From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Humanity, having never faced any serious competition or whole-species-threats, feels relatively safe from existential events and cannot conceive any threats it may be creating.
My favourite question when evaluating a startup idea is, 'Is this from the future?' I'm not interested in your ideas about the future; I want to understand why you are living in it today. Why are you living in a different future right now than other people are?
There is a big black box of as-yet unimagined risk. Most of what now seem like the biggest risks to society were unknown one hundred years ago.
The only reason we are the master of anything today is because of our intelligence. We're not the strongest species on the planet. We're not the biggest, we're not the most resilient. We're quite fragile and in all honesty, without our intelligence, we're quite irrelevant. The reality is, when they are smarter than we are, it is wishful thinking that they will continue to be connected to us.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning.
Cultured meat can be very helpful. You can design them in such a way that they will have wonderful health benefits for the entire population. This is where exactly where we're going, but it doesn't have to, other producers might do something else.
For commercial markets, a shift to collaborative economies is not far behind, and businesses must change their thinking about the nature competition, defending value, and other strategies if they wish to grow in an uncertain future.
We're creating a different type of work. The average Dasher dashes for about four hours a week, and very often they're trying to save-up for something and use it as a supplement to their income.
Much of our future work may end up being about convincing them that we are conscious, and worth keeping around.
What was impossible 20 years ago, is possible today. What is impossible today, will be possible x-years from now. We are always in change.
Super intelligence would be the last invention biological man would ever need to make, since, by definition, it would be much better at inventing than we are. All sorts of theoretically possible technologies could be developed quickly by super intelligence — advanced molecular manufacturing, medical nanotechnology, human enhancement technologies, uploading, weapons of all kinds.
With superintelligence, that whole panoply of physically possible technologies could be realized in short order, since the inventing would happen on compressed timescales. We could experience a telescoping of the future—where developments that once seemed millennia away arrive soon after the transition to the era of machine intelligence.