Original subtitles

Even if we can change human beings,

in what direction do we change them?

Do we want to change them this way or that way?

This is an example of the way in which

technological advance impinges on sociological necessity.

♪

What we need to ask ourselves is,

"Where does my individual ability to control my life

or to influence the political process

lie in relation to these new forms of technology?"

♪

Government and politicians

don't understand what's happening.

See, they don't even realized this change is happening.

♪

It is very difficult, not impossible,

to predict what the precise effects will be,

and in--in many cases, like with other technologies,

we have to socket and see.

Who would have predicted the internet?

And I talk about this matter as humanity 2.0

'cause in a sense, this is kind of where we're heading,

to some kind of new--new normal, as it were,

of what it is to be a human being.

It's not a problem

that we should dismiss or underestimate.

It's staggering in its proportions.

Ignorance and disbelief at the same time.

People don't believe that change is happening this fast.

That's the problem.

♪

This is a stone

formed naturally in the Earth's crust

over millions of years through pressure and heat.

It was discovered in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Dated around 2.5 million years BC,

it is arguably one of the first examples of technology.

Stone tools were first adapted for the use of cutting,

scraping, or pounding materials by Homo habilis,

one of our earliest ancestors.

Over one million years later,

mankind made one of the most significant

of all technological discoveries...

Fire.

The ability to control fire

was a turning point for human evolution.

It kept us warm, allowed us to see in the dark,

and allowed us to cook food,

which many scientists believe was a huge contributor

to the ascent of mind.

♪

Each age, each empire, has brought with it

the discovery and invention of numerous technologies

each in their own way redesigning human life...

♪

...leading us to now...

...modern-day society.

We're now more advanced, connected, knowledgeable,

and resistant to disease than ever before,

and it is all due to our ability

to apply scientific knowledge for practical purposes

in a bid to maximize efficiency.

Just as the stone set us on a path of transformation,

the technologies of the future

may bring with them a paradigm shift,

changing two major features of the human experience.

Two things that have defined our lives

for as long as we can remember.

Two things that have always been involuntary constants:

trading our time for sustenance

and losing that time through senescence.

♪

♪

(indistinct chattering)

♪

(telephone ringing)

♪

(Zapping)

♪

(laughing)

♪

The Industrial Revolution effectively freed man

from being a beast of burden.

The computer revolution will similarly free him

from dull, repetitive routine.

The computer revolution is, however,

perhaps better compared with the Copernican

or the Darwinian Revolution,

both of which greatly changed man's idea of himself

and the world in which he lives.

In the space of 60 years, we have landed on the moon,

seen the rise of computing power,

mobile phones,

the explosion of the internet,

and we have sequenced the human genome.

We took man to the moon and back

with four kilobytes of memory.

The phone in your pocket is at least 250,000 times

more powerful than that.

We are ever-increasingly doing more with less.

One of the things that has been born

out of this technological revolution

is the ability to replace human workers

with more efficient machines.

This is largely due to the speed

at which we are advancing our technological capabilities.

(applause)

Information technology grows in an exponential manner.

It's not linear.

And our intuition is linear.

When we walked through the savanna

a thousand years ago, we made linear predictions

where that animal would be and that worked fine.

It's hardwired in our brains,

but the pace of exponential growth

is really what describes information technologies,

and it's not just computation.

There's a big difference between linear

and exponential growth.

If I take 30 steps linearly,

one, two, three, four, five, I get to 30.

If I take 30 steps exponentially,

two, four, eight, sixteen, I get to a billion.

It makes a huge difference.

And that really describes information technology.

When I was a student at MIT,

we all shared one computer, it took up a whole building.

The computer in your cell phone today

is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller,

a thousand times more powerful.

That's a billionfold increase in capability per dollar

that we've actually experienced

since I was a student,

and we're gonna do it again in the next 25 years.

Currently, on an almost daily basis,

new algorithms, programs,

and feats in mechanical engineering

are getting closer and closer to being a reliable

and more cost-effective alternative to a human worker.

This process is known as automation.

This is not just about,

you know, automation where we expect it,

which is in factories

and among blue-collar workers and so forth.

It is coming quite aggressively

for people at much higher skill levels,

and that will only grow in the future

as we continue on this exponential arc.

This business that, you know, not having to work very hard

because machines are taking care of things for you,

I mean, you see this also in the 19th century

with the Industrial Revolution.

And, in fact, I think one of the problems

with the Industrial Revolution,

and this is where Marxism got so much traction,

was that machines actually did render

a lot of people unemployed, okay?

That already happened in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And it was only by labor organizing itself

that it was able to kind of deal

with the situation intelligently

because there was no automatic, you might say,

transition to something else.

It was just, you know, "We don't need you anymore.

We have these more efficient machines,

and so now we don't--you know,

now you just have to find work somewhere else."

Automation clearly has been happening for a long time,

and it has, you know, automated

a lot of very laborious work that we don't want to do,

and that's gonna continue to be the case in the future,

but I do think that this time is genuinely different.

If we look at what's happened historically,

what we've seen is that automation

has primarily been a mechanical phenomenon,

and the classic example of that

is, of course, agriculture.

I'm a farmer.

Here's what mechanical engineering has done

for all of us who work on the farms

and for you, too.

It used to be, in the United States

and in most advanced countries,

that most people worked on farms.

Now, almost no one works on a farm.

It's less than two percent.

And, of course, as a result of that, we're better off.

We have, you know, more comfortable jobs,

food is cheaper,

we have a much more advanced society.

The question is, "Can that continue indefinitely?"

And what we're seeing this time

is that things are really quite different.

If this keeps up,

it won't be long before machines will do everything.

Nobody will have work.

So as we move deeper into the automated future,

we will see different stages take form.

The first stage that we're entering

is the stage where automated robots are working

side by side with people in factories.

Some of those jobs are slowly going away,

but in the near future, within two to three years,

you're going to see a huge percentage

of those factory jobs be replaced

with automated systems and automated robots.

The next stage following that is we could see

up to a third of jobs in America

be replaced by 2025

by robots or automated systems.

That's a huge percentage of people

that could be unemployed

because of this automated tsunami

that's coming, basically.

We have a colleague here called Carl Frey

who has put together a list of jobs

by their vulnerability

to getting replaced by automation,

and the least vulnerable are things like choreographers,

managers, social workers.

People who have people skills

and who have creativity.

♪

One area that I look a lot at is fast food.

I mean, the fast food industry is tremendously important

in American economy.

If you look at the years since recovery

from the Great Recession,

the majority of jobs, somewhere around 60 percent,

have been low-wage service sector jobs.

A lot of those have been in areas like fast food,

and yet, to me, it seems almost inevitable

that, ultimately, fast food is gonna automate.

There's a company right here in San Francisco

called "Momentum Machines" which is actually working on

a machine to automate hamburger production,

and it can crank out

about 400 gourmet hamburgers per hour,

and they ultimately expect to sort of roll that out

not just in fast food establishments,

perhaps in convenience stores

and maybe even vending machines.

It could be all over the place.

♪

I can see manufacturing now becoming completely automated.

I can see, you know, hundreds of millions

of workers being put out of jobs,

That's almost certain it's gonna happen.

So you have lots of companies right now that are automating

their factories and their warehouses.

Amazon is a great example.

They're using robots to automate their systems.

The robots actually grab the products

and bring the products to the people

who put those products into the box.

So there are still people

within the factories at Amazon,

but in the near future, those jobs may go away as well.

There is a company here in Silicon Valley

called "Industrial Perception,"

and they built a robot that can approach

a stack of boxes that are son of stacked haphazardly

in some nonstandard way

and visually, by looking at that stack of boxes,

figure out how to move those boxes.

And they built a machine that ultimately

will be able to move perhaps one box every second,

and that compares with about three seconds

for a human worker who's very industrious.

Okay, and this machine, you can imagine,

will work continuously.

It's never gonna get injured,

never file a workers' compensation claim,

and, yet, it's moving into an area

that, up until now, at least, we would have said

is really something that is exclusively the provid--

province of the human worker.

I mean, it's this ability to look at something

and then based on what you see,

manipulate your environment.

It's son of the confluence

of visual perception and dexterity.

♪

We'll see self-driving cars on the road

within 10 or 15 years.

Fifteen years from now, we'll be debating

whether we should even allow human beings to be on--

be on the road at all.

Tesla says that by next year,

that, you know, their cars will be 90 percent automated.

Which means that the jobs of taxi drivers,

truck drivers, goes away.

Suddenly, we don't need to own cars anymore.

Humanity isn't ready for such a basic change such as that.

♪

Call center jobs, voice recognition

is pretty sophisticated these days.

And you can imagine replacing many kinds of,

you know, helplines and things.

There's a company called "lPsoft" that has created

an intelligent software system,

an automated system, called "Amelia."

She can not only understand what you're saying to her,

she understands the context of what you're saying,

and she can learn from her mistakes.

This is a huge deal because what we're going to see

is all of the customer service agent jobs,

if she is successful, if this software program,

this automated software program is successful,

we could see all of those jobs go away.

These things tend to go to marginal cost,

and marginal cost is copying software, which is nothing,

and running it on a computer

which will probably be very cheap.

♪

Human doctors will be, in some respect, pushed aside

because machines can do a better job

of diagnosis than they can.

Now will they have the empathy that current doctors do?

I don't know, but at least they'll have the knowledge

that our doctors do, they'll be more advanced,

so I can see this option in healthcare.

The one that is likely to be the biggest growth area,

from an economic standpoint, is the android companions

to help elderly people, okay, because there's--

you know, given the rise in elderly people

over the next 20, 30 years, that it's--

and it's unlikely there are gonna be enough people

going into the nursing profession

to actually serve them, especially if we're thinking

in terms of home-based care.

The robot surgeon, I think, is something that will happen

in the not-too-distant future

because a lot of that is to do with manual dexterity

and having the expertise to recognize--

to understand what you're manipulating as a surgeon.

Terrific amount of expertise for a human to accumulate,

but I can imagine that we would be able to build

something that is a specialized robot surgeon

that can carry out particular operations

such as a prostate operation.

That's one that people are working on right now,

and I think they're nearly there

of being able to produce

a reliable robot surgeon that can do that.

You might not want to submit yourself to this thing,

you might think, but in fact, I think we'll be able to make

a very reliable robot surgeon to do that sort of thing.

♪

I can see this option in finance

because they're moving to digital currencies.

And--and we're now moving to crowdfunding

and crowdbanking and all these other advances.

One of my favorites is investment bankers.

Artificial intelligence already does more

stock market trades today than any human being.

Lots of decisions like decisions about mortgages

and insurance, already those things have been,

you know, largely taken over by programs,

and I think that kind of trend is only gonna continue.

♪

Every time there's a technological change,

it will, unfortunately, put a lot of people out of work.

It happened with the cotton gin.

It's happened with every single technological change.

So, sure, technology destroys jobs,

but it creates new ones.

Moving from the age of work that we're in now

into the abundant, ubiquitous automation age,

that bridge that we have to cross

is gonna be a very interesting time period.

I think in the very beginning of that time period,

you're going to see automation star-t to replace jobs,

but those jobs will transfer into other forms of work.

So, for example, instead of working in a factory,

you will learn to code and you will code the robots

that are working in the factory.

When I was a young man and I went for careers advice,

I don't know what they would have made of me

asking for a job as a webmaster.

It didn't exist, there wasn't a web at that time.

And, right now, we have over 200,000 vacancies

for people who can analyze big data.

And we really do need people

and mechanisms for analyzing it

and getting the most information from that data,

and that problem is only gonna increase in the future.

And I do think that there's gonna be a lot of employment

moving in that direction.

♪

The history of our country proves that new inventions

create thousands of jobs for every one they displace.

So it wasn't long before your grandfather had a better job

at more pay for less work.

We're always offered this solution

of still more education, still more training.

If people lose their routine job,

then let's send them back to school.

They'll pick up some new skills,

they'll learn something new, and then they'll be able

to move into some more rewarding career.

That's not gonna operate so well in the future

where the machines are coming

for those skilled jobs as well.

The fact is that machines are really good at

picking up skills and doing all kinds

of extraordinarily complex things,

so those jobs aren't necessarily

gonna be there either.

And a second insight, I think, is that historically,

it's always been the case that the vast majority of people

have always done routine work.

So even if people can make that transition,

if they can succeed in going back to school

and learning something new, in percentage terms,

those jobs don't constitute

that much of the total employment out there.

I mean, most people are doing these more routine things.

So, you know, we're up against a real problem

that's probably gonna require a political solution.

It's probably going to require direct redistribution.

That's my take on it,

and that's a staggering political challenge,

especially in the United States.

This would be fine if we had generations

to adapt to the change so that the next generation

could develop a different lifestyle,

different value system.

The problem is that all of this is happening

within the same generation.

Within a period of 15 years,

we're gonna start wiping out most of the jobs that we know.

That's really what worries me.

A term commonly used when describing the trajectory

of technological progress and where it's leading us

is the "technological singularity."

The term is borrowed from physics

to describe an event horizon or a moment in space time

that you cannot see beyond.

We are currently in the transistor era

of information technology.

In 1965, co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore,

made the observation that the processing power

of computers doubles every 18 months.

The prediction that this trend will continue

is known as Moore's Law.

When Intel created

their first computer processing unit in 1971,

it has 2,300 transistors

and had a processing speed of 740 kilohertz.

Today, a typical CPU has over a billion transistors

with an average speed of two gigahertz.

However, many predict that by 2020,

the miniaturization of transistors and silicon chips

will reach its limit,

and Moore's Law will fizzle out into a post-silicon era.

Another way of describing the term

"technological singularity"

is a time when artificial intelligence

surpasses human intellectual capacity.

But does this mean that a computer

can produce a new idea

or make an original contribution to knowledge?

Artificial intelligence, Al, is a longstanding project

which has to do with basically trying

to use machines as a way of trying to understand

the nature of intelligence

and, originally, the idea was, in some sense,

to manufacture within machines

something that could simulate human intelligence.

But I think now, as the years have gone on,

we now think in terms of intelligence

in a much more abstract way,

so the ability to engage in massive computations,

right, where you can end up making

quite intelligent decisions much more quickly

than a human being can.

So in this respect, artificial intelligence

in a sense is a, you might say,

as trying to go to the next level of intelligence

beyond the human.

♪

A proper Al could substitute

for practically any human job at some level of skill,

so it's--it would be

a completely different situation.

You can imagine any kind of job could, in theory,

be replaced by technology, if you build human-level Al.

Now that, of course, may or may not be a good thing.

You'd be able to, for example, make robots

that could do all kinds of jobs

that humans don't necessarily want to do.

There are the so-called three D's jobs

that are dirty, dangerous, or dull,

which humans might not want to do,

and yet, where you might actually want

a human level of intelligence

to do the job well or do the job properly.

These are things which are achievable.

- Yeah. - This isn't something...

I don't think it's science fiction.

I think this is entirely feasible

that we could build a computer

which is vastly superhuman

which is conscious, which has emotions,

which is, essentially, a new species

of self-aware intelligence and conscious in every way

and has got emotions the same as you and I do.

I don't see any fundamental limits

on what we can do, and we already know enough

about basic science to start doing that now.

So some people are concerned about,

you know, possible risks of building Al

and building something that is very, very powerful

where there are unintended consequences

of the thing that you've built and where it might

do things that you can't predict

that might be extremely dangerous.

So a so-called "existential risk,"

as some people call it.

We are going to hand off to our machines

all the multidimensional problems

that we are incapable of coping with.

You and I can take a problem with two or three

or four or even seven inputs.

But 300?

A thousand, a million inputs?

We're dead in the water.

The machines can cope with that.

The advantage that computers have

is that they communicate at gigabit speeds.

They all network together.

We talk in slow motion.

So computers will achieve this level of awareness

probably in the next 20, 30, 40 years.

It's not that if it's good or that it's evil.

It's we're probably good enough

to not program an evil Al.

It's that if it's lethally indifferent.

If it has certain things

that it's tasked with accomplishing

and humans are in the way.

So there's this concern that once we reach that moment

where the computers outperform us

in ways that are quite meaningful,

that then they will somehow be motivated to dispose of us

or take over us or something of this kind.

I don't really believe that

because these kinds of developments,

which probably are a little farther off in the future

than some of their enthusiasts think,

there will be time for us to adapt,

to come to terms with it, to organize social systems

that will enable us to deal adequately

with these new forms of intelligence.

So I don't thi--this is not just gonna be something

that's gonna happen as a miracle tomorrow

and then we'll be taken by surprise.

But I do think the key thing here is

that we need to treat these futuristic things

as not as far away as people say they are.

Just because they're not likely to happen

in 15 years, let's say,

it doesn't mean they won't happen in 50 years.

It's gonna be of kind of historical dimensions,

and it's very hard to predict, I think,

whether it's gonna take us in a utopian direction

or in a dystopian direction

or more likely something in between,

but just very different.

Very hard to predict.

You see, it's our job to take raw materials,

adapt them to useful forms,

take natural forces, harness them to do man's work.

The automated systems of the future

are a natural process of human innovation.

It all comes back to the idea of doing more with less.

This process of innovation

is driven not by necessity, but desire,

or to simply fill a gap in the market.

Farm owners didn't really need to replace

their workers with machines, but they did so

because they could foresee the benefits.

It's a natural cycle of business.

Doing more with less leads to greater prosperity.

♪

The hope is that we can adapt to this

politically and socially.

In order to do that,

we have to begin a conversation now.

Remember that we're up against

an exponential arc of progress.

Things are gonna keep moving faster and faster,

so we need to star-t talking about this now

and we need to sort of get the word out there

so that people will realize

that this problem is coming at us,

so that we can begin to discuss

viable political solutions to this

because, again, I think it will require,

ultimately, a political choice.

It's not something that is gonna son itself out

by itself as a result of the normal functioning

of the market economy.

It's something that will require

some son of an intervention

and, you know, pan of the problem is

that in the United States,

roughly half of the population is very conservative

and they really don't believe in this idea

of intervention in the market.

It's gonna be a tough transition,

and those that find themselves out of jobs

because a robot has taken it

are gonna be pretty pissed off.

The effect of automation on jobs and livelihood

is going to be behind this like the original Luddites.

It wasn't--it wasn't that they were against

technological developments in some ethereal sense.

It was that this was taking their damn jobs.

I absolutely think there could be a Neo-Luddite movement

against the future, against technology

because they're gonna say,

"Well, hey, you're taking our jobs,

you're taking our livelihoods away.

You're taking everything away from us."

But I think that's when it's gonna be important

that leaders and government step in and say,

"It may seem that way,

but life is going to get better for everyone."

We're gonna have more time to do things that we want,

more vacations, more passions.

This is the modern world.

We can create the utopia that we've always dreamt of.

Why are we saying, "My job's not safe,"

or, "Automation's going to steal my jobs"?

These are the--these are the phrases

that keep getting pushed out there.

They're negative phrases,

and instead, it seems that we would look at this,

especially if someone has been working in a factory

their whole life,

that they would look at that system and say,

"Thank goodness that this is starting to be automated."

I don't want anyone to have to crawl

into a hole in the ground and pull up coal.

No human being should have to go do that.

If you make an awful lot of computers

and a lot of robots, and the computers can make

those robots very sophisticated

and do lots of sophisticated jobs,

you could eliminate most of the high-value physical jobs

and also most of the high-value intellectual jobs.

What you're left with, then, are those jobs

where you have to be a human being,

so I find it quite paradoxical in some ways

that the more advanced the technology becomes,

the more it forces us to become humans.

So in some ways, it's very good.

It forces us to explore what is humanity about?

What are the fundamentally important

things about being a human?

It's not being able to, you know, flip a burger

or, you know, carve something intricately.

A computer or a robot

could do that far better than a human being.

One thing I've noticed, if you talk to techno-optimists

about the future of work and how it's gonna unfold,

very often they will focus on this issue

of how will we all be fulfilled in the future?

What will be our purpose in life

when we don't want to work?

And, you know, you can son of posit this

in terms of-there was a guy named Maslow

who came up with a hierarchy of human needs,

Maslow's pyramid.

And at the base of that pyramid

are the foundational things like food and shelter,

and at the top of that pyramid, of course,

are all these intangible things like, you know,

a sense of purpose in your life

and fulfillment and so forth.

What you'll find among the most techno-optimistic people

is that they will want to skip

right over the base of that pyramid

and jump right to the top and start talking about,

"Oh, gosh, how are we gonna," you know,

"what's the meaning of our life gonna be

when we don't have to work?"

But the reality is that the base of that pyramid,

food, shelter, all the things that we need

to have, you know, a decent life,

that's the elephant in the room.

That stuff costs real money.

That stuff is gonna involve

perhaps raising taxes on a lot of the people

that are doing really well right now,

and that's probably part of the reason

that they prefer not to talk about it.

So what do we do with the 99 percent

of the population on this planet

if they don't have jobs?

The suggestion is and the goal is

to make this an efficient system.

You put automation in the hands of everyone.

In the near future, we're going to see systems

where we can 3D print our clothing,

we can 3D print food.

If you automate these self-replicating

industrial machines to pull the raw materials

and distribute those raw materials

to everyone who has the capacity

to 3D print their own house

or 3D print their own farm bot,

you have literally solved the equation

of how do I automate my life

and how do I automate my basic necessities?

If we had the political will

to take all these new technologies

and the wealth and abundance they create,

and distribute these across our society

in the First World countries

and also across the whole world,

then, of course, I mean, the sky's the limit.

We can solve all kinds of problems.

But we will have to have the political will to do that,

and I don't see a whole lot of evidence for it right now.

There really is enough already for everybody,

certainly to have an adequate life,

if not a life of superabundant,

so, you know, I don't think that the introduction

of more labor-saving devices

or more is really gonna make any difference in that.

The reason there are poor people

is 'cause there's rich people.

♪

You're simultaneously making a lot of people

almost completely useless

while generating a lot more wealth

and value than ever before.

So I worry about this.

I worry about the schism

between the super rich and the poor.

The ultra rich, if they're representative

of some of the people we've seen in Silicon Valley,

I really, really worry

because I wonder if they really have a soul.

I really--I wonder if they really have an awareness

of how regular people feel

and if they share the values of humanity.

It really bothers me that you have this ultra rich

that is out of touch with regular people, with humanity.

This is being filmed right now in San Francisco,

which is by all accounts one of the wealthiest cities

and most advanced cities in the world,

and it's pretty much ground zero

for this technological revolution,

and, yet, as I came here,

I almost tripped over homeless people

sleeping on the sidewalk.

That is the reality of today's economy

and today's society.

In a very real sense,

we already live in the economy of abundance,

and yet we have not solved this problem.

I think the future for the four billion

poor people in the world is actually a very good one.

We've seen the amount of food in the world, for example,

has more than doubled in the last 25 years.

That's likely to continue.

Worldwide, we're seeing massive economic growth.

That really means that people in poor countries today

will be much better off in the future,

so there will still be some poor people,

relatively speaking,

but compared to today's poor people,

they'll be actually quite well-off.

I think this is an amplifier for inequality.

It's gonna make what we see now much more amplified.

The number of people that are doing

really well in the economy

I think is likely to continue to shrink.

Those people that are doing well

will do extraordinarily well, but for more and more people,

they're simply gonna find themselves

in a position where they don't have a lot to offer.

They don't have a marketable skill.

They don't have a viable way to really earn an income

or, in particular, middle-class income.

We should value the fact

that we can spend more time doing human work

and the robots will get on, increase the economy.

They'll be still taking all the resources

and convening them into material goods

at very low cost, so the economy will expand,

we'll be better off,

and we can concentrate on what matters.

There's nothing to worry about in there.

A constant stream of savings dollars

must flow into big and small business each year.

These dollars help to buy the land,

the buildings, the tools and equipment,

and create new job opportunities

for our expanding population.

♪

We need consumers out there.

We need people who can actually buy

the things that are produced by the economy.

If you look at the way our economy works,

ultimately, it's driven by end consumption,

and by that, I mean people and to a limited extent,

governments, who buy things because they want them

or they need them.

You know, businesses in our economy,

they also buy things, of course,

but they do that in order to produce something else,

and one business may sell to another business,

but at the end of that, at the end of that chain,

there has to stand a consumer or perhaps a government

who buys that product or service

just because they want it or they need it.

So this is not the case

that things can just keep going like this

and get more and more unequal over time

and everything will still be fine.

I think that it won't be fine.

It will actually have an impact on our economy

and on our economic growth.

We need intelligent planning because, you know,

being unemployed is not a positive thing in itself.

There has to be some kind of transition point

to some other form of life after that.

And, again, at the moment,

I really don't see enough attention being paid to this,

so we need to take this future prospect seriously now.

♪

If we manage to adapt to this expected wave

of technological unemployment both politically and socially,

it's likely to facilitate a time

when work takes on a different meaning

and a new role in our lives.

♪

Ideas of how we should approach our relationship

with work have changed throughout history.

In ancient Greece, Aristotle said,

"A working paid job absorbs and degrades the mind."

I.E., if a person would not willingly adopt

their job for free,

the argument can be made that they have become

absorbed and degraded by it,

working purely out of financial obligation.

In 1844, Karl Marx famously described

the workers of society as "alienated from their work

and wholly saturated by it."

He felt that most work didn't allow

an individual's character to grow.

He encouraged people to find fulfillment

and freedom in their work.

During World War Two, the ethos towards work

was that it was a patriotic duty

in order to support the war effort.

To best understand our current relationship with work

and perhaps by extension modern life itself,

we can look to the writings of a man called Guy Debord.

Debord was a French Marxist theorist and in 1967,

he published a powerful and influential critique

on Western society entitled

The Society of the Spectacle.

He describes our workers are ruled by commodities

and that production

is an inescapable duty of the masses,

such is the economic system

that to work is to survive.

"The capitalist economy," he says,

"requires the vast majority to take part as wage workers

in the unending pursuit of its ends.

A requirement to which, as everyone knows,

one must either submit or die."

The assumption has crept into our rhetoric

and our understanding that we live in

a leisure society to some extent.

We have flexible working time.

You hear the term a lot "relative poverty"

it's, again, it's absolute poverty,

and all these kinds of ideas suggest that, in fact,

we should feel pretty pleased with ourselves.

We should both feel quite leisured

and we should feel less in bondage to work

than perhaps somebody in the 19th century

who was kind of shackled to a machine in a factory.

But, in fact, we're very unhappy.

It's irrelevant how much you work

in actual terms anymore.

The way in which the spectacle operates

is to make of leisure itself an adjunct to work.

In other words, the idea of networking and working

are in some sense locked into an unholy

and reciprocal relationship with each other.

You know, the fact that you're not working

is only because you've been working,

and the fact that you're working

is only so that you cannot work.

In other words, so engrafted is that rubric

in the way that we approach life

that--that we can never be rid of it.

Debord also observed that as technology advances,

production becomes more efficient.

Accordingly, the workers' tasks invariably become

more trivial and menial.

It would seem that as human labor becomes irrelevant,

the harder it is to find fulfilling work.

The truth of the matter is that most people already,

in Britain, are doing useless jobs

and have been for generations, actually.

Most jobs in management are completely useless.

They basically consist in the rearrangement

of information into different patterns

that are meant to take on the semblance of meaning

in the bureaucratic context.

So most work is, in fact, a waste of time already,

and I think people understand that intuitively.

When I go into companies, I often ask the question,

"Why are you employing people?

You could get monkeys

or you could get robots to do this job."

The people are not allowed to think.

They are processing.

They're just like a machine.

They're being so hemmed down,

they operate with an algorithm and they just do it.

We all have the need to find meaning in our lives,

and it is our professions that define us.

To work is to provide a service

either to yourself or for others,

but most of us would like our work to be purposeful

and contributory to society in some way.

It is an uncomfortable truth

that with our present model of economics

not everyone is able to monetize their passions.

If any of this were to come to fruition,

if we learned to make automation work for us,

the question remains, "What do we do with our days?"

There's a good and a bad.

The good is that the cost of everything drops.

We can solve some of the basic problems of humanity

like disease, hunger, lodging.

We can look after all the basic needs of human beings.

The dark side is that automation takes jobs away,

and the question is, "What do we do for a living?"

Some of us will seek enlightenment

and rise and will keep learning and growing,

but the majority of people don't care about those things.

Majority of people just want to do, you know, grunt work.

They want to socialize with people as they do at work.

Sennett wrote in his book, The Corrosion of Character,

that in late capitalism,

one of the great kind of supports

for human interaction and for human meaning

is the longevity of social relations

and the interactions in working environments

and that if that's taken away,

if what's required is to be continually responsive

and changing in a precarious world,

then people no longer find the fulfillment

or the substance in what they're doing.

There is an underlying desire for people to do things,

you know, you spoke about the idea

that people want to be engaged creatively.

They want to be engaged, you know,

go back to basic Marxist ideas of praxis

and right back to John Locke.

They want to be engaged in what Locke thought of

as primary acquisition,

mixing their labor, either their creative thinking

or their physical labor even,

with the world in order to transform it.

They want to do that, and that's a very basic

human instinct to do that.

And the idea of a leisured class, as it were,

a class who is not involved in a praxis with the world,

but is simply involved in a passive way

as a recipient of things is actually repugnant to people.

They would sooner work for the man in a meaningless job

and construct a false ideology

of involvement and engagement

than they would actually sit on their ass.

We can't get away from the fact that--

that people work because they have to.

That's, you know, the primary motivation for most people,

that if you don't work,

you're gonna be living on the street, okay?

Once we--if we ever move into a future

where that's not the case

and people don't have to worry about that,

then we can begin to take on

these more philosophical questions

of-of, you know, but we're not at that point yet.

We can't pretend that we are living in an age

where that necessity for an income doesn't exist.

Douglas Rushkoff stated in 2009,

"We all want paychecks or at least money.

We want food, shelter, clothing,

and all the things that money buys us.

But do we all really want jobs?"

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization,

there is enough food produced

to provide everyone in the world

with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day.

♪

At this stage, it's difficult to think of

other possible ways of life.

The need to earn a living has been a pan

of every cultural narrative in history.

It's a precondition of human life.

The challenge facing the future of work

is politically unclear.

It is likely to require

not only a redistribution of wealth,

but a redistribution of the workload.

But will working less mean living more?

♪

And is our fear of becoming irrelevant

greater than our fear of death?

♪

The process of physical aging is known as senescence,

and none of us are spared from it.

It remains to this day an evolutionary enigma.

Our cells are programmed to wane

and our entire bodies are fated to become frail.

It was seen that the laws of nature would prefer it

if we dwindle and die.

♪

Negligible senescence, however,

is the lack of symptoms of aging.

Negligibly senescent organisms include certain species

of sturgeon, giant tortoise,

flatworm, clam, and tardigrade.

One species of jellyfish called turritopsis dohrnii

has even been observed to be biologically immortal.

It has the capability to reverse its biotic cycle

and revert back to the polyp stage

at any point in its development.

There is only one thing wrong with dying,

and that's doing it when you don't want to.

Doing it when you do want to is not a problem.

Now if you put that bargain to anybody,

"Look, this is the deal:

You will die, but only when you want to."

Who would not take that bargain?

In 2014, a team of scientists at Harvard

were able to effectively reverse the age

of an older mouse by treating it

with the blood of a younger mouse

through a process called parabiosis.

For the first time in history

it is deemed scientifically possible

to gain control over the aging process.

♪

Ultimately, when people get the hang of the idea

that aging is a medical problem

and that everybody's got it,

then it's not going to be the way it is today.

He thinks it's possible that people will extend--

be able to extend their lifespan by considerable amounts.

I think he's on record as saying

the first 1,000-year-old person is already alive.

It's highly likely, in my view,

that people born today or born 10 years ago

will actually be able to live

as long as they like, so to speak,

without any risk of death from the ill health of old age.

The way to apply comprehensive maintenance to aging

is a divide and conquer approach.

It is not a magic bullet.

It is not some single thing that we can do,

let alone a single thing that we could do just once.

Aging is the lifelong accumulation

of damage to the body,

and that damage occurs as an intrinsic,

unavoidable side effect

of the way the body normally works.

Even though there are many, many,

many different types of damage at the molecular level

and the cellular level, they can all be classified

into a very manageable number of categories,

just seven major categories.

So now the bottom line, what do we do about it?

How do we actually implement the maintenance approach?

There are four fundamental paradigms,

they all begin with

They are called replacement, removal,

repair, and reinforcement.

We've got particular ways to do all these things.

Sometimes replacement, sometimes simply elimination

of the superfluous material, the garbage that's accumulated.

Sometimes repair of the material.

Occasionally, in a couple of cases, reinforcement--

that means making the cell robust

so that the damage, which would normally have caused

the pathology no longer does that.

I wanna talk about one thing that we're doing in our lab,

which involved the number one cause of death

in the western world, cardiovascular disease

causes hear-t attacks and strokes.

It all begins with these things called foam cells,

which are originally white blood cells.

They become poisoned by toxins in the bloodstream.

The main toxin that's responsible is known--

it's called 7-ketocholesterol, that's this thing,

and we found some bacteria that could eat it.

We then found out how they eat it,

we found out the enzymes that they use to break it down,

and we found out how to modify those enzymes

so that they can go into human cells,

go to the right place in the cell that they're needed,

which is called the lysosome,

and actually do their job there, and it actually works.

Cells are protected from this toxic substance--

that's what these graphs are showing.

So this is pretty good news.

The damage that accumulates that eventually causes

the diseases and disabilities of old age

is initially harmless.

The body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of it.

That's critical, because while we damage it

at that sub-pathological level,

it means that it's not participating

in metabolism, so to speak.

It's not actually interacting with the way the body works.

So medicines that target that damage

are much, much less likely

to have unacceptable side effects

than medicines that try to manipulate the body

so as to stop the damage from being created

in the first place.

It's unlikely, in fact, by working on longevity per se,

that we will crack it.

It's going to be-- it seems to me more probable

that we will crack longevity simply by getting rid of,

sequentially, the prime causes of death.

I hear people talk about living hundreds of years.

Inside, I'm like, yeah, right,

I mean, because if you study the brain,

the dead end is the brain.

We all star-t developing

Alzheimer's pathology at 40 years old.

It's not a matter of whether you get Alzheimer's,

it's when.

It's when, and genetically,

we all have some predisposition

to when we're gonna get this disease.

It's pan of the program.

Let's fix that part of the program

so we can live past 90 years old

with an intact, working brain

to continue the evolution of our mind.

That is number one in my book, because here's a fact:

Life span's almost 80 right now on average.

By 85, half of people will have Alzheimer's.

Do the math.

Seventy-four million Baby Boomers

headed toward risk age.

Eighty-five, 50 percent have Alzheimer's,

current life span's 80.

They're gonna be 85 pretty soon.

Half our population at 85's gonna have this disease.

And then keep going up to 90 and 100,

and it gets even worse.

This is enemy number one.

It's interesting, just this week

it was discovered that an Egyptian mummy

had died of cancer, so even way back in those times,

cancer was around.

What seems to have happened is, as we have lived longer,

the number of diseases that pop up to kill us

star-ts to increase, and the reality is

I think this is a son of whack-a-mole situation

as we beat cancer to death and it disappears,

something else will pop up.

Cancer is a specific disease,

and every cancer is a specific gene involved

together with lifestyle.

Alzheimer's, specific disease, specific genetics.

I can go on and on-- diabetes, hear-t disease.

These are diseases, and as you get older,

your susceptibility to these diseases increases,

and your genetics will determine

whether you get them and when you get them

given your lifespan.

That's not aging,

that's just living long enough to be susceptible,

so we may very well eradicate, in our fantasy world,

all the cancers and strokes and hear-t disease

and diabetes and Alzheimer's we get right now

by 80 or 90 years old, and then what's gonna happen?

You live out to 110, and guess what's gonna happen,

new, other genetic variants

suddenly rear their ugly heads and say,

"Now we're gonna affect whether you live to 110

without Alzheimer's and hear-t disease

and cancer and diabetes."

And it'll go on and go on and go on.

There will undoubtedly be enormous challenges

concerning the biological approach to longevity.

There could, however, be an alternative route

to extreme longevity.

When people are worried about death,

I guess the issue is what is it

that they would like to have stay alive, okay?

And I think that's often very unclear what the answer is,

because if you look at somebody like Ray Kurzweil, for example,

with his promises of the singularity

and our merging with machine intelligence

and then being able to kind of have

this kind of infinite consciousness

projected outward into the Cosmos.

I don't think he's imaging a human body

living forever, okay?

And if that's what we're talking about is immortality,

what I kind of think Kurzweil is talking about,

then I can see it.

I mean, I could see at least as something to work toward.

In 2005, Google's Director of Engineering,

Ray Kurzweil, published a book

entitled The Singularity is Near:

When Humans Transcend Biology.

He predicts that by 2045,

it'll be possible to upload our minds

into a computer, effectively allowing us

to live indefinitely.

When people think of death at this point,

they think of a body going into a coffin,

and the coffin going into the ground.

When in fact that age of death is dying.

We are ending that stage.

We're entering a new stage

where we could possibly upload consciousness

into a silicone substrate.

You know, a lot of these science fiction ideas

from decades ago are becoming real

and already people are spending millions of pounds

research today on making this happen.

Nobody expects to do it before 2040 at the earliest.

My guess is 2050, it'll be a few rich people

and a few kings and queens here and there and politicians.

By 2060-2070, it's reasonably well-off people.

By 2075, pretty much anybody could be immortal.

I'm not convinced that uploading my consciousness

onto a computer is a form of immortality.

I would like to live forever,

but I'm not sure that I would like to live forever

as some digibytes of memory in a computer.

I wouldn't call that living forever.

The things I wanna do with my body

that I won't be able to do in that computer.

Immortality is a question that keeps arising

in the technology community, and it's one which I think

is entirely feasible in principle.

We won't actually become immortal,

but what we will do is we will get the technology

by around about 2050 to connect a human brain

to the machine world so well that most of your thinking

is happening inside the computer world,

inside the l.T.,

so your brain is still being used,

but 99 percent of your thoughts, 99 percent of your memories

are actually out there in the cloud

or whatever you wanna call it,

and only one percent is inside your head.

So walk into work this morning,

you get hit by a bus, it doesn't matter.

You just upload you mind into an android

on Monday morning and carry on as if nothing had happened.

The question with that kind of technology

and the extension of human capacity

and human life through technology

is where does the human, um, end,

and the technology begin?

If we upload our consciousness into a robot,

a humanoid robot that has touch, the ability to feel,

all of the sensorial inputs, if they're the same,

there is a potential of continuity, right?

So you can have the same types of experiences

in that new substrate that you have as a human being.

It's beyond a continuity issue,

it's an issue that you have the ability to record

and recall without the content--

the content being the sensations, images

and feelings and thoughts you experienced your whole life

that have associated with each other

through your neuronetwork.

Where are they stored?

I don't think consciousness and the brain

is anything to do with any particular

individual region in the brain,

but it's something that's all about--

its distributed organization.

I don't think there are any mysteries.

There are no causal mysteries in the brain,

and I think that there's a perfectly--

a comprehensible, physical chain

of cause and effect that goes from the things

that I see and hear around me

and the words that come out of my mouth,

which would encompass consciousness, I suppose.

But the things that--

the moment you say something like that,

you're on the edge of the philosophical precipice.

When you think about a machine,

the question is are you simulating consciousness

or are you simulating cognition?

Cognition requires inputs and reactions

that are associated with each other

to create an output and an outcome.

And you can program that all day

and you can make that as sophisticated

and as information-dense as you want,

almost to the point that it mimics a real person.

But the question is will it ever have the consciousness

that our species with our genetics,

with our brain has.

No, a machine has its own consciousness.

All you're doing is programming it

to be cognitively responsive the way you are.

I remember well, when my father died,

asking my mother, "if I could've captured

the very being of my father in a machine,

and I could put him in an android

that looked exactly like him, had all the mannerisms,

and it was warm and it smelled and it felt like him,

would you do it?" and she said, "Absolutely not.

It wouldn't be your father, it wouldn't be him."

I think that someday you can upload

your current neuronetwork...

but that's not you.

That's just your current neuro map, right?

♪

As with any concept that proposes

to change the natural order of things,

the idea of extreme longevity can be met with disbelief.

But there is currently an international movement

called transhumanism that is concerned

with fundamentally transforming

the human condition by developing technologies

to greatly enhance human beings

in an intellectual, physical, and psychological capacity.

I really want to just simply live indefinitely,

and not have the Spectre of Death hanging over me,

potentially at any moment taking away

this thing that we call existence.

So for me, that's the primary goal

of the transhumanist movement.

Transhumanists believe we should use technology

to overcome our biological limitations.

What does that mean?

Well, very simplistically, perhaps,

I think we should be aiming for what one might call

a triple S civilization

of super intelligence, super longevity,

and super happiness.

We have been evolving through hundreds and hundreds

of thousands of years, human beings,

and transhumanism is the climax of that.

It's the result of how we're going to get

to some kind of great future where we are way beyond

what it means to be a human being.

Unfortunately, organic robots grow old and die,

and this isn't a choice, it's completely involuntary.

120 years from now, in the absence

of radical biological interventions,

everyone listening to this video will be dead,

and not beautifully as so,

but one's last years tends to be those of decrepitude,

frequently senility, infirmity,

and transhumanists don't accept aging as inevitable.

There's no immutable law of nature

that says that organic robots must grow old.

After all, silicone robots, they don't need to grow old.

Their pans can be replaced and upgraded.

Our bodies are capable of adjusting

in ways we've hardly dreamt of.

If we can only find the key.

I'm so close now, so very close.

- The key to what? - To be able to replace

diseased and damaged pans of the body

as easily as we replace eye corneas now.

Can't be done.

It can be done!

The relationship between life and death

and the role of technology in forestalling death

creates death, in a way, as a new kind of problem.

Death becomes something that needs to be solved.

Why would it be good to live forever?

'Cause if you have a shit day,

it dilutes the depression

within countless other days, you know?

And all of these metrics are about failing to exist

in the full light of your own autonomy.

That's all they're about,

and the paradox of your own autonomy,

which is you're simultaneously completely free

and completely unfree at the same time.

I have been to many conferences

where you got the anti-transhumanist person

saying, "This is just denial of death."

At the end of the day, that's all it's about, right?

And it's a kind of-- the last hangover

of the Abrahamic religions,

this idea that we're gonna, you know,

come back to God and all this,

and we're gonna realize our God-like nature,

and this is really the last kind of point for that.

I think there's a lot of truth to that,

especially in terms of the issues

we've been talking about where everybody just seems

to just take for granted that if you're given

the chance to live forever, you'd live forever.

I think yes, I think that that's true.

I don't think it's-- I think it's true,

I don't know if it's as problematic

as people kind of claim it is.

In other words, that there's something wrong

with having this fear of death

and wanting to live forever.

No, I think living forever is--

I think the question is what are you doing with your time?

In what capacity do you wanna live forever?

So I do think it makes all the difference in the world

whether we're talking about Kurzweil's way

or we're talking about Aubrey de Grey's way.

The way the human species operates

is that we're really never fully ready for anything.

However, the prospect of living indefinitely

is too promising to turn down or to slow down

or to just not go after at full speed.

By enabling us to find technologies

to live indefinitely, we're not making it

so that we're going to live forever,

we're just making it so we have that choice.

If people wanna pull out of life

at some point down the future,

they're certainly welcome to do that.

However, it's gonna be great to eliminate death if we want,

because everyone wants that choice.

There are other socioeconomic repercussions

of living longer that need to be considered.

The combination of an aging population

and the escalating expenses of healthcare,

social care, and retirement is a problem

that already exists the world over.

In the last century alone,

medicine has massively contributed

to increased life expectancy.

According to the World Health Organization,

the number of people aged 60 years and over

is expected to increase from the 605 million today

to 2 billion by the year 2050.

As people live longer, they become more susceptible

to noncommunicable diseases.

This becomes enormously expensive.

Dementia alone costs the NHS 23 billion a year.

Currently, elderly non-workers

account for a vast portion of our population

and a vast portion of our work force care for them.

It is economically beneficial to end aging.

Social life is organized around people having--

occupying certain roles at certain ages, right?

And you can already see the kinds of problems

that are caused to the welfare system

when people live substantially beyond the age of 65,

because when the whole number 65 was selected by Bismarck

when he started the first social security system,

in Germany, the expectation was that people would be living

two years beyond the retirement age

to be able to get the social security.

So it wasn't gonna break the bank, okay?

Problem now is you've got people who are living 20 years

or more beyond the retirement age,

and that's unaffordable.

There's no question that, within society as a whole,

there is an enormous tendency to knee-jerk reactions

with regard to the problems that might be created

if we were to eliminate aging.

There have been people that said, you know,

"You'll be bored, you won't have anything to do."

Speaking from a place of a lifespan

that's 80 or 90 years old,

saying that we're going to be bored

if we live to 150 years old really is just invalid.

We have no idea what we'll do with that time.

Pan of this transhumanism stuff,

where it gets some kind of real policy traction,

is people who want us not to live to be 1,000,

but maybe if we can take that 20 years

that we're living longer now than we did 100 years ago

and keep that productive.

So in other words, if you could still be strong

and still be sharp into your 70s and 80s,

and so not have to pull any social security

until quite late in life and then you'll be--

you'll have 20 extra years

where you're actually contributing to the economy.

So one of the areas that we're gonna have to think about

in the near future if we do achieve

extreme longevity physically

is the idea of overpopulation.

This is a controversial idea, of course,

and we may face a time period where we have to say to people,

"You have to be licensed to have more than one child."

The ideas around children, I hope, will probably change

when people start to realize that the values of children

need to be defined first before we have them.

And that's not something that we do.

We just have them, and we don't define why

or for what purpose.

I'm not saying there has to be a defined purpose,

but I'm saying that just to continue our gene line

isn't the biggest reason.

At the moment, ultimately,

we see in any society where fertility rate goes down

because of female prosperity and emancipation

and education, we also see the age

of the average childbirth go up, right?

We see women having their children later.

Now of course, at the moment, there's a deadline for that,

but that's not going to exist anymore,

because menopause is pan of aging.

So women who are choosing to have their children

a bit later now,

it stands to reason that a lot of them

are probably gonna choose to have their children

a lot later and a lot later and that, of course,

also has an enormous depressive impact

on the trajectory of global population.

If we actually said to everybody, "Okay,

you're all now gonna live for 1,000 years,

we could restructure society

so it's on these LOGO-year cycles.

That's possible, but the problem becomes

when you still allow people to live the normal length

and you're also allowing some people to live 1,000 years

then how do you compare the value of the lives,

the amount of experience?

Supposing a 585-year-old guy

goes up for a job against a 23-year-old.

How do you measure the experience?

What, the old guy always gets the job?

I mean, really, these kinds of problems would arise

unless there was some kind of legislation

about permissible variation in age.

This is a bit of a conundrum

because we're all expanding our lifespan,

and the question is, would you like to live

for not 100 years but 200?

Would you choose to if you could?

It would be very, very difficult to say no.

The reality is the replacement of human piece pans

is probably gonna take us in that direction,

but it will be market driven,

and those people with the money will be able to afford

to live a lot longer than those people without.

Pretty much most of the discovery these days

takes place in Western Europe of the United States

or one or two other countries, China, Singapore, and so on,

but if they're valuable enough-- and I don't mean monetarily--

if they're worth having, then people extend them.

We have to star-t somewhere, and I don't believe

in the dog in the manger attitude

is that you don't give it to anybody

until you can provide it for everybody.

All technologies are discontinuous.

There are people at this very moment

who are walking four kilometers

to get a bucket of water from a well.

You know, there are people who are having cornea operations

that are done with a needle where it's stuck in their eye

and their cornea is scraped out.

You know, so these ideas of totalizing

utopian technological intervention

are pan of a discontinuous technological world

and the world will always be discontinuous technologically.

When a child has to drink dirty water, cannot get food,

and is dying of starvation and disease,

and the solution is just a few dollars,

there's something badly wrong.

We need to fix those things.

The only way that we could fix them in the past

would've been at unbelievable cost

because of the limitation

of our industrial capacity and capability.

Not anymore.

...not the one which is-- which stops us from aging.

In the last 20 years, healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa

has greatly improved.

♪

HIV prevalence has gone down,

Infant modality rate has gone down.

Immunization rates have gone up,

and the drug supply in many areas has risen.

♪

However, healthcare and medication

in developing countries

is not always affordable or even readily available.

It is not just medicine.

According to the World Health Organization,

over 700 million people worldwide

do not have access to clean drinking water.

We still live in an age where over one billion people

live off less than a dollar a day

and live in extreme poverty.

It is ultimately not a scientific issue,

it is a geopolitical issue.

Now a lot of people, a lot of philanthropists

are of the view that the most important thing to do

is to address the trailing edge of quality of life.

In other words, to help the disadvantaged.

But some visionary philanthropists

such as the ones that fund SENS Research Foundation--

and the fact is I agree with this,

and that's why I've put most of my inheritance

into SENS Research Foundation, too--

we feel that, actually, in the long run,

you lose out if you focus too exclusively

on the trailing edge.

You've got also to push forward the leading edge,

so that in the long term, everybody moves forward.

Due to a lack of funding from governments,

anti-aging research is often pushed into the private sector.

If we look at funding for disease--

cancer, hear-t disease--

they get six billion, eight billion, ten billion.

AIDS still gets two to four billion.

Let's look at Alzheimer's disease.

It's probably the most important disease of aging,

the brain--it gets under a half a billion

from the federal government,

and a lot of that goes to programs

that are tied up with pharma trials

where we don't really see it in the labs,

so you're maybe down to two or three hundred million.

It's not nearly enough to really make a dent.

The question is, why when it comes to Alzheimer's disease,

which is a problem in the elderly

do we just see it as-- the federal government

seems to see it as a red-haired Stepchild.

They don't take care of it.

Some people say it's because--

people say, "Well, it affects old people,

they lived their lives, let them go."

No one wants to admit that, but maybe subconsciously,

when Congress is thinking about this,

that's at play, who knows?

Um, maybe it's much more compelling

to wanna put money into diseases that affect young people

who still have their whole life to live

when they have AIDS or breast cancer

or cancer that can strike somebody at 30 or 40 years old.

Age might be pan of it, and even if it's something

where you'd say, "No, it can't be that!"

you never know what's happening subconsciously

in those who are making the decisions.

Otherwise, it just makes no sense at all.

I don't know how to explain it.

When you talk to people about aging

and rejuvenation medicine, you're talking about things

that they haven't put in the same category

as things that they can fight.

They are willing to put money

towards solving cancer and curing cancer.

It's something they might have the potential of experiencing.

But the thing that's 100 percent in terms of probability,

they haven't classified that as in the same category

when actually it is and actually it's more dramatic

because 100 percent of people experience it.

You need to have the will to be cured.

Beyond that, medical science will play its pan.

I think it's essentially a crime

to not support life extension science,

because if you support the other side,

you're an advocate for killing someone.

When you actually support a culture of death,

when you support embracing death,

what you're really doing is not supporting embracing life.

Everyone ought to be healthy,

however long ago they were born.

When someone says, "Oh, dear, we shouldn't defeat aging,

we shouldn't work to eliminate aging,"

what they're actually saying is they're not in favor

of healthcare for the elderly, or to be more precise,

what they're saying is they're only in favor

of healthcare for the elderly

so long as it doesn't work very well.

And I think that's fucked up.

In September 2013,

Google announced the conception of Calico,

an independent biotech company

that remains to this day a little mysterious.

Its aim is to tackle aging and devise interventions

that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.

In September 2014,

the life extension company announced it was partnering

with biopharmaceutical giant AbbVie,

and made a $1.5 billion investment into research.

I think one of the biggest obstacles

that we have at the moment to come to terms

with this future world we're talking about

is a lot of people who basically

don't want it to happen at all

and so are placing all kinds of ethical

and institutional restrictions

on the development of this stuff

so that it becomes difficult, let's say, in universities

to experiment with certain kinds of drugs, right?

To develop certain kinds of machines maybe even,

and as a result, all of that kind of research

ends up going into either the private sector

or maybe underground, right?

Or going into some country that's an ethics-free zone

like China or someplace like that,

and I think that's where the real problems

potentially lie, because we really need to be doing,

you know, we need to be developing this stuff,

but in the public eye, right?

So it should be done by the mainstream authorities

so we can monitor the consequences

as they're happening and then be able

to take appropriate action.

But I'm afraid that a lot of this stuff

is perhaps being driven outside

because of all the restrictions that are placed on it.

That I think is very worrisome,

because then you can't keep track of the results,

and you don't know exactly what's happening.

And I think that's a real problem already

with a lot of this more futuristic stuff.

Arguably, the human condition

is defined by our anxiety of death.

It's of little wonder that throughout history,

mankind has built countless belief systems

in a bid to pacify the fear of death

through the promise of endless paradise.

Ultimately, death always wins.

If it's not so much death we fear, it's dying.

The relationship between life and death

is often figured in terms of immortality

and the quest for immortality.

There's a philosopher, a brilliant philosopher

called Stephen Cave, who, in his book Immortality,

argues that our fear of death is the great driver

of all civilization, of all human endeavor,

and he identifies four different ways

in which people seek immortality,

so firstly the idea of extending life,

of living forever.

Secondly, the idea of resurrection

so that we might come back after death in some form.

Thirdly, the idea of the immortality

of some pan of ourselves beyond the physical body.

So perhaps the immortality of the soul, for example,

or living on in Heaven.

And finally the idea of leaving a legacy.

I think that one of life's challenges

really actually is to come to terms

with our own finitude and modality

and human limitations,

and this is an enormous challenge.

♪

Technology, a reflection of our times.

Efficient, computerized, with a sleek beauty all its own.

Technology is the human imagination

convened into reality.

We are all interested in the future,

for that is where you and I are going to spend

the rest of our lives.

(high-pitched tone)

♪

It's impossible to say for sure

where these new technologies will take us

and how we will prepare to implement them into society.

It is likely that they will affect the sensibilities

of global infrastructure.

There are always anxieties surrounding new technologies,

and this time is no exception.

♪

I think people fear change,

and so the future represents this enormous amount

of change that's coming at us.

I do think it's overwhelming for people,

you know, they are afraid to change

the paradigm that they live in,

and when we talk about the future of work and death,

what we're really talking about is changing

a paradigm that has existed for us

as long as we can remember.

All of this Kind of scare mongering

about harm and risk and stuff like that

really is--it's based on a kind of psychological illusion,

namely that you imagine that you kind of see the bad state

as a bad state when it happens,

whereas in fact, what more likely happens

is that you kinda get adjusted to the various changes

that are happening in your environment

so that when you actually do reach that state

we're talking about, it'll seem normal.

And because, look, when the automobile

was introduced in the early 20th century,

people were saying this is just gonna pump

a lot of smoke into the atmosphere,

it's going to ruin our contact with nature

'cause we'll be in these enclosed vehicles,

we'll be going so fast,

we won't be able to appreciate things,

there'll be congestion, blah, blah, blah,

they were right!

They were right, but of course,

by the time you get to that state

where the automobile has had that impact,

it's also had all this benefit as well,

and your whole life has been kind of restructured around it.

Arguably, people who are using

or have been conceived using in vitro fertilization

are cyborgs way before they were ever even people.

Now that doesn't mean that we understand kinship

in a radically different way.

Just look at the Industrial Revolution!

Is anyone actually-- does anyone actually regret

that the Industrial Revolution occurred?

No, it was fairly turbulent, right?

You know, we did actually have a little bit of strife

in the translation from a pre-industrial world

to the world we know today.

But the fact is, we adapted.

The most important thing here is to try to compare it

to something in the past.

Imagine we were-- it was 1914, 100 years back,

and I told you that most people on the planet

would have the ability to have

this tiny cell phone screen in front of them

and video conference with ten of their friends all at once.

If it was 1914, you would look at me and say,

"That's absurd, this guy's insane."

However, it's the son of same concept

when I tell you now in 50 years

we're going to be digital beings of ourselves,

it's no so far-fetched.

You have to look at it in the historical context.

All concepts of technological progress

in that way are linked to post-enlightenment ideas

or non--they're linked to the idea

of the arrow of time being in free flight forward,

but they're also chiliastic, they propose an end state.

They propose the end state,

and the end state is the singularity,

but they propose it as something desirable.

Now any kind of philosophy like that, it's, you know,

jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today.

They're all philosophies that are about

accept the shit you're in-- work, consume, die--

because there is something better in the future,

or there's something more innovative in the future.

There are good scenarios and there are bad scenarios.

I don't know where we're headed.

I mean, I don't think anyone really knows.

You know, if anyone claims to know the future,

they're guessing, they're extrapolating forward,

and we draw some lines and curves

and see where technology's gonna be.

What that means,

I don't think any of us really understand.

Everyone assumes that the future is going to be

dramatically different from today

and that's absolutely true,

but it's also true that the future will be

an extension of today's world.

The problems that exist in today's world

are still gonna be with us in the future.

Human nature is not gonna change.

The end point in all of this game

will become a bit of a moral

and an ethical question for society

where decisions will have to be made.

Like life itself, work and death, for better or worse,

are two features of the human experience

that are thrust upon us.

Whether or not we define work and death

as problems in need of remedy,

human ingenuity is a progressive and natural extension

of our own evolution.

♪

Advancing our technological capabilities is a way

of dealing with our limitations as human beings.

♪

Must we do something

just because we're capable of doing something?

Or can we withhold our hands and say

"No, this is not a good thing to do"?

This is something that the human species

must decide for itself.

You and I, we can't just leave it to the scientists.

We have to know what's going on and why!

♪