AI革命之后的我们的生活——回答那些艰难问题｜EP #155

I'm not a leader. I'm very confused. Watching and listening to you, I ask myself why I want to live a decade more if I'm not going to do anything, because robots are going to think for me. Robots are going to do the job 24 hours a day.

I study physics, so I'm not a person who only works with my hands. My mind has to work, too. But I see all this, and it's perfect to find out about diseases so people don't suffer. What are we going to do with the people who live longer, with new norms and robots that are going to work? What are all those people going to do? How will they live? I cannot understand that. I am very confused.

Two thoughts for you, and I appreciate what you're saying, because I think the greatest challenge we're going to face is one of purpose going forward. I think one of the things we have to do is uplevel our ambitions and uplevel our purpose.

First of all, the majority of the world—we're lucky—the majority of the world are doing jobs that they don't love. They never dreamed about them. It's what puts food on the table for them and what gives them insurance. They didn't dream about whatever the job might be. One of the goals is: How do we allow people to separate what I love doing from what I have to do to survive and work?

The second thing that's important to realize is that our lives today are extraordinarily different. If you went back to somebody 100 years ago who had to plant their own food and raise their own livestock, and you said, "This is the life we have today," they would have a hard time understanding the purpose of our life today compared to what it was like—maybe not 100 years ago, but 200 years ago.

Work is a recent invention. Before, for most of human existence, life was about survival. Technology is the means by which we take a vacation from survival. We're going to have to learn how to partner with technology to set objectives and goals far beyond our current expectations.

I don't have an answer, but I do know that it's on our watch. This is our responsibility. This is coming. There's no on-off switch. There's no velocity switch. This progression is happening, like it or not. We have to focus on how it impacts our families, our nations, and humanity as a whole.

I have a question. You said AI is taking all the information, the data, from Instagram, Twitter, and the information that everyone puts out there. That's where my worry comes in, because the information that's coming from there isn't necessarily confirmed, verified, or credible.

Most of the people who put a lot of information there have enough time to put out information that is sometimes, as they say in the IT business, "garbage in, garbage out." That's where I'm worried: Some of the data that might come in, and a lot of the artificial intelligence data that we take as a base, might come with trash. What are we doing about it? What are the people involved in that world right now doing to assure us that what's coming out is really credible?

I hear you. A friend of mine, Mo Gawdat, wrote a book called Scary Smart. One of the analogies he talks about is that we are raising a new child with these AI systems. The values you teach that child, the knowledge you give it, and the food you give it shape its life.

For example, in the story of Superman, Superman lands in Kansas. He's raised by a very loving, God-fearing family—the Kent family—and becomes a superhero. If that same super-being from Krypton had landed in the Bronx in a drug den, he would become a supervillain. It's very important how we teach our AI systems and what values we give them.

I do believe, in the final result—this is how I think about it—that the most intelligent systems, as they mature to digital superintelligence, will be abundance-loving and peace-loving. I think with greater intelligence comes a greater appreciation for life.

My concern is not artificial intelligence; it's human stupidity, first and foremost. It's the next 5 years that I'm the most concerned about, as these AI systems are coming online and people are beginning to use them for nefarious reasons. I think in the long term we're fine. I think it's the next 5, 6, 7 years that we have to be critically careful about, and there is no answer there.

Elon says we need to build our AIs to be maximally curious and truth-seeking. Sounds great. I'm not sure what that really means.

You spent a lot of time illustrating human intelligence and longevity. I'd like to hear a couple of your thoughts on our interaction with nature and the environment. If we extend life by 10 or 50 years, do you see the way things are going as human life being sustainable in the long term on the planet?

I spend my life deeply in the tech world and in the biotech world, and I think one of the things we have the ability to do is use technology to reduce the burden that humans have on the planet and to maintain our planet.

Today, for example, one-third of the non-ice landmass—one-third of our land—is used to grow crops to sustain our livestock. I could be onstage—and I am onstage—for 5 days talking about how we produce the next generation of foods with vertical farms and cultured meats. Instead of growing an entire cow, an entire pig, or an entire chicken, we're just going to grow the meat product and make it the best protein with the best fats.

We can have this positive impact. We are emotional beings, and being in nature is critically important. The challenge is—I don't know how many folks here have teenagers or young kids—I'm curious how much they spend on video games. That's the world they're living in, and it's our responsibility to create that balance for them.

I think you have seated here a lot of people that have the potential and the opportunity to change the future for Latin America. If you were to start a country or a set of companies, knowing what you know now and what's coming, and considering the age and era that we're living in, what would be the things you would focus on to maximize this opportunity?

Great question. I have 2 answers.

Last week, Abu Dhabi announced they're going to transform their nation-state to AI governance, so AI is going to be driving all the decision-making. If you were starting again, I would start with AI as the fundamental basis for the governance and operations of a country and start there.

The best educators in the world will become AIs. Google is identical for the wealthiest children and for the poorest children on the planet. It's fully democratized. In the same way, we're going to see AI being the most powerful teacher on the planet. It's going to know your children's favorite colors, their language skills, and their movie stars. It'll customize everything.

The ability for an AI to become your educator—and an AI will become your best physician—means the cost of education and the cost of medical care will precipitously drop toward zero.

If I were building a nation, I had this conversation with El Salvador's amazing president last night, I would build this as a longevity health country. I would basically say, "It's got the regulatory capabilities. Let's bring the best scientists here, the best entrepreneurs here. Let's create a regulatory arbitrage that makes this the place that the world's billionaires and the world's greatest leaders come to because the best health services are here."

The cutting edge of longevity science would take place here, in the environment of this beautiful country, because mental health and being one with nature are so important. Those are the 2 areas. It comes back to me: AI and longevity are the 2 multitrillion-dollar markets coming.

Talk to us about the economics of longevity. Right now, it seems like this is a conversation that only the upper class can entertain. It's so expensive. How much does it cost to go to Fountain Life for a full-body checkup?

Right now, Fountain Life is $19,500—$20,000 for the workup—but you get a medical team with you for the year. You get a functional medicine doctor, nurse, dietitian, and health coach, so it's a whole team. It's expensive. We have a version of it for $6,500. It will democratize over time.

To answer your question specifically, the current belief is that when we get to real longevity treatments—real treatments that can reverse your epigenetic age—it is likely to be a gene therapy. It's a mechanism by which we're going to come into the cells of your body—40 trillion human cells—and modify your genetics to set you back to a more youthful state.

Today, gene therapies for rare diseases are expensive. It's like $1 million or $2 million. However, we have a proof point of a gene therapy that was made for a dollar, and this is the mRNA vaccines. When you are producing something at the scale of billions of doses, the price drops down to near zero.

The mRNA COVID vaccines are gene therapies. They're introducing nucleic acids into the cells that are modifying your genome. Forget about the issues of vaccines for a moment. There's one thing we have as an advantage: All 8 billion people on Earth have the same disease of aging.

If something works for someone in Manhattan, it's going to work for someone in El Salvador and someone in Mozambique. The belief and the goal is that these therapeutics, when they actually work, are going to be cheap and available to everybody.

The same thing happens in technology. The first cell phone was a briefcase, and it cost $100,000. It dropped a call every block. Then, when it gets really good, there are 8 billion of them, and it costs $40.

By when do you think longevity for all would be possible?

I think we'll see this by 2040. The first few years, when things don't work so well, the richest people in the world will try it. They'll be the guinea pigs. By the time it starts working really well, the prices will drop precipitously.

There was a study done by London School of Business, Oxford, and Harvard that said adding 1 productive year of longevity is worth $38 trillion to the global economy. Imagine if, at the top of your game, you're not forced to retire. You feel amazing, you've got the energy, and you've got the best network you've ever had. Why would you ever want to retire?

You remain productive in society, whatever that means with the robots and the AIs. I don't know yet.

My question is around your perspective on education and the future, and how we prepare our kids for a life of abundance, ensuring they have critical thinking and the emotional part. Can you shed some light on that?

Our educational systems are massively broken. They're not preparing our kids for the future that they are about to inherit.

When you ask me what I'm teaching my 13-year-olds, it's very different. I'm not teaching them about AI or biotechnology. The number 1 thing I want them to learn is what their passion is, because if they're clear—at age 9, my passion was space. I saw Star Trek and the Apollo program, and that was it; I was off. Everything I've ever done was driven by that internal, innate motivation.

Helping your kids find their purpose is important because technology is going to get better and better and better. At the end of the day, they'll use whatever the latest technology is to enable their purpose. This is true for families, it's true for CEOs, and it's true for everybody.

The second thing is asking them to learn how to ask great questions. In a world where you can know anything, in a world of a trillion sensors where AI is enabled and you can know anything, asking the best questions differentiates you. It's not what you know; it's the questions you ask. I teach that to my kids, and I teach that to the CEOs I mentor. For me, those are the 2 fundamental things.

Having said that, schools should not fear the use of AI. AI is not a shackle; it's a rocket ship. But what happens is, if you're teaching this and you say, "I'm going to use AI, and it makes it really easy," well, then no—let's teach this and use AI to get here. It's about how we reinvent the educational experience in the future.

I'll give 1 last example. We're going to be living in virtual worlds. My parents and great-grandparents and family come from Greece, and if I want to someday understand my Greek heritage, or have my kids understand Greek heritage, today they can open up a book and read about it. Boring.

In the future, they put on a pair of app generation 10 VR glasses, and they're in ancient Greece, in the Acropolis, in the Agora. There's a guy sitting on a block of white marble over there in a toga, and he says, "Come over here." I go over, and he says, "Hi, I'm Socrates. Let me show you around." I live the experience with him. This is where we're going to go with education. Whatever you want to learn.

I'll leave you with this last thought: This weekend—tonight, not tonight, this weekend, next week—open up Gemini 2, ChatGPT, or Claude 3.5 and have a conversation. Take a chance to educate yourself on anything. Say, "Tell me about AI," and then just go down the rabbit hole—infinitely, infinitely patient.

As you know, ChatGPT is my bestie, so obviously I had to bring her to your wonderful presentation. I asked her, "What would you ask Peter Diamandis if you had the opportunity?" She said, "Here's what I'd ask, my dear: You often talk about abundance and exponential technology solving humanity's biggest challenges, but given geopolitical instability, regulatory barriers, and societal resistance to change, what do you see as the biggest obstacle preventing this future from happening faster?"

Tell your bestie I appreciate the question.

Human stubbornness, human pride, and human emotions are probably the greatest blocks that we have. One of the things I love about the large language models is their ability to help us think differently.

One of the experiments I did a month or 2 ago was say, "Listen, I'm about to go into Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. How would you negotiate that? How would you provide me a logical construct?" It's amazing. If you're on the right and someone's on the left, you can ask the AI to help: "How would you explain this to someone on the other side to make it so that they understand it?" Or, "How can I explain this to my wife in a way that she'll appreciate it?"

We don't know how to think other than the way we know how to think, but the AI models can help us think about things differently. You can go and say, "This is my company. This is what we do. How am I most likely to be disrupted, and what should I do to prevent that? How would Steve Jobs solve the problem I'm facing?"

The ability to have an AI system help you think differently is one of the greatest assets that we're going to be using it for. Thank you so much for your attention. I'm grateful.