Transcription
If an AI can make the AI better, yeah, wherein lies the role of the human?
The old social contract was you work hard in high school, you go to good college, and you get a degree, and you get a job. That's going away, and it's scaring a lot of people. The world is moving faster than ever before. Entire industries are being reshaped overnight, and leaders are having to make decisions in conditions no one would have ever predicted. So what this series does is it gives you an inside look into how these decisions are made or can be made. Real life stories and lessons from leaders who know how to navigate this volatility, who know how to build trust and who move forward when the future feels uncertain.
Hello, this is Susant Tan, CEO of DBS and with me today I am super super excited to introduce the famous and incredible futurist Peter Dondis. I've been fanirling you Peter and you had no idea. I listen to all of Peter's podcasts every week as I go for my weekly runs. This podcast that he runs, Moonshots AI and all the incredible stuff that you've done has been so instructive. Seven years ago, I attended Singularity University at the NASA campus and took away so much. And Peter, just so excited to be here with you.
Pleasure. You've talked about how you see the whole global economy changing. So, let's take it from the top. Tell me where you see the world changing. You're seeing incredible change upon us. Take us there and then let's unpack them one by one.
So, first off, I think there's no greater wealth than our health. And we're about to see a revolution in how long we can live and how healthy can live. I remember when I was in medical school, I learned that certain species on this planet, the boowhead whale, could live for 200 years and the Greenland shark can live for 500 years. And I remember I was asking if they can live that long, why can't we? And my conclusion was it was either a hardware problem or a software problem and we're going to be able to fix that. And I think with really one of the greatest forces ever, AI is going to enable us to understand why we age, how to slow it, stop it, and reverse it. So culturally, we're going to see a world in which people can start to understand that their life expectancy will exceed 100 years old. A lot of the people I work with believe we can double the human lifespan, 180 to 200 years. Well, I think right now people are saying comfortably we should exceed 120 and get to 150 years. Are you saving enough money to live that long, right? And then how many careers will you have? If you've got the aesthetics, the mobility, the cognition, if you if you look good, you're moving well, you're thinking clearly, are you going to want to retire at 60 or 70 when you're at the top of your game? So, that's one big implication that's coming.
The thing that's differentiated us from all species on this planet is our intelligence. We're not the fastest. We're not the strongest, but we are, I like to believe, the most intelligent species on earth. And so what happens when intelligence is available as a service? For example, BU and Google basically made access to information equal for the poorest child and the wealthiest child, the heads of nations and everybody. What happens when intelligence is equally available to everybody? One of the things that we're seeing in my AI venture fund, Link Ventures, that's based out of MIT and Harvard, is that the average age of entrepreneurs starting billion dollar companies is dropped from mid30s to early 20s.
Wow. So, you got Jen Z's now being founders of unicorns. It entrepreneurs don't know what they can't do. There's no legacy systems to hold them back. There's nothing, right? and and now they have the greatest tools ever and it can be two or three guys or gals together who can experiment and take big risks that large companies don't take. So we're going to see a lot of wealth creation in different populations.
So just to take a step back so you're thinking longevity as a theme macro theme has got tremendous opportunities. It's your new sort of you know trillion dollar investment opportunity. And of course AI, yeah, the big game changer, knowledge and intelligence being democratized, but also in in view of your theory of abundance. Surely as the singularity happens, will that mean that knowledge becomes increasingly free? What does that mean for jobs? What does that mean for white collar work? What does it mean for knowledge jobs and human intelligence? If an AI can make the AI better, Yeah. wherein lies the role of the human.
Yeah. That is the big conversation. I wrote a book years ago called abundance the future is better than you think. Arguing that everything we hold of value, food, water, energy, healthcare, education, all these things are are becoming available to everybody on the planet at dimminimous costs. Right? My are demonetized, dematerialized, democratized and such. And that's proven out. That thesis has proven out across the board. But as we start to have AI doing the work, the white collar and robots doing the blue collar work, what do we do?
Yeah. And I think one of the things is how do we use that power now to make grand dreams come true? Uh I think we're going to move towards a future where most everybody's an entrepreneur. You see all these sort of large corporates changing their operating model and I think they're they're going to be forced to. Here's a situation. The old social contract was you work hard in high school, you go to good college, you work hard there, then you get a degree and you get a job.
Yeah. That's going away and it's scaring a lot of people.
So, what do you do now? Now, I think what's important, you know, I've got two 14-year-old boys and I think about their future. Will they go to college? You have to find your purpose in life. And how do you use these technologies to build your moonshot to go and create something of value? What are problems that you want to solve? You know, I grew up on Star Trek. I think Dr. Doctor Yes. We have a a challenge of are we going to create a Star Trek future or a Mad Max future?
Yeah. So, is it utopian or dystopian? And one of the challenges is that uh there's a lot of fear about the future. And I think that fear in part comes everything they've held as uh stability in their lives is changing rapidly. The second thing is that Hollywood unfortunately shows us all these negative visions of the future. The Matrix and Terminator, all of these things. And so if if that's the future you've seen, you get scared about that.
Yeah. And so we need to show people uh a vision which is hopeful and compelling for them.
I hope you're right. And the democratization of knowledge and intelligence leads to opportunities being available for for everybody.
Yeah. The truth is there is a lot of wealth concentration happening. The mag seven to your point is now what half half of the US GDP US GDP in terms of their revenues and if the concentration of capital and technology goes to just the same big players how do you spread that out?
Yeah. So there's a new economy that's coming. So what do we spend our money on today? We spend our money on health, on education, on housing, on entertainment, and we have to realize that health care is going to be available for free, right? So, you're no longer spending money. Your AI is your diagnostician. I had a podcast with Elon Musk, the Optimus robot, for him. There are lots of great robot companies or hundreds of robot companies right now growing. The best surgeons in the world will be robots far more precise, far more capable, right? that can see an infrared and ultraviolet, you know, no hands are shaking, didn't get too little sleep.
And so if the cost of the best surgery in the world is electricity and capex, then you've demonetized access to surgery, great surgery, and we start to cure cancer. Dario Amade said, "We're going to double the human lifespan because of AI." Um, Demisabis, the head of Deep Mind at Google, has said, "We're going to eliminate all disease." So all of a sudden this category of health care spend goes to near zero. The best educators in the world will be AIS and it knows your child's passions, purpose, their favorite movie stars, favorite colors.
How scary is that? Well, but all change is fundamentally scary because humans like waking up in the morning and knowing the world is the same as it was last night. And although that would be boring, it would be. But regardless, people want that. And stability.
They want stability, but they also want trust and security, Peter. And my question is, would this lead to a trust deficit or a security deficit? You don't know if you can trust the AI. You don't know if your data is safe. They're pluses and minus. I'm with you. I would love to see the utopian outcomes come true. But on the other hand, I also think that you know as the AI becomes recursive and AI gets the AI better and you can't control it at some point if it gets into you know not so good hands what are we going to do
here's the problem there's no onoff switch there's no kill switch there's no velocity knob we are moving rapidly right in the US the hyperscalers the the foundation labs United States Google Anthropic XAI all of those are in an interesting situation. They're competing against each other and then the US abuse it as a binary state of China versus the US. So these levels of competition are moving things as fast as possible.
Yeah. And yes, that that is concerning. That is concerning.
Yeah. No question about it. At the same time, AI is delivering us miracles on a constant basis. So I think a lot of the hyperscalers are saying we're going to deliver the best education, the best health care. You can't slow us down. If you slow these things down, are you going to slow down the curing of cancer, the doubling the human lifespan? What I do know is that the world is going to look very different 10 years from now than it does today. And we're in this period of time, and I think people don't realize this when I talk about this on the Moonshots podcast with my Moonshot mates, that we're entering a period where we're going to be able to solve almost all problems. Math is being solved. Physics is being solved that
that's scary for all the PhDs in this world.
It is. I mean, a lot of the mathematicians are seeing the challenges that they've always pursued now being solved by AI, right? We're going to soon see all the Nobel Prize winning work being done by humans and AI together. And I think it's going to eventually be the AI doing the work and the humans taking the credit. Perhaps Ray revolution. It it is Ray Kerszswe who is the you know he wrote the singularity is near he's a dear friend he's been my mentor for years we started Singularity University together and you know he talks about the singularity that moment in time when it's impossible to predict what's coming next and we're in the middle of the singularity now
we're living it
we're we're living it. Yes. It's right now.
Yeah. And it's not something that that governments understand. My biggest concern is governments don't truly understand how fast the world is changing.
Yeah. And humans just can't keep up. Right. So I guess what's your advice, Peter? I mean, we have customers, both corporate customers and individual consumer customers, wealth management customers, they'll need to know, you know, how do they prepare their companies for this eventuality? How they prepare their portfolios, their children for this eventuality? to your point about you know white collar jobs changing if you're a CEO you're a business leader you've got to reconfigure your operating model you're going to try and get more efficient you're going to have to change your op chart is it no longer going to be bell curve distribution and then if you are saving for the future you got to rethink if you're going to double your lifespan do you allocate more capital longer term and then if your children aren't going to get jobs and they're going to do a lot more gig work more entre entrepreneurial work which does suck out some capital perhaps. How do they plan for their futures?
Yeah, the answer is no one really knows. Companies are going to get a lot more efficient as they begin to deploy AI and robots, you're going to see returns on capital massively increasing. you know, some of the predictions on GDP growth, which GDP is not a good measure of what's going on, but there's going to be a massive increase in income for multitude of companies and we're going to see a lot of disruption. A lot of companies are going to go away.
Yeah. And companies that are not incorporating these technologies, I'm going to have a challenge. I think we're going to start to see a lot of entrepreneurs building small companies with outsized capabilities. Uh on the top of that, you know, we're going to start to see what we've talked about is, you know, single person billion dollar companies, right?
Single person unicorn, right? Sort of. Yeah. Because you can now because you're deploying agents that are using some version of cryptocurrency for trading. So again, new economies are coming in. If I had more time, I'd write an economics book.
That whole theory about, you know, labor plus capital equals production no longer stands true. I mean, and if you lower interest rates to stimulate employment, but if I'm the CEO and I get access to lowcost capital, I'm going to hire more AI agents and more robots. Am I going to hire more people? Probably not.
But Peter, that means this velocity of money in the real economy will go down. you know less money will circulate in the real economy and more capital will circulate in the financial economy which maybe will lead to asset inflation and that in a way helps the youth of today and and and the leaders of tomorrow supplement their incomes. The other side of the equation is massive deflation as the cost of things plummet. Again, if all of a sudden health is free, education is free, I I think agility is the most important thing right now.
Absolutely. I keep telling my managers, you know, because knowledge is ubiquitous and intelligence is democratized. Higher for attitude. Attitude means humility and agility, right? And being nimble.
Agreed. Agreed. So, uh, we're seeing a world in which, uh, the things we used to pay money for are going to start to decrease. What is scarce in the future? That's going to be an interesting conversation. I think one of the things we're going to start to see people wanting to spend more time with other humans.
Yeah. Like in-person events, the human spirit is going to become more important.
I agree. My friends were saying, "Hey, you know, nowadays in concert, you see robots dancing in the back, but you know, I don't want to see robots dancing in the background of a concert. And I want to see humans dancing, right? So people want more real life experiences. They want more authenticity, don't they?
They do. So we still have a hope in the entertainment world that it will be human- based.
And then we're heading towards a world, you know, Faith A. Lee out of Stanford and Google have been working on these complete virtual worlds. So what happens when all of a sudden I enter into a virtual world where every pixel is AI generated and it's photorealistic and I can enter a world of amazing entertainment that I control everything that's there. We're going to start to spend our time in different ways. And again it's the velocity of change that is unpredictable. Another thing that Elon said is we're in a almost a postc capitalist society.
Really? What does he mean by a post capital?
Well, if all of a sudden money start and not a good conversation to have with the CEO of a bank, I'll take it. But if at end of the day the cost of everything is massively demonetizing, if I want a house, I'm going to have robots build that house for me. If I want to transport someplace, I'll be in an autonomous electric car. if I want education or healthcare or entertainment, all these things start going towards a a near zero cost. This is a a world that I don't think anyone's prepared for.
Yeah. Uh now, at the end of the day, wealth's being concentrated. Yes. True. But the average individual is now living better than presidents 50 years ago. We have access to more. You know, the things you did between breakfast and lunch are godlike compared to our ancestors. You know, being able to know anything you want, to be able to communicate with someone for free in video on the other side of the planet. This is an extraordinary future and it's the speed is the challenge.
The speed is the challenge. So I want to end along the moonshot themes.
Yeah. On something you're very familiar with. You you were one of the first to start this. Let's talk about space.
You were one of the early investors in space. For someone who hasn't looked at space, what what are your thoughts there and what what excites you about investing in space?
So everything we hold of value on earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate is in infinite quantities in space.
Minerals too.
Yes. If you think about asteroids for example are trillion dollar objects in space. There's categories of nickel iron asteroids that are rich in platinum, palladium, osmium, aridium, platinum group metals. In even another category of asteroids called carbonatous condrites are rich in water. Every every ounce, every millimeter, centimeter and gram of water on Earth came from asteroids in space, comets in space. We are about to move irreversibly off the planet. Millions of years from now, people look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that the human race moved off planet into the cosmos. The last time we did that, we moved out of the oceans onto land as a species.
Wow. As my friends say, we're about to speedrun Star Trek. We're back in the United States this year. We're sending the first humans in cis lunar going back around the moon. We're landing on the lunar surface. You know, this is a little bit of a USChina race to go to the moon. We're heading to Mars and the robot technology is enabling us to do this and I think it's it's an amazing time.
It's amazing time. You're a pilot. So, you see yourself piloting?
Yes. I I want to go on your I want to go start a city on the moon.
You want to start a city on the moon?
Yeah, I'd love that. I'd love that. And then to go mine the asteroids. I I think one of the things that's important for people to realize is uh we're entering a time where you can make your grandest dreams come true.
Yes. We used to be limited by what technology we have, what capital we have. Now technology is becoming accessible to everybody. Your ability to get access to compute and and use that compute to solve problems or to build to have robots build what you need. I think on the on the flip side, we're about to see a a massive global growth. You know, Elon was saying tripledigit GDP growth.
Triple digit. Wow. So, you're talking like 100 200%.
So, yeah. So, you know, imagine the US GDP just as a metric of comparison going from 30 trillion to to 60 trillion.
Oh, that would be extraordinary.
It will be it will be extraordinary. All I can say is don't blink.
Don't blink. I'll try not and be and be agile.
Fasten your seat belt. Fasten your seat belt for sure.
We're on for a great ride.
Yeah. Okay. Well, on that note, you know, a theory of abundance, exciting, slightly scary. It's all in fear. Future ahead of us. Your theory of abundance and your AI loop, the longevity loop, the energy loop. Yes.
And now, of course, we're only restricted by our own human imagination.
I think so. It's finding your purpose.
Finding your purpose and making your grandest dreams come. And how do you use what's now becoming accessible to everyone to go bigger? Uh to dream bigger than ever before.
I love that. Let's all dream bigger than ever before. Thank you, Peter. We've learned so much. Thank you for being with us.