[Music] this week on the futurist in 30 years time or 50 years timedoesn't matter we will have guaranteed swarms of smart robotswhich is going to destroy the economics of the current world system rightextracting very valuable resources in the asteroid belt so i don't know if at the time bitcoinis going to be dominating i don't know if blockchain is going to be viableso as those robots coordinate and andallocate energy and propellant and bandwidth and communication and otherresources amongst them by the millions if not the billionsare they going to use wire transfersuh credit cards uh are they gonna write paper checks toeach other exactly [Music]welcome back to the futurists i'm joined by rob tursek and i'm brett king we arethe hosts of this uh relatively new show um we hit a milestone uh um last week uh rob whichis we became the the second largest podcast for the provoked media network so that's yes right so right onyeah no it's it's getting some great traction so thanks everybody for your incredible support and we have a aa very cerebral um you know a guest a friend of both uh robert and i over many yearsi'm really excited to have him on because we always have really engaging conversations and he challenges thinkingand that is david orban he is the managing advisor of beyond enterprisesyou may know him from the work he's done as the founder of the network society research global think tank and also hewas faculty and advisor at singularity university he's joining us from somewhere innorthern italy um david orban welcome to the futurists thank you brett thank you robert it's great to see you again davidyeah so um let me let me kick this off with a fairly simple one umyou know you don't necessarily label yourself as a futurist even though you clearly do work in that spacebut when was it that you first realized you wanted to be involved in you know building thefuture and advising on the future and and you know what what took you down that paththe way i express uh myself about this is that we are all time travelersuh one minute per minute we are going to get to a place we call futureand similarly to how we choose uh the the path on a trainor a car when we look at the map there is a map of the future where thecontours of that place are becoming sharperas we get closer and we have the powerof shaping that future and i knew that i wanted us toimprove this power improve our ability to yield itand to wield it in order to make sure that the place when we getthere is one we enjoy that enables us to thrive this was reallyum at the very beginning of of my independent life if you wish umalready uh 30 40 years ago when i would be at dinner with someoneuh one of my favorite questions um to us the closing of the dinner when theother person would be sufficiently drunk is okay what is your 30-year planand very few people would have an answer now at the time i did of course and i stilldo and since i said that uh this started 30 40 years agoone of the questions you may ask further uh in this conversation hey what wasyour plan and and was it uh completed in the meantime so we will we will uhpotentially go there but yeah i i believe that uh we have theopportunity to really be active abouthow our life is unfolding and as a consequence cumulativelyhumanity has the power to intervene and make sure thatwe are happy about the outcome of uh ourcumulative actions what we do together in this worldi mean that this is a common theme that i think we're finding um you know rob you you can um let me know your thoughtson this as well but you know a lot of people talk about the fact that umyou know at a governmental or a governance level policy is really critical to ensure that wehave a good future but also that collectivelywe you know philosophically humanity is going to need to come together more in the future and i'm not talking aboutglobalization necessarily as much as is a philosophical understanding of where humanity fitsin in the future you know combined with artificial intelligence and how we respond to climate and you know ongoingissues with pandemics and you know inequality and all of these these hot buttons um you know megetting consensus on this um you know we we had brad templeton on a few weeks agoand he was talking about the the stewards versus the um the keynes youknow people keen on the future and the stewards of history and the fact that technology always seems to win and itcreates this friction against people who are very traditional in their viewpoint but getting consensus about where we go toin the future is is often a really difficult thing so have you got any thoughts on that interms of how we can be better at getting people to come together in terms ofthese this the future vision of humanity uh daniel dannetta wonderful philosopher whose books are suspiciously easy to readnonetheless in my opinion contain some of the deepest ideasin a manner that that is reliably solid and valuablewrote a book called freedom evolves and in that book hetalks about many things amongst them how evolutionimproves in time as well and how the emergent phenomena includingum free will according to his worldviewbecome viable from substrates that apparentlyinclude them as a potential but looking at the substrate itself ishard to understand what those possibilities are andall of dennis writing has been very influential on my thinking especiallythe ideas in in this book and i feel that we areable of creating infrastructure thatis then the basis for a better uh understanding of the worldboth from the point of view of of science and technology but also from thepoint of view of policy and social organization whenmore than 10 years ago i started talking about the concept of network societythe starting point there was thatcontrary to what most people feel it is not society that is shaping and dictating uhum scientific and technological policy for example allocating research dollarsand then deciding what results to adopt and what results to to discard or shyaway from but that it is there's not a lot of scientificmethod to policy uh well there is a lot of hubrispolicymakers believing that they have the answers they are in a an uninviable positionbecause whether they are elected or appointed they are supposed to have the answers itis very hard for a policy maker to say you know let's have a lean agileapproach make a thousand mistakes and i'm sure that we will find actually what worksthey would be fired very very rapidly right so what in reality happens is thatyou have uh technologies that are improving andmaking a given uh social organization possibleit wasn't a problem how to reach global consensus 500 years agobecause communication was so slow that by the timeone continent was in sync with what another continent was thinkingor desiring or aiming for well everything would have beencompletely different again the heartbeat of the planetin terms of what human society needed or wantedcouldn't uh be in sync yeah but did you really think that's the case today i mean look todayyou look around the world you've got a war in the ukraine uh where you know basically an oil uholigarch has invaded the sovereign uh you know the sovereign nation uh next door and isin bombarding cities in the most brutal fashion uh in the united states where i live uh we have one political party thatseems to be held back on dismantling the federal government and violating every norm of policymaking in the processso as i look around the world i am having a tough time finding the optimismwhen i hear you talk about global consensus or consensus even between two continents right now itseems like we're fragmenting into uh into more polarization and more conflictthose are examples of what i'm saying becausethe war in ukraine or the moral panic around certainthings in in the us reverberate around the planet almostinstantaneously there are many uh international bodies that predictum [Music] food shortages if not even famine as aconsequence of the war in ukraine there areconversations around the role of uh gender and uhpronouns and and very americantopics in countries like italy for example where language isinherently sexist um right tableis male or female in in italy right how can you not be sexist in your languagewhen uh every noun is is either male or or femalewith contradictions because one hand is is male two hands are femalecrazy um i won't even ask why that is and they wouldn't be able to answer buti have a spanish friend who said um said if there's a room of women uhthat are talking then there's one way to describe it as soon as a man joins the room the gender of the entire room changes oh yeahand so he said he said you know this uh this gender issue you're grappling with in the united states it gets intractablymore difficult in other languages so i can appreciate that concept but tell me are you optimistic as you hear aboutthese things it sounds like all we're doing is uncovering more ways to find conflict and more ways to disagreeum well being an optimist or a pessimist i think is umnot something that someone chooses someone isi am an optimist and as a consequence i see the world with thoselands i have great friends who arenot by choice just by their nature are our pessimists and see the world throughuh their lands now er after the fact we then tend to selectand find ways to justify our positions that is whywebsites like our world in data are souseful and and valuable because they try to assembledata sets that can objectively illustrate whether certain conditions globallyare improving or or or not another one is gap minder a and both of these uhillustrate in in beautiful visual uh dynamic representationsthat indeed thanks to technology human condition has been improving forthe past uh well we've eliminated extreme poverty in in most cases youknow china has obviously done very well at that um but let's get back to the processyou know as a futurist um and let me just start before we get into how youknow what what is your methodology um in in terms of your track record umyou know you've made big bets you you made bets on crypto and and blockchainand other stuff very early in the process on the network solution side of things what is it that you count as some ofyour more successful bets in the past in respect to the future that that evolvedum i like trends that can not prove me wrong because they arelong enough that's my joke about what is the definition of a futurist right it's it'snever being wrong today that's that's right or uh being luckily dead uh by the time you you could bewrong and so i have uh been umteaching uh cisco uh what is the internet of things uh at the beginningof the century right and uh they were very excitedand then adopted the internet of everything uh uh slogannow i'm not saying thanks to what i have been telling them buttheir thinking and my thinking about how the interconnectivityof our physical world is going to increase by many many orders of magnitudeis similar and still unfolding um i have been talking aboutconversational interfaces and how um artificial intelligence is going toenable a new way of interacting with our digital worldand i am very excited about how today we are not onlystarting to speak to smart speakers as a matter of fact wherever they areand uh you know for some of us uh uh it is a daily happenstance for thingsjust uh waking up ready to um decipher what we are saying with theirlittle icons on the devices or the ring lights in a given color on the speakerthemselves but we have been just very recentlywitnessing the emergence of an entire new professionthat people start to call prompt engineering wherethe foggy understandingeven by their creators of the abilities and capabilities of massiveneural networks is probed and and mapped througha natural language interaction when bringing out unexpected resultswhen do you remember the first conversations on your networksuh 1988 1989 that was very early in the processyeah and there were still largely expert systems back then right well umyes because there was some mathematical misunderstandingabout how back propagation could converge and andit was believed that as you increase theum size of the networks the the problems would become eitherintractable or the the system would just not convergeand would not yield anything usablethat that was luckily resolved the the mathematicalmisunderstanding as well as of course the power of thehardware dramatically increased thanks to to moore's law and andhere we are we have huge amounts of data on powerful hardware withum algorithms that themselves arevery very effective that is why there is the renaissance ofuh uh bottom-up approaches versus the top down that dominated threefour decades ago is is there anyone you've mentioned a lot of different authors already todaybut is there any anyone in particular that really inspired you that thatcaptured your imagination in those days you know back in the sort of the foundational times of theinternet and in the inner things um science fiction ofall kinds and and all authors um as we are recording this there is afull shelf of books behind me and in front of me there are all thepaperbacks with david brain and neil stevenson andgreg egan and isa kassimov of course and and all of those wonderfulum books uh full of ideas that have uh driven a lot ofinvention and innovation because they have been inspirational for those doers thatturn ideas into tangible reality as as those ideas becomeuh embodied in in what is possible at any given timewe've had several good conversations with science fiction authors and it looks like we're going to have a couple of others some of the folks youmentioned in fact david yeah david's coming on we we hopefully will get neil stevenson on but david brynn'sdefinitely coming on soon so and inspiration's a big part of it you know you need the inspiration i thinkmany researchers and technologists toil in uh in obscurity and sometimes in isolationand so you need a good idea of what you're working on and what you're working towards because those results might not show up next year or even acouple of years later so that science fiction can be very inspiring for people in almost areligious context and speaking of religious context i want to talk to you a little bit about the singularityuh and maybe uh silicon valley's irrational faith in uh in the uh accelerating technologies butwe should do that after the break i think right now it's time for us to to go to a break umso we're going to take a few minutes break here you are listening to the futurists i'm robert turcik and my co-host is brett king our guest todayis david orban orban is a long time friend of both of our someone we've known for years and years uh he's beenat the forefront of emerging technology now for gosh how long david 20 30 years as long as i've known youum so we will be taking a short break here stay tuned and we'll be right back and we'll continue with david orman[Music] welcome to breaking banks the number oneglobal fintech radio show and podcast i'm brett king and i'm jason henricks every week since2013 we explored the personalities startups innovators and industry players driving disruption in financial servicesfrom incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a moreinnovative inclusive and healthy financial future i'm jp nichols and thisis breaking banks [Music]we're back with the futurists i'm brett king your host co-hosting with rob tursekum i'm in bangkok this week rob bazin eindhoven um we are enjoying uh beingoffshore how was your fourth of july offshore robert did you do anything it's fine but you know the one thingthat's happening here again this covet outbreak is starting to happen so everyone's getting a little bit paranoidum going back for the masks and so on right before the break i was joking around a little bit about umthe singularity because i think some aspects of the singularity this this notion thatat some point in the future a uh a thousand dollars of computing equipment will exceed human brain capacity and then the nextstep will be that you know it'll greatly exceed it by many multiples because thetechnology is improving so fast and at that point it's predicted by ray kurzweil andothers that we will reach what is known as a singularity a turning point such that everything we've known until thatpoint will no longer apply there'll be such a tremendous change and while that's a fascinating conceptand by the way the singularity is near still is an excellent read even though the book's more than 10 years old at this pointsome people have taken it very very literally there's actually a church of the singularity in silicon valley and sodavid i know that you've been involved in singularity university this is a place where i studied10 years ago and enjoyed myself tremendously they focus on the exponential technologies or what's sometimes calledthe accelerating technologies these are the technologies that are following that curve that exponentialgrowth curve uh where you know at the very beginning it's hard to detect much improvements umand then suddenly you get to the knee and the curve and then it takes off and it starts tochart up straight up on the chart um we were now in the knee of that curve with artificial intelligence something davidwas talking about just before the break but david i'd love to tease you a little bit about singularity so tell me am iright is it a religion or is there some merit to the concept uh well if it is a religion i'm an absolutechurchgoer and i am happy to be proud of itto the point that i think we are alreadyin the singularity you know when you are circling a a a back black holeyou have a hard time realizing that you have crossed theevent horizon my definition of singularity is uh maybeless quantitative than race but that is whyif you look at my definition and its consequences you may end up saying yeah we are already in it because what italk about is the limits ofadaptability of individuals thetechnological ways to push the limits of this adaptabilityand some people who potentially throw in the towelbecause they renounce those tools and as a consequencethey voluntarily and definitively stay behind theythey leave we see that right now in the eu the european union has been struggling to define a way toregulate artificial intelligence for years i've talked to a couple eu ministers aboutthat and now they're trying to like sort of a shopping list of artificial intelligence technologies that they'd like to apply regulation toi look at that and say gosh the americans are going to love this in the chinese as well because it means the europeans are just getting off theplaying field they're not going to compete what's your take on that you know but but i think china has has takena heavier hand in terms of regulation of ai more recently the biggest problemis in the us is ai is running rampant right now you know there's 600 federaldatabases with facial recognition on them you know you've got the facebook you know cambridge analytica thingbehavioral modification attempts and things like that you know i mean it's it's clear that some sort of regulationis needed in in in the us if anything i think china's probably got a more matureview of this but um which we always thought the singularity would come out of the states out of u.sbased tech companies but to respond to robert uh the eu believesthat you can innovate by uh regulation uh we we we do have you know we havefintech we have gov tech how to create better ways to governand we have rack tech but the eu definitely took the interpretation ofregulatory technology and its implications too farto the point that that it can be absolutely harmful theum a scientific objectionagainst genetically modified organismsfor example led to the uh to to african countriesnot buying golden rice so-called golden rice thathas been enhanced through its ability to produce or includevitamin b and and this led to an unnecessary increasein blindness due to a vitamin deficiency deficiencyespecially in children that that that could have been avoided were it not for this anti-scientificstance from the eu so you sound like an american david you're talking like an american politician talking aboutregulation working against the interest of of the future of being anti-scientific i spoke to a finnishforeign minister recently who complained that the united states has outsourced tech regulation to the eu yeah that's avery clever way that's a fair point yeah like we just aren't even attempting to regulate this stuff the europeans arestruggling with it and you're right you know once you're like because of gdpr and and you know allthose sort of things you know you you're effectively as an american company you have to cutyou know the the european standard is what you end up encoding because you know you have to be compliant witheu laws and and um you know you can't really do what can you do operationally in the u.sthat allows you free reign that you can't do in the eu as a global platform it's very difficult to st to really codethose differences because even a european citizen who comes to the states and is using the platformyou know they they're going to have a case with the law right so that's true that's true letme let me respond to david in a different way uh that builds on one of his other observations which is that we might actually already be in thesingularity and one of the one of the signposts for that one of the things that indicates that we're entering thisphase of singularity which is to say a technological change that's moving at such a rapid pace that humanity cannotkeep up well one of the signs that that might be happening is around the world we're starting to see institutions break downtraditional institutions that have done very well and institutions that have served us for 50 or 70 yearsare starting to fall apart we're seeing a reactive response governments don't seem to be able to beon top of this the conversation regulation although we're kidding a little bit here we're joking a little bit that's one illustration of itgovernments find themselves on the back foot they can't keep abreast of or stay ahead of technological developmentdavid what's your perspective there you have a you have your own term you've coined for this it's not acceleratingtechnology it's jolting technology that's right uh the mathematical term uhfor the first derivative of acceleration is the joltthere is an alternative term as well jerk is the same jolt orderbut when i thought about publishing thesethoughts i i decided it was better to end up calling them jolting technologies ratherthan jerking technologies which would have led to some misunderstandings ofwhat i'm talking about uh so jolting technologies are those where therate of acceleration is increasing and there are manythe the simplest to illustrate is maybe a rocket where the uh the propellant isconsumed as the engine roars at full power and as a consequence the acceleration ofthe rocket is able to increase because the massof the the rocket is diminishing forceis constant mass is diminishing and as a consequence the acceleration is increasing right butthe engines would actually get lighter because it would burn off the uh that is true as well yescoding of the engine bell and and theexamples are numerous in quantum computing for example when youadd qubits to the system you are not merely increasing uh the power of the system atthe rate of uh what you would expect in in traditionalcomputers uh but uh with the uh an increasing rate of acceleration umartificial intelligence many people have been expectinga tapering off in the increase of the power of neural networks as the size of these networksincreases but it hasn't been happening the contrary the more you increase thesizes and now we are talking about neural networks with uhum not billions but trillions trillions ofthem parameters yeah the their their abilitiesstart to include uh new and new uh things a wonderful example um i i sawjust a couple of weeks ago in the field of ofthose systems that generate images based on the prompts you give them yeah andand one of the examples was a kangaroo umstanding in front of the sydney opera holding a signuh with uh written on um artificial intelligence or somethinglike that and with just a few hundred million parametersthe the network wasn't even able to draw a decent animal with its full powerit was able to represent the scene perfectly including the the writtenelement and in the middle it is very funny and so endearingbecause maybe it gets the kangaroo right but the the opera housein the back is is fishy the writing on the label it looks like it's it's just coming upwith something but it doesn't know how to write really soall of these from from rockets to quantum computing to artificialintelligence and others are examples of what i call jolting technologies whichare harder to decipher harder to predict harder toregulate so it is not a surprise robertas you said that organizations are unable to cope that organizationsare breaking apart because their role of understanding andregulating being on top of this is is completelyeliminated in fact many of the cycles in government are based on an agrarian economy from150 years ago you know the reason americans still vote on tuesdays is because that was market day right thatwas the day when farmers would come to town they couldn't travel on sunday because that was a day of churchso they would pack up their wagons on monday and come into town on tuesday and that seemed to be the date that the american the u.s government decided wasthe best day for voting now today in the 21st century this is an absurdity uh you know in other countrieshave been a little bit more nibble they've been able to move their voting to the weekend sometimes the entire weekendand sometimes like in australia it's a national holiday so everybody can vote even if you have to workum but yeah you see examples of this everywhere you travel to where governments seem to be caught in a reactive mode they're unable toanticipate they're not well informed many of the times the people in government aren't really scientificallyliterate in a way where they can um they can master these technologies and so they rely on think tanks they rely onadvisors and too often they rely on lobbyists who are going to pay their way to advisingi don't know if you come into any contact with those folks in your line of work david but it would be quiteinteresting i think to hear about your perspectives on the kind of advice that you give to clients because you're an advisor youknow what do you tell companies today about the future how to prepare for jolting technologyum what i love about our world today is that the barriers to entry for all ofthese technologies are uh disappearing uh do you want to experiment with spacespace technology you would think that requires billions of dollars nottrue the european space agencyis dying for individuals and companies to takeadvantage of the immense amount of earth observation data that they are makingavailable for free including for commercial applicationsthey have an entire summer school that teaches you how toincorporate your your ability ofusing space originating data in in yourcorporate applications do you want to understand how quantum computerswork work the platforms that microsoft and and googleand ibm uh make available uh let you play with quantum computers in order tounderstand uh how uh their logic is fundamentally different from uh theprevious computing architectures and of course ai whereyou can sign up and get access to gpt-3 which generates text for your marketingcopy or use uh dali or mid journeyin order to create the illustrations for your next slide presentation which is actuallywhat i did a couple of days ago where are excitedlythroughout all the remaining stock photos that werelingering in my presentation and in a few minutes interactively andactually sharpening my thinking as i was doing it i created the slidesthat i delivered in seoul remotely so these theseare beautiful the images were created by an ai yeah that's right yeah that's awesome and and[Music] it is it is very powerful not only because itrepresents the concepts that you want but because you can adddescriptors and styles that will represent those conceptsso you can have like a kind of emotional message that you want to come to that's awesomelike you can ask it to do game of thrones pictures rend it in a style of dr seuss and as absurd people are doingthis you gotta search it deli it's an amazing tool what's remarkable with dolly and gpg three is how good they gothow so quickly it's all in the last 18 months uh you know just two years ago itwas easy for copyright to add an agency or for screenwriters to dismiss artificial intelligence people in thecreative industry said ai will never displace us and now it's quite evident thateverybody is saying the same thing about the internet man internet advertising it's never going to replace uh you knowprint and and tv you know it's not going to replace she's been really bad atpredicting the future that's true but they're going to have to learn to work with these tools and so just what wewere just describing about where you know some creative person is kind of directing it and collaborating with theai as a tool that accelerates the process i think that's going to be likely in every creative industry in the very nearfuture now david just if we were having this conversation 18 months ago you would have been for sure telling us aboutcryptocurrency blockchain web3 and all these exciting things because at that time those fields were white hot andthey were booming it looked like the future at that point but today we're recording this in julyof 2022 where the crypto market has been bad and getting worse month after monthafter month this has been a terrible year a major setback for cryptocurrency and today that newspapers are full ofheadlines talking about the crypto crash and how it's not the same as the dot-com crash in 2000uh now i know you work a lot with the blockchain would you like to respond to what i just said would you like to tellus a little bit about what you're doing at the blockchain and tell us where we should be optimistic about blockchain or even cryptoand i have a long-term perspective on things and this is the third or fourthcrypto winter that i'm weathering right andat beyond enterprises we recommend our clients not to focuson the next week or next month but really ask themselves what is the long-termvalue they can build i am fully convinced thatblockchain and bitcoin are here to stay i actuallybelieve that the current downturn is is healthy because iteliminates uh projects that do not have the staying power that is necessary uhthat that are based exclusively on on hype we are working uh with uh a client basedin india and uh today there are about 10 million peopleusing uh cryptocurrencies in in india out of1.4 billion people and they really want to extend the reachof these tools now the opportunity for for growth istremendous and if we have anotherepisode recording in a couple of years time i am sure that a lot ofthe projects such as the one that i am talking about will be here and they willbe on a good path towards giving value to an increasingnumber of people hundreds of millions and then and then billions but we've been hearing about that for 12years now with respect to blockchain and cryptocurrency um every time i talk to people in that field they're like ohjust wait you're going to start to use bitcoin or other kinds of currency to purchase real things in the real worldthat hasn't happened no one uses these currencies to buy anything in the real world they might doit in the group unless you're using us the e1 the central bank digital currencyin china sure or if you're using it for robbery transfers you know for remittanceswe were talking about the the global heartbeat if i came to you in 1978and i told you the internet is going to be big you would have told me what areyou talking about if i came to you in 1988 and i told you the internet is gonna bebig you would have told me what are you talking about if i came to you in 1998you would have started hearing about the internet i was working full time on theinternet by that point so yes i would have been not talking about you uh uh specificallypeople in general in the world so the fact that the bitcoin technology and andblockchain has been around only for about a dozen years and we have beenhearing about it and we are asking ourselves is it delivering on its promiseis due to the fact that with the infrastructure we already havethe internet infrastructure ideas can move around fast that we can ask thesequestions rather than being in the dark about them and we can explore alternatives the central bank digitalcurrencies which are a next generation extremely dangerous i mean blockchain technology too yeah this is where davidand i probably differ with you on this rob is that um you know i mean we you know david wasone of the you know i mean i know we had the dao guy on the other day the other week umright david was involved in the original dao um and um you knowi mean i just see crypto as and tokens um as the underlyingmechanism of smart contracts and that's inevitable so there's no future where we don't havedigital currency in terms of core operation of value exchange at a ata smart contract level you you either have cbdc's or tokens or crypto right umso the example i i i give is i have friends working on asteroidmining and in 30 years time or 50 years time doesn't matter we will haveguaranteed swarms of uh smart robotswhich is acting uh is going to destroy the economics of the current world system right extractingit's very valuable resources uh in the asteroid belt soi don't know if at the time uh bitcoin is going to be dominating i don't knowif blockchain is going to be viable so as those robots coordinate and andallocate energy and and propellant and bandwidth andcommunication and other resources amongst them by the millions if not the billionsare they robert going to use wire transferscredit cards uh are they gonna write paper checks to each other exactlyright i don't care what you call the system that they are going to usebut it has to be something that is resilient enough so that when thecoordination breaks down in an area it can be rapidly and non-violentlyreconstituted when the communication becomes possible againso you're talking about now the advantage of decentralization that's what you're referring in in case the network is disrupted um from the recordlook i'm not i'm not anti-crypto i'm long bitcoin among uh ethereum i've been involved in these things since 2011 soi'm quite interested in this space uh a support of dows and of uhautonomous organizations as well so smart contracts are interesting to me but i think it is a fair criticism tosay to point out that at this stage 12 years in other technologies had achieved muchbroader and more widespread uh adoption and i'm talking about um internet technologies and web technologies in the1990s networking e-commerce and so forth they had multi-billion dollarbusinesses happening where today the market for uh for for blockchainsolutions for enterprise is less than 5 billion and that's 12 years in so we have to say that's notany way comparable to other network technologies that were adopted by enterprise you're right in the future itmight happen and it's a mythical future where everything's robotized and robots are communicating with each other it isit is not in a way to transfer that i was mentioning the 70s tcpipwas developed in the 70s we are now in the equivalent of the 70s maybe thebeginning of the 80s in terms of blockchain technologies that's where we arewe are not in the 90s yet in the 90s is when the internet explodedin the common uh conscience consciousness of of millions of peopleum in america and and europe uh butthat is not where we are yet we are still yeah but yet this the analogy doesn't hold upforgive me but look today you have five billion people using smartphones around the world today youhave massive companies in the technology space companies whose market cap exceedsthe gdp of most countries on the planet earth we're not in the 1970s where in thosedays the number of users was small the devices themselves were weak the network couldn't transmit data veryfast the analogy just doesn't hold up as you see you said it is technologycriticism against blockchain that it cannot transmit enough uh or cannot holdenough transactions in a in a given block and its throughput is is too smallyou you said it the protocol itself is not mature yet in order to servethe needs and the um imaginationof its its users it is going to catch up for example in bitcoin the lightingnetwork uh is a relatively recent technology component in the in the sameprotocol and it is massively increasing the capacity of the bitcoin network uhin terms of of transactions per second or or whatever you want hey guysi'm mindful of the fact that we're running out of time here and so i want to wrap up with something a bit moreoptimistic because that's what you're you're like david um because i know that right it islet me ask you this we we do ask this you know at the close of the the the episodes what is it thatexcites you about the long future you know over the next 30 40 50 yearswhat is it that really interests you in terms of humanity'sdevelopment or a particular element of the future that really excites you personallywe will have incredible opportunities to profoundly transform ourselves iwas at the time robert and i met the president of humanity plus plus theworld transhumanist association and thevery definition of transhumanism is thedesire and ability of individuals and humanity at large toask ourselves what are we what are we here forhow can we realize our dreams how can we understandand impact the universe when we talk aboutsearching for alien civilizations we ask ourselveswhy didn't we hear from them yet and we don't have an answer to what is calledthe fermi paradox of of not having detected alien civilizations yet but inmy mind we are already expanding our impact on the universewith the speed of light in this sphere that is expanding andinteracting with the rest of of the world in and outside of the solar systemso these opportunities of understanding the impact of technologyof asking whether ai can or should be conscious whethersharing the world with conscious ais is possiblehow will our world and the rest of the of the universe changeas a consequence these are uh incredibly fascinating big picture stuff mani love it when when people ask what is the uh the purpose of of of life uh eachof us have uh a subjective experience what it means to be to be living we lookout of of uh our skull and we have these uh perceptorsand sensors with which we can uh try to decode uh the universe and this uhkilo of uh matter uh in in our cranium uh is is really a fascinating uh pieceof meat our our brain and we're about to take it up a a notch because ofaugmented think about it we are multiplying the number of humans and ifour journey is going to be shared with ais and those ais are going to beconscious claiming to be and us will accept their claimit means that the mass that has awoken in the universeis going to again exponentially or joltingly increaseand that is the the purpose of life we are literally waking up uh the universe and and andthat is what i am excited about when i think about a futureover the course of the next decades or millions of years we will have peoplelooking back similarly to how we look back at the renaissance and we say oh mygod can you imagine in those very few decades leonardo michelangelo noseriously we need a new renaissance ai-based relationship together and changing the worldthousands and millions of years from now people will look back and ask themselvescan you imagine living in those decades the first decades of the 12thcentury when those things were happening at a daily basis and they were stillfuzzy about the meaning of the future the impact they would have hadthey changed the trajectory of the universe wow wow what a what an optimistic notewhat a bright note to bring us to thank you very much very muchdavid tell us how can people learn more people who are looking for a jolt of enthusiasm and maybe some optimism wherecan they find out more about david orman i am very easy to find just google myname the website is davidorban.com i'm davidourban on twitterand uh you are more than welcome not only to followbut also to interact i love receiving questions uh i tend torespond and reply publicly rather than privately uh you can of course ask notto be named in the in the answer if you don't want to be identified but ibelieve there's a great power in these conversations to happen in the open justlike we are doing now so i welcome your listeners our listeners to to reach outand to follow of course i publish a weekly video called the contextthat talks about things that catch my attention and have a broaderimplication and yeah i greatly enjoy interactingwith with people who gravitate around these themesbecause we all have different perspectives but being excitedabout the implications of technology and how it is shaping our world is what unites us fantastic well that's it foranother week of the futurist david thanks for joining us robert um thanks again um and uhthis week's episode was produced by kevin hersham with support from our us-based team includingelizabeth severance and sylvie johnson and carloand the team in the u.s offices please if you enjoyed the showleave us a review five stars preferably tweet us out you know mentionus on facebook help us spread the word the the the show is really getting some enormous traction right nowand that's obviously because of the support that you guys have given us um you know we we will very soon be umyou know the not only the top branded futurist show around but we you know be in the top uh you know 100 200technology you know shows in this space so it's fantastic to see the growth comingso please um you know give us a shout out and let us know what you think of the show and we will be back next weekwith more guests on the future and but for now we will see youin the future [Music] well that's it for the futurists thisweek if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don'tforget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the showand you can ping us anytime on instagram and twitter at futurist podcastfor the folks that you'd like to see on the show or the questions you'd like us to ask thanks for joining and as always we'llsee you in the future [Music]