 Welcome. Thank you for having me. My name is Dr. Amon Choudhury and I'm the global lead for responsible and ethical artificial intelligence at Accenture. And what's so great about my job is I get to bring morality and humanity to what people think is a soulless consulting company. I get to be the face of humankind and be the voice for the people who aren't heard. So what I'm going to talk about a bit is human augmentation and the ethical limitations that we should really be thinking about as startups, as people who participate in this society. So what's human augmentation today? Let's just, let's think about what human augmentation means. So sometimes we may think this is a far off future thing, but in today's world we already have bionics. So we're capable of augmenting our physical capacity. And today it's mostly used for people who are disabled to be able, people without arms to have a bionic arm, legs, etc. It's integrated robotics to allow enhanced mobility. And the big shift and the change that we're seeing over time is that we've moved from the world of, let's say, the Paralympics which are manually, musculely powered Olympic games to the Cybathlon which is human augmented bionic games. So even though to us today human augmentation seems pretty far away, to somebody 30 years ago, to you as a child, we already seem like cyborgs. The second part is neuro-technology. So this is the augmentation of our mental capacity, brain-computer interfaces. Now we have companies working on making chips in your brain to actually augment your own memory. And something that a lot of Silicon Valley people, including myself, love, it's neuro-tropics. Neuro-tropics are taking things like ginkgo or ginseng and micro-dosing in order to improve your brain capacity, pretty much hack your brain. The last is gene editing. So we've finally gotten into a world where we've mapped the human genome and we're starting to do amazing things with it. So now we can do personalized treatments for life-threatening diseases. We can create targeted cancer treatments instead of chemotherapy that attacks your entire body. We can do things like repair congenital defects. So what's human augmentation tomorrow? And that's really what we're thinking about here. So what if our bionics are more like super-soldier suits? So when we send somebody out into war, they're enabled with a full-body Iron Man type costume. To be less morbid about it, what about physically-enhanced workers? So if somebody works on a construction site, instead of having to be physically strong, they get some sort of a brace or maybe a literal arm replacement so they're able to pick things up that are heavier. We can also have a more evolved digital twin. So at Accenture we make what we call digital twins, so you have yourself and then you have your virtual reality self. So let's say you work on an oil rig and it's a dangerous setting, it's a dangerous situation. What you can do is have your digital twin be a robot and you actually manage that robot and virtual reality. So imagine your digital twin was pretty much connected to you and this thing operated as you moved from another location. Neurotechnology, so I just mentioned getting these brain chips installed in your head, right? And that seems a little far away, but it's actually not terribly. We've heard talk about neural lace and brain-computer interfaces. So now instead of it being toy cars that I can control with my minds, what if you can open all the windows in your house and turn on your lights just by thinking about it when you're walking up your driveway? That's the kind of thing we can accomplish. And finally, gene editing. So if any of you were alive in the 90s, you saw this term designer babies. So what if you're allowed to pick what your child would look like, not just about genetic defects, right, but about how they would physically look, what color eyes, what color hair they would have? What does that mean? Or you could do advanced gene suppression to limit things that aren't necessarily congenital defects, like allergies, right? Or, you know, being shorter or, you know, having a different kind of nose. So here's where we arrive at the ethical pivot, and this is where what I do becomes important. So today, being able-bodied and neurotypical by birth is considered baseline. In other words, the way the majority of people on this planet are born is the baseline for humanity. In the world of human augmentation, baseline could evolve to require physical and cognitive automation. So what that means is to be a quote-unquote normal human, you would have to get surgery. The way we are naturally born wouldn't be good enough, and that's a society that I want to talk about and want to think about. And if that sounds crazy and way out there in the future, you see a bunch of names on this list that you could probably recognize. Tiger Woods, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, right? These are household names. The common thing that all of these people have is they've all had Lasik eye surgery. So what these, a lot of athletes do, Major League Baseball, the NFL, Major League, sorry, ProGolf, and a lot of Olympic sports is people get eye surgery to have better than perfect vision. Not that these people are going from poor vision to normal vision 2020. They go from 2020 to 2010, which means that what you and I see at 10 feet, they see at 20 feet. So now the standard in some of these sports, so let's say to be a baseball pitcher, is to be an augmented human. So to be a regular person in that world, you are augmented. And it's allowed, by the way, so while we've limited doping and we see all these doping issues coming up, nobody talks about Lasik, nobody talks about surgical enhancements that people are getting. So here's the question we ask, right? Will human augmentation worsen the divide between the have and the have nots? What is fair? Is it fair that one Major League Baseball pitcher might be better than another because he or she got eye surgery? Maybe if these people are making millions of dollars, what is a $10,000 eye surgery? But then we ask the question, who are the have and have nots in this situation? So as these technologies become more available to everybody, it starts to matter more. This is no longer about who is incrementally the best golfer in the world. This is now about who's able to achieve and get a good job, who's able to advance in society. So then we start to ask, what is fairness? So we all recognize this pyramid, it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization, self-esteem, love and belonging, safety and security, and physiological needs. So now what I say is that with human augmentation, as well as all of these exponential technologies that we're looking at, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, et cetera, we're no longer a pyramid, we've actually turned that pyramid on its side. And I'll tell you how. Right now, just about everybody in this room, we don't worry about our physiological needs. We don't worry about where our next meal is coming from, whether or not we have somewhere to sleep at night. When we think about physiological needs, we think about developing nations and poor people, safety and security as well. Most of us operate in a world where we worry about self-esteem, love and belonging, and if we're very privileged, we worry about self-actualization. This is the, what is your passion question? That's self-actualization. But imagine a world in which parents worry that their child can afford, that they can't afford the latest memory upgrade for their child. So you send your kid to school, and no matter how hard your kid works, that kid next to him has a memory chip, so they have all of that storage that they can fall back on. As a human, you can't compete. Let's think about safety and security. Well, what if you worry about somebody on the street having a bionic arm and they're able to break into your car, are they able to harm you in some way? About love and belonging. It's already hard to find somebody on Tinder, right? It's really hard to find someone on match.com, and there are all these papers about how this new app-driven dating has demolished the way we find love. So what if you had to compete on Tinder with people who are genetically perfect, literally tall, beautiful models whose mom and dad had enough money to do the right genetic makeup so that they're stunningly gorgeous? How are you supposed to compete with that on an app that's entirely based on physical looks? And what about self-esteem and belonging? So what if we lived in a world in which just because you wore glasses, you were considered to be less than? Because that was an indicator that you didn't have the money to get surgical enhancements. And finally, self-actualization. And that's the really interesting part here. So when we ask who are we, what are we doing, and why are we doing this, the position that most of us in this room are actually in? It's a really beautiful place to be in. We really think about this fairness, right? Why was it fair that baseball players have to get eye surgery? Why is it not fair that you and I would? Because it's divided by money. And when things are divided by money, it is inherently unfair. Because we're not born with money. We're born with many things, and that is not one of them. And we already live in a world with a significant, significant divide that is simply luck. I happened to have been born in the United States by my parents who emigrate, and I think about this all the time. If my parents decided to stay in Bangladesh and I was born and raised there, I would probably not be on the stage today. And that was just a function of their decision and their choice, right? Nothing to do with what I did. So when we divide things by money, we're really further creating an unfair world. So when we have a world in which this physical augmentation is now part and parcel of what it means to be normal, that idea of fairness, by the way, now impacts you and me. So we're no longer saying physiology is something we have to worry about for a Syrian refugee in Lebanon. We're saying physiology is something you and I will have to think about, and especially for our children. So what I say is that the actualization of self is the actualization of all of humankind. Now we ask self-actualization is kind of selfish way, right? What is my passion? What do I want to do in my life, right? How can I be a better person? I will tell you this is how you're a better person. When you help actualize all of humankind, that is what helps you be a better person. And particularly in places where we are in the Nordics, people talk about abundance societies, right? We talk about a post-scarcity society and how we get there. How we arrive at an abundance or a post-scarcity society is only if we bring all of humankind with us. So we can't sit here in a place like slush surrounded by people who are so privileged, right? All of us and say that, yeah, we want to make this better world. You want to make this change, blah, blah, blah. But by the way, this change impacts us as well. So selfishly speaking, think about all these technologies and how they will require you to be a better person, but also that if it's harder for you, how much harder will it be for the people who can't afford to be here today, who don't have the privilege of knowing what a startup is or having the access to the tools and materials needed to actually get there in an artificial intelligence-enabled world? Safety, security, abundance, mental and physical health, right? We all need these things and we all need to provide for them. So the next question is to say how, right? How do we do this? Like I said, my job is to do ethical and responsible AI. So are these noble goals for the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks and Apples of the world? Well, they're here but they're not here, right? You guys aren't Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. You might say I'm just a startup founder, just some guy, just some woman, I'm just learning AI. But this responsibility is ours and I'll give you a couple of examples of companies that are actually taking this principle to heart. One of them is OpenBionics. OpenBionics is able to 3D print customized limbs at a fraction of the cost of what it is to make a regular limb. What's actually extra cool, by the way, is they've partnered with Marvel and Disney and they make themed arms. You can get a frozen arm, you can get an Iron Man arm and you can get a Jedi arm, isn't that cool? But the important and impactful part here is that they're based out of the UK. They're partnering with the National Health Service in order to provide these for low-income individuals. So they are creating this amazing technology and they are harnessing the power of the reduced cost because of exponential technologies to make their products available to others. So it's not just about being cutting edge. It's about being cutting edge and accessible. A second one that the programmers in this room might be familiar with is OpenBCI. So for those of us who love to play with code and programming, OpenBCI is like the coolest thing ever. And it's open source and it's free and it's a brain-computer interface that you can just learn for free. And if you have any access to a 3D printer, you can 3D print your own headset so that you can start working with brain-computer interfaces in your bedroom. So you think about, it's not just about creating that. It's about making it open source. So I want to leave you with one last statement. The slush motto here is nothing normal ever changed a damn thing, right? And it's true. And I will add to you a second imperative. If what you build is not accessible to all, it is neither radical nor revolutionary. Thank you.