy to talk about it the first thing you tell them that would really freak them out is we can now consistently have sex and not have a child and yes birth control existed back when they were there except it was illegal for everybody but married people and even then it was frowned upon and it wasn't consistent so the notion that you can have an act with no consequences it was completely alien then comes the second part where you say and oh by the way i'm going to have a year abroad my hubby is going to stay home and we're going to conceive a child using ivf and and they're going to scratch their heads i'm going to say ivf so did i just understand that you're going to be on one continent your partner is going to be on another continent you're never going to have physical contact and you're going to conceive a child and so you've now separated act consequence from physical contact and that used to be called the immaculate conception and then you talk to them about oh by the way i'm also going to have cancer treatments and so therefore i'm going to freeze my eggs i'm going to have a surrogate mother and i can now have identical twins born 10 years apart and so now you've separated sex and consumption from time right and and all of us on this call we may agree with it we may not agree with it but it's not something that is miraculous and you know against everything that i ever believed in and completely wrong for most of us now imagine the same conversation going forward your 60 year old grandchildren bring you back and begin to talk about the birds and the bees with you and what they do with gene editing and how children are born and what children look like do you think it's going to look anything like what it looks like today do you understand how much what they take for granted is going to freak us out as what are you talking about i would never do that um and and so things change and they change very very quickly and businesses often get caught in the stuff because they're teaching that this stuff doesn't change and it does change and it changes very fast 1997 two-thirds of the united states was against gay marriage 1997 and and today it's probably not very good for your company to take that public position just saying so one the implications are our children grandchildren great gen grandchildren will look at us and say you didn't do things right any any examples you'd raise if you were to guess you know 50 years from now 100 years now people look back on our generation what would they what will they criticize us on how long do we have um that's that's why you know some of these debates criticizing people in the past or founding fathers or authors of little house on the prairie everything else you have to distinguish between two things is what they did right no it's not it can't be justified should they be judged as harshly as we would judge anybody today doing the same thing no because they were taught different right by their parents by their peers by their preachers by their doctors by their lawyers by their government and if you or i have been 14 years old living in charleston south carolina and have been taught by richard furman who was the leading preacher of his day or had been taught by jeremy aryan sims who was the founder of gynecology or had been taught by mr cooper who was an oxford don who came and ran the university of south carolina and went from being an abolitionist to being an architect of secession you know the chances that we would have known what to do that was right like some of the very brave people who did take a stand that was not a two-thirds majority that was a very very small segment of society and it is great arrogance to say well i wouldn't have done that maybe right but boy you would have had to be the 0.01 or the 1 of that society that realized just how wrong this was at the time so i think in this whole debate about how we treat each other and how we judge each other destroying each other because of a single stupid comment a joke something we did a costume we wore 20 years ago something stupid we wrote 20 years ago or a month ago is a really dangerous thing to do because we're going to be caught off base and and we need to bring back in this debate some you know the other person i may not agree to that person i may think that person is fundamentally wrong but the fundamental question is is that a decent human being and not is that the other because right now we are really judgmental we've forgotten two words humility and forgiveness we tend to stereotype people who disagree with our views on an ever-increasing bunch of topics forgetting that if we were caught in a snowstorm in the hinterlands of whatever and you went and you knocked on any door that person would likely let you in would likely offer you a warm drink would likely try and fix your car and would likely try and get you back on the road or call a mechanic or something out of a sheer basic human decency that person wouldn't open the snowstorm door and say are you a this are you a that tell me what you believe about x they would try and help you right and we forget that humanity in each other in in these battles we spend two billion dollars every cycle convincing one half that the other half you know baby killers or fascists or this or that what we have to understand about this stuff is the world is really good at ripping nations apart there are three times more flags borders and anthems in europe today than there were a century ago and there's still questions as to whether scotland stays corsica and southern finland northern italy the basques the catalans it goes on and on do we really want to rip great nations to pieces yep and and you know boy some of the stuff i wrote this book the untied states of america in 1998 and said look folks be really careful subtitles polarization fracturing in our future and it wasn't meant to be a how-to it was meant to be a warning yeah and one on this topic of technology driving ethics and the bad behavior etc when you look at companies like facebook and god they've been in the news so much i just interviewed roger mcnamee last week etc is facebook and and obviously they've done a lot of great stuff but the worst of facebook whatever you believe that is is that a living example of your point that it's created this giant echo chamber that has accelerated divisiveness and judgmental views and a whole bunch of other bad stuff yeah there's no question it has done stuff that's really awful it has also allowed groups that could never talk to each other to come together and not just groups that are groups that are like it comes back to the basic notion of humanity there's a whole bunch of people who may believe stuff that's different from what you and i believe what's really dangerous about this debate is when you stereotype 49 of the population as the other you begin to do things that ethically are absolutely indefensible so everybody on this call knows the horrible instances of japanese internment in world war ii right it's just drum ninjas and you know they took japanese families japanese american families and they put them in concentration camps and you know how dare they have done that okay fair enough what the hell is wrong with us that we allowed over the past few years for families that came across without papers they didn't pick the right parents to not only be placed in prisons with an indefinite term but to deliberately separate the children and lose them right and somehow as a society we thought hey um well yeah that's going on but when you criticize the past and when you criticize what was happening in the past you know i hope most of you did something when they started taking children and losing them from their parents because that's the kind of stuff that the brazilian hometown did that's the stuff that the argentine generals did that's the stuff that pinochet did and they would deliberately take the children of people they disagreed with or who they considered radicals and lose the children and put them up for adoption with military families and the parents would never find them again if they survived that is not something i ever expected to see in the united states yeah ever i thought those lessons will work and and somehow when we when we make the person the other you get back to voltaire those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities yeah and and by not isolating the half percent or the 0.1 that is truly evil by
putting those people together with 50 we forget the basic humanity in one another and and that's where you rip apart nations let me ask you one we got a whole bunch of questions i want to make sure we get to them let me ask you one other question on this topic and then we'll go to the the audience questions you know you've made a fairly compelling argument that technology and the rate of change has affected our ethics let me ask you the opposite direction for for a second about where ethics um has either had a good effect or bad effect on technology and i'm thinking of the the somewhat active debate going on between mark zuckerberg and mark benioff mark bettinghof founder ceo of salesforce who will regularly say if you're not guiding your organization by a north star you're going to do horrible stuff and we'll talk he talks about his north star and how that drives a lot of the actions of salesforce and said listen um facebook does not have a north star you know growing at all costs is not doing that is is there not an example that is the mark betting off example that said listen if you had quote-unquote ethics if you thought about things in a thoughtful way and weren't pointing out the other and doing all these other that you would then drive technology-based product services and companies in better directions do you buy that or you know that's kind of the exception to the rule not the not the rule you know what you and i were taught in business school is so completely different from what a ceo has to do today so if you look at the edelman you know global barometer it's not just the us phenomenon all of a sudden business is seen as the only big institution that is both ethical and effective ngos are seen as more ethical than business but less effective and government is seen as not very ethical not very effective and the consequence of that is again in this poll that and it's a global poll that 68 of people think that ceos are responsible for pushing societal change and a similar number think that the ceo should act before government forces anybody to act because ceos are responsible for societal change and so when you think of you know what we were taught you know the milton friedman stuff and shareholder and that's who you're responsible right you are now a substitute government because government's so ineffective you are now supposed to be the leader in terms of achieving ethnic equality ethnic opportunity access to wealth and power for people who haven't had it you know there's a whole bunch of societal engineering which is now dropped into a ceo's life and and so the chances for a ceo to make the wrong comment to do the wrong policy to ally with the wrong people to give a donation to people that somebody else is going to get very upset about those things have become astronomically important and you can make and unmake a brand in an afternoon through a tweet through something you say because this whole humility and forgiveness that just ain't everybody wants to punish they're not in a forgiving mood right now this is this is a very angry polarized society and the consequence of that in a society that is highly armed and weaponized is really dangerous right this this is not a trend that we want to push so i love the idea of celebrating people like the founder of patagonia people like the founder of chobani i think we're seeing more and more examples of people who are doing well on doing good and there's some very hard questions for econ economists and capitalists out there and and of course as venture capitalists i'm in this right i'm not excusing myself i'm not saying this in the abstract but when you and i were taught economics it was the allocation of scarce resources and now all of a sudden we're in a situation where we've got an abundance in fact extra you name it antibiotics aspirin textiles computer whatever i mean you know put the supply chain stuff aside right now we have enough for everybody in the world at a basic level and then you get into really complicated questions like should a few dozen people concentrate 49 of the wealth on the planet is that okay how about 60 how about 80 percent at what stage do we begin to and and there's more and more people who i haven't been as lucky as you and i who are really angry about the system yep and reacting to the system in a very nasty way and i think we ignore that anger at our peril because i think the ethics on who has what and how much are going to shift and i think are going to shift very radically fascinating okay let me ask a few questions we've got a whole bunch of questions here i'm going to start out martin and quite a few other people that upvoted this are you concerned about genetic modification in humans it could increase inequality the wealthy could modify their children to be super humans how does that movie play out and how concerned are you on that uh yes and yes and no so let me unpack that um thinking of that example of grandparents thinking about sex there was a really stupid incident by a chinese doctor who modified the genome of two babies to avoid getting aids and he did it without the right overview he did it without the right supervision he did it without the you know controls in place to make the thing safe without enough informed consent make a long story short law school-sized laboratory destroyed scientist ends up in jail big scam that same story in 20 or 30 or 50 years may end up very different you may have a conversation with your kids or grandkids where they say why were you so backward that you didn't bother to edit out the genes that gave me cancer why did you leave me with a k-ras g why did you leave me with a p-53 why did you leave me with a bracket why were you so primitive because as as the price of gene editing gets faster better cheaper and safer what seems to us a yuck which i agree with we shouldn't be editing babies especially at this stage may end up being something that is normal natural and expected for two generations the second point which i think was really interesting is if you're going to modify longevity in a serious way and if you're ever going to live on mars or anywhere else you really have to think about engineering and things like radiation resistance right it just doesn't work without you know a dinococcus radioduran's type genes allows these things to do the backstroke and nuclear reactors and the amount of you know sheer radiation that you're exposed to in space means that your dna were replicating mechanisms haven't adapted to that and that's going to require some really serious engineering if we're ever going to leave this planet now you can agree or disagree as to whether we should that's a different debate excellent excellent good another question this is from jorge and against several others thinking about legal implications of printing biotech cells and rewriting a genomic code who regulates this how does this work on a global basis i spent most of the morning debating that with a lot of people who were a lot smarter than i um there's a national academy study right now thinking about how you regulate emerging technologies in medicine and that is a front and center question and we've been working on that for two years um i think rule number one you're transparent when we did that first synthetic genome we asked every major religion in and told them what we were going to do and asked them to study it for a year we took every security agency and brought them in and said look this is coming we brought in a whole bunch of business leaders and said this is coming so people knew for four or five years before that was sprung on but this was coming and the consequence of practicing open science is that the science discovery of the year was basically the vatican and a bunch of other religions and the security agencies and the white house came out within 72 hours of the announcements that we're okay with and and that's because we spent five years telling people what controls you want in place how do you want us to do it what do you want us to do what don't you want us to do how far do we go and that that kind of societal debate is going to be incredibly important in building trust in building security in getting technologies adopted the arrogance of i'm going to do this because i can do it and i'm not going to tell you bad idea not the way to do science excellent let me ask one last question and then i want to do a wrap up and then we can get to our uh the breakouts um on the social networks right now and everything we're living through with facebook etc how do you envision free societies managing and mitigating the toxic effects of social media what should the government do or society do i'm going to say something which i found to be very unexpected when i researched untied states and i said 98 that's wrong it was 88. one of the most interesting countries in the world is canada and that's not a phrase you often hear unless if you're talking about hockey or a couple of other things and the reason why canada is so interesting is because it came so close to splitting right it was just so close to being french and british and the maritimes almost became part of the united states or an independent country in 1949 and that vote was really close and and what you've seen canada do time and again is to take some very deep-seated divisions that are historical divisions and and be able somehow to restitch the country back together in in a in a very humanitarian way and what you're seeing them do right now which is brilliant is when hong kong first announced it was going to leave the british sphere the canadian consul in hong kong basically went out and gave out passports with no requirement of residency to the smartest and most entrepreneurial people you could find in hong kong and and that's the reason why vancouver today has the highest degree of patents in universities in canada that's the reason why it's one of the most vibrant real estate markets that's the reason why when you come out of the airport in vancouver you see just this strip of stuff as you go over that first bridge that looks like hong kong i mean the degree of entrepreneurship in that migration okay now fast forward that to the last few years in the united states while the united states was adopting a immigrants are rapists and murderers posture canada basically went out and just sucked a lot of the brains that used to go to google that used to go to facebook they used to go into the national laboratories that won 50 percent of the us nobel prizes and said come here and you watch what happens in canada over the next 10 years because they have a community that is very good at adopting immigrants adopting different cultures doing so very quietly doing so in a non-confrontational way mean you don't have big problems in canada but it means that's a country that when you look to how do you restitute society really interesting country fascinating one let me do this i always like at the end of every session to share a few of my own takeaways so you can uh upgrade them or share any final comments you've got um you know first of all i gotta start out and just say i always kind of think about the people that speak and you know i interview them and what defines them your ability to think laterally and expansively is just very impressive because i look at the range of things that we covered and the rationale so several things that uh to me uh came out of this um the discussion on genomics and writing life code that can drive biology at the speed of light and what this opportunity can create if harnessed uh uh well the second point and it's a broader one about technology technology is overestimated in the short term underestimated in the long term and it's a little bit of a beware message you know we tend to look at early failures early challenges and then kind of pooh-pooh it and we don't see the long-term trajectory of the the technology um a third area here about synthetic life forms redoing the body you know uh that can create um not immortality but certainly much longer life and much better uh health health outcomes fourth area ethics are not static and a lot of what you talk about is make sure we look at context and what's going on uniquely with an individual a community of society that might have driven decisions as opposed to looking at things in the abstract that may get a more static look at uh at ethics your view about technology changing ethics which is kind of countered a lot of how a lot of people refer to it technology is becoming a bigger and bigger change agent in our lives and thus in uh in our our ethics and then a bunch of kind of personal warnings about how we look at one another avoid stereotyping avoid judging don't make the other person the bad person it's very easy to kind of go down that trail and actually your canadian example is one of you know good outcomes you get if you don't behave about the the other guy um the idea about business people and are they becoming a substitute government and interestingly a bit of a warning that that may not be a sustainable model and get get government and our system working better and don't completely punt on on business people and then the final thought is again it gets back to this kind of it i always think about people's mental map how they think about things and you've transcended so many boundaries and borders but your message about think about the problem you're trying to solve how big is that problem and how great is it before you get to all the negative things of what needs to be stopped think about knock-on effects so what can that lead to think about the context broadly you're operating in and then form your views as opposed to starting with all these truisms and and self held beliefs about things and letting all that kind of guide how we look at the world those are the things i took away your upgrades on that or other thoughts parting thoughts better than i've ever said thank you okay okay hey juan just a massive thank you you know i said you know you're lateral in your thinking and you're expansive and that couldn't be a better set of of learnings and style for us to start the the conference with um let me thank you we're gonna go to zoom breakouts and juan and i are going to roam around each of the zoom breakouts um you're going to see the link to the zoom breakouts in the chat feature so just look at that and click on that to get to the breakouts and then again tomorrow we're going to have hybrid format 9 a.m to 1 p.m both in person and remote for a tomorrow's session thank you all and we'll be seeing you in the virtual assessions juan thank you huge thank you thank you
2021-11-19 20:03
