Futuristic #14 – Peter Xing, Transhumanism

 

[00:00:00] Cameron: Welcome to the Futuristic Podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about all of the emerging technologies that are going to shape our lives forever. And this is episode 14. We’re recording this on Friday, the 6th of October, 2023.

[00:00:24] Cameron: Got to put a timestamp on it because in the next 24 hours, everything could change as it does so often.

[00:00:31] Cameron: Stories that seem really relevant one day are outdated the next. With me as always, uh, coming from Melbourne is my co host, Tits McGee, also known as Steve Sammartino. That’s an Anchorman joke. I watched Anchorman last night again.

[00:00:45] Cameron: And also coming to us from

[00:00:47] Cameron: Sydney.

[00:00:48] Cameron: Our old, like, we all know this guy, uh, I don’t know, I can’t even remember how long you and I have known each other or where we first met, Peter. Peter Xing, coming from Sydney. How are ya,

[00:00:59] Cameron: Peter?[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Peter: oh, really good. We just had our meetup, uh, over at Stone & Chalk last night. We were just saying to Steve, it was like five years ago that we met at TEDxMelbourne. And he was talking about the pizza stuff. And the pizza and beers is still what’s powering civilisation, mate. It’s still going. You gotta know the ingredients.

[00:01:16] Steve: You know, I’ve got a theory on, um, if you want to know which industry to work in as a youngster,

[00:01:24] Peter: Mm.

[00:01:25] Steve: just look at where you can get free pizza and beer in that city and that’s the industry to work

[00:01:32] Steve: in. Right? Because that’s where, that’s where money is flowing

[00:01:36] Steve: to, right? It’s where they

[00:01:37] Steve: think tomorrow is going to be better and they want to get the youth involved.

[00:01:41] Steve: So that’s what you look to. Forget about the Wall

[00:01:43] Steve: Street Journal. Forget about anything else. Where is their free pizza and beer? That’s the industry that money is flowing to. Here’s some advice. Write it down. The future is

[00:01:52] Steve: yours.

[00:01:53] Peter: Yeah. Free advice, free beer, and free pizza. How good is that?

[00:01:57] Cameron: Plastics.

[00:01:58] Cameron: That’s Steve’s career advice.

[00:01:59] Cameron: [00:02:00] Now, um, I don’t, I honestly have no idea how long Peter and I have known each other or where we first

[00:02:05] Cameron: came across each other, but it feels like it’s been forever. Um, for people who don’t know Peter, according to his LinkedIn page, assuming this is up to date,

[00:02:15] Peter: Yeah. All right.

[00:02:16] Cameron: he’s building the transhuman network state.

[00:02:19] Peter: Yeah.

[00:02:21] Cameron: Australia, Transhuman Coin, SingularityU, WAVIA, former Emerging Tech Director of KPMG and Deloitte and just many, many other things on his bio there. Give us, give us your, your elevator pitch, uh, bio. How would you introduce yourself at a

[00:02:42] Cameron: conference in an elevator?

[00:02:44] Peter: Cheers. I’m trying to, we just had a talk around, uh, mushrooms and myceliums last night. And we want a bit of mycelium for transhumanism, right? Like, we want to have all the connectors underneath the earth. Bridging it, you know, you don’t quite see it, but you see the mushrooms [00:03:00] popping out in the physical locations all around the world.

[00:03:02] Peter: So yeah, this network state concept comes from, uh, Balaji from CTO Coinbase. Uh, you know, he’s been talking about how to use, you know, Web 3. 0, you know, cryptocurrencies. Now you don’t need governments to do anything for you. People. Places, laws that you can create through this new web, decentralized autonomous organizations, right?

[00:03:23] Peter: AIs, power on the earth, you can make things happen through the power of will of individuals coming together. And so for transhumanism, we want to use science and technology to accelerate all of this that’s happening for humanity. Whether it’s in our healthy longevity, our super intelligence around how do we actually keep up with the AIs, right?

[00:03:43] Peter: They’re going to take all our jobs so we might as well try to… Merge with them eventually to, to stay relevant, um, then also keeping well, right? Mentally, physiologically, but keeping together as a society to make sure that we still

[00:03:56] Peter: feel part of this sort of human before all of it

[00:03:59] Peter: goes to tits up [00:04:00] into the future, right?

[00:04:01] Cameron: Tits

[00:04:01] Steve: and tits

[00:04:02] Steve: up. That’s what we’ve

[00:04:03] Peter: Tits McGee!

[00:04:04] Cameron: They’re relatives.

[00:04:07] Cameron: They’re related.

[00:04:08] Steve: I love that idea of merging because the technology is us. And I just have always thought that we’re evolving outside of our bodies. We’ve figured out a way to do that because the world was changing too quick and that’ll eventually enter our body.

[00:04:21] Steve: So I feel like this, you know,

[00:04:23] Steve: transhumanism where we’re in a

[00:04:24] Steve: transition stage. And, and, you know, when you say merge with it, there’s something wonderful about that. Of course. Things are moving quicker than they ever have, you know, since our species things used to move a lot slower. But I feel like merging is far better than

[00:04:39] Steve: competing.

[00:04:41] Peter: yeah, definitely. I mean, we get

[00:04:43] Steve: is

[00:04:43] Steve: it Cam?

[00:04:44] Peter: pretty much just be part of

[00:04:46] Peter: it, right? You can’t fight it.

[00:04:48] Peter: I mean, uh, we’re

[00:04:49] Peter: already,

[00:04:49] Peter: we adapt so quickly now. We’re adapting faster than ever before. Like smartphones, I

[00:04:53] Peter: was like more than a decade

[00:04:54] Peter: ago, 15 years, the iPhone 15. And so now we’ve got,

[00:04:58] Peter: you know, this AI agents, [00:05:00] ChatGPT, we’ve, we’ve adapted to it.

[00:05:01] Peter: People are just having that as their homepage now, no matter when they ever start writing, it’s just like auto populates. So we’re going to get really used to this technology, but it still takes a lot of people to understand and adopt it in the first place, just, just to get access, right? If you, if you’re out and miss out for like six months, that’s your competitive advantage.

[00:05:21] Peter: And with all the devices, all the AI agents that are coming online. I think we’re going to get to the point where, um, if you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it. Um, so yeah, this is, this is for us to get across every individual out there. Um, and for startup founders as well. So, uh, we’re running an incubator over at Stone & Chalk.

[00:05:39] Peter: Uh, this is the part of the city startup hub and they’re in Melbourne and Adelaide as well. So we’ll be building out this network state of startups that are building our transhuman future. Um, we’ve got accelerated programs coming up on the end of this month, uh, right at the University of Technology in Sydney.

[00:05:56] Peter: And uh, we’re having an investment community so

[00:05:59] Peter: that we can [00:06:00] raise the right funding for that impact that we want to fund for this future as well.

[00:06:04] Cameron: Anyone listening to this, Peter, who wants to get in on all of that stuff you just said, what’s the best way? Should they go to connect with you on LinkedIn or find you on Twitter or what?

[00:06:14] Peter: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter or check out transhumanism. com. au. This is how you can sign up to our meetups, we have them fortnightly. The pizza and beers are amazing. Sponsored by the, the great guys over in Avalon, uh, Cranzgots Pizza and Cafe, and uh, also Avalon Breweries that make the best pale ales and also the kombuchas if you prefer not to have alcohol in your diet for the longevity side.

[00:06:39] Peter: But also, you know, like we say, like pizza and beers is what civilization happen, makes civilization happen. And you just need that gathering. And to your vice point, to the younger generation, you know. Before the robots take over the world, I think tradies are still going to be like the ultimate skill set.

[00:06:57] Peter: It’s still going to be challenging until the Tesla [00:07:00] optimist comes online with the right sort of fidelity and agility and dexterity in their hands. Um, but yeah, I think it’s going to be an

[00:07:06] Peter: interesting way for us to reconnect and understand what’s coming.

[00:07:10] Steve: Yeah.

[00:07:11] Steve: Wow.

[00:07:12] Cameron: Well, you know, you’ve been on the cutting edge of this stuff for a long time, Peter. I mean, I’ve been around the transhumanist movement for 25 years on the fringes of it, um, and the singularity stuff for the same amount of time, but you actually have been You know, throwing everything behind this. I was doing podcasts about this stuff 20 years ago, but you’ve, you know, you’ve built a career out of this.

[00:07:35] Cameron: I, I, I’ve been thinking about you and I’d see you pop up on the socials over the last, you know, eight or nine months. I’ve been thinking, wow, Peter must be going. Yep.

[00:07:44] Cameron: I’m just,

[00:07:45] Peter: This is it.

[00:07:47] Cameron: I love it when a plan comes together kind of thing. You’ve been

[00:07:50] Cameron: working on This stuff for a long time, talking about it and like you, what’s the last 12 months been like for you with all of [00:08:00] this stuff starting to come to

[00:08:02] Cameron: fruition?

[00:08:04] Peter: Yeah, I mean, it feels so good, eh? You know, you’ve been talking about all your like, you know, like crazy guys shouting in the mountains, and then finally all the techs go, Oh, okay, now we know what he’s talking about. But it’s, uh, it’s been, I think over the last nine years or so, we’ve been running, you know, meetups at pubs, just, just small groups, gatherings, like who else is thinking like this?

[00:08:24] Peter: Me, it took like a near death experience, uh, for it to really trigger down the singularity rabbit hole. You know, the Ray Kurzweil stuff, but he reckons by the end of the decade, we’re going to have human level AI. And so people are actually starting to come around this whole AGI concept that Ben Goertzel coined, who’s also a transhumanist over there.

[00:08:41] Peter: It’s a singularity net. And so, you know, this stuff has actually become more and more mainstream. It’s passed the Orbiton window and people are actually going, Oh shit, there’s actually a pretty good prediction on the sports bets equivalent of AGI that’s going to happen by the end of the decade. So, you know, it’s great to have that validation.

[00:08:59] Peter: And [00:09:00] you’re seeing a lot more people out in the communities. Thank you so much for joining and getting interest and understanding what has this been for not only ourselves, our jobs, our societies, um, but also what does the future of humanity look like? And so we’re actually going to be building this together.

[00:09:15] Peter: Now we’ve got people that can leave their corporate jobs. I left my corporate job, what, six months ago to do this, like, just full time. I was doing it internally, trying to spruik it up, the whole singularity at KPMG. Um, but now we can actually just. Pursue that singularity full time and get the other founders to start building themselves.

[00:09:33] Steve: Just on the singularity thing, Cam and I’ve discussed it a lot real quickly. I guess there’s, there’s two parts of this equation and people’s thoughts vary. I’d like to get your view on this. I mean, the first one is, and it’s one of our stories today is, when does human intelligence Get surpassed by machines or AI, but then there’s the, the, the biggest singularity idea, which is like the moment that all bets are off because [00:10:00] we’ve never been here before.

[00:10:00] Steve: And it’s the black hole of technology exponentially improving upon itself in, you know, infinite time, just doubling and doubling. Where do you land on that? Because at the moment there’s a lot of talk about, well, is it 2027 or 2030 when we’re surpassed and that’s going to happen? There’s, there’s nothing clearer,

[00:10:18] Steve: but.

[00:10:18] Steve: Is that also the moment of the singularity because it doubles on itself once it gets beyond us? Are they the same moment

[00:10:23] Steve: for you? Because I think Kurzweil

[00:10:25] Steve: said 2027 was the moment that he had for, uh, surpassing human intelligence and he had 2045, I think, as his singularity moments.

[00:10:35] Peter: Yeah. He’s

[00:10:36] Steve: I’m not purporting to know exactly which of those two things and where the overlap is, but we’d love to

[00:10:40] Steve: get your view.

[00:10:41] Peter: Yeah, no, you’re totally

[00:10:42] Peter: right. Like as soon as you have human level AI and that’s self

[00:10:45] Peter: recursive,

[00:10:46] Peter: you can actually pretty much just have that intelligent explosion, right? There’s nothing stopping it from continuing to replicate. Create their own data centers And just

[00:10:53] Peter: add more energy to

[00:10:54] Peter: the mix. and I think Keswell’s revised

[00:10:56] Peter: it down to 2039 for the singularity as well.

[00:10:59] Peter: [00:11:00] But you know, even that is just, you know, finger in the air. It’s so hard to predict with exponentials, even with the sort of the numbers that he’s got backing up all his predictions on the

[00:11:08] Peter: level of computation, he calls it the law of accelerating returns. So just like Moore’s law. Um, but basically what he’s saying is that, well, 2045 was when he measured that.

[00:11:18] Peter: You know, AI is going to have more intelligence than the collective intelligence of all humans combined. And so that’s where he put that as a sort of finger in the air. But now that he knows that, say, 2029 or 2027, like you say, might be actually the point where, you know, it could do anything that a human can, and have the, without the limitations of humans, of our, you know, limited energy consumption, our brain capacities, and just have multiple instances of itself.

[00:11:47] Peter: Um, that’s going to be the most important part and I think it might just have that fast take off after that point. There are some proponents like George Hotz and, you know, you’ve got the likes of Yann LeCun who are a little bit more sort of [00:12:00] sensible on the computational limitations of how These AIs can accelerate.

[00:12:06] Peter: So, you know, right now they’re looking at, say, a human being might be, say, 20 petaflops. And for a computer to get that level of efficiency, it’s going to take quite a few, you know, engineering finesses, whether it’s at the nanotech level. Um, so we’re not quite there yet in understanding how that should get there.

[00:12:24] Peter: AIs will figure it out, but that’s the limitation. And so, you know, the likes of Yudowsky, right, who’s the AI doomer. He says there’s going to be a fast takeoff. He calls it FOOM, so fast doom. And so these doomers think that as soon as you could have something that switches on, it becomes self recursive, it’ll just become the super intelligent thing.

[00:12:44] Peter: And humans might not be relevant in their equation, just like a human might not be, you know, keen on understanding when an anthill does, it just needs to build a freeway. Um, but yeah, there’s some computational limitations that make from a practical perspective, um, prevent that fast doom takeoff.

[00:12:59] Steve: [00:13:00] I always thought that the computational limitations, or let’s call them even the physical limitations and energy limitations, would be overcome by an intelligence that is vastly out surpassing humans because it’ll find some

[00:13:13] Steve: sort of curve jump. And that’s what I always liked about Kurzweil’s look

[00:13:16] Steve: at Moore’s law beyond, uh, silicon chips, how he goes all the way back to punch cards.

[00:13:20] Steve: And even before that, that part of. The computation requirements get overcome by a new technology where the old technology invents a new technology.

[00:13:28] Peter: Yeah. Paradigm shifts, you know, it’s not just limited to silicon, right? Then the next one could be graphene, quantum

[00:13:33] Peter: computing.

[00:13:34] Peter: And so the

[00:13:35] Peter: thing is with, um, yeah,

[00:13:36] Peter: and it’s, it’s still bound by

[00:13:38] Peter: physics. So potentially, you know, the

[00:13:39] Peter: AI has come

[00:13:40] Peter: up with actual new

[00:13:41] Peter: physics that actually connects general relativity with quantum mechanics.

[00:13:45] Peter: You know, the Stephen Wolfram working on the physics project based on the ruliad. So there’s all sorts of stuff that humans are still limited in our understanding of how we, how much we can push the limits of our physical reality. Right. Um, and then we can bring about this whole simulation [00:14:00] theory around, okay, well, once it has figured it all out, it’ll just create its own simulations around trying to understand how to create better intelligence within that simulation.

[00:14:08] Peter: But still like that’s, that’s sort of where all this, um, this theory is that, but one of the things that we can practically do to ensure that, you know, for us to have a, I don’t know, Safer future, a way to actually do something about it, I think is what Jan LeCun’s been saying, is that we should open source as much as we can the technology.

[00:14:28] Peter: So we could, we should push for open source AI. Like what Llama’s, Llama 3 coming up from Meta is going to be like, the irony is that Facebook, Zuckerberg is the one open sourcing the tech. And this whole time, you know,

[00:14:40] Steve: For now.

[00:14:41] Peter: being pushed to the ground. Yeah, for now, whatever,

[00:14:43] Steve: Until he closes it

[00:14:44] Peter: Meta AI. Yeah, once it gets what it wants, yeah, Llama3 could just be like ChatGPT, right? Um,

[00:14:50] Peter: but yeah, pushing for open source and also not on the software side, but the

[00:14:54] Peter: hardware. So, this is where

[00:14:56] Peter: George Hotz has come in, he’s built this open source platform called

[00:14:59] Peter: [00:15:00] TinyGrad. Um, so what he

[00:15:01] Peter: was working on before… Four gel, breaking the iPhone gel, breaking the PS three with comma AI open sourcing, uh, self-driving cars with open pilot.

[00:15:09] Peter: Now he’s taking that tech to tiny grad and these tiny boxes, which can, you can pretty much put together six of these AMD 7,900 x TXs with 24 gigabytes of v a each stacked together. In a box running TinyGrad, the open source software that’s competing against NVIDIA’s CUDA platform, so that you can actually stop this bottleneck of NVIDIA having this monopoly over machine learning frameworks and making that available to any GPU, not just NVIDIA’s.

[00:15:36] Peter: So the H100s from NVIDIA that are costing 600 grand US can be now competed against the 16, 000 open source TinyBox that you can buy. That way we can actually start to have our own ais that are aligned to ourselves like an extension of ourselves, almost like our smartphones are an extension of our limbs.

[00:15:56] Peter: And fine tune it in a way that we want it to be almost [00:16:00] like a lawyer attorney, uh, you know, a power of attorney, of an AI agent that is like the Arnold

[00:16:05] Peter: Schwarzenegger and terminated two for all of us. Like we should all be John Connors of our future. Right?

[00:16:10] Cameron: you’ve just skipped ahead to our last segment. The future is forecast where I talk

[00:16:14] Cameron: about that. But a couple of things before we, before we keep going. One, I’ve sent you a link to our show notes. It’s in the chat. So you’ll be able to see all the stories that we have to talk about. Secondly, when you mentioned Ben Goertzel before, I went and looked up my interview with him from May 2007.

[00:16:31] Cameron: I

[00:16:32] Peter: Oh, wow.

[00:16:33] Cameron: It’s G’day World number 234, Artificial Intelligence with Dr. Ben Goertzel, Ph. D., May 3rd, 2007. We were talking about his company, Nova Mente’s approach to Artificial General Intelligence and their plans to release some of their early products into the Second Life universe. I was, I was like,

[00:16:53] Steve: Second Life

[00:16:54] Cameron: I was just talking about Second Life with one of my older boys the other day, how 20, well not quite [00:17:00] 20 years ago, but 2007, that was sort of the,

[00:17:03] Steve: was the thing,

[00:17:04] Steve: I went on it for a while. I really enjoyed it. I met some people on there. It was kind of interesting. Then it got

[00:17:07] Steve: really weird and sexual.

[00:17:09] Steve: It was, it had all this, it got

[00:17:10] Steve: all super weird.

[00:17:12] Peter: That’s where all the money’s at,

[00:17:13] Steve: were flying

[00:17:13] Steve: around and companies

[00:17:15] Steve: were, you know, building hotels in there, it was like, it was real early doors.

[00:17:19] Steve: And when the Metaverse came out, I’m like, Hey guys, this is some revisionist stuff. It would been here before as

[00:17:24] Steve: well. Uh,

[00:17:25] Peter: us some Linden coins, right?

[00:17:27] Steve: yeah, it was cool. They had Linden Dollars. It was Linden Dollars

[00:17:30] Steve: from Linden Labs.

[00:17:31] Peter: Bloody hell. Yeah.

[00:17:32] Cameron: And is It Still around. Second

[00:17:33] Cameron: Life? It was the last

[00:17:34] Cameron: time I

[00:17:35] Peter: Still around. They literally had another meetup there

[00:17:37] Peter: a

[00:17:37] Peter: few months ago with the transhumanists. They were just like, look, we’ve been in the metaverse, right? We’ve still got people that are still living

[00:17:43] Peter: here. They’ve been here for 10 years.

[00:17:46] Cameron: yeah,

[00:17:47] Steve: don’t we get into some of these things? Because Peter, you’re going to have some really, actually so many of them overlap your stuff

[00:17:53] Steve: this week. So that’s

[00:17:54] Cameron: yeah, let’s get into it. Well, the way we normally

[00:17:57] Cameron: start, Pete, um, is with one thing [00:18:00] of note that we did in the last week that revolves

[00:18:03] Cameron: around

[00:18:03] Cameron: this technology. And, um, one of the things that I’ve struggled with

[00:18:07] Cameron: over the last couple of months I’ve been talking about is getting ChatGPT to right places.

[00:18:10] Cameron: Podcast notes for my history shows. There was a while, a few months ago when it was working really well, I could give it a couple of pages or a chapter of a book and ask it to write, rewrite it as bullet point notes for my podcast. I, I’m doing a show at the moment on my Cold War series about the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953.

[00:18:31] Cameron: I could read a chapter of a book and instead of having to write my own notes, I could read it. Just give it to GPT and say write this. And it used to do a good job and then when they nerfed it, it, it, Stopped being able to do that. It would just sort of cut a whole bunch. It would take a chapter of a book and like condense it down to five bullet points.

[00:18:52] Cameron: And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I went, I spent ages trying to fix it and was getting nowhere. And this week I finally managed to fix it [00:19:00] somehow. And I was wanting to explain to people how I did it in case anyone else is struggling with a similar problem. What I did this week was. I read the first couple of paragraphs of a chapter, wrote my own notes on those paragraphs.

[00:19:13] Cameron: Then I gave GPT the original paragraphs and my notes and said, based on that, now write similar notes in a similar sort of style for this chapter of the book. And it did a pretty good job. It still missed out. A few, what I thought was salient points that I had to go back and fill in, but it meant that instead of me having to write You know, three pages of notes.

[00:19:42] Cameron: I had to just, you know, fill bits in here and there. Saved me a lot of time. So that was a big relief. It, it, it, it was, um, figuring out the right kind of prompt, I guess, to get it to do what I’ve been trying to get it to do again for the last couple of months. So that was [00:20:00] my, my big win for this week. Steve, have you had a big win this week?

[00:20:04] Steve: I haven’t had a win, but, uh, an idea that I’m hoping becomes a win. So my next viral project, and I’ve done a few sort of quirky projects, which, you know, I’ve had lots of views around the world. The Lego car was the biggest one. Um, what I want to do is build the world’s first house entirely by AI. And I call it Project C5.

[00:20:24] Steve: So it’s going to be command to concept to CAD to code to construction. Um, so the

[00:20:31] Steve: startup I’m working on now is 3D

[00:20:32] Steve: printing construction, where we print houses. We’ve already done our first building since

[00:20:37] Steve: we launched in Jan.

[00:20:38] Steve: And we’re going to do this, and we’re going to look for a corporate partner. See, look what I’m doing.

[00:20:42] Steve: I’m getting with the corporates. Can’t help

[00:20:44] Steve: myself and always need their

[00:20:45] Cameron: That’s the, that’s the sixth C,

[00:20:47] Steve: Yeah, corporate,

[00:20:48] Steve: Corporate, there you go, I love

[00:20:49] Peter: 6C.

[00:20:50] Steve: that, C6, and Corporate Dollars, Shilling

[00:20:53] Steve: for Corporations,

[00:20:54] Cameron: And then when you work they’re cunts, it’s the seventh.

[00:20:56] Cameron: C, and you

[00:20:58] Steve: and there goes the

[00:20:59] Steve: [00:21:00] PG rating,

[00:21:01] Peter: Yeah, there you go,

[00:21:03] Steve: not appropriate for children as we load it up onto YouTube, um, because in AI, of course, we’ll hear that CBag

[00:21:09] Steve: word, so Project C7 is

[00:21:10] Peter: 8Cs. That’s 8Cs with the children at the

[00:21:12] Steve: Yeah,

[00:21:13] Cameron: yeah, yeah,

[00:21:14] Steve: so the idea there is to get, you know, a million dollars, uh, off, A big company that, you know, banking, construction, telco, something like that.

[00:21:23] Steve: They spend up to 2 million on their terrible ads that no one wants to see, you know, with robots chasing houses or whatever. It’s like, actually do something good and get behind this and you can turn it into content. And we’re going to use that as a bridging funding round, uh, cause we’re trying to get funding right now.

[00:21:38] Steve: We’re looking for 5 million, which. As soon as you’re doing anything that goes beyond software and touches the physical world, I mean, you would have seen this a little bit yourself,

[00:21:46] Steve: uh, with, with, with,

[00:21:48] Steve: your work,

[00:21:49] Steve: uh, it gets harder, right? And,

[00:21:51] Steve: um,

[00:21:53] Steve: so that’s, that’s what I’m working on at the moment and Really strong interest.

[00:21:57] Steve: As soon as you’re doing something interesting, that’s a bit different, [00:22:00] just throw the word

[00:22:00] Steve: AI into any project, of

[00:22:02] Peter: Yeah, exactly.

[00:22:03] Steve: and, bam.

[00:22:05] Peter: Yeah, let us know. I mean, with the investment community, We’re all about the impact

[00:22:09] Steve: Well, this is crazy. I mean, our whole thing is we want to do affordable houses and we’ve already proven our tech. So we’ve already got revenue. So it’s just a matter

[00:22:16] Steve: of, all right, there you to

[00:22:18] Peter: well. We’re on, we’re on,

[00:22:21] Peter: because

[00:22:21] Peter: um,

[00:22:22] Peter: yeah, yeah, it adds,

[00:22:24] Peter: it connects

[00:22:25] Peter: so well, yeah,

[00:22:26] Cameron: do you have a thing of note that you, a bit like a, a,

[00:22:29] Cameron: win that you had this week involving tech,

[00:22:32] Cameron: new tech?

[00:22:32] Peter: yeah, it connects so well.

[00:22:34] Peter: So I was just saying, Steve,

[00:22:35] Peter: we just got back from Africa and we’re just standing out our transhuman network state in Nigeria, in Abuja. which is their capital city. Um, you know, culture shock for me, first time there, but the people are just so entrepreneurial. 70 percent of the population on the 30 super connected infrastructures.

[00:22:54] Peter: They’ve got the internet, smartphones, Web3 adoption. So, you know, for us, it’s [00:23:00] almost like a perfect place where a lot of our coin holders are there in a, in Nigeria. And, uh, for us to stand up and be physically there to hold the Evolve conference, um, it’s going to be something that is going to be super amazing.

[00:23:11] Peter: We’ve got the government support, 75 acres of land allocated for this new innovation center in Arby Estate. Um, this is… This is going to be where we can actually have those mushrooms blowing, blooming from all the way on the other side of the world, but to give access to people that, you know, have such a need and want, desire to be part of this global economy.

[00:23:35] Peter: You know, but because the opportunities are just

[00:23:37] Peter: not heard of over there, um, that they’ve been, yeah, sitting in the dark.

[00:23:43] Cameron: I’ve just been reading, and there’s another note I had to talk about in our deep dive later on, I’ve been reading Neil Gershenfeld’s book, Designing Reality, from 2016, where he talks about the fab labs that he’s been building around the world, fabrication labs, and he talks a [00:24:00] lot in that book about Nigeria and Africa, countries like that, where they’ve been building fab labs, and he talks a lot about the implications of manufacturing, People in developing countries having the facilities locally to be able to build and construct anything that they need without having to rely on the global supply chain issues.

[00:24:26] Cameron: Just to be able to have an idea and build it. And he’s talking about the entrepreneurship and all of the excitement in these developing countries for FabLab. So sounds like you got a firsthand glimpse of that. That’s fantastic.

[00:24:39] Peter: Yeah. These free zones and the construction, it’s like, I think real estate is really booming over there. I mean, the hotel chains are really sort of, you know, been encompassing the entire country all throughout, but only now with the government support and also the tourism coming back in. Like it’s just exploding in potential.

[00:24:57] Peter: And so, you know, Steve, with, with some of the things that you [00:25:00] guys are working in the construction side, um, let us know the places where, you know, likes of Nigeria, um, we’ve got a freezer in Aruba that we’re standing up as well. So, you know, it’s a nice sort

[00:25:10] Steve: Yeah,

[00:25:11] Peter: Dutch friendly location on the Euro side.

[00:25:14] Peter: And but also close in proximity to the Americas and the time zone as well. So it’s just the perfect location where we can actually build vertically to make the most of that island. That’s a

[00:25:25] Steve: I’ll send you some stuff that just at least gives you an idea of what we’re doing.

[00:25:29] Peter: Yeah.

[00:25:30] Steve: Take it from me.

[00:25:30] Cameron: Let’s get into tech news for the week. The big one for me, guys, I don’t know about you, is this new version of ChatGPT that I haven’t got. I keep checking my app every five minutes. One of my sons has had it for a few days and that’s pissed me off enormously. That I, he’s got it and I haven’t had it. But for people who haven’t seen this, haven’t heard about it, the new version that’s rolling out has voice and vision.

[00:25:56] Cameron: People are calling it ChatGPTV in Reddit [00:26:00] for Vision. Basically, you can already talk to ChatGPT on your phone or your iPad. It can now talk back to you. And it blew my mind, the first demo I saw of this, because we’re, you know, we’re used to Siri. Which sounds kind of human, but is very sort of stilted, and the voice that is coming out of ChatGPT based on their whisper, uh, text to speech engine, I believe, is amazing, like it sounds like a real person, the intonation, the inflection, it will go, um, yeah, that’s a good question, it’ll put an ah or an um in there, It sounds super human realistic and it just makes me laugh now because since this news broke, uh, like a week ago, I’ve been playing some computer games like, um, [00:27:00] Starfield, the new one on Xbox, where there’s an AI robot following you around.

[00:27:05] Cameron: And the way that, and it’s like set in, you know, a hundred years into the future. It’s the, the AI voice on the robot sounds clunkier. than the ChatGPT voice that’s available in 2023 October.

[00:27:21] Steve: Cam, up until now it had to because unless it didn’t, unless if it sounded like a human it wouldn’t

[00:27:27] Steve: have worked.

[00:27:28] Peter: Yeah!

[00:27:29] Cameron: Yeah!

[00:27:30] Steve: Yeah, because you wouldn’t have believed it!

[00:27:31] Cameron: wouldn’t believe it! Exactly! And you,

[00:27:34] Peter: just you have Westworld. You can just have

[00:27:36] Steve: Yeah, right. exactly, Yeah.

[00:27:37] Cameron: exactly, but

[00:27:38] Cameron: it’s

[00:27:38] Cameron: just like, same way now that, you know, You watch movies from, the 70s, 80s, 90s and their depiction of,

[00:27:48] Cameron: of,

[00:27:49] Cameron: uh, technology in the

[00:27:51] Cameron: distant

[00:27:52] Cameron: future isn’t even as advanced as what we have now. Star Wars with their navigation trackers and it’s all, [00:28:00] you know, blocky green screens and there’s no touch screen stuff happening and there are still keyboards in, alien on, on the spaceship and flashing lights.

[00:28:09] Cameron: We look at it now and we go, wow, they really got that wrong. You know, now it’s gonna happen with C three P. Oh, and R2 D2 and HAL 9000. Like the voices on all of the computers, uh, the AIs that we’ve seen in science fiction are gonna, as of this month, they’re just going to appear ridiculous to, you know, future generations growing up and watching these things.

[00:28:36] Cameron: And I go, really? That’s, that’s what they thought computers were going to sound like? It’s a joke.

[00:28:41] Steve: two things. I mean, the first one is, is that now that it’s human, everything from now on changes in every mover and every pop culture element. It just sounds purely human. Two things on this. Another one that I find interesting is that human frailty and nuance is really, really important to us. And we, when we build technology, we want to build in some of our [00:29:00] flaws with it just to create that comfort level and adoption.

[00:29:03] Steve: I guess it’s a form of, you know, skeuomorphism that we had with the graphical user interface and Cam, uh, coined the phrase, you know, we went from the GUI to the Louie. Now we’ve got the language user interface, which is brilliant

[00:29:15] Cameron: I didn’t coin that. I

[00:29:16] Steve: Anyway, um, as far as I’m concerned, you

[00:29:19] Cameron: Yeah. Right. I’ll take

[00:29:20] Steve: Great artists and all that.

[00:29:23] Steve: And so, um, and we want that there’s a skeuomorphism there that is required, which is human frailty and imperfection in our voice, in our communications. But it raises to me, I think the number one AI law that we should pass, and it’s really hard to pass any AI laws. For me, it’s like, uh, the simple law is we need to know if something is a robot, just that.

[00:29:43] Steve: Is this AI or is this real? That’s the first, I think, fundamental law

[00:29:48] Steve: just to

[00:29:48] Steve: know. And only if you have that, can you really have Asimov’s five laws

[00:29:52] Cameron: real? Yeah, you’re saying that robots aren’t real?

[00:29:57] Steve: Well, that’s, that’s, I don’t think we’ve got time for that, Cam. I mean, [00:30:00] it’s a great question and we could go for two hours on

[00:30:02] Steve: that.

[00:30:02] Cameron: let’s not get into the semantics, all right?

[00:30:04] Steve: Yeah.

[00:30:05] Cameron: Well, before we move on too far, the other aspect of the new ChatGPT version that’s rolling out is the Vision. This is where you can take a photo of

[00:30:14] Cameron: something straight into GPT and it’ll tell you what it is or it’ll give you tips on it.

[00:30:19] Cameron: Now, obviously, these things are gonna be… Flawed in the beginning when they’re rolling out, so we shouldn’t expect too much. But the demos that we’ve seen are pretty impressive. People taking a photo of their fridge and it saying, gimme a recipe based on the ingredients. A woman taking a photo of her bike and saying, something’s broken, and my bike’s not working.

[00:30:40] Cameron: And it’ll tell you, oh, it’ll spot what’s wrong and where to fix it. And then she zooms in and says, is this the part? And he goes, no, that’s not the part. It’s to the right of that part, you know, just being able to interface. with GPT using photography and images rather than having to talk to it or type in text.

[00:30:59] Cameron: [00:31:00] Again, this is like killer, mind blowing stuff that I didn’t expect to see for another year. And I believe they’re rolling this out now to get the… Uh, get a heads, uh, heads to get a, uh, the jump on Google’s Gemini, which is supposed to be coming out soon. Gemini is apparently going to have this sort of, these sort of features as well.

[00:31:20] Cameron: An open AI, trying to beat them to the punch. I don’t know. What, what do you guys think? You know, what does this news meant to you this week? Were you as excited and giddy about it as I

[00:31:30] Steve: they’d already shown us some of this before

[00:31:33] Steve: about a few months ago

[00:31:34] Peter: At the launch.

[00:31:35] Steve: it and I subscribed to it and I haven’t been given access yet either.

[00:31:39] Steve: The two things I thought, I thought it was convenient that they did it for the raise and I thought that helped them raise the capital that they got recently.

[00:31:46] Steve: But it did, uh, ensconce further my thought that, uh, Google could potentially be disrupted and not be the biggest search engine. Just think about that bicycle one, the idea that you go to YouTube to get instruction and you hope that they have, and I’m [00:32:00] about to do it with a new dishwasher, where I’m going to type in and say, Oh, have you got a video of how, because I have to put salt in it or something ridiculous anyway.

[00:32:09] Steve: So I’m going to go into YouTube this weekend. And get an instruction on how to do it. But I have to hope that it’s there and that

[00:32:16] Steve: someone filmed it. I mean, think about

[00:32:17] Steve: the implications on

[00:32:18] Steve: something like YouTube or some of the other Google properties. For me, this is a real moment where I say, I promise you, you know, no tech company is infallible and it goes back to your point on the importance of open source, um, with, with anything and anyone,

[00:32:32] Steve: Peter,

[00:32:33] Peter: Yeah, definitely. They’re going to have to come up with their own

[00:32:35] Peter: device, like their own phones, their

[00:32:38] Peter: own

[00:32:39] Peter: glasses. Um, because what’s happening now is all the

[00:32:42] Peter: big tech companies are going to

[00:32:42] Peter: start shutting them out other than

[00:32:44] Peter: Microsoft. So Meta, obviously with

[00:32:46] Peter: smart

[00:32:47] Steve: and Microsoft doesn’t have

[00:32:48] Steve: hardware except for the

[00:32:49] Peter: Marcus, yeah, I know, right,

[00:32:50] Steve: walk around with an Xbox in

[00:32:51] Peter: Zune would have been nice.

[00:32:52] Peter: Yeah, it falls in the pocket.

[00:32:54] Steve: The pocket

[00:32:55] Peter: are trying, right? They’re trying with the Surface Duo, but,

[00:32:57] Peter: you know, you just don’t have enough Windows phone users, come [00:33:00] on.

[00:33:01] Peter: But, um, you know, I’ve got access to

[00:33:03] Peter: the, uh, ChatGPTV, I’ve got, uh, access to DALI3.

[00:33:07] Peter: And I’ll integrate it now.

[00:33:08] Peter: It just works so well. Um, you know, you’ve seen how they were initially

[00:33:12] Peter: before they, before they, um, sort of, uh, patched it, people were able to solve these, uh, QR, sorry, these, um, capture codes, right?

[00:33:22] Peter: As just by uploading it. Um, initially when you try to upload the capture code, okay. Oh, no, no, we can’t solve that. And then the other person was like, okay, I’ll just. Put it on my grandmother’s necklace and create a sob story that, Oh, I just found my grandmother’s necklace and I want to read it. I don’t know what she inscribed on the necklace.

[00:33:38] Peter: And it was the actual capture code. And so it was, I managed to jailbreak it through that process. So the AI is so good now that. No Captcha is going to be able to like, you know, be useful. Um, and so like, it’s, the spam’s coming. But at the same time, you can just see so many use cases. You saw like back in March when they announced GPT 4, they had this functionality already planned out.

[00:33:59] Peter: You know, [00:34:00] just drawing a little diagram of a website

[00:34:02] Peter: And also a tool, it comes out. But also what they did was, um, Uh, they determined that if you could load up an entire instruction set, say, say if you just wanted to have, uh, Be My Eyes, right? If you had the software right now, it’s operating as, you know, remote workers, can help

[00:34:20] Peter: disable people see just by guiding them through audio.

[00:34:23] Peter: Well, now the AI will be able to guide this. That have vision impairments just by outlining what is everything surrounding them. So the smart glasses will be the first use cases of that embedded on device. So that’s privacy focused. You’re not going to be going to the bathroom and it’s going, Oh, you’re in the toilet.

[00:34:39] Peter: You know, you’re going to, you know, do the number one or number two. I don’t know if that’s a good classifier use case or not. But, uh, I think OpenAI is going to have to come up with its own device. It’s announced, yeah, that it’s going to be building this one out. through SoftBank. So SoftBank’s going to be walking out a billion dollars for Sam and the team to, you know, come up with the hardware.

[00:34:59] Peter: And that way you’re going to [00:35:00] see a whole raft of smart devices coming online just to compete with this too. Um, so super exciting times.

[00:35:05] Steve: You actually jumped to one of our next, one of our subsequent stories and I was just scrolling down to look now, no, which is perfect because you perfectly did it. And I thought it was so interesting that Johnny Ive. And

[00:35:19] Steve: OpenAI, uh, CEO, um, Sam Altman went to raise this capital. What I was thinking when I read the article is like, it can’t be hardware.

[00:35:26] Steve: And I just wonder if Johnny Ive is the right person. I don’t know. Uh, because for me, it’s like, it fits more with what Musk is doing with Neuralink to truly get the effectiveness. of generative AI then I think it needs to be in some way beyond a hardware device and embedded into us biologically and I don’t

[00:35:50] Steve: think the next iPhone is going to

[00:35:52] Steve: be hardware, unless it’s hardware that has some sort of, you know, the only one I can think of that works is maybe glasses, more [00:36:00] likely, uh, you know, maybe contact lenses or, or an insertion, um, a BMI of some

[00:36:07] Steve: some sort.

[00:36:08] Peter: Yeah. The Ray Bans are pretty, look pretty neat. Like it’s all audio based, right? So what Google Glass

[00:36:13] Peter: got wrong was that

[00:36:14] Peter: they

[00:36:14] Peter: put this dorky thing on the top of the eye that everyone’s called a glass hole, but now it’s just audio. And it’s so subtle

[00:36:19] Peter: that, you know, you can basically just let the AI understand what’s aroundings and give you that almost like a.

[00:36:24] Peter: You know, it’s like virtual reality, but for audio and eventually the tech will get better. So you can have these see through ones with the holographics embedded as a mixed reality headset that Quest 3 offers right now. Super well. Um, but that is the gateway to, uh, EEG headsets, which is non invasive BCIs.

[00:36:42] Peter: Um, so we’re actually working on some at UTS right now. We’re actually deciphering. From the EEG brainwave, the actual patterns using a custom stable diffusion model to create the images and eventually the videos of your thoughts. Like

[00:36:55] Steve: Yeah. I’ve seen

[00:36:56] Peter: is where we’re at right

[00:36:57] Peter: now.

[00:36:57] Steve: some, uh, some video footage of that, you know, via, [00:37:00] is it, is it via an MRI style scan

[00:37:02] Steve: that can do

[00:37:03] Peter: Yeah. The functional MRI ones, but yeah, that’s super

[00:37:06] Peter: bulky. You got to get in there. You got to get the white noise,

[00:37:09] Steve: have an MRI in

[00:37:10] Peter: be like,

[00:37:10] Steve: Just put it

[00:37:11] Peter: yeah, exactly. We need

[00:37:12] Steve: like an old Nokia. It’s just like

[00:37:14] Peter: be so good.

[00:37:14] Steve: the same size.

[00:37:16] Peter: Yeah. The devices of MRIs will

[00:37:18] Peter: get super, super compact. They’ll just come with the smart glasses eventually.

[00:37:22] Peter: But right now, the EEGs can use the AIs

[00:37:25] Peter: that are powering it to come up with some pretty useful stuff. We’re going to be demoing this at South by South by Sydney at the Collider in Tech Central. Um, so we’ll have, we’ll be under the New South Wales house and the company’s called Dream Machine. That’s where our incubator companies and commercializing UTS tech to actually visualize your thoughts and eventually making your dreams a reality.

[00:37:44] Peter: Thank you.

[00:37:45] Steve: I don’t know if I want to see my dreams.

[00:37:46] Steve: Listen, what

[00:37:48] Peter: Make sure it’s

[00:37:48] Peter: private.

[00:37:49] Steve: no one needs to

[00:37:50] Steve: see, but Cam and me both. Isn’t that right, Cam?

[00:37:54] Cameron: Well, my dreams are mostly about you, Steve,

[00:37:56] Cameron: so

[00:37:56] Cameron: it’s…

[00:37:57] Cameron: uh, it all fits in. [00:38:00] Before I move on, before we

[00:38:01] Cameron: move

[00:38:01] Cameron: on too much, I want to point out that they also,

[00:38:03] Cameron: OpenAI,

[00:38:04] Cameron: also announced DALI 3 rolling

[00:38:06] Cameron: out,

[00:38:07] Cameron: uh, the latest version of their image generator. And on their website, they say, modern text to image systems have a tendency to ignore words or descriptions, forcing users to learn prompt engineering.

[00:38:19] Cameron: DALI 3 represents a leap forward in our ability to generate images that exactly adhere to the text you provide. And this is one of the things we’ve been saying on the show for the last couple of months is the whole prompt engineering thing is, uh, is not going to last very long. Like it’s, it’s sort of.

[00:38:39] Cameron: All these jobs that are being created for prompt engineers where it’s going to be passed over really quickly. And this is the first sign we’re seeing of that, where these things are just going to develop a much better understanding of what it is you’re trying to do. Now, if you don’t like me, if you don’t have the new ChatGPT with all of these features built into it, you can test it out [00:39:00]already because they’re all in Bing already.

[00:39:03] Cameron: Bing, Microsoft’s browser, obviously they have a big investment in this. So if you go to Bing, get the latest version of Bing, you can play around with DALI 3, I had a little play around with it yesterday. Have you guys tried DALI 3 yet? What do you think? How does it compare to mid journey?

[00:39:19] Peter: it’s super good. I mean, it’s like a comic strip. You can create an entire comic strip, coloring books for your, for your kids. Um, and the text comes out super well. Well, that’s what’s the power of it.

[00:39:30] Cameron: Yeah. Steve, have you played with it.

[00:39:32] Steve: I haven’t, I haven’t played

[00:39:33] Steve: with it yet. I looked at

[00:39:34] Cameron: It’s a huge leap forward.

[00:39:36] Steve: That, that it generated, it, what I, what was noticeable was that it seemed to shift closer to the type of imagery that you get through mid journey and, and stable

[00:39:46] Steve: diffusion. Cause I, I thought

[00:39:48] Steve: that they were superior. Well, I, I. That was certainly more

[00:39:50] Steve: visually alluring, the type of things that they would develop, and it seems

[00:39:53] Steve: as though it’s kind of moved away from some of that cartoonish kind of stuff.

[00:39:58] Steve: I didn’t think Dali was as good as the [00:40:00] others, so, um, without

[00:40:01] Steve: playing with it, that’s what it

[00:40:03] Steve: seems,

[00:40:04] Peter: Yeah. Mid journey is like, Yeah. that’s right. It’s

[00:40:06] Peter: super beautiful. Mid journey like 5. 3, but then it’s like, it’s sort of like keeps to that style,

[00:40:12] Steve: does. It has a personality. It’s funny because Cam and I have been talking about the AI that if you have code, then you have nuance. If you have nuance, you have personality. And all of these AIs have personality,

[00:40:23] Steve: which I kind of

[00:40:23] Steve: like. I like

[00:40:25] Peter: agents are all personalities.

[00:40:26] Steve: right. And I think that we want that, right?

[00:40:28] Steve: Because you maybe want to, in the same way that social medias have personalities and brands have personalities, I think that’s interesting and good. And you, and you want that, those points of differentiation

[00:40:39] Steve: across the AIs.

[00:40:40] Peter: And you want

[00:40:40] Peter: to make your own personalities.

[00:40:42] Peter: That’s what Stable

[00:40:42] Peter: Diffusion enables you, right? With SDXL, you

[00:40:45] Peter: can create your own Lora models. And there’s a whole marketplace

[00:40:48] Peter: for

[00:40:48] Peter: them, depending on what style you

[00:40:49] Peter: prefer. And with, you know, the AI studios that

[00:40:52] Peter: Meta’s coming out with, you can do your own personalities as well on the AI

[00:40:56] Peter: agent side.

[00:40:57] Cameron: Yeah, it bugs me. I like,

[00:40:59] Cameron: um, [00:41:00] people, well

[00:41:00] Cameron: my mother actually sent me an article,

[00:41:02] Cameron: Joyce Maynard, a journal, uh, an author, sorry, complaining about AI, reading her books and, you know, people, people having arguments with me about whether or not AI. should be writing. And this is saying like, you know, people have developed, spent lifetimes developing their own voice as writers and AIs are just stealing that and it’s plagiarism and it’s copyright infringement.

[00:41:31] Cameron: And I keep making the point, look, anyone, any writer or any artist, and look, this is coming from somebody who makes a living out of podcasts and films and books, right? Every creative artist has learnt by copying other creative artists and then you gradually, if you’re good at it, over time develop your own voice and your own style.

[00:41:54] Cameron: And AI already, you get GPT to write a story for you. It sounds like [00:42:00]GPT. I mean, it’s very easy to tell an article or a blog post or a story written by GPT. It’s not, they’re not very good in terms of, I don’t know. idiosyncratically, unless you train it on your voice, whatever. They have a style, but they are all going to have their own styles, exactly the same as humans have their own style.

[00:42:20] Cameron: I just think that the artists that are complaining that AI is learning from them how to do stuff, just no different from Luddites complaining that knitting. Machines were going to replace them. I mean, yeah, look, if you earn a living out of creating stuff and you know that machines are going to all of a sudden be able to do that as well, that’s a shock and it sucks for you, but this is the industrial revolution has been going on for 250 years.

[00:42:49] Cameron: This isn’t a new story. It just affects you now. Uh, you know, it’s like, Oh shit. Now it’s come up to my door in a, in a. Profession that [00:43:00] most people didn’t think computers would ever be able to do, certainly wouldn’t be able to do in their lifetimes. It’s a bit of a future shock, I think, for artists suddenly being able to realize that computers can now do shit that they thought was purely in the domain of humans.

[00:43:17] Cameron: But, uh, turns out you’re not so special.

[00:43:21] Steve: Oh, I just, I just asked for, um, I just did one now in Bing. While we’re speaking of a prompt that I’ve done before a few times and it came out really badly and this one came out quite good. I

[00:43:32] Steve: typed in an image of a man

[00:43:34] Steve: surfing

[00:43:34] Steve: in a wave pool in a cyber city from the future who is muscle bound and wearing

[00:43:38] Steve: board

[00:43:38] Steve: shorts.

[00:43:40] Steve: And it was, came out,

[00:43:41] Steve: came out alright.

[00:43:43] Steve: And

[00:43:43] Steve: it’s actually, and I said, and he’s writing

[00:43:44] Steve: in a tube, I wrote as well.

[00:43:47] Steve: It’s actually

[00:43:49] Steve: not bad.

[00:43:50] Peter: That’s pretty good. Add some text, get them to say something. It’s like cowabunga or something, you know, like

[00:43:55] Steve: So, you know,

[00:43:56] Cameron: that yet, the text thing, that’s interesting.

[00:43:58] Peter: the text is really powerful, but [00:44:00] that’s pretty good.

[00:44:00] Peter: Like it’s super accurate in

[00:44:02] Steve: pretty, it’s a really big improvement. Um, and, and look, and don’t ask me why I’ve asked for that image more

[00:44:07] Steve: than

[00:44:07] Steve: once. Okay, let’s just, let’s just let that

[00:44:09] Steve: slide.

[00:44:10] Cameron: Hehehehe.

[00:44:11] Peter: We’ll capture that in The dreams. It’s all good.

[00:44:13] Cameron: The other,

[00:44:13] Steve: my dreams are not going to be available at any point in the

[00:44:17] Steve: future.

[00:44:18] Cameron: getting back to this argument about writers and artists, somebody was trying to argue with me on Facebook that only someone who doesn’t care about human spirit, or the human soul, could say that, you know, machines writing stuff is the same as humans. And I keep saying… who the fuck do you think created the machines?

[00:44:36] Cameron: It was the human spirit that created the machines that are creating the writing. This is the human spirit. Just because you might value the human spirit of a writer more than you value the human spirit of a software engineer, doesn’t mean that it’s not the human spirit that’s created AIs, right? But we’re just not used to

[00:44:57] Cameron: thinking about unless. [00:45:00]

[00:45:00] Steve: Kevin Kelly, used to say, I remember he did the first 5, 000 days of the internet talk, which was.

[00:45:06] Steve: A long time ago now, maybe 15 years, and he closed with, and what is the internet? The internet is us. Love it, hate it, whatever. It’s, it’s, I mean, it is a reflector and a director at the

[00:45:15] Steve: same time, but it’s certainly not anything

[00:45:18] Steve: else.

[00:45:19] Peter: Yeah.

[00:45:20] Steve: It’s certainly

[00:45:20] Steve: us.

[00:45:21] Cameron: name of one of my albums that I put out years ago, Reflector of Director, Reflector and

[00:45:26] Steve: Well, it’s uh,

[00:45:27] Steve: actually I’m

[00:45:27] Steve: quoting

[00:45:28] Steve: Michael Franti from television, The Drug Of The Nation. Is it the reflector or the

[00:45:32] Steve: director?

[00:45:33] Cameron: ha,

[00:45:33] Steve: Does it imitate us or do we imitate

[00:45:36] Steve: it? We may never know.

[00:45:37] Cameron: of a nation,

[00:45:38] Steve: The Drug Of The Nation, The Methadone, Metronome,

[00:45:41] Steve: TV, Radiation.

[00:45:42] Cameron: All right, moving right along before Steve and I just go into early 90s hip hop.

[00:45:47] Cameron: Zuck on Lex. Did you guys watch the Lex Fridman interview with

[00:45:52] Cameron: Zuck in virtual reality? Fuck me. Holy shit.[00:46:00]

[00:46:00] Steve: when I saw that? Because, Jesus, you come along a ways and fucking cartoon

[00:46:05] Steve: floating face,

[00:46:05] Peter: yeah, the Paris,

[00:46:07] Steve: Holy shit, talk about curve jump.

[00:46:09] Peter: yeah, yeah, exactly, this is how technology catches up with you, right?

[00:46:13] Peter: You know,

[00:46:13] Peter: you can

[00:46:13] Peter: always head down to tech

[00:46:15] Peter: before it’s ready,

[00:46:16] Peter: but now it’s sort of gone to the point where he announced

[00:46:19] Peter: the

[00:46:19] Peter: Codec stuff. like a while ago right now they’re aiming

[00:46:22] Peter: to make this codec

[00:46:23] Peter: avatar a lot more accessible right now it takes hours to do the full scan of the body for it to get to that stage

[00:46:30] Peter: but they’re going to get to the smartphone nine hours and then now they’re going to try to get that into the smartphone and cloud processor so everyone can have it but how good was lexus delivery in it right did you see that front front version front facial going ah where am i who

[00:46:45] Steve: yeah, it was,

[00:46:46] Peter: Where are

[00:46:46] Steve: Lex, I really like Lex. He’s, He’s

[00:46:49] Peter: He’s

[00:46:50] Cameron: I listened to the whole thing. I was at the dentist getting a crown replaced the other day, and I had like an hour and a half in the chair, so I listened to the whole thing. I didn’t watch it all, but I listened to it [00:47:00] all. And the great I mean,

[00:47:01] Cameron: Lex was blown away through the whole thing. First of all, by how realistic it was and what the experience was like, and after a while, he keeps saying he’s blown away by the fact that he’d forgotten.

[00:47:14] Cameron: It was, they were in virtual reality doing the interview, he goes, you know, it’s just, it’s become normalized for me already, like, I forget that you and I aren’t sitting in the same room, because it just seems so realistic. For people who haven’t seen this, by the way, Lex Fridman interviewed Zuckerberg in virtual reality with, they both had hyper realistic avatars.

[00:47:35] Cameron: Again, it took nine hours to scan Lex’s face in, but it’s… They’re wearing the, is it the quest

[00:47:43] Cameron: goggles,

[00:47:44] Peter: The pro, Quest Pro. Yeah, it was like the version

[00:47:46] Peter: before Quest 3, before the announcement. Yeah, before the launch, sorry.

[00:47:50] Cameron: which is able to pick up their words, so their lips are moving in sync with their words, and their eyes, and their [00:48:00] expressions, and the blinking, and the crinkling of the eyes, and the whole thing, it’s able to Thank you. Recreate that in real time in the, in the VR, but the rest of their bodies and their mannerisms, they’d spent nine hours scanning it in, but it’s insane, insanely lifelike and realistic, even Past Uncanny Valley for me.

[00:48:27] Cameron: Like, it was not Uncanny Valley esque. It was, I had a hard time initially telling, is this really Lex or is it a VR Lex? Like, I really struggled to tell. It was quite imperceptible. But some of the things I want to talk about, so some of the interesting ideas. First of all, I gotta hand it to Zuck. Like, his self awareness.

[00:48:50] Cameron: Um, his PR team have done a good job at prompting his self awareness, like he la

[00:48:55] Steve: him. he’s been

[00:48:56] Steve: reprogrammed.

[00:48:57] Cameron: he’s been

[00:48:58] Peter: He’s been updated.

[00:48:59] Steve: So, [00:49:00] I think we know that all things can be upgraded in software and the exponential curve of improvement of, of the very first transhuman Mark Zuckerberg has been quite successful over the

[00:49:09] Steve: years.

[00:49:10] Peter: that’s

[00:49:11] Cameron: He makes jokes

[00:49:12] Cameron: in it about how people say that he has no human

[00:49:15] Cameron: expression,

[00:49:16] Steve: no smile.

[00:49:17] Cameron: No, smaller. He talks about how he’ll be able to tweak his avatar

[00:49:20] Cameron: to actually show more human expression

[00:49:22] Cameron: than he does in real life. And then Lex makes a joke about how, you know, there’s the two worst people in the world to demonstrate this because they’re both monotonous

[00:49:32] Cameron: people with no

[00:49:32] Cameron: expressions.

[00:49:33] Cameron: It was kind of, Oh,

[00:49:35] Cameron: they’re the perfect people. Yeah, exactly. That’s right.

[00:49:37] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:49:39] Cameron: Some of the really interesting

[00:49:40] Cameron: ideas that came out of this. One of the ones that really struck me was Zuck talking about In the next few years, you’ll be sitting in a meeting. He says by the end of the decade, 50 percent of the objects in a room that you see will be holograms, people or other objects.

[00:49:56] Cameron: He talked about having a meeting where 50 percent of the [00:50:00] people sitting around the table are holograms, and one of them is your AI engineer who has a human like avatar. So imagine engaging with your AI. In virtual reality, that has a human, lifelike, indistinguishable avatar and personality, voice, look, idiosyncrasies, you can give it the personal, like they talk about having a Snoop Dogg, uh, uh, avatar, right?

[00:50:30] Cameron: Or, you know,

[00:50:31] Peter: Dungeon Master, Yeah,

[00:50:33] Cameron: Yeah, you can have any avatar, like, and so the,

[00:50:37] Cameron: the, um, the, the actors that are on strike trying to make sure that their likenesses aren’t repurposed without their consent will be able to sell their likenesses or likenesses of characters that they’ve done. You can have a Walter White. Uh, uh, AI Assistant, or, or, or, a Jesse Pinkman, Science Bitch, or, Gus [00:51:00] Fring, or, or, or, heh heh, Saul Goodman, you know?

[00:51:05] Steve: it’s cool because I mean, you know, we talked about a few, a few episodes back, uh, bio APIs, and I think a lot of us will make money through selling our bio APIs and bio prints, whichever parts they are, whether it’s our whole body or our voice or whatever,

[00:51:20] Steve: which is one of the reasons why

[00:51:22] Steve: personal branding and influencers can go to another level.

[00:51:25] Steve: But I do want to point

[00:51:26] Steve: out that I love. How we’ve just revisited the past, and instead of just having

[00:51:31] Steve: Arnold Schwarzenegger on your voicemail, now you’re gonna have him in your meeting!

[00:51:38] Peter: How good was the timing with the Black Mirror episode, Joan, it’s awful, eh? It’s just like, just as the Hollywood

[00:51:43] Steve: That was, that was genius, that episode, that

[00:51:45] Steve: was so good.

[00:51:47] Cameron: Charlie is so fuckin on the money with his Black Mirror episodes, right?

[00:51:51] Steve: he is, he is insanely good. What did he do before that? What was his first

[00:51:56] Steve: stuff?

[00:51:57] Cameron: I think he’s an

[00:51:58] Cameron: AI. I really do. I think

[00:51:59] Peter: he’s [00:52:00] actually an

[00:52:00] Peter: AI,

[00:52:00] Cameron: He’s too good.

[00:52:02] Cameron: Well,

[00:52:02] Cameron: he

[00:52:03] Peter: yeah, talking about

[00:52:03] Cameron: Charlie’s a

[00:52:04] Cameron: journalist and

[00:52:05] Cameron: he was doing, like he used to do, still does, I think, like

[00:52:08] Cameron: the New Year’s Eve episodes of the year that was

[00:52:11] Cameron: making fun of all of the year news and, you know, Black Mirror sort of just plays on his thing as a journalist.

[00:52:18] Cameron: Yeah, he is a fucking genius.

[00:52:19] Cameron: He’s

[00:52:19] Cameron: great. Anyway,

[00:52:21] Peter: gonna bring a lighter version of how do people actually do something about this that’s positive. Like you said, the actors should be actually monetizing their

[00:52:27] Peter: likeness

[00:52:28] Peter: as opposed to striking. There’s no way

[00:52:30] Steve: Oh, they got that back to front. That was upside down and

[00:52:32] Steve: pathetic.

[00:52:33] Cameron: I heard,

[00:52:34] Peter: right? It’s a last stretch, you know,

[00:52:36] Peter: desperation, right?

[00:52:37] Cameron: Yeah, so the writers apparently

[00:52:39] Cameron: have

[00:52:40] Cameron: gotten through their strike and I believe, I haven’t read it, but my

[00:52:46] Cameron: sons who

[00:52:47] Cameron: are sort of across it, one of them dates a girl who’s an actress in LA, follows this stuff pretty closely, was telling me that the writers deal was that [00:53:00] Studios have agreed to tell them if they’re using AI in the writing of a film or something.

[00:53:09] Cameron: That’s what they managed to squeeze out from an AI side of things. Like… Yeah, how long is it before the studios are just, uh, hiring, hiring either AIs directly or writers that are using AI,

[00:53:23] Steve: Writers that use AI will go further because I still think there’s a place for prompting. Now, I don’t mean prompt engineering to try and get it to say the thing you really wanted to say. I mean, taking the database of your personal experience, which is unique for every human on earth because I’m the only person who’s ever been in this room at this moment.

[00:53:43] Steve: So that’s part of my database. How do I overlap those two things to create something nuanced? And working with the AI is really the key. So this whole AI versus us. And the other thing, they’ll strike against the wrong person.

[00:53:57] Steve: Scott Galloway had a really great [00:54:00] outtake, who’s sort of a marketing guy. Uh,

[00:54:02] Steve: And his outtake

[00:54:03] Steve: was they should be collaborating

[00:54:06] Steve: with all of the

[00:54:07] Steve: movie, film, TV, creative producing houses and going

[00:54:10] Steve: to Big Tech and saying, Hey, congratulations,

[00:54:13] Steve: we’re your newest customer.

[00:54:14] Steve: And what you’ve got to do is give us all

[00:54:16] Steve: the money, all that stuff that your AI

[00:54:17] Steve: is

[00:54:17] Steve: trained on. Congratulations.

[00:54:19] Peter: It’s what Reddit and Quora all did. Exactly. Yeah. And, um, you know, see, seeing how they can do that now, it’s, it’s interesting new formats are coming out, right? So the Runway Gen 2 guys, they’re going on Twitter right now, a tweet, uh, Xtreme, whatever you want to call it.

[00:54:34] Peter: It’s like, you know, they’re going to crowdsource all the different plot points to this new movie they’re creating, purely AI generated. And it’s going to be creating this new format. Remember those, like, choose your own adventure ones in the forums that

[00:54:47] Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That

[00:54:48] Steve: was cool. Yeah.

[00:54:49] Peter: Now they’re making it a reality and turning it into the visuals and audio side as well.

[00:54:54] Peter: 11 labs is just so good now. Um, you know, like you

[00:54:58] Peter: said, with the avatars, plug that [00:55:00] in, make your own voice. It’s it all. The tech is there now with the Kodak

[00:55:03] Peter: avatars. So Star in your own movie that’s crowdsourced by everyone around them that’ll generate not only

[00:55:09] Peter: the clicks, but also licensing rights if you want to go to market with it.

[00:55:13] Cameron: yeah, it’s gonna be a, uh, a very brave new world and all of these people trying to cling on to the remnants of the 20th century business models are just, uh, gonna find themselves sliding downhill. The only way to

[00:55:28] Steve: got revenue

[00:55:29] Steve: streams.

[00:55:30] Cameron: it. Yeah. Gotta

[00:55:31] Steve: one of the things that we see again and again. And of course. The example of Kodak, I want to point out some financials, which not many people spoke about, but everyone knew that we went to digital cameras, but what they didn’t understand is that enabled all, all sorts of revenue streams around photography and the idea of sharing an image, right?

[00:55:49] Steve: And they thought their business was film instead of sharing an image. I’m not even talking about Um, going to digital. I’m talking about data footprints, you know, metadata, the idea that you can [00:56:00] train AIs if you have enough images and then you have some descriptions underneath it and social connection.

[00:56:04] Steve: The maximum market capitalization that Kodak had was 19 billion.

[00:56:08] Cameron: Mm,

[00:56:09] Steve: Facebook is…

[00:56:10] Steve: You know, uh, a

[00:56:12] Steve: Kodak moment of sorts with a whole lot of other revenue

[00:56:14] Steve: streams and that’s a 700 billion dollar company. And, and likewise, what are the new

[00:56:18] Steve: revenue

[00:56:19] Steve: streams that present themselves with artificial intelligence and acting and

[00:56:22] Steve: creativity?

[00:56:23] Steve: You

[00:56:23] Steve: know, and the simple example we already gave is a bio API.

[00:56:26] Peter: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So We can fund the U B I right there.

[00:56:29] Steve: We don’t need UBI,

[00:56:30] Peter: a bio A b

[00:56:31] Peter: i at the bio. A p i is your way to implementing the U B I,

[00:56:35] Steve: yeah.

[00:56:35] Cameron: don’t get Steve started on UBIs, Peter. He goes a little bit,

[00:56:39] Peter: doesn’t love the handout,

[00:56:40] Steve: no, I, I, I just, yeah, let’s do that another day.

[00:56:46] Cameron: Alright, moving right along. Neuralink begins human

[00:56:49] Cameron: testing.

[00:56:51] Cameron: We’ve talked about the fact that they had announced that they were going to do this a few months ago. They have

[00:56:56] Cameron: announced that they are beginning human testing right [00:57:00] now, and

[00:57:01] Steve: Will they hide the humans with the dead

[00:57:03] Steve: monkeys?

[00:57:04] Cameron: I

[00:57:05] Steve: Did they put them in the same warehouse of dead

[00:57:07] Cameron: Hyatt as well. Yeah.

[00:57:09] Cameron: Look,

[00:57:10] Cameron: yeah, I’m sure there’s truth to the dead

[00:57:12] Cameron: monkey stuff and Elon’s obviously going to try and cover that up or PR

[00:57:17] Cameron: spin it.

[00:57:18] Cameron: And look, there are going to be risks. You know, I’m

[00:57:20] Cameron: reading,

[00:57:21] Cameron: as I mentioned, I think in the last episode, I’ve been reading Isaacson’s biography on Elon, and also, if you haven’t already heard it, um, Walter Isaacson’s interview on Lex, talking about Elon, and Da Vinci, and Steve Jobs, and all the other people he’s done biographies on, but You know, in Elon, in the book on Elon, he talks about Elon’s, uh, philosophy towards building SpaceX and Tesla as, you know, I think it’s like move quickly and blow things up, you know, it’s, uh, that’s, one of the things that Isaacson says that sets Elon apart from most corporations [00:58:00] and NASA and places like that is he’s willing to blow up rocket ships in the, you know, Searched for quick progress.

[00:58:08] Cameron: Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna blow a lot of these things. What do they call it? A rapid, unscheduled disassembly, or something like that.

[00:58:15] Steve: I actually really like that.

[00:58:17] Steve: I’m no Elon

[00:58:17] Steve: Musk lover,

[00:58:18] Steve: but to really create something, that takes us to a next level, it requires extraordinary risk, doesn’t it? It

[00:58:26] Steve: really does.

[00:58:27] Cameron: And failing

[00:58:28] Steve: easy to forget how many people died trying to make

[00:58:31] Steve: cars and aeroplanes

[00:58:32] Steve: and everything else that we take

[00:58:33] Steve: for granted now.

[00:58:34] Peter: right. Plus the monkeys were dying anyway.

[00:58:36] Steve: I’m not, I’m not…

[00:58:37] Peter: terminal cancer or something, you know?

[00:58:39] Steve: Well, yeah, look, and, and, and like

[00:58:42] Steve: Cam said, Look, so long as someone else dies, it’s fine. We don’t, we don’t mind at all.

[00:58:48] Cameron: Look, I’m sure the

[00:58:48] Peter: look at, yeah. The Great

[00:58:50] Cameron: signing up for the human trials, uh, probably, I think, in most cases, people who are quadriplegics, or suffering from some sort of motor neuron [00:59:00] disease, they, I hope, are making a conscious decision. Yes, this is extremely risky, but, you know, I’m willing to… You know, devote my life to science and progress and, and trying to find a solution for people in a similar sort of like, hold it down, right, right.

[00:59:22] Cameron: Oh, okay. Yeah. 3pm your time or my time, Steve?

[00:59:27] Peter: Yeah.

[00:59:27] Steve: but I am loving this, by the way. I want to do this with the three of us. This is,

[00:59:31] Steve: this is gold.

[00:59:32] Cameron: Yeah, it’s good having the third voice on. Anyway, so, uh, what are you guys got any other thoughts on the human testing for

[00:59:38] Cameron: Neuralink?

[00:59:40] Peter: Yeah. No. And then, um, so, so

[00:59:42] Peter: what, what.

[00:59:43] Peter: Elon’s doing, right, it’s nothing new, but what he’s going to bring to it is the whole manufacturing process, right, the gigafactory of Neuralinks. So, you know, you got like the BlackRock Neurotech, you got the Aussies, the Syncrons that are doing here already, your Precision.

[00:59:57] Peter: Um, these guys are already sort of getting [01:00:00] to the stage where there’s one guy is that he will walk again after being paralyzed at the age of in his 20s, right? He’s using these brain and spinal implants to walk again. So this stuff is creating miracles. And of course, people that want that quality of life is going to take any of these chances to bring that back, as long as it’s a probable chance and not something that’s like completely out in the dark.

[01:00:20] Peter: And this is going to bring about a whole raft of breakthroughs. For these disabilities, once these disabilities, we can turn them into super abilities. That’s when the cash is in, right? This is where we go, Meta’s going to get in, Google’s going to get in. I think, I think this is like, you know, talking about the AIs pivoting towards hardware so that they can own, have their own privacy centric, right?

[01:00:43] Peter: Platforms, just like Apple has created. This is how we actually going to see this whole immersion,

[01:00:47] Steve: I like that.

[01:00:48] Peter: that whole mind to the AIs, this is very transhuman.

[01:00:51] Steve: It’s funny. I really like you’ve said that, Peter, because all of the pieces that have written about this, no one is really talking about the depth of the manufacturing requirement [01:01:00]to make a lot of these things happen. It’s always sort of the underbelly of everything that’s forgotten in the

[01:01:04] Steve: software world is that there’s a hardware reality of manufacturing.

[01:01:07] Steve: I always find it funny. Any movie from the future, it’s like, where

[01:01:11] Steve: is

[01:01:11] Steve: all this stuff made? Like, there’s no evidence of any factories anywhere. Yeah, even when you’re watching The Matrix. Like, but where did they make the Nebuchadnezzar? I mean, let’s, let’s, where, where is that

[01:01:20] Steve: manufactured?

[01:01:21] Peter: Yeah, he’s

[01:01:23] Cameron: made it in his backyard.

[01:01:24] Steve: Of

[01:01:24] Peter: pizza, he’s

[01:01:25] Steve: did. Of course he did. It was generative. It was generative manufacturing. Which we will get to eventually, uh, molecular manufacturing, I, I, I think. I like that. The only thing that came

[01:01:35] Steve: up, in my view, on this

[01:01:37] Steve: Musk thing is that

[01:01:38] Steve: it feels like there needs to be an overlap with that and Johnny Ive and, uh, the investment in

[01:01:45] Steve: what is the interface.

[01:01:46] Steve: I think I already mentioned that and, and, and again, I don’t think

[01:01:49] Steve: it’s a clunky piece of hardware. We’ve

[01:01:50] Cameron: it’s going to be a progression, right? The, the iPhone of AI that Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are working on, backed by Masayoshi [01:02:00] Son, SoftBank CEO, who by the way, has also come out and said he reckons we’ll have AGI within 10 years. Uh, that’ll be in, that’ll be

[01:02:07] Steve: We’ve already got it.

[01:02:09] Peter: you there?

[01:02:10] Cameron: Intermediate device, like the iPhone of

[01:02:12] Cameron: AI will be a phone,

[01:02:14] Cameron: that’s

[01:02:14] Cameron: kind of interesting to see what happens to Apple’s share price, but you know, it’s a phone or a device that will be

[01:02:23] Cameron: built from the ground up based on the utilization of AI.

[01:02:30] Cameron: That’ll be a stepping stone, I think, to the Neuralink. And the point I wanted to make about the Neuralink is that You know, Musk has been very clear in saying that his end goal with Neuralink is human AI interface, so it’s built in, so that’s, you know, love him or hate him, like as Isaacson points out, love him or hate him, He is taking on the big missions, get humans to Mars, human AI [01:03:00] integration, you know, uh, sustainable energy and safe AI is his other big mission, you know, you know, AI that’s gonna be good for humanity and not bad for humanity.

[01:03:10] Cameron: Like the guy’s biting off the big, the big missions and you, you know, you gotta be a little bit of a psychopath to do that and believe you’re capable of that, uh, which he apparently is. Now look

[01:03:21] Steve: me of a great

[01:03:22] Steve: book.

[01:03:23] Cameron: yeah, great book. Uh, we’re an hour in and

[01:03:27] Cameron: I know that we’ve, a few of us have got hard stops. I’ve got to go pick my wife up from the airport.

[01:03:32] Cameron: Um, we’ve got, you’ve both got the run shit, run shit, the run sheet full of shit

[01:03:36] Peter: Wipe it. Wipe

[01:03:38] Steve: you not to tell anyone, Cameron.

[01:03:41] Cameron: I’ll, I’ll shut

[01:03:41] Cameron: up for a

[01:03:42] Cameron: minute. Both of you pick one thing or even if it’s not on there, Peter, if you want to do one more thing to talk about so we can tie this one off.

[01:03:53] Steve: Well, I’ll go while Pete has a think. Uh, for me, interesting was the ad, ad free [01:04:00] Instagram and Facebook, which is going to be happening in Europe. Uh, it’s part of the response to EU laws about privacy and also Apple closing down certain elements which have affected the advertising effectiveness. I think that’s really interesting because I think that…

[01:04:17] Steve: Part of the original sin of the internet was things being free and not having a little way to have microtransactions in browsers, that type of thing. Uh, it’d be interesting to see how it takes off. I don’t think it will. I don’t think many people will pay for it. Uh, but there is an interesting viewpoint in the attention economy, how the wealthy who can afford to buy away Uh, Advertising, and free up their own attention,

[01:04:46] Steve: get a further advantage where they

[01:04:47] Steve: get access to more

[01:04:48] Steve: knowledge and

[01:04:49] Steve: for information and entertainment.

[01:04:51] Steve: So it’s kind of the same

[01:04:51] Steve: patterns again and again.

[01:04:52] Steve: I just thought that was

[01:04:53] Steve: interesting.

[01:04:54] Cameron: And I don’t think it’s 145 a month as you put in the notes. I think

[01:04:57] Steve: A year, it’s meant to be, I think. [01:05:00] There you go, 14.

[01:05:01] Steve: There you go.

[01:05:02] Peter: That’s insane. Yeah. I mean,

[01:05:03] Steve: know what, Cameron? No one would have known that. I didn’t say 145 a month until you

[01:05:09] Cameron: I was pointing it out in

[01:05:10] Cameron: case

[01:05:11] Cameron: you thought that I

[01:05:12] Steve: pointed that why?

[01:05:15] Cameron: wanting to make sure

[01:05:16] Cameron: you

[01:05:16] Cameron: didn’t think It was a hundred. I looked at your note and I went

[01:05:18] Steve: you worried about what I thought? Don’t you worry? you

[01:05:21] Steve: worry about what the listeners hear? Our

[01:05:25] Peter: I’ll just, I’ll just keep on going with the run shit. This is that the

[01:05:28] Peter: first world’s first drug to regrow a teeth. Look, that’s so many AI discoveries are

[01:05:34] Peter: going to come from, you know, this for the scientific field and for the betterment of our healthy longevity. Like this gonna, this is just the beginning.

[01:05:42] Peter: You saw the mRNA guys just won the Nobel prize. Um, there’s going to be AI drug discovery is happening through our colleagues at Insilico Medicine. They’re based in Hong Kong and Dubai. They come up with a new drug using the same technologies AlphaFold that, uh, the DeepMind guys came up with to [01:06:00] do new drugs that are now in phase two clinical trials.

[01:06:03] Peter: And so, you know, the sort of bottleneck the big pharma had faced doing these manual different trials of different drug combinations, different molecule combinations, um, this is a way to actually prioritize and help them mitigate and triage that entire process. And so we’re going to see this like hit the shelves.

[01:06:20] Peter: I’m just hoping that it’ll be part of this generation that’s still alive. We don’t want to be the last generation to die, right? So hopefully AI can help, yeah, prevent that. But also we don’t want to go like all ape and take us out as a, as an ant colony. So we’ve got to find the right balance. I think open sourcing we were saying before, applying it to the fields that we want to is probably the best to go forward on that.

[01:06:45] Peter: Um, but

[01:06:45] Peter: Yeah. Just some thoughts on the On that particular teeth

[01:06:49] Peter: regrowth right there.

[01:06:51] Cameron: Yeah. Just for people who haven’t heard that story. It’s a Japanese pharmaceutical startup that have just begun clinical trials on [01:07:00] how they’re going to begin them next year, human clinical trials based on. work that they’ve already done to grow new teeth in mice, they’re going to start doing it on humans.

[01:07:09] Cameron: Uh, and you know, as you say, this is just the beginning of us being able to have micro control over our bodies over the next 10 years. Just, we’re going to have story after story after story. of our ability. We, we talked about AlphaMazenz, uh, last show or the one before that based on AlphaFold, the ability to identify genetic variants that cause disease.

[01:07:35] Cameron: We’ll then be able to build specific drugs. We’ll be able to use CRISPR. We’re going to just be able to affect our bodies on a, on a molecular basis like we’ve never been able to do before. It’s going to have massive impact to Life extension, healthy life extension, healthy lifespans, et cetera. The last thing I wanted to talk about, and we can wrap it up guys, is again, this sort of comes out of the Musk thing on Lex, is this idea of building an, [01:08:00] your own digital assistant AI version of you.

[01:08:05] Cameron: Like he was talking about. Uh, Lex, having a big community, but there’s only so many hours in a day that he can interact with his community. If you could have your own AI that was trained on you, how you think, what your values are, that could interact with your community for you. And then just relay to you, Oh, I had this really interesting conversation with Steve and Peter.

[01:08:28] Cameron: You know, this isn’t actually me doing the podcast, this is my AI, and it’ll tell me there’s a to do item or something you might want to think about feeding it back to you. This idea of building AIs in the not too distant future, trained on you, how you think, what your values are, what your morals are, what your goals and objectives and dreams are, and then it can go out into the world, the digital world initially, and maybe even eventually the physical world, and do things that you would [01:09:00] previously have had to do.

[01:09:02] Cameron: You can send it off to do your shopping, you can send it off to do research for you, it can interact with family members or friends, or it can represent

[01:09:11] Steve: of information

[01:09:12] Steve: is

[01:09:13] Peter: Yeah. And in laws.

[01:09:15] Cameron: Yeah, it can represent you the world. Now it reminds me, there

[01:09:18] Cameron: was a,

[01:09:19] Cameron: there was a Michael Keaton film, I

[01:09:21] Cameron: think, years ago,

[01:09:23] Peter: Duplicity. Yeah.

[01:09:24] Cameron: Duplicity, that’s it, where he was like

[01:09:27] Cameron: cloning himself and each clone was dumber than the

[01:09:29] Cameron: last one, but, It’s the same sort of idea, right? The idea that you can replicate yourself, and that’s something I hadn’t really thought much about before this interview, is the idea of building digital replicas of yourself that can go out and act as if you would act.

[01:09:47] Cameron: In the world, uh, just scaling up your ability to get things done. You say there’s only 24 hours in a day, but if there are, if you have a a hundred digital versions of yourself, [01:10:00]imagine what you can get done in a day. Mm-hmm.

[01:10:04] Steve: what’s kind of interesting how, you know, cells multiply is really a form of cancer. What, what if we start multiplying, and then you add this idea of a neural link. If you have a neural link, you can have a facsimile of you where the two interchange with each other in real time.

[01:10:19] Steve: So it’s not. It doesn’t represent or replicate you, it is you just embodied in a different form in real time and then you have a multitude of yous going out. How many, how

[01:10:29] Steve: many,

[01:10:31] Steve: I mean, then you have this whole population crisis as well and, oh, look at Cam, he’s so greedy, he’s got 36 of him out there, I’ve only got 3 of me, how can I possibly compete with 36 Cams?

[01:10:41] Steve: You know, like he’s written 426 books in the last 3 months, what’s going on?

[01:10:47] Peter: You’ve got to put a cap on it, right? It’s all, it’s like an

[01:10:49] Peter: altered carbon where they had

[01:10:50] Peter: to, you

[01:10:51] Peter: know, cap out on how many people had multiple stacks out there, right? Also sleeves. You can have one

[01:10:56] Peter: stack, but one sleeve and some people were double

[01:10:59] Peter: stacking to [01:11:00] try to get around it. We’re

[01:11:01] Peter: getting multiple

[01:11:02] Steve: and,

[01:11:02] Steve: then I wrote… I wrote in, in today’s blog that I put out each Friday that everyone should sign up to at stevesamartino. com. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Anyway, so what I wrote about today… Was the idea that we’re going to have posthumous AIs where, uh, I mean, that it’s already been created with, uh, a dad bot, you know, seven years ago, James Vlahos did it and there was a story in Wired, but the idea that we could probably put your personality into a ChatGPT and get a video likeness and have a Zoom call with, you know, a dead loved relative, but imagine like our children who’ve only known the world with smartphones where everything essentially is recorded.

[01:11:42] Steve: Uh,

[01:11:43] Steve: you could create that now,

[01:11:45] Steve: but then with the Neuralink, you could just download your life after you die. But then do you die? Maybe the physical embodiness of you dies, but the mindset of you lives in, in another,

[01:11:58] Steve: uh,

[01:11:59] Peter: It’s syncing up your [01:12:00] backup copy. Yeah, pretty much having that, you know,

[01:12:02] Steve: so then we start to get into this.

[01:12:03] Peter: right? You just lost that previous

[01:12:04] Peter: timestamp version, right? You were covering back an older version,

[01:12:07] Peter: but it’s, um, the roadmap is

[01:12:09] Peter: there.

[01:12:09] Steve: well, but, but, but not only the roadmap, there’s a multitude of permutations of this.

[01:12:15] Steve: There’s the, do you have the timestamp of a person who just lives on Zoom and you talk to that

[01:12:18] Peter: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:12:19] Steve: Does the person live in

[01:12:21] Steve: a transhuman, stock robotic, Hanson Robotics types of sphere? Or, or, Hiroshi Ishiguro who makes robots of himself and you have

[01:12:30] Peter: That’s all right. Hmm.

[01:12:31] Steve: that, like, So, then you get all of these various permutations of Exactly why you’re here, Peter,

[01:12:35] Steve: is

[01:12:37] Peter: They’re all going to happen, right? And it’s what we want as a society, or

[01:12:40] Peter: if we can do anything about it. And I’m just saying

[01:12:42] Peter: the

[01:12:42] Peter: roadmap is there

[01:12:43] Peter: to have, to give that to the fork in

[01:12:45] Peter: the road. So there’s a company called

[01:12:47] Peter: Rewind, right? So it’s amazing software that you can put onto

[01:12:50] Peter: your Mac that you can just record everything that’s on the screen, right? Privacy centric, hopefully. And they’re coming up with the hardware,

[01:12:59] Peter: coming up with the [01:13:00] hardware

[01:13:00] Peter: that. you’re

[01:13:00] Steve: have that. As much as I want that, I can’t have my screen being looked at all the

[01:13:05] Steve: time, because there

[01:13:05] Peter: can install on the iPhone, but only on your public tabs, not your private tabs, unfortunately.

[01:13:11] Peter: And so they’re coming up with the hardware as well.

[01:13:13] Peter: So that’s their journey into

[01:13:15] Peter: what OpenAI will go through As

[01:13:17] Peter: well. And all the other big tech companies already have, you know,

[01:13:19] Peter: smartwatches and the

[01:13:21] Peter: smartphones and the AirPods and the Google, but yeah, so the, the, the big tech companies already there. And so the Neuralink, like you say, is going to bring that real time element to it.

[01:13:32] Peter: And once you have that disconnection, once you go offline, and you have a different version of you elsewhere, you’re going to have to find a way to sync back up, right? Try to merge those pull requests and find a way to remove any of those conflicts, right? It’s like, what are your identity issues? And I think Westworld painted out this potential future, right?

[01:13:50] Peter: So Dolores, the main character in Westworld, created multiple copies of her because she was… She thinks that she was the best person to do the job. You’re going to do [01:14:00]something, do it yourself. She created like five versions of herself, same copy at the time, but she put it into Charlotte Hale, right? Who had a kid and went through an entire different life journey.

[01:14:10] Peter: So

[01:14:11] Peter: there was de coherence, right? In the whole quantum mechanics

[01:14:14] Peter: kind of a view

[01:14:15] Steve: get that

[01:14:16] Peter: fighting each other.

[01:14:17] Steve: get that quantum reality of different timelines sort of happening in real time because we build different versions of it. It starts to get really metaphysical and weird and

[01:14:26] Steve: interesting, doesn’t it?

[01:14:27] Peter: yeah.

[01:14:28] Peter: I mean, they say that

[01:14:28] Peter: intelligence

[01:14:29] Peter: is compression

[01:14:30] Peter: and if all of space and time in this whole,

[01:14:32] Peter: sort of our understanding

[01:14:33] Peter: of the universe is just compressing that intelligence here, they’re just going through the natural parts of the

[01:14:39] Peter: natural evolution

[01:14:40] Peter: of the universe. So yeah, very

[01:14:41] Peter: metaphysical, lots of talk about it in the next session,

[01:14:44] Peter: I’m sure.

[01:14:46] Cameron: Yeah, and you know, it’s going to force us to think about questions of identity, which, you know, Steve knows I’ve been talking about and thinking about for decades, I’ve written books about it, but this is going to force a lot of us, I think, to think about the question of [01:15:00] who am I? What am I? And what does identity mean?

[01:15:03] Cameron: But with that, I think we should We should wrap it up, guys. Peter, thanks again for coming on. It was really great having you on the chat. Uh, again, people can look you up on Twitter, LinkedIn, Peter Zeng, Transhuman, is it transhuman. com. au? Transhumanism?

[01:15:21] Peter: Yeah. Both of them work. Yeah. We’re,

[01:15:23] Peter: uh. Yeah.

[01:15:23] Cameron: All the transhuman URLs he, uh, he owns.

[01:15:26] Peter: Yeah, that’s it.

[01:15:29] Cameron: stuff. Well, it’s going to be an exciting year, and I hope you’ll

[01:15:31] Cameron: come back on from time to time and chat with us, Pete, because it’s a lot of fun having another

[01:15:35] Cameron: voice on.

[01:15:36] Steve: So

[01:15:36] Steve: good, Pete. I just loved

[01:15:37] Cameron: The reason Steve

[01:15:38] Cameron: and I started this is, you know, Steve and I would just have, you know, chats. We’d just call each other up once

[01:15:44] Cameron: every six months and just talk about, This sort of stuff and get all excited.

[01:15:47] Cameron: And we thought, you know what? We should do it more often. So the podcast is just an excuse for me to have someone who’s excited. Like I am about this stuff to talk to because most of the people in my life just think I’m crazy getting excited about it, which has always been, [01:16:00]that’s why I started podcasting in the first place was because no one gave a shit about all the stuff I was excited about.

[01:16:05] Cameron: I had to find an audience. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Steve. Have a

[01:16:08] Cameron: great week

[01:16:09] Peter: soon, babe. We’ll have some beer and pizza at the next one, huh? That’s it.

[01:16:13] Peter: I can’t

[01:16:13] Peter: wait.

[01:16:15] Steve: you guys.

[01:16:16] Cameron: See

[01:16:16] Cameron: ya.