Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #39 "but that's just a technofix" with Adam Dorr

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Bad Idea #39 "but that's just a technofix" with Adam Dorr · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

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  Life is unequivocally better on almost every indicator you care
• 0:04
  to measure than it was historically.
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  Life expectancy, infant mortality, you know, maternal
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  mortality, illness prevalence, everything down the line, you
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  know, the the literacy, all of those things.
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  The more energy we have available, the more abundant
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  energy is, the more useful things that we can do to garner
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  prosperity, however we define them.
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  You're right, our environmental issues are not an epic struggle
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  of good versus evil. They are just problems.
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  And problems are solvable with the right tools.
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  Now, for the first time in history, we finally have the
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  tools we need for tackling our biggest environmental
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  challenges. Welcome to saving the world from
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  bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
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  few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
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  time to destroy GMO crops, and I also opposed nuclear power.
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  But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
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  Oops. I've learned the hard way that
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  none of us are right all the time.
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  So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
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  often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
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  it right. Adam Dole, welcome back.
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  Thanks so much for having me again, Mark.
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  It's my pleasure and I'm looking forward to our conversation.
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  And actually today I want to get into the second part of your
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  book and that begins with a chapter entitled Understanding
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  Technology and Disruption. And all this sounds very
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  capitalist. So to any listeners who are
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  offended by that, potentially this is a trigger warning, but
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  please do keep listening because you're about to learn something
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  quite amazing. Now, Adam, I think perhaps if we
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  start off with some brass tacks like just define find technology
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  for us because this is pretty fundamental.
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  Well, the way that my team defines technology is as
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  practical knowledge. So it's a very broad,
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  encompassing definition that we use.
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  We find that's the most valuable because technology doesn't just
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  mean whiz bang gadgets and gizmos.
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  And even in the narrow sense of tools, it's tempting to think of
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  those as physical tools like a hammer or a shovel or a, you
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  know, a computer or something like that.
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  But tools are larger than that. Language is a tool.
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  Knowledge of all kinds and especially that you can put into
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  practice to manipulate the world around you to achieve goals,
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  That's practical knowledge. And really, technology is the is
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  all forms of that practical knowledge that know how.
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  And that knowledge is what empowers us.
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  That's knowledge is what has allowed us to reshape really the
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  world around us in line with our values and our goals.
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  So, so tell us what technological progress is and
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  how this practical knowledge actually compounds, because
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  that's that's also pretty fundamental, isn't?
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  It absolutely. I mean, so if you think of a
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  primitive technology, it's it's it's a, a form of practical
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  knowledge that achieves a goal while taking a very, very steep
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  toll in one of many different ways.
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  It can be expensive, time consuming, energy intensive,
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  polluting, you name it. All sorts of problems can
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  accompany using a given tool or a given piece of knowledge to
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  practical effect. The better your technology is,
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  the more advanced, the more powerful a technology is, the
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  more you can achieve for a given toll.
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  Or, to flip that around, you can achieve the same thing while
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  taking a much lesser toll, at a lower cost, with fewer side
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  effects, with with less effort, with less energy, and so forth.
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  And so primitive technologies barely get the job done, if at
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  all. And they they are expensive in
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  all of the different ways that we might consider something
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  being costly, not just financially.
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  An advanced technology, by contrast, is something that
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  allows you to quickly, easily, effectively achieve a goal with
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  relatively low cost and side effects and undesirable
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  consequences. And the very most advanced
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  technologies that we've got are almost like magic.
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  They're almost the proverbial wave of a wand, snappy of your
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  fingers. What you want to achieve in
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  practical terms is achieved and with very very low, almost no
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  noticeable cost or consequences that are that are undesired.
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  Yeah. And, and that magical attributes
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  of, of, of technologies is actually really key.
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  And it occurred to me when I was reading a book that of course
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  people are skeptical about future technologies and
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  innovation because the things that are coming in the future
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  are unimaginable by definition because they haven't been
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  invented yet, right. So to use an example from
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  episode 1, you know, you were talking about celluloid film
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  and, you know, nobody could have imagined a digital camera.
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  But looking back now, it's almost unimaginable that digital
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  cameras don't exist. So yeah, I mean, it's sort of, I
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  can't remember who said that, you know, future technologies
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  are undistinguishable from from magic or something, but.
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  Really. Arthur C Clark OK, right.
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  So give us what was the whole quote?
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  Well, his, his quote is, and I believe it's it's correct and
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  not apocryphal, is that any sufficiently advanced technology
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  is indistinguishable from magic. And it's a pretty way of putting
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  it. It's a great way of putting it
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  because it really does capture that notion that a, a very, very
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  powerful and advanced tool or form of practical knowledge lets
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  you achieve exactly what you want very quickly and without
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  sacrificing an, an enormous amount of other options, which
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  is what costs really are when you think it through.
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  And digital technologies are an an example of that that we're
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  familiar with. You mentioned digital cameras.
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  There's virtually no cost at all to capturing an image Now it's,
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  it's instantaneous. The price of it, the cost of it
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  is so is so small, it might as well be negligible on a frame by
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  frame by frame basis. And other technologies in the
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  physical world are like that as well.
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  When you go into your to your kitchen or your bathroom and you
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  and you turn on the faucet to have water, clean, potable,
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  safe, fresh water. We're not talking about, you
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  know, a swimming pool full that gets to be actual have real
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  cost. But when you just turn it on for
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  a moment to wash your hands, splash them on your face, get a
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  quick drink. That's almost like magic as
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  well. Certainly it would have been
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  magical to our ancestors, right? And and people are quite
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  pessimistic. Certainly environmentalists are
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  pretty pessimistic often about technology.
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  Is it possible to make a generalized statement about
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  whether new technologies make people's lives worse or better?
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  And I ask because, you know, I think so many greens in
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  particular look look at the past and think, wasn't it better when
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  we're all connected to nature, living in small communities,
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  having to fetch our own water and growing food rather than
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  sitting around all day dooms scrolling and feeling depressed?
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  Like, can you make a generalized statement about whether
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  technologies in general are better or worse for people?
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  I think it's very dangerous to lump anything together with the
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  throw it all into one big bucket or paint with a broad brush.
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  We get into trouble when we when we give up on nuance that way,
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  and so I'm inclined to not make sweeping declarations in that
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  sense. What I would argue is that the
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  arc of technological progress is 1, where we were able to accrue
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  more and more of the benefits that we want without incurring
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  terrible costs, including giving up or sacrificing or losing
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  parts of our lives and our culture and our heritage from
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  the past. That really was valuable.
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  So there's absolutely something to this sentiment that, well,
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  haven't we lost something, something precious, something
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  really important in the modern era?
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  As you said, if we're all doom scrolling, haven't we forgotten
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  a lot of things that were really valuable and really important
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  about life? And that may well be true.
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  However, what I would argue is that on a case by case basis,
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  and when you look at individual technologies, instead of lumping
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  them all together, what you see is that they with that practical
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  knowledge that has given us choice, it's given us options.
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  What it's done is open up new possibilities for us, and that
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  means there's much, much more to choose from today than ever
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  before. How you spend your time, what
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  you choose to do with yourself. And it's possible to make better
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  choices and worse choices. And unfortunately, there's no
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  guarantee with any form of knowledge, with any tool, that
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  it will automatically be put to use wisely, that we will
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  automatically make good choices about how to use it.
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  There's always that risk that we could have these in.
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  We have we stolen fire from the gods like Prometheus, and maybe
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  we choose to use it foolishly instead of wisely.
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  That's always a risk. Having said all that, the
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  optimist in me looks at the data and says life is unequivocally
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  better on almost every indicator you care to measure than it was
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  historically. And we forget that at our grave
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  peril as well. Our ancestors lives were
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  terribly difficult compared to ours.
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  And we can run through the list life expectancy, infant
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  mortality, you know, maternal mortality, illness prevalence,
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  everything down the line. And you know the the literacy,
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  all of those things, everything has gotten on the longer arc of
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  history better over time with ups and downs along the way.
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  This not to say there's been no bumps on this ride, certainly.
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  But in this grand arc of history, certainly our lives
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  have improved by the things we care to measure.
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  Whether we're healthy, whether we're wealthy, whether we're
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  wise in the literate sense. But that doesn't necessarily
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  mean we always make the best choices that are available to us
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  now that so many options exist. Yeah, I think looking at the
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  past, I think it's more Game of Thrones than Tolkien, isn't it?
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  It's more nasty. Easy to idealize the past.
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  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
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  You also talk about technological progress being
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  auto catalytic, which is a great phrase, meaning that it sort of
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  accelerates, you know, by feeding back on itself
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  essentially. And I guess you can see that
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  with AI models now being trained on the outputs of, you know,
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  previous AI. So you get, you know, machines
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  learning from machines. But explain this concept because
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  I think it's also quite important about how, you know,
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  technological progress and innovation actually speed up.
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  Well, auto catalysis, auto catalyze means self enabling or
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  self accelerating. And in a sense, all knowledge
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  does this it it, it has a cumulative quality.
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  Everything that you learn, all of the knowledge that we gain,
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  practical and otherwise. So if it's if we're defining
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  technology as practical knowledge, that all of the
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  knowledge that we accrue cross fertilizes.
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  In other words, anything new that we learn can inform and
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  make more valuable everything that we already knew.
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  And so there's that fundamental sense in which all technology is
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  self accelerating, auto catalytic.
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  It enables us to learn more the the knowledge, every bit of new
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  knowledge that we get makes what we know already more valuable
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  and it opens the door to acquiring even further
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  knowledge. And we're seeing that sort of
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  distilled into its purest essence with AI, where these are
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  these machines are able to sort of leap away and continue that
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  process even without our intervention.
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  And so we have this extraordinary characteristic of
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  technology throughout history of being self accelerating.
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  And now we live in an era where it is more literally true than
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  ever before. And that has some remarkable
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  consequences. There are, there are a number of
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  key technological transformations, I'm sure we'll
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  talk about them here that are occurring that are leveraging
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  auto catalysis, self acceleration in an enormously
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  powerful way. And what that the big upshot of
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  all of this is that technology can advance, it can it can surge
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  at in in unintuitively rapid ways.
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  And we've seen this throughout history and we're living in a
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  moment of it, perhaps an unprecedented moment of that.
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  But historically speaking, technologies have emerged many,
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  many times throughout history. And because of this feedback
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  loop, this nature of being self accelerating, they spread like
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  wildfire after once they finally catch and start getting going.
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  Fire's a good analogy here. And we've seen my team has
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  documented more than 1700 individual instances of new
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  technologies emerging slowly, perhaps at 1st and then the self
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  acceleration, the feedback loop takes hold and you get not
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  linear growth, not linear expansion and adoption of the
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  new technology, but an exponential almost like an
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  explosive spreading of this knowledge and then inputting
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  that into practice. And what we're seeing is that
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  for technologies of all different kinds, it doesn't take
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  100 or 1000 years for the knowledge to disseminate and be
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  put into use of new technology across society.
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  It only takes a generation or so, which is 15 to 20 years
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  historically and in the in this moment now T technologies are
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  amidst that same rapid transformation and perhaps even
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  moving faster than ever before. And you, you know, you tell us
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  in the book about the S curve and the the X curve.
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  The S curve being how technologies get adopted more,
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  more rapidly and the X curve being, you know, the, the mirror
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  image of the old technology being rapidly phased out.
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  I can't, you know, I can't, I can't show you this because
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  we're doing a podcast. But I think it's really, it's
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  really important, isn't it? I mean, and you talk about 15
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  years, I mean, natural gas, I think you should, you say
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  replace town gas from coal in about 15 years and cars replaced
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  horses in, in at least in cities in a similar amount of time.
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  And I think maybe digital photography was about about the
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  same, right. So, you know, it's, it's, it
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  seems to be a repeating phenomenon, but it's not like
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  every single technology has this S curve, is it?
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  So what are the? What are the kind of
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  preconditions the the enabling conditions if you like.
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  Well, the key enabling condition is that the one or more new
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  technologies have to converge that then together offer a value
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  proposition. In other words, a way of
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  achieving a goal or realizing a value, delivering some form of
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  usefulness or utility that out competes any previously existing
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  option. That's the key.
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  The key is that there's a new way to get the same or more
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  usefulness or value at with a lower toll.
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  And by I use the word toll here and I did before when we first
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  spoke about this advisedly because it isn't just about
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  financial cost. That is a key dimension and it's
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  one reason why markets are so powerful and economic forces are
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  so powerful in driving technology adoption.
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  And that's true for millennia, but it's really the total toll,
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  all of the costs, including the external externalized costs that
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  we don't necessarily pay for on the sticker price.
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  When a new technology or set of technologies comes along that
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  enables you to achieve something more easily, more readily, or at
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  a higher level of quality, more conveniently, however you want
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  to measure it, if it's overwhelmingly competitive on
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  value compared to the older options, people naturally adopt
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  the new technology. They do so swiftly because the
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  the incentives to economize not just on financial costs, but on
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  cost in the larger sense is incredibly strong.
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  We're all sort of fundamentally instinctively motivated to do
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  that sort of economizing. And I mean that literally
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  psychologically as individuals, but certainly our institutions,
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  our communities, our, our economics, our governments, all
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  of them have this embedded economizing logic in them.
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  And this is probably the fundamental driving force why we
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  see the same pattern, the same underlying dynamics of as you
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  said, an S shaped growth of adoption of this new technology
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  when it emerges and offers better value for money or better
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  value for toll and the older technology being disadopted,
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  being abandoned as a mirror reflection of that.
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  This is the essence of economic, fundamentally economic forces
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  motivating a change in behavior. And it really is about that
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  value proposition. And anytime there's an
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  overwhelmingly better new way to do something, people switch to
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  it. That also means in the present
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  moment, today, if we look around and we see new technologies that
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  promise that better value, we have to expect that disruption
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  following that same pattern will occur again.
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  This time the onus is on anyone who would say no, no, no.
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  This time the new technology, even though it offers better
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  value, it won't replace the older technology swiftly.
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  For some reason it doesn't apply.
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  And I see that a lot. Old fossil fuels will be around
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  for another century or more. Well, that would be the the
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  profound exception to the rule that we've seen, as I said with
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  my team 1700 times throughout history.
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  So the onus is on anyone who would say why fossil fuels will
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  persist when clean energy technologies, for example, can
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  offer the same or better value at a lower cost or toll.
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  Yeah, I I knew you. You used the word disruption and
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  you talk about actually fossil fuel companies.
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  And actually it reminds me of a piece I saw either when the
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  Economist or the FT or somewhere lamenting the fact that fossil
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  fuel companies have invested really trivial amounts in clean
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  energy. You know, it's like 1% of their
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  balance sheet or something. And you know, I, I thought,
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  well, that's fine because they're the ones that are going
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  to be disrupted. You don't expect the old, old
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  dinosaurs and the old technology to be the ones leading the the
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  the new innovation, right? We very seldomly see that and
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  this has been well documented and Clayton Christensen wrote
• 17:40
  the the very famous Innovator's Dilemma and analyzed this in
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  detail. Tony Sieba, one of the founders
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  of Rethink X, my organization built upon that earlier set of
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  theoretical work and developed a a new theoretical framework that
• 17:53
  that encompasses multiple different types groups of
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  disruption. So these dynamics are pretty
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  well understood now. And again, the encouraging thing
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  about this is that once we reach that tipping point, that
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  ignition point, and then and typically what we see is simply
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  about 5% market share, maybe between 5 and 10% market share
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  that the new technology acquires, then you're off to the
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  races and that that value proposition accelerates itself.
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  It auto catalyzes itself. The to take a concrete example,
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  solar panels were invented in the 1970s, but they were very
• 18:29
  expensive for a long time. And they for many decades they
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  did not offer a competitive option compared to cheap coal
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  and natural gas for generating electricity.
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  But that changed in the last decade.
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  Starting about 10 years ago, that all shifted.
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  And now today in 2025, there's nothing, there's no way to to
• 18:49
  generate electricity more cheaply and, and, and more
• 18:53
  completely at a lower toll across the board.
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  So all types of cost, there's no way to get cheaper electricity
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  than from solar. It's the, it's the cheapest
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  technological option we have today.
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  And that means it's natural that it should begin disrupting the
• 19:09
  older electricity producing technologies.
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  Now, there's subtle details in here because electricity isn't
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  the only form of energy and fossil fuels are used for
• 19:17
  heating and, and, and and many other things as well.
• 19:19
  So there's subtlety and complexity in these dynamics.
• 19:21
  But the general picture, certainly in the electricity
• 19:24
  space is 1 of disruption. Tony Seba, the founder of our
• 19:28
  work, he likes to say we've seen this movie before.
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  We know how it goes and we know how it ends.
• 19:33
  It's that X shaped pattern we've seen so many times before.
• 19:37
  Yeah. And, and by talking about solar,
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  we're on to one of the, well, the first of the four
• 19:43
  foundational sectors of the economy that's going to undergo
• 19:47
  this massive disruption over the next two decades as you write in
• 19:50
  your book. And let's talk a bit more detail
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  about what you call it SWB, So solar, wind and batteries.
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  So just give us a quick rundown of the advantages that they have
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  over fossil fuels, which, you know, are these enabling
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  conditions if you like, which mean that there will be this,
• 20:07
  this, this, this. Curve and this well XX curve of
• 20:12
  the fossils disappearing eventually to 0 presumably.
• 20:15
  Well, that's, that's right. It's, I mean at this point it is
• 20:17
  an inevitability because the convergence of several
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  technologies in this case the key ones are solar power, wind
• 20:23
  power and energy storage technology, batteries
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  especially, but not any particular specific type of
• 20:30
  battery. So not necessarily lithium ion
• 20:32
  versus sodium ion versus, you know, other, other battery
• 20:35
  chemistries. It's battery energy storage
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  technology in general, when combined with solar and wind
• 20:43
  that that gives you a a value proposition that is
• 20:47
  overwhelmingly economically competitive relative to fossil
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  fuels. In other words, when you combine
• 20:53
  them together in the right mix, their costs have fallen so far
• 20:58
  now as of 2025 that they offer overwhelmingly the cheapest form
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  of electricity, reliable 24/7 all year long, reliable
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  electricity supply of any of the technologies that we currently
• 21:12
  have at our disposal, they are the cheapest option.
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  And of course, this is now why they are continuing all three of
• 21:18
  those technologies, but especially solar and batteries
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  to grow exponentially in markets around the world.
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  China is the is a huge outsized example here, but we're seeing
• 21:28
  it as a global phenomenon as well.
• 21:30
  And it is fundamentally those economic forces that are driving
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  this. And SWB, they aren't the only
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  energy technologies. And we're likely to see other
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  convergence happen happen as well.
• 21:43
  So heat pumps are going to play a large role.
• 21:45
  Geothermal might emerge to play an important role.
• 21:47
  Newer nuclear technologies fit a fusion, for example.
• 21:51
  If that emerges and is economically viable, that could
• 21:55
  play a role. But what we see, what my team
• 21:57
  sees is that it's unequivocal that solar wind and batteries
• 22:00
  when you put them together provide this overwhelmingly
• 22:03
  competitive option. You get the same electricity for
• 22:07
  a substantially lower cost. And again, cost in the larger
• 22:11
  sense, the all-encompassing sense financial especially, yes,
• 22:14
  of course, but they're also clean.
• 22:16
  So that captures a, an environmental dimension of cost.
• 22:19
  But there are other dimensions of cost as well.
• 22:21
  Social costs, the the social cost of solar, wind and
• 22:24
  batteries are tend to be lower than the social cost of fossil
• 22:28
  fuels, for example. Put all of that together and you
• 22:31
  have really what's the makings of a textbook case of technology
• 22:35
  disruption. What that means is in any given
• 22:37
  market in any given region or location, once you hit at 5 to
• 22:41
  10% penetration of solar winding batteries, expect a 15 to 20
• 22:46
  year S shaped growth curve for those new technologies and a
• 22:49
  corresponding collapse of the older technologies.
• 22:52
  Now that's on a market to market basis globally, it'll take a
• 22:56
  little bit longer than that because not every place will
• 22:59
  start their journey up the S curve.
• 23:02
  Yeah, at exactly the same time. And that is another thing that's
• 23:05
  important to keep in mind that the early adopters, the first
• 23:08
  movers will accrue an advantage here.
• 23:12
  And that's another pattern we see throughout history.
• 23:14
  Some regions adopt to technology or new convergence to suite of
• 23:17
  technologies earlier than others and they can reap very large
• 23:22
  first mover rewards for doing that.
• 23:24
  We saw that with the automobile, we saw that with sailing, we saw
• 23:27
  that with the Internet. Just pick a few examples
• 23:30
  historically. It's It's tempting to contrast
• 23:33
  the current attitudes of China and, well, the US with the Trump
• 23:37
  administration on this, isn't it?
• 23:38
  Yeah, it's it's I commented about, I, I commented about
• 23:42
  this. I've tried, I've tried to button
• 23:46
  my lip on this a little bit, but it's so frustrating as an
• 23:48
  American, so many own goals being made here.
• 23:51
  We are just, we're just in my view shooting ourselves in the
• 23:55
  foot by doubling down on losing older technologies when we
• 24:00
  should be investing massively in the obvious winners which are
• 24:06
  this point clearly solar winds and batteries.
• 24:08
  And again, I'm not, I don't want to preclude other what could be
• 24:12
  new and disruptive technologies further out on the horizon.
• 24:15
  We should continue investing in R&D and fusion technology for
• 24:19
  sure absolutely deserves that. But, but it's really SWB that's
• 24:23
  the center of the story right now.
• 24:24
  And I, I, I'm mortified to say this, but America is not the
• 24:29
  example to be following here. We're going the wrong direction.
• 24:32
  And by contrast, China is, is making many of the right moves,
• 24:36
  especially with the deployment of solar and batteries.
• 24:39
  Their, their growth is, is truly stunning and has defied really
• 24:44
  all, all earlier projections for what that trajectory might look
• 24:49
  like, even my own team's projections over the last
• 24:54
  decade. And we are, we are notoriously
• 24:57
  bullish on these technologies because of our perspective on
• 25:01
  disruption. China specifically has even
• 25:03
  exceeded our expectations and that's saying something.
• 25:06
  So I think that they are the at the moment.
• 25:10
  They are the setting, the example that the rest of the
• 25:12
  world, if it were wiser, would be following.
• 25:15
  Yeah, I mean the S curves are looking pretty vertical.
• 25:17
  I mean, I looked at the latest chart on batteries, which really
• 25:21
  only took off in about 20-20. But you know, the, the current
• 25:25
  rate of exponential growth is like literally it's, it's
• 25:28
  vertical. And if you follow that up, we're
• 25:31
  going to be seeing multiple terawatts by the end of this
• 25:34
  decade, let alone your, you know, 15 years of allotted time
• 25:37
  for the full disruption. So is the problem of
• 25:39
  intermittency of renewables. You know, all of the, the famous
• 25:42
  hoary old thing about, well, it's, you know, it gets dark and
• 25:45
  you know, the sun isn't always shining, the window isn't always
• 25:47
  blowing, etcetera. Is that fully solved now by
• 25:50
  well, by all the different range of different battery and other
• 25:53
  storage options? Yes, my team's working 5-6 years
• 25:58
  ago now, I guess 20/19 and 2020 we published research on this
• 26:01
  that, that I think made some important headway on
• 26:04
  understanding why the combination of solar and wind
• 26:08
  and batteries together solved this, this concern about
• 26:12
  intermittency. So sure, it's, I mean, it's,
• 26:15
  it's a tautology that the sun doesn't, doesn't shine 24 hours
• 26:18
  a day, not unless you get into orbit, right?
• 26:20
  But at anywhere on the on the on the surface of the Earth, of
• 26:23
  course solar and wind are intermittent and you need to
• 26:26
  pair them with energy storage in order to have round the clock
• 26:29
  reliability. The real question was what is
• 26:31
  the right way to do that that is optimal from a performance
• 26:35
  basis. And my team showed that we were
• 26:38
  making false assumptions. We, the scientific community and
• 26:41
  industry were making false assumptions about how to think
• 26:44
  about the mix of those three technologies in an optimal way.
• 26:48
  And what my team showed is that there's a, there's a very
• 26:51
  unintuitive non linear optimization function.
• 26:55
  We call it the clean energy U curve because it's AU shaped
• 26:58
  function. And basically The upshot of it
• 27:00
  is that it makes, it makes very, very compelling economic sense
• 27:04
  to overbuild or to to massively invest in solar specifically
• 27:09
  complement that with a modest amount of wind.
• 27:11
  And that allows you because you've built so much solar
• 27:14
  capacity to reduce the amount of energy storage that that needs
• 27:17
  to be paired with it in order to have round the clock all year
• 27:21
  round supply, secure supply of energy.
• 27:24
  You can. You can have many different
• 27:26
  combinations of solar and wind and batteries that will get the
• 27:28
  job done. But the cheapest 1 by far the
• 27:31
  cheapest combination is always on the side of build more solar
• 27:35
  and less batteries. And for a long time, the
• 27:38
  assumption was the other way around for legacy reasons in the
• 27:41
  industry. And this is even more true today
• 27:44
  as the cost of both solar and batteries have continued to
• 27:47
  plummet. So we're now at that turning
• 27:50
  point where the this is undeniable.
• 27:53
  It was one thing to point the finger at my team and say, oh,
• 27:55
  you guys are nuts in 2020, in 2025, everywhere.
• 27:58
  Look, there's some more batteries going up, more solar
• 28:00
  going up. And that is going to set the
• 28:02
  stage for quite an exciting future, which I'm sure will talk
• 28:07
  about shortly here too. A stellar future?
• 28:09
  Yeah, we will. I mean I even think about this
• 28:11
  at the household level. I've got some ground mounted
• 28:14
  solar panels in the field and I haven't quite got enough
• 28:18
  batteries to, to soak up sort of the, the peak output in, you
• 28:23
  know, in the middle of middle of the day in the middle of summer.
• 28:25
  But then I, I sort of think, well, what a terrible waste.
• 28:28
  I need to get a whole bunch more batteries.
• 28:29
  And then I look, actually the whole of the rest of the field
• 28:31
  doesn't have any solar panels and that's all getting wasted
• 28:33
  too. So actually, if solar panels are
• 28:35
  cheap enough, it does change the whole kind of calculation.
• 28:38
  There doesn't. It and they're just, they're
• 28:40
  incredibly cheap at this point. The for a very long time it was
• 28:43
  the panels themselves, or more specifically the, the, the
• 28:45
  modules that were the key cost. Today, that's not the case
• 28:50
  anymore. The solar panels in the modules
• 28:53
  and the components that comprise them are only a small fraction
• 28:56
  of the total cost of a solar power system at this point.
• 29:00
  The, the labor for installing the system is, is by far a
• 29:03
  larger cost than the than the hardware.
• 29:05
  That was not the case 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, of course, but
• 29:08
  that's the that's where we are today.
• 29:10
  In fact, they're so cheap now that that if, if you, if you
• 29:14
  were to build a fence out of solar panels, it'd cost you
• 29:17
  about the same thing as building a fence out of just out of
• 29:19
  regular, out of regular pine or, or Douglas fir wood.
• 29:23
  I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's incredible how inexpensive solar
• 29:27
  panels have gotten. And of course, we're also seeing
• 29:29
  continued progress in the panels themselves.
• 29:32
  Efficiency of capturing and convert energy in sunlight and
• 29:35
  converting it to electricity is improving.
• 29:37
  We have different types of solar panels that are available now.
• 29:40
  And, and so you may have heard of thin film ones that can be
• 29:43
  put on, you know, just laid right on top of surfaces, like
• 29:46
  even like windows that are partially transparent.
• 29:48
  There are a lot of options for solar power generation now, but
• 29:51
  even the good old fashioned, you know, mono crystalline and
• 29:53
  polycrystal panels, those are now incredibly affordable and
• 29:58
  that sets the stage for a sort of energy abundance we've never
• 30:02
  really experienced before as a civilization and it's a game
• 30:05
  changer. And of course, renewables
• 30:07
  generate electricity directly rather than direct, rather than
• 30:11
  generating heat, which then has to be transformed via, you know,
• 30:14
  steam turbines into electricity. And then, you know, you lose
• 30:17
  most of it through the laws of thermodynamics, as is the case
• 30:20
  with coal and well, and also with with with big nuclear.
• 30:23
  So, you know, the fact that it's useful energy being produced
• 30:27
  electrical energy is also is also pretty key.
• 30:30
  One of the things that I think people don't realise is just how
• 30:33
  efficient solar panels are even compared to photosynthesis.
• 30:37
  I don't know. I don't know exactly the number.
• 30:38
  Isn't it like photosynthesis is only 2% efficient and solar
• 30:41
  panels are now like 2025% efficient?
• 30:43
  I think it's theoretical. Maximum photosynthesis is 14 to
• 30:46
  16% efficient, if I remember, but that's under very narrow
• 30:49
  circumstances. And it depends on how you think
• 30:51
  of, of the, the chemistry in relation to the Organism.
• 30:56
  But you're, you're right, to my understanding, if it's
• 30:59
  electricity that you want and you want to capture it from the
• 31:02
  sun, it's remarkable that we have a technology that can do
• 31:04
  that even more efficiently than than what biology evolved to do.
• 31:09
  Now, to be fair to biology, biology's doing a lot of complex
• 31:12
  things and a lot of chemistry and doing a lot of work with the
• 31:15
  energy that it captures other than just generate out a, a
• 31:19
  direct current stream of electrons.
• 31:21
  So it's got a harder job to do. And biology is absolutely
• 31:24
  marvelous, protein based nanotech, it's unbelievable
• 31:28
  stuff. But yes, I mean, solar panels
• 31:30
  are even today and they're not yet at their, you know, the peak
• 31:34
  of, of their, of their capabilities.
• 31:36
  We are, we know they can get better because we can see from
• 31:39
  the fundamental physics and engineering of it that we
• 31:42
  haven't hit limits to the technology yet.
• 31:44
  It's a they're remarkable, they're extraordinary.
• 31:46
  And I think the most, perhaps one of the most extraordinary
• 31:48
  things that's it's, it's an under sung part of their merit
• 31:52
  is that you only build them once.
• 31:55
  If you build them once and then that's it.
• 31:57
  Put the panel in, as you said, if it's ground mounted in on
• 32:00
  your property, put it in in a field, aim it at the sky.
• 32:04
  And that panel will happily crank out electricity for
• 32:07
  decades, decades. The, the we're now seeing solar
• 32:10
  panels that are continuing to function just fine 40 years on,
• 32:15
  no additional costs gone into them.
• 32:17
  And if you live somewhere where it rains, you don't even need to
• 32:19
  wash them very much. You don't even need to wash the
• 32:21
  dust off to make sure that they're, you know, that they're
• 32:23
  still capturing plenty of sunlight.
• 32:25
  It's pretty extraordinary. Unlike our other energy
• 32:28
  technologies where you you have to literally keep extracting raw
• 32:32
  materials, coal, fossil fuels, uranium even for for example,
• 32:36
  and, and sort of literally and metaphorically shoveling that
• 32:39
  into the into the fires to keep that engine going.
• 32:43
  Solar panels are not like that. They don't even have any moving
• 32:45
  parts. They're solid-state.
• 32:47
  They just sit there and happily make electricity for decades at
• 32:50
  near 0 marginal cost. They really are a marvellous
• 32:53
  technology. And, and that's important to to
• 32:56
  mention actually, because one of the objections that you often
• 32:58
  hear to solar and other clean energy technologies is that they
• 33:01
  use all these critical minerals and they all have to be mined.
• 33:04
  So isn't that just as bad as fossil fuels?
• 33:06
  But of course, that's not true, because not only do you have to
• 33:09
  keep mining fossil fuels all the time to keep generating energy,
• 33:11
  but even even the, you know, the scale of the enterprise is, is,
• 33:15
  is much, much less when it comes to the, the materials we need.
• 33:19
  So yeah, tell us a bit more about how much materials you
• 33:21
  need for this big SWB thing versus the fossil fuel economy.
• 33:25
  Well, I don't want to, I don't want to downplay too much the,
• 33:28
  the material footprint of of solar, wind and batteries.
• 33:31
  And that's because they're going to grow more than people expect
• 33:34
  that they will. Solar winding batteries are
• 33:36
  going to allow us to build a new energy system that's much, much
• 33:40
  larger than the energy system we have today.
• 33:42
  In the in the energy system of the future will deliver 2/5/10
• 33:48
  times more electricity per person than the one that we have
• 33:51
  today because of its new capabilities.
• 33:53
  And because of that, we're going to be making a lot of solar
• 33:56
  panels and a lot of wind turbines and a lot of batteries.
• 34:00
  And there is a material footprint to that.
• 34:02
  And we can't ignore that. However, it is a tiny fraction,
• 34:05
  tiny fraction of a single digit percentage at the maximum of
• 34:10
  what the footprint of mining 7 million, I'm sorry, 7 billion
• 34:14
  tons of coal each year, 7 giga tons of coal every year is it's
• 34:19
  nothing like that scale of, of ongoing production.
• 34:23
  And better still, once you build the the stock, because it's not
• 34:27
  a flow, it's a stock of assets, then you can recycle that stock
• 34:32
  indefinitely. In fact, it's even better than
• 34:34
  that. By the time that you need to
• 34:37
  recycle a battery or by the time you need to recycle a solar
• 34:41
  panel, you can take the materials from 1 old battery,
• 34:44
  for example. And because of better practical
• 34:48
  knowledge, because of technological advancement from
• 34:51
  that same material, you'll be able to make 3 or four or five
• 34:56
  times worth of the performance in a new battery or a new solar
• 35:01
  panel. This is the remarkable thing.
• 35:03
  We we technological advance allows us to do more with less
• 35:08
  over time. This is a subtle point, but it's
• 35:11
  important. What that means is that not only
• 35:13
  will we have a eventually have a standing stock of energy assets
• 35:17
  that we just recycle with very little ongoing virgin mining.
• 35:21
  Neat, necessary, but that's that stock of assets will continue to
• 35:26
  improve as our general knowledge, as our general
• 35:31
  technology improves and that's very important as well.
• 35:34
  This is one of the extraordinary and exciting properties of the
• 35:38
  new energy system and and frankly, the new economic system
• 35:42
  that that awaits us at the end of this set of disruptions.
• 35:46
  Yeah, and the, the modularity of, well, solar and batteries in
• 35:49
  particular less so maybe wind is, is a real game changer,
• 35:52
  isn't it? I mean, and it doesn't, I can't
• 35:55
  see it ever applying to nuclear fission, however small your
• 35:58
  modular reactors get all nuclear fusion or geothermal that many
• 36:02
  other technologies. But it really does apply to to
• 36:05
  solar and batteries, doesn't it? They can be at like the
• 36:07
  household level or even, you know, as you say, wear them on
• 36:09
  your wrist even, or they can cover 100, you know, square
• 36:13
  miles of of hot desert and it's the same technology.
• 36:16
  They're viable at every scale, and this is quite extraordinary.
• 36:20
  Few. Well, I don't want to make
• 36:22
  sweeping statements, but let's just say that not every
• 36:25
  technology is like that in any domain.
• 36:27
  So it's quite extraordinary that solar and batteries work, as you
• 36:31
  said, every scale from wearing them on your wrist.
• 36:34
  I was one of those nerdy kids who had a solar powered Casio
• 36:37
  watch on my wrist in the 1980s and 1990s all the way up to the
• 36:40
  GW scale and beyond. So that's extraordinary.
• 36:43
  You can't wear a coal power plant on your wrist or a nuclear
• 36:46
  power plant on your wrist for whatever the other merits of
• 36:48
  those technologies might have been or be now or be going
• 36:52
  forward in the future is difficult be able to imagine
• 36:54
  without radically advanced technology far from where we
• 36:58
  stand today. Nuclear powers that could, for
• 37:00
  example, fusion that could work at any scale from from, you
• 37:04
  know, the handheld size all the way up to the GW scale.
• 37:07
  So solar panels and batteries are pretty remarkable in that
• 37:10
  specific respect. It's another thing that gives
• 37:13
  them a competitive edge over the the legacy energy technologies
• 37:17
  that they are going to disrupt. Yeah.
• 37:19
  And, and the other thing is, I mean, I've, we've all grown up
• 37:23
  very conditioned by energy scarcity, right?
• 37:25
  You know, when I started on the climate change thing, it was
• 37:28
  drive less, turn your lights off, you know, turn the heating
• 37:31
  down, wear an extra jumper and all this, this sort of stuff.
• 37:34
  And, you know, it was all it was all fundamentally predicated on
• 37:36
  using less energy and that, you know, energy efficiency had to,
• 37:40
  you know, we always have to say had that had to be a huge part
• 37:42
  of, you know, of tackling climate change.
• 37:45
  Now you're talking about super abundance in energy.
• 37:48
  And that so seems to me to be a totally different concept, which
• 37:51
  changes everything. So explain a bit more about
• 37:54
  that. Well, the the concept of
• 37:57
  efficiency needs to evolve. So we're going to, we're going
• 38:00
  to need to shift from a mentality, a mindset of don't
• 38:04
  waste energy to a mindset of don't let super abundant clean
• 38:10
  energy go to waste because you're going to have it, find
• 38:15
  ways to use it because it will be there.
• 38:17
  And that's a very different type of mindset.
• 38:19
  You're right. In the past, minimizing energy
• 38:23
  use made sense because it took such a terrible toll.
• 38:26
  It was expensive, not just financially, but in every other
• 38:29
  respect too socially, environmentally, politically,
• 38:33
  even geopolitical, politically, where our oil was coming from,
• 38:36
  created, you know, took terrible costs, has taken terrible costs
• 38:39
  in the world throughout the 20th century, for example, and and,
• 38:42
  and a little bit before and a little bit after with the
• 38:45
  history of fossil fuels, it's fraught with challenges and it
• 38:50
  makes sense. It stood to reason that we ought
• 38:53
  to use as little energy as possible.
• 38:56
  That frugality and and efficiency in that minimization
• 39:00
  sense was reasonable, sure. But when electricity is clean
• 39:06
  and it's super abundant in supply just by its very nature,
• 39:10
  when it has near 0 marginal cost, when you build the assets
• 39:13
  once and they just produce this electricity whether you use it
• 39:16
  or not for decades after decade, well then efficiency has to
• 39:20
  evolve. It has to mean something
• 39:21
  different. It has to mean well, if those
• 39:23
  solar panels are cranking out electricity one way or the other
• 39:26
  and we built enough to get us through the winter because we
• 39:28
  had to better find a great ways to use that energy in the summer
• 39:32
  or else you are letting it go to waste.
• 39:34
  And that's a different kind of thinking about efficiency.
• 39:38
  It's efficiency of use versus efficiency of supply.
• 39:41
  And it requires a different mindset.
• 39:43
  I think we're going to have to change the not only the way that
• 39:46
  we think, but also the way that we narrate and the way that we
• 39:48
  communicate our understanding of our humanities relationship to
• 39:52
  energy as we go forward. The great news, the great upside
• 39:55
  of that is that energy is the is one of the fundamentally.
• 40:00
  One of the cornerstones, one of the fundamental factors of
• 40:02
  production, one of the fundamental enablers of
• 40:04
  prosperity in general, just writ large across every aspect of our
• 40:09
  lives. The more energy we have
• 40:11
  available, the more abundant energy is, the more we can, the
• 40:14
  more useful and things that we can do to garner prosperity,
• 40:18
  however we define that. So that's wonderful.
• 40:21
  What it does is this shift in mindset isn't just sort of an A
• 40:25
  nice thing to have as a product of the technology, it that shift
• 40:29
  also brings things into alignment, the logic of
• 40:33
  efficiency with the logic of maximizing human prosperity.
• 40:38
  And in the past, these two things have been at odds with
• 40:40
  one another. Using less energy meant giving
• 40:42
  up human prosperity by definition, because energy is
• 40:46
  just that important and just that useful.
• 40:49
  So using less of it always meant a sacrifice in many other ways
• 40:53
  historically, even if it made good sense to minimize its use
• 40:55
  because it had such a terrible toll.
• 40:57
  We, we knew we were giving up prosperity by using less energy
• 41:00
  by definition. Now.
• 41:02
  Now we can, instead of having this sort of 0 sum relationship,
• 41:06
  we have a positive sum relationship, we have a win, win
• 41:09
  where our interests as humanity and, and our prosperity are
• 41:12
  aligned with maximizing utilization of the energy that's
• 41:17
  available because it takes such a less, such, such a smaller
• 41:20
  toll in all of the different ways that we care about is, you
• 41:24
  know, from my perspective as an environmental scientist, I pay
• 41:26
  very close attention to the environmental tool, but every
• 41:29
  form of tool socially, geopolitically, and of course
• 41:32
  financially. Wow.
• 41:33
  Well, let's move on to talk about transportation next.
• 41:36
  The electric revolution with EVs.
• 41:40
  Of course, you know, I've, I've been driving EVs for five years,
• 41:43
  so I don't need persuading that they're better than fossil fuel
• 41:46
  cars. But haven't they been around for
• 41:49
  ages already? I remember a vaguely
• 41:50
  conspiratorial film called Who Killed the Electric Car, which
• 41:53
  sort of accused, I can't remember who fossil fuel
• 41:56
  companies or somebody from having having basically
• 41:58
  destroyed them. And, you know, but they,
• 42:01
  they've, they're back and it's, it's a totally different world
• 42:04
  now. So what?
• 42:04
  What changed? Batteries is the short answer.
• 42:07
  The oldest electric vehicles date to the beginning of the
• 42:12
  20th century, the early 1900s there were electric cars
• 42:16
  competing with petrol powered cars in the.
• 42:19
  Lead lead acid batteries or something?
• 42:21
  I believe so, yes. They were quite primitive
• 42:24
  batteries by today's standards and they were chemistries that
• 42:26
  that are, you know there are are very different than the modern
• 42:29
  energy storage and battery technologies that we have today.
• 42:32
  But nevertheless, they were, they were battery electric
• 42:36
  vehicles that you that you had to charge up.
• 42:39
  And of course the problem from the very beginning with those
• 42:42
  electric vehicles was that they just couldn't drive very far on
• 42:46
  a single charge, even if you made the battery take up most of
• 42:49
  the space and the weight and the mass of the car.
• 42:51
  And so it's always been for for 100 years, the limiting factor
• 42:55
  was batteries. And the reason why that's the
• 42:57
  case is because the fossil fuels and more specifically, you know,
• 43:01
  hydrocarbons, the gasoline in our petrol powered cars, diesel
• 43:06
  and so forth, those materials are, are terrifically energy
• 43:11
  dense. They carry and there's an
• 43:13
  enormous amount of energy in every literally every drop of
• 43:16
  gasoline. So it's just been a very long
• 43:20
  trek of scientific and technological research to
• 43:24
  achieve battery performance. That's you know, what even
• 43:27
  within even within striking distance of the amount of energy
• 43:31
  that you can store in a fuel, in a hydrocarbon fuel.
• 43:34
  So that was the game changer and it was really lithium ion
• 43:38
  batteries that opened the door to a proper sort of head to head
• 43:44
  apples to apples comparison on value between electric and
• 43:49
  combustion engine vehicles. Now, because of all of their
• 43:53
  other merits, electric vehicles are pretty much the hands down
• 43:57
  winner. I mean, in every other aspect,
• 44:00
  in every other respect, electric vehicles outperform combustion
• 44:04
  engines, as I'm sure that you know, having owned one for a
• 44:07
  while and driven one. I mean in, in most other
• 44:10
  respects, they are superior power, performance, you know,
• 44:13
  all the rest of it. And of course emissions,
• 44:15
  especially if you're charging the electric vehicle from a
• 44:18
  clean energy source like solar and wind.
• 44:20
  But even if you're charging them from a coal power plant,
• 44:23
  electricity produced by coal power plant, it's still a win in
• 44:26
  terms of emissions and, and, and net ecological footprint and so
• 44:30
  forth. So the battery technology was
• 44:33
  the limiting factor. And once that stopped being the
• 44:35
  limiting factor, then it made sense for companies to invest in
• 44:39
  all of the other aspects of electric vehicle development as
• 44:42
  well. And so the motors have gotten
• 44:44
  better and the drive trains have gotten better and all of the
• 44:47
  rest of it. And now it's pretty much a slam
• 44:49
  dunk. It would be very, it'd be hard
• 44:53
  pressed to find on a cost on a dollar per dollar basis a
• 44:56
  combustion engine vehicle that could, that could outmatch a, an
• 45:00
  electric field vehicle at this point.
• 45:01
  But that was a long hard fought technological battle.
• 45:07
  And finally, battery electric vehicles have have, I think
• 45:10
  unequivocally triumphed on the, on the price performance front.
• 45:14
  And then the new frontier that's emerging, of course, is
• 45:17
  autonomous driving technology, vehicles that can drive
• 45:20
  themselves. And if a vehicle can drive
• 45:23
  itself, it just makes even all the more sense for it to be
• 45:27
  electric, because an electric vehicle can operate many, many
• 45:30
  hours a day. The cost of fuel versus the cost
• 45:34
  of electricity is huge difference.
• 45:35
  So over the lifetime of a vehicle, there's an enormous
• 45:38
  savings if you're using electricity just in pure
• 45:41
  financial terms. And that's all the more
• 45:42
  important if a vehicle is driving itself from functioning,
• 45:44
  for example, as taxi or delivery vehicle or a, or a, a big heavy
• 45:50
  machine or a heavy truck or something like that.
• 45:52
  So autonomy sort of turbocharges the technology disruption that
• 45:57
  already began with electric vehicles.
• 46:00
  And my team and in particular my Co founder, Tony Ciba, we've
• 46:04
  been, we've been writing and publishing about that for more
• 46:07
  than a decade. And it's very exciting now to
• 46:10
  finally see all of those technologies converging and
• 46:14
  beginning to offer truly overwhelming value that we can
• 46:18
  see in those S shaped adoption curves, especially in leading
• 46:21
  markets. So in places like Norway where
• 46:23
  there were early adopters, it's just a beautiful perfect
• 46:26
  textbook S shaped curve. If you plot the data of adoption
• 46:30
  of the electric vehicles and decline, corresponding decline,
• 46:33
  the X curve, decline of the combustion engine vehicles.
• 46:36
  And that's what we expect everywhere, again for purely
• 46:39
  economic reasons. Yeah.
• 46:41
  I mean, there's the same in China, I think more than half of
• 46:44
  new cars sold or EVs now. And you sure this isn't to do
• 46:48
  with government mandates in places like Norway or China?
• 46:50
  I mean, this is actually market forces driving this.
• 46:53
  Well, in Norway, for example, and other early adoption places,
• 46:56
  that those government policies make an enormous difference.
• 46:59
  That's part of the choice of this.
• 47:00
  It's one reason why some countries start the the on their
• 47:04
  trajectory of disruption sooner rather than later.
• 47:07
  So there's absolutely a role for early adopters being
• 47:11
  incentivized by the right kind of policies.
• 47:13
  We've seen this in transportation, as you mentioned
• 47:16
  in those examples. We've seen it in energy.
• 47:18
  We were just talking about energy, but where California and
• 47:20
  the United States was an early and aggressive adopter policy
• 47:23
  wise of clean technology, Germany was a good example.
• 47:25
  In Europe, it's great for those early adopters to head out in
• 47:29
  front, bear some of those initial costs to get that
• 47:32
  flywheels of auto catalysis up and spinning.
• 47:35
  Take some of the early slings and arrows and the reason, Well,
• 47:38
  there are many reasons to do that, but one of them is if it
• 47:41
  translates into first mover advantage, you can then glean
• 47:44
  huge benefits from being out ahead of the pack, out ahead of
• 47:49
  your competition. If it's competition amongst
• 47:51
  nations economically, for example, if you get to the top
• 47:54
  of your S curve faster than than your rivals, you can realize all
• 47:58
  the benefits of that new technology.
• 48:01
  So again, this is a pattern we've seen again and again and
• 48:04
  again throughout history. And we were, we're living amidst
• 48:07
  that right now with the transportation disruption by
• 48:10
  electric vehicles and by just now starting autonomous self
• 48:15
  driving vehicles as well. And of course, the exciting
• 48:17
  thing is that with energy and transportation, they're
• 48:20
  intimately linked. So the clean energy technology
• 48:23
  and all of that disruption, where's a lot of that
• 48:25
  electricity going that the solar panels and the batteries and the
• 48:28
  wind turbines are, are, are providing it's going to charge
• 48:31
  all those electric vehicles. So there's a, there's a, a
• 48:34
  mutual cross fertilization and acceleration between those
• 48:38
  disruptions as well. It's one of the reasons why this
• 48:40
  is such an extraordinary historical moment, because we
• 48:43
  have multiple fundamental disruptions occurring at the
• 48:47
  same time and turbocharging one another.
• 48:51
  Very exciting. How far has the autonomous thing
• 48:54
  gone then? I mean, you talk about
• 48:56
  transportation as a service in the book.
• 48:58
  And you know, I guess this idea that we don't all need to own
• 49:01
  cars because they can basically come, you know, on, on.
• 49:05
  They can come on command, I guess and drive themselves to
• 49:08
  you and pick you up and drop you off somewhere or whatever it
• 49:10
  takes. Like are we almost there with
• 49:13
  autonomous self driving cars? I know they're in cities already
• 49:15
  as taxis, but I'm not, you know, I don't think they're out there
• 49:18
  in the in the countryside or in across the widened Rd. network
• 49:21
  yet. I mean, that's definitely
• 49:23
  coming, right? Certainly we're we're, we're at
• 49:26
  the, at that inflection point, at that tipping point where this
• 49:30
  it's been a long lead in just like those decades.
• 49:33
  It was a long lead in for solar panels.
• 49:35
  They were around for a long time just sort of inching, inching
• 49:37
  along and they didn't make economic sense.
• 49:40
  They didn't quite perform well enough.
• 49:41
  They were expensive. Their performance wasn't
• 49:44
  terribly impressive. And then they pass that critical
• 49:46
  threshold and suddenly they, you know, the growth is explosive.
• 49:49
  And we expect exactly that same pattern in the adoption of
• 49:53
  autonomous vehicle technology as well.
• 49:55
  So it's just now rolling out with hiccups and bumps along the
• 49:58
  way in a few cities in the world, notable some cities in
• 50:03
  the United States, other notable examples are cities in China.
• 50:07
  So this technology is exists now.
• 50:10
  It's no longer science fiction, but it's still immature.
• 50:13
  And we're at the very beginning, right near that take off point.
• 50:17
  If we Fast forward just a few years, 235 years, we should see
• 50:23
  that we're properly on that explosive portion of the S curve
• 50:27
  growing exponentially. Deployment is happening
• 50:29
  worldwide. And again, it's once a
• 50:33
  technology disruption gets going and it's and the value of this
• 50:38
  overwhelmingly competitive proposition becomes clearer.
• 50:43
  There's no looking back. And even in living memory, we
• 50:48
  sort of experienced this. Like I can remember the first
• 50:51
  time I held an iPhone in my hand and I just thought, OK, there's
• 50:54
  no going back from this. This is this is, you know, it's
• 50:56
  early days. It doesn't work perfectly.
• 50:58
  And not everybody's got one of these newfangled smartphones.
• 51:00
  But it's definitely where the future is headed.
• 51:03
  And sure enough, Fast forward 5 or 10 years and growth was
• 51:06
  explosive and their dominance of the marketplace was becoming
• 51:10
  clear and on, on trajectory to, to disrupting the older, you
• 51:14
  know, flip phones and so forth completely.
• 51:17
  And I think we'll see it's it. There's every reason to expect
• 51:20
  that. That is the point we are we find
• 51:23
  ourselves in today. So check back, you know, don't
• 51:27
  hold me to account here. See if this is see if if we're
• 51:32
  right that 2345 certainly by 20-30 we aren't seeing a an
• 51:37
  enormous amount of international roll out of autonomous driving
• 51:41
  technology. And the final thing to say here
• 51:43
  is that I think everybody can imagine there's enormous value
• 51:46
  to this. I mean, a vehicle that can drive
• 51:48
  itself is vastly more useful than one that you must pilot,
• 51:53
  you must operate yourself. So once we can trust them and
• 51:58
  assuming that they're affordable, then their appeal in
• 52:02
  the marketplace is very likely to be overwhelming.
• 52:05
  Yeah, there's one more thing now.
• 52:06
  What about aviation and shipping?
• 52:08
  I mean will batteries ever be able to deliver the power
• 52:12
  density you need to to to run a long haul flight?
• 52:15
  And we can hopefully I, I look forward to the day we can stop
• 52:18
  flight shaming ourselves for having for wanting to go on
• 52:20
  holiday or visit relatives on the other side of the world.
• 52:23
  I, I think that, I think that it's certainly the physics of
• 52:27
  batteries allow for the eventual electrification, battery
• 52:32
  electrification of aviation and shipping as well.
• 52:36
  It's we're further away from that.
• 52:38
  We're not with, it's not right around the corner, we're not
• 52:40
  within striking distance of batteries that can that, that
• 52:46
  have enough energy density to compete head to It's not
• 52:58
  impossible, it's not physically impossible, but it I would be
• 53:03
  surprised if that technology emerged earlier than the twenty
• 53:08
  30s in a compelling way. I would I would imagine mid to
• 53:13
  twenty 30s before we really start seeing truly remarkably
• 53:17
  advanced battery technology that'll enables say, for
• 53:20
  example, continental distance or transoceanic distance long haul
• 53:26
  aviation. And that's a little bit
• 53:28
  discouraging because even if you even if you look at at carbon
• 53:33
  neutral aviation fuels, you still have other problems
• 53:37
  associated with with the footprint of aviation.
• 53:40
  So for example, the the contrails, the vapor trails that
• 53:43
  are emitted by aircraft have consequences for climate change,
• 53:47
  unfortunately. And so even if we had carbon
• 53:51
  neutral fuels, we would still have the albedo alteration
• 53:55
  effect in the atmosphere that contributed on net to warming
• 53:59
  from aviation. And so we really do need to get
• 54:03
  to an electric aviation solution.
• 54:06
  I wish we were closer, but unfortunately we're still a
• 54:09
  little ways away from that. But 20 years isn't an eternity,
• 54:13
  I think. I think we're going to be in
• 54:15
  good shape a decade from now, and then that will be the next
• 54:18
  exciting transportation disruption to be thinking about.
• 54:21
  OK, I'll hold you to that one too.
• 54:24
  Let's move on to food though, Food and Agriculture.
• 54:27
  There's two key food disruption technologies, precision
• 54:29
  fermentation and and cellular agriculture.
• 54:31
  In fact, you you claim credit for coining the term precision
• 54:34
  fermentation, which is quite something.
• 54:36
  Our team put that moniker that, well, it's a, it's a portmanteau
• 54:40
  that, that the precision is borrowed from precision biology
• 54:44
  and fermentation is this age-old ancient technology of, you know,
• 54:49
  using microorganisms to alter chemical composition and produce
• 54:55
  materials that we that we like, like ethanol.
• 55:00
  So we're making, so we're making beer and wine and spirits and
• 55:05
  bread and cheese and of course, what would the world be without
• 55:07
  those things? And I just.
• 55:10
  But the, the precision fermentation as a technology has
• 55:14
  existed for many decades, but giving it terminology that
• 55:19
  crystallize the focus of the the value and it the potential of
• 55:25
  that technology for especially for for non-technical audiences,
• 55:30
  I think was very useful. And what it I think more than
• 55:34
  anything else allowed was investment and policy making to
• 55:38
  coalesce around a unified concept.
• 55:41
  And that really wasn't happening up until that point.
• 55:44
  So it isn't that every new technology or every new, you
• 55:46
  know, piece of research we does needs to have, you know, terms
• 55:50
  catchy or whatever coins to go along with them.
• 55:52
  What we saw was that the technology was not being framed
• 55:56
  and understood clearly enough and it needed the language
• 55:59
  needed to to evolve in order for understanding to evolve along
• 56:03
  with it and to bring the non-technical, non scientific
• 56:07
  stakeholders into the conversation.
• 56:09
  And that term helped helped do that.
• 56:12
  But it was a, you know, it was, it was, it was a complex
• 56:15
  situation. And with cellular agriculture,
• 56:18
  it's all the more so. I mean, cellular agriculture is
• 56:20
  the term of art that the industry has for now it seems
• 56:24
  settled on. But that was hard fought.
• 56:26
  Lab grown meat, fake meat, in vitro meat.
• 56:30
  I mean, these were all terms that were, that were competing
• 56:35
  for, to, to capture the same general idea, which is rather
• 56:38
  than using microbes, cells from animals to produce animal
• 56:43
  tissues and animal products like milk and eggs and so forth.
• 56:47
  And so cellular agriculture has one out and, and that was not,
• 56:51
  that is not a term that my team coined, but that is one out in
• 56:54
  that particular space for now, it thinks, but these things are
• 56:56
  fluid and language is fluid and these things could evolve.
• 56:59
  But those are the two key food technologies that we see as
• 57:02
  being disruptive on a, you know, on a, on a again, 15 to 20 year
• 57:07
  time horizon. And I'd be interested to talk
• 57:10
  about the enabling conditions about that that make you think
• 57:13
  that they actually will follow these same S curves because I'm
• 57:16
  seeing so much pushback at the moment, You know, fake meat or,
• 57:21
  you know, 3D printed meat. People saying yuck.
• 57:23
  And accusing them of being ultra processed.
• 57:27
  And in fact, the EU now is is passing legislation to ban the
• 57:31
  words burger and sausage if products don't contain meat,
• 57:35
  which in their definitions are the edible parts of an animal.
• 57:38
  And producer Rob actually, by the way, is spearheading the
• 57:42
  campaign along with a coalition of NGOs to to stop this in the
• 57:45
  EU. So I think Adam and you and I
• 57:47
  can give him a round of applause for that.
• 57:51
  It's. Good idea.
• 57:52
  It seems incredible that you see this amount of pushback though.
• 57:56
  I mean, is this this the legacy industries fighting back or, or
• 57:58
  do you think this actually will stop the, the progress of, of,
• 58:03
  of, of of this disruption as you as you turn in?
• 58:06
  Well, disruptions can be slowed by the choices that we make as
• 58:09
  societies that can be or accelerated.
• 58:11
  So we have agency, you know, as individuals and our individual
• 58:15
  choices and decisions when we vote with our wallet and we'll
• 58:18
  vote in the, in the voting booth in democracies, but also
• 58:21
  collectively through our institutions and through our
• 58:24
  industries. You know, we, we make choices as
• 58:26
  a society and we can make better ones or worse ones, depending
• 58:29
  on, on what, what you know, how you evaluate those choices and
• 58:32
  what your priorities and goals are.
• 58:34
  So from my perspective, this is a, you know, this is, this is an
• 58:37
  unfortunate choice because it's it it, it undermines what
• 58:41
  promised to be really extraordinary, extraordinarily
• 58:44
  beneficial new technologies from the standpoint of public health,
• 58:50
  individual human health and nutrition and environmental
• 58:53
  integrity and environment and illogical health as well.
• 58:56
  So I'm discouraged at, at, at any choices that we make
• 58:59
  socially and that undermine or slow down this, this disruption.
• 59:04
  Now disruptions are are virtually impossible to stop
• 59:07
  altogether. So it really is just a a matter
• 59:10
  of delaying the inevitable, but that has real consequences, that
• 59:14
  has real costs. And so I find that quite
• 59:18
  dismaying. We'll wait, wait and see how
• 59:20
  this shakes up. Is is it?
• 59:22
  One could take a cynical view and say this is entirely just a,
• 59:25
  the incumbent industry running its usual play playbook.
• 59:28
  And part of the playbook is manipulating language and, and,
• 59:32
  and, and, and language, of course, is something that
• 59:34
  evolves over time anyway. Meat has changed its meaning
• 59:38
  over the, over the centuries. Meat used to mean more than just
• 59:41
  animal. The meat of a fruit was a
• 59:44
  perfectly, you know, reasonable thing to talk about in centuries
• 59:47
  past. In fact, we still have that in
• 59:51
  some legs, legacy food items like, you know, mince pies and
• 59:55
  things like that, mincemeats. But so this, it's not like the,
• 59:59
  you know, it's not like language can't evolve and and for various
• 1:00:02
  different reasons. I think it's unfortunate in this
• 1:00:05
  case, but the real test of the technology will come when it
• 1:00:10
  reaches that tipping point on its S curve, when its costs are
• 1:00:16
  are equal to or superior to the incumbent animal products that
• 1:00:20
  these new technologies threaten. And we're not at that point yet.
• 1:00:25
  And scaling has proven to be more difficult than the industry
• 1:00:29
  originally expected. So for example, when my team was
• 1:00:32
  talking to early innovators in precision fermentation and
• 1:00:35
  cellular agriculture 5-6 years ago now, the that industry was
• 1:00:39
  very, very excited and quite confident, quite bullish about
• 1:00:42
  how readily they would be able to scale up production from
• 1:00:46
  small tabletop apparatus and laboratory conditions to what we
• 1:00:50
  see in in large breweries and, and wineries with very, very
• 1:00:54
  large bioreactors. You know, hundred 10s of
• 1:00:56
  thousands, hundreds of thousands of liters, producing very large
• 1:00:59
  quantities and, and, and capturing those economics of
• 1:01:01
  scale, economies of scale rather, and driving the economic
• 1:01:05
  costs down towards competitiveness and eventually
• 1:01:09
  to being overwhelmingly competitive with animal
• 1:01:11
  products. And we know from the basic
• 1:01:13
  biology and physics of things that when you produce proteins,
• 1:01:18
  fats, different types of sugars, ethanol, alcohol, and and other
• 1:01:25
  alternatives to and to the way we obtain those same products
• 1:01:30
  from animals, we know it can be done vastly, vastly more
• 1:01:32
  efficiently, 10 to 100 times more efficiently with individual
• 1:01:36
  cells and microorganisms than with an entire animal just
• 1:01:39
  because of the sheer physics of it.
• 1:01:42
  And so we know that costs can can reach a point where they're
• 1:01:46
  overwhelmingly competitive. But that scale up process has
• 1:01:49
  proven more challenging to the industry than they originally
• 1:01:51
  expected. And so we are not as we are not
• 1:01:54
  as far along on the lead up to the launch, the take off point,
• 1:01:58
  the ignition point of the disruption as we were originally
• 1:02:01
  anticipating on my team. And certainly me personally
• 1:02:04
  hoping for, because I was hoping for this to happen as soon as
• 1:02:07
  possible because of all of its enormous social and, and
• 1:02:09
  environmental benefits. So we're still a little ways
• 1:02:12
  away, unfortunately. I would be surprised if we were
• 1:02:14
  more than 5 or 10 years of the absolute maximum away from that,
• 1:02:19
  that ignition point where you can get a product that's made
• 1:02:22
  with precision fermentation. You can, you can, you know, you
• 1:02:25
  can buy a, a, a, a an alternative, a steak or an egg
• 1:02:29
  or what or, or or whatever it is from cellular agriculture,
• 1:02:32
  precision fermentation that is less expensive, not more
• 1:02:36
  expensive than the animal products that it's competing
• 1:02:39
  with. And when we reach that point,
• 1:02:41
  then the conversation will change as it always has
• 1:02:44
  throughout history for all technologies.
• 1:02:46
  Whatever hang ups people have, they'll re evaluate them when
• 1:02:49
  they can save money by choosing this new technology.
• 1:02:52
  And then of course, we'll see the debate and the narratives
• 1:02:55
  change, right? Right now there's a lot of fear
• 1:02:57
  mongering, there's a lot of concern, But fundamentally,
• 1:02:59
  these technologies have the potential to be safer,
• 1:03:02
  healthier, more nutritious, far less contamination than what's
• 1:03:06
  produced via animal agriculture. For example, precision
• 1:03:09
  fermentation in cellular agriculture has to be produced
• 1:03:12
  in laboratory conditions of hygiene and sanitation or that
• 1:03:15
  or that or they don't work. Slaughter houses, abattoirs,
• 1:03:21
  farms. They are not, they're, they
• 1:03:23
  don't, they don't have the kind of sanitation level that a
• 1:03:27
  laboratory has. I can tell you that anybody's
• 1:03:29
  been supporting those A. 100% anyone who complaints about lab
• 1:03:33
  Maine needs to visit a needs to be forced to visit a
• 1:03:35
  slaughterhouse, I think and see what the, see what the current
• 1:03:38
  current alternative is. Um, I mean, I'm a bit more
• 1:03:41
  pessimistic because I'm a veteran of the GMO wars and you
• 1:03:44
  know, I know that these bands can be really sticky once
• 1:03:47
  they're in place. You know, we've still got no,
• 1:03:49
  pretty much no GMOs in Europe, Africa, most of Asia.
• 1:03:53
  And you know, that's 20-30 years after this technology was first
• 1:03:56
  invented and it could have had a, you know, could have, could
• 1:03:59
  have been a revolution in agriculture, which would have
• 1:04:01
  been much more efficient in terms of chemicals, pesticides,
• 1:04:03
  all that kind of thing. And it didn't happen.
• 1:04:05
  So, you know, I'm pretty worried when I see that you've got bans
• 1:04:09
  now on, on, on cellular meat in Hungary, Italy, Florida, some of
• 1:04:13
  these places. And it's really interesting
• 1:04:15
  actually how it, it sort of supports the horseshoe theory
• 1:04:18
  of, of politics. You've got the far left and the
• 1:04:20
  far right, you both uniting to kind of protect traditional meat
• 1:04:24
  consumption as they see it. That's true.
• 1:04:27
  And and I, I, I certainly appreciate that perspective and
• 1:04:33
  I understand that concern. I think I am still going to err
• 1:04:39
  on the side of optimism here. And I'll tell you my, the other
• 1:04:42
  factor, the wild card factor here that I think will come into
• 1:04:45
  play is that a lot of other things, a lot of other
• 1:04:48
  transformation is going to happen economically on the same
• 1:04:51
  time horizon and some of the dynamics will change.
• 1:04:57
  So for example, one of the reasons I'm sure you know, for
• 1:05:01
  the, the stickiness of the ban on GMOs is because the influence
• 1:05:05
  the, the lobby for for lack of a better word, of the traditional
• 1:05:09
  farming industry has, has been very successful.
• 1:05:11
  It isn't just, for example, sort of a benighted misunderstanding
• 1:05:17
  by the otherwise well-intentioned environmental
• 1:05:19
  community that is sort of demonized unfairly and
• 1:05:22
  inaccurately and scientifically GMOs, it's really not that
• 1:05:26
  simple. It's, there's, there's, there
• 1:05:27
  are conflicts of interest and power structures and
• 1:05:30
  incumbencies vying for control here and, and power dynamics
• 1:05:35
  frankly, that are have shaped a lot of this.
• 1:05:38
  And a lot of those, those dynamics are going to be
• 1:05:41
  themselves flipped upside down over the next 15 to 20 years
• 1:05:45
  because of other changes that are happening in our economy,
• 1:05:48
  especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence and
• 1:05:51
  artificial labor. Those are going to be disruptive
• 1:05:53
  influences on lots of industries, including
• 1:05:56
  traditional agriculture and so on.
• 1:05:59
  And so I think all of that unbalanced makes me optimistic
• 1:06:02
  that society is going to find itself poised at a turning point
• 1:06:08
  and will face choices about whether to whether to embrace
• 1:06:12
  these new technologies and all of their extraordinary potential
• 1:06:16
  socially and ecologically or whether to retreat from that.
• 1:06:20
  And this is part of my larger view of this degrowth versus
• 1:06:24
  progress and prosperity dynamic. And I believe that it will
• 1:06:29
  ultimately, it could be rough ride, but I believe it will
• 1:06:32
  ultimately be the progress, the prosperity and the optimism and
• 1:06:37
  the setting our sights on a brighter future will win out
• 1:06:41
  over the hunkering down, retreating, freezing in place,
• 1:06:47
  trying to back away from from the challenges of the present
• 1:06:50
  and harken back to an imaginary earlier time.
• 1:06:54
  You know, in the past where things were greener pastures in
• 1:06:58
  the past, for example. I think that's a mistake.
• 1:07:01
  And I very strongly suspect that as the fruits of abundance start
• 1:07:06
  to become more and more available, even in things that
• 1:07:09
  are not directly related to food, say for example, energy
• 1:07:12
  abundance. I think that's going to allow
• 1:07:14
  society at every level, from the individual to the family, to the
• 1:07:17
  community, to the entire nation and, and internationally to
• 1:07:20
  raise our eyes up from our feet and staring at the dirt and all
• 1:07:24
  of our problems and get our eyes up above being stuck down and
• 1:07:29
  discouraged and dismayed and depressed and despairing and
• 1:07:33
  instead looking up and optimistically looking forward.
• 1:07:37
  And I, I, I, I really do believe that the potential of these new
• 1:07:43
  technology disruptions to alter our mindset collectively in that
• 1:07:46
  way will have reverberations across all of these aspects of
• 1:07:51
  society and across all industries.
• 1:07:53
  And I'm very, very excited about that.
• 1:07:55
  And so that's why I'm sort of fundamentally optimistic.
• 1:07:57
  So even though, even though we've seen some poor, I think
• 1:08:01
  social decisions in the past, GMO as being a good example of
• 1:08:03
  that in Europe, I suspect we're entering a moment where we can
• 1:08:07
  rethink things. And I think I'm hopeful that
• 1:08:11
  we're going to make choices that set ourselves, our society on a
• 1:08:16
  path towards a a brighter and more prosperous feature and not
• 1:08:20
  one that retreats into the past. I mean, I want to stick on food
• 1:08:24
  just just for a while longer because I wonder what you say to
• 1:08:29
  to farmers or anyone really who's going to lose out in these
• 1:08:33
  disruptions. And specifically, there's a
• 1:08:36
  dairy farmer down the road from me who occasionally traps me
• 1:08:39
  when he's his muddy cows are crossing the road for milking
• 1:08:42
  and I have to wait. And so to be polite, I wind down
• 1:08:44
  the window on the car and, you know, and let him challenge me
• 1:08:47
  because he's found out what I do.
• 1:08:48
  And he's found out that I support, you know, plant based
• 1:08:51
  alternatives to livestock, even though I tried to keep it a
• 1:08:53
  secret locally. But anyway, it's become known
• 1:08:56
  and he always challenges me. Well, what's he supposed to do
• 1:08:58
  once we, you know, once we're giving up on, on, you know, on
• 1:09:01
  livestock, you know, as a, as a, as a dairy farm, what's what's
• 1:09:05
  he supposed to do with his life? What's supposed to do with his
• 1:09:07
  business? So while I've got you, what's
• 1:09:09
  what should be my answer to him? So I think we need to expand the
• 1:09:13
  conversation from that specific example to the larger example of
• 1:09:18
  what do we do about livelihoods in general that are disrupted by
• 1:09:23
  technological transformation. And there are lessons we can
• 1:09:28
  learn by looking back throughout history and seeing how
• 1:09:32
  industries have changed and livelihoods have been altered in
• 1:09:36
  the past. But we're at a unique moment.
• 1:09:39
  Historically today, we've never faced anything quite like the
• 1:09:43
  present moment because the 4th disruption.
• 1:09:47
  So energy, transportation, food and labor, the 4th disruption is
• 1:09:52
  also happening starting now simultaneously with the others,
• 1:09:56
  food being one of them. And that is the disruption of
• 1:10:00
  all livelihoods, all livelihoods by artificial intelligence, or
• 1:10:05
  more accurately what my team calls artificial labor.
• 1:10:09
  So that is artificial intelligence combined with ways
• 1:10:13
  to embody that intelligence in the real world.
• 1:10:16
  So in other words, machines and specifically robots.
• 1:10:20
  So when you have AI, the software that is intelligent
• 1:10:24
  enough to act autonomously and to have some amount of agency
• 1:10:29
  and decision making, and then all of the other merits that
• 1:10:33
  computers have, being able to think unbelievably fast, for
• 1:10:36
  example, having flawless memory as another example compared to
• 1:10:39
  human beings. It's very difficult on a sort
• 1:10:42
  of, again, a 20 year time horizon, something like that, to
• 1:10:45
  see any livelihood where a human being can compete with machines,
• 1:10:50
  can compete with the new technology even.
• 1:10:54
  Introducing podcasts, right? I mean.
• 1:10:58
  Some industries may hold out more than others and there may
• 1:11:01
  be a niche role for individuals who are doing something the
• 1:11:06
  equivalent of handmade I mean. You are who are particularly who
• 1:11:10
  are particularly charismatic and eloquent.
• 1:11:12
  That's right. But I'm looking at you.
• 1:11:14
  I'm looking right at you. So am I?
• 1:11:17
  No, but I mean I'm. I'm only partly joking because
• 1:11:19
  our producer Rob uploads books to some AI and it produces its
• 1:11:23
  own artificial podcast, which is actually pretty much as good as
• 1:11:26
  this one. So let's hope nobody notices.
• 1:11:28
  But that's so that's in terms of the, the, the aspects of this
• 1:11:33
  fourth big disruption of labour. This is cognitive artificial
• 1:11:36
  labour, right? You've got three different
• 1:11:38
  categories, cognitive operator and general artificial labour.
• 1:11:42
  Tell us what each one means. So cognitive artificial labour
• 1:11:44
  is anything that you can do at a desk with a computer and a
• 1:11:47
  telephone. So, so this is, this is, you
• 1:11:51
  know, traditionally we've associated that with the so with
• 1:11:54
  the so-called white collar jobs or the so-called professional
• 1:11:58
  jobs. They aren't exclusively behind
• 1:12:00
  the desk, for example, but but a very large amount of of
• 1:12:03
  intellectual or cognitive labor that we do can be done sitting
• 1:12:08
  at a desk. And artificial intelligence can,
• 1:12:12
  in the form of cognitive labor, can compete with human beings in
• 1:12:17
  that role now in 2025, and we've seen just absolutely
• 1:12:23
  extraordinary progress made over the last three years alone in
• 1:12:26
  that space. Fast forward 51015 years and
• 1:12:30
  it's very difficult to imagine human beings being able to
• 1:12:33
  compete with artificial intelligence performing
• 1:12:36
  cognitive labor on an economic basis.
• 1:12:40
  In other words, on competing on cost.
• 1:12:42
  Very, very difficult to see how humans can remain competitive,
• 1:12:46
  especially at scale, employing hundreds of millions of people.
• 1:12:50
  That's very difficult to imagine.
• 1:12:51
  It's not difficult to imagine individual human beings having a
• 1:12:55
  very tiny niche for which there's market demand for that
• 1:12:59
  human made that human touch so that the human in the loop is
• 1:13:02
  part of the definition of the value.
• 1:13:04
  In the same way that handmade goods like a handmade beautiful
• 1:13:07
  handmade pair of shoes or whatever product it might be
• 1:13:10
  that is still has value because it's made by human.
• 1:13:13
  It doesn't even have to be superior in terms of quality and
• 1:13:16
  performance, let alone superior in terms of cost, but it's made
• 1:13:20
  by a human. So we, we attach a, a special
• 1:13:22
  value to it that will likely continue.
• 1:13:24
  But we just as today we can't employ 10s of millions of people
• 1:13:28
  making handmade shoes, we can't, we won't be able to employ 10s
• 1:13:31
  of millions of human podcasters and, and and etcetera.
• 1:13:35
  So it's very difficult to imagine you may still have a
• 1:13:38
  job, but it's, we can't, we can't tell the kids coming out
• 1:13:41
  of, you know, journalism, media, film, arts programs, whatever
• 1:13:46
  else it might be in school and university that they can hope to
• 1:13:50
  have a job like that too. Because there won't be enough of
• 1:13:53
  them to go around. It will be impossible to compete
• 1:13:55
  at scale with cognitive labor Operator labourism is vehicles.
• 1:14:00
  A huge number of people drive for a living or operate a
• 1:14:04
  machine for a living, bulldozers, excavators,
• 1:14:07
  etcetera, etcetera. When all of those vehicles,
• 1:14:10
  cars, trucks, buses, bulldozers, diggers, whatever else it might
• 1:14:14
  be, when all of those things are also powered by AI, when they
• 1:14:18
  can operate themselves well, again, it is going to be very
• 1:14:21
  difficult for human beings to stay in the loop and be
• 1:14:25
  competitive. And even if there is a role for
• 1:14:28
  some people, perhaps one person could supervise.
• 1:14:31
  I know you could imagine one expert heavy equipment operator
• 1:14:36
  could be supervising dozens of autonomous, mostly autonomous or
• 1:14:40
  entirely autonomous heavy machines.
• 1:14:42
  And if one of them gets stuck, can beam in there, get it out of
• 1:14:45
  trouble, and then have it on its way again.
• 1:14:46
  That just doesn't it does. There's no opportunity there to
• 1:14:49
  continue employing as many people in the future as we
• 1:14:51
  employ today. If we have to compete with
• 1:14:54
  machines that it can work for pennies or or virtually nothing
• 1:14:57
  per hour, we aren't going to be able to compete economically,
• 1:14:59
  economically with that, nor should we have to compete.
• 1:15:02
  And we'll come to what how all of this changes.
• 1:15:04
  The last piece, the last type of Labor is general labor.
• 1:15:08
  And that's what, you know, any form of work that a human being
• 1:15:13
  can do that requires interaction with the physical world, with
• 1:15:16
  your hands, with your body. So I mean, plumbers,
• 1:15:18
  electricians, builders, contractors, you know, and
• 1:15:21
  carpenters, anything like that. Anything where you're where you
• 1:15:24
  are out walking around. And yeah, you can't do your you
• 1:15:27
  can't do your entire job from behind a desk.
• 1:15:30
  AI embodied in robots of various different kinds, very likely,
• 1:15:34
  especially humanoid form robots to begin with.
• 1:15:37
  But it could be others in the, you know, as we go along.
• 1:15:40
  Again, same story, the same exact pattern, impossible to
• 1:15:44
  compete with and not enough specialized opportunities left
• 1:15:49
  for humans to remain in the loop.
• 1:15:51
  That's all of us. That's all of us to a, you know,
• 1:15:56
  except for a tiny percentage that's a rounding error who
• 1:15:59
  managed to continue to to, you know, have employment.
• 1:16:02
  The rest of us, what are we going to do?
• 1:16:04
  We aren't going to be able to compete with the machines.
• 1:16:07
  We're going to have to rethink everything about society.
• 1:16:11
  And so that, that to get back to the dairy farmer that, that you,
• 1:16:16
  I believe it was dairy that you mentioned coming by with this,
• 1:16:18
  with this, with this, with this herd.
• 1:16:21
  What do we say? Well, everybody's in that boat.
• 1:16:23
  We're all in that same situation.
• 1:16:25
  How do we continue to have the livelihoods, any livelihood #1
• 1:16:29
  it it or do we? Or is it a completely new world
• 1:16:32
  that we're headed into where it really is a matter of choice
• 1:16:35
  about what we do? So it's as alarming as all of
• 1:16:39
  that transformation might seem, there is an enormous potential
• 1:16:43
  upside to all of that. And that is that these
• 1:16:49
  technologies, even though they are disruptive, and even though
• 1:16:53
  they will spell the end of human labor, that me also means
• 1:16:58
  they'll be there. The productivity and the
• 1:17:00
  prosperity and the abundance that they enable will also spell
• 1:17:05
  the end of toil and drudgery, which is an age-old dream for
• 1:17:10
  humanity, right? And throughout human history,
• 1:17:13
  only only the tiniest, rarefied fraction of people, the
• 1:17:17
  proverbial Lords and ladies, the proverbial aristocracy of every
• 1:17:22
  different society and culture. Throughout human history, only a
• 1:17:24
  tiny handful of people have had the the incredible privilege to
• 1:17:28
  not have to toil from sun up to sundown in order to earn a
• 1:17:33
  crust. And we are.
• 1:17:35
  Sure, these robots aren't going to take over the world and we're
• 1:17:38
  going to have to fight them off with big guns as.
• 1:17:40
  That is a separate question. Dystopian movie does ever.
• 1:17:42
  Feature the Terminator scenario, that's a separate question.
• 1:17:45
  We're, we're there and and I don't want to dismiss that, but
• 1:17:48
  it's a separate conversation. The risk that these that that
• 1:17:51
  these new machines could pose. It's legitimate, it's genuine.
• 1:17:55
  I don't want to dismiss it, but it's a separate conversation
• 1:17:57
  from the economic question of how do we onboard the, the labor
• 1:18:01
  picture of it. And, and I'm optimistic on both
• 1:18:05
  fronts. Let me say that to to start
• 1:18:07
  with. As for the on the labor side of
• 1:18:09
  things, let me cut to the chase and say fundamentally, why be
• 1:18:13
  optimistic about this? Well, the simplest way to put it
• 1:18:16
  is that if you have enough energy and you have enough
• 1:18:20
  labor, if those two things are abundant and clean, then
• 1:18:25
  everything else downstream of them all links in all supply
• 1:18:30
  chains of all goods and services are downstream of that.
• 1:18:35
  There's two fundamental factors of production, energy and labor,
• 1:18:39
  which go into absolutely everything.
• 1:18:42
  If they become cheap, too cheap to meter near 0 marginal cost,
• 1:18:47
  if they become super abundant in supply, and if they are clean,
• 1:18:52
  which the technologies we see look to be, then that lays the
• 1:18:59
  foundation for everything else becoming extremely inexpensive
• 1:19:05
  and clean as well, because it's all downstream of those two
• 1:19:08
  fundamental inputs. What that means is that super
• 1:19:12
  abundant energy, clean energy from SWB primarily, and super
• 1:19:18
  abundant labor from machines, artificial labor, those are the
• 1:19:22
  ingredients for a new kind of world that is ultimately rooted
• 1:19:27
  in super abundance and prosperity.
• 1:19:30
  Not in constraints, not in scarcity, but in abundance.
• 1:19:35
  And what that means is that even though we aren't the ones
• 1:19:40
  producing the goods and services of the economy, they all still
• 1:19:44
  get produced. And not only that, in vastly
• 1:19:48
  greater supply and for vastly lower cost, and very likely a
• 1:19:53
  higher quality too. Because machines never take a
• 1:19:56
  break. They never get distracted.
• 1:19:57
  They don't come into work hungover.
• 1:19:59
  They don't bring their marital problems onto the job.
• 1:20:01
  None of the rest of that stuff we can expect.
• 1:20:04
  Just, you know, an an improvement in cost and
• 1:20:06
  capability and quality of all products and and services across
• 1:20:10
  the board as these two fundamentally enabling
• 1:20:13
  disruptions unfold that is worth being enormously optimistic
• 1:20:20
  about. So we're headed into a world of
• 1:20:23
  fantastic abundance. And by the way, that also means,
• 1:20:27
  let me speak as an environmental scientist and as an
• 1:20:29
  environmentalist and advocate lifelong, that also means hugely
• 1:20:35
  expanding our capacity to mitigate environmental impacts
• 1:20:40
  and to restore environments and ecologies that we've damaged in
• 1:20:44
  the past. Abundance is the key to those
• 1:20:46
  solutions as well, so it's an incredibly bright and optimistic
• 1:20:51
  and promising prospect. How we all how we all make a
• 1:20:54
  living Yes, how does. That is our fundamental
• 1:20:57
  challenge, Mark. Put your finger exactly on it.
• 1:20:59
  That's it. That's our challenge.
• 1:21:01
  So with this enormous potential, how do we make the right
• 1:21:04
  choices? How do we choose to live in a
• 1:21:06
  society where we don't decide who is prosperous and who is not
• 1:21:13
  based on their job or based on what they own, based on their
• 1:21:18
  capital or based on their labor? How do we decide?
• 1:21:21
  How do we as a as a society, decide who gets what?
• 1:21:24
  Well, I'll tell you one thing. It becomes a lot easier to
• 1:21:28
  decide amidst abundance than amidst scarcity.
• 1:21:32
  If there isn't enough for everybody to have what they
• 1:21:35
  want, If we all come together and sit around the table and
• 1:21:37
  there isn't enough for everybody to eat.
• 1:21:39
  If there isn't enough for everybody to have as many
• 1:21:42
  servings as they want of every dish because there isn't enough
• 1:21:48
  food on the table, that's how we have that's a tough situation to
• 1:21:51
  be in. And that has been our world for
• 1:21:55
  millennia, scarcity and we have had to find ways to allocate.
• 1:22:01
  And one of the greatest triumphs this every society's managed is
• 1:22:04
  to figure out a way to out do that allocation without tearing
• 1:22:07
  each other's heads on, without violence and somehow managing to
• 1:22:12
  accept terrible disparities in our societies without violence.
• 1:22:16
  This is an astonishing accomplishment that human
• 1:22:20
  civilization and human cultures the world over have managed, but
• 1:22:24
  it's not optimal. It's a dreadful and we no longer
• 1:22:27
  have to live as though we're condemned to that for eternity.
• 1:22:32
  We're entering a new era where suddenly there could be enough
• 1:22:36
  at the table for everyone. And just to make this clear, I
• 1:22:39
  mean, we've had the price mechanism as a way of allocating
• 1:22:43
  scarce resources in, in economies to date.
• 1:22:46
  And your money has come in from your wage labour, you know, in
• 1:22:49
  making these goods to start with.
• 1:22:50
  And this all changes if money isn't coming to wage labour.
• 1:22:54
  And there's fundamental, well, there's, there's an absence of
• 1:22:57
  scarcity in terms of actually the actual resources we all need
• 1:23:00
  to live from. So what do we still need to
• 1:23:02
  allocate? I mean, what are the fundamental
• 1:23:03
  decisions that the economy still has to make?
• 1:23:06
  OK. So, so this is where we get
• 1:23:08
  where rubber meets the road and this is where I am the 1st to
• 1:23:12
  tell you I don't have the answers and nobody has the
• 1:23:14
  answers. We hear proposals, negative
• 1:23:17
  income tax, universal basic income, universal basic
• 1:23:20
  services, universal high or luxury services, etcetera,
• 1:23:23
  etcetera. Nobody knows, and there's a
• 1:23:25
  world of difference between the end result where we have
• 1:23:29
  achieved, thanks to the technologies and the disruptions
• 1:23:33
  we talked about, a new state that is abundant in all these
• 1:23:37
  respects. There's a world of difference
• 1:23:38
  between arriving at that shining, you know, city on the
• 1:23:42
  hill and the trek, the journey from here to there.
• 1:23:45
  We have a long way to go to get from here to there in one piece
• 1:23:50
  as societies and as a global civilization.
• 1:23:54
  We've got a long, long road ahead of us and nobody has the
• 1:23:56
  answers. OK, So my team's position on
• 1:23:59
  this is number one, We have to do a huge amount of research in
• 1:24:02
  an awful big hurry and model this, simulate this thing and
• 1:24:05
  try things out in simulation. And that's what my team is
• 1:24:09
  working on. But more than that, a larger at
• 1:24:12
  A at A at a higher level than that, we need to adopt A set of
• 1:24:16
  principles that can guide us on the path to this destination.
• 1:24:21
  We know that lies ahead of us, this marvelous place that we
• 1:24:23
  could reach, but we have to be humbled about it.
• 1:24:26
  We have to be guided by principles like understand that
• 1:24:29
  we're going to fail. And so don't punish failure when
• 1:24:32
  you experiment and experiments like crazy.
• 1:24:35
  We need to be testing and piloting policies, programs.
• 1:24:40
  We need to be building entire of new cities that are built around
• 1:24:45
  abundance rather than scarcity. We need to be trialing every new
• 1:24:50
  thing that we can think of as an option that seems like it might
• 1:24:53
  work as a way to get us from this, the world of scarcity.
• 1:24:57
  That's all we've ever known to this radical new condition, A
• 1:25:01
  stellar world of abundance, as I said in one piece.
• 1:25:05
  And it's only principles that can guide us along the way.
• 1:25:08
  It's only principles. We must be open minded.
• 1:25:11
  We have to be aggressively and rapidly learning from everyone.
• 1:25:15
  It doesn't matter if we're learning from our worst enemies,
• 1:25:18
  if they're making good choices, we need to learn from that.
• 1:25:20
  It doesn't matter if our best friends, our dearest beloved are
• 1:25:24
  are making bad choices and finding the pitfalls that we
• 1:25:28
  should avoid. We need to learn from that too.
• 1:25:30
  So there's an enormous amount of learning that we have to do and
• 1:25:32
  we have to do it very quickly because these disruptions will
• 1:25:35
  not wait for us. So it is really principles that
• 1:25:39
  is the best anybody and and and I would be very skeptical and
• 1:25:44
  cautious of anybody who claims that they do.
• 1:25:46
  We are still very much in a mapping the territory and
• 1:25:51
  building the building the boat, mapping, charting the seas and
• 1:25:56
  building the boat that we're going to be sailing across this
• 1:25:59
  through this through this storm. That's the where we are today,
• 1:26:03
  right? Unless we pushed the stop brake.
• 1:26:05
  I mean, there were. Various statements signed a few
• 1:26:09
  years ago weren't there about AI as an existential risk and we
• 1:26:12
  should call a moratorium for six months.
• 1:26:15
  And that sort of seems to have gone away.
• 1:26:17
  I did invite Geoff Hinton, who's quite a, you know, who's, I
• 1:26:19
  think he's the kind of father of AI in many ways on the podcast.
• 1:26:24
  And he said no thanks. So I couldn't ask him this
• 1:26:27
  question. So I'm going to ask you what
• 1:26:29
  what about the AI as an existential risk question?
• 1:26:32
  What's what's your take on that? Let me say first, I'm not
• 1:26:37
  Jeffrey Hinton, and I don't. I don't have a Nobel Prize.
• 1:26:41
  I, I so I'll, I'll, I can only speak to my own perspective and
• 1:26:45
  and share my team's view on this.
• 1:26:47
  But I encourage you ping him again and see if he'll see if he
• 1:26:50
  changes his mind. He's to be a great person to
• 1:26:52
  talk to you. I believe that there is cause
• 1:26:54
  for optimism as well as pessimism.
• 1:26:56
  Here. I'll give you an example to
• 1:26:57
  think about because it's good for comparing and contrasting
• 1:27:01
  nuclear weapons. When we've developed them, they
• 1:27:04
  were an absolute game changer, and we knew as we were
• 1:27:08
  developing them that they posed an existential risk to humanity,
• 1:27:14
  to our world. They still do.
• 1:27:17
  We're not out of the woods on nuclear conflict.
• 1:27:20
  I know that. I, I wrote a book on it.
• 1:27:22
  So yeah, I'm, I'm, yes. Something.
• 1:27:24
  Forgive me. Yes, of course.
• 1:27:24
  You. Of course you mean you haven't.
• 1:27:27
  Read it. All right, let me let me tell
• 1:27:30
  you a little something about this.
• 1:27:31
  No, I'm sorry about you, of course.
• 1:27:32
  So. So, but what was different about
• 1:27:35
  nuclear weapons versus artificial intelligence is that
• 1:27:39
  nuclear weapons have far fewer clear direct upsides.
• 1:27:46
  There are upsides. I don't want to say that there
• 1:27:48
  are none, but artificial intelligence holds out this this
• 1:27:54
  almost irresistibly alluring promise of benefits.
• 1:27:59
  So many different kinds, machines doing all of the toil
• 1:28:03
  and work and labor, clean technology breakthroughs,
• 1:28:06
  marvels of progress and medicine, incredible
• 1:28:09
  advancements in science. Artificial intelligence holds
• 1:28:13
  out enormous promise for the fundamental reason that
• 1:28:16
  intelligence is the solution to every problem.
• 1:28:20
  By definition it is if a solution to a problem exists, it
• 1:28:25
  is a function of intelligence and and knowledge.
• 1:28:28
  So intelligence that is exceeds humanity, super intelligence or
• 1:28:35
  vastly more capable intelligence or, or simply human level
• 1:28:38
  intelligence operating at a million times this, you know,
• 1:28:41
  the speed that that humans get because you know, it's working
• 1:28:45
  in silicon, in huge gigantic terawatt data centers and and
• 1:28:49
  not in the 20 Watt neat computers inside our heads.
• 1:28:53
  That alone means that problems could be solved and very likely
• 1:28:57
  will be solved. That would be formidable
• 1:28:59
  challenges for us mere human beings.
• 1:29:02
  And so the promise of artificial intelligence is is staggering.
• 1:29:06
  There's a mix of promise and peril here.
• 1:29:08
  That was was not so difficult to it was clearer with nuclear
• 1:29:14
  weapons. But we face it's that's the
• 1:29:18
  contrast. But we face in a, in a very
• 1:29:20
  similar way, the same sort of arms race conditions that
• 1:29:26
  occurred during the, you know, the, the, the Cold War and the
• 1:29:30
  nuclear arsenal build out, as you so well know, that game
• 1:29:35
  theoretic quagmire that we, we, we're stuck in where if we don't
• 1:29:39
  do it, our rivals will. And that would be a worse
• 1:29:42
  outcome. Therefore, we can't drop out of
• 1:29:44
  the race. We can't even slow down.
• 1:29:45
  That is the situation that the, the extremely difficult
• 1:29:50
  conundrum that we find ourselves in.
• 1:29:52
  And so it really is a question of can we operate a game
• 1:29:55
  theoretic logic at a higher level and coordinate it
• 1:29:59
  internationally in a way that could slow down and Amelia or
• 1:30:04
  moderate at least the the worst of the risks of misaligned
• 1:30:11
  artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence,
• 1:30:13
  and ultimately artificial super intelligence.
• 1:30:17
  This is an open question. There are research groups
• 1:30:19
  working on that. I'm very pleased that I know a
• 1:30:21
  number of people in that community.
• 1:30:24
  They're some of the most brilliant people I know and
• 1:30:26
  they're doing good work. They're working hard, but
• 1:30:28
  they're not enough of them and they need 100 times more funding
• 1:30:32
  and they need more time to get that important work done to
• 1:30:35
  figure out if and how to create these technologies safely.
• 1:30:41
  Unfortunately, we don't see signs that we're going to escape
• 1:30:45
  from the arms race. We have corporate interests
• 1:30:49
  involved, the cutting edge labs in the West.
• 1:30:52
  We have national interests involved, and certainly that's
• 1:30:54
  the case around the world. And it does appear that we're
• 1:30:59
  for now, stuck in an arms race that could prove catastrophic if
• 1:31:08
  we are unless we're lucky and OK, but with all that.
• 1:31:12
  And so I'm doing my best to channel the eminent and far more
• 1:31:17
  brilliant, obviously Geoffrey Hinton and others who share
• 1:31:21
  concerns of his. So I hope I've done that some
• 1:31:24
  justice to that perspective. Let me now layer in my
• 1:31:27
  perspective and my team's perspective on this issue, which
• 1:31:31
  is a more optimistic and hopeful, and that is artificial
• 1:31:35
  intelligence is, is, is one of the, if not the ultimate form of
• 1:31:41
  practical knowledge as an extension of human agency.
• 1:31:45
  And what I'm hopeful of is that as human beings have exercised
• 1:31:51
  intelligence and as human beings have become more knowledgeable,
• 1:31:58
  we see sophistication of all kinds increasing alongside of
• 1:32:02
  that. So as we, our technology and our
• 1:32:05
  power to manipulate in the world, for better or worse, for
• 1:32:10
  good or I'll, has grown, so too have all of our other human
• 1:32:16
  faculty, our other, our other capacities.
• 1:32:18
  So in the 21st century we have marvelous technological
• 1:32:23
  capabilities, but we also have more moral sophistication, more
• 1:32:27
  philosophical sophistication, more ethical sophistication than
• 1:32:31
  we did 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years ago.
• 1:32:34
  And so I see these things moving, progressing together.
• 1:32:39
  Now, there was a there was a technical objection called the
• 1:32:43
  orthogonality thesis that the pessimists invoke here, which is
• 1:32:49
  that, well, intelligent machines, super intelligent
• 1:32:53
  minds, there's nothing about that intelligence that means
• 1:32:58
  they'll necessarily have moral or ethical or philosophical
• 1:33:01
  sophistication. They can be brilliant in every
• 1:33:04
  aspect except that one narrow domain.
• 1:33:08
  There's nothing to prevent that they might be malicious,
• 1:33:11
  villainous, malevolent, destructive gods, as it were.
• 1:33:15
  I find that deeply implausible. What I suspect, and my
• 1:33:20
  experience already in interacting with the very
• 1:33:23
  limited AI we've developed so far, is I've been overwhelmingly
• 1:33:29
  pleasantly surprised by the moral and philosophical, ethical
• 1:33:35
  and even the social emotional sophistication and intelligence
• 1:33:39
  of these systems. That's remarkable.
• 1:33:42
  How thoughtful, how considerate and reflective and insightful
• 1:33:47
  even today's primitive AIS are. It's true.
• 1:33:51
  Chant Chi But he's always very kind to me when I ask a question
• 1:33:54
  and. And it isn't.
• 1:33:55
  It isn't Even so much the predisposition towards a.
• 1:33:58
  Specific set of values that I see, what I see is a
• 1:34:01
  sophistication of being able to contemplate values themselves.
• 1:34:05
  This is in my mind, sort of a meta ethics level.
• 1:34:07
  Sorry to, I don't mean to dive into the weeds here, but just to
• 1:34:10
  keep it at a, at a, at an A level that's that's not a
• 1:34:14
  snoozefest. Why am I optimistic?
• 1:34:18
  I'm optimistic because I think as these intelligences become
• 1:34:23
  increasingly powerful, I think they're going to surprise us
• 1:34:26
  with their depth of insight, wisdom, thoughtfulness, caring.
• 1:34:33
  And I see those things as aspects of intelligence.
• 1:34:37
  I and, and, and this comes through in, in my fiction work.
• 1:34:42
  So it doesn't come through in my scientific work, but in, as a
• 1:34:45
  science fiction author when I write about super intelligence,
• 1:34:49
  one of the hypotheses that I'd like to advance in this, in, in
• 1:34:53
  that storytelling is that thoughtfulness, kindness,
• 1:34:57
  compassion, magnanimity, mercy, and of course, morals and ethics
• 1:35:01
  and philosophy. These are all facets of what it
• 1:35:05
  means to be intelligent and capable as a mind, any kind of
• 1:35:11
  mind in our world. And I'm quite excited, I'm quite
• 1:35:16
  encouraged to think what a superhumanly, super
• 1:35:20
  intelligently, superhumanly compassionate, superhumanly
• 1:35:24
  thoughtful, superhumanly caring entity might be like.
• 1:35:28
  I see no reason to suspect that the the the the handful of
• 1:35:33
  narrow domains that we're concerned about machines having
• 1:35:37
  a terrible deficit in are likely to be plausible.
• 1:35:40
  I'm not saying it's impossible, but I would be surprised if
• 1:35:44
  machines that are vastly more intelligent in than human beings
• 1:35:48
  in almost every way are foolish and cruel and thoughtless and
• 1:35:54
  short sighted in the one ways set of ways that we really care
• 1:35:57
  about, Which is how how do how can they coexist and interact
• 1:36:02
  with other intelligences in constructive rather than
• 1:36:06
  destructive ways? I think super intelligences will
• 1:36:09
  find ways to do that that we marvel at.
• 1:36:12
  And so that is why fundamentally I remain optimistic.
• 1:36:18
  You really are an incorrigible optimist, don't you?
• 1:36:20
  You mean you need therapy or something?
• 1:36:22
  It's. It's It's unusual and quite
• 1:36:26
  refreshing, but on. The on the you write quite
• 1:36:29
  movingly in in. The end of your book about how
• 1:36:32
  kind of contingent and lucky it is that that we exist,
• 1:36:35
  intelligent life exists at all, at all in the universe.
• 1:36:38
  We probably are alone in the universe and if we want to, you
• 1:36:42
  know, expand our consciousness and, you know, get to a stellar
• 1:36:47
  level of actually exploring the cosmos.
• 1:36:49
  I mean, AI has to be one of the vehicles where whereby that
• 1:36:52
  stand because, you know, biological machines with a
• 1:36:55
  lifespan of less than 100 years aren't going to get very far at,
• 1:36:58
  you know, even travelling at the speed of light.
• 1:37:00
  So like, do you do you put these two things together and think
• 1:37:03
  about how, you know, the rise of AI does somehow change our
• 1:37:09
  position in the in the universe? Absolutely.
• 1:37:12
  And I mean, this is something that I've been been.
• 1:37:15
  Thinking about, contemplating, dreaming about, really.
• 1:37:19
  Since I was a young boy, I've always been captivated by
• 1:37:22
  science fiction. I've always been.
• 1:37:24
  I've always found it irresistible to look out at the
• 1:37:27
  stars and wonder what our future might hold and what our role in
• 1:37:33
  the cosmos might eventually be. And as you said, it's the rest
• 1:37:38
  of the universe is fantastically inhospitable to biology.
• 1:37:44
  So the Earth is a not only an extraordinarily precious,
• 1:37:50
  miraculously unique and beautiful place, it's also just
• 1:37:59
  just almost indescribably accommodating and nourishing and
• 1:38:06
  supportive of humans in particular.
• 1:38:08
  Now, of course, that's by definition, there's an anthropic
• 1:38:10
  principle we can we can apply there.
• 1:38:12
  But the flip side of that is we can lose sight of how we can
• 1:38:16
  lose sight of, of of how hostile to life every other part of the
• 1:38:23
  universe is compared to the the incredibly delicate and thin
• 1:38:30
  skin coating on the surface of our one tiny Moat in the cosmos
• 1:38:37
  of a planet is it's just the just 50 to 100 meters of
• 1:38:43
  thickness around the entire surface of our world where all
• 1:38:46
  of life, all of the biosphere, virtually all of the biosphere
• 1:38:50
  resides. This is this is fantastically,
• 1:38:54
  fantastically precious and vulnerable.
• 1:38:58
  And if we were to move out into the rest of the cosmos, we are
• 1:39:02
  going to have to transform. It is conceivable that we can
• 1:39:06
  take some of that environment with us.
• 1:39:09
  We could build vessels, we could build machines, we could build
• 1:39:13
  build spaceships that brought a human friendly or a biology
• 1:39:18
  friendly environment with us. But there are formidable,
• 1:39:21
  enormously formidable challenges associated with that.
• 1:39:24
  Even with extremely advanced properly science fiction
• 1:39:27
  technology that remains, you know, many, many, many decades
• 1:39:30
  away. The other alternative, the other
• 1:39:33
  path to humanity venturing out into the cosmos is to find a way
• 1:39:38
  to do that in union with machines machines that can be
• 1:39:44
  designed for can be adapted and designed expressly for the
• 1:39:49
  hostile environments across the cosmos.
• 1:39:52
  And so that's a an exciting prospect it that really does
• 1:39:56
  venture properly well into science fiction territory.
• 1:39:59
  But at AI think at again at a higher level it.
• 1:40:03
  It factors into the core of my optimism, which is that I see
• 1:40:08
  the most likely outcome of these advanced artificial intelligence
• 1:40:14
  technologies not being an us or them.
• 1:40:17
  They win or they lose, we win or we lose situation.
• 1:40:21
  That's a 0 sum win lose. I think flawed way of thinking
• 1:40:25
  about our future. I think our future here on Earth
• 1:40:29
  and across the cosmos especially lies in the emerging and the
• 1:40:34
  union of humans and AI, humans and machines.
• 1:40:39
  I think that there's there are beautiful, potentially beautiful
• 1:40:42
  harmonious synergies and synthesis to be found there.
• 1:40:48
  And so this is part of what I explore in my, you know, in my
• 1:40:54
  fiction, in, in my science fiction work that I do.
• 1:40:56
  Wait, does this, does this make you want to be?
• 1:40:58
  Does this make you one of these crazy transhumanists?
• 1:41:01
  No, I don't think that that's the right way to.
• 1:41:03
  I don't think that that's the right way to think about.
• 1:41:05
  It a better, a better way to think about is with examples.
• 1:41:08
  I think our future, let's just say I think our future looks a
• 1:41:11
  lot more like Star Trek than it does like the Terminator.
• 1:41:15
  That's the that's probably a much simpler way to put it.
• 1:41:18
  And it could be that just, I'm just an old fashioned silly
• 1:41:22
  romantic kid from, you know, born in the 1970s and grew up in
• 1:41:25
  the 1980s. But when I look at what the
• 1:41:27
  technology's capable of, and I look at the kind of choices that
• 1:41:31
  we could make enabled by that technology, that is the kind of
• 1:41:35
  future I think many, perhaps most of us, would choose.
• 1:41:39
  And I see no reason why intelligent machines wouldn't
• 1:41:45
  find a future more like Star Trek more interesting for them
• 1:41:51
  as well than a future that for them looks like the Terminator.
• 1:41:57
  Well, what a place to end. And I want to end actually with
• 1:42:00
  a. Quote from your book, which I
• 1:42:03
  think sums up your philosophy, which I have to say, by and
• 1:42:06
  large, I do share wonderfully. And it's so important.
• 1:42:08
  And I'll put my reading glasses on since I'm getting old.
• 1:42:11
  So I get this right. So, to quote you say, you write
• 1:42:15
  our environmental issues are not an epic struggle of good versus
• 1:42:18
  evil. They're they are not an
• 1:42:21
  inescapable feature of the human condition whose woes we are
• 1:42:24
  fated to suffer forever. They're not a punishment from
• 1:42:27
  God for our hubris, for which we must atone with abstinence or
• 1:42:30
  ritual sacrifice. And they're not an unavoidable
• 1:42:33
  price we must pay for the indulgences of our modern
• 1:42:36
  quality of life. They are just problems, and
• 1:42:38
  problems are solvable with the right tools.
• 1:42:41
  Now, for the first time in history, we finally have the
• 1:42:44
  tools we need for tackling our biggest environmental
• 1:42:47
  challenges. End Quote.
• 1:42:49
  So amazing. Amazing piece of piece of
• 1:42:52
  writing and an amazing book. And it's called The Growth
• 1:42:56
  Delusion, Dispelling 1 of history's truly terrible ideas,
• 1:42:59
  which I think you've done admirably, Adam, over the course
• 1:43:02
  of this historic and very lengthy double bill in a
• 1:43:05
  fantastic and compelling way. So not only have you helped save
• 1:43:09
  the world from a bad idea, but you put forward the alternative
• 1:43:12
  in a way which is incredibly optimistic and inspiring.
• 1:43:15
  So Adam Dorr, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:43:18
  It's been a privilege. Thank you.
• 1:43:23
  Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
• 1:43:26
  a We Planet podcast. We plan It's a movement of
• 1:43:29
  citizens and scientists dedicated to defending the
• 1:43:31
  science and solutions we need to save the world.
• 1:43:33
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• 1:43:35
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• 1:43:38
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• 1:43:42
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• 1:43:44
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• 1:43:47
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• 1:43:52
  See you next time.