Name: CEO Initiative 2019: Former Hacker Reveals His Latest Project
Uploaded: 2019-06-11
Duration: 21 min 12 s
Description: A former hacker, Pablos Holman shares some of his latest mind-blowing projects and reveal why, in order to greet the automated future, we’ll need to become better humans.

Let's see if you can find yourself on this chart. So this is the history of humans on planet earth. Not very many of us about 160, 000 years ago, you get the first Homo sapiens and it's just thousands, 100s of thousands, millions. Not really until the last few hundred years, did we hit that hockey stick growth curve and go from millions to billions? almost overnight. So, what happened? Well, what happened is along the way, We invented solutions to the hard technical problems that kept humans from thriving. How do you feed all those people? Give them jobs, give them homes, eradicate the disease that's killing them off. To know about 400 million people died of smallpox. Before we invented vaccination people think it was government policy or religion or charity or some election but in fact it's new technology. That is the force multiplier that gives us. The ability to solve these problems at scale is the exponent in your equation. But there's one thing all these extra humans are good for. It's making more problems. So our job, literally our job in this room is to figure out how are we going to invent On that scale. At one point, we thought it might be wise to try and come up with a backup planet in case this doesn't work out. So I started this lab. This company for Jeff Bezos called Blue Origin a long time ago. Just kind of the first time in human history. The individuals got wealthy enough that they could try and have their own space program. Which sounds crazy, but it's a sign of the times like one of the things that comes with affluence, is this ability to start worrying about problems that you don't have, right? For the first time humans are wealthy enough that we can start worrying about generations to come. thousand years in the future, all right? It's not something you can worry about if you're trying to put food on the table. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] And the I built this lab for Nathan Melvolt, it's called intellectual Ventures Lab. And we basically just bought one of every tool in the world, hired one of everyone of every kind of scientist, put them on the same team and the started trying to go after the biggest problems that we could find. And see if we could invent new technologies. That's kind of a weird business with invention you're just wrong. Almost all the time. It's the kind of business where like you need a garage and a crazy hair and a DeLorean. And your gonna get a few inventions a year and most of them aren't gonna work out. At our scale, we get 500 inventions a year and so out of that we hope one of them pays for all the failures. We have a batting average of 1. And you know what, in any other business that would sound crazy but in arts it's a hits business and it works. So here's some hits. Enough police defends he takes almost a million lives a year, spreading malaria in Sub Saharan Africa and other diseases. This is the most dangerous animal on earth, not sharks, not snakes, not spiders. Actually the person sitting next to you is a close second, watch out for them. Yeah, this is the low hanging fruit in global health right now. So we thought it's be funny to try and find those mosquitos, and shoot them down with laser beams. So that's what that looks like. She's not coming back. It's okay you guys, you can laugh. You can kill as many mosquitos as you want. Not even Peter cames to save them. [ LAUGH ] [ LAUGH ] Here we vaporized her wing off. At one point we're overdoing it with a little bit too big of a laser. So here we vaporize an entire bug. It's very satisfying work if you can get it. I mean I don't know what you guys are doing at work but [ LAUGH ] Yeah. So malaria is insidious. You know you have a parasite living in a red blood cell. The diagnostic for it is a human counting cells in a microscope. It's like they're trying to find a quarter in a football field and they get 20 minutes to do it. It's hard. Most countries are lucky to have one person who's any good at it. We invented this thing. It's an automated microscope, using machine vision. It can look at that blood sample, and it now outperforms the best humans on Earth. In fact, it's been doing that for about five years. This is the kind of thing that's easy for us. It's not necessarily easy for you if you are dying of malaria in Africa. We invented a new antenna technology that could be used, it's part of 5G but we can use it to get gigabit wireless to everyone on Earth. We invented this pretty simple device really. It's a giant tube, you stick it in the ocean and as waves crush over the top and it's like an artificial beach. It pumps the hot water from the top down to the cold water below and mixes it up And it brings the surface temperature down just a couple degrees. And that's enough to turn Cat 5 hurricanes into Cat 4 or Cat 3. All right, we invented a new type of nuclear reactor that's powered by nuclear waste. What a lot of people don't realize is today's Reactors were all designed before we were born with pencils and slide rules. We designed these reactors using giant super computers with computational models. We knew what every neutron's going to do before we ever build it. The other thing people don't realize is those reactors we have deployed today Are 0. 7 % efficient, yeah. If you had a can of depleted uranium the size of a Coors Light, sorry, did I offend somebody from, wait. I know we have a beer guy here. I forget which beer guy. [ INAUDIBLE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] That's enough energy in one can to power you for our entire lifetime It's so energy dense, but we're only getting 0. 7 % out. Our reactors can get the rest of that energy out. This is a stock pile in [ UNKNOWN ], Kenturcky, 700, 000 metric tonnes of depleted uranium sitting on the surface of the earth. We're saving it for our grandkids, maybe they'l figure out how to make [ UNKNOWN ] out of it or something, all right? With this one stock pile in our reactors, se could power the entire planet including growth for about the next thousand years. We don't even need to mine uranium. Right? We can do better but we've got to try on these things. And the truth is We're not really trying this tech industry that we're all excited about it's mostly a software industry right enterprise software iPhone apps the potential for humans to use technology to solve our problems to advance ourselves into the world. Is so much greater than iPhone apps. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] See if you can find yourself on this chart. Yeah maybe in the blue part or the red part. Doesn't really matter. On your worst day girlfriend left you. Lost your job, iPhone battery is dead, [ LAUGH ] you're still in the top 14 % globally. That's not so bad, it's like being a lottery winner. You won one lottery by getting to be human, which, you know, for a mammal is pretty good. Only thing coming after you is mosquitoes .>> [ LAUGH ] Reproductive process is fairly enjoyable. One a second lottery by getting to be American, which, assuming you've got $ 400 saved for an emergency, you're doing amazing. Most people are trying to live their lives like they gotta win that third lottery Right. I think what this means is that the world just kind of over invested in us, right? More money's been spent on me. More education has been spent on me more jet fuels been spent on me. So I should probably do what I'm uniquely good for. World probably doesn't need me. Sowing in a factory dungeon, all right? Maybe I can contribute something more. If you have an iPhone in your pocket, the cost to that thing is equivalent to the global median income. I'm not trying to make you feel bad, I've got Piles of these things lots of them with the screws taken out because trying to figure out what else I can make out of these parts .>> [ LAUGH ] You should have an iPhone, you should drive a Tesla, you should do all these expensive things that we get to do first because it's our job. To advance these technologies into the world, to waste a lot of money on them and figure out. What's good about them but then understand that the job isn't done just because we made a product for rich people. Then the job is to take on a problem that you don't have. That a billion people have. That's harder. Here's an example. This woman is Pac and $ 25, 000 worth of vaccines. Into a crummy two dollar Styrofoam cooler and she's going to truck him out into the bush. Start injecting kids, about half of those vaccinations are gonna fail. And they fail because it too stay cold. There's no detection for that, so we're injecting kids anyway. Every year a quarter million kids die. Something they were vaccinated against. We did. Part of the work we went through the motions we spent the money we put the people there we injected a kid to vaccinate him and didn't work. You know why no refrigerator. Your kids don't have this problem. My kid doesn't have this problem. We have refrigerators and power. The power is out for to 16 hours a day in these places. So we invented this thing. It's a kind of super thermos. You put vaccines in there. Stick it in the sunshine in the Sahara. No external power has no power cord. Come back a couple months later and your vaccines will still be cold This is literally the deployment scenario, is strap this R2D2 looking thing to a camel, walk for days into rural Ethiopia, set up a clinic, which is a fancy word for a tree with a doctor under it, and this thing, injecting kids. That's the front lines of vaccination. This is how we save. Millions of lives here all right? That's the work that has to be done. It's probably worth a little extra effort if you get these folks good tools all right? It wasn't that hard for us, the team that work on it did a lot of work. They did, you know, they worked hard on it. But I've got a lab full of PhD's in physics and chemistry and biology. It's comparatively easy for us, compared to that guy. Probably, I don't know what his educational background is, but chances are, the world invested more in us than him. Right? We can do better on these things but not with enterprise software. That you know Styrofoam cooler they use today is only good for 4 hours. So for the entire history of humanity we've had this sort of innovation methodology. Biological evolution. And that's actually how you got opposable thumbs and two eyes and the ability to appreciate music right? Through, successive generations of sex and gamma rays. We've got variations and mutations and then Survival of the fittest, you kill of the one's that don't work as well, that's how we got here and, it's amazing. It works so well but, once we got to the top we killed off the very mechanism that got us here. You used to just have to die to innovate. Now, you got to use your brain To innovate. We don't actually know if this is gonna work. For the first time. Biological evolution isn't doing the job for humans anymore everybody gets to live regardless of their fitness. At some point you gotta ask yourself. Do we need all these extra humans? Now don't get me wrong. I'm not going to tell you which humans are extra. Actually if you want that job you should probably be the first to go, okay. It's the most beautiful and amazing thing we've ever done We overcame a biological instinct, we chose the sanctity of human life, we chose to let everybody live, right? That's extraordinary, I think we made the right choice, but it doesn't come without a cost, right? Up until about 100 years ago maybe with the industrial revolution I think everybody just had to work all the time, To keep us going, right. But at some point we got efficient enough, that we got a little bit of spare time. And I don't think we were, you know we didn't squander it, we were industrious we invented the entertainment industry. Books, movies, music, elections, video games all the things that we do to fill our free time. We're very industrious. But at some point, I think we hit peak entertainment, right? At some point, maybe we don't need you to watch more Netflix. And something really important is about to happen, which is that robot is coming to take your job. Actually, you guys probably won't be that lucky. No robot is going to come and take your job. Unfortunately, you suckers are going to have to work until you're dead. Or you might get to retire a little and then play golf for a while before you're dead. But essentially, you're not going to be that lucky but lots of people who work for you will be lucky and a robot What common take over if not their job, at least a bunch of the work that they do right? And is really important to understand this right? I mean I know we are talking about this fantastical staff with artificial intelligence and what not, the truth is the only, there is only one thing you gotta know. Right. Computers for our whole lives were really good at following sequences of of instructions. If you could map out the plan, go from A to B to C, computers could do it, they've been doing that our whole careers. Now computers can figure that **** out for themselves. Right, so now they can do the things that we thought they'll never do. Right, and computers probably should, robots probably should come and take over any mini or dangerous, repetitive, boring job that they can do better than a human, right, but that leaves you with the big question, what are the humans good for? This is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So it's way of thinking about what humans need to feel fulfilled. I'm sure other people have beaten you over the head with this slide in the past. But look at the bottom of this pyramid. Think about where technology is helping. Physical needs, Breathing, food we have lots of technology reason to feed people warmth, sex with condoms in vibrators you know keep going. Things like health. All kinds of technology for that well we're at a point where. We're using technology to help us meet these needs. The bottom half of this pyramid is what I call quantity of life issues. We can keep you alive longer, we can make you healthier, we can keep more people alive but keep going. Friendship, Family, there's no app for that. Where's technology helping? Sexual intimacy, you're using technology for that? You're probably doing it wrong. [ LAUGH ] Self esteem, confidence, achievement, these are what I call quality of life issues. And I'm here from the front lines of inventing new technology to tell you we don't have any idea what to do about that stuff. We're not even working on it. Silicon Valley acts like we're solving every problem, nope, we're working on the bottom half of the pyramid, right? Now as [ UNKNOWN ] highest level Meaning in life, creativity, the things you need to feel happy. That's not stuff technology is currently helping with. These are the happiest people I know. You look around you you see a lot of people hurting. These are orphans in Ethiopia In their classroom. They've never heard of overcrowding. Look at this kid, you know anybody happier that him? [ LAUGH ] I don't pity this kids. They've got something we don't have. He knows exactly who needs him when he wakes up in the morning. Robots can only do what we teach them how to do. And right now we are terrible role models for robots. This is my daughter, she came from that orphanage in Ethiopia. And I immediately started raising her with a bunch of American problems. For example, we have this robot in our kitchen, called Alexa You guys know Alexa? I noticed she talks to Alexa kinda bossy like, Alexa, tell me a joke. Well, she talks to Alexa the way I talked to her. And I said, hey, there's gonna be a lot more robots coming. They're probably gonna need some friends. They also have very long memories, you might try to be a little nicer to Alexa, so she liked this idea and she would say hey Alexa please tell me a joke, which totally confuses Alexa cuz apparently she wasn't trained on respectful training data but listen, [ LAUGH ] You and I never got this manual. Right, these technology are coming and they're here to help us, right? They are here to help us and it's not a technology problem. If it's all goes south and we become pest for robots or [ UNKNOWN ] you don't get to blame the technology, you get to blame humans. For not choosing what to do with it. These are human values problems. And it's up to us to decide what future we wanna create, it's up to us to use these tools to become better ancestors. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Every tool is a hammer, I can smash your head with it, I can build you a home. Artificial intelligence is no different. That's what I had to share with you guys today. Thanks so much and I'm gonna jump off stage and you guys can run me out of town but hopefully, if you get to catch me afterwards I'd love to hear what's on your mind and if you think I'm full of ****, please tell me about that too. So thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

CEO Initiative 2019: Former Hacker Reveals His Latest Project

Tech

A former hacker, Pablos Holman shares some of his latest mind-blowing projects and reveal why, in order to greet the automated future, we’ll need to become better humans.