Breaking Banks

Hosted By Brett King, Jason Henrichs, & JP Nicols
The #1 global fintech radio show and podcast. Every week we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services; from Incumbents to unicorns, and from the latest cutting edge technology to the people who are using it to help to create a more innovative, inclusive and healthy financial future.

https://provoke.fm/show/breaking-banks/

This week on the futurist in 30 years time or 50 years time doesn’t matter we will have guaranteed swarms of smart robots which is going to destroy the economics of the current world system right extracting very valuable resources in the asteroid belt so i don’t know if at the time bitcoin is going to be dominating i don’t know if blockchain is going to be viable so as those robots coordinate and and allocate energy and propellant and bandwidth and communication and other resources amongst them by the millions if not the billions are they going to use wire transfers uh credit cards uh are they gonna write paper checks to each other exactly

welcome back to the futurists i’m joined by rob tursek and i’m brett king we are the hosts of this uh relatively new show um we hit a milestone uh um last week uh rob which is we became the the second largest podcast for the provoked media network so that’s yes right so right on yeah no it’s it’s getting some great traction so thanks everybody for your incredible support and we have a a a very cerebral um you know a guest a friend of both uh robert and i over many years i’m really excited to have him on because we always have really engaging conversations and he challenges thinking and that is david orban he is the managing advisor of beyond enterprises you may know him from the work he’s done as the founder of the network society research global think tank and also he was faculty and advisor at singularity university he’s joining us from somewhere in northern italy um david orban welcome to the futurists thank you brett thank you robert it’s great to see you again david yeah so um let me let me kick this off with a fairly simple one um you know you don’t necessarily label yourself as a futurist even though you clearly do work in that space but when was it that you first realized you wanted to be involved in you know building the future and advising on the future and and you know what what took you down that path the way i express uh myself about this is that we are all time travelers uh one minute per minute we are going to get to a place we call future and similarly to how we choose uh the the path on a train or a car when we look at the map there is a map of the future where the contours of that place are becoming sharper as we get closer and we have the power of shaping that future and i knew that i wanted us to improve this power improve our ability to yield it and to wield it in order to make sure that the place when we get there is one we enjoy that enables us to thrive this was really um at the very beginning of of my independent life if you wish um already uh 30 40 years ago when i would be at dinner with someone uh one of my favorite questions um to us the closing of the dinner when the other person would be sufficiently drunk is okay what is your 30-year plan and very few people would have an answer now at the time i did of course and i still do and since i said that uh this started 30 40 years ago one of the questions you may ask further uh in this conversation hey what was your plan and and was it uh completed in the meantime so we will we will uh potentially go there but yeah i i believe that uh we have the opportunity to really be active about how our life is unfolding and as a consequence cumulatively humanity has the power to intervene and make sure that we are happy about the outcome of uh our cumulative actions what we do together in this world i 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 thoughts on this as well but you know a lot of people talk about the fact that um you know at a governmental or a governance level policy is really critical to ensure that we have a good future but also that collectively we you know philosophically humanity is going to need to come together more in the future and i’m not talking about globalization necessarily as much as is a philosophical understanding of where humanity fits in in the future you know combined with artificial intelligence and how we respond to climate and you know ongoing issues with pandemics and you know inequality and all of these these hot buttons um you know me getting consensus on this um you know we we had brad templeton on a few weeks ago and he was talking about the the stewards versus the um the keynes you know people keen on the future and the stewards of history and the fact that technology always seems to win and it creates this friction against people who are very traditional in their viewpoint but getting consensus about where we go to in the future is is often a really difficult thing so have you got any thoughts on that in terms of how we can be better at getting people to come together in terms of these this the future vision of humanity uh daniel dannett a wonderful philosopher whose books are suspiciously easy to read nonetheless in my opinion contain some of the deepest ideas

in a manner that that is reliably solid and valuable wrote a book called freedom evolves and in that book he talks about many things amongst them how evolution improves in time as well and how the emergent phenomena including um free will according to his worldview become viable from substrates that apparently

include them as a potential but looking at the substrate itself is hard to understand what those possibilities are and

all of dennis writing has been very influential on my thinking especially the ideas in in this book and i feel that we are able of creating infrastructure that is then the basis for a better uh understanding of the world both from the point of view of of science and technology but also from the point of view of policy and social organization when more than 10 years ago i started talking about the concept of network society the starting point there was that contrary to what most people feel it is not society that is shaping and dictating uh um scientific and technological policy for example allocating research dollars and then deciding what results to adopt and what results to to discard or shy away from but that it is there’s not a lot of scientific method to policy uh well there is a lot of hubris policymakers believing that they have the answers they are in a an uninviable position because whether they are elected or appointed they are supposed to have the answers it is very hard for a policy maker to say you know let’s have a lean agile approach make a thousand mistakes and i’m sure that we will find actually what works they would be fired very very rapidly right so what in reality happens is that you have uh technologies that are improving and making a given uh social organization possible it wasn’t a problem how to reach global consensus 500 years ago because communication was so slow that by the time one continent was in sync with what another continent was thinking or desiring or aiming for well everything would have been completely different again the heartbeat of the planet in terms of what human society needed or wanted couldn’t uh be in sync yeah but did you really think that’s the case today i mean look today you look around the world you’ve got a war in the ukraine uh where you know basically an oil uh oligarch has invaded the sovereign uh you know the sovereign nation uh next door and is in bombarding cities in the most brutal fashion uh in the united states where i live uh we have one political party that seems to be held back on dismantling the federal government and violating every norm of policymaking in the process so as i look around the world i am having a tough time finding the optimism when i hear you talk about global consensus or consensus even between two continents right now it seems like we’re fragmenting into uh into more polarization and more conflict those are examples of what i’m saying because the war in ukraine or the moral panic around certain things in in the us reverberate around the planet almost instantaneously there are many uh international bodies that predict um food shortages if not even famine as a consequence of the war in ukraine there are conversations around the role of uh gender and uh pronouns and and very american topics in countries like italy for example where language is inherently sexist um right table is male or female in in italy right how can you not be sexist in your language when uh every noun is is either male or or female with contradictions because one hand is is male two hands are female crazy um i won’t even ask why that is and they wouldn’t be able to answer but i have a spanish friend who said um said if there’s a room of women uh that 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 yeah and so he said he said you know this uh this gender issue you’re grappling with in the united states it gets intractably more difficult in other languages so i can appreciate that concept but tell me are you optimistic as you hear about these things it sounds like all we’re doing is uncovering more ways to find conflict and more ways to disagree um well being an optimist or a pessimist i think is um not something that someone chooses someone is i am an optimist and as a consequence i see the world with those lands i have great friends who are not by choice just by their nature are our pessimists and see the world through uh their lands now er after the fact we then tend to select and find ways to justify our positions that is why websites like our world in data are so useful and and valuable because they try to assemble data sets that can objectively illustrate whether certain conditions globally are improving or or or not another one is gap minder a and both of these uh illustrate in in beautiful visual uh dynamic representations that indeed thanks to technology human condition has been improving for the past uh well we’ve eliminated extreme poverty in in most cases you know china has obviously done very well at that um but let’s get back to the process you know as a futurist um and let me just start before we get into how you know what what is your methodology um in in terms of your track record um you know you’ve made big bets you you made bets on crypto and and blockchain and other stuff very early in the process on the network solution side of things what is it that you count as some of your more successful bets in the past in respect to the future that that evolved um i like trends that can not prove me wrong because they are long enough that’s my joke about what is the definition of a futurist right it’s it’s never being wrong today that’s that’s right or uh being luckily dead uh by the time you you could be wrong and so i have uh been um teaching uh cisco uh what is the internet of things uh at the beginning of the century right and uh they were very excited and then adopted the internet of everything uh uh slogan now i’m not saying thanks to what i have been telling them but their thinking and my thinking about how the interconnectivity of our physical world is going to increase by many many orders of magnitude is similar and still unfolding um i have been talking about conversational interfaces and how um artificial intelligence is going to enable a new way of interacting with our digital world and i am very excited about how today we are not only starting to speak to smart speakers as a matter of fact wherever they are and uh you know for some of us uh uh it is a daily happenstance for things just uh waking up ready to um decipher what we are saying with their little icons on the devices or the ring lights in a given color on the speaker themselves but we have been just very recently witnessing the emergence of an entire new profession that people start to call prompt engineering where the

foggy understanding even by their creators of the abilities and capabilities of massive neural networks is probed and and mapped through a natural language interaction when bringing out unexpected results when do you remember the first conversations on your networks

uh 1988

1989 that was very early in the process yeah and there were still largely expert systems back then right well um yes because there was some mathematical misunderstanding about how back propagation could converge and and it was believed that as you increase the um size of the networks the the problems would become either intractable or the the system would just not converge and would not yield anything usable that that was luckily resolved the the mathematical misunderstanding as well as of course the power of the hardware dramatically increased thanks to to moore’s law and and here we are we have huge amounts of data on powerful hardware with um algorithms that themselves are very very effective that is why there is the renaissance of uh uh bottom-up approaches versus the top down that dominated three four decades ago is is there anyone you’ve mentioned a lot of different authors already today but is there any anyone in particular that really inspired you that that captured your imagination in those days you know back in the sort of the foundational times of the internet and in the inner things um science fiction of all kinds and and all authors um as we are recording this there is a full shelf of books behind me and in front of me there are all the paperbacks with david brain and neil stevenson and greg egan and isa kassimov of course and and all of those wonderful um books uh full of ideas that have uh driven a lot of invention and innovation because they have been inspirational for those doers that turn ideas into tangible reality as as those ideas become uh embodied in in what is possible at any given time we’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 you mentioned in fact david yeah david’s coming on we we hopefully will get neil stevenson on but david brynn’s definitely coming on soon so and inspiration’s a big part of it you know you need the inspiration i think many researchers and technologists toil in uh in obscurity and sometimes in isolation and 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 a couple of years later so that science fiction can be very inspiring for people in almost a religious context and speaking of religious context i want to talk to you a little bit about the singularity uh and maybe uh silicon valley’s irrational faith in uh in the uh accelerating technologies but we should do that after the break i think right now it’s time for us to to go to a break um so 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 today is david orban orban is a long time friend of both of our someone we’ve known for years and years uh he’s been at the forefront of emerging technology now for gosh how long david 20 30 years as long as i’ve known you um so we will be taking a short break here stay tuned and we’ll be right back and we’ll continue with david orman welcome to breaking banks the number one global fintech radio show and podcast i’m brett king and i’m jason henricks every week since 2013 we explored the personalities startups innovators and industry players driving disruption in financial services from incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative inclusive and healthy financial future i’m jp nichols and this is breaking banks we’re back with the futurists i’m brett king your host co-hosting with rob tursek um i’m in bangkok this week rob bazin eindhoven um we are enjoying uh being offshore how was your fourth of july offshore robert did you do anything it’s fine but you know the one thing that’s happening here again this covet outbreak is starting to happen so everyone’s getting a little bit paranoid um going back for the masks and so on right before the break i was joking around a little bit about um the singularity because i think some aspects of the singularity this this notion that at some point in the future a uh a thousand dollars of computing equipment will exceed human brain capacity and then the next step will be that you know it’ll greatly exceed it by many multiples because the technology is improving so fast and at that point it’s predicted by ray kurzweil and others that we will reach what is known as a singularity a turning point such that everything we’ve known until that point will no longer apply there’ll be such a tremendous change and while that’s a fascinating concept and by the way the singularity is near still is an excellent read even though the book’s more than 10 years old at this point some people have taken it very very literally there’s actually a church of the singularity in silicon valley and so david i know that you’ve been involved in singularity university this is a place where i studied 10 years ago and enjoyed myself tremendously they focus on the exponential technologies or what’s sometimes called the accelerating technologies these are the technologies that are following that curve that exponential growth curve uh where you know at the very beginning it’s hard to detect much improvements um and then suddenly you get to the knee and the curve and then it takes off and it starts to chart up straight up on the chart um we were now in the knee of that curve with artificial intelligence something david was talking about just before the break but david i’d love to tease you a little bit about singularity so tell me am i right is it a religion or is there some merit to the concept uh well if it is a religion i’m an absolute churchgoer and i am happy to be proud of it to the point that i think we are already in the singularity you know when you are circling a a a back black hole you have a hard time realizing that you have crossed the event horizon my definition of singularity is uh maybe less quantitative than race but that is why if you look at my definition and its consequences you may end up saying yeah we are already in it because what i talk about is the

limits of adaptability of individuals the technological ways to push the limits of this adaptability and some people who potentially throw in the towel because they renounce those tools and as a consequence they voluntarily and definitively stay behind they they leave we see that right now in the eu the european union has been struggling to define a way to regulate artificial intelligence for years i’ve talked to a couple eu ministers about that and now they’re trying to like sort of a shopping list of artificial intelligence technologies that they’d like to apply regulation to i 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 the playing field they’re not going to compete what’s your take on that you know but but i think china has has taken a heavier hand in terms of regulation of ai more recently the biggest problem is in the us is ai is running rampant right now you know there’s 600 federal databases with facial recognition on them you know you’ve got the facebook you know cambridge analytica thing behavioral modification attempts and things like that you know i mean it’s it’s clear that some sort of regulation is needed in in in the us if anything i think china’s probably got a more mature view of this but um which we always thought the singularity would come out of the states out of u.s based tech companies but

to respond to robert uh the eu believes that you can innovate by uh regulation uh we we we do have you know we have fintech we have gov tech how to create better ways to govern and we have rack tech but the eu definitely took the interpretation of regulatory technology and its implications too far to the point that that it can be absolutely harmful the um a scientific objection against genetically modified organisms for example led to the uh to to african countries not buying golden rice so-called golden rice that has been enhanced through its ability to produce or include vitamin b and and this led to an unnecessary increase in

blindness due to a vitamin deficiency deficiency especially in children that that that could have been avoided were it not for this anti-scientific stance from the eu so you sound like an american david you’re talking like an american politician talking about regulation working against the interest of of the future of being anti-scientific i spoke to a finnish foreign minister recently who complained that the united states has outsourced tech regulation to the eu yeah that’s a very clever way that’s a fair point yeah like we just aren’t even attempting to regulate this stuff the europeans are struggling with it and you’re right you know once you’re like because of gdpr and and you know all those sort of things you know you you’re effectively as an american company you have to cut you know the the european standard is what you end up encoding because you know you have to be compliant with eu laws and and um you know you can’t really do what can you do operationally in the u.s that allows you free reign that you can’t do in the eu as a global platform it’s very difficult to st to really code those differences because even a european citizen who comes to the states and is using the platform you know they they’re going to have a case with the law right so that’s true that’s true let me 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 the singularity and one of the one of the signposts for that one of the things that indicates that we’re entering this phase of singularity which is to say a technological change that’s moving at such a rapid pace that humanity cannot keep up well one of the signs that that might be happening is around the world we’re starting to see institutions break down traditional institutions that have done very well and institutions that have served us for 50 or 70 years are starting to fall apart we’re seeing a reactive response governments don’t seem to be able to be on 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 it governments find themselves on the back foot they can’t keep abreast of or stay ahead of technological development david what’s your perspective there you have a you have your own term you’ve coined for this it’s not accelerating technology it’s jolting technology that’s right uh the mathematical term uh for the first derivative of acceleration is the jolt there is an alternative term as well jerk is the same jolt order but when i thought about publishing these thoughts i i decided it was better to end up calling them jolting technologies rather than jerking technologies which would have led to some misunderstandings of what i’m talking about uh so jolting technologies are those where the rate of acceleration is increasing and there are many the the simplest to illustrate is maybe a rocket where the uh the propellant is consumed as the engine roars at full power and as a consequence the acceleration of the rocket is able to increase because the mass of the the rocket is diminishing force is constant mass is diminishing and as a consequence the acceleration is increasing right but the engines would actually get lighter because it would burn off the uh that is true as well yes

coding of the engine bell and and the

examples are numerous in quantum computing for example when you add qubits to the system you are not merely increasing uh the power of the system at the rate of uh what you would expect in in traditional computers uh but uh with the uh an increasing rate of acceleration um artificial intelligence many people have been expecting a tapering off in the increase of the power of neural networks as the size of these networks increases but it hasn’t been happening the contrary the more you increase the sizes and now we are talking about neural networks with uh um

not billions but trillions trillions of them parameters yeah the their their abilities start to include uh new and new uh things a wonderful example um i i saw just a couple of weeks ago in the field of of those systems that generate images based on the prompts you give them yeah and and one of the examples was a kangaroo um standing in front of the sydney opera holding a sign uh with uh written on um artificial intelligence or something like that and with just a few hundred million parameters the the network wasn’t even able to draw a decent animal with its full power it was able to represent the scene perfectly including the the written element and in the middle it is very funny and so endearing because maybe it gets the kangaroo right but the the opera house in the back is is fishy the writing on the label it looks like it’s it’s just coming up with something but it doesn’t know how to write really so all of these from from rockets to quantum computing to artificial intelligence and others are examples of what i call jolting technologies which are harder to decipher harder to predict harder to regulate so it is not a surprise robert as you said that organizations are unable to cope that organizations are breaking apart because their role of understanding and regulating being on top of this is is completely eliminated in fact many of the cycles in government are based on an agrarian economy from 150 years ago you know the reason americans still vote on tuesdays is because that was market day right that was the day when farmers would come to town they couldn’t travel on sunday because that was a day of church so 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 was the best day for voting now today in the 21st century this is an absurdity uh you know in other countries have been a little bit more nibble they’ve been able to move their voting to the weekend sometimes the entire weekend and sometimes like in australia it’s a national holiday so everybody can vote even if you have to work um but yeah you see examples of this everywhere you travel to where governments seem to be caught in a reactive mode they’re unable to anticipate they’re not well informed many of the times the people in government aren’t really scientifically literate in a way where they can um they can master these technologies and so they rely on think tanks they rely on advisors and too often they rely on lobbyists who are going to pay their way to advising i don’t know if you come into any contact with those folks in your line of work david but it would be quite interesting i think to hear about your perspectives on the kind of advice that you give to clients because you’re an advisor you know what do you tell companies today about the future how to prepare for jolting technology um what i love about our world today is that the barriers to entry for all of these technologies are uh disappearing uh do you want to experiment with space space technology you would think that requires billions of dollars not true the european space agency is dying for individuals and companies to take advantage of the immense amount of earth observation data that they are making available for free including for commercial applications they have an entire summer school that teaches you how to incorporate

your your ability of using space originating data in in your corporate applications do you want to understand how quantum computers work work the platforms that microsoft and and google and ibm uh make available uh let you play with quantum computers in order to understand uh how uh their logic is fundamentally different from uh the previous computing architectures and of course ai where you can sign up and get access to gpt-3 which generates text for your marketing copy or use uh dali or mid journey in order to create the illustrations for your next slide presentation which is actually what i did a couple of days ago where are excitedly throughout all the remaining stock photos that were lingering in my presentation and in a few minutes interactively and actually sharpening my thinking as i was doing it i created the slides that i delivered in seoul remotely so these these are beautiful the images were created by an ai yeah that’s right yeah that’s awesome and and it is it is very powerful not only because it represents the concepts that you want but because you can add descriptors and styles that will represent those concepts so you can have like a kind of emotional message that you want to come to that’s awesome like you can ask it to do game of thrones pictures rend it in a style of dr seuss and as absurd people are doing this you gotta search it deli it’s an amazing tool what’s remarkable with dolly and gpg three is how good they got how so quickly it’s all in the last 18 months uh you know just two years ago it was easy for copyright to add an agency or for screenwriters to dismiss artificial intelligence people in the creative industry said ai will never displace us and now it’s quite evident that everybody is saying the same thing about the internet man internet advertising it’s never going to replace uh you know print and and tv you know it’s not going to replace she’s been really bad at predicting the future that’s true but they’re going to have to learn to work with these tools and so just what we were just describing about where you know some creative person is kind of directing it and collaborating with the ai as a tool that accelerates the process i think that’s going to be likely in every creative industry in the very near future now david just if we were having this conversation 18 months ago you would have been for sure telling us about cryptocurrency blockchain web3 and all these exciting things because at that time those fields were white hot and they were booming it looked like the future at that point but today we’re recording this in july of 2022 where the crypto market has been bad and getting worse month after month after month this has been a terrible year a major setback for cryptocurrency and today that newspapers are full of headlines talking about the crypto crash and how it’s not the same as the dot-com crash in 2000 uh now i know you work a lot with the blockchain would you like to respond to what i just said would you like to tell us a little bit about what you’re doing at the blockchain and tell us where we should be optimistic about blockchain or even crypto and i have a long-term perspective on things and this is the third or fourth crypto winter that i’m weathering right and at beyond enterprises we recommend our clients not to focus on the next week or next month but really ask themselves what is the long-term value they can build i am fully convinced that blockchain and bitcoin are here to stay i actually believe that the current downturn is is healthy because it eliminates uh projects that do not have the staying power that is necessary uh that that are based exclusively on on hype we are working uh with uh a client based in india and uh today there are about 10 million people using uh cryptocurrencies in in india out of 1.4 billion people and they really want to extend the reach of these tools now the opportunity for for growth is tremendous and if we have another episode recording in a couple of years time i am sure that a lot of the projects such as the one that i am talking about will be here and they will be on a good path towards giving value to an increasing number of people hundreds of millions and then and then billions but we’ve been hearing about that for 12 years now with respect to blockchain and cryptocurrency um every time i talk to people in that field they’re like oh just wait you’re going to start to use bitcoin or other kinds of currency to purchase real things in the real world that hasn’t happened no one uses these currencies to buy anything in the real world they might do it in the group unless you’re using us the e1 the central bank digital currency in china sure or if you’re using it for robbery transfers you know for remittances we were talking about the the global heartbeat if i came to you in 1978

and i told you the internet is going to be big you would have told me what are you talking about if i came to you in 1988 and i told you the internet is gonna be big you would have told me what are you talking about if i came to you in 1998

you would have started hearing about the internet i was working full time on the internet by that point so yes i would have been not talking about you uh uh specifically people in general in the world so the fact that the bitcoin technology and and blockchain has been around only for about a dozen years and we have been hearing about it and we are asking ourselves is it delivering on its promise is due to the fact that with the infrastructure we already have the internet infrastructure ideas can move around fast that we can ask these questions rather than being in the dark about them and we can explore alternatives the central bank digital currencies which are a next generation extremely dangerous i mean blockchain technology too yeah this is where david and i probably differ with you on this rob is that um you know i mean we you know david was one of the you know i mean i know we had the dao guy on the other day the other week um

right david was involved in the original dao um and um you know i mean i just see crypto as and tokens um as the underlying mechanism of smart contracts and that’s inevitable so there’s no future where we don’t have digital currency in terms of core operation of value exchange at a at a smart contract level you you either have cbdc’s or tokens or crypto right um so the example i i i give is i have friends working on asteroid mining and in 30 years time or 50 years time doesn’t matter we will have guaranteed swarms of uh smart robots which is acting uh is going to destroy the economics of the current world system right extracting it’s very valuable resources uh in the asteroid belt so i don’t know if at the time uh bitcoin is going to be dominating i don’t know if blockchain is going to be viable so as those robots coordinate and and allocate energy and and propellant and bandwidth and communication and other resources amongst them by the millions if not the billions are they robert going to use wire transfers credit cards uh are they gonna write paper checks to each other exactly right i don’t care what you call the system that they are going to use but it has to be something that is resilient enough so that when the coordination breaks down in an area it can be rapidly and non-violently reconstituted when the communication becomes possible again so 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 record look i’m not i’m not anti-crypto i’m long bitcoin among uh ethereum i’ve been involved in these things since 2011 so i’m quite interested in this space uh a support of dows and of uh autonomous organizations as well so smart contracts are interesting to me but i think it is a fair criticism to say to point out that at this stage 12 years in other technologies had achieved much broader and more widespread uh adoption and i’m talking about um internet technologies and web technologies in the 1990s networking e-commerce and so forth they had multi-billion dollar businesses happening where today the market for uh for for blockchain solutions for enterprise is less than 5 billion and that’s 12 years in so we have to say that’s not any way comparable to other network technologies that were adopted by enterprise you’re right in the future it might happen and it’s a mythical future where everything’s robotized and robots are communicating with each other it is it is not in a way to transfer that i was mentioning the 70s tcpip was developed in the 70s we are now in the equivalent of the 70s maybe the beginning of the 80s in terms of blockchain technologies that’s where we are we are not in the 90s yet in the 90s is when the internet exploded in the common uh conscience consciousness of of millions of people um in america and and europe uh but that is not where we are yet we are still yeah but yet this the analogy doesn’t hold up forgive me but look today you have five billion people using smartphones around the world today you have massive companies in the technology space companies whose market cap exceeds the gdp of most countries on the planet earth we’re not in the 1970s where in those days the number of users was small the devices themselves were weak the network couldn’t transmit data very fast the analogy just doesn’t hold up as you see you said it is technology criticism against blockchain that it cannot transmit enough uh or cannot hold enough transactions in a in a given block and its throughput is is too small you you said it the protocol itself is not mature yet in order to serve the needs and the um imagination of its its users it is going to catch up for example in bitcoin the lighting network uh is a relatively recent technology component in the in the same protocol and it is massively increasing the capacity of the bitcoin network uh in terms of of transactions per second or or whatever you want hey guys i’m mindful of the fact that we’re running out of time here and so i want to wrap up with something a bit more optimistic because that’s what you’re you’re like david um because i know that right it is let me ask you this we we do ask this you know at the close of the the the episodes what is it that excites you about the long future you know over the next 30 40 50 years what is it that really interests you in terms of humanity’s development or a particular element of the future that really excites you personally we will have incredible opportunities to profoundly transform ourselves i was at the time robert and i met the president of humanity plus plus the world transhumanist association and the very definition of transhumanism is the desire and ability of individuals and humanity at large to ask ourselves what are we what are we here for how can we realize our dreams how can we understand and impact the universe when we talk about searching for alien civilizations we ask ourselves why didn’t we hear from them yet and we don’t have an answer to what is called the fermi paradox of of not having detected alien civilizations yet but in my mind we are already expanding our impact on the universe with the speed of light in this sphere that is expanding and interacting with the rest of of the world in and outside of the solar system so these opportunities of understanding the impact of technology of asking whether ai can or should be conscious whether sharing the world with conscious ais is possible how will our world and the rest of the of the universe change as a consequence these are uh incredibly fascinating big picture stuff man i love it when when people ask what is the uh the purpose of of of life uh each of us have uh a subjective experience what it means to be to be living we look out of of uh our skull and we have these uh perceptors and sensors with which we can uh try to decode uh the universe and this uh kilo of uh matter uh in in our cranium uh is is really a fascinating uh piece of meat our our brain and we’re about to take it up a a notch because of augmented think about it we are multiplying the number of humans and if our journey is going to be shared with ais and those ais are going to be conscious claiming to be and us will accept their claim it means that the mass that has awoken in the universe is going to again exponentially or joltingly increase and that is the the purpose of life we are literally waking up uh the universe and and and that is what i am excited about when i think about a future over the course of the next decades or millions of years we will have people looking back similarly to how we look back at the renaissance and we say oh my god can you imagine in those very few decades leonardo michelangelo no seriously we need a new renaissance ai-based relationship together and changing the world thousands and millions of years from now people will look back and ask themselves can you imagine living in those decades the first decades of the 12th century when those things were happening at a daily basis and they were still fuzzy about the meaning of the future the impact they would have had they changed the trajectory of the universe wow wow what a what an optimistic note what a bright note to bring us to thank you very much very much david tell us how can people learn more people who are looking for a jolt of enthusiasm and maybe some optimism where can they find out more about david orman i am very easy to find just google my name the website is davidorban.com i’m davidourban on twitter and uh you are more than welcome not only to follow but also to interact i love receiving questions uh i tend to respond and reply publicly rather than privately uh you can of course ask not to be named in the in the answer if you don’t want to be identified but i believe there’s a great power in these conversations to happen in the open just like we are doing now so i welcome your listeners our listeners to to reach out and to follow of course i publish a weekly video called the context that talks about things that catch my attention and have a broader implication and yeah i greatly enjoy interacting with with people who gravitate around these themes because we all have different perspectives but being excited about the implications of technology and how it is shaping our world is what unites us fantastic well that’s it for another week of the futurist david thanks for joining us robert um thanks again um and uh this week’s episode was produced by kevin hersham with support from our us-based team including elizabeth severance and sylvie johnson and carlo and the team in the u.s offices please if you enjoyed the show leave us a review five stars preferably tweet us out you know mention us on facebook help us spread the word the the the show is really getting some enormous traction right now and that’s obviously because of the support that you guys have given us um you know we we will very soon be um you know the not only the top branded futurist show around but we you know be in the top uh you know 100 200 technology you know shows in this space so it’s fantastic to see the growth coming so 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 week with more guests on the future and but for now we will see you in the future well that’s it for the futurists this week if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don’t forget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the show and you can ping us anytime on instagram and twitter at futurist podcast for 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’ll see you in the future.