Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
I work with the Millennium Project, that began 15 yeas ago
as the futurist part of the United Nations
and, in the last three years,
they have also been working at Singularity University,
that I'm going to tell you more about, later.
The Millennium Project - we have offices all around the world,
including here, in Brazil,
and we publish every year a report about the future of humanity.
And this year, actually, we talk about Latin America in the year 2030,
and how things are going to be in the year 2030. OK.
Three years ago, a university was created with Google and NASA,
and now we have many other sponsors to prepare humanity
for what is going to come in the next 20 to 30 years,
and one of those things, obviously, is energy.
The big energy source in the planet is obviously solar power.
If look at the amount of solar power we receive,
in one hour of solar power,
we receive energy for about one whole year;
one hour of solar energy for one year.
Then, we have other sources, like wind energy, and so on.
But there are problems, like global warming.
Global warming, as you know, is real.
Global warming is happening, OK?
So, we have to consider one of the big issues is not only energy,
but also the environment.
Energy is changing in different waves,
and each wave is cleaner and it has less carbon,
which is the bad part, the carbon.
So, we're going through a de-carbonization of energy
and the creation, also, of an "Energy Internet."
This was a concept that was invented almost 40 years ago,
and now it has actually received that name, the "Enernet,"
"Energy Internet,"
and this will connect the whole planet,
and we will move from dirty energy into clean energy,
with the whole planet connected through this Energy Internet.
Besides that, we're also moving into biofuels, bioenergy,
and Brazil is a power in the world in terms of biofuels, OK?
And there's a scientist called Craig Venter,
who is also one of our faculty at Singularity University,
and he's working on artificial bacteria that will produce biofuels.
So, this is one of the new innovations in energy coming up.
Energy, also in terms of solar power, is increasing exponentially,
and the cost is decreasing exponentially.
In the next two years,
we're going to reach what is called grid parity,
when solar energy is going to become cheaper than fossil fuel energy
and, at that time, the whole planet will move into solar energy.
If we needed to power humanity with solar energy,
we'd basically only need six blocks in some of the deserts of the planet.
These six blocks, each one of 100 km by 100 km,
would produce enough electricity for civilization today.
So, actually, it's not so much land that we need.
In Europe, together with North Africa,
they are working on a project called Desertec.
In the next 20 to 30 years,
they want to produce all the energy that Europe needs from North Africa,
and this is just beginning, it's in negotiations,
but this will be fantastic.
It will be like a Saudi Arabia of solar energy for Europe,
and the same could happen here in the Americas,
with Brazil being the new Saudi Arabia of solar power for the Americas.
And we are going to have all kinds of solar-powered animals,
like this solar donkey,
and also a solar camel, OK? There we have a solar camel.
We will power humanity, every part of the world,
including Africa, that is the dark continent so far,
with electricity in the next 20 years,
because we are going to have this Enernet, Energy Internet,
connecting the whole planet.
And energy, eventually, will be free.
Energy is going to be like the Internet.
It is basically going to be free everywhere.
NASA has a plan for the year 2020 about space-based solar power,
and this will work with this kind of solar satellites orbiting planet Earth,
and then this energy will be beamed through microwaves to planet Earth.
The Japanese are working on something similar
and, by the year 2030,
they want to begin powering Tokyo
with this electricity coming from outer space,
where the Sun never sets; the Sun never sets in outer space.
So, this is a continuous energy source, all the time.
And we need this energy because we will also finally begin exploring the space.
We are going to leave our tiny planet in the next 10 to 20 years
to begin with finally Moon colonies and Mars colonies,
and for that we need a lot of energy.
This is a very complicated scale,
which is called the Kardashev energy scale.
Kardashev is a Russian scientist, an astrophysicist,
who computed the amount of energy in the universe.
And he talked about three different types of civilization.
Civilization type one is a civilization
that uses all the energy that is available to its planet.
In our case, planet Earth,
we receive 170 terawatts of solar energy,
continuously, from the Sun.
That could make us civilization type one,
but we are very far from being civilization type one.
And then, there would be a civilization type two,
when we use the solar power in the solar system,
and civilization type three is a civilization
that uses all the solar energy in a galaxy.
And eventually, a civilization type five
would use all the energy that is available in the universe,
and that is a big, big number.
If you look at the bottom here,
it's 1 times 10 to the 46 watts of power that is available in the universe.
So, we are still babies in terms of energy.
We are not even close to being civilization type one.
To give you an order of magnitude of how much energy or power we have,
a human body produces and consumes about 100 watts.
We are 100-watt machines.
And our brain, actually, requires 30 watts.
The brain is the most energy-intensive organ in the body.
30 watts.
So, we could talk a lot about energy,
but I invite you to watch Discovery Channel Latin America.
There's a series which is called "2111"
and I was the adviser for the energy program.
So, I hope that you can watch this on Discovery Channel Latin America.
But I want to talk more about the future
and what is going to happen besides energy.
And for that, I like Mafalda, the most famous Argentinian philosopher.
(Laughter)
And, you know, when people ask Mafalda, "What is the future?,"
then she says, "Well, the future is no longer what it used to be."
So, Mafalda is a very famous philosopher and futurist.
We'll talk about four ways of looking at the future.
First, the passive attitude, like an ostrich that hides its head
and doesn't want to see what is going to happen;
the worst possible type of futurist.
You don't want to know what is going to happen.
Second is to be reactive:
when you prepare for something, you respond like a firefighter.
The third type is preactive:
when you want to really prepare for something that's happening,
but the fourth and best type of futurist is to be proactive,
so that you can build the future,
you can construct the future you want to be in.
So, I hope that there are no ostriches here,
but, if there are ostriches, I hope that you are technological ostriches.
OK?
Using technology to change the world.
Three years ago,
Singularity University was created with the initial support of NASA and Google.
This university is located in Silicon Valley, in California.
We have had students from all over the planet.
In this room, we have four of our students.
Four of our students are here in this room and I talked to you before.
So, we want to have more Brazilians,
we want to have people from all over the world,
because our mission is to use technology to change the world for the better.
And the idea of the singularity might not be known to all of you.
Please, raise your hand if you know what the singularity is.
Have you heard about the technological singularity?
This idea was popularized by one MIT engineer called Ray Kurzweil.
He wrote this book, The Singularity Is Near, in 2005,
and this has been the most widely sold book on Amazon.com,
in Science and Technology.
And he talks about the singularity
as the time when technology changes so fast
that humans cannot keep track with the technology,
unless we enhance ourselves,
unless we modify ourselves with the technology itself.
There is another shorter definition of the singularity,
which is the time, the moment,
when artificial intelligence reaches human intelligence levels,
and that is the last invention that humans will ever make
because, after having intelligence
superior to human intelligence, there is nothing that we can do,
unless we enhance ourselves with technology.
Now, how can you know that, if it's going to happen?
If you look at the trend, which is slower,
Gordon Moore was the co-founder of Intel,
and he discovered that, every two years, computers double their power
and they become cheaper, and this trend continues, continues.
This is a logarithmic scale.
Let me show you what has happened in the last 30 years.
Thirty years ago, we used the IBM punch cards.
This has 1K of memory.
This was an electromechanical memory.
And these were invented later: the floppy disk, with 8 inches.
This also has 1K,
but this 1K was better because this is electromagnetic,
and this was mechanical.
And this one you could erase and you could write again on.
So, this is better. But we had 1K and 1K.
So, 30 years ago, we had -
In Spanish, I say, (Spanish) "1 K and 1 K is too little;
a ridiculously little memory."
Thirty years ago.
Then, we moved from this
to different, more advanced memories.
You all knew this, probably; and also this.
If you come to Korea and Japan, where I also teach,
they are producing these new types of memories
that are like Lego pieces that you can add on to.
This is 128 gigabytes.
So, look, we have gone from (Spanish) too little
to 128 gigabytes.
Well, you will remember me in 20 years,
and you will remember the (Spanish) "too little,"
but this will be (Spanish) too little, in 20 years.
In 20 years, we're going to have computers
that will be more powerful than the human brain,
that is, computers that have more transistors
than the human brain has neurons.
So, let me keep on talking about that.
Time Magazine just published recently an article about the singularity.
One of the consequences of the singularity
is that we will reach physical immortality in two ways:
in the human hardware and the human software.
So, let me tell you about that.
A few years ago, I went to visit Sir Arthur C. Clark,
who was one of the most futurist and science fiction writers,
and he wrote, half a century ago, the three laws of the future.
Law number one:
when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right,
but when he says it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Second law: the only way of discovering the limits of the possible
is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
And the third law: any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.
This has a corollary: if you see something that does not look like magic,
it's because it is not advanced.
Thirty years ago, we had no personal computers.
Twenty years ago, mobile phones were beginning.
Ten years ago, Google was growing.
What will happen in the next 10, 20, 30 years?
Magical phase. We are going to see magical technologies.
We are going to have immortal cells.
We will control the aging process.
We will have free energy.
Like free internet, we will have free energy.
We will have space elevators.
One of our professors at Singularity University is working on aging,
and he says that aging is a disease, but it is a curable disease.
We will cure aging in the next 20 to 30 years.
Today, he created this prize, which is the Methuselah Mouse Prize,
to have mice that are going to live 1,000 years like Methuselah.
And today, we have mice that live three times their expected lifetime.
Three times, today.
In the next ten years, we'll probably have one mouse
that lives the equivalent to a 1,000 human years.
This is happening now,
and with other species, we even have longer lifespans.
The National Science Foundation talks about the four technologies of the future:
nano, bio, info, cogno.
Nanotechnology studies the atoms;
biotechnology, the living cells.
Nano and bio are the hardware of life,
and info and cogno are the software of life.
Info studies the bits and cogno studies the neurons.
So, we have the hardware of life and the software of life.
And everything is becoming mixed with virtual reality;
not just real reality, but virtual reality.
This is my human genome.
All of you will have your genome sequenced in the next ten years,
and you will know which diseases you will have in the future.
But the important thing is not to know which diseases you will have,
but how to cure them, how to cure the diseases,
how to prevent the diseases.
You will know where your family comes from.
This is my paternal line, 500 years ago;
my maternal line, also, 500 years ago.
You can reconstruct your family tree,
and you can construct the descendants, the children you want.
You will choose the genes you want for the future
and create your own descendants.
This is actually very cheap.
People think this is expensive. It was expensive at the beginning.
The first human genome cost $ 1 billion to do.
Now, in a few years, it will cost about $ 10,
and it will be done in one hour.
So, this is the complexity of the hardware of the human body,
which is 3 gigabytes; the human body is 3 gigabytes.
I showed you the pen drive before, that has 128 gigabytes.
How many humans can I fit here?
I can fit here 42 Brazilians and 1 Argentinian.
(Laughter)
And then, we will also have the complexity of the software, which is the brain.
What is the complexity?
And the complexity, basically -
In Japan, they're working on creating artificial brains in the years 2018.
And what is a brain?
A brain is basically a machine
that computes 10 to the 17th operations per second,
and we will reach this in the next 10 to 15 years.
We will have machines with the computer processing of a brain,
and we will mix with the machines.
We will mix and we will create better brains - than that -,
but we will mix with external brain implants.
Computers are doing that already.
We will interact with robots.
These are the last 15 years of ASIMO.
Imagine the next 15 years of ASIMO.
And robots will have feelings, and they will be fantastic.
Also, for women, they will be fantastic, and they will not get tired.
(Laughter)
But robots in the West are bad.
In Asia, they are good, they're actually good.
We will merge with the machines.
In the Olympic Games now, this is one of the athletes from South Africa,
who has no legs.
We will cure all the diseases in the next 20 years,
including all these horrible diseases,
and, eventually, we will conquer aging.
Aging will die.
Death will die in the next 20 years, if you don't want to die.
If you want to die, that's OK. You can die,
but, if you don't want to die, you will not have to die.
This is called transhumanism,
a philosophy about humans transcending our limitations, but carefully.
And so, I just want to finish,
saying that there is always the dark side of the force.
We have to be careful; these technologies can be used for bad things.
So, the world is one, we have to meditate. I do a lot of meditation.
And I finish with this Chinese word, that means "crisis."
This expression has two parts.
The first first part means "danger," but the second part means "opportunity."
So, in every crisis, there is danger, but there is opportunity.
(Portuguese) Thank very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)