Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - First Neuralink Implanted & Where Other Tech Giants Are Headed w/ Salim Ismail | EP #85

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

In this episode, Peter and Salim dive into the craziest news in robotics, generative AI robots, Neuralink, and the Uncanny Valley of robots.  11:59 | $500 Million for Humanoid Robotics 29:07 | Robotic Surgeons of the Future 47:21 | The Future of Brain Interfaces Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Join Salim’s OpenExO Community ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH- ph balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils so whether you're going for a run or just running late do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't find secret at your nearest walmart or shoppers drug mart today we're literally within a site of that type of abundance, where every single person on the planet can be fed and clothed and have energy.

Five years, ten years, or twenty years? I think we're within five years. Now things get really interesting because you get a distributed intelligence that can be applied. Learn once and apply a million times. Every percent increase, I can increase my brain processing power. That's just a game changer. The ability to think things into existence is going to be powerful. People forget that scaling things is an engineering problem, not an invention problem.

Once you figure out the invention of it, then the scaling is actually not that difficult. We tend to make linear our future extrapolations, even though we're faced with this amazing exponential growth. Welcome back to Moonshots. Peter Diamandis here. And this is my favorite segment of the month. It's WTF just happened in technology with my dear brother, Salim Ismail. We're going to be looking at what just happened in the news and what's hot and what we think of it. So let's jump in. Salim, welcome, pal. Good to be here. Good to be back. Yeah, I mean, it's blinding speed. And I don't know, I'm having a blast.

Well, I think it's just so interesting. Every day you have no idea what's going to show up. Your mind is blown every month or two with something that happens. So you almost want to do this more often than monthly just because there's so much going on. So I'll call you every morning. Lily will be really upset at me. But, you know, it really is. I mean, I literally wake up.

The first thing I do is I look at my Google News. I look at my, I got to say, Twitter stream. I did a podcast with Elon and I'm like, it's like, do I call it? What do I call it? I X'd. I'm looking at my X stream, I guess. It's like, it will eventually flip our neuron right we will eventually let go of twitter and but he needs to give us something to hold on to that's right because i think it'll happen when he's doing payment processing yeah for me the thing that's going to be a game changer is when he allows turns every crypto user and gives every x user or twitter user a crypto wallet yeah for sure and that's going to be an inflection point. It'll be instantly the biggest bank in the world.

Yeah. I mean, it will give you a, X will give you a sovereign identity and a wallet and an interface to all crypto and NFTs and everything you own. And it will be the everything. It'll make Amazon look like really small potatoes. So I would never, you know, people say, you know, would you bet on Elon and stuff?

I would never bet against him. Well, this is the key point, right? People complain about it. And I have my big beefs about Twitter and what's going on there. But when he looks, when you talk to him about that and you hear him speak about that and he says, we're swinging for the fences. And we may throw out a bunch of features that don't work but one out of five could be a home run and then off you go yeah right and that's just awesome yeah so i teed up a few fun news items that really like like snap my gaze uh here's the first one i found amazing. Uh, this year, Google was spending more on compute than people.

So Google invest 30 billion on data center expenditures and Microsoft 50 billion. Um, insane, right? So it's another tipping point is the amount of chip compute over brain compute on the planet. And I think we passed that or are about to pass that. The amount of processing power resident in 8 billion brains, which is 100 billion neurons per brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections per brain.

It's just a lot of zeros. But you're saying the chip compute exceeds the brain compute globally. I think it's either we pass that or it's very close. And people... So this is fascinating, right? So if you're a tech company, where do you spend your next $100,000 or your next $100 million? Do you hire smarter people or do you spend it on tech? Well, I think you spend it on tech. And it goes to that comment we had the other week where we said you can now build a billion-dollar company with three people.

Yeah. Right? Sam Altman just said one person with a billion-dollar company, by the way. Yeah. So, you know, it's just shrinking to absurd levels. And the value creation, I think, delivered by technology. For our moonshot listeners, your goal to take a moonshot is it's a billion-dollar company with one person or a hundred billion-person company with three people. I mean, the other flip side of it is are we about to demonetize the economy where money has that much less meaning?

I think this speaks to your abundance concept, right? Like once you have abundance, then money kind of does matter. Yeah. And everybody has a lot of whatever they can tip i think i don't know why we can't flip as quickly as possible into like a burning man type economy which is a gifting economy and if you need stuff where you're scantily clothed at least the weather if the weather provides it this year and then you manage it was the mud mud economy it was like the economy at burning Man this year during the rains was plastic bags to wrap around your sneakers.

Right. So that you could actually make it through the mud. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and those are, you know, very high class problems. But I think as we deliver more and more, you know, imagine a little community in the western sahara right you have water extraction out of the atmosphere you have satellite internet by starlink you have energy production by solar you've got local battery protein production via vertical cultivating micro greens which are which are like you kind of don't need much else. And I think we're literally within a site of that type of abundance where every single person on the planet can be fed and clothed.

Five years, 10 years, or 20 years? I think we're within five years. Interesting. You know, of course, the end point, when I was at MIT as an undergrad and grad student, there was a guy named Eric Drexler there. Sure, of course. So Eric wrote an amazing book. I'm so proud. I was credited in the opening notes of that book because I reviewed his draft.

It's called The Engines of Creation. Yeah. And he talks about the future of nanotech. Yeah. Right? Where we have assemblers. And an assembler, for those who don't know, because you haven't read Engines of Creation or you're not a geek or enough of a geek, but most people listening to this are, an assembler is a little micro, a molecular machine

that can pull a carbon atom from here, nitrogen from here, silicon from here, and build things on an atomic level. And so if I have an assembler in my hand and I command it to generate, copy itself, and I give you one. Now you've got an assembler and I have an assembler. Now I take my assembler and I throw it in the ground and I say, build me an electric Ferrari. Yeah. And it says, okay, I'm going to get the design, the data. It's open source. It's free. Yeah. Right?

The energy to build it is from solar or fusion. It's effectively free. And then it's really the material cost. Yeah. And you may need to throw in a chunk of titanium or lithium or something. But all of a sudden, stuff becomes really cheap. Well, I remember Ralph Merkle talking about this, and he said you should be able to build

anything for about a dollar a pound. Yeah. Ralph was one of our faculty members in the nanotech field at Singularity University in the early days. Brilliant guy. Brilliant. More famous, because I remember from one of the the lectures somebody said, are you Ralph Merkle from Merkle Hash Trees? And Merkle Hash Trees are the basis of Bitcoin.

It's the one-way encryption. And he goes, yeah, that was me, but that was like decades ago. So in the 1980s he conceived of Merkle Hash Trees, which then 30 years later, so I actually did a session with him about two years ago uh-huh an interview yeah i said where are we going with computation yes and he goes oh i'm working on a paper that for thermodynamically reversible computation which means you take the heat out of the computation i said how do you get there he goes well if you do a computation using molecular bonds to form the ones or zeros you essentially can can read or write, and then you don't generate any heat.

I'm like, okay, and what will that give us? He goes, oh, 10 orders of magnitude on top of this. The transistors per square millimeter, at least. 10 extra zeros. Moore's law is another 10 orders of magnitude just from that. And you're like, okay, in terms of a bridge to quantum or whatever, this is so... People get worried that we're

running out of computational capability. And you talk to Ralph, and it just goes so far past what you're thinking. And this is where people kind of really lose their way. They get so stuck on, oh, silicon chips can only deliver so much.

And then you have to go to them and go, listen, we have perovskite coming, which takes a widely abundant, it's like a salt. Love perovskite. And they're just working on how to scaling it. And people forget that scaling things is an engineering problem, not an invention problem. Yeah. Right? And once you figure out the invention of it, then the scaling is actually not that difficult. It's like nothing can go past the steam engine.

Nothing can travel faster than a horse or a train. It's over and over again. I mean, when do we actually figure that out and stop saying never? It's insane. Well, Ray figured it out a while ago. Yeah, Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil. And the rest of us are kind of catching up to it now.

Yeah. So here's another story from the news this week. And this is a company in Silicon Valley called Figure. Full disclosure, my venture fund is an investor in Figure. And there's a whole breed of humanoid robots coming out. I want to talk about three of them. breed of humanoid robots coming out. I want to talk about three of them. And the gentleman who is the CEO of figure has built a number of moonshot companies previous to this, but here's a quick video clip of figure making a cup of coffee. Let's check it out. Can you make me a cup of coffee? that might not look as impressive as it is i was talking to brett adcock who's the ceo he's the

moonshot entrepreneur in here and he was telling telling me about a day where they went from programming this to how to move the joints and so forth to the day they had generative AI watch a human do that thing over and over and over again. And the generative AI model is what the software that drives that thing. Right. So what we're seeing is basically a neural net inside this robot watching and learning by repetition, which is the way kids learn. Yeah. Yeah. So I have an issue. All right.

But before, let me show you one other. So this came out today. And this is Microsoft and open ai are in talks to inject 500 million dollars into humanoid robotics um in particular with figure ai so i don't know what your issue is but microsoft and open ai think it's worth a half a billion dollars of injected capital so tell me your issue now because this is my defense mechanism that's fair enough you know when you talk about there may be lots of classes of applications where robots, humanoid robots are really valuable. Mining applications where it's really dangerous or a toxic environment, for example.

Bring me my dinner. No, I think that's where it falls down. So let me give you the example. The robot or the case study? The anecdote here. So take a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. Okay. Once you use a Roomba for a while, you stop using it.

Why? Because you still have to go and prep the room for the robot. You have to pick up all the laundry off the things and da-da-da-da-da, and it gets stuck on slanted things. There's like 100 little things it can't do. You must have an old Roomba. And by the time you finish kind of configuring the room, you might as well just vacuum the room yourself, right? This is the same difficulty with self-driving cars.

And God knows I'm one of the people that die, I'm dying for the self-driving car. Okay, so listen, you've got a Tesla. And by the way, I've got a Tesla that I've driven four times from Miami to Toronto or New York and back. So I've crossed the country. I may be one of the longest distance driving Tesla drivers, owners anywhere in the world. I've done 10,000 miles back and forth. Now, it's incredibly valuable getting on the highway, hitting the button for autonomous mode, and then eating a shawarma. But you don't have the self-driving beta right now, right? No, this is just a straight autopilot.

I know. And so the self-driving mode, right, will take me from door to door without me touching anything. A few moments of, you know, being a little bit nervous, but it works amazing. Yeah. And Phoenix now has self-driving taxis, Waymo, et cetera, and it's coming. But look how long it's taken. has self-driving taxis, Waymo, et cetera, and it's coming. But look how long it's taken.

We first posited that in 2012, 2013, that within five, six years, you'd have a large percentage, a meaningful percentage. Yeah, we were off by that. And here's why. Elon was slow. No, no, it's the fact that driving, which is moving around in a physical environment, is just inherently very hard. You drive, you weave a little bit to avoid a pothole.

I live in New Jersey. There's a pothole center. My apologies. And you weave around a pothole. A self-driving car doesn't see any of that stuff. And so there's lots of little things. It'll get there eventually. But it's like the Roomba.

It's just going to take a long time before it gets to the point where it can handle those things there was a change this year pal there was a fundamental changes here so i still so i call it the that's my version of the uncanny valley for robotics is like dealing with these stupid niggly so what's the uncanny valley the uncanny valley is um adapt a physical physical adaptation to local physical phenomena is just a really difficult task. Can I go back and tell a story about Dan Barry here? Yeah. So Dan Barry was an astronaut faculty member. Yeah, he'd flown five times to the space station.

Yeah, so he was building robots at home. Yeah. And he was building robots. He was trying to build intelligent robots. And he was, like, talking about intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. And his wife who's a neuroscientist says you're an idiot come outside and let me show you something so they go outside and she's like show me everything with the brain and everything that doesn't have her brain

out in the out in the garden in the woods looking around and he's like well i don't know like the squirrel has a brain and she said it's really simple anything that moves around in the world has a brain anything that doesn't move around inda. And she said, it's really simple. Anything that moves around in the world has a brain. Anything that doesn't move around in the world, like a tree, doesn't really, it may have a nervous system, but it doesn't have a brain in the classical sense. It seems we've evolved brains purely to adapt to moving around in physical space. There's an amazing animal called a sea squirt,

which in its larval stage moves around the ground and moves around catching things etc and has a brain then it when it graduates to being an adult it plants itself on a rock and it filter feeds from then on like a lawyer like and and the first thing it does when it plants itself it eats its own brain like a lawyer it eats its own brain and now it never needs a brain anymore so it turns out to to have a brain, the reason we have brains is to move around in the physical domain. I think that, in fact, it's a great distinction. There's a lot of individuals who feel like we don't have full-on AI until we embody AIs into physical robots.

Yeah. Now, there's lots of ways of doing it. Yeah. Now, there's lots of ways of doing it. Like if I had a robot that I was kind of transporting into or bridging into, right, and I could move with my horns, like the Avatar XPRIZE thing that you had. And there's models like that. There's other models where, now I did get very excited when we were talking, when we first saw the Baxter robot. I remember Baxter. Right. Now I got super excited for a specific thing because I have a computer science software development background. If you used to program an industrial robot to say, pick up a widget, turn 90 degrees, move over here, turn back, put it down type of thing. You had to program every step in that path. And it took a long time.

Hundreds of instructions just to do this little thing. Okay. And with Baxter, you could move its arms and show what to do, stock picking, whatever. And it would then go, oh, I get it. And it would just do its own thing. And I thought that was a massive step change, which is roughly what you're referencing here. Well, it's actually a step further here. So, for example, Tesla, earlier in 23, announced that they had replaced 300,000 lines of computer code in C++

with 3,000 lines of a large language model. And so basically they used all of the self-driving data to train a model to look for the potholes, look for this, look for that, and do it. And it's doing amazingly well. And full credit, yes, Elon was six years off from what he promised, but it's getting there. It's happening. So I'm excited.

I would like to see the, for me, it feels like the use cases are not clear for why you need it. Dude, I totally disagree. Hold on, let me give you one last anecdote. So I remember Boston Dynamics had this robot horse, right? I remember that. It was called Big Dog. Yeah. And it was amazing watching this thing.

And the iterations of it was fantastic. It was a pack animal. It was a pack animal. Yeah. And it cost like $300,000, $400,000 for this thing. Okay. And somebody asked Brad Templeton, what do you think of that? And he was like, great, but if I wanted a horse, I'd get a male horse and a female horse and I'd breed a horse at almost zero cost, right? Give it a bit of hay and you've got a horse. Why

do you need to build a robot horse? Right. So I think we, we, and this is like, it's for me, this feels like when we move from radio to TV, the first thing that people did was read radio scripts on television. Because they didn't have the imagination to have TV series and sitcoms and drama series and do acting. So for me, it feels like we've moved into, okay, we have human-owned robots. Let's do what human beings are doing. I think we could use human-owned robots to do stuff that we aren't able to do or don't want to do or shouldn't be doing. Listen, Dan Barry used to say, do things that are dull, dangerous, or dirty with robots.

I got it. And I think we're going to see a new generation of robots. And like, figure is amazing. Optimus, especially Gen 2, I think is extraordinary. Let me just show you this video of Gen 2. This came out in December of 23. Let me just show you this video of Gen 2. This came out in December of 23. Let's roll the video.

So not bad, humanoid robots. It can be your workout coach here. If it can do my workout for me, that's when I'm happy. Well, listen, I wanted to just cook me my omelet every morning here. Yeah. I mean, the precision here is pretty extraordinary. Yeah. By the way, that, I just want, just on the other side of the argument, that little thing of picking up an egg and knowing how much pressure to put on the egg to move it. It's a huge, huge break, right?

The other one that I remember, I think, hearing about the big challenge is proprioception. Yeah. Right? Like if you close your eyes, it's very easy to go touch your nose. You instinctively, your brain knows where you are in the three-dimensional space and you can do it blindfolded. A robot has a very difficult time with that. However, generative AI built into the robots and leveraging it, I think, is a game changer. I still don't understand.

Let me share. Let me tell you. So first of all, again, Elon's numbers, Elon's timeline, which is – Ignore the timeline. He calls me the most optimistic person in the world. I would say he's the most optimistic on timelines and costs. But his number here is $20,000 per Optimus robot, right? Let's call it $50,000.

So what does it cost you to lease a $50,000 car? Very little, a few hundred, a couple hundred a month. Call it $500 a month, right? So imagine you've got this in your closet for $500 a month, right? What is that, Doug? $20 a day to clean up the house while you're gone, mow the lawn, prepare lunch and dinner for you. I don't want to go to the notion of free labor, but it's effectively free labor. So anything, and why humanoid robots? Why not a, you know, first of all, anything that

becomes really good, like something, a robot that cleans dishes, we call a dishwasher, right? So we, or a dryer or a washing machine. But a humanoid robot, we live in a human world, that doorknob over there, the accelerator in your car, the, you know, the steps we go through the sides of the doors. And so being able to navigate our physical world by humanoid robot. So I want one, maybe two, okay. You know, clean up after me, cook my meals, do the stuff I want. Um, I don't know. I think, I think there are a million uses. I don't know. I think there are a million uses. So I'll tell you what my inflection point threshold is for me.

Okay. When you have a robot that you can say, oh, go tidy up the kitchen. Yes. And it can go and put the dishes, rinse them off, put them in the dishwasher, put the salt and pepper away, put away the various appliances you've taken out, et cetera, and do that reasonably completely because that's a repetitive task. Once you learn a bit how to do it, it's not that hard. That, I think, is a game changer. I'll give you another application. But I think we're going to be there because you can have that robot walk into the kitchen

and say, this is a state of clean. Look around, memorize where every single thing goes yeah right open every drawer look in it i mean photographic memory yeah it's there right and then and then return this kitchen to a state of clean yeah so let me flip around to your side of the argument for a second so i'll give you a couple of areas where i think it'll be monstrously useful in a house okay where did i put that damn little pair of pliers? I don't think you need a robot for that. And the robot will know.

No, but that's an AI. It's Jarvis and cameras that happen to notice where your things are. Okay, go get it for me. Okay, go get it for me. Sure. I'll give you another one. Go walk the dogs. I think that would be awesome.

A dog walking robot is going to be coming very quickly. And I think that can be done very soon. I pay my dog walker much more than 20 bucks an hour. There you go. So I think there's some areas, but I still think there's, we're looking at, there's some cost effective areas. I think the vast majority of really powerful applications will be construction. Go build a house and a swarm of these robots. By the way, I disagree with the fact that it should be humanoid.

There's all sorts of inefficiencies with being humanoid. And so why are we building that into the dang robot? I think it's going to be a multitude. It's going to be Star Wars. Yeah. Like I'd rather see an octopus spidery thing because then it can navigate lots of environments. And some will fly. It'll have eight arms. It can do lots of things. And some will fly. It'll have eight arms.

It can do lots of things. It can do it super fast. I prefer it not to be humanoid. Well, I'm sorry. We're going to have humanoid robots, and I want data. Okay, so let's talk about humanoid robots one second. We've got Terminator. Don't want those.

Yeah. Data. C3PO. Yeah. What's your favorite robot? Probably Data. Yeah. Any others your favorite robot? Probably Data. Yeah. Any others?

Positronic brain. Sure. If I only had a brain. C-3PO for me is too fanciful or too much personality in it. Do you have one? Well, I mean, Data for sure but growing up it was you were lost in space yeah yeah so robot that was his name very imaginative robot you know right uh i loved robot yeah from lost in space actually i remember just build those with like

uh uh core you know things from the uh dryers and boxes and so forth. It was fun. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins

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we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to Fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. I think there's something magical about a humanoid robot. And, you know, I want to show you another humanoid robot here. Actually, here's Tesla again,

doing something useful. Okay. Like, you know, folding my shirt. Yes. Okay. Now, this is pretty amazing. The ability to actually understand where the edges are. I remember Scott Hasson, who had Willow Garage. Yeah. And he built a robot. To fold laundry. To fold laundry. Yeah.

And it was just extraordinarily difficult. It did it. Yeah, it was really slow. It was really slow and really painful and detecting the edges and where to pick it up and a whole model of how a cloth folds. I mean, it's crazy. So I'll flip to where I think this robot is really powerful. They now have a stitching robot. Sure.

Okay. Sure. Okay. We have a trillion dollars of the global economy of people sewing T-shirts together and clothes together and jeans together, et cetera. And it's really horrible work. And it's low paid. It's very difficult. Child labor in a lot of cases in dodgy countries.

I agree. And you have this sewing robot that just does it all. And I think things like that are where the game changes. Agricultural applications. How about surgery? Surgery, huge. Yeah. So I've said this before, and I say this to all my friends who are in medical school or physicians. It's like, listen, the best diagnosticians will be AIs.

Yeah. And the best surgeons will be AIs. Yeah. So let me ask you this. Do you know the question, if you need to get a surgeon for any procedure, and hopefully you don't, but if you do someday, there is one question you ask when interviewing a surgeon. Do you know what it is? How many of these have you done in the past? How many of them did you do this morning? Okay. Right. So in other words, the surgeon who has the most experience with a particular procedure is trained his or her neural net

to see every arterial venous malformation, every situation, is prepared for everything. And he wants someone who's done 80 of them a week. I want you to imagine a future in which these robots are our future surgeons and every time a robot does one it's uploading its experience to the cloud yeah and every surgeon every surgical robot has had every experience in millions of them yeah so now this is where this is where things get interesting for me right this is the same thing with the tesla car once it knows to navigate a pothole and tells every other tesla car to do, now things get really interesting because you get a distributed intelligence that can be applied. Learn once and apply a million times. And I think if you have somebody who's done 100 heart replacements a month, a surgeon, and you have a robot, a camera just watching over that with the generative AI built in, the robot will be able to do the same thing very quickly.

And that's super exciting. So you mentioned the uncanny valley before, which is a term that's typically applied to how human-like we make a robot's face look. Yeah. So what that means is when you see an animation of a human face, because we're so attuned to human faces, our brains... We have a whole bunch of neurons. We have a million brains to detect, etc. It turns out seeing a cartoon face is easy,

but making it visibly real to the point where you think it's real is near impossible. The Uncanny Valley is a robot that we think is human, and that we think is human. And that, I think, is like a Turing test for visual robotics. And can you detect that or not? So this is a robot, Amica, who's been on my stage at the Abundance Summit. Amica is coming back this year in 2024.

Engineered arts out of London, manufacturersondon uh manufacturers i keep on wanting to say her well i mean it's a she in a sense is it i mean uh why it's gray it has no hair i mean anyway um i you know i'm gonna say her her. We can barely classify humans right now. It's probably safer to go. My pronouns are it. All right. So check this out. So this is a video of Amica seeing herself in the mirror for the first time.

Okay. Okay. the first time okay has she been told that that's her in the mirror i have no idea what the setup is okay but it's amazing i think i think she has like 23 servo motors in her face alone. Yeah. I want her to wink at the end there. That's freaky. It is freaky. And so here we have a humanoid robot that, for me, would be meeting me at the entryway someplace, would be my guest service manager, would work the front desk at a hotel. I think that's pretty extraordinary. my guest service manager would work the front desk at a hotel. Right.

Um, you know, I think that's pretty extraordinary. And by the way, when you, uh, when you see Amica, uh, at, at the abundance summit this year, um, at a three 60, it is, uh, she's powered by GPT four. Yep. Right. So when you have a conversation with her, you're having a conversation with a large language model. Okay. I don't know.

I want some. I'm looking forward to having some humanoid robots in my life. I think this is, again, one of those fun to play with. But I think there will be enormous power in various activities that can get done. For example, if you had a robot like this as a reception check-in, a hotel check-in, right? They will process white-collar drudgery. Like, okay, I want a king's room. I registered for a book for this, but do you have one of these free?

And I arrived early, and do you have a room available, et cetera. They'll be able to handle that stuff very fast. Whereas today is like super slow and takes a long time. And they'll be able to do a lot more effective. They'll process many more guests at a time per hour type of thing. I think that's where things will become really interesting around this. But I still don't see the need for it to be humanoid. Well, sex bots.

I mean, you can imagine there's going to be a market for that. Yeah. Right? And in that case, do you want to look at the show? I mean, there already is. The one that blows my mind is this phenomenon in Japan where men walk around with blow-up sex, not blow-up women figurine dolls, just for companionship. And that's just Japan. No wonder the reproductive rate is so very surreal but it's

just a thing over there just a thing yeah um so this blew me away this was an article that came out on the prediction of how many bipedal humanoid robots will have and so so the prediction I heard from the team at Figure is single digit millions by 2030 and billions in the 2040s. Elon came out with his prediction of a billion by 2040. Okay. And potentially 10 billion by the end of the 2040s. So imagine a world with more humanoid robots than humans. This is like the equivalent of we have more chip neural power than human neural power. And we have more cell phones than we have humans on the planet right now. Right.

So I think I go back to the use cases, right? I think the number is not that relevant, but I think the use cases is fascinating. So if you can have a rice picking robot that goes and tends the rice fields, or in this case, picks things or picks lettuce or strawberry or whatever, and takes away that drudgery from human beings, I think that is a game changer in some profound ways. But I think we're kind of almost all the way there now. We have many, many areas where Apple picking is now done largely by robots, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that we're – and it doesn't have to be human or a robot.

No. And we have in Amazon service stations and so – I think the automation of labor is, I think the one thing that we found most surprising is when we were looking at automation and robotics and AI, we thought manual labor would be automated first and white-collar labor automated later. And this is another one of those areas where it's really, really hard to be a futurist because chat GPT comes out and all of a sudden white-collar thinking is totally automated. And it's way harder to do the manual labor because of the physical dexterity stuff. So I'm excited by the robot revolution. I think it's farther away than most people think. Certainly farther away than you want.

Okay. you want. Okay. These robots will be in production in 2025 and they'll be sold and they will be put into limited use cases. Yeah. And I think we're going to start to see them as they learn. The thing I remember, and this is where, you know, I was having a conversation with Ray the other day, Ray Kurzweil, and we both hit on the same thing, that we tend to make linear our future extrapolations, even though we're faced with this amazing exponential growth.

Yeah. Right? So listen, if we've got what I'll again term AGI, artificial general intelligence, by 2029, driving these robots, these robots are doing anything and everything. Yep. In which case, if they can do anything and everything, even if they're $100,000 a robot or a quarter million dollars a robot, we're going to have a lot of them. Yeah. They're not limited by physical manifestation. They're limited by the intelligence to have them do things that are useful. Yeah. True. I think you will have a

corresponding concern around regulatory and safety. What could possibly go wrong? Well, if I can tell my human or robot, go steal something from that house and figure out a way of getting into the house and go get stuff from the house. How do you navigate that? We're back to the general concerns of AI, right? It comes back to ethics and morals and dystopian uses. But it's so interesting. We're here in Santa Monica recording this. And did you see the Coco robots on the streets here at all? The delivery robots?

Yeah. So it's fascinating, right? So these little six-wheeled robots with a little antenna and little headlights. And I think they're manually driven or they're manually assisted. They're like some AI plus in somewhere in the world deciding whether to cross the street or not but the first time you see them it's like wow that's amazing yeah look at that delivery robot you take photos up and so forth and then like a week later it's like boring yeah it's this is that back to that conversation or how quickly we normalize yeah these things

right and i think once you once you get i think the way to do this is to pick some uh value-added use case that people allows people to get used to them and then it'll spread then they'll take over and you use for lots of other things all right well i think i'm gonna keep i'm gonna surprise you with this prediction that we're gonna have a billion robots and you should listen to this. You know, I didn't listen to you in 2011 when you were like Bitcoin, Peter Bitcoin,

2011, like you should have forced me, dude, dude, I didn't buy it either. Yeah. So I watched Bitcoin go from 5 cents to 50 cents to $5 to $50. Finally at $500,

I bought a bunch. Yeah. Okay. And like, that was hard when you first started, $0.05 to go, I'm spending $500 on this thing that costs $0.05. That emotional resistance is a very difficult thing to overcome. Then you have to just go, if I was coming

at it blank, what would I do? If we've got billions of these robots walking around we're going to need battery power so two articles come out um that were amazing uh you know there's been a whole debate and discussion about do we have enough lithium yeah to power you know the cars and will we have enough for for robots so this was interesting so this is the first mass-produced ev with sodium ion batteries right gets 250 kilometers so new battery chemistries one of the things people forget is that scarcity drives innovation and reinvention yeah and this is a really this is you know i remember this conversation for me the penny dropped when we first came across CRISPR, which is a biotech capability of programming your genome.

Editing your genome. And people try to patent it. And then people thought, oh my God, if it's patented, there'll be da, da, da, da. And very quickly, researchers found like five other mechanisms to achieve the same thing. Yes. Right? found like five other mechanisms to achieve the same thing. Yes.

Right? And when I first heard it, I've watched the people complaining about lithium ion forever and complaining about China hoarding all the rare earths, et cetera. I've never been worried about it. Yeah. I've always figured we'll either engineer around it. We don't have enough. Yeah. We'll engineer around that.

Yeah. Or we'll find other compounds that do the same thing. Or we'll kind of create different models for how to do this, and something will happen. And this is, for me, the validation of that type of thing, where we are going to completely blow the lid off energy storage in the next decade. And I think that, for me, is an absolute game changer. Well, here's an amazing story.

Right. This is a tweet from Beth Jesus. Beth goes, her real name is Gil Verdon, and he'll be on stage. He runs Effective Accelerationism. And he's just brilliant. He used to be working with Sergey Brin at Google in quantum. And he is, you know, in the boomer to doomer scale. He's like, you know, the extreme on boomers.

Like, we have to go as fast as possible. Yeah. And this is this tweet. He says, we're so fucking back. Right? So this is a tweet from the U.S. Department of Energy that confirmed a discovery of 3,400 kiloton reserve of lithium in California's Salton Sea, making one of the largest exploitable lithium deposits in the world.

So for the last 10 years, it's like, oh, my God, we're running out of lithium, there's not enough lithium. And this is the abundance thesis. It is. That there is nothing truly scarce within the right context. It goes into the same thing around technology and energy scarcity. We were worried about, oh my God, limiting oil reserves. And then technology came across, figured out fracking.

And that expanded radically the scope of it. And the whole ability with technology, something like 40% of oil discoveries today are AI-driven. Wow. 40% of oil discovery. That's kind of massive. And that's a game-changer in this. I think there's hundreds of these examples we're going to come across, and it's not even. So I'll give you one of my other favorites.

There's a project called the Materials Project. Materials Genome? Materials Project. Materials Genome? Materials Project. Okay. Saul Griffith talked about this at one of our sessions. And what they've done is put together a giant database of about a million compounds and cataloged in great detail the chemical, electrical, and physical properties of these compounds. And these are multiple minerals?

Lithium ion and different molecules, different, different material compounds. Right. Now this goes to the linear to exponential thing. If you're a battery researcher and you're trying to figure out, okay, what's an alternative to lithium ion? Well, okay. Maybe sodium ion. So you run some experiments and you find, okay, that does or doesn't work. Maybe it's lithium air.

Maybe it's lithium this. And you test sequentially compound after compound very linear approach very linear and you may fail at each time and you don't know when you're going to succeed it's the way edison edison did it with his light bulbs now you can go to his database and go okay give me a compound that meets this voltage and this thermal resistance and this retention and boom it'll say these are the five that meet your needs yeah i call that i call that the materials genome and the concept i had uh on my stage at abundance the head of applied materials amazing company right yeah so first of all i think material science is like the most underappreciated field in technology it's like all the progress we have is a result of new breakthroughs in materials

yeah huge huge like another era if you want to be you know material science is is amazing course two at mit but never went there um uh that wasn't course two damn it what was it anyway long story short uh the materials genome was being able once you know like in a sudoku board once you know the properties of different you can start to extrapolate what materials that have never been once you know the properties of different you can start to extrapolate what materials that have never been made might have the properties of amazing and that is extraordinary yeah and now you can then design those so i think what's going to happen now is you let a generative ai loose on the materials database which is open source and free by the way the materials project

and let's start thinking about that and say, what alternative do I have for this or this or this? That's a game changer for materials research. That changes the game, again, another level of... Hey, everyone. I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day.

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and use the code peter25 to get your 25% off the first month of Seed's Daily Symbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's go back to the episode. Here's another story that breaks this past week. It's Neuralink. And in particular, you know, the ability to connect your neocortex, the outer layer of your brain to the cloud.

Yeah. Right. And I'm going to show a couple of tweets from Elon and talk about those in a moment. But, you know, Ray Kurzweil has been talking about this forever. Yes. And Ray's prediction, if I remember correctly, is high bandwidth brain-computer interface by 2033. Okay. All right.

So that's like nine years out. And I believe it. Yep. I believe it. Most people don't realize we're constantly bombarded by so much information, right? Our optic nerve, our touch and hearing. Yeah. I think the number that I looked up earlier was 11 megabits per second of data coming into the brain.

And the problem is our brain processes that at 60 bits per second, right? So it has to use all these filters to reduce the noise. And this is why we're so geared to see certain things, facial. Yes. We don't see much else. Dangerous. Change in the face. Yeah, exactly. So our amygdala, for example, filters.

I mean, we're so inundated that we have to make very quick decisions. And so anything dangerous goes to the amygdala and puts you on red alert. Yeah. So as kind of cautious as I am about making predictions about robots, I'm unbelievably excited about this. Because every percent increase, I can increase my brain processing power. That's just a game changer in terms of the interfacing with various things. The ability to think things into existence is going to be powerful.

So we were talking about this earlier. I could go, I really want a chair that has this type of a shape, da-da-da-da-da. And you let an AI design six versions of it, and you go, I want that one, and then a separate 3D printer goes off and goes off and builds the thing for you, and you're done. That's just amazing. I think this is going to be a huge force multiplier for humanity. Yeah, for sure. for humanity. Yeah, for sure. The ability to have brain computer interface, BCI, also brings us a lot of other things. It brings us telepathy, right? My ability to communicate with you, right? Omniscience, able to know through the trillion sensors out there what's going on in

the world. I mean, it is godlike powers if you connect your brain to the cloud. Well, I think, so I have a spiritual tilt to my thinking. Of course, Buddha. When you connect all the brains together via BCI, right, now you have a hive mind and you have a hive consciousness. And that, I think, is really… That was my final chapter of Futures Faster Than You think. I call it a meta intelligence. Can I tell a story here one second? So I think this is, uh, just a step in human evolution. And the reason I believe

it's a step in human evolution is I look back at time. So if you look back, uh, you know, three and a half billion years ago, when life first came into existence on the planet, it was these very simple cells called prokaryotic cells. They were bags of cytoplasm and they were not energy efficient. They were not, the DNA was free floating inside. And over the course of a half a billion years, they went from these prokaryotes to what are called eukaryotes. And the eukaryotic cells brought in mitochondria for processing energy. They put a nuclear membrane and chromosomes for processing the information. And they brought in endoplasmic reticulum and liposomes.

They brought in all of this tech inside the cell. And so they became tech-enabled cells. And then the next step was that they went from single cell to multicellular. And then from multicellular to tissues and organs. And then you and me, we have 30 trillion human cells. You might have 35 trillion human cells. I'm not calling you fat. I'm just saying you're bigger than I am.

So the process has been that incorporating technology, going multicellular, and then connecting to another higher level. And so I see that happening right now, right? So we are the equivalent of those simple prokaryotic cells. We're connecting this technology into ourselves. And as soon as that gets connected, I connect with you and with a million other people. And we become conscious at another level. And I call that a meta-intelligence. And it is making me one with the universe. Now, here's where it gets interesting.

I wonder if we become conscious on a global level. I wonder if we become conscious on a global level, and then we look out in the universe, and we see all these other meta-intelligences. What sensors would we detect that with? I don't know. Okay. I don't understand. Okay.

When you think about the paradox, what's the paradox? Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox. Where is everybody? Where is everybody? I actually believe the most in the – so just for people listening, if you run the numbers, the Drake equation, et cetera, there should be a million other intelligences out in the universe that have advanced things. So why don't we see them?

That's the question. Where are they? That's the Fermi paradox. that have advanced things, so why don't we see them? That's the question. So that's the Fermi paradox. And I believe the most in, there's a number of answers to it. One is everybody else died ahead, we're the most advanced,

or we can't detect them. Or they didn't pass the great filter, they had nuclear weapons, they blew themselves up. My favorite hypothesis is the transcension hypothesis. I agree. Which is you've gotten evolved enough that you have virtual reality to do everything. You don't need to go out. You go inwards.

Yes. And therefore, you don't need to broadcast outwards. And we may find there's a billion of those types of things. And we do broadcast outwards, but not intentionally and in a focused fashion. believe that as we are going from evolution by natural selection, Darwinism, to evolution by human direction, we are evolving into something brand new. I mean, natural selection has been dead for quite a while. True. Because we've been farming species and guiding evolution for quite a while, right? There's inflection points around all of that

that I think are interesting. For me, when you think about the evolution of the world, when, you know, we talked last month about the multi-dimension, other parallel universes. Yeah, and quantum computing. For me, what will get interesting is when I can bridge between universes. That's when I'll be interested.

All right. I think there are drugs that can do that for you. There are drugs that can do this. But the ability to sense the world in one time and the ability to process that, that collective consciousness is going to be essentially the Buddha. That is the oneness. Yeah. You know the joke, right?

The monk goes up to the street vendor in New York and says, make me one with everything, to the hot dog vendor. All right. So Elon tweets out, the first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.

At Abundance this year, I've got the surgeon who does all of Neuralink's implants. Wow. So, you know, it was interesting. I have done two podcasts with Elon. One was a couple years ago. One was early in 24. And we talked about when he was playing Pong against a macaque monkey that was drinking a banana smoothie and playing Pong with its brain. Yeah.

And that's crazy because where we're going to go is we're that game of playing Pong. Because I mean, Pong was like the earliest games that you and I played, right? And how far they come now. So that same trajectory, right? So you'll be plugged into some advanced neural link and playing a virtual world. I mean, we're in a virtual world right now. We'll be playing in a virtual world within our virtual world. Yeah. I have a question for you that you may have an answer to because you're closer to this. Why do you have to have an invasive procedure to implant a BCI? Do you not wear a

helmet that reads your neurons and then writes to your neurons? So it's resolution. It's your resolution. So your brain is wrapped in a material called a dura, and your dura then has on top of it a skull and then your scalp. And if you're trying to read individual neurons, because we're going to go into BCI at the Abundance Summit, is a company that puts, not into your brain, but under the dura, but on top of the brain, it puts these ultrasound, focused ultrasound and steerable ultrasound. That's right. That can go and actually stimulate individual neurons. Yeah. The idea is. By the way, there was a story on 60 Minutes last weekend. They use focused ultrasound to treat people that are addicted.

And they were able with one treatment of focused ultrasound. Yeah, it's huge. To treat, can completely cure addiction. So here's where. So that kind of stuff, I get super excited. Here's where this company wants to go. Imagine an app. Yeah.

If you have this implant in, fairly easy to put in, but an app that says, I want to go to sleep. Yeah. Or I want to wake up. Yeah. Or I want to feel good. Yeah. Or I want to have energy. I want a better tennis forehand.

That's going to come to you, but I think the earlier apps are going to be states of emotion. The stuff that Neuralink is doing, and there are other companies, BlackRock. There's another company run by a friend, Matt Angle, called Paradromics. And they're in sheep right now, and they could well be in humans very shortly. And they actually have much more, they're more advanced in a number of ways compared to Neuralink. All of these companies, Paradromix and Neuralink, a surgeon puts in these small filaments that are going into the neocortex, and they are able to read and write off of individual neurons, right?

But it's not really individual neurons. It's groups of neurons. Yeah, it's individual. Because even a thin wire is much, much bigger. So they put them over the motor cortex and over the sensory cortex, and then you can control things, listen to things, and such. I mean, when we get to nanowires, that's totally going to be a game changer because they'll be atoms thick and you can put it anywhere.

Well, there is another amazing tech. This comes from Mary Lou Jepsen. Do you know Mary Lou? Yeah, Open Water. Open Water. So Mary Lou, who is brilliant, God Almighty, she was at Facebook and at Google and at MIT and one laptop per child. She's one of our Abundance members.

I love her. She has built a technology that allows you to use red laser light, which penetrates skin and skull, and able to use red laser light and ultrasound to actually target an individual neuron and stimulate that neuron to fire or be able to sense if there's a ruffle on the neuron surface of whether it's firing. So you can read and write onto individual neurons.

And that's amazing. Do you remember that movie Brainstorm? Yeah. It's literally like that's amazing. Do you remember that movie, Brainstorm? Yeah. It's literally like that. Yeah, so you put on a cap and can record memories and listen to memories. So here's the point. It's the point you just made. The single most valuable thing that any country or any company has

is the intelligence of its employees or its citizens. Yeah. And so if you've got technologies like Neuralink or Paradromics or Open Water or BlackRock, able to increase the intelligence of your individuals, I can think in Google, right? That's amazing. You know, where that goes becomes,

there's a spectrum of intelligence going to collective intelligence and then you get to collective consciousness yes now you get into a definition problem but that's where I think things become really interesting aware at scale of what's happening in the world for me one of the

applications of this that I'm super excited about is implanting this into animals and then being able to talk to the animals. Yeah, or at least feel and also feel what the animals say. Now, we have talked about at XPRIZE this year at Visionaire, we talked about an AI that can translate between humans. There was a project in 2017 out of Sweden. I don't know where it's at right now.

But they predicted by about now, they were using machine learning to understand dolphin language. And they figured within five years, they would be able to do it. My response was, I'm really not sure you want to hear what dolphins have to say. You're pretty pissed at us.

But in general, that ability to then, because now you can, when you can communicate with other species, that, then things get interesting. So forget the human or robots. When I can communicate with other people. Give me that. There's that too. This is another tweet Elon put out. He says, the first Neuralink product is called Telepathy. I mean, he does do, they have great marketing.

Yeah. Right. Telepathy is what a great name. It says enables control of your phone or computer and through them almost any device. Just by thinking initial users will be those that have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster

than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is his goal. And you know, I knew Stephen Hawking well. Yeah. I flew him into zero G back in 2007. And I remember just the painstaking rate of communication. Yeah. As he was tapping.

Well, he's using his eyes on a screen to be able to select a single letter at a time. Yeah. And today, using AI, you can get to 60 words per minute, which is pretty amazing. And this will be even further. So listen, I'm super pumped about this. Let me ask you a question. Let's say it's available.

Are you in as soon as possible? For something like this? Oh, yeah. I prefer it not be invasive. But let's say it is. Let's say it requires surgery. It's going to be, by the way, Neuralink's, I've seen the tech, it is a fully robotic surgeon. Yeah.

That anesthetizes you, cuts it open, drills a small hole, places it in, places the, you know, the thousand filaments on your, on your neocortex, seals it up with glue. Yeah. I'd be in. You'd be in. Yeah. I think that's way more interesting than getting a chip planted in between your knuckles. Oh, look, I do. That tells the reader right of the thing.

But that's true functionality that augments human capacity. And then the application, you know, software, right? And whatever you can program it to do, you can do. Software upgrade. It's like wake up smarter every morning. You know, bring it full circle as we wrap here to robots. The thing that is going to happen and is going to be incredibly cool is when I have my Neuralink in and I can occupy my Optimus. Well, not just the Optimus, but five of them around the house, right?

You clean up the kitchen. And by the way, I can see through one optical nerve what you're doing. So do it this way. And over here, oh, by the way, put the jam in this drawer, not over there, in the kitchen of the fridge, and do that in parallel. Yeah. Right? And now you can do things at scale, and each human being gets augmented like a thousand times.

Have you ever read Ramez Nam's books, Nexus? Oh, yeah. Huge. Yeah. So I'm just rereading them again. By the way, listening to this, if you've not read Ramez Naam, N-A-A-M, he's- Trilogy called Nexus. Yes.

It's Nexus, Apex, and Crux. Amazing. It's about a product, a sort of neural lace called Nexus that allows you to have telepathy. It allows you to connect to the cloud. And he explores everything here. Yeah. Beautifully written. It's incredible. I'm jealous for people who are reading it for the first time. It's that good. It's really good. And it's already been being made into a movie, et cetera, et cetera. It's crazy.

Yeah. All right, buddy. Well, listen, I expect a chip in you as soon as possible and robots that are following you around doing your bidding. Let's do the second part first, and then we'll put the chip in later. Okay. All right. Good to see you, buddy. You too. Take care.