Future of AI, You Must Listen: A Conversation with Futurist John Sanei | S2 Ep. 70

0:05Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Founder Story. We have someone who I got the chance to listen to. And oh my gosh, the juices in my brain were flowing. I had so many questions that I wanted to ask him. And I'm super happy that John Sané is back here. He's going to talk through every answer that I need to know. Because he is a five-time best-selling author. He's an incredible knower of the future, global expert at Singularity University, faculty at Duke. and he's the associate partner at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, and he knows all about the future. But John, welcome to the show.

0:47Thank you so much. I mean, look, that's a big, bold statement to say. I know what's going on in the future. It's really quite murky. So let's get into the discussion and figure out how to make the best way of making decisions in uncertainty. I love that. So I wanted to start off with something that may be the most controversial opinions right now. There's a lot of fear and anxiety around AI coming for every single job. And we're just going to be kicking back, drinking pina coladas in the future because we won't have to work. What are your thoughts on that? Well, our current intelligence that's been educated into us and programmed into us because of the economies of scale system is disruptible.

1:32And why? Because that level of intelligence is algorithmic it's pattern repetition and pattern recognition this is what we used to get degrees for and get paid salaries for but this is all up for question now because ai can do it better faster and cheaper so yes in our current state our current jobs all look like they'll become irrelevant over the next sort of five to ten years but as always what technology gives us is an opportunity to solve bigger problems uh more in-depth problems more conscientious problems as we start to take away the rudimentary things that we have always thought was the peak of human existence.

2:12Because remember, in the agricultural times, the peak was our physicality and understanding the seasons. In industrial times, it was analytical, logical, and outcome-based thinking. And as we evolve into the next phase of this quantum AI-fueled reality, again, we will start to discover new potentialities that humans have. But the big, big problem is that we become addicted to certainty and stability. And that's the thing that we have to unhinge from so we can stop looking at exploiting an existing system, but to become explorers of a new system. I love that you have said in your talks, it's not about how intelligent we will be.

2:51And I know you've used like the Einstein and IQ tests will become irrelevant. And it's going to what you just had mentioned here around what is it this skill, the most important skill that you see in the future? Well, I think it's emotional currency. And we can't quite monetize that yet. But I do think that we realize that in agricultural times, physicality was most important. industrial was intelligence that was most important now it's adaptability and if you think about what adaptability truly is is to deal with any situation in a calm and relaxed way the ability to unlearn and let go of old ways of thinking of adding value in old ways and engaging with something that's uncertain and new with excitement curiosity and fascination requires a high level of emotional intelligence and so the future is this emotional currency that's been birthed right now that we call EQ, AQ from adaptability.

3:50So the skill of the future is about dealing with uncertainty with optimism, and that requires high levels of emotional intelligence. I've seen you talk about how everything in the future service-wise will be free. So we have a lot of people that watch this. They have different business types. Many of them are service providers. So what happens in the future if all these services become free? Well, exactly like the way we're able to farm and feed 8 billion people with very few people farming. I think it's below 1.5 % of the human population are farming. And everybody's eating what most people are eating.

4:27Some people are eating far too much. But what we realize is that the economies of scale system because of technology took care of that. And services is just the next thing that's going to be happening. Will there be some upheaval? Absolutely. We're moving from LLM, from large language model, to LAM, large action model, which means that everything from a nutritionist to a doctor to a lawyer to a personal trainer starts becoming personalized to you based on algorithmics and algorithmic intelligence that it can pick up on. And so not only will we have these service providers servicing us, but it'll be a hyper personalized ability to make suggestions to us, not only for what music or movies we should or entertainment we should be engaging with, but where to go on holiday and who to date and what to eat.

5:17And so all of that is coming up for question. But again, I know people are fearful of it. But remember that this happened already in many other guises. we just have to start looking at new ways of adding value. And because we're addicted to certainty, we want to know exactly what it may be. But the truth is nobody really knows. It's uncertain. And the process of exploring into uncertainty really becomes a superpower in this future that we're moving into. It sounds super exciting thinking back to the original explorers and that's where we're at. But I could see why it's difficult for a lot of people.

5:52We had Will.i.am and Mercedes on before. And they had just built the system where when you drive your car, the music changes based on the speed that you drive and it personalizes it to how you drive. And I thought that was very interesting. What are you seeing or what are you excited about when it comes to future personalizations? Well, I think the most exciting thing for me is I travel a lot and I'm always in a new city. And it's my favorite thing to do is really to get lost in a new city. miss out on so much. And when I do get a tour guide to explain to me, like I was in Florence, and I learned so much about Florence just from spending a couple hours with a tour guide.

6:35Now, imagine I had that insight just by my AI assistant knowing me really well, making suggestions for me, my experience of meeting people, having experiences in those cities, exponentially becomes better, deeper and more personalized and that's just me on a very selfish level of of uh and of entertainment and and and travel but just now let's take this down into education and think about how personalized our own educational processes need to be because you learn differently to i learn and i was a terrible student at school because i was terrible at sitting still and having to deal with one level of educational system so i left school very demoralized thinking I was stupid.

7:20Like I couldn't really do what school needed me to do. But school was not personalized. It was homogenized. It was about fitting into a system, not personalizing. So everything from healthcare to personalized music being made for us. And I'd like to take Will.I.Am and Mercedes Benz's process and extrapolate it a little bit ahead because ultimately what it will start doing is preempting the moods we will be having. And in preempting the moods, the music will be created to bring more peace and calm through our moods if that's what we choose to have which is really what I'm always looking for is more peace and allowing that to really start to infiltrate our lives and create environments that are one that brings the best out in us personally this reminds me of a joke I heard a comedian say that when you when you're sad you want to put on sad music because you want to cry more so I guess we'll see if it's if you're sad you want to be happy or maybe you want to cry more.

8:16When it comes to the future around how we think it's going to be right now, is there something that you're looking at like, okay, we're getting this wrong? Yes. I think what we all do as human beings without realizing it is we extrapolate our current understanding of something and put it into the future. So what we think about, for example, universal basic income, everybody's going, oh my God, this is never going to work because people will lose ambition, they'll lose this. I said, yes, from our current standpoint, that is right. But we're not taking into consideration the massive changes that will be arriving that we're not expecting.

8:51And so what we often do is we extrapolate our current stress, our current anxiousness, and apply technology in a rudimentary, linear fashion, and then stress about it. And that's really the worst thing that we can do is become anxious about uncertainty. Because what we're doing is we're taking legacy thinking, applying our current understanding of technology into the future. So it's not one thing. It's everything. Everything everybody's thinking about the future, they're doing it based on legacy and current anxiousness levels and then extrapolating that. So I think nobody expected large language models to take such a hold last November.

9:29Now we're seeing large action models and this is again going to take a hold to the point where the thing is changing at such a pace that Sam Altman was asked in an interview, what is the business model for OpenAI? And he says in the interview, we don't quite know yet. We will ask OpenAI itself eventually how to monetize our business and our platform. So that's coming from, you couldn't get more horse's mouth from the horse's mouth if that was a comment from Sam Altman. So John, this is something I've been really obsessed with because I bought the website daterebots.com many years ago. I have yet to do anything with it, but I'm very curious into how humans and AI or machines, robots, not only from a romantic side, but also just from a relationship side.

10:19You know, how is this going to change when I say in the future, instead of me going through the heartaches of learning another person and its challenges and all that, I can have the perfect mate that is not real, but to me it feels real how are you looking at this yeah look it's a very scary prospect uh it's called the economies of intimacy the intimacy economy and it's really starting to grow more and more around the world and because we have so many disenfranchised males around the world they are going to be the most susceptible to developing these relationships with i suppose these AI characters.

10:57I do think that we will have a swing towards this and then balance out. I do think that the nitty-gritty and the sort of grunginess of getting to know somebody will again become something that we seek out. I think what has happened to us as a society at large is we become disenchanted with marriage and with the structures that once were in place. But again, this is not just relationships. This is almost every structure is up for question and in its place initially, AI will replace many different things from friendships to romantic, to financial advisors, to nutritionists. This will all become a modestly sort of reacting to our personalization.

11:38I do think we will have a swing, a major swing towards having these relationships with AI. And when they become humanoid robots, again, we'll have another sort of leveling into this in many ways. I think all of this requires a very, very high level of awareness and consciousness. If we are arriving at this world unconsciously, we will get sucked into it. If we're arriving at this world consciously with hyper-awareness, then we can start to engage with the world in a more conscientious way. So it's available. It's a choice that you want to have to engage with these things. But yes, there will be more and more engagement with AI assistants that will develop friendships that will then develop romance, if that is the thing that you're looking for over the next sort of five years or so.

12:27But again, like with everything with AI, I think we'll have a swing like a pendulum and then it will balance itself out depending on your consciousness and your awareness. So my last question is more about you. I know you are big into Joe Dispenza and you're just talking about higher consciousness. I know you're very health conscious and you're big into wellness as well. What are you doing to ensure that you're going into the future? When you realize you need to hire, it's usually already too late. I've been there wasting weeks waiting for decent candidates. If I had used Indeed, I could have hired way faster.

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14:23And this quote comes from Einstein. It says, you cannot solve a problem from the same awareness that created it. And so you have to ask yourself, what is awareness and how quickly can I change mine? And if you start asking that question, you'll start coming to an answer that adaptability, the ability for your brain to unlearn, relearn, unlearn, relearn becomes by far the most important skill that you can pick up on. And that requires you letting go of old traumas, your ability to find stillness in times of uncertainty. And these sort of scenarios are really emotional intelligence. It's almost like a gym for your emotions.

15:04And so if you really start to dig down into that, what you have is meditation, trauma healing, a lot of research coming out of Stanford around psychedelic use in this process of creating more malleability in the brain. And ultimately to arrive with optimism towards an uncertain future becomes a very, very powerful skill set that you can develop. John, this has been incredible. If people want to get in touch with you, if they want to hear you speak, if they want to book you to be a speaker, how can they do so? Thank you so much. You know, 8 billion people. I'm the only John Sane in the world. I don't know how we achieve that.

15:41So John, J-O-H-N-S-A-N-E-I, Sane. I'm all over social media. My website's out there. Please do reach out. Love to see you at your event. Amazing, John. Thank you for joining us today on Founders Story. Thank you so much.

15:56You