From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Humans often come together by believing in ideas that may only exist in our imaginations. We have an ability to imagine together, to merge our ideas as a collective, which can slowly move us toward a future once believed to be impossible. This is part of what changes us from being simple animals to a group that will soon travel to Mars and perhaps even further. To me that is magic.
We have layer upon layer of novelty, and today we are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. Today, we have a USDT on Tron Network. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning. Future generations will handle their payments through cryptocurrencies and all the settlements will be on blockchain.
Ultimately, I think we'll be able to pop a pill and reset our body's age. It takes us about 4-8 weeks currently to reset the age of a mouse, it shouldn't be any different for humans.
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.
If you want to have a great startup idea, don't try to think of a startup. If you focus on creating a startup, you'll be grounding yourself in the present, studying customers living in the present, their problems in the present, and their unmet needs in the present. You want to define a future market by living in the future.
Web3 and blockchain are as big of a fundamental shift as the internet was in 1999-2000. Crypto and NFTs create open systems with distributed ownership that can be used to build a practically infinite number of applications. We're at day zero of a gigantic wave.
These are technologies that are autonomous in many, many ways. They are independent in many, many ways – they have free will. They can replicate. And that makes a difference because then we teach them how to learn, but we have no idea what they will do with that ability to learn and develop intelligence.
What we have seen here is a pseudo-nuclear war. An unwind of misused financial instruments created a huge economic shock- which will fundamentally change the next quarter century of our economic story.
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?
I don't believe human radiologists will ever be completely replaced. However, there will be a clear distinction between radiologists who adeptly use AI in their practice and those who don't. Ultimately, those who embrace AI will likely lead the field.
In the future people will spend the majority of their time online, with their online identity and digital assets. The majority of their interactions with friends, family, relatives and colleagues will be online.