 For a final talk on the unintended consequences of technology, we'll be hearing from a group of people coming to the stage that are leaders in their respective fields who have taken in deeply the fields of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and have been trying to determine what ramifications we can anticipate and strategize an ethical path forward. Please welcome to the stage our moderator, Dan Schaefer, the co-founder of Jubilee, who will introduce his panel. Thank you. Thank you, Don. Thank you. Well, guys. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Well, welcome to this panel. Again, my name is Don Schaefer, co-founder of Jubilee, and I'm looking forward to getting this subject surfaced for everyone in this community. It's been an area that I haven't seen get a lot of attention here over the years, so hopefully we can shed some light on it and have it be a permanent feature of these conversations. So it's great to be here. I'm going to introduce my three panelists and friends momentarily. Let me just first say that it's great to be here in a new identity. This is the first year that I'm here without my RSF hat on. I was the leader of RSF Social Finance for 10 years. And just a few weeks ago, we launched a new organization called Jubilee. It's a direct investment platform for those who want to go all the way, let's say, who want to question the assumptions of our financial system, who want to look deeply within themselves. And if they're not already committed, you go on a learning journey inside themselves about how they relate to money. And it also, these are all people who want to create a beautiful portfolios, is what we call it, of direct investments that will change the world for the better. So my partners, some of whom are here, Michelle Long and Condi Mason and David Haynes are here and look forward to talking to more of you about Jubilee in the future. Let me introduce my panelists now. Just to my right is Ting Wu. She's a renowned Harvard geneticist and is the co-founder of an organization called the Personal Genetics Education Project. So she's one of the leaders really in the world about hosting conversations related to the future of where we're going with genetic engineering. So it's really an honor to have you here, Ting. Thank you. To Ting's right is Tobriz Virgi. Tobriz is a co-founder and partner in Uprising, which is a venture capital fund based here in San Francisco that's investing in companies that I would say have love at the center of their management teams and of their missions. And so he'll shed a little more light on that. And then Tobriz's right is Alpha Demolash, who's the founder and CEO of Rising Tide Capital based in New Jersey. Rising Tide works with struggling individuals and families in urban settings to kind of leverage the power of entrepreneurship to strengthen those communities. And so I will kind of set the stage just for a quick moment here and then I'll ask them to talk about some of these issues so that there's a little bit deeper understanding of what it is we're talking about. So to me it's really a deep breath moment. A lot of the conference and a lot of the focus of dialogue that you see in mainstream media right now is focused on, you know, when it's not about politics and such, it's focused on climate or it's focused on the tremendous wealth gap that we have here in our country and around the world justifiably so. And what I think will be very prominent in the news in the years to come are how we're grappling with these advances in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. And in my mind it doesn't feel like we're having nearly enough dialogue with the precautionary principle in mind just because we can do something, should we do something, and who is involved in these conversations beyond the scientists and the finance people who are driving these technologies. So that's kind of the purpose of our session today is just kind of to seed the ground for future conversations and see what can we as those in the impact investing arena do to kind of get ahead of some of the unforeseen consequences of these technologies. So with that I'll turn to you Ting first. If you could, I read an article in Wall Street Journal in February about you and your great work and there were some really provocative questions in the article. One was should scientists have the right to create inheritable genetic changes in embryos and sperm and eggs? That was one very provocative question. Another provocative question people might think about when they're thinking about genetic engineering is is it a good idea for the environment to allow for genetically modified, to address disease carrying mosquitoes, for example, to look at eradicating species based on genetic engineering. And so these are some of the tougher questions, we go right out of the gate and you don't have to address those exactly, but maybe you could share with everyone in your travels with the personal genetics education project, the kinds of conversations you're having and the tough issues that are rising. So thank you. Those are tough questions and I will just briefly touch on them, but I'll start perhaps by giving you some perspective, my personal one from my colleagues and myself. The reason we do science is we feel we have a mandate from the taxpayers and from the public to help improve human welfare and the status of the planet. So whether we feel we have the right, I think we feel we have an obligation to learn and to do what we can do. Now many decades ago being in biology or genetics meant trying to understand how organisms work. We have left that level. We understand enough now about proteins, nucleic acids, all kinds of molecules that we are able to invent. So we've moved into the world inventing machines out of biological materials that can be used to address issues. Do we have the right to do that? I don't know. We are in service to the public, we use public funds. As we ask ourselves, do we have a right not to explore certain avenues if we think we can help individuals? So now I'll address your questions about the environment and then I'll draw to close because I know we don't have too much time. The issue of being able to change the environment, let's say in particular, to perhaps rid an area, a vast area of malaria, is very complicated because malaria travels by a bug. And so the way to address it to help people not even develop the disease is to rid yourself of the bug. And that is going to affect the environment. What I have found in my travels is when we talk to individuals who have suffered a lot in their life because they have not had very much in terms of health or jobs or security or respect from the community, and they are sick and they are just suffering constantly, they want to get rid of that bug overall from my personal experience. When I talk to communities who have not suffered very much and have generally grown up with good health and security, they turn much to should we change the status quo? So I think the answer will involve very much conversation, and I'll just end by saying what the Personal and Genetics Education Project tries very hard to do is to get everyone included so no one feels left out because this is a global community decision. Thank you. Thank you. Those are tough questions to address in a few minutes' time, so I appreciate you kicking us off. Alpha, let's go to you. Alpha Demolash spends a lot of time and energy focused on the question of what is the future of work in the context of automation and artificial intelligence in her work, and maybe you could touch on some of the key issues that you feel like we're going to be confronting or already are confronting due to automation and artificial intelligence in the context of the future of work, especially for people who will be affected the most. Sure. Yeah. You know, in the work that we've been doing at Rising Tide over 15 years, we've been working with entrepreneurs who are in distressed communities, and their ambitions and aspirations to participate in a thriving economy is like all of our ambitions, right? But we'd observe that a lack of access to, a little louder, a lack of access to capital and opportunities has been a major barrier. But in the work that we've been doing over the past 15 years, the field itself of this kind of grassroots economic development and microfinance, we've been very much focused on helping people access opportunities in the dominant economy. But the dominant economy is shifting and changing radically as we're here talking about. Paradigms are shifting. Automation and AI are changing the nature of jobs. What kinds of jobs will be available? How many of them will be available? And a lot of our dialogue right now is stuck in this kind of dichotomy of there won't be any jobs or we'll have like 40 to 60% unemployment or there will be all these jobs that are unfilled that can't be filled by our existing workforce. And we're debating which reality will be true when either reality were screwed basically. So the problem in terms of how we're framing it and what it looks like to actually support individuals in transitioning and understanding the nature of the emerging economy, the role of these exponential digital technologies in changing the nature of work itself, and making sure that people are actually aware that these things are coming and they're participating in the emergence of this because they're using their iPhones. They're spending a lot of time in the digital environment. Their monies are going towards that kind of an economy. And so there are participants in it but we're not yet having the kind of dialogue we need to have as social impact investors, as change agents to say actually the problem, the nature of the problem we're working on has changed. And so our strategies have to change. The scale of interventions have to change. Our policies, decision making, governance, all of that is up for dialogue and discussion and we're not yet having that robustly. We're still debating which end of the paradigm we're actually in but it's a totally different paradigm that's emerging. Okay. Thank you. I will come back to a couple things related to that. Tabriz as a venture capitalist here in Silicon Valley, in your work, in your travels, I imagine if people are here you may have heard terms like the singularity, you may have heard of things like transhumanism, transhumanist movement. It would be great to hear your perspective on either what you feel like people may not have heard about yet that seems like it's up and coming or what keeps you up at night or what you think some of the unforeseen consequences of AI might be. Thank you. For those of you that don't know and I don't think I'm an expert on either of the two things that Don mentioned but singularity is the idea that computing power will be strong enough to where we can essentially upload our brains to the cloud and I think it's started by a lot of folks that probably are very enamored with living forever and transhumanism is part of this broader idea that we are going to sort of fuse with machines. We will augment our own biology with embedded computing power and other things to sort of enhance our function and as Juan Enrique is the famous biologist talks about we are moving from Homo sapiens to Homo evolutis where we are really taking control of our own evolution. The backdrop for us as venture capitalists is that we are looking to invest in teams and companies that can really redefine the industries in which they operate and when they do they become very large very quickly at increasing speeds and we live in a world now where corporations have become like nation states in terms of their power and influence and a group of people who are probably of good values and are well-intentioned people who are playing with ad technology can fundamentally undermine democracy right like that's what just happened. And so we've been thinking a lot and a lot more about how does that happen and I think our concern is when we begin to play with taking control of our own evolution and AI and technologies that are far more powerful right than ad technology in that kind of a context where regulation and policy just can't keep up right at least the way it looks today is nowhere close to keeping up like what happens and as my friend Nadine talks about it's like the largest concentration of power in human history in terms of our ability to affect things at a planetary scale at a species scale quickly and it's like the lowest concentration of wisdom because you know the game is rigged for people that are operating up here and are you know not necessarily in here or embodied right and so that's that's scary so while I think there there's a separate category of things which are threats from bad actors Chris talked about this before you know we're if you talk to people in the intelligence community they're more worried than they've ever been because these technologies that can have an impact are becoming cheap and widely distributed and in a world with sort of wind lose dynamics and what we see right that is scary we're going to have probably a lot more events that you know are sort of you know minor catastrophes so that's one sort of the antidote or the answer to that and how we manage that as one realm of work but in my work it's really more about the unintended consequences right and it's really about a company like Facebook which means well right but isn't fundamentally questioning the answers that they have right like they're not actually looking at the shadows that their superpowers cast they're not really deeply looking at what the possibilities for unintended consequences car and thinking about the different stakeholders and people involved with that kind of a process and so what we have been doing and then I'll pass it back to you is really just thinking about those very human things like who the who are these people and what do they think about the meaning of life and how how is there underlying meaning making mention engine working right and and how can we support them in the process of of doing those things and I think in that in that process right our technology is really just a reflection of our humanity so in a world where we want to concentrate wealth and power and we care about winning we use technology that way and it divides us and it separates us and it widens the gap between the have and the have nots and it creates the consequences on the planet but in a world where you know we we use technology to become more human to be more closely connected to one another to you know to deepen and and be more aware of the interrelationships between one another and to deepen our experience of life and what it means to be human well you know then I think you know all the dystopian visions that we talk about a lot like you know as those things manifest to some degree that's like the sort of push and the fuel for like we don't want that we need to change but there's a pull from the future and a vision of like what we could create when we use technology to actually go deeper into what it means to be human thank you degrees that's okay I'd love to be believing and seeing evidence that that's how what technology I mean I I can go there you know so thank you for those reflections I like to turn back to a combination of alpha and Ting for a second because both of you are involved in on the ground conversations in communities Ting you mentioned to me that you're working a lot in disenfranchised communities to have conversations related to these topics and I know every day you're involved in that work alpha yourself and so this notion of dialogue and having conversation so that more people beyond the scientists and the capital providers and the business executives are involved and could you could you name an instance or an example of where you've had such a conversation that that you felt where the people who were participants in the conversation felt that they had a voice and that you learned something that you felt you could incorporate because both of you as leaders are translating from those communities back up out to these other other folks funders and and so forth can you speak to that yeah I'd like to tell you about one of the first events I had I went to a I was sitting in my office and I thought there's a public school right nearby I'll just get up and go there and so I made an appointment went down walked into a classroom of about 30 students they were all students of color and the second they saw me with my you know computer I could feel the animosity it was pretty hard to miss and they ignored me for a few minutes chatting with each other until and I got up and I said I'm I'm not here to tell you to stay in school I'm not here to tell you not to use drugs I'm not here to tell you that science is great because this young man had said before he raised his hand said to teacher what happened to the outreach person last week and I realized that every week someone was coming to talk to them so finally this young man said why are you here lady and I said I'm here because I have five one thousand dollar tickets to a genetics conference they didn't miss a second and the young lady to the right said there is nothing wrong with my genes so people tell me something's wrong with me because I get so angry I have a lot to be angry about lady and you know what can you say to that and then another young woman raised her hand and said who pays for all your work I hadn't told them what my work was and so I told them about NIH taxpayers funds and she said so you mean my mother who has no health care pays her taxes for you to do things that she'll never benefit from and you know that that was correct and then this young man who had started the conversation said I just have two questions for you do you believe in evolution and do you believe in God and so I realized that where I was coming in to talk to them about was completely irrelevant to their life and then he said when do these diseases hit that you're trying to solve and so I talked about Alzheimer's and breast cancer and colon cancer and he said lady I'm not worried about dying from those diseases I don't want my brothers or sisters stabbed or killed before they're 20 so then we embarked on this amazing conversation where I learned far more they were so angry but by the end of half an hour I had not taught them a single thing about genetics we became pretty close friends and they came to the conference they met all these CEOs of genetics companies and one by one privately they didn't say this in front of either of their friends they said those aren't really bad people and that's when I realized we have to close this gap and CJ Ashley came to work at PJ for a few years so I don't think it takes a lot I actually think it's conversation and and respecting people's histories so that's why I'm very optimistic I feel with the rights infrastructure we can we can do a lot thank you Alpha you want to share share quickly sure instance yeah and I fully agree with you it is about conversations so at rising tide one of the things that we're working on and we're calling it future tide partners right now and just even immediately it is about inviting people to start having these conversations so we've launched a platform called earthrise50.org inviting people to just have dinners in honor of this 50th anniversary of the earthrise photo to just have an open conversation about the transformational future that is here that is you know happening in front of us so those conversations with unlikely people people who are not likely you know I call it bubble ambassadorship it's like we're all in our little bubbles but we need to have conversations in between the bubbles where we can actually make meaning around what matters to us and down to your question and around specificity and where I'm encountering this I'm encountering it with our entrepreneurs let's say my Hildamera who owns an auto shop auto body shop and we're talking about what does repair of auto automotives look like in a world in which we have self-driving vehicles these are computers on wheels you know so is your mechanical you know your auto mechanic that repairs your car going to be capable of servicing those vehicles so what is what are the consequences of some of these technologies that are already here that is like there's public information available to be able to actually make meaning for the vast majority of enterprises which in this country like we've got 24.5 million micro or small businesses across this country that are responsible for the vast majority of employment so when we talk about workforce that's where so many of the people in the world are working and so these technologies have a ripple effect that are going to impact the decisions that people like Hilda are making about whether to train her auto mechanic whether to upgrade her technology or whether to open a new auto shop using her savings and the ramifications of the decisions she would make today are going to manifest in 10 years and so we think oh you know self-driving vehicles on the worst leader need to think about that today but the reality is the decisions she's making are having consequences on her and her children in 10 years that's the kind of long-term thinking and really 10 years is short-term you know thinking that we need to be engaging in and we can't do that unless we're having public dialogue great yeah thank you alpha well to breeze we can't hear from you again because we're out of time unfortunately it goes really fast and this is just we're just able to get obviously a micro dose of an immense couple of subjects that I urge you to check out the work of these three rising tide capital uprising and the personal genetics education project that Ting is leading and if you do one thing related to genetic engineering and synthetic biology that Christopher talked about I would read a book by Bill McKibbin called enough it came out in 2003 and so as usually it's about 15 years ahead of his time and if you if you want to get exposed to frameworks of how to think about what's coming and that we can all try to anticipate the kinds of conversations the kinds of dialogues and then the kinds of enterprises and things we could invest in and give to that would help with this I just invite everyone to join with us in this so thanks for thanks for attending thank you thanks you guys thank you