Man vs. Machine: The Intersection of Technology and Humans

30:07This is an incredible tool for human amplification. Yes, these tools hallucinate. Yes, they instantiate all the prejudices and assumptions and broken thinking that is part of our legacy as humans. And they're going to spit that back at us. And that's going to be distressing and toxic. And it's going to be false. It's going to be disinformation sometimes. Can we can we grow as human beings and deal with that and work our way through it and find what is going to be incredible about these technologies? Or do we just want to sort of lock them away in a cupboard and say, oh, you know, because it's going to because it's going to cause trouble, we can't touch it.

30:43I don't think that is right. I don't think it's workable. It's not going to happen. So, yeah, we're left with the disruption. And I mean, this again taps into stuff we said on the live show, which was such fun, by the way. You know, our governments are not in the driving seat. They're not anywhere near the driving seat. What is the overriding force shaping our collective destiny now? It's not the guy sitting in the White House or the guy sitting in Downing Street. It's not policymakers. It's this incredible white-hot technology revolution that is reshaping the world around us faster than any of us can comprehend.

31:20Governments, as the rest of us, scrabbling to react to that. Interesting. Emad, one of his points is this is going to dwarf the dot-com bubble because there's thousands of businesses being built. We don't know what's going to survive, what's going to win, how much is going to accumulate to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, all of these players who all have strategies. It's going to be a ludicrous boom, probably a bust as well before we start hitting stuff like GPT-7 when the world has entirely changed because it becomes AGI. So talk us a bit about AGI, because that's when we go from generative to something that thinks in a broader sense and is better than humans at pretty much every single aspect.

32:15Yes, yes, exactly. And to understand the real meaning of AGI, artificial general intelligence, it just pays to have to have a very quick look back at machine intelligence and how it's evolved across the last few decades. What has machine intelligence been good at, you know, historically across the decades? Highly structured domain specific tasks with a very clear set of rules and a very clear procedural technique that can be applied. And this is something Ahmad spelled out so beautifully in his first interview with you. In the 90s, when an AI beat the world chess champion for the first time, this incredible achievement in machine intelligence, how did that AI beat Garry Kasparov?

33:07It beat him because chess is a game that's literally domain-specific. You have a board, 64 little squares in one big square. You have very clear rules. and this AI just did it by knowing those rules. So we taught it the rules to begin with. We literally said, here are the rules of chess there. And then this AI can just perform calculations way, way, way, way faster than any human being. So it can just game out every single move, every single position and choose the best one. And then you make your move. And then it does that all over again. And it's just crunching, crunching, crunching, huge numbers of moves, very domain specific, very rule bound.

33:52We're on a journey towards machine intelligence that is much more flexible than that, that doesn't have to be so rule bound, and that we don't have to teach rules to machine intelligence that can discern patterns that emerge out of complex situations. That's the big revolution that is machine learning, that is neural networks. And generative AI, these transformer models, are built on top of neural networks. They're a version of a neural network. So now we have an AI with these transformer models that are fueling things like GPT-4, where you can just throw a huge amount of unstructured data at the AI, tell it nothing about that data, give it no rules or anything.

34:43And it will just go and absorb that data and draw down rules of its own. It will spot incredibly nuanced, complex, submerged patterns existing within that data. And that's what GPT-4, the language model, has done. It's gone and read almost everything on the internet, a huge amount, an appreciable segment of all the text that's ever existed. And it's discerned deep underlying patterns in the structure of language that enable it to take some language you've given it and then predict what the next language should be. That's what it's doing. What's the next step to finally get to AGI? It's machine intelligence that is truly flexible across multiple domains in the way human beings are, so that you can set it loose on an entirely unstructured environment, physical environment, intellectual environment, and it will just set about making sense of that environment itself.

35:45And it will be able to do that, you know, across text, across image, across all domains of sensory input too. But because it's also fueled by the incredible calculative and processing power of a machine, of a computer, it will have that also. So it will be far faster than us at calculating far deeper than us. And you'll have something that has the incredible recursive flexibility of the human brain combined with the incredible raw processing power of a machine. And that's where you have, in essence, a kind of superhuman intelligence, a superperson. And that is, Because how far away are we from that?

36:30It's very, very hard to say. RAOUL PAL So Mo Gordat, who was the head of Google X and the labs there, he thinks it's 2029. He's like, things are moving so fast that AI will be smarter than any human at any task by the end of this decade. Yeah. And that accords with a set of predictions. People like Ray Kurzweil were trying to look at this back in the 90s and drawing curves of processing power and increasing flexibility of machine intelligence, saying things like 2029, the 2030s, 2035. It's incredibly hard to say. And I suspect it will also be incredibly hard to say when we've got there. We're going to start to approach multimodal transformer models like GPT-4 that across multiple domains are so flexible and are so intelligent that for all intents and purposes, and for many of the intellectual tasks and knowledge worker tasks that we do day to day, it's like a super intelligent human.

37:47Now, could you sort of drop it in the middle of a field and just leave it and let it figure out, maybe not. Maybe it's not as adaptable and as infinitely flexible as a human being, but most of the time that's not going to matter. And then the other crucial thing, just very quickly, that people get all caught up in with AGI is when we talk about a universal general intelligence of that nature, we're not saying, and it's not in any way necessary, that this thing is conscious. People tend to couple those two things. We're very accustomed to the only truly sort of higher form of intelligence on the planet, humans, being also conscious beings.

38:28So people believe that the two, they don't articulate it to themselves, but they naturally believe the two necessarily go together. They don't necessarily go together. You can be ultra, ultra intelligent across and hugely flexible across that without being conscious, whatever that means, really, we don't really know as well. So yeah, we're not saying these things will have personhood, but we are saying they will be super intelligent, better at a human than at every intellectual task that we can offer. So I'm going to break this down into this three paths, two paths. And so the first part is, okay, so we've now augmented humans.

39:15We've given the ability to find answers instantaneously not like Google search, but by asking a mentor, essentially, which is GPT. It'll take, as you said, video, it'll take photographs, it'll take anything and turn it into stuff. That's the power of imagination. We can be immensely productive for those with the imagination, because the computer, the AI doesn't have the imagination. We have to drive the imagination. Then we've got CRISPR technology and other longevity sciences. Humans are going to be smarter or have more productivity from the knowledge-based economy. They're going to probably live longer and healthier.

39:57That's all pretty good. Then we've got Neuralink, let's assume not ready yet, but let's assume we've got wearable devices, and those will keep getting closer to Neuralink. That's where it's all going. So wearable devices, monitoring our health at all points. It can completely go directly to a doctor who can tell you you've got an issue coming. Again, health, longevity, intelligence, and then we've got robots. Robots are almost ubiquitous already. They just don't look like humans yet. But Optimus and Boston Robotics and a bunch of these people have got a moving towards that humanoid robot idea where you can then give it the artificial intelligence and you can have it around your house or in your office or in your workplace or anywhere, including on Mars, doing tasks for you.

40:51So, how I look at this point, where we are now, and we'll get into the doom later, this is a renaissance for humanity. We become immensely productive. We live longer. We live healthier. We can do more things, create more units of output, add to that stuff like an energy revolution that will come, the cost of energy comes down, computational power has to improve and move, whether it's from distributed computing or whether it's quantum computing. There's ways of extending Moore's law, and then you can change it with quantum. To me, when I look at this, I just think, okay, yes, society is going to struggle.

41:37Yes, humanity probably gets this amazing 20-year window. I think it's probably a 20-year window, probably no longer. Then at the end of the 20-year window, Also, we start merging with the technology itself, which is how does Neuralink, that kind of technology exists for the average person? The idea of the bionic man of can you have limbs that are stronger, faster, better, eyes that can see five miles in the distance, all of that stuff, it's all going to be possible. That's when we start merging with the machines, the Homo Deus idea. But there's another race going on. And I just look at my fridge and my stuff, the internet of things.

42:29And things that aren't human, and you give them AI, are prolific, and they're everywhere. Yeah. And the robots with AI are prolific, and they can speak to the things, and the cars, and the planes, and the everything. RAOUL PAL Yeah. I mean, we're - RAOUL PAL So we kind of feel like it's two parallel paths. The machines are having a renaissance, and humans are having a renaissance, and we will end up, we'll come on to where they meet in a minute. But what do you think about that whole idea? RAOUL PAL Yeah, I mean, I think exactly that. We can build a world covered in sensors, relentlessly sending data to artificial intelligence, which can crunch it.

43:15We can build incredible and huge simulations, essentially, of the real-time simulations of the entire world. I mean, you look at what NVIDIA are doing with their Earth 2. They're building a supercomputer to simulate the entire climate system. And this interacts with the availability of computation and quantum computing. because if we can simulate the entire Earth climate system, we can think about climate change and weather prediction in much more granular detail. But yes, we can create a mirror world in virtual space based on exactly what you've talked about, objects that are smart, kind of an old-fashioned word now, but essentially enabled with sensors, enabled with artificial intelligence.

44:00And we can build the entire world again in data and in virtual space that will allow us to do incredible things in that virtual space that offer us insight and information, actionable knowledge that we can then apply to the real world. And the climate system is one of those. Social dynamics is another one. Modeling how viruses move through the world would be a useful one before the next pandemic. All of that is coming too. And exactly as you say, robots, and I loved your piece in GMI, Robots are Demographics. I think that is such a powerful insight. Robots are coming, humanoid robots are coming, and that interacts deeply with the transformer model, large language model work we've been talking about.

44:44I think I mentioned on the show, and you mentioned it too, Google has Palm, its large language model, is doing incredible work in its everyday robots division to marry a large language model with a robot equipped with sensors. So you have an AI that can understand natural language. In other words, we can talk to it. And it can also take visual input from the sensors on the robot and make sense of that visual input. And you then have a walking and talking robot that can, and the dream there is a robot finally where you can say, I've spilled my Coke, and it knows you wanted to clean up the Coke.

45:23Do the dishwasher, and it can walk into the kitchen and do the dishwasher. It's proven incredibly hard to get to that kind of robot. But go and have a look at everyday robots. We're approaching that world. And that will be, again, I mean, And this is the same time that cars become robots with AI. Because a car just takes you from A to B, assesses all of the risks and everything needs to happen to get you to a particular place on time and driving and having driving licenses and all of this stuff will seem archaic. It's just a robot that picks you up, takes you to where you're going. Yeah, yeah.

46:05And as I've heard you talking about before, and that's almost incidental to what it's really doing, which is just it's a rolling sensor or bundle of sensors, just constantly scraping the data from the physical environment around it, feeding it into what can be just a real-time, one-to-one virtual instantiation of the world that we keep in virtual space. I mean, New York City, live, 24-7, in virtual space, everything that's happening. Every time this car passes a shop, it will communicate with that shop. Every time it passes a post, but every time it does anything, that will be instantiated in data, and we can have a live, real-time version of the entire world inside a virtual space, because these cars will be everywhere all the time collecting that data.

46:53And that, I mean, what's the value? How many trillion dollar industry is that? It's insane. And yeah, so the virtual world or the metaverse is where this is all going, right? This is where the complete seamless blend between the digital world and the physical world happens. And we've got these parallel paths of this renaissance for humans, but I think a renaissance from machines, because it's going to happen that my car is going to tell my fridge that I'm coming home and the cooker, the fridge will order from Amazon the food that I need. And before you know it, it depends how fast, how smart the machines come.

47:33But it feels like another species ends up emerging from this. And we either merge with them, or there's the battle of the species. I know this sounds ridiculous. And I was never this guy. No, I mean, likewise, you know, I mean, it's the outer edges of this are conclusions, like I said at the beginning, that I've come to extremely reluctantly. And when I say I've come to those conclusions reluctantly, I'm reluctantly because of because of a natural and legitimate skepticism. Skepticism is a very important thing. You can't have your mind so open that it falls out, that your brain falls out. Your scepticism is extremely important, especially in these times.

48:16But I am gradually being persuaded that we're heading towards something of that nature. It's hard for me to see how we don't end up in a place where we've changed the nature of the human being, what it is to be human. And it's very hard to make practical or moral sense of that. I think that is the key challenge of the age. Now, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that that's likely where we're heading. Whether or not that's a good or bad thing is, in any case, a completely different question. It's not like I've reluctantly come to the conclusion it's happening and now I'm a cheerleader for it.

48:51This is hugely, hugely challenging. But the more you believe it's hugely challenging, the more you believe, surely, that we should be thinking about it now. you know and we can we can you're right like this this is this is long run it's very out there it's very hard to get rake elswell thinks it's not that long run i mean he's talking 30 years from now right yeah i mean i suppose yeah i mean sometimes i exist in a world of the next the next year the next two yeah to me 30 years is is long run enough like it you know we're in very very very tight cycles of change this isn't next year 30 years who the who the fuck knows what i mean 30 years was when we all started getting home computers, right?

49:31Yeah. We can kind of remember that. Yeah, exactly. Now we've got generative AI and robotics. And in 30 years' time, I worry we've created a machine species in its own right, which is driven by AI, and it's augmented humans. And like every bloody sci-fi thing, the battle shall commence. Yeah, exactly. I mean, 30 years ago, I was putting a cassette and most of the people watching this won't know what I'm talking about. But perhaps you do, Raoul. I was putting a cassette in my Commodore 64 and pressing play to load a game. Yeah, for 20 minutes. Yeah, exactly. And 20 minutes later, if you were really lucky, you might have a game to play.

50:15So, you know, 30 years from now. A lot about that is simply incomprehensible. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves. But we can look at very long term, well, we can look at powerful, put it another way, powerful structural shifts that give us an indication of where this is headed. Now, in terms of like bringing it back down to earth, if we're interested in doing that yet, maybe we'll come to that later. Like, what do you where do you go with this? You know, I'm evolving thinking around. And this is something I'm writing about for GMI. Look, you either go to if you're thinking about where to put money and, you know, you go to the foundation layer.

50:57You know, I loved that in an essay of yours. You know, what drive what what what must you have for all of this energy? data, compute. So let's hold those three because they are crucial. What's left at the end of this long journey that we're on with machine intelligence, where pretty much everything we define as work right now is being eaten by machines, every procedural domain of human activity is being automated away by machine intelligence. What is left at the end of that is just one another, is just human beings. And this is where my framework does deeply inform my thinking again. Human beings, such as we are now, will always want other humans to see them.

51:46They'll always want to commune with the lived experience of other human beings. We need to be together. We need to feel seen by others. It doesn't matter how much machine intelligence can do for you and can automate away, there's something deeply important about that. So you have the foundation layer, and then you have what's left at the end of this long road, which essentially I believe is entertaining one another, being with one another. RAOUL PAL And I thought about that, and I've looked at spending habits, and we're headed in or are in a recession, but stuff like holidays have been going up.

52:28And I think that you and I have never met, but we've spoken many, many times, and it's now normal for us to speak like this. I feel like I know you. I feel like we've met. There's a human connection just by doing this now. We're used to the digital realm. But I think humans still want that connectiveness, the interactivity. We're sociable creatures. So what I'm seeing is we get these pop-up social experiences. Holiday, you will spend a lot more money on your holiday now because you don't go to an office. You don't see as many people in your day to day. I think events. We do these Real Vision events called meetups, and we hold them in 12 cities around the world and 30, 40 people turn up because they just want to get together and talk to each other physically, share a beer, clink a glass.

53:19And so I do think, and I also think nature trades at a premium. Because in a digital world where you can fake nature, there's something still about nature that is an essence to the core human experience. So I'm trying to separate out these things and think, okay, what do humans really need for that social experience that can't be replicated in the digital world. And there's certain ones. I think we like dining together. Even if you and I had holograms and we're both having dinner at home, it's kind of still not the same. No, exactly. And all of that will happen, but it would just intensify the value, the perceived value of the quote unquote real thing.

54:01When you commoditize, when you can have a million pairs of digital trainers, and we can meet on a virtual desert island and have lunch in the metaverse and all of that. We'll do all of that, sure. Just like we're doing a lot of this, what we do now. And I agree, it does feel as though I'm losing track of who I've met like this and who I've actually met, which is insane. An irreducible core of value will exist around true human interaction. And like you say, we're deeply social creatures that is hardwired into us. That's not going to go away. We'll always value as well the sharing of felt lived experience.

54:45So this idea that generative AI is the end of human creativity is nonsense. We'll always want stories told by a human being who lived that experience and is now telling you what it felt like to be a human going through that thing? RAOUL PAL So human experiences, being Ranulf Fiennes or being Bear Grylls, they're uniquely human that tells a story of humanity and our interaction with our planet and stuff like that. Again, it feels like that stuff becomes more and more important. Because I'm thinking, I want to bring it down into the current time, we're saying the knowledge economy is going to be decimated.

55:30There are people being laid off from tech companies who may never get a job again. Now, can they start their own business quickly, do stuff because of all this technology? For sure. But the structure of the world is changing, and maybe it leads to universal basic income. But there's also other opportunities here, which is maybe to lean into humanness, that But things like hotels or travel experiences or even airlines, I know airlines have been thought of for business travel, and we don't need business travel. But humans still want to experience the planet around them. So it feels like there's an opportunity in leaning into two ways.

56:08You can either completely lean into the technology or completely do the opposite and lean into the most human element of all. That framework is one that's increasingly on my mind right now. I think it's that soggy middle, so to speak, where it gets very difficult. And hundreds of millions of people who are just about to be disrupted by GPT-4, it's going to be extremely difficult and painful. If you are, and no, I don't mean this in any kind of disrespectful way, but if you're sort of a cog in the machine of McKinsey, doing knowledge work in there that can now be done by GPT-4 or the next iteration when it comes, it's just extremely difficult.

56:50But if you're doing the kind of knowledge work you do, where people deeply care, what does Raul think about X, Y, Z, you can't automate that way. No, no, no. I'm not so sure that it doesn't. People will still care what you think, however much information there is out there. And there's going to be so much information that they're going to want you, even if it gets to the point where they just want to sit with you to hear you say, what the fuck is happening? There's so much information. We need that. I'm not saying it won't change. The value that people like us offer won't change. It will change.

57:28But people will want that kind of human connection. And so, yeah, you go that way or you go to the absolute foundations of this. What does all of this run on? What can we not do this without? Everything runs on energy, clearly energy. And as you've said before, and you've written before, we're still in the beginnings of an incredible energy transition that has to happen, that is mandated by government. Everyone agrees on it. Solar has fallen 80 % across the last day, the cost of solar installation 80 % across the last decade. The cheapest electricity ever is essentially going to fall to free, I believe, We'll get to a world where electricity is free, because the amount of sunlight falling on the planet is ridiculous that we're still charging for electricity.

58:16RAOUL PAL People get stuck with this, because people think it's a political statement, because they get stuck in fossil fuels. We must keep... The technology is not there at scale to do this yet. But the rate of acceleration of the technology due to the government investment is exponential. And whether it's nuclear, whether it's nuclear fission, whether it's solar, whether it's geothermal, whether it's wind, whether it's a combination of all or something else. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, look at modular nuclear reactors. I'm always writing about fusion. There are really interesting advances happening with nuclear fusion.

58:55It's still some way off. But modular, small, nuclear reactors, fusion reactors, eventually, that's going to come online and we're going to have infinite nuclear energy. But there's a road to trap. There's an investor. I mean, you know about that side of it much more than me, but there's an investable road to travel across energy for the next two, three, four decades. We have to transition. We're going to that journey is investable. The other thing is compute. All of this runs on compute, on computational power. I'm increasingly thinking we're moving from a world where the banks were the organizations that were too big to fail.

59:42You could not have bank failure. Even now, but in a decade or two, certainly, who's too big to fail? The providers of compute. We cannot allow the diminishing power of Moore's law to catch up with us, you're right, we can keep it in train till the mid 2030s. Then it starts to look very shaky, because you can't stop these things overheating anymore. We're reaching the physical limits. So we then need quantum computing to rise up to meet that challenge. If it doesn't, we have severe productivity challenges, severe challenges across the board. I don't believe we're going to let that happen. There's going to be huge investment in moving quantum computing along, I believe.

1:00:32RAOUL PAL Now, so if people are investing in compute now, that's AWS and Azure, it's Microsoft and Amazon and then the chip manufacturers, like the semiconductor index, NVIDIA, ASML, all of this stuff. That's very basic, but it makes total sense. There is a small little gap of which every single thing needs to use a silicon chip for starters. Everything needs to go into cloud storage. Yes, we can have distributed computing power. We'll see vast distributed networks at some point. Maybe even Starlink will have distributed computing power in space. I think we'll see it in space. But it feels pretty obvious there's a lot of these big people that accrue everything.

1:01:18RAOUL PAL Yeah, I think that's right. This kind of thinking, it does lead you to a certain extent back to the usual suspects. Who's doing amazing things in quantum computing? Once again, our old friends, Google. This news was slightly, well, it wasn't slightly, it was totally washed away by all the GPT-4 assignment. But Google just announced an extremely interesting advance in quantum computing in a research paper five, six days ago that's about error correction of qubits. So instead of working with a bit, which can only be one or zero, quantum computing works with qubits, which are much more complex.

1:02:00They can exist in many different states rather than just two, and that enables far faster computation. But the problem is they're very, very error prone, and they have to be kept incredibly cold at the moment. So there are significant challenges, but yet very, very interesting work, breakthrough work in terms of error correction when it comes to working with qubits. And if we unlock quantum computing, it's going to just blow away what we can do with computation right now. I think it was Mo Gordat's point was that the moment we have quantum computing and AI, we're all fucked.

1:02:43Because the computational power of the AI is now so vastly superior to all human forms of any intelligence ever created that we don't stand a chance. And I think it was he was pointing out, I think Noah Harari, Ray Kurzweil is all pointing out, hey, listen, by the time you get to that point, the average AI is something like 10 ,000 times more intelligent than the most intelligent human that's ever lived. So it's like the difference between Einstein and a goldfish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that is my work right now to try to figure out how, if we're going to build something like that, how we keep it in some kind of box, how we put guardrails around it, how we align it with human values is so important.

1:03:36But I must say that work is bedeviled by serious problems, because humans have never been able to agree a set of values among ourselves anyway, let alone - That's why we have different religions. Exactly, yeah. So good luck. I mean, what set of values exactly? And this is where Imad, the brilliant interviews he's done with him are so interesting. People must go and watch those interviews if they haven't already. Incredible, incredible. But this is where his fundamental position is so interesting and I think so valuable. Look, if this world is coming, then we need to empower everyone with it, because the problem of fundamentally opposing human values and ways of life is eternal.

1:04:22It's not going away. And so people should be able to build their own AI models that reflect and instantiate their own different sets of values. If we just create one kind of AI overlord with a Californian set of values, you know, I love those guys. A lot of them are my friends. But, you know, that's not, that's probably not the world we want. So politics is becoming technology. But your point is that, I mean, they can't even regulate Web 2. No, no, no, we're not. It's not going to come from, it's not going to come from government. So, you know, I know, again, I don't want to get too high flown and I don't want to go into the realms of ideology necessarily or politics, but politics is about to radically change.

1:05:13The way we do it is at the moment is not making contact with the true drivers of our shared destiny and the structural forces that are reshaping society. It's like a sort of wheel that's no longer, it's like a cog that's no longer touching the other cog. It's spinning and spinning frantically, and it creates a huge amount of noise. And it's what we watch on CNN. And Joe Biden just said this. But it really is not making any material real difference to the future we're going to meet 10, 20 years down the line. That future is being shaped by people in technology companies and increasingly by technology, which has kind of forces and directions of travel all of its own?

1:05:56How do we start to get our head around that collectively and decide where we want to go? And I think, so I also think, look, typically human beings don't get through this kind of mass disruption without wars happening. There, I've gone and said it. I mean, if you want me to prove that I'm not the wide-eyed utopian, RAOUL PAL But the question is, who is the war between? Because I'm thinking it's less sovereign war. OK, fine. We're always going to have frictions between rising superpowers. I fear that the war is actually the cultural war that's being fought across the internet every day. The same war that just brought down Silicon Valley Bank, the way to mobilize a hive mind, turn it into a mob instantaneously to coalesce values in this digital world in ways that were not possible before.

1:06:52And it's not possible to bring, it's not like a protest in Hyde Park, where the police can turn up and say, hey, calm down, everyone. It can happen like this. There are no police online. It just happens. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think that's right. No, I don't think the most relevant war is likely to be an old fashioned land war between sovereign states anymore, not at all. And this goes back to another of your great theses around the the falling value of fiat currency, if I understand you correctly, essentially the increasing irrelevancy of fiat money, what deep underlying forces underpin that?

1:07:34If I understand your position on it correctly, in my view, one of the deep, deep underlying forces that underpins it is just declining relevance of sovereign government. Money is a form of value, in the end, guaranteed by sovereign government. Sovereign government - RAOUL PAL And it's a belief system. It's a belief system. Do you believe in the state, the state you live in? Because we can also live in different states now. I can live in the Ethereum state, as it looks very much like a global sovereign state, but without a sovereign head. Now, money is just a belief system. If humans say, we don't believe the US dollar is valuable anymore, or we don't believe gold is, it will be thus.

1:08:19It's as simple as that. These cultural wars, I don't know if you've been following Balaji online, basically saying Bitcoin is going to go to a million because of response. I don't think he really believes that it is. But the point being is what he's saying is we can affect change by turning this hive mind into a mob and moving across to a parallel system. And if we decide your currency is worthless, it is worthless, because we ascribe value. Value is not a scientific law. It's a mental state. Yeah, exactly that. And I think the function by which people decide money isn't valuable anymore or lose trust in it is because they start to see, even though they won't articulate it to themselves necessarily, they start to see that government is not in the driving seat of our decade on decade future, that other forms of community, often mediated by blockchains, are what are going to bring people together and mediate relationships and mediate transfers of value in that future.

1:09:22And in that future where government's just kind of spinning its wheels and not really having an impact, you start then to question the value of this dollar amount you have in your account that in the end is backed by this thing called the US government that starts to feel that it's losing control. Again, we're talking longer run, and it's very, very hard to make sense of this, but it deeply needs to be thought about. RAOUL PAL But how is, just a final note, and this is too long. Obviously, we could talk about this for 16 hours, and we will do many more discussions on different parts of this. But we're at this point where trust is breaking down.

1:10:02It's kind of, I don't know if you've read the book, The Fourth Turning. Yeah. I mean, I endlessly reread it for the last couple of chapters, which is basically this whole thing. Trust has broken down. It's splintering into online digital societies outside of the physical society we live in. We have the political system that's now so far apart that everybody's blaming each other. And then in the middle of it, you say, oh, you guys who drive cars and trucks, you're out of a job. You guys who do anything else, you're out of a job from AI. Oh, by the way, you Amazon workers, you're out of a job. There's no government, to your point, is actually thinking this through.

1:10:42So society is, and meanwhile, the purchasing power of currencies are going down. I mean, that is a horrific set of outcomes. Now, I do believe there is ability to solution this and we can leverage this renaissance. But if we fuck this up, I mean, as you said, war is the outcome and it's the war against the people. Yeah, exactly. The disruption coming down the track, multiple disruptions smashing into one another, just swinging hard to process changes to what work even is across the board. Like you say, whether you're in a warehouse, whether you're driving a truck, whether you're on your way to being partner at Mishkondorea in the City of London as a lawyer, how do we make sense of that?

1:11:38But the next few decades are going to, you know, the next decade, decade and a half, it's going to just be deeply, deeply turbulent. And it's very hard to make sense of where it lands. I mean, I'm so mindful as we speak that we have an audience here that wants this to be investable. There are clear investable journeys through this. But be thinking about what it means for you. Be thinking about where this is heading kind of medium to long term, because it's inspiring but terrifying in equal measure. You know, I do feel I mean, we picked a great time to be people who look at the world and try to make sense of it because it's never been more interesting.

1:12:21But I'm sure there's a famous Chinese proverb about that somewhere. you know it's also terrifying and if we fuck it up you know what with where we started at beginning this conversation what with the merging of humans with technology it feels like a sort of end game definitive fuck up i don't want to be a do you know i feel you've forced me into a doomster position now but it there feels something kind of end game in that it feels like there's a chance we lose touch profoundly with what was valuable about human beings and human life And if it's gone, then it's gone. It's very hard to make sense of.

1:12:58So I think in summary, both of us are vastly optimistic about the technology. We probably both think the next 20 years is an extraordinary time to be alive. It will come with a lot of societal issues. But generally, people should live longer, be more productive, probably have more per capita income. We will see changes to climate science. We will see changes to energy. It will take a lot of people out of poverty in third world countries. So it's amazing, but really hard at the same time, because society is going to get fractured as we try and rebuild a new society for this new digital age. And then after that, we don't know.

1:13:44And the issue is, I don't think we can stop it. No, I don't think anyone's in the driving seat. I think we can't stop it. I think that characterisation is broadly right. I think extension, it's going to be incredible. All the benefits you talked about will accrue to billions or hundreds of millions of people. They simply will not accrue to hundreds of millions or billions of others at all or in the same way. You have a lengthening then of inequalities, you know, across economic inequalities, intellectual, creative inequalities that will set people against one another. And all the time the clock is ticking towards this sort of material, significant merging of humans with technology that it's hard to see as anything other than a profound new chapter for human beings.

1:14:33If we're then on a planet where there's more than one type of human, how do you accommodate that and how do we build accommodations between groups in new ways? Incredibly difficult questions to make sense of. Yeah, and I've been going down this rabbit hole, started with cynicism, started with like, yeah, this is all nonsense, and then went deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole. I got to the same conclusions of you and the inevitability of all of this. And so I just thought back philosophically and thought, okay, what do I do about this? So I can either shake my fists at the sky and say, it's all terrible.

1:15:13This is never going to happen. Or you can invest in it and make some money out of it and hope that humanity is inventive enough to figure out ways that because everyone asks the same question. And you've written about this. What are my kids going to do? Yeah, exactly. RAOUL PAL, MD, PhD And the answer is, we don't know. There is no answer. I can't make anybody happy. But my guess is your kids will go through an extraordinary time where they're almost augmented humans with superpowers. So it's their kids I'd worry about, not your kids. I think it's investable. And I think we can all embrace it in our lives to become augmented and our businesses to become augmented.

1:15:58And after that, we just have to figure it out. We just have to keep our radars up, keep monitoring it, and see which way. If not, we might have to join Elon Musk and piss off to Mars because the AI has taken over the world, right? Yeah. Honestly, I think what we're going to need is ways of building accommodations between groups of people who have varying degrees of willingness and ability to invest, and I use that term in its broadest sense, to participate, to be involved in this technology revolution. So you're going to have some people who want to merge with technology and want to become essentially cyborgs.

1:16:33You have others who don't, people who want to live across the spectrum of technological advancement. We're not very good at that at the moment. It feels as though modernity is just this massive one way highway. Everyone's strapped in just whooshing towards the final destination. We need to allow exit routes off and we need to allow those different kinds of groups of people to live peacefully with one another. Good luck. That is a 500 year project. We evolved liberalism to deal with a problem of that order that was founded in religious difference. I think the difference now is going to be founded in technological difference.

1:17:10But what is valuable in liberalism that we can bring forward is simply this idea of how do we find ways to live peacefully with one another? And yeah, like what should I teach my children is the number one question I get asked when I speak at events now. resilience and creativity and care for one another is what's at the end of this journey of machine intelligence. And this is one of the reasons that I ended up building a house in Little Cayman, an island of 150 people, where literally none of this matters. There are off-ramps, there are places, and nature is that off-ramp. So if you don't want to be involved, or you need a counterbalance.

1:17:52Just think of nature. Nature is the friend here. Go to places where there's less humans and less technology, where technology doesn't matter, where you grow your own vegetables, stuff like that. It's game-changing because you can opt out and you can live. We can have a multi-speed world. We just need to allow that to happen, as you say. RAOUL PAL That's exactly right. A multi-speed world, I think, is exactly where this could land in a good place. But get it. And truthfully, I believe we will get there. I think humans find a way. But I think the journey there is likely to be incredibly bumpy at the level of systemic global shocks, wars, and so on, because we're talking about profoundly disruptive forces here.

1:18:40But a multi-speed world is where this could land. And it could be a beautiful place. And I think you're exactly right, nature, and perhaps blockchains as well. If you can participate in what's about to happen or what is happening with blockchain, with currencies on the blockchain, that is a way of insulating yourself against some of this disruption. Because just as you've said, we're still near the beginning of this incredible adoption curve, this transition to an entirely new system of value transfer. If you participate in that, that can help insulate you against some of the disruption that is coming.

1:19:23And look, you can participate in that while living in nature. It might be the ideal combination, actually. Blockchains in nature may be the way to go. David, look, amazing conversation. I'm sure we'll have many more. And looking forward to seeing more of you on Real Vision. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Okay. I mean, there is a ludicrous amount in this video, and there's a lot for people to take in. There's a lot of doom. There's a lot of positivity. There's talk of Renaissance. There's talk of hiding in small Caribbean islands. There's talk of augmented humans. There's talk of AGI and artificial intelligence being smarter than the average human.

1:20:11There's talk of the robots. There's a lot here, and it's hard for us to all process. But I think you've now seen with the revolution that's just happened in AI, that this is not going to stop. Within five years, our cars will drive us. Our factories will be only robots. Our warehouses will be robots. Many of the servers will be robots. We will have technology everywhere. Our internet of things devices will communicate with each other using artificial intelligence. All of these things are going to happen. We're going to edit the human genome like it's a software program. And these aren't on the horizon.

1:20:55These are happening right now. So we will go through this period of time of such staggering disruption that we're going to spin to get our heads around it. So anyway, we're going to try and help you in that journey. This is what this whole exponential age is all about. We're trying to help you navigate it, find the pitfalls, and David will be one of our guides. Thank you.

1:21:21Thanks for joining us today. Just a reminder, the Real Vision Daily Briefing is in partnership with the Gold Investment Letter, helping sophisticated investors successfully navigate capital markets and maximize profits in gold, silver, and mining stocks. GIL discovers the most undervalued companies and isolates special situations in the mining sector for their members, breaking down unique topics such as investor psychology, portfolio management, and macroeconomic trends with a goal of drastically improving investment returns. Sign up for this free e-letter for immediate action. goldinvestmentletter.com.

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