 Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube, covering IBM Insight 2015. Brought to you by IBM. Now your host, George Gilbert and Paul Gillin. Welcome back, this is Paul Gillin. We're live here at the IBM Insight Conference in Las Vegas. 2015, we're coming to the end of our second day. One of the things I love about doing the Cube and particularly conferences like this is we get really interesting people. People who just come out of completely different backgrounds like our interview with the Weather Channel earlier and certainly our next guest, Jason Silva, meets that definition of somebody who is not the conventional trade show kind of speaker. Jason's a media artist, futurist, philosopher, keynote speaker and TV personality, creator of the short film series, Shots of Awe. And also a host of National Geographic Brain Games, Emmy nominated program that I was unfamiliar with until I began doing a little research for this interview and now I'm going to become hooked. Jason, thanks for joining us today. Thank you guys for having me, how's it going? Good. You are speaking on the topic of digital transcendence here at this conference, what is that? Well, I've become very interested in why we're living in an age of technological disruption, why the world seems to be changing so fast, why we're feeling in all these industries like the rug is being pulled from underneath our feet. And this led me down a rabbit hole into thinking about technology in the future, how technology is changing. I stumbled upon Ray Kurzweil's ideas, Moore's law, exponential change. And what I realized is that most people didn't really quite wrap their heads around what is meant by exponential change, which is the underlying bedrock of why we're living in disruptive times. And I learned very quickly that because technology evolves at an exponential rate, but our brains think linearly, we find ourselves confounded. One of the examples that Ray Kurzweil gives is if you take 30 linear steps, which is how we think about change linearly, you get to 30. If you take 30 exponential steps, again, the same amount of steps. But they're longer steps. Well, and they compound on each other, you get to a billion by step 30. So again, linear steps, 30 of them get you to 30. 30 exponential steps gets you to a billion. The example I gave you earlier, that exponential trajectory is the reason why the smartphone in your pocket today that you take for granted is actually a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful than what used to be $60 million, half a building in size 40 years ago. So when I say digital transcendence, I say, how does it change what it means to be human when the supercomputers of yesterday and everybody's hands? How does it change our space of possibility when a young kid in Africa with a smartphone has better comms tech than the US president had 25 years ago? That's digital transcendence, transcendence. It changes the world. It changes the space of possibilities. It changes what becomes possible. Okay, so give us some concrete examples. We've heard about remittance payments from relatively sort of well off countries, let's say in the Middle East, workers sending money back to their families. We hear things about weather forecasts and advice about when and how to plant crops. Take us to that sort of desert outpost and gives the sense for how life has changed. Well, life has changed, for example. I mean, there's places in Africa that don't have running water but have internet access. I mean, education, the world is in your pocket. All the world's knowledge and information is available at Google search away. So this democratizes education, this democratizes communications, it democratizes. I mean, there's my mom, she's a teacher at the International School of Kenya. They do mobile payments there in a way that's far more advanced than in the United States. People use their cell phones to do business. I remember there was a Bill Clinton cover story in Time Magazine called A Case for Optimism in which he cited a 2010 United Nations Development Study that found that the cell phone was perhaps the greatest invention in history to pull people out of poverty. Most people don't think about that when they think about technology. They think about, oh, the inevitable consequences over damaging the planet and certainly there's room for concern in all those areas. But when you think that a technological device has done more to pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty than something else, I think that's something to think about. And just to suffice, what I'm interested in ultimately is to get people to question their dogmas when they think of change and disruption and just try to look at it through a positive lens. I'm just trying to get you inspired. I'm an artist with a curiosity for how we co-evolve with our technology. It's not an academic. It's inspiring the idea Bill Gates 20 years ago coined the term information at your fingertips and it sounded crazy and now we're there. You're absolutely right. But the flip side of that, I guess another view of that is that this kind of empowerment actually gives the haves more and the have-nots less of more. I think the benefit that they get out of having that technology is less because they still don't have running water and they still have disease. But those of us who are well off and who know how to use these tools or comfortable these tools, we actually vault ahead in an even faster rate. Well, look, I think that's a great question and they ask Ray Kurzweil the same thing all the time. They're like, you know, you're professing this future technological singularity and these kids in Africa with smartphones are so empowered but they might still not have running water in some of their villages. How do we address that? And his answer is actually makes perfect sense. He says, look, the world has changed on the back of information technology but the physical world of pipes and other things, that's physical, that's the meat space. That doesn't move at the exponential speed but it turns out that these things are now becoming information technologies also and are subject to the same exponential breakthroughs. So for example, you talk about healthcare, you talk about being able to treat people with illnesses and diseases in these real parts of the world. Biology is now becoming an information technology. Biotechnology means mastering the information processes of biology. We're doing the rate, the speed of development of gene sequencing now is three times faster than exponential. The X-Prize Foundation had a prize recently to create a tricorder, an iPhone-sized device that could diagnose you better than 10 board-certified doctors. We're talking lab on a chip technology, something this size that you could pee on, that you could take blood out and it could diagnose you. I mean, this point, what this implies is that in the next 25 years, healthcare will be democratized and transformed the way that information technology transformed the computer industry. In the physical world, nanotechnology. Nanotechnology allows us to pattern atoms the way we patterned ones and zeros in the digital revolution. So all of a sudden, the material world becomes programmable as well. I'm not a nanotechnologist, but reading Eric Drexler's engines of creation and just taking that in for a second, like that we could make an information file, software that writes its own hardware. I mean, that's insane. Self-assembling. Yes. Tell us a little about the idea that technology evolves, but technology helps us evolve too. Like in a codependent way. Yeah, well, Kevin Kelly is one of my heroes. He's the co-founder of Wired Magazine and a brilliant philosophical futurist. And one of the things that he says is that we have always been cyborgs in the notion that everything that we've designed that we've created is creating us back. And this symbiotic relationship between man and tool goes to our very physiology. Give us an example. Okay, yes. We created Stone Tools over 100,000 years ago. After we started using Stone Tools, our jaws physically shrank, like our jaws shrank. When we discovered fire, we could cook our foods. Fire acted as an external stomach that predigested our food that made every meal more energy dense, more efficient. So instead of foraging all day for raw foods to barely get by, we could have in one sitting enough nutrients to free up cognitive real estate that led to the development of art, culture, and all these other things that we do when we're not fighting to eat. And he's written a wonderful essay about it, but essentially cooking made us human. I mean, there's been books written about it. So when people say technology is unnatural, they don't look at the long view when they don't realize that to be human is actually to be transhuman. Like, we are the tool making animal. That's what we are. In fact, and not to get too philosophical, but the very last sentence of Singularity is Near, which is Kurzweil's book, says that our ability to create virtual models in our heads, that is our imaginations, virtual realities in our heads, pre-design things before we make them, right? To imagine, combined with our modest looking thumbs, was sufficient to usher in the secondary force of evolution called technology. And it will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips. On the National Geographic Brain Game show that you host, you exercise people's minds in ways that's uncomfortable to them. Give them scenarios that force them to think differently. What have you learned about the human mind in the process of conducting all of these experiments over the last four years? Yeah, yeah, well, it's interesting. Yeah, with Brain Games we do set up these experiments to try to highlight or reveal shortcomings in your perceptual apparatus, to show you the ways in which you fill in the blanks. Your brain doesn't experience reality directly. You don't get to have a naked interface with reality. You get limited information from your brain and then you fill in the blanks. You look for patterns and you render a kind of movie in real time, an approximation, an inference of the world. And that rendering is mediated by culture, it's mediated by language, it's mediated by the clothing you wear and even the weather. Certain clothing can change the way you see the world. The language you speak can actually structure your world view. So what you come to realize is that we're a story. We're a autobiographical software that's taking cues from the world and trying to find coherence, but we don't know the world directly. And so hopefully by highlighting this on Brain Games, we're giving people a sort of feeling of curiosity and wonderment where they stop taking things for granted and they realize the ambiguity of their knowledge of the world. We may be stepping off the... The topic at hand? The topic, but it's... Is there a topic at hand? It's just really interesting because there's a process of socialization that goes on from the time you're born where the people around you, starting with your parents, help you or guide you into seeing the world as they see it, which is to apply those same filters and mental models. And look, but tell us, we're bringing it back to technology. The fact that all that perspective now gets put into this internet repository, this worldwide web repository, what impact does that have on unifying how others see the world or in giving us richer perspectives to step into that we hadn't before? Well, it's great. I mean, my career started really because I started making digital video content. I make short form media about big ideas that I distribute for free on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. And we've had over 80 million views now to our channel through all these different platforms. So here, I can be limited to a particular place in space and a particular place in time, but I'm interfacing and reaching other minds and distilling comprehensive insights about the state of the world and having conversations with other people across the planet. So I like to think that that expands their brains, but it also means that there can be a lot of garbage, 10,000 hours of video uploaded every day to YouTube. And so we're suffering bandwidth anxiety. How do we know what to pay attention to? How do we curate our information diets? How do we not become overwhelmed by the signals competing for our attention? I mean, there's a reason why attention is the new oil. Attention is the new limited resource. I don't know, it's both. It extends and amputates. Should that be a cause for anxiety or should we just get comfortable being overwhelmed? I think we need to upgrade our brains eventually, I mean, we're due for more RAM for sure. But I think that what we're going to do in the meantime is we're going to start offloading a lot of decisions as to what we read and what we look at to algorithms. There's a wonderful essay recently called Anticipatory Design, The Age of Anticipatory Design. You know, today you open Netflix, there's 10,000 million options. I get overwhelmed and I watch nothing. But it's the FOMO, no matter what I pick, I'm missing out on something else. I'm being made acutely aware that I can't possibly have it all. Where technology creates problems, are you saying technology then needs to come along and solve those problems? Yes, look, technology, we've sort of surpassed our own cognitive bandwidth. We've given ourselves more possibilities than we can ever possibly quantify and measure to make decisions about those possibilities. And so eventually we're going to ask the technology to probably make a lot of these choices for us. And that scares a lot of people, but I think it'll be an interesting debate. But it's, I mean, if attention's the limited capacity and we're co-evolving with our tools, I mean, you can extract summaries, perhaps. And curation doesn't have to be by hand, it can be learned, you know. I try to practice the kind of intellectual discernment and filtering of all the media that's coming at me, but sometimes I do get overwhelmed. And sometimes I just have to say, you know what? Like I'm turning my phone off, you know? I've gotten some interesting articles to read, switch it to airplane mode and just read what I have rather than keep browsing. That's an interesting point. One of the reactions against this kind of transcendental change you talk about is that some people simply shut down. They want to go back and they want to live in the cabin in the woods, or they want to, in the case of teaching creationism as a science in school, which has been reintroduced in some states, they want to actually go back to an earlier, simpler time. Is that just a natural human reaction? Is that to be expected when technology changes? No, look, I think when people are overwhelmed, they recoil, you know? Some people thrive when they're overwhelmed. But most of us, if the overwhelming intensity of the media assault, of the transformation, feels scary to our bottom line, if we feel like we can't keep up, if we feel trampled by it, then we recoil. But what's important for people to understand is that there have been other onslaughts of technological transformation. I mean, when we, I said this example to you earlier, writing is perhaps the most disruptive information technology to have ever come along, and that was thousands and thousands of years ago. But Play-Doh, at the time, is rumored to have been very against this tool because he said our brains would atrophy if we were writing things down. So in his mind, this was just not good for us. So, I always tell people to check out Stephen Johnson's book, Everything Bad is Good for You, which he looks at all these fears that we've had about the radio, telephone, video games, and showing all the ways in which these things actually have cognitive benefits in the end. So it's made me an optimist, but look, in the end it's a matter of opinion. You know, if you refuse to believe, you refuse to believe. One topic that's gotten quite a bit of media coverage lately has been robotics, and even Steve Wozniak has weighed in on this, and whether our artificial intelligence systems will eventually be smarter than us, and then we'll have the students based scenario where they decide we're not needed anymore. What's your take on that? How should we think about that? You know, I think when we say, when we talk about intelligence and artificial intelligence and so on and so forth, again it's sort of an error of language. I think what matters is intelligence. It doesn't matter what substrate it runs on, and it doesn't matter if some of it is biological and some of it is non-biological. So I don't think so much that it's the AI that's going to wake up and conspire against us. I think there's going to be a cognitive merger of sorts. We're going to incorporate non-biological intelligence into our cognitive machinery, and maybe, right now most of it runs on our wetware, but certainly some of my thinking happens through the mediation with my smartphone. Maybe eventually more of it will be running on the non-biological hardware rather than in the biological hardware, but it'll be thousands of baby steps. We won't really think, wow, we became the AIs until we're on the other side of that line and we look back and we're like, remember when we had to like do all that stuff on like wagons and horses, and now we fly through the air? You know, it's kind of going to be like that. Before we know it, we'll just be mostly digital. But one gets the impression that, you know, we've been going through these sort of transitions and the evolutions. The very first demonstration, despite everyone giving Alan Kay credit for the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC, the very first demonstration was done by a guy named Douglas Engelbart at IBM. Oh, I know. And it looks like a Graphical User Interface. He had a mouse, direct manipulation. And you know what else nobody talks about is how many of those engineers were doing psychedelic drugs when they were solving engineering problems. It's a book by John Markoff called What the Door Mouse Said is the History of the Counterculture and the Cyberculture in Silicon Valley. Because think about what these technologies have become. They have fulfilled, they have literalized the psychedelic dream of expanding our minds, of freeing our minds beyond their limitations. Marshall McLuhan said computers are the new LSD. Most of us don't think about that because this stuff has become so mainstream, but this was disruptive in the 1960s. Bicycle for the mind, as Steve Jobs said. But the key decision or the key assumption that Engelbart made was one group of people, or I think most people went down the path of, let's figure out how we can replace the mind as a tool of productivity. And he went down the path less trod of how can we augment it. And we're- That's spot on. That seems to be the discussion all over again, 50 years later. Yeah, well I just wanted to see the Steve Jobs film, the Danny Boyle new one. And there was a wonderful flashback scene where they have Steve Jobs talking to John Scully back in the day. And the anecdote that he used in the film, I don't know if this really happened, but he said the most efficient animal in the animal kingdom is the condor. The least efficient animal in the animal kingdom is the human being. But you give a human being a bicycle and he becomes the most efficient animal in the animal kingdom, just like that. So if the computer is the bicycle for the mind, then it takes potentially our thinking and makes us gods. So look ahead a little bit. We have, we no longer have to look things up. We no longer have to memorize things. Their information is at our fingertips. One school of thought would say well the mind atrophies because we don't need to remember things anymore. I take it that's not your point of view. How does the mind evolve? Now that we have this capability, how do you see humans evolving over the next generation? I mean, look, I've always been a fan of, what's his name? The guy that, Abraham Maslow, hierarchy of needs. And he talked about how we have these kind of basic biological needs that we have to meet before we can get to more creative places of self-actualization. So we gotta eat, right? We gotta get laid. We have to reproduce. We have to have shelter food. We have to have then maybe esteem. And there's this ladder of needs. And as we fulfill the more basic animalistic needs, we get the more creative needs. At the top of the chain is the desire for meaning. You know, when you're starving, the meaning of life is food. When you are wealthy and educated and you're fed, the meaning of life becomes cosmic. You're searching for it, right? And today we're experiencing a little bit of existential dread because people have more of what they need than any other time in human history. People are still hungry for meaning. So I think that's how it changes. We dovetail more and more of the things that machines are better at through the machines. And we free our brains to focus on far more creative things that we don't get to play with today because we don't have the space or the time or the context to do so. You look at disruption and everybody's focused on, you know, not being Ubered out of business these days. What do you think the ultimate, how disruptible is our economy right now? Is every business essentially in play? Some would say yes. But that sounds kind of scary, you know, because we all kind of want some kind of financial stability, you know, I have some stock on this. The truth is, yeah, I mean, things are going to change very fast, but there's going to be certain things that slow the rate of change, namely, you know, we don't want to disrupt an industry where 100,000 people are going to lose their job overnight, so that might slow the disruption, but the disruption's coming. I mean, I think it was, I read something recently said 100,000 years ago, not 100,000, 100 years ago, 90% of the jobs in this country were farming. Today, they're less than 1%. And when that happens over a generation, it's less disruptive because, okay, so you were a farmer and then your kid goes and does something else. When it's happening while you're still in your prime, you're like, what the hell, I just studied and I'm just getting good at this and now it's all messed up. So it's not the scope of change with the velocity that makes the difference. It's telescoping, yeah, yeah. Changing times, changing times, but. Last question. Oh, I was just going to say, Jason, we covered a lot of territory from We did. Pre-classical Greek, you know, down to the, all the way to the future. Right. One common thing, or one comment that came up about, you know, we don't need to remember things now. Remember in pre-classical Greece, literature was memorized, you know, the great, the Homeric poets, you know, those were big books to memorize. I know, I know. And, you know, they exercise that faculty. We exercise different faculties. That's what I think too. You know, so on that note. On that note, we're out of time. We could go on with this for a long time. Jason Silva is a filmmaker of futures, the epiphany addict. You can look up shots of awe on YouTube, three minute videos that will change your world. You can look up National Geographic's Brain Games, which is just very cool. And, if you're lucky enough to be here at Insight, you can hear him speak. Jason, thanks very much for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you. Paul Gillan from theCUBE. We're live, Las Vegas. We'll see you for our next guest in a minute.