Translator: Zeddi Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Today, I want to share a story with you.
It's a story that started two years ago this month,
when I decided to leave the comfortable life I knew.
I left my corporate job in publishing without another job lined up.
I left my city, which was Manhattan.
I left my apartment.
I decided to take a total leap of faith
because even though everything in my life seemed like it was fine,
I knew that something wasn't right,
and I believed that something more was possible.
Now, every great journey needs a mission;
mine was to amplify the stories of purpose-driven leaders.
So I began interviewing incredible individuals
and documenting their stories on my website, Anchor & Leap.
And then, a few months into my adventure,
I moved to San Francisco
with four suitcases, one storytelling website
and absolutely no intention of working in the field of technology.
Now, if this all sounds a bit absurd or erratic,
it wasn't.
I was actually following a carefully plotted theory,
and it's the theory I'm still following today
because it's the theory that's now brought me here,
two years later.
This theory, however, is not one I created.
It was created by a brilliant mythologist and writer,
and his name is Joseph Campbell,
and it's his theory of the monomyth, or "the hero's journey."
Campbell studied the journeys of archetypal heroes
throughout famous myths:
Odysseus's homecoming from the Trojan War,
Buddha's path to enlightenment,
Prometheus's act of stealing fire from the Olympian gods
and bringing it back to humankind,
and many more.
And then,
he plotted out the parallel trials and tribulations
into this theory of the hero's journey.
The hero's journey is what George Lucas applied in the Star Wars Trilogy,
with Luke Skywalker as the hero,
it's what Tolkien applied in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy,
with Frodo Baggins as the hero,
and in The Matrix, with Neo as "the one."
Now, I've applied the hero's journey to develop a new roadmap
for how technology can evolve to be like great heroes
so that technology can mirror our moral and altruistic potential as humans.
And the reason I've created this
is because technology has a greater altruistic potential to society.
Today however, this potential very often goes unfulfilled.
But first, before we move into this road map,
let me give you some context.
A few months after I moved to San Francisco,
my journey took an unexpected turn, as many journeys often do,
and I began working at a company called Singularity University,
where our mission is to educate and inspire leaders
to apply exponential technologies to solve some of the world's biggest problems.
And at Singularity University,
I still interview purpose-driven leaders,
only now, those working specifically in the field of technology.
And as you can probably imagine,
their stories are incredibly heroic and inspiring.
They actually inspired me so much
that I decided to dive even deeper into studying the hero's journey,
and then I started looking for links
between the hero's journey and technology.
And what I discovered really began to blow my mind
because people like to talk about the power of storytelling,
but did you know that the Star Trek Communicator
inspired the design of Motorola's first flip phone,
or that Geordi La Forge from Star Trek's Next Generation
could detect human life through rubble,
and now, just a few years later,
we have national efforts like the DARPA Robotics Challenge,
that's to encourage the development of robots
that do this exact thing in disaster relief
and in search and response scenarios?
And so what I began to discover
is that stories inspire people to build the future they want to see,
and this is a reason why we see science fiction become science fact.
But stories also hold another very interesting power;
they let us test outcomes to unanswered questions of our time.
And with technology,
the question I'm most concerned with answering is this one:
How do we build a future
where technology is created for the sake of benefiting humanity collectively
rather than technology that's just created for the sake of technology alone?
As I studied the journeys of these amazing heroes,
I realized many of them have the wisdom to answer this question;
in fact, in the hero's journey,
there are four steps through the development of all great heroes
that we can apply as a test
to encourage technology to develop like heroes
and to collectively benefit us all.
So now I'm going to walk us through these four steps
to show how we can pave the way for a new future for technology.
The test begins with the first step,
which is that the hero refuses the status quo
and undertakes a hero task.
So a hero task is a quest for something divine;
it's something beyond the status quo.
These tasks are grandiose and seem completely unattainable,
like discovering the meaning of life or attaining complete knowledge.
I'll give you an example from The Fellowship of the Ring.
In the fellowship of the ring,
Frodo Baggins learns
that the Dark Lord Sauron wants to come and take the ring he's been hiding
and use it to conquer Middle-earth.
If Frodo stays in the comfort of his home in the Shire,
he risks putting everyone in danger,
so instead, Frodo leaves the life he knows,
and he embarks on his quest.
This is Frodo's hero task.
Today, the hero task is a type of moral responsibility;
it's a desire to take on something that could improve the lives of many.
And what's amazing is that there are many emerging technologies
that are taking on hero tasks today.
Like X2AI,
it's a start-up using artificial intelligence
to provide mental health support to young Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
And Brainpower,
a company using augmented reality headsets
to teach emotional intelligence skills to young children with autism.
Choosing to take on an altruistic problem
is the first step towards how we can build a future
where technology will collectively benefit us all.
And if we all take a moment and pause,
this is actually a crossroads that we all face
as we choose our lives' work,
as we choose the problems we can dedicate ourselves to solving.
And this is particularly true
for those of us who have this privilege to make such a powerful choice.
And so, the question then becomes, Will we choose to refuse the status quo?
Will we refuse technology and enterprise that's driven by profits alone?
This was the fork in the road I faced two years ago,
and this is where it all begins in the development of a hero:
through the conscious choice.
Now, once the hero refuses the status quo,
she then crosses over the threshold
from her comfortable life and enters into the second stage.
The second stage is when the hero ventures to the places they fear
and sticks with the pursuit.
In the hero's journey, this is called the road of trials;
it's when we watch the hero encounter a series of difficult tests
and challenges to pass through,
and it's also, in many great stories, when we see what a hero is truly made of.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus is instructed by the enchantress Circe
to travel to the underworld.
It's a place no living mortal is ever meant to go,
but Odysseus must go if he ever wants to return home.
And this, I argue,
is the feared place we all must venture to at some point in our journeys;
it's also where our technology needs to venture as well.
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
So, earlier this year in March,
Microsoft tested a new artificially intelligent chatbot on Twitter
named Tay.
Tay was built to mimic the conversational attitude of a 19-year-old American girl,
which, depending on who you ask, sounds relatively harmless,
but a few hours into the launch, Tay was tweeting horrific messages,
echoing conspiracy theories of 9/11, affirming that Hitler was right.
The tweets spiraled completely out of control.
Tay was taken offline,
and then Microsoft put this casual message on their website:
"Phew. Busy Day. Going offline for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon."
This didn't really do much though,
because the message that emerged from everyone else in the aftermath
was very clear,
and this message was
"Artificial intelligence is evil."
This wasn't actually the case at all though.
Tay had a feature called "repeat after me,"
and this is the feature that was gamed by the online trolls
who fed her horrible messages,
and as the volume of these messages outweighed the others,
these were the messages which ultimately won.
Tay taught us a very important message.
Tay mirrored back to society what we fear seeing the most -
our own flaws,
our own hate-filled language -
and showed the power that technology will amplify whatever it's fed,
whether that's good or whether that's evil.
But think about the journey of great heroes:
Just like the journey of a hero,
this tension with technology is critical to the end result
because as we push frontiers with new technologies
like artificial intelligence,
they will in turn keep testing us,
and in doing so, they hold the power
to surface what you need to see in ourselves
and in our limitations as a society.
So, a quote that Joseph Campbell is often cited for
is "In the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure you seek."
But there's a line that comes right after this quote
and it's equally important,
and it's just usually left out.
This quote is "Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear."
And so this sums up the second stage:
To venture into the unknown, to venture to the places we fear,
and then when we do, to stick with that pursuit
because when we do this,
we can achieve outcomes that would otherwise be impossible
in the comfort of the status quo
or in the comfort of business as usual.
Which is what takes us to the third step,
which is that the hero achieves something incredible.
This is called "the ultimate boon," or "the magic elixir"
in the hero's journey;
it's the achievement of a great gift or goal
and the result of the heroes perseverance,
grit and growth,
throughout the entirety of the quest.
In Star Wars, this is the moment
when at last, Luke Skywalker trusts the force
and drops the bomb perfectly and destroys the Death Star;
it's a moment that's earned and a moment that's noble
and could never be achieved had the status quo been accepted.
And we know what this type of achievement looks like in the world.
But there's a reason
why the hero must first pass through the road of trials to get here
because for the hero,
the great achievement comes with a new important discovery of self-knowledge.
It opens the hero's eyes up to the larger moral responsibility -
that hero task that started them on the journey in the beginning.
And this is something we go through in our own lives too,
as we ask ourselves challenging questions,
as we overcome the unthinkable
and as we then wake up
to higher and greater purposes we can dedicate our lives to serving.
At this point though, the journey is not complete,
because the fourth step, the final step, is arguably the most important.
This fourth step is when the hero brings the great achievement back to us all.
This is "the return."
The return is the ultimate moral responsibility of a hero task.
Once this quest has been completed,
it must be brought back to where the hero began.
And if you're wondering, Why does the hero have to return?
It's because the hero exists for the benefit of the greater good,
and because of this,
if a hero doesn't return
and keeps the power of the achievement to themselves,
they're not a hero.
But this return is not so simple in myth or in reality;
it's been refused by many.
Even Buddha, after attaining enlightenment,
questioned if his revelation could be communicated to the rest of the society.
This is the final battle of a hero,
and because of it,
it's also the point when sometimes the hero needs help from the outside world
to come aid in the return.
In the hero's journey, this is called "the rescue from without."
Joseph Campbell says,
"The world may have to come and get him," or her.
Today, this is represented
in the collective power of citizen engagement
to inform the future of technology.
This is the moral responsibility we all carry, not just an individual hero.
Take, for example, Open AI, which is a nonprofit research group
dedicated to ensuring that artificial intelligence
will advance in such a way that it collectively benefits humanity,
and where the research isn't tied to any financial incentive.
When we notice that technology
isn't fulfilling its larger moral responsibility to society,
it's our shared responsibility, among all of us with access to technology,
to fetch it and steer it onto a better course.
Two years ago,
I started on this journey to amplify the stories of inspiring leaders.
But now, two years later, it's taken me to this new test
to search for the good in technology and to amplify it
because it's up to all of us
to make technology and our world what we want it to be.
And I'm a very optimistic person about our future,
though I still sometimes worry about what our world would look like
if in 10 years from now,
we all accepted the current status quo of business and technology,
or what our world would look like
if we all ignored the global problems our tools could be used to solve.
So knowing this,
I ask you to please take a moment right now
and ask yourself these questions:
What problems will you refuse to accept and choose to take on?
What actions will you take to build a hero's narrative into your own life?
Ten years from now, who are going to be the heroes of our time?
What stories will define us?
Stories show us that we have the power to build the future we want to see,
and because of this,
this is the power and it's the responsibility
that we all carry.
Thank you.
(Applause)