 Well, here we are at the top of the hour. 10 o'clock, we're pretty informal around here, I know. So I'll just get going. It is so nice to be back here at this science circle. I was saying it feels like a holiday actually. Had a hard time getting to sleep last night, looking forward to this so much. Haven't been in the world so much interacting with Second Life, but I've been doing quite a bit outside of the end world space here, trying to bring in some people. I'll be talking about that a little bit later today. I do wanna thank Chan and all of you here in this circle for always keeping the light alive for virtual world science and this learning space. So good to see some things do continue on and keep getting better and better. I'm gonna start with a joke, it's a Russian one. And I think Russians tell the very best jokes. It's a dark humor grounded in truth. When I was working in Moscow, this is one of my favorite jokes. It's on the difference between an optimist, a pessimist and a realist. And it goes, here's the difference. An optimist learns English, a pessimist learns Chinese and a realist learns to use a machine gun. And that was 1990. Right about the fall of the USSR, was there covering it for a news bureau? And it's still a darkly funny and true joke. And our topic today is hope. It's not blind optimism that everything is gonna be okay, but it is a realism grounded in authentic possibility. And I think that's where hope truly lies. And yes, this is not a time for unwarranted optimism foolishly ignoring the horrors of today, but it can also be equally foolish, I think, to lose sight of the greater possibilities right now, today, and wants to come. Yes, hope does lie sometimes. Hopefully lies straight ahead of us in the days to come. This is a brief interview of our topic today. A little bit about me. You can go ahead and get a PDF file at any point if you like, if you see any of the slides and the links that I'll be sharing are interesting to you. Go ahead, click the little I on the screen here. It'll give you a link to the PDF slides. You can follow along if you like. I'm gonna be sharing my take today from a sailor's viewpoint. I've been a sea captain for a decade here on the Pacific and a chaplain on the side conducting weddings and memorials at sea. So many, so many things can go wrong at sea. Bad weather, bad gear, bad passengers, bad captains. And during a crisis on board, we can lock our head into the boat and we might get scared. Our passengers are for sure. We lose reason and perspective and context when we're afraid. Often we do, we go into survival mode and we tack others and we trust less and we can't always help it but we can try to understand it better. As a captain, you learn to keep your head in the boat during a crisis, often several things going wrong at once and you also keep your eyes on the horizon. Sailors who forget that last part can get walloped by something pretty quick. The horizon really isn't that far away. Even just 10 miles ahead can hide some stuff behind the curve of the earth. So we often get so locked into our heads in turmoil that we just ignore the view ahead. Why do we do that? Well, there's some pretty good reasons why we do that. We know why. It's called the brain's negative bias. And politicians and news media and manipulators use this so well and it's so important for us to understand. Let's say that you get a good performance review at work and they say four really good things about you but there's one critical suggestion where you might improve. What is it we fixate on? It's the criticism that rings through so loudly and that's not necessarily a bad thing and negativity bias has served us well when our forebears were peeping out of a cave. They weren't searching for butterflies on a breeze but they were searching for cracking twigs and shadows on the ground. There's monsters out there. So it's good to have a negative bias. It served a survival purpose but what is wrong is exploiting that for nefarious ends. So we need to understand how this bias works to counter it. And we have a formula to counter our negative bias. Psychology Today reports the magic ratio of five positives to counter one single negative. That same concept also applies to those nasty negative self criticisms. We take way too much to heart. We need to present ourselves I think with more positives and self-compassions and here's the useful article from the New York Times on how to do that. All these hyperlinks are active in the PDF file if you do grab that. I think we also need to moderate our own negativity bias. No one else will but they sure will exploit it. Perhaps there's also I fear a positivity bias that if it's happening now it can't be all that bad that we walk through the storm with a smile as our umbrella the best is yet to come. And you know the old sayings maybe we shouldn't be feeling so optimistic after all if it keeps us from fixing the disasters at hand. 5.6 kilometers away that is pretty damn close. Your rights is thanks for doing the math. I kind of just hold my fingers out in front of me for our fingers is about 10 degrees of arc and it all it all adds up. I spent a number of years before I became a sailor working in the news media in TV and radio and newspapers. I was an anchor and I selected the day's news stories as a news director. And let's say that you are a producer of a newscast and you're trying to decide the lead story for your six o'clock newscast which one are you gonna choose? Are you gonna choose a late evening homicide that impacts just a single family? Or are you gonna cover a new diet tip that may add years to everybody's life? Well unfortunately that healthy tip may be a kicker at the end of a newscast if it runs at all there is a saying in news you've heard it that if it bleeds it leads and that homicide is unfortunately gonna go up on top and it hooks people with a negative bias and that's good for ratings. Journalists we zoom in on flames and in Moscow we would zoom in on the protesters until it looks like the whole world is ablaze and in revolt. It's good for scaring people and it's good for locking in their attention and it's profitable. One network executive said it may be bad for America but it's great for advertising revenue. That wasn't too long ago. Journalism it profits off of the bias as do politicians and tyrants and insurance agents. That's a cheap joke. I'm sorry as do many of us. It's easier to scare people than it is to inspire them. To scare them all we need to do is say boo to inspire people it can often take a lot of talk or some special kind of act. Those of you that may have attended some of my earlier science circle talks I've done a number of them here. You know I'm focused on finding our cultural commonalities so we might better understand our differences. My research, my publications have been on trans-cultural themes and images that connect us across cultural gulfs. The most resonant images are children and animals. Look at these combo two first shot shots. It's hard and not to smile at that, not to feel good about it. And that response is trans-cultural wherever people are in the world. When they see images like this we tend to smile and feel good about it. That's called trans-culturalism. One commonality we share, I've been looking more and more trying to find commonalities between us around the world, hopefully helping to bridge our differences. One commonality we share for the most part is that we are all good and caring and generous people. You don't always get that. Watching the news or interacting with the well-placed bad people in the world, sometimes it seems like everybody is just out for themselves. But in a recent study, and there's a link to that here, 200 participants in seven different nations were given $10,000 each to spend however they wanted and seven people in 10, that's 70% spent most of the money on people other than themselves even when it was kept secret and they got no glory from it. The money mostly went to their family and their friends and even strangers and charity more than they gave to themselves. And the 30% of the greedy selfish people who put themselves above all else, even truth in the planet itself. We know those kinds of people out there. They're the ones so often on display, aren't they, the ones that we see that we think the world is made up of these kinds of people in business and politics, in media. But actually they're just a minority that quite often what we do is we zoom in until once again the world looks like it's a blaze. Here's another little factoid. I found courtesy of Bard's AI platform actually. We were watching one of those pirate movies where they collected a mermaid's tear of joy and they said supposedly these are the most potent tears according to Siller's tale, the tears of joy. So it got us to wondering just how rare are tears of authentic joy and we guess to be very rare given how depressed everyone seems, but Bard told us that tears of joy are more common than people might think referred to a 2022 study in the journal Front Tears in Psychology, which I was able to easily locate. And it says that 92% of the participants in the study had cried tears of joy over the past year, 92%, nine out of 10 of us. Almost all of us then know these moments of joy that bring tears to our eyes, authentic happiness and most of us most likely would like to have more of that. Here's another commonality we all share at least here in the United States is just how sick we are of the current political climate. It may look like everyone is caught up in the news of the moment and that's all we think about and talk about, but 65% of us are just really exhausted by it. I'm a newsman and I'm exhausted by it. And 55% of us are often are always angry about the political turmoil going on right now. Only 10% of us find this situation hopeful. This is a Pew research based here in the United States, but I think publics everywhere may well be feeling the same right now. Here's some more data, what we share in common around the world, according to a survey of 15,000 workers in 12 different countries. A few of us are really flourishing in our work. 55% of us are struggling with issues of self-worth and mental health and report feeling like we're failures. More than 60% of us are struggling with physical health due to poor sleep and poor exercise and poor eating habits caused by the stress of the time. Here's an interesting piece of data that we also share. 83% of the workers said they'd be willing to work less, earn less to be happier. They'd work as much, but they'd accept a lower rate of pay if they could just be happier in their work. Any teachers here, what we call that, a career in education, don't we? And of course, something else we share in common, malady is the down hill, the downward slide in all of our environments. The United Nations says billions of people are endangered by the climate crisis, a toxic air pollution, diminishing food security, disease, outbreaks, drought, floods, leading to toxic levels of malnutrition, anxiety and stress, hard to be hopeful about that. But one thing we can do is try to feel a little more empowered dealing with it. Go ahead and check out the link on this slide in the PDF to the UN climate action link. Maybe you'll find some positive outlets for our anxiety, our anxious energy. So where is the hopeful news? If there is any, we all share a common space in the disasters. I think we all share a common space in hope. Here are two reports you might wanna check out. The first is Bill Weir's report on CNN covering how to unscrew a planet, talking about our screwed planet. Well, he offers some fixes here. That's what the segment's called. He has expert guests coming in and sharing hopeful results and carbon removal and solar-powered travel and climate intervention and just increasing a global awareness of what works. And my favorite example was countering the hunting to near extinction of baleen whales and the missing whale wastes that used to feed entire ecosystems, which are now starved ocean deserts. But there was this trial underway of artificial whale poo made from volcanic ash and rich in nutrients and they sprinkled this over a patch of sea. And with just four days, there was fresh phytoplankton and just five days after that, it was full of fish. And there is a YouTube video here linked to that CNN report, Bill Weir. He is the CNN chief climate correspondent. He does a really good job. There's also a transcript, if you prefer transcripts, I do, I just wanna get to the data. It's about a 40-minute long video, but I guarantee it'll make you feel hopeful about the future. There's also more hopeful news on this slide. A NPR has a recent report since the use of electric vehicles and solar power is catching on so rapidly that we might still yet meet our climate change goals. And we may even set some higher goals. I wish I could follow the chat a little closer. That's where the good stuff is. But I'm trying to keep my eyes on my notes where I get too lost, where I'm talking about. There's also lots of hopeful things happening in health and science. The New York Times has a recent report saying that it looks like we're in a golden age for medicine. We're on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation to come, a limitless horizon for CRISPR-powered therapies and cures, that's been talked about on this very stage of CRISPR developments. There's also vaccines for our most infectious disease coming, there's cancer treatments and weight loss. And experts say we can't even imagine what's gonna be coming over the next 30 years as we advance at an exponential rate. And here's an exciting update from popular mechanics. Popular mechanics, it's a frequent source for great breakthroughs, I find. In this, it's a combination of interests of a Nobel Prize physicist and intersecting with biology and our psyche. It's a recent experiment that suggests our consciousness, our sense of self is a quantum wave process facilitated by microtubules and nerve cells of our brains. And like every quantum wave, it has the ability of superposition to be in multiple places. At the same time, we're kind of doing that right now, aren't we? And also there's an entanglement that allows very distant particles to join. That's part of the quantum wave process that our brain receives like a television program. And through this, the scientists say our individual consciousness might connect with the whole universe. And we've had moments like that, haven't we? Well, we feel like we're connected to everything and everybody, that oceanic experience. Well, scientists are saying, well, of course, and here's the mechanism on how that happens. And I'd say that is some hopeful news, isn't it? Before we look at some more examples of hope on the horizon, let's look at what's happening in parts of academia, which quite often feels hopeless to us working in it, especially in regards to the metaverse and virtual world education. I wouldn't call this news especially hopeful, but there is often opportunity in a crisis. So we hear, I've been meeting with educators and administrators and university officers and program heads and course developers. And I've been giving presentations about virtual world learning. I bring them in quite often using Zoom so they can experience it from their comfort of their Zoom platform without having to sign into second life. And it's been working quite well. Oh, thank you for sharing that link on consciousness that it is right there. My most recent presentations typically focus on their main question is, well, what about the headsets? And you can see here, it's a common question over all the metaverse hype that's been happening. Somehow we've gotten the impression that the only way to engage virtual world learning is through a spendy 3D headset. That's a message that may well have been amplified by Mata, Facebook, Apple, Sony, and all the rest certainly looking to get a new market in those headsets. But I've been teaching marketing and tech courses since 2000, following these issues closely. We've seen lots of breakthroughs come and go in 3D, 3D theaters, 3D TV, 3D games on the Oculus. And I've tried them all. I've really wanted them to work. I've bought the headsets and the glasses and the custom TVs and the pricey DVDs. But none of it has really clicked, has it. Did they even make 3D movies anymore? We were so sure that that was gonna take over. And now the 3D metaverse is shaking out its offering. But in the meantime, we have work to do in our own virtual world with educational practices apart from any specific platform or dimension. I've been saying, and quite often, I think, upsetting people that I think it's a mistake to conflate and confound what we do in virtual world learning with the metaverse, at least as it's being hyped right now. If you have a stake in the 3D educational metaverse, I'm sorry for some bad news, but in the short term, it's really not looking good. Already the metaverse is tumbling down in the hype cycle and the stories are coming out, what colleges should do next as this begins to fade away. Once the initial 3D novelly and the headsets begin to age, I think early participants are wondering if it was a smart investment that's certainly being borne out by some of the news reports, some of the comments. One innovation consultant, he consults with a number of university presidents and vice presidents. He told me that administrators speak of their twin campuses, that's what they call them in glittering terms on the record, but then they tell them their regrets about what else they could have bought for those hundreds of thousands of dollars and once the initial funding dries up, universities are gonna be at a loss for additional funding, especially as their attention turns to other pressing issues such as declining revenues and artificial intelligence. The administrator linked in this story from inside higher education, there's no paywall on that, some of these may have a paywall, but it says this multiverse technology is inevitable, but it has a long way to go, maybe another 20 or 40 years, he says before it becomes widely accessible and affordable and just universal. You can get this article, very interesting article through the slide here. I guess the slides again, I guess all you need to do is click the little I, the information I at the bottom of the screen and it will take you to a PDF of these slides. These days when I speak to administrators and I teach for four different universities on one of those adjuncts that somehow managed to squeeze a living out of it and I'm speaking with administrators left and right and these days almost all of them have artificial intelligence as their top issue. Oh, I don't wanna add more noise to all that's going on, but I do wanna share just three quick impressions that I've had as an educator specializing in tech as far as admissions go, admissions officers have been wringing their hands and tugging their air over students using artificial intelligence for their applications and their personal statements. And how are the admissions officers to distinguish actual skills? Yet, I just saw this recent report that says that by 2024, 80% of all admissions offices will be using artificial intelligence on their own to review student applications rather than using human eyes. It's just inevitable. They say already about 50% according to the article link here, 50% of admissions offices are using artificial intelligence to review a student applications and writings. Also in cheating as educators are scrambling to catch artificial intelligence, cheating some of the teachers I know are already using artificial intelligence to design courses. One teacher told Howard just three pictures and three prompts to an AI platform. She generated a valid lecture with slides and a reading list and discussion topics and an exam. I don't know if she was trying to warn us or if she was just bragging and then in the workforce tried to download the PDF a 404 error file not found. Oh, well, that's just awful. Click the little I. I don't know. It's downloading for me when I click the link. Somebody just got it. Okay, you might want to try again says it just worked for me and it worked for Gus and it worked for Sumo. If it gives you any trouble, get me at the end of the session here. I'll email you a direct link about that. Let's see. We were talking about artificial intelligence. Oh, employment already. There is such workforce demand. Do you remember when the internet first started companies were waiting in the parking lots outside of community colleges hiring students right outside their classes? Well, we're seeing something similar now in the workforce that if an applicant actually said they were able to cheat their way through a college degree with artificial intelligence, that might actually be a good interview talking point. But I think what we need to do is keep our human communication skills sharp. There's a good case study on this actually after the industrial revolution when machines were making everything handmade has become a selling point, handmade clothing, handmade sweaters, a hand-packed milkshakes, you know, the human touch. Maybe someday it's actually gonna be a marketing point. We'll pay extra for human brain-made content or a movie that uses actual sets and no CGI. That's gonna be a plus for us. We're gonna pay extra for that. Artificial intelligence also, well now it's after everyone, now we're really beginning to take it seriously. Software publishing, computer design, programs designing programs now. Professional services such as legal and marketing and banking and accounting. They say the best defense against getting cut is more education. I certainly agree with that and a diversity of skills to navigate the shifts. We should be expanding our skills, not turning them over. CIS was able to download at Chrome. Yeah, some browsers I know are fussier than others. Thank you for following up on that, CIS. Here are a few cheat sheets. If you decide you wanna join the ranks and turn your life over to artificial intelligence, these are two really good cheat sheets and these prompts, I just copied those to direct artificial intelligence and just how you want them to go about collecting information, what mindset, what voice you want your AI to use, some useful stuff here again available in the PDF. Let's go ahead and look at just what is gonna be happening in the future looking ahead to 2040. We've looked at some of this stuff before but in the interest of countering our negativity bias, let's go ahead, let's review some of this positive stuff on the horizon. Let's quickly turn to the national intelligence officers who since 1979 have been making predictions 20 years into the future. This is a coalition of government, academic and private sector and senior experts on a range of regional and functional issues. There's a link on this to this report. Some of it hopeful, some of it not so hopeful. The pace of technological developments that is certainly gonna increase even faster, ever faster exponentially in certain fields. It's gonna transform our lives and health and climate change and productivity while also creating some tensions between the social fault lines that we have especially along the technological divides, educational divides. We need to find ways to get a lot better. That's for sure. There may also be greater international geopolitical rivalries but also advantages to be found by companies with long-term focus and global REITs companies in a lot of ways have become the new nations with ambassador powers even, we've seen that happen. It's also, it's gonna be a huge game changer is abundant and cheap energy, inexpensive access to universal information and healthcare and quality living. And we also of course may face threats of privacy intrusions and technological failures and who knows if artificial is gonna rise up artificial intelligence and conquerors. Let's go ahead as we look ahead. Let's go ahead, let's take a look backward a little bit and just see how far we've come. If we look at some of the trends over the last two decades we're actually doing pretty good according to an article and charts by Dylan Matthews. Dylan, if you're out there update this but what we're actually looking at is just general trends and they have remained consistent. For example, look what has happened to extreme poverty in just 35 years. Yesterday we still have one in 10 people living on less than $2 a day and that's a horrible thing to pass on to the next generation. My generation, we inherited three in 10 people living in extreme poverty. I think we've done a pretty good job of that. You older folks here in the room with me. Next generation, you younger ones now it's your turn. Fix the rest of it. Feed the people. And hunger is following around the world. It's decreased by half in more or large generations. Oh, Philip Youngblood, how good to see you in the room and posting your encouragement the way you do, Philip Youngblood while here is a true Longwood Chan and Phil and Jess. These are the true heroes that have kept us on track here in virtual worlds, keeping the spark alive so much for that. So good to see you here, Phil. What else has changed over the track of time, getting better child labor and hazardous work is decreased by 40%. Please let's keep working on that and some of the slaughterhouses and the fields where I see young children working. Please, let's try to fix that. Also, global life expectancy. Look at the climb there increased by six years over a 25 spread. We're now living twice as long as we did just two centuries ago. And boy, doesn't it feel like it? Child deaths have fallen by half over 30 years. Our children are living and getting healthier. People are getting taller around the world. We're shooting up in height. Look at that jump since the Industrial Revolution. Thank you, Phil. And also due to better nutrition and living standards as we worked less than lived better. Also homicide rates have fallen around the world. Stockpiles of global nuclear weapons are declining. More people around the world are living in democratic countries. People are going to school longer, especially in many of the developing nations. Yeah, poverty is getting a lot worse in the UK. Hopefully these are just cyclical burps in the system. And as things begin to settle out, we'll see these trends taking place. People are going to school longer and also continuing education. I teach quite a bit in continuing education is going strong more access to the internet. That is rapidly rising all over the world. All these grumpy people that feel left out of the changes legitimately. So the cranky people living in the middle or the south. Well, I think if we could just get them, everybody had high speed internet next day delivery of Amazon. I think that might mellow people out a little bit. Also alternative and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are now cheaper than gas or oil per megawatt hour. Cheap energy is so crucial to our next phase. And thank you for that point, Phil, weirdly. And it's so easy. That gets back to my point at the top of this. You missed this, Phil. I'm coming at this from the perspective of a sea captain working at sea and taking people out to sea is that if we get our head locked in the boat during the middle of a crisis, we lose so much that's happening on the horizon. And as somebody here pointed out, the horizon isn't that far away. It comes up so quickly. If we lose sight of what's coming at us, we lose actually quite a number of opportunities that we might develop. One of the darkest points, and this may relate to what's going on there in the UK. This is courtesy of the Guardian, a linked article here, is this new useless class of people as we're replaced by artificial intelligence. This article tells us they're not gonna be just unemployed, but unemployable, there's not gonna be enough jobs. So what are we gonna do with these people? What are we gonna do with us? Well, interestingly, this article says that we might spend increasing amounts of time in virtual reality worlds. It gives a plug here. The 3D, which may provide us with the excitement and emotional engagement that we could be missing in the real world. Yeah, there are so many sad times here happening, Brioni. It just breaks my heart to watch the news these days. We gotta watch it, especially, you know, I was a journalist in Russia for three years, and another three years working in Ukraine on economic development, trying to help these people find a new way, and just to see it all falling apart, it is heartbreaking, the hunger and the death and the destruction of billions and billions of dollars, hundreds of billion dollars spent simply on destroying things, it's heartbreaking. Let's get back to some of the good news though. Here are some interesting perspectives, and I want to share a few of those from some good thinkers out there. And one of these is from Fast Company. So if we aren't gonna be employed and we aren't gonna be defined by our careers, what may be our purpose in life? If it's not to work and earn, you look at the data on people who retire and how quickly they simply drift away from life and their friends and activities if they don't find something to keep them better. This piece from Fast Company, it says artificial intelligence may actually help set us free with a real potential for humans where we're not defined by our jobs, but we're defined by a newer purpose to prioritize the planet and people over profit. And here's another good thinker with thoughts on that. Also in the Guardian from the UK, lots of good thinking coming out of the UK these days, speaking of the Industrial Revolution. And this piece says the change may already be underway in disciplines from neuropsychology to economics that we're coming to recognize that both the natural and the social worlds are as orchestras of interdependence, of survival as an essentially collaborative and cooperative business. We need to get along with one another. We need to seek a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet. I don't know if you were here, Phil, but earlier we looked at a report on physics now that's saying through quantum waves and receptors in our brains that we are indeed tied in to the universal all of the quantum. It's a fascinating study, Phil, if you download the links, I'm sorry you missed that little bit you may have, but there's a link to that article in the slides here. Also I had cheap, abundant power. Let's just click through some of this quickly. What's happening out there in the world? Oh, and thank you, says also posted a link about quantum mysticism. Yeah, they say if we understand what's happening in the quantum world, we just aren't paying attention. It will really blow our minds. As it feeds them with quantum waves, maybe if we meditate long enough on it, it'll all make sense. There are lots of sources out there now for cheap, abundant power, solar, fusion, wind, water, 5G, wireless electricity itself may be beamed around the city. It's a global game changer for sure. There's some interesting articles on all that. In this slide there again, The Guardian. I like The Guardian. It does some really good reporting, especially even what's happening here in the United States. We're either gonna pluck electricity right out of thin air. Scientists at UMass and Amherst, they developed a thin film of protein and nanowires that create power right out of thin air by sucking up atmospheric humidity. Also, tidal power from the sea. Entire towns in Norway powered with tidal energy. Every day along a coast, the tide comes in. The tide goes out. A massive surge of energy easily tapped with some simple spinning giant propellers once we start thinking that way and get our minds out of the fossil fuel mess. Wind energy taking flight. If you drive to Las Vegas from here in California, driving through the desert, you see mile upon mile of these guys spinning in the wind. Also, here's a prototype of an aircraft. We may be a sea flying come 2040. It's basically it's a flying wing. It's a reduced drag and powered with electric fans. More solar power, electric power. There's planes that never need to land at all that are powered with solar power. Seating looks like they're really gonna be packing it in for the passengers. Probably gonna be just simply loaded on with forklifts and our preceded modules there. Oh, I dread flying these days. We may not get our jet backpacks, but soon we should be able to hail an air taxi, nice gentle landings right on our rooftops. A housing is also, I do two guys. I've got a pilot's license. And I think about getting a pilot's license is it's good forever. I haven't flown in 20 years, but all I gotta do is three takeoffs and landings. And I'm good to fly again. Isn't that amazing? Housing is really gonna benefit from some of the newer and cleaner technologies coming, such as these cost and energy efficient solar floating homes. A thousand square feet is a good living space. 12 meters in diameter, four meters high with a roof topped by solar collectors. I want one of these. Also printed homes, here's a good news for the developing world. 3D printed homes created right on site using a local clay zero waste product. Several homes can be printed at once using multiple crane printers, some really hopeful stuff there. And for those of us who like a life at sea, there are some floating cities that could easily become a reality later in the 20s here helping to solve problems such as overpopulation and rising sea levels, construction plans in China here for a prefabricated, self-sufficient island, zero carbon energy efficient producing its own food with vertical farms and fish hatcheries decentralized yet happy living. Here's a plan for Haiti, a collection of artificial islands called Harvest City. The center of the floating city dedicated to urban functions, housing office space and education while the outer areas are made of agricultural lands. Doesn't that look promising? Medical care, we talked earlier about that what's happening with CRISPR developments in vaccines. Medical care is gonna continue with some amazing breakthroughs, robotic deep-filled surgery, heart and brain operations where the doctor may be in Tokyo or New York and the patient is in a remote village across the world or our surgeons may be operating on people on the moon soon from their station on Earth. And robots, robotics are proving perfect for eye surgery. I was just reading an article about workers in Las Vegas and how they're being replaced with robotics, mixing drinks, room service, even cleaning another field where robotics is gonna be taking over. And bionic eye implants, boy I'd like one of these, it can give us super vision powers complete with wifi and Bluetooth interactivity. We can zoom in with our eyes with an implant. That's supposed to be coming out in the very near future. And the singularity, Kurzweil singularity as we build more bridges between our biology and technology, some futurists such as Kurzweil, they're predicting to buy the next decade, 2040s. People are gonna be able to digitally back up their brains. It seems that if we can download data from our brains, perhaps we can upload learning as well, an instant course in Russian or physics. He predicts we may even achieve a path to 700 year lifetimes. This new generation here of millennials and Gen Zers, maybe living a long, long time, we should try to get them off to a good start. Those of us old timers are not gonna benefit from this. Also, they're predicting experts by 2045, just 20 years. So from now that we're gonna be able to load our brain content into low-cost avatars, complete with the particulars of our consciousness and personality where we can even go on learning and having conversations with our descendants. Isn't that a little creepy of a thought? But on the other hand, you know, down the future is just gonna be a given. You mean you guys lived in a time where you actually died and you couldn't pass your consciousness on to others. What a waste of learning and life. That may well be, isn't it funny how quickly technology goes from being scary to being indispensable? I was reading that long ago when slide rules first came out, they were forbidden from classrooms that they thought we were gonna come up with a new breed of engineers that couldn't even do simple calculations. Slide rules were banned in the classroom. Google that, it's true. And as we start living forever, the youngest among us, they're gonna be able to print out new skins and new organs and customized. And no reason we couldn't live forever. You're right, Simo, when calculators came out, those were also banned in the classroom and there was the big fear when auto-correct came out in word processing programs that we were gonna lose those skills. Yeah, I've been around enough. I'm just turned 65 and I feel old enough there using a slide rule in college. I actually had one once it's still floating around somewhere. Quantum computing, lots of stuff happening there. Back to that article where our brains are actually quantum wave receptors. I think there's some fascinating stuff happening here. Yeah, I guess if you've seen one, you get to join our old people's club. Quantum computing is gonna be using transmons and entanglement for subatomic weirdness where we can now perform highly complex calculations in just minutes that used to take eons, 10,000 years to complete a calculation. Now we can do in minutes. Plus they look pretty cool, don't they? I wouldn't mind having a computer like that in my home. But you know, it's the simple things that we also need to keep our eyes on. It's the dames who invented the live straw that can filter out waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera and dysentery and diarrhea that kill as many as 6,000 children a day and that only costs $3 each. I have one myself here on this shelf, just in case. And well, as we begin to wrap up here, I see we're coming up on the top of the hour. What I have been doing out there, we can expect some big changes in education. I've been interacting with a number of university leaders and designers as we try to find ways to expand opportunities for all. I've been getting presentations on virtual world education to university administrators and department heads and directors and professors and students, international students in particular, I think this is really gonna be an asset. And I've been giving these tours through Zoom. I haven't been doing much outside of my protected zone here, but I've been bringing a lot of people in from the outside, first timers, just giving them a safe look at what we're all about. It's been working very well, these presentations in virtual worlds on their uses as an educational platform. Here's some of the people that have been coming in, I quote, actually, I just met a presentation on this yesterday to the Virtual World Education Consortium. Maybe they call themselves. On some of these comments, and maybe we can share that here at some point, some of the steps we might take to meet other legitimate concerns and demand of others in academia, especially as we adjust to the multiverse and try to find our way within that, I advise that we try to separate ourselves right now from what's happening in the multiverse and the negative publicity that it's been receiving as some outside forces trying to grab it to themselves. Good sign. I think if people are trying to make money off of it, we must have value here. Slides to that presentation, actually, from yesterday, what's happening in the multiverse, what we need to do to meet some of the comments of these people. Those slides are posted. In fact, if I still have just a couple of seconds, let me share those slides from yesterday. It really applies to what we're talking. It's specifically focused on education and it was called University's Response to Virtual World Learning. Let me do a quick copy here. I always fumble this when people are waiting on me, but actually this time it seems to work. There is, yeah, WAC Education 2023, just what some leaders in academia have to say about our efforts, unfortunately. Our efforts here going for 20 years, some 20 years here in virtual worlds is now being usurped by this flash in the pan universe pitch, multiverse pitch, trying to get people to buy these glasses. Unfortunately, we're being tarnished by some of that as the negative reports come out. And my presentation yesterday, the slides from those provide some thoughts on that. Here is some contact information for me if you'd like to take a look at my research website. There it is on transculturalism in education. Made-a-Mate Tube Mistakes Wild Garden and very poor content, you're right about that. They should have learned. I've got some interesting quotes from a university professor on this very same topic that boy, are we still a long way, 20 to 40 years away from this actually being practical. Yet nonetheless, there are some suggestions there. Cheap suggestions that we might do when I talk with administrators and I tell them that my nonprofit edukari Island here is only $100 a month. They blanch when they consider the 200, 300,000 that they just spent on a twin campus in the made-a-verse. But we saw that here in Second Life, didn't we, all these great campuses built that became ghost towns after the initial fascination wore off. Well, that's what we're seeing right now in the multiverse. Thank you so much, says I appreciate you. You know, in the 1980s, those of us that remember back to farm aid, what a great thing that was, that farm aid concert queen performed. Oh, what a great concert that was. And there was a slogan and it said, now that we can, we must. I love that slogan. Now that we can, we must. Let's try to make it a little less preachy perhaps and say now that we're able, we shall. And I really do believe that providing that we change our ways and our hearts and what I see coming up in the young people and so many people trying to make things better, I can't help but be hopeful about that. However, you know, changing our ways is a pretty big provision without much evidence to give us confidence in it that we are gonna change our ways. Albert Einstein said that it's easier to split the atom than to purify the human heart. But we still keep working at it. Unfortunately, we've come to expecting competence. So our hopefulness has to come from somewhere else. The grand standards, the politicians, the news media aren't likely to be the solution. In fact, quite often they're the problem itself or at least exacerbating the problem. There's this avarice in that 30% that we talked about earlier that is ultimately consuming ourselves along with the planet, which is ironic really, why are we consuming ourselves when we have such abundance? One of the points that should be clear from some of what we looked at today, there should be plenty of stuff for everyone to live well, cheap energy, comfortable housing, open education, safe water, nutritious food, 3D printing of our most everyday necessities. And the problem is always is how are we gonna distribute this abundance? What systems are we gonna turn to? One advantage of being an educator is you get to see this next batch of minds and hearts coming up the teachers in this room. You know this is true. It's so comforting to see so many bright and well-intentioned students rising to the time with so many ideas on how to make things better. It reminds me of our hippie hay days in the 70s, any hippies in the room, you just had a feeling that there was profound change in the air and that's the hope that I hope we're sharing with one another and I thank you for sharing some of your day with me. That brings us right up to the minute of the hour and I thank you.