Why the current moment is bigger than the invention of electricity | Peter Leyden

- When you talk about a different age that humans enter, like oh, the humans entered the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, I mean you're talking about essentially a fundamental game-changing technology that once you cross that threshold, you don't go back. We are now, humans are entering an age where we are going to live side by side with intelligent machines. Up until now, anything to do with intelligence had to have a human attached to it. Through the industrial evolution, through the 20th century, the whole thing, right? Until now, we now have machines that can actually have intelligence. And so we're on the verge of a unbelievable reinvention of essentially our economy, our society. And ultimately it's gonna be a civilizational skill change, because anything people do with intelligence, you're gonna have to rethink, is the machine gonna do this or is the human gonna do this? And then the other thing about it is, if the machines do enough of it, humans are gonna take the machines to augment themselves and go to the next level of problems, jobs, a whole nother thing. This is a monumental world historic shift that we're going through, and most people do not understand how big it is and also how fast it's coming very, very soon. (logo whooshing) - [Interviewer] Okay, here we go, Peter Leyden, take one, mark. Great, so let's get into the future that we are sort of currently living in, whether everyone realizes or not. Let's start with the one that we are seeing and hearing about constantly, which is AI. - AI is essentially the culmination, I would argue, of the entire digital revolution that goes back to mainframe computers in World War II actually, it's really the start of computing, mainframe computing. AI is now the cherry on the top. It's like the last thing we really needed to do was to harness all that technology, harness all the digitization, everything, harness the cloud, harness all the things we did over those years, laying fiber optic cables and wireless networks and everything to kind of come to the point where now the computers can actually think, they can interact with us via voice, and they can do things that we could never do on our own. So anyhow, that is a big deal, I just wanna say, and I think once you kind of grok that or really get it, you realize, oh my God, we could start applying intelligence to everything. And we are gonna start this crazy sorting process between humans and machines now, that boring stuff or things that essentially humans really don't wanna do are gonna be done with machines and we're gonna take it and invent new jobs that are gonna use that capability to augment us to kind of do new things that we didn't think we could do and scientific breakthroughs we never thought we'd see. Anyhow, there's a bunch of sorting going on here. I don't wanna go into those details, but the point is it's a huge deal that we're crossing here. And I think because of that, we have to be thinking extremely expansively of what's possible now. And one of the things I think we're gonna talk about in a recurring fashion is this idea of abundance. One thing you can say about AI is it is a technology with the potential to create incredible abundance. And I can explain why in many respects, but let's just, I'll give you one example. Every knowledge worker, and basically every person is essentially gonna have a digital assistant, essentially like an executive assistant who's virtual, essentially AI. Now you could say, "Well rich people or wealthy people or CEOs have always had executive assistants. " In fact, I've had three startups myself, the first person I hire was an executive assistant to kind of solve all the stuff I don't want to do and scheduling and all this stuff you have to solve, but you give it to everybody and you say, "Oh my God, we're all gonna do this. " It'll cost you 20 bucks a buck a month or something like that. But here's the thing that's interesting about that. It's like that's along average people, everybody to get the same thing that the people at the top, the kind of elite scarce kind of commodity essentially used to be a human executive assistant. You had to come up with about 150 grand or 100 grand essentially to get someone to do that every year, as opposed to 20 bucks a month. So it's essentially creating an abundant system of executive assistants. Same thing with tutoring. Those same executive assistants are gonna be essentially tutors for everybody. Everybody, every kid. Now you say, "Well, you know, rich people have always had tutors for their kids. " You need extra help on SAT scores, whatever, you get a tutor, you're paying them through the nose. But you know, if you have money, you have money. If you get a digital tutor for every kid starting from scratch even, it costs 20 bucks a month. Essentially, you've opened up tutoring to everybody. I mean, there are so many positive things about AI potentially happening. Let me just give one of them that's already happening is simultaneous language translation. American English has become essentially the lingua franca of the 20th century in the modern world. But still you needed a business class, college educated strata from all these different societies

to actually learn the language and be able to talk that language of kind of English that connect around the kind of global economy. But that leaves off a unbelievable amount of people who can't learn English or don't learn English or aren't an educator, can't go to college or whatever it is until now, because now as you've seen, the AI's talking to you in English if you're speaking English, but it's talking Chinese to Chinese, it's talking Hindi to the Indians. I mean, it's basically doing it all. And it's doing it about 90, 95% accuracy now. We'll be able to have earbuds. You go traveling with earbuds, you're just gonna have an earbud on, and whatever that person and street vendor says, you're gonna understand it. You're gonna be asked to talk to them about their family, you're gonna go home with them, see their kids. I mean, that's the level of integration in the world here. So instead of a Tower of Babel, we're gonna have this cross connection of all those cultures, all those kind of societies, and it's just gonna be a wild time. Now it's also gonna throw a lot of unintended consequences and who knows what. I know for a lot of people, particularly Americans are scared of AI. In fact, weirdly, Americans are more scared of AI than other countries. Like Chinese for example, have huge majority, like 60% or more are very positive about AI. And in the United States, the positive people of AI are something like 35%. It's about a third of Americans think it's a good thing, horrible thing, and about a third in the middle just don't really know yet. But the point being is there is a lot of fear and there's a lot, and partly I think it's around a misunderstanding of what's going on. The second thing at why is this happening is the media I think is very reactive. It's very fear mongering. It's freaking people out by these distortions of these risks and things that essentially are solvable, but essentially make them unsolvable. So there's a lot of fear and worry about what's going on here. But I think one of the things that needs to happen, and I'm trying to do, but there's a lot of people increasingly are gonna do, is show the unbelievable positive potential of this stuff. And I will say every introduction of every world-changing general purpose technology, fire, electricity, all of them come with risk. I mean, when we first invented electricity, wow, it lit up a house, it lit up the street, and it's like, wow, powers this thing called a radio. It's like, this is awesome, but if you touch the wire, you're dead. And so there were people like, "Oh, we can't do electricity, that's gonna screw us up. " And so there's always been these risks, but we always kind of figure out how to innovate to contain the risk and then institutionalize it to the point where like every room on the planet now has electricity and we don't even think about it. It's not even thought of as dangerous, because we have codes and we have all kinds of ways we do this. Let me just create another parallel here, which is why do we call it the enlightenment? When you go back in the past there, that enlightenment, the enlightenment essentially was an opening up of the lens of what we understood about the world. Because we had array of new tools, everything from microscopes to telescopes, and all kinds of things that opened up the world. So we said, "Oh my God," we actually are kind of, this is how blood cells work, I mean there was all that kind of level of fundamental expansion and enlightenment of what do we understand about the world, which kind of drove this crazy explosion of innovation in the enlightenment. So here we are in our era, and you got AI, I mean AI is going to not just supercharge innovation, it is going to dramatically expand what we understand about the world. It's already happening. In fact, you can kind of see these various examples of how just in the last year essentially, we applied AI to one of the most difficult scientific problems of how do we understand the protein folding, from a genetic code, how does it get expressed in three dimensional proteins? Humans have been trying to wrap their head around that for 50 years and been completely stumped. And we put AI on the task and essentially it took every gene and explained every dimension of every protein that's possible. There's like 250,000 of them just overnight. I mean, so that's just one scientific advance that just has already happened in this early crude form of AI that essentially is just a taste of things to come. We are gonna understand our world in ways that we absolutely were just, we'll be boggled by like, holy shit, how did we not know that? Or all the kind of things that's gonna happen. And so there is a sense of essentially creating a new kind of enlightenment, maybe our new enlightenment is one way to think about it. And I think AI is gonna be one of the players of that, but there'll be other examples of this. But essentially we're gonna watch an explosion of amplification. The amplification of our mental powers with digital computers and now AI are gonna be very similar to the amplification of our physical powers that mechanical engines initially by steam essentially amplified our physical powers, we're now amplifying our mental powers, and that's gonna create another one of these enlightenment situations where we're just gonna say, "Holy shit, we had no idea this is the world we're in. " (dramatic music)