Matthew Sanders, Frank Ricotta, Nicholas Haan, Eddie Lee, Matthew Loughran, Robert Grant, Maria Rosario Taddeo, and Ali Hajimiri Deliver Emerging Tech for Good Panel at Humanity 2.0 | Traders Network Show – Vatican City
Contributed by: Show Editorial Team
Humanity 2.0 Emerging Tech for Good Panel was delivered by Matthew Sanders, Frank Ricotta, Eddie Lee, Nicholas Haan, Matthew Loughran, Robert Grant, Maria Rosario Taddeo, and Prof. Ali Hajimiri at Humanity 2.0 (Vatican City)
HIGHLIGHTS
- ITA blockchain initiative creates path for US economic development & job creation in technology sector
- Estimated that crowd funding could address a $1.2 trillion opportunity in technology sector
- Digital Ethics lab at Oxford is one of the leading research groups in the world
FULL COVERAGE
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS: Matthew Sanders, CEO of Humanity 2.0, Frank Ricotta, CEO/Co-Founder of BurstIQ, Eddie Lee, President of Pledgecamp, Nicholas Haan, VP of Impact at Singularity University, Matthew Loughran, CMO at Uulala, Robert Grant, Chairman/Managing Partner at Strathspey Crown, Maria Rosario Taddeo, Deputy Director of Digital Ethics Lab at University of Oxford, and Prof. Ali Hajimiri, Fellow at IEEE.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 00:02
Well thank you everyone for your attention. I know it’s been a really long day. So this is going to be the last panel of the day. So I wanted to take a moment to introduce everyone and I’m going to have them explain a little bit about why they’re on the panel and what they’re up to. So the first person, again, I’m not going to do this in order, I’m going to do it in the order I have here on my list is introduced to Robert Grant from Crown Sterling. Matt Loughran from Uulala, Eddie Lee from PledgeCamp Frank from BurstIQ. Maria Rosario from the digital ethics lab at Oxford University. Nicholas Hahn from Singularity University and professor Ali Hajimiri from IEEE. Okay, so let’s do this. Everyone, I’d like to everyone to kind of understand what you guys are actually up to before we start this larger conversation about emerging technologies. So Frank wants to take it away with what you’re getting there.
Frank Ricotta – CEO/Co-Founder, BurstIQ: 01:01
So it’s good. I can only go by my first name. Everybody knows me now, not just these I’m Frank ricotta. I’m the CEO and co-founder of BurstIQ. You know, I’m really honored and humbled to be here. It’s been really an amazing day with a lot of amazing panelists and just everybody that’s down here that I met has been truly impressive. So thank you Matthew for having us. What we’re all about at BurstIQ is really focused on health equity and access. You know, we use blockchain to help facilitate that from a tech perspective. And yeah, I’m a technology geek, so I have a little bent to that, but, you know, foundational why we were so excited to, to work participate with humanity to dot. Oh, it goes down to just basic core values in that at its very core was just the respect of each and every person’s human dignity. Thank you again for the initiative. The other thing I like to just, just make everybody aware of, I’m very happy to talk on behalf of the US department of commerce and international trade administration, that we’re, we are collectively launching an economic development activity focused on facilitating the use of blockchain initiatives such as Humanity 2.0 and others. And, and really hope to, to drive a broader international economic commerce and partnerships for both us based companies and outside of the US.
Nicholas Haan – VP of Impact, Singularity University: 02:42
Hello. It’s a delight to be here. Thank you. I come from Singularity University and at the NASA Ames research center in California and we do programs for large corporations, for entrepreneurs, for governments, for investors on how to leverage advanced technologies like AI, robotics, digital biology to solve the world’s biggest challenges. And our perspective on that is, number one, the world’s biggest challenges are solvable. Number two, there’s a couple of mindsets that are very useful in doing so. One of them is what we call an exponential mindset, recognizing that these technologies are growing at exponential rates, doubling year in, year out in their price performance. And the other one is an abundance mindset. We all have grown up in an economy and societies that are based on scarcity, when actually if you extend out the power of technology and the power of human creativity and innovation, we can create a world of abundance. And that’s really the challenge I think for all of us today.
Eddie Lee – President, Pledgecamp: 03:45
My name is Eddie. I’m the co-founder and president of Pledgecamp. What we’re building is a crowdfunding platform using blockchain technology. If you’re familiar with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these platforms have given entrepreneurs around the world incredible opportunity to raise funds directly from a network of individuals from often their target markets and not based on whether they know a VC or are keyed into these pretty exclusive communities. The reason we got into this cause myself and my co-founders, six years ago we started our company doing consumer electronics. We funded our company through Kickstarter multiple times. We’ve become among the top 1% most funded on the platform. But over the years we’ve also seen how bad it’s gotten in a sense that there’s no accountability issue mechanisms. There’s issues of trust that are causing consumers to doubt crowd funding. It’s been much harder for people to raise the funds. And it’s a lost opportunity to, because this is really a way to democratize opportunity for a lot of these entrepreneurs who don’t have any other options. And what we’re trying to do is really create a more sustainable model and redesign it from the ground up and hopefully help crowdfunding really fulfill its potential.
Matthew Loughran – CMO, Uulala: 05:01
I’m Matt Loughran, cofounder and CMO, Uulala. We’re a blockchain based FinTech company, a lot of blockchain up here. We’re really focusing in on banking the under and unbanked, so really work with the most vulnerable demographics. And there’s a lot of talk today about faith based NGOs, corporations, how do you work together? We’re doing that. All right. So we have partners in this room from corporate and private to the ICM, CS sitting right there with secretary general, one senior, the Tello to actually actualize this type of technology for inclusion in different jurisdictions around the world. So there’s people here that are policy makers that we work with to governments. I mean, it’s very doable. You just need to act, which I think is a big thing coming out of this forum. Who can you partner with? Who can you make actions? So our whole goal is to provide people with the financial choices that they don’t have. It’s very expensive to be poor. Let me say that again. It’s expensive to be poor. You get the highest fee structures can you get predatory on consistently. So we’re here to at least stop it and damp in that. Well, we can only do that with partners that are here.
Robert Grant – Chairman/Managing Partner, Strathspey Crown: 05:58
Hi, my name is Robert Grant. I’m the founder and CEO of Crown Sterling. We are not a blockchain company. We are an encryption company. I make the distinction because most people actually believe you asked most consumers they think blockchain is encryption. Most of the world is protected by the same types of encryption that’s RSA as well as elliptic curve or Shaw 3. That’s what is used on Bitcoin’s platform. And I’m a mathematician. I am also a serial entrepreneur and as part of my mathematical work, I discovered the first prime number infinite pattern and published it last month with Cornell University.
Robert Grant – Chairman/Managing Partner, Strathspey Crown: 06:52
And that allows us to infinitely predict prime numbers. It also allows for new methodologies in the way we approach encryption which we’re not using prime numbers at all. But as part of that discovery, there was also some fundamental discoveries that happened around mathematical constants and their relationships with each other. That’s very exciting for us because we think that this is something that could be used around the world to potentially increase data sovereignty for consumers, not just large organizations or you know, sovereign nations. But actually for people like you and me. And I think a lot of the discussion today has been about ethics and what’s right and as there’s a quid pro quo of data, when I go on Facebook, do I know that I’m making this contract of adhesion? And probably most people do not. And so what we’d like them to be able to have as a choice to not have Facebook be in a position to have to self-police itself, put it’s in a dichotomous relationship with between its shareholders and the greater good as it was referred to earlier today, but rather actually have a system where consumers can be empowered to protect themselves. And this is something we’re very excited about and we think has very broad reaching application and we’re very grateful to be here today.
Maria Rosario Taddeo – Deputy Director of Digital Ethics Lab, University of Oxford: 08:12
I’ll say my name again, Maria Rosaria today. Sorry. Just because I know it’s very hard for whoever is not born was not boring to say that. So I am the deputy director of the digital ethics lab, which is a research group at University of Oxford. I’ll be and say that we are one of the leading research group in the world on digital activities. What we do is address ethical issues which have to do with whatever digital technologies you can think of. The moment we are running projects which run from a privacy transparency in patrol digital technologies on human wellbeing, cyber conflicts, and how to develop AI for social good. Specifically as DGS, our mission is this one we understood many, many years ago, about 20 years ago, that digital technologies are reshaping our societies, the environment in which we live, the way we interact with each other, the way we understand ourselves as human beings.
Maria Rosario Taddeo – Deputy Director of Digital Ethics Lab, University of Oxford 09:06
These are profound changes which have huge, serious ethical inputs. So we do a lot of theoretical research on these ethical aspects and we write all those nice ethical papers, which nobody reads. On top of that, we build what we defined translational attics. You might ever heard about translational medicine translating biological research into clinical findings. So bring stuff that is developed in a lab onto the bedside and cure people. We tried to do the same things. We translate all those nice boring papers into stuff that companies like Google, Facebook can use to do a job which might be more ethically shaped. And so we run projects which are funded by UK research councils, European Union as well as major digital companies. I mentioned Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many others.
Prof. Ali Hajimiri – Fellow, IEEE: 10:03
Good afternoon. I’m Ali Hajimiri presenting the projects that I’m responsible for. I’m honored and grateful to be here to share the information. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization, which edging towards half a million members globally. So, after United nations probably does the most representative professional technical organization similar to our hosts who have been gracious enough to take responsibility on behalf of the humanity and drive humanity to drive a program called ethically aligned design. My colleague John havens, who was here this morning actually manages that program and under the ethical aligned design, which is not published as a public document or only a month or so ago. So I would encourage you to refer to that. If not, please ask us. If we have from IEEE, we will gladly share it. We have started a number of fairly, if you like beneficent and daring programs.
Prof. Ali Hajimiri – Fellow, IEEE: 11:11
One of them is developing a suite of standards on how to design emerging technologies ethics embedded. Now you would argue a why should a technical professional organization develop a suite of ethical standards? Frankly, why not? Why? Why exactly the same as our honorable hosts here, somebody needs to take leadership, somebody needs to fulfill the moral duties in this context. And I’m really pleased that arch Ripley’s done that and I’m also honored to be assisting with program. So under ethically aligned design, we’ve got currently 14 standards on the go. Addressing various aspects, ethical behavior of products and services from emerging technologies. And if are there say the second program, which is of significance and relevance here is how to certify for these ethical properties. Again, that’s a vacuum in the existing global marketplace and because IEEE is a not for profit organization is accepted the responsibility to develop a series of certification programs currently focused on transparency that we heard a lot in the previous panel. We all need transparency by institutions, by products, by decision makers. The second bit forge certification is accountability and responsibility and final bet is about algorithmic bias.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 12:40
Great. Well I want to open it up now just for general conversation. So when you say emerging technology, I think people have one of two reactions right there. They get really excited or they’re terrified of what their kids are going to grow up like. So I want to ask each one of you now, obviously for the companies that are in emerging tech, you guys obviously have a positive perspective on it, which is why you started your companies. But I’d like you to talk about what drove you into the emerging tech field and how do you expect or hope it will actually add value to the human family. And second, I would like you to, to speak to someone who actually is afraid of the technologies and say, how do you actually work through those, those fears, yourselves.
Frank Ricotta – CEO/Co-Founder, BurstIQ: 13:24
Well, you know, tech technology is really just an enabler. So when you look at it, when you look at it for technology’s sake, just for technology’s sake, it sometimes can be become a useless pursuit. One of the things that attract us to blockchain is not the technology itself, but really more of the philosophy behind it, which is the empowerment of a person and really extending the Liberty of a person and giving them access. More universal access and just, you know, kind of more social justice type, access to goods and services such as payment systems, financial inclusion, health access. And the best technologies are those technologies you don’t know are there. And we have a lot of talk around AI but how many of us use a map app or use something like Siri or Hey Google to get a response route through a voice response, you’re starting to interact with some level of intelligence in the backend. So, you know, my thing is that from a technology’s perspective, we have to look at really enabling capabilities that allow us to address some of these problems in ways we couldn’t but have to make it so transparent that most people just don’t even know a Sarah and it just becomes part of their lives.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 14:40
Anyone else?
Nicholas Haan – VP of Impact, Singularity University: 14:44
So I’m drawn to technology in terms of its potential for us to completely redesign humanity in our relationship with other and the planet for a more sustainable world. The recent IPC report, if you caught a quote there, was incredibly powerful. He’s the world’s leading scientists who declared to be able to get on track by the year 2030. That’s only 10, 12 years from now. It will require unprecedented transformation in all aspects of society. Raise your hand if you think we’re actually going to be able to achieve that. With our current trajectory, we won’t. We need radically different new solutions and technology applying this power of this exponentially growing technology and challenging our value systems and our received wisdom in terms of the way that we have been applying technology and relating to ourselves. Challenging that to redesign a future where we can live in harmony with each other and with nature. Because I would agree that climate change is one of our greatest challenges, but it’s also our greatest opportunity to reshape Humanity 2.0 so that we thrive amongst each other’s and in our planet.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 15:51
Let me ask a more provocative question here. With emerging technologies, right? How do we know what the right emerging technologies are? How do we go about making judgments between emerging technologies that may actually harm humanity and the ones that may accelerate human progress? Like, this is something, maybe this is for the one academic on the panel, but I think it’s something that a lot of people are concerned about that technology companies are running away and they’re moving forward and they’re spitting out new products because they have a market, right? And they’re driving sales. But is anyone thinking about how these technologies may actually affect civilization down the road? So how do people that are in the industry and then people who are, of course studying the industry’s effects, how do you guys work through this and reconcile these things?
Eddie Lee – President, Pledgecamp: 16:30
I think specifically talking about blockchain. And I know Matthew feels this too, when we sometimes say that we’re doing this company on blockchain, we got like rolled eyes or people who are very skeptical because in the industry there’s been a lot of, there’s been hype, there’s been scandals and lack of regulation and ethical behavior quite frankly. But I think it’s important that even for being in Silicon Valley and you get those similar reactions to blockchain, either enthusiasm or fear or just a real polite apathy. It’s important for the people in blockchain to, to understand that there’s hard limitations of blockchain. The blockchain doesn’t know what’s happening in the real world, how people are interacting and there are limits. But what it’s really done without getting into like specifics of how it works, it’s created a really new computing platform, but no one in human history has had anything like this before. And what it allows us to do is really fine tune and tweak some levers and create an incentive structure that hopefully lets your efforts scale in a decentralized way. So instead of, again like asking people to abide by rules, if you’re a centralized platform and have a terms of service to something like that, you can create an incentive here with a token or this kind of contractual agreement that exists in software that really, again, is programmed by the humans. But if you know the limitations and you know that you can create an right incentive structure, that’s really what we’re trying to do. Rather than just impose rules.
Matthew Loughran – CMO, Uulala: 17:50
And we, for example, when we talk about emerging technology, we went emerging technology married with emerging markets, right? So there, there’s a lot of room there for us to be very ethical in how we set up our organization as well. So our primary market right now is Mexico. All right? About 70% of the countries on banked. Massive number. There’s a lot of ways for us to build trust and transparency, which I’ve heard a lot about today, but we do that with our blockchain as well. We’re building people the financial identity that they can take with them around the globe. We’re building a new credit portfolio, if you will, that they can qualify for microfinancing based on if they’re even just sending their mother money. We using small steps increments to actually incentivize the right behavior.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 18:35
But how do you convince them that? How does the end user say in an emerging market who I barely understand blockchain and I’ve been listening, people talk about it for anyways?
Matthew Loughran – CMO, Uulala: 18:51
It’s simple. You don’t tell them there’s blockchain. It’s really that simple, it just confuses them or anybody, if I told half this room bell blockchain, you start rolling your eyes like he just said, this is like how the internet, right? You just turn on your phone and it works. Do you care that it works? You don’t care what’s behind it and actually doing what he probably does from encryption. But it’s very, that’s drew the mentality. You have to make it simple for adoption by the end user. We’re very much a base of the pyramid bottom up company to actually grab adoption. And one of the reasons that we do that is partners, right? Network effects. How we get very fast adoption so everybody can share in that as well.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 19:22
Maria, represent for academic community here.
Maria Rosario Taddeo – Deputy Director of Digital Ethics Lab, University of Oxford: 19:36
No pressure. So adoption by blockchain makes me jump on check cause we didn’t, we went into, without internet, we didn’t tell people how the internet worked for the first 10, 15 years. Then everyone went ballistic when they realize where you’re giving your data for free service and that’s going to shape the way your credit Corp is defined and so on and so forth. So let’s be careful on how we want to have trust and support adoption. On a more general sense, how do you know that an emerging technology is going to be good or bad, but you don’t. Because technology and especially digital technology is everything. Any of your object can be used for one purpose on the other. Digital is increasingly more so. Now this is an important aspect because we have to understand that to make sure that we design something which is going to be used more often for a good purpose than a bad purpose. You need an ethical thinking. Now, the previous panel was really encouraging from one side, but from the other made me also think ethics is not just about do the right thing, be a good person. It’s not about what you told when you are a child. Ethics is about funding trade-off. Deciding when you’re going to have a little bit less privacy so that you can ever be more research in bioethical Aria when you’re going to have a be more security and so less previously again or more transparency and then less easiness of adoption is a bunch of trades off that required careful considerations because those trades off shaped society shape the environment in which we are.
Maria Rosario Taddeo – Deputy Director of Digital Ethics Lab, University of Oxford: 21:01
How you do that. There are methodologies, we call it ethical foresight understanding. When you go on a design, a specific artifact and you deploy it in a specific context, what are the risks and what are the opportunities? And the last thing I want to say is that ethics is not there to tell us what we should not be doing is not the man who slept under your wrist. When you steal the candies from the jar. Ethics is also there to tell us what we absolutely should be doing, especially with these technologies is about what opportunities we should not be missing because otherwise our children in 10, 15, 20 years, we are going to tell us you knew how to cure cancer and you didn’t. Why you knew how to stop climate change and you didn’t, why so many, many times, many companies to which I talk, they tell me, well actually I’m not sure I’m going to do that thing because I’m not sure how he’s going to pay back. And if it’s problematic, then I’m investing money in risky reputation for something which is not bringing profit. So you need to understand what are the opportunities in which we want to invest. And that’s why adequately activities is important to round up the fear that something might not be good, should not stop emerging technology. The need to control how the emerging technologies actually behave in the real world, which will enable us to achieve the best of the technology and minimize the risks
Robert Grant – Chairman/Managing Partner, Strathspey Crown: 22:23
On the question of knowing whether or not a technology will be good ultimately or bad. I’m reminded of the sort of story of when the Adam was first split and out of splitting the atom came as a result, the potential for building a nuclear bomb. Now when I discovered the prime number pattern, I was immediately approached by people that said, wow, now you can crack encryptions and that was not what I was thinking. I thought, well, I was looking for the connection between gravity and electromagnetism. And that’s how I discovered the prime number pattern. And I found the constants and the language that connects the constants like verbs in this language of mathematics, this universal language of mathematics. I never thought that this could cause potentially havoc and financial economies. But what we all have to realize is that in physics Albert Einstein was very much of the belief like many, many physicists are, that every action must have an equal opposite reaction.
Robert Grant – Chairman/Managing Partner, Strathspey Crown: 23:23
We cannot break such an equation. So that means any new technology that comes out must have by definition both good and bad consequence associated with it. We can talk about polio vaccinations. The greater good is that we get polio vaccinations, but we know that some people die every year because of polio vaccinations. Right now in Europe, we have a problem why? People don’t want to get the measles vaccination. We have this problem also extended the United States, the reason they don’t want the vaccinations because they don’t believe the pharmaceutical companies or the health authorities have done the appropriate work to look at the cumulative effects of aluminum, which is used as a preservative. So now we have a measles outbreak in Europe, in the United States. But is it better for the greater good or is it better for your family? And in the questions of ethics, I see this all the time, whether it’s related to politics or new technologies, it doesn’t really matter what people will justify is what they believe will benefit them. It took me a long time to realize that fact. It doesn’t matter to me. You can have a great corporation like Google, you’re going to have a great corporation like Apple. Google would as far as making it part of its credo to say don’t be evil, but just as Shakespeare says, and I believe it’s taming of the Shrew, me think the woman doth protest too much. Whenever someone is saying they don’t want to be something, you also have to start looking to see what’s on the other side of that coin because all things have equal opposite reactions.
Prof. Ali Hajimiri – Fellow, IEEE: 24:57
Driven by the ethically aligned, designed other referred to professor Spiekermann who was a ma honored friend here actually drafted a standard which codifies 2000 years of human ethics that father Philip referred to earlier on. There’s three fundamental tenants of a philosophy and ethics relate to virtue ethics that I’ve learned or from Sarah relates to basically fundamental human values, virtue ethics from Aristotle. Then we have duty ethics or the ontological version from Emmanuel Kant. And then we’ve got the consequentialism that comes from John Stewart. Now these three fundamental tenets help us to actually evaluate the impact of the technology based on effectively philosophical ethics. And on top of that in the standard that we are developing, you’re adding a fourth leg and that is ethnic ethics. Whether people have their own local values do not fit these 2000 year history of ethical development or philosophical development. So we are in the final stages of codifying, establishing social impact effectively and encouraging businesses to go from shareholder value to social value.
Frank Ricotta – CEO/Co-Founder, BurstIQ: 26:37
Well I liked the aspect of both sides of the both sides of the coin. Cause I think that’s important. You know, throughout innovation, throughout history, all the positive goods have happened are, there’s been a result of that in society, even though the industrial revolution had a corresponding bad, which in some aspects was worker exploitation. It’s the same in the digital space. There’s a whole dimension of digital exploitation. You know, we went through all these evolutions of the internet where was fundamentally been a winner take most. And we’ve seen some of the backend of that now where our data in many ways then exploited for other benefits and even negative benefit for ourselves. Now we do, we deal with dealing with health data. I mean everybody says that, Oh, it’d be wonderful to have all our health profiles online and we’d have better quality interaction with our care providers. And I actually think a more personal interaction about who we are.
Frank Ricotta – CEO/Co-Founder, BurstIQ: 27:31
Cause my, my personal belief that data is really the currency that changes the whole health economy. You know, everybody wants it because they know it’s valuable. Companies that are created everyday degenerate more of it. Researchers definitely can leverage it. I think a lot of breakthroughs will be second, second and bench level data research. But bad people know it’s valuable too and they try to try to exploit it. And especially if you get an unethical employer, so I’m not going to hire you because you may have a certain medical condition that’s not a good thing. So, we definitely have to balance the good and bad and know the positive consequences and the unintended consequences. And again, it’s all about are we enabling the Liberty of an individuals and individuals? Are we enabling the suppression of individuals and societies? I think both are possible through the evolution of what we’re seeing on the precipice of this next technology wave. And it’s up to organizations like this to really make sure it goes down the right path.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 28:26
Thanks Frank. I’m going to end with one more question for all of you to answer. What is the emerging technology field that you are most hopeful about? You think we would have the greatest positive impact on humanity? And what’s the one that you’re concerned about the most? Frank want you to start us off and we will go around.
Frank Ricotta – CEO/Co-Founder, BurstIQ: 28:46
Well, okay. Since a blockchain dominates the panel, I like blockchain not from a technology, but more from the philosophy and way of doing things because you know, the underlying culture in the community is really empowerment of a person and a person’s Liberty. So I really like that. It has some downsides obviously, and I think what’s on the fence is this whole aspect of machine learning and artificial intelligence I think can go either way. I’m probably most concerned about it going the wrong way if it gets out of control without the right ethical boundaries.
Nicholas Haan – VP of Impact, Singularity University: 29:20
In the field of energy, I think solar energy and the renewable energy sphere is extremely promising and I’m going to pick the one I’m going to pick is one that demonstrates that money can be made by radically changing our systems and that is meat. Last week a company called Beyond Meat IPO. And if we had had a conversation only five years ago and I said that throughout every Burger King in the United States, there’s going to be a plant-based protein hamburger alternative. You would’ve thought I was crazy but not the folks at beyond meat. They had been investing in this over the last five, six years. They IPO last week and it was the most successful IPO since the year 2000, because people are realizing our food system’s going to radically change. Now what happens when we go to plant based meat substitutes? Suddenly we reduce almost 25% of our greenhouse gases. We stopped killing Sendak beans. We use less land, less water, less energy, etc. So it’s an example of a breakthrough technology which can have huge reverberations throughout our society in terms of a technology which hasn’t been mentioned, which I do, I think has great good, but also great concern, especially in the realm of ethics is CRISPR. The ability to genetically engineer ourselves and all living things has profound implications for good and profound implications for the bifurcation of society potentially.
Eddie Lee – President, Pledgecamp: 30:53
I’m also really high on beyond meat. Very excited about that. I guess I’ll speak to my experience and say blockchain again for both. What I’m excited about and what I probably be fearful about. I’m excited, like I mentioned to see and like Frank mentioned, the culture of people, tinkering with what can this new technology do for people and for society? How can we, like I said, adjust incentives in a way that we never could before and really try to take all of these existing problems and apply a new technology to it. That’s always an opportunity and that’s always an exciting time. But the downside is and the flip sides of the coin is that it’s a little bit of a technology in search of a problem, a solution in search of a problem sometimes. And a lot of people are jumping on the hype train or straight up using it. The aspects of, you know, anonymity or permanence in negative ways. So it remains to be seen how much time it’ll take for us to kind of work out the kinks and get to a place where people figure out what to do with it. But like any, you know, paradigm shift in a computing platform, I’m confident that we’ll get there.
Matthew Loughran – CMO, Uulala: 32:02
So I think enough has been talked about blockchain, so I’ll go a little bit differently. So what I’m looking forward to, I think technology has the most potential is something around biometrics as well. We talk about blockchain and suffer payment systems, but eventually that might be biometric now on what I’m most concerned about. I don’t think it’s been released yet. Like, if you look at Gen Z coming up, who’s been literally born digital, who knows what’s going to come out of this specific generation? Maybe it could be from an ethical standpoint or if they, you know, whatever it might be. They’ve been in cyberbullying now forever as well. So it’s been really interesting. Or scary as well. Coming out of that generation. What types of technologies might be released here in the next 10 years.
Robert Grant – Chairman/Managing Partner, Strathspey Crown: 32:39
You know, I, I’m fascinated by the notion of expanding what it means to be a human being. And the reason I say that is because even 30, 40, 50 years ago, we never thought of our digital life as being part of who we are. And this is raising lots of new ethical questions right now because what we’ve done is we’ve expanded and created another dimension of individuality. And that higher dimension of individuality also can bring along with it new ways of looking at monetization. I remember when I was in college, my buddies would say, Hey, do you want to go down to the blood bank and earn some money? It may be in the future that your thoughtful decision to sell some of your data in a format that you’re accepting of in a way that you like, and knowing that you actually are making such a transaction, not one that’s a contract of adhesion, not one that is basically foisted upon you because you didn’t want to raise 78 pages and just click agree. I think that that could bring dramatic change to the planet. I think it could actually lead to a notion that we become true human beings rather than human doings. And I think we’ve spent the last century being human doings rather than human beings. So we’ve lost the arts, we’ve lost music, we’ve lost so many elements of society and education that have fallen by the wayside in exchange for hyper specialization, which has led us down paths of reductionism. And I personally believe that if we could tackle being human, we could actually be human beings to the rest of humanity.
Robert Grant – Chairman/Managing Partner, Strathspey Crown: 34:29
And I think that’s what Humanity 2.0 is about. And then secondly, I believe that we could actually have the time to tackle the big issues like genetic or gene editing, which in some circles is a hist and a byword not supposed to be said. I have several patents on gene editing on using sound and light electromagnetism to be able to change outcomes of phenotypic expression and I think that’s a fantastic future. I think free energy, I thought technology yesterday that was literally a piece of tin foil, 10 microns thick that can supply if built into a five pound cube, 3.6 kilowatts with no light, not connected to any plugin in the wall and simply harnessing what we call neutrino or vacuum fluctuations. To me, those are very exciting things and what we want to be able to do to help enable that is to create an encryption platform that each and every one of us can use. It’s called Time AI that each and every one of us can use to be able to safeguard this expanded dimension of who you are, which is what your digital life is. And I personally believe that digital rights should be looked upon as if they are human rights.
Maria Rosario Taddeo – Deputy Director of Digital Ethics Lab, University of Oxford: 35:56
Difficult to top that up. So the answer is going to be AI, artificial intelligence both for the great opportunities and the great risks. The great opportunities is building on what you just said. Because AI as this great potential of free hours, three hour time from tedious tasks, stuff we didn’t want to do things which are dangerous and that time can be dedicated to human flourishing. If this is the case, then we have to make sure that in our society is where they’re going to be more AI and this is the trajectory where we are on. We need to make sure that that means more humans in any possible sense. The risks that see there are not any of those Sci-Fi singularity related risks. If you read about that, just go do something else is no scientifically substantiated, but it’s much more concrete. One, AI can enable human wrongdoing. It can enable us, our biases, our prejudice, our superficialities. It makes it much easier to be a wrong or evil person. And this is the risk dicey there. Without the right guard rails, AI can facilitate us going on to the wrong path rather than on the right path. So as ever is a tool and we have to make sure that we harness value in the best possible ways.
Prof. Ali Hajimiri – Fellow, IEEE: 37:15
We have come 2000 years of civilization and if you look at the fabric of the legal protection that we’ve got in much of the world is about preventing harm to people, physical heart. So long as we don’t physically harm, but we can still the data, we can profile them, we can commoditize them, we can set it. So we need to make the transition to the next stage of humanities enlightenment. And that is take social responsibility, respect each other’s differences and respect human values. In reality, I really don’t have a favorite or fear about technology. I prefer to be upbeat about the value and virtues of human thinking and ingenuity. So long as value in terms of moral values are built in every consideration that we come to, whether it’s nuclear power or future free energy comes out of neutrinos or blockchain. I don’t have a favorite and I don’t think humanity has a favorite, but it needs to factor in the elements of tolerance and social value and human value. And just to finish, frankly, wanting, I haven’t heard today, does the word love and not does not love in the poetic, this is the divine love. Ultimately, the founder of this institution here preached that love is what binds us together. What brings us humanity, not exploiting each other, not benefiting from each other’s labor, from each other’s data, from each other’s profile, and selling it behind each other’s back. So I hope that would dominate our future.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 39:06
I really want to give a professor, I’ll leave the last word there because I think that’s a really beautiful way to end, but let me just start by saying, someone asked me, what is Humanity 2.0 what was 1.0 and let me just quickly define that from our perspective, Humanity 1.0 was when we all looked at each other as individual tribes all competing for scarce resources. It was inherently an adversarial dynamic. Humanity 2.0 is when we recognize we’re in one planet, we’re one tribe. And if we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to do it together. So one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this is because this is emerging technologies in many ways is going to affect our future. And whether they become technology becomes a good thing, which saves humanity, at least in some respects or it kills us off, is dependent upon us.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 39:49
And that’s why project vision would father, as I talked about, about defining what human flourishing is and then determining the impediments. Art is so important because we don’t have a roadmap or a sense of, of what we’re trying to build together that I don’t think we’re going to be able to achieve it. What you’re seeing here is a foreshadowing of, of next year’s panel, which is a May 8th, 2020, and we hope you’ll be able to come. And it’s, it’s really looking at how can we apply emerging technologies to actually tackle or address very concrete problems. So trying to get very practical. The last thing I want to say, and it’s more of an announcement, I’m really excited to announce Thomas you’re in the room.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 40:29
So one of the things that we’re honored to be working on is looking at a way to leverage the Catholic churches building platform. And I think you all heard me mentioned it’s pretty substantial. It’s the largest building platform in the world. How can we leverage that building platform to, I’m going to use the example of lead certification but green certified the entire platform and then how can we as well, well certified. So certifying to make sure that the environmental outputs are as low as possible, but also optimizing the buildings for human health and wellness. We want to do this in the entire Catholic churches building platform and we want to do it by 2030. You can imagine the impact that would have globally. This is not just about making a statement.
Matthew Sanders – CEO, Humanity 2.0: 41:13
This is also about providing models that other networks can follow. If we can get the Catholic health system globally to go green and go well, that provides them a competitive advantage and we’re hoping that will incentivize other health networks to follow suit. And we’re looking to do this with parishes and with schools as well. So anyways, anyone who’s interested in and those particular you know areas of greening the worlds and welling and would like to work with us on that. It’s an open invitation. So in the coming months we’ll be working to build that out and, and we’re honored to be working with the global Catholic climate movement and other partners to architect that strategy, which will then present formally. And then we’re going to be basically presenting next year in 2020 how we’re planning on executing it. And it’s a fairly obvious, by developing showcases, developing the partnerships necessary to affect the actual standards in the buildings themselves, and then to demonstrate the financing models that are necessary in order to fund them and then pay them back. So anyways, I, I hope you’ll join us next year, May 2020. We have our dinner at the St. Regis at seven and if for those who have the, you won’t want to join the Basilica tour we have in there now, thanks very much.
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