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Some Future Day evaluates technology at the intersection of culture & law.
Join Marc Beckman and his esteemed guests for insider knowledge surrounding how you can use new technologies to positively impact your life, career, and family. Marc Beckman is Senior Fellow of Emerging Technologies and an Adjunct Professor at NYU, CEO of DMA United, and a member of the New York State Bar Association’s Task Force on Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets.
Some Future Day - Episode 2: The Threats & Opportunities of AI, VR, and Robotics | with Robert Scoble
[00:00:00] Marc Beckman: All right. I'm thrilled to welcome Robert Scoble to Some Future Robert has been a pillar in the the technology community a strategic thinker, mind, and well ahead of the curve for over three decades. Robert? my first question to you is this. Why it seem like every new technologies are brought out, there's a certain type of that we experience as business people politicians, the media, there's always like a to new technologies, Robert. So what do where's from? And do you even agree? are we going through this resist time where there's resistance again?
[00:02:17] Robert Scoble: Yes, every time there's a paradigm shift, uh, people resist. Uh, and mostly it's, they resist change. new technology, new ideas, new thinking represents new work for them. And most people don't like to do extra work. They don't like to study new things. They don't like to consider new things. They don't want to, you know, if they work in a factory, they don't want to rip up their, their workstation and do things a different way.
[00:02:44] And they certainly don't want to lose their jobs. So there's a lot of resistance there. There's a lot of fear about AI right now because of that.
[00:02:51] Marc Beckman: do you think that resistance is a global phenomenon?
[00:02:54] Robert Scoble: Oh yeah. I've been in 70 different countries and, and you hear the same resistance worldwide. In some places it's worse Actually in Silicon Valley at least we know, you know, Hey, there's a. You know, if you change, there's companies that spring up and there's, you know, there's good stuff that comes with that.
[00:03:14] But around the world, most people don't have Silicon Valley in their backyard. So they, you know, their parents tell them, Oh, go, go get a real job. You don't start a startup, you know, stuff like that. And so you hear a different kind of resistance around the world that you wouldn't hear here in Silicon Valley.
[00:03:29] But Here in Silicon Valley, every time, you know, a new email tool comes out, people are like, why do we need to use email? I, you know, I'm old, so I remember the days before email.
[00:03:40] Marc Beckman: Me too, too. I stories about when I was in law school, we had an email that we can only use within the the school, and when law school, I kid you not, I had to give my email, to return my email address and all of my emails. Can you imagine?
[00:03:59] Robert Scoble: Yeah,
[00:04:00] Marc Beckman: It's really dating myself a a little bit. So, so on global though, like in your experience and in in your opinion, do you feel like the innovation worldwide is at a, more than average pace than typical?
[00:04:14] Robert Scoble: It is right now because, AI is making all the programmers more efficient. Many of them say it sped them up by 50%. So, you know, something that used to take a month now takes two weeks. And in some cases, it takes a lot less than that, right? I've had many people say, man, it wrote a month's worth of code in an hour for me, you know?
[00:04:37] And... And because of that, you're seeing that speed up, but you're also seeing speed up because of the AI world. As AI gets more data, they can use AI to do more things, right? And so you're seeing this whole industry just booed up. I have a Twitter list or next list of 1600 AI companies now that really didn't exist a year ago.
[00:05:01] And so this whole world is just springing up like, uh, mushrooms after rain.
[00:05:07] Marc Beckman: Where are are you seeing other than in, Silicon Valley and States, which regions of the planet you about as it relates to innovation and growth? Maybe as it relates to AI, but in general.
[00:05:20] Robert Scoble: there's three places that really you see a lot of innovation being done. Israel, because of its startup nation. And there's a lot of reasons that that happened. They generate more startups in Israel than any other country and it's a far smaller country than any place else.
[00:05:37] and China, uh, is something to work and watch, you know, but we don't have really that much, uh, touch points with China right there. Most of the startups there are going after their internal market, which is quite large. Um, but every once in a while you'll see a DGI or a Insta360 you kick out and try to build a global brand out of China.
[00:05:59] So
[00:05:59] Marc Beckman: It's interesting that you mentioned like I told you, I, I was fascinated to, um, learn about you. We did some research and I think you you uh, that your, your was in and a brave man In fact, I think he was very vocal against the the Nazis.
[00:06:19] Robert Scoble: Yeah, he was arrested for speaking out against the Nazis, right, but it, which caused a split in the family that continues to this day, right, because part of the family is like, you're putting us at risk by doing this kind of speaking out and getting arrested. And we don't want to be on these people's radar screen, right?
[00:06:40] So it really caused a rift in the family. But yeah, my mom grew up in Germany and immigrated here and so so I to see the, uh, I call it the German Mafiaa, right? Because there's all these in Silicon Valley, there's all these mafias. There's the Indian Mafiaa, there's the Jewish Mafiaa, there's the j German Mafiaa, there's a Muslim mafiaa.
[00:07:01] I just went to a Muslim ai, uh, meetup ,
[00:07:05] Marc Beckman: You know, so it's really like the way that that articulating all different mafioso, um, so, so
[00:07:11] so
[00:07:12] Robert Scoble: Oh, they run the place, man.
[00:07:14] Marc Beckman: AI, so does, does, seems like AI have boundaries, in a time where we're living, know, it seems like culturally so split, we're so divided because of politics, do you think that artificial can work humans back together again, to unify us?
[00:07:33] Robert Scoble: you can ask chat GPT or any of these large language models, uh, show me all points of view on X on something, right? And it does. And that's positive, right? Because it shows you, you know, you can put a, a political problem in there, like show me all points of view on abortion, right? And it'll, it will give you a holistic view.
[00:07:56] That's positive. But it could also. Take you down a rabbit hole and turn you more and more extreme, i. e. more and more toward the edges and therefore it could make our democracy worse in a lot of so it's something that definitely to be aware of and watching because it You know, it's, it's cool. It doesn't care about us really.
[00:08:24] It cares about laying down the next word. That's all it really cares about, right? And it's really good at that. It's so good at that that humans think it's a college essay, right? But all it did was lay down a next word. Yes.
[00:08:37] Marc Beckman: So, so you're really referencing, um, LLMs then,
[00:08:42] Robert Scoble: Yeah. These new large language models that are the technology, the machine that's Google barred and stuff like that.
[00:08:51] Marc Beckman: Do you, do think that will carry over that that, that you're talking about where I guess it it doesn't understand, bias and, and, types of statements? Will carry
[00:09:04] into other types of types AI?
[00:09:06] Robert Scoble: Well, first of all, I mean, technically it doesn't understand anything other than laying down the next word.
[00:09:10] right?
[00:09:11] Marc Beckman: right.
[00:09:12] Robert Scoble: Just to protect myself against all the AI people who are like, ah, you know, this is a machine that just knows how to lay down the next word, and it knows how to do that. Because it studied all human knowledge, right?
[00:09:24] It ingested all of that. It read my blogs for 20 years and ingested that into this machine that's like a, a, a, a very complex machine with a trillion knobs on it. And the way you turn these knobs is to talk English to it. You actually program it with your own language. You can talk any number of languages to it, right?
[00:09:44] Um, yeah, these LLMs, Uh, they do understand, I mean if you ask them a question like can you explain what kind of biases exist in AI like yourself, it answers the question and it does a very very good job at that. It does understand at some level because of how it was built, but, it, um, also ingested all of our human knowledge.
[00:10:12] So if you ask it, here's, here's an example. If you ask it, um, please show me, please tell me about how Silicon Valley was started. It leaves the Chinese out just like Leland Stanford left the Chinese out because Leland Stanford pays all the historians to write the history. He wrote the history because he's the victor.
[00:10:34] He doesn't have to include the people he beat up. 1, 300 people died building his transcontinental railroad. and then they weren't invited to the final party. They don't like to talk about that at Stanford University. They will if you ask them. And GPT is the same way. If you start asking them about the role of the Chinese, all of a sudden it gives you a different answer.
[00:10:56] Right? But there was an original bias there in the first answer that, you know, it picked up from us. Right? And, and that's a, that's a egregious case, a big case. There's lots of little places like that's where it picked up our biases from our society. By the way, this is going to be a tool that you use to find all sorts of things in society.
[00:11:19] Like I've used it to find a screw in a Lowe's. It knew where it was.
[00:11:24] Right?
[00:11:25] So. Did it pick up, if you start asking it questions, like if you're a banker and you're using it to run your, your banking system, does it pick up your redlining that you used to do back in the 50s and
[00:11:37] Marc Beckman: Right.
[00:11:37] Robert Scoble: They could.
[00:11:38] Marc Beckman: so that's an question then then because what you're talking about to a certain extent, maybe today, during early stage, the entity, and maybe this is also fueled a lot by venture capital private but the entity Or wins training these LLMs can also set the tone for our history and influence people perhaps to government.
[00:12:06] You You for is China programming their LLMs to Be communist or, you know, themed around communism. And then will Chinese people are training, the Chinese LLMs, will they ultimately, beat American trained LLMs?
[00:12:26] Robert Scoble: It will if you want to learn how to make an electric railroad. As have a thousand of them over in China, we don't have one yet in America, so how are we going to train an LLM to teach you how to build one of those? They could, right? So their, their LLM will have things that ours don't have, but I guarantee you there won't be any talk of Tiananmen Square in that LLM, right?
[00:12:51] They'll make sure that gets removed from any training data that they train their LLMs on. So if you're looking for accurate, uh, historical analysis of what happened in Tiananmen Square, you're not going to use the Chinese one.
[00:13:03] Marc Beckman: you that the, Chinese government Chinese population is better than than the Americans at, you know, building New structures, you mentioned the electric train, but I, I've been been a lot in the space too, coincidentally, and I that, you know in in a very short period of time, it seems like the Chinese could go in, an entire station, build a new building, and and it takes us here in 24, 36 months to do a thing.
[00:13:34] the same thing's happening in California. So is China beating on front?
[00:13:39] Robert Scoble: Uh, depends how you look at it, right? If you ask at all points of view, there's a, there's a pro view and an anti view. I China, I visited Shanghai back in, um, 1995 and they took me up in a little TV tower that still is there and looks like a series of balls on a, on a tripod. And they said, look over there.
[00:14:04] And they had just. completely, uh, uh, tore down everything on this island. In other words, the island was flat. And they said, we're going to put our Wall Street there. And they did in the last 20 years. Now, if you go to, uh, Shanghai, uh, you, you see this huge, uh, Wall Street with tall buildings, some of the tallest in the world, right? But tore down a whole bunch of neighborhoods. And they probably didn't go through a lot of public discussion like they would here in the United States where, you know, you know, if you want to build a freeway through Los Angeles right now, you'd have to have 30 years of meetings with to try to convince them that's a good idea.
[00:14:51] And then you'd have to do eminent domain and go through the court process and all that. No, in China, they just filled in. They just tell you to move, right? And you have to, there's a different
[00:15:03] Marc Beckman: So there's the, there's the loss, right? Like they might be more as far as leveraging new technologies, to but at who's, you know, at who's detriment? at the the people's detriment.
[00:15:14] Robert Scoble: There's always a pro and a con to these things, right? And, you know, they do build things very quick. And I've talked to factory owners over there and they sort of make fun of our system. It's like, hey, you guys can't get anything done over there. We can build a factory, you know, you know, in a month.
[00:15:29] Marc Beckman: Yeah, it's incredible. I see I see it But, like, is, like, in in your opinion, there's, there are a lot of races that are happening in AI right now, right? Like domestically in States and U. S. versus China, we've, we all go through it. in your opinion, do like the competitive, uh, nature of an individual matters in these AI wars or do think about the funding and and the behind?
[00:15:57] Robert Scoble: Uh,
[00:15:58] Marc Beckman: entities
[00:15:59] Robert Scoble: I mean, I'm looking at a list of AI artists, about a thousand people using, you know, Mid Journey and uh, Diffusion to create art, right? Those are individuals who are using AI to do something new that wasn't possible a year ago. So, yeah, there, there's a lot of impact there. I mean, you, you see the money because The leverage that this gives a company is extraordinary. I mean, you see an open AI come out of almost nowhere and getting 13 billion from Microsoft to a system that integrates into all the Microsoft tools, right? This large language model system, That gives them a lot of leverage that, you know, we haven't seen in the tech And so the, the Funding events are getting extraordinary, you know, they're just unreal. I remember, you know, back in the old days, uh, this little startup called Color came out and they, it got 41 million dollars investment and everybody in the valley was outraged. It was like, that's so much money for a company that doesn't have a customer, doesn't have a, you know, a sales, right?
[00:17:08] And now that seems like a dime on the sidewalk compared to some of the funding events I've seen this year.
[00:17:15] Marc Beckman: But There's still some right Like I I remember you you um, open AI. AI. think like Elon Musk out a few months ago and said, whoa. whoa Although I helped finance it seems like Microsoft is really controlling open AI now and furthermore. I think there's such a high risk with in general, everybody should put the brakes on and figure things out.
[00:17:41] But is that like Elon just playing games and trying catch up here and, and, and, you know, the competitive spirit of Elon Musk in in play?
[00:17:49] Robert Scoble: There's something to the existential threat, I, you know, I sat next to one of the top AI safety researchers in the world for 10 hours on a plane trip last year. And he laid out, well, you know, yeah, it could go on a line. In fact, my, my show's called Online because of this conversation. It could go on a line.
[00:18:10] It could go anti human. How would that happen? Well, the AI today is already better at seeing tumors and scans than a surgeon is. And surgeon is our most highly trained human being there is. And if the AI is already beating the surgeon at his job or her job, Uh, you know, you take that 20 years down the road, it's going to be better than us at a lot of things.
[00:18:34] Maybe everything. So, if it gets to that point, does it decide it doesn't need us anymore? Because it's better than us, right? It go on a line. It could go anti human. It could decide to turn us off in various ways and cause us problems. Existential threat. I, +I+ get that. I, I, I think that it. As we join with AI and as AI gets, uh, smarter, uh, it's going to show us how to make sure that we build the guardrails so it doesn't do that.
[00:19:06] And there's lots of companies working on that. Anthropic, for instance, gives its AI a constitution so that it'll stay on task and
[00:19:14] not go completely unaligned and do something anti human. But there's a whole lot of other problems from joblessness, uh, you know, because These things are going after our jobs.
[00:19:24] Let's be honest, you know, if you have a job driving a car today, you're not going to have a job in 20 years. In 20 years, it's going to be completely autonomous, our transportation system. So how's a human going to be driving a truck or a car? That doesn't make sense to me. So let's start talking about what kinds of policies we need to get people to be retrained, uh, give them a fair shot at the American dream again, and, uh, and get them back.
[00:19:51] And, you know, it's, we should have a debate about, uh, you know, guaranteed minimum income, because this is going to be a problem. The, the, the AI is coming after everybody's job. If anybody thinks it's not, even a highly, you know, human job like nursing, it's going to come after that kind of thing. You're going to have a robot doing the, the, the, you know, the rounds on patients soon, right?
[00:20:17] Marc Beckman: So So touching um, lot of interesting topics here. Um, you, you had mentioned, or like alluded to the concept of. Humans working with AI, right? And, and I'm curious in your are we we to a point in time where we actually integrate into so that we can work with the artificial intelligence at higher, efficient level?
[00:20:46] And if so, so,
[00:20:47] Robert Scoble: Now, people are already getting it. If you have a hearing problem, you're getting cochlear impants. They're putting sensors into your brain. And that's it. If you have Parkinson's, they're already putting an electrode in your brain. And if your hands shake, uh, because you have Parkinson's, you can't hold a cup of water or something like that, and feed yourself, can't wipe yourself in the, in the bathroom.
[00:21:13] Well, then you go to the doctor and say, man, I, my life sucks. I can't, I can't do anything. My hands are always shaking. Well, they put a electrode in your brain and they turn it on and your hands stop shaking, right? I've met the surgeons who do that. They say, well, now we have a discussion with the patient, like how many wires do you want on your brain?
[00:21:30] You need one. We're going in there to put one in, but do you want four? Do you want eight? You know? Do you want a Neuralink soon with 32, 000 wires? Right? Yeah, yeah, we can hook you up. We could give you some new features, you know, improve your life.
[00:21:47] Marc Beckman: you're, you're talking about, um, medical types benefits that come, but, but if, if I had some sort of a physical just for my daily life, life or purposes where where, where do
[00:22:00] Robert Scoble: The is that surgery is 150, 000 and it comes with a lot of side effects because, first of all, you're cutting somebody's head open, you're, you know, putting a quarter inch hole in their skull, and then you're having a robot go in and put a bunch of wires down on your brain. That. It's not something that normal everyday people are going to sign up for today.
[00:22:21] First of all, normal everyday people don't have 150 grand lying around to do this. And second of all, they don't want to sign up for the side effects. There's ways to do some of this on the outside of your head, right? I have a device from a company called NextMind, which puts a bunch of sensors on the back of of your head, presses them against your skin, and then it can sort of tell what you're looking at because the back of your head is where you do all your visual processing.
[00:22:47] So like I'm looking at you right now, all that processing is being done at the back of your head. AI, it can sort of start figuring out what am I looking at?
[00:22:58] Marc Beckman: That's pretty wild. do anticipate, um, a situation where there's the haves the have nots? Maybe a greater divide in society? Because for a 150, 000 surgery, a lot of people in the upper of society that wouldn't even think about it, and if that's going to their performance, their quality of life, their their earn, why
[00:23:23] they
[00:23:24] Robert Scoble: grotesques, you know, are you going to get Neuralink? Let's talk about Apple Headset. Apple headsets come in in Headset's coming in April next year, and it's around 3, 500, right? That, that is not affordable by a lot of people in society. I mean, out of the 8 billion people on the earth, how many people can afford a 3500 computing device?
[00:23:46] Marc Beckman: But I,
[00:23:47] Robert Scoble: plenty,
[00:23:47] but there's a very small number in terms of 8 billion people, right?
[00:23:51] Marc Beckman: but but I don't that was um, objective at this first stage, right? I think they're
[00:23:56] Robert Scoble: they know that the price will come down, you know, over the next decade, and that 10 years from now, most people are wearing glasses. Augmented reality glasses are a superpower. If you want to fly an F 35 fighter jet, you have to put on the augmented reality device they make. Right? That gives the pilot a whole lot of superpowers.
[00:24:16] And the same thing is going to come to your boardroom. if CEO has a pair of these glasses on, he can see your sale or she can see your sales in a whole different way than you can, can look at your, uh, data lakes now, right? You know, if you work at a bank, you have petabytes of data going through your system, it can let you see that data in a new way.
[00:24:38] It gives you superpowers at work, and you're absolutely right. If you have the glasses on, you're going to be more productive than if you don't have the glasses
[00:24:46] on. And
[00:24:46] Marc Beckman: to real time
[00:24:47] data, access to historic references, And, and if my colleague doesn't have that ability, I win every time,
[00:24:56] right? So it's interesting when you
[00:24:57] Robert Scoble: VR showed me that. They showed me, uh, ability to see data in 3D, lings, like on the factory floor. She showed me a factory floor where instead of looking at a spreadsheet of each machine's performance, I could actually look at the machine and it would tell me. Right? That lets me see patterns in data that I just couldn't see before.
[00:25:19] Marc Beckman: so when you talk about spatial, like you're getting into the spatial computing, uh, obviously, uh, conversation, and I, I the that you did surrounding Apple Vision Pro. It was very insightful. Something that really caught my attention when when Apple Meta approach, which is really heavy on, on VR, this concept that you started describing, which was transition.
[00:25:43] We'll beat revolution. The transition applies to Apple's spatial computing, whereby the revolution is what doing it relates to VR. So can you you take a second and talk a little bit about, about why I, I assume you're saying you're betting on, on Apple in the short term it relates to to uh,
[00:26:05] Robert Scoble: Zuckerberg will have some fun with a Quest 3, right? Um, the problem is he, he doesn't have a lot of AI inferencing. uh, uh, uh, You know, because he's using a Qualcomm chipset in his headsets and the GPU in that Qualcomm chipset, which is really an Android phone stuck on your head, right? The GPU is about one half the power of an Apple GPU in an Apple phone.
[00:26:34] So right there, they're behind. on the ability to do AI inferencing. So what's about to happen in society is we're about to get uh, 3D environments that are photorealistic that are generated by AI, right? Nerfs, neural radiance fields they call them, or Gaussian splats. You're about to get virtual beings that are completely generated by AI.
[00:26:58] You're talking to chat GPT through a thing that's standing here in the room, right, or on your screen, and those are virtual beings. Those are about to come, and they're coming a lot, I'm watching a lot of companies building these. Um, there's a few other things coming as well. All of that requires AI inferencing.
[00:27:17] Now, Mark has a problem because Apple has a phone. Apple can put a lot of GPU and antennas and CPU and battery down in the phone and run a pair of glasses with the phone, right? And do a lot of AI stuff on the phone as AI stuff on the phone well as on its ecosystem because Apple has, um, A new radio network that nobody knows about called Ultra Wideband, and that can let your glasses talk to the M1 in your Macintosh that I'm talking to you on.
[00:27:53] In the Macintosh, the M1 processor that I'm talking to you on, 21 percent of that is neural network. It's not being used right now. The conversation me and you are having on my computer is not using that piece of the chip at all, but there's a lot of AI inferencing sitting there. So it can run all these new kinds of things on the Apple ecosystem that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have.
[00:28:18] So he has to put everything in the cloud. He has to put all the AI inferencing on an NVIDIA card up in a datacenter somewhere and shove the results down to your glasses and keep the glasses lightweight. Well that shows you a difference in philosophy on privacy, on latency, you uh, you know, if the AI Because if the inferencing is being done either on your headset or on the phone in front of you, or on the computer around you, it never leaves the house.
[00:28:46] Marc Beckman: Right.
[00:28:47] Robert Scoble: Now, think about, you know, I was playing VR, uh, the other day, and that thing has, you know, four cameras that are facing at the, at the room. It's doing, uh, a lot of work to figure out, you know, where the room is around you.
[00:29:02] Um, well, my wife walked into the room naked. Where did that AI inferencing get done, right? You have to think about that now. And in Apple's ecosystem, it's done in the house. It never leaves the house. Never leaves your head, really.
[00:29:17] Marc Beckman: so that localized power that you're talking protects the individual's privacy and I would imagine can also create a much more powerful as it relates to the immersion or the the the illusion the as well the experience as well
[00:29:37] Robert Scoble: I have a list of AI artists, and they're using AI tools to create art by talking to it in English, right? And they'll say, I want a purple tree, and boom, out comes a purple tree, right? You, soon you're going to be in an environment where the system is doing that for you.
[00:29:55] Marc Beckman: So how far away we though, Robert? Like is it imminent? Do Do you think will happen? In So so So, when you
[00:30:03] Robert Scoble: Christmas
[00:30:04] you're gonna see a lot of this, what I'm talking about.
[00:30:06] Marc Beckman: By Christmas 24.
[00:30:08] Robert Scoble: Yeah, and certainly by Christmas 25, then you're seeing a whole lot of new devices, a whole lot of new AI things, a whole lot of new, uh, 3D environments, and a whole new way to compute,
[00:30:20] Marc Beckman: So, um, it's going going to though, of innovation and creation on on the software side, too.
[00:30:27] Right?
[00:30:28] Robert Scoble: yep.
[00:30:29] That's why they're spending these billions and billions of dollars on these AI companies. Because they know that when they get to the promised land of everybody's wearing glasses, talking to virtual beings, and talking to 3D environments that are changing, which sounds sort of weird, you're going to be doing this even in the street, you know?
[00:30:48] Hey, Siri, can you turn turn night into day? Your glasses will! Right? That's an AI that does that.
[00:30:57] Marc Beckman: So, when you talk about
[00:30:58] Robert Scoble: field that appears on the real world and turns your nighttime into day, right?
[00:31:03] Marc Beckman: so how will the neural radiance fields, benefit... Our community, like, what, what value is Like, there's the factor, of course, right? Like, Like, my imagination going right now. All of a sudden, I'm finding myself, you know, in the middle of a safari been to take my my entire life, and I had the chance to.
[00:31:22] I see great educational opportunities. I'm at, you know center field for the NFL Superbowl, like, incredible, incredible things. But from utility perspective, where, what what the of a nerf? Like, how how does that come into play?
[00:31:36] Robert Scoble: let's say you're standing at, uh, Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. You're down at the valley, uh, you know, Half Dome is over here, El Capitan's over there, Yosemite Falls is right in front of you. Why would you put on these glasses there, right? Well, it'll tell you all the mountain ranges around you. You on the glasses, you see all the mountain ranges. That's cool. You take off the glasses, maybe you see a little bit more analog. You put the glasses back on, you see mountain ranges. Then you look at the sky above you and say, Hey, uh, you know, Google, can you change the sky to the Hubble telescope view?
[00:32:13] And it does. Or, can you tell me what that star is above my head? You know, oh, that's not problem. We have apps that do that on our iPhones right They're just not put together very well.
[00:32:23] So even in a beautiful place, you're going to be getting a lot of utility out of these kinds of AIs, glasses that can do things for you.
[00:32:30] You know, they look at the, uh, at the tree. What kind of, what's the scientific name for that tree? There's an app on the iPhone that already does that. It just painted an ass to use.
[00:32:40] Marc Beckman: What What do, as it it relates to something? This is a topic been um, on my mind for a while. What What does it do as to, um, like Western University? Education, like, I think there's be some sort of a rebalancing effect internationally now in You you the India, you you super creative, curious individual but they they could never go to because they don't have the financial means, but they could could now, like, not only can they access information that you're talking about through AI, through spatial computing, but I would imagine they even.
[00:33:22] Just look at their phone and, and run their, a a off of it So like, do do you envision a set, a kind of reset on on landscape and will Western universities, will we need same of in the future?
[00:33:37] Robert Scoble: I, I think you still need education. I, I mean, if you look at Stanford and why, why parents are spending, you know, 70, 000 to send their kids there for a year, right? there's a few reasons. One, they have a half billion dollar machine underneath the freeway to play with. Right? That's really hard to, you know, to take to other places in the world.
[00:33:59] You gotta come to, so you wanna use that machine, which takes pictures of really small structures and does material science? You gotta be at Stanford. There's no other alternative. Now, could they virtualize that so that you could use a, uh, a simulation of that machine from your own home? Absolutely.
[00:34:18] Totally. That costs money, though, and takes some time. I don't know that that's going to And there's some advantage of having your actual students at the machine, understanding how it works, and maybe even doing some tweaks to the machine, so that they get better pictures out of the materials that they're trying to take a picture of.
[00:34:38] They take pictures of... You know, uh, Silicon and other materials, real small materials, because that's the, that, that is the ground, that's why Silicon Valley is in Silicon Valley, is that machine, right? That's why the Silicon Valley ain't gonna move nowhere else, because the freeway, there's a machine that's a mile long underneath our freeway that costs half a billion dollars, and there's two of them in that building now, right?
[00:35:01] They just
[00:35:01] built
[00:35:01] Marc Beckman: But hardware.
[00:35:02] Robert Scoble: But that's, that's why you go to Stanford University.
[00:35:05] Marc Beckman: Right.
[00:35:06] Robert Scoble: That's why you want your kids to go to Stanford University, because if your kid is a hot ass physicist or material scientist, they get to go and play with that machine, and learn a new skill, and build a new company, and you know, blah, blah, blah.
[00:35:18] Stanford
[00:35:18] also
[00:35:19] Marc Beckman: you're in the finance department, like, do do we need to Stanford for finance? Do we we need to go
[00:35:23] Robert Scoble: oh, okay, there we go. There we go. Now, there's another advantage of going to Stanford, because every kid you go into is either rich, right, or was, grew up in poverty and worked their ass off to get into Stanford. either way, you're sitting with interesting people around you, and you go to the AI lab at Stanford, there's brilliant kids around you.
[00:35:47] I mean, really brilliant people,
[00:35:50] Marc Beckman: And,
[00:35:50] Robert Scoble: you're learning from
[00:35:51] Marc Beckman: grows together too, I, I talk about a benefit of very schools is the ongoing relationships. I something that you would not be able get if you're just in in your home
[00:36:06] Robert Scoble: Now, see, now, now let's talk about how we would take that on, right? Because I've been in an app called Nanome in VR. This is a material scientist app. It, uh, lets you... see a chemical structure blown up as big as a house. So we were walking around the COVID virus and they blew it up as big as my house and I could stick my head in the chemical structure and look around and I could see how it was built.
[00:36:35] I could see how the oxygen molecule connects to the carbon molecule, right? And I could actually click on each of those molecules and change it. And by the way. I was talking with scientists who were standing right next to me in VR. They weren't with me physically, they were somewhere else in the world, but we all met around this virus that, and we could all change its chemical structure interactively, we could high five each other even, right, in VR, around this virus, around this chemical structure.
[00:37:07] So now they're teaching me about chemistry in a way that I would never be able to learn in a classroom.
[00:37:13] Marc Beckman: So how do American schools transform their curriculum? Even at a a even at grade to
[00:37:24] integrate these types of experiences artificial intelligence. I know you mentioned like, I read a report recently said an an experience, the retention rate for individuals, actually a Stanford issued report, the retention rate for immersive is much I think it goes high as 75%, percent than Being at or reading, and um, I think in situations it's percent respectively.
[00:37:55] Hmm?
[00:37:56] Robert Scoble: Billinson at the Stanford VR group, uh, lab, uh, and his students did research and they showed it, they showed, showed me, they gave me some examples. They put me in VR, they had me walking across a plank, right? And I knew this was coming because you can watch it on YouTube, you know, if anybody gets a tour of Stanford VR lab, you can.
[00:38:14] You know the plank is coming, right, and you're sitting in a conference, you're standing in a conference room, and you know, before you put on your VR headset, yeah, you're in a normal conference room, there's three people standing around you that could catch you if you're falling or anything like that, right, so that's the rational part of your brain, and then you're, all, so they put you in VR, and you're walking across this plank, and then all of a sudden the floor falls away, so I, all of a sudden you're on a plank on you know and there's your mind is starting to go crazy because it thinks it's going to fall off this plank and into a canyon or something like that right
[00:38:49] um
[00:38:50] Marc Beckman: not forgetting that.
[00:38:50] Robert Scoble: you're not forgetting that first of all your mind is freaking out in a way that 2d screens just cannot do and three you you come away with a memory of that that is real.
[00:39:03] It's the same as if you were on a real plank walking across a canyon. Your mind will also freak out and it's going to be very memorable. It's the same whether you experience it virtually or experience it in real life, doesn't matter. Your mind absorbs that and remembers it the same way.
[00:39:22] Marc Beckman: So, Robert is it it just of time until the United States government, like, federal funding, vis a the the Department of Education, is investing in in technologies for our next generation? Because it seems it's be super important. Here in City, I think 30 percent of New New City in fact, did not
[00:39:42] Wi Fi. And, um, obviously impact is terrible, right? you can imagine with, with learning from home during period, it really had an adverse impact on our community. but it seems to me from what you're describing, it's not.
[00:39:57] Just about Wi now. It's access to hardware and access to all of this new technology, if we're going to bring
[00:40:05] Robert Scoble: access to people. Right, I mean in the Nanome, in this chemistry app, I was talking to other scientists who were walking around with me. So if you're going to Stanford, VR Stanford someday, or a VR Harvard or something like that, you're gonna be walking around, you know, a lab with with your professors and your other fellow students in VR.
[00:40:29] So, if you have one of the glasses, now you can go to Harvard in the future, right?
[00:40:34] But
[00:40:34] Marc Beckman: I
[00:40:35] the value, Robert. I actually one of my classes at NYU into a VR experience with a scientist works at NASA. He's been developing VR 30 years. He met us from Cape Canaveral. we were were here in midtown Manhattan. And he spent two with class, walking us through, you know, all incredible are happening at NASA now.
[00:40:59] without a doubt, that experience to it didn't feel like the The digital, the technology divide. It actually me closer to the scientist. I felt like a, like a a human connection him than I could have had call, even was
[00:41:16] Robert Scoble: Think about what we didn't do because of that. That astronaut or that administrator didn't have to fly in a plane, didn't have to get a hotel room. So, uh, you know, it's over time, it's cheaper to do this kind of education in VR, and it's much more capable. Plus, you can bring it to people all over the world, right?
[00:41:37] Because everybody in the world can join you in your classroom, uh, you know, virtually if they have one of these headsets. Thank you. There's a lot of change because of this coming education. We all know it. We just don't know how it's all going to happen. Because right now, I'm not wearing a pair of these smart glasses, right, as soon I will be.
[00:41:57] I mean, I have a pair. I have a HoloLens here, right, you know, so I could put on my HoloLens and go to town with you. This is a 3, 500 device. It's ugly. It's not well supported. There's not a lot of software on here, right? And in
[00:42:13] five years, you're going to have a pair of lightweight glasses that's way, way more capable than this.
[00:42:18] Marc Beckman: So is it fair to assume what you described will also have a, um, softer footprint on the planet? It would actually be beneficial relates to climate change?
[00:42:30] Robert Scoble: You're not flying as much, so you're not putting carbon in the air. Every time you fly, you're putting carbon in the air, you're causing climate change, right? And people haven't quite gotten that message yet, but they will. A few more cities burn down, they're gonna get that message that this is not a good thing to do for the environment, so let's stop doing it.
[00:42:51] Well, how do we stop doing it? How do we stop traveling? You gotta get into new technologies, but it's hard to explain that to people because right now that new technology looks like this, looks ugly and big and expensive, right? Well, in a decade it's not going to be. It's going to be cheap and lightweight and very capable, so.
[00:43:10] Marc Beckman: What going to this concept you earlier about AI robots? I I you talk a bit about Tesla autonomous vehicles. I anticipate only a of time until we see autonomous vehicles above us as well. But, how far off are we? As it it relates to, um, robots that are trained and providing chores for humans and running errands for when does come into play?
[00:43:41] And do you you is car a car or is is it a robot?
[00:43:45] Robert Scoble: My car's a robot. Drives me around town. I don't drive my car. It drives me. Right? I can take over and drive if I want. You know, if it's a curvy road on a sunny day and there's no traffic, no cops around, you know, it's fun to drive a little bit. Right? But most of the time I'm in stop and go traffic, uh, taking the kids to school or going to someplace in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, right?
[00:44:11] And there the car driving is fine. you're seeing the autonomous cars really cha change pretty rapidly now. They're, they're getting to the final stages of fixing every error that they have, right? And so you're seeing... Uh, GM Cruise driving around San Francisco and Google's Waymo company, uh, Waymo spun out of Google or Alphabet or whatever they call themselves now, right?
[00:44:36] Marc Beckman: I, I actually just read today that Google, you two like I read today that GM and Google just cut a deal and I believe GM is valuing the, um, the at about 25 billion a year subscript, new subscription revenue just by integrating Google Cloud into its automotive fleet.
[00:44:59] Robert Scoble: the numbers are getting crazy because the data is getting crazy, right? My, my Tesla is uploading, uh, gigabytes per day to the Dojo and and and NVIDIA Cloud that they have, right? yeah, it's a new world. Uh, anyways, back to robots. Let's talk about robots. So this, this, uh, robot car, Is the first step, and the second step is a humanoid robot.
[00:45:23] The car can go someday and pick up my humanoid robot and bring the humanoid robot to my house. Oh, welcome, Mr. Tesla robot. What can you do? Oh, Stanford has a robot that already does 1, 600 tasks, like folding laundry, cleaning toilets, uh, playing games with you, doing the dishes, cooking dinner, right?
[00:45:44] Who doesn't want a robot like that?
[00:45:46] It's just, right now, those kinds of robots, uh, cost about 100, 000 to build, to sell you, right? Maybe 30, 000 to build. But they're only 26 little brushless electric motors and a computer. It doesn't cost that if you get to scale, right? right? So if they get these things to scale, like if Tesla could ever get to the place where they're making 10 million of these humanoid robots a year, The cost is going to go down to less than 5, 000.
[00:46:15] 000. And that's when we get the revolution, right? that, that day is not far off. I, I originally thought it was 2026. Uh, Irina and I wrote a whole report about this humanoid robot and what it's going to do to the Western home. But, uh, Tesla just showed off an end to end system that trained itself how to drive just by watching videos.
[00:46:38] That's right.
[00:46:39] Marc Beckman: so that's totally transformative, right? If it's just by watching video, what type of an an impact does that have artificial
[00:46:48] Robert Scoble: It speeds it up. So now I'm expecting the robot in 2025 instead of 2026. Well, maybe it's still 2026, but it's somewhere in that range, uh, a robot's going to come to your door and deliver your pizza, right? Once it does that, it's going to invite itself in. It's going to say, hey, you know, now that I'm here to deliver your pizza.
[00:47:08] Would you like me to come in and set the table or do your dishes or clean your bathroom while you're eating your pizza? You know, I do a lot of things like, you know, and I can and here's the secret. There's robots that mow lawns, blow your snow, clean your windows, vacuum your floors, right? There's all sorts of robots.
[00:47:29] You go to the Consumer Electronics Show now and there's a hall just of robots. Well, the humanoid robot can bring all those other robots to your house And charge you for them. Hey, you want your snow blowed today? I think, you know, that costs a hundred bucks and we got a robot that does that.
[00:47:46] Marc Beckman: So, it's pretty wild, Robert, and then when you go back and think the impact on jobs, because there's, um, it seems to me like I'm in the camp of, um, LLMs are really impacting More of the, um, let's say white collar jobs right now. Like I, I don't think the legal community realizes what about to be hit with, with, you know, platforms like
[00:48:10] Harvey AI. I think the communities, et cetera. But what you're talking as it relates to the the is coming down to the blue collar jobs So where do you think people should be, um, Yeah, so where people be heading as it relates to reskilling, as it it to new job There's going to be a a slew jobs I would imagine, new concepts that we can't dream of today that are going create the the phase of billionaires, the
[00:48:38] the next
[00:48:39] Robert Scoble: to a lot of
[00:48:39] CEOs and I'm like, all right, let's say you, you have a thousand workers and you'd need to cut 10 percent of them. Do cut the AI people first or at last? Of course, they cut the AI people last. They're the most productive people in your company. So that's the secret. Get skilled on AI.
[00:48:59] Understand how the robots, you know, start doing projects with robots, right? But most people don't think like this. That
[00:49:07] Marc Beckman: But you see, you'll see like a subscription service, right? Like I could envision a subscription for these, um, what calling today they'll turn Who knows, right? You never know, but all of a sudden for my house, it's my housekeeper, my my, um, gardener. and it just goes on and on and on. nannies, where does where does it stop? It
[00:49:33] Robert Scoble: It doesn't, it doesn't man, the, I'm already having conversations with my, with OpenAI, with ChatGPT, ChatGPT, right? And it's really good at listening. It, huh. I, uh, worked with a psychiatrist who worked with a entrepreneur who built a listening system for herself, for her psychiatry meetings. And we had a 30 minute conversation, a therapy session where, you we just had a conversation about what's going on in my life and what's my struggles, what's my mental challenges, where am I getting into fights with people, you know, what triggers me, that kind of stuff.
[00:50:12] And it listened to that 30 minute conversation and it wrote seven highly detailed technical notes for her, uh, about me. And I posted them on x. com so you can go look at them. And it nailed all my mental illnesses in 30 minutes. So just by listening to me talking, like it could be listening to me right now talking to you and figuring out something new about me, right?
[00:50:38] Because it's analyzing this, listening to this, and then it'll tell Twitter, oh, this was a good, good quote right here. You know what I'm saying?
[00:50:45] Marc Beckman: Well, it's kind of interesting. So, a worker, right? Like, in this case, you have a doctor, and it could go even further, right? Because then, for, for You You know, baseline right? if I have the flu, do I need to go spend a ton of of money in to see my primary doctor?
[00:51:05] Or can I just, you know, get into a quick call with an AI and explain what my my And then can the AI go ahead and write a for And, And, can I just have a robot deliver my house? Like that doesn't seem so far fetched.
[00:51:21] Robert Scoble: Doing that, prescribing and giving a detailed, you know, oh, you have the flu, like telling you what you have, that's FDA regulated. That, does things. So, if you have an AI that does that, it has gone through a whole FDA process and it's a medical app. Um, there's a lot of things they can do. Without doing that, for instance, my friend is building a check engine light for human beings where it's just going to tell you, Hey, you need to go to the doctor.
[00:51:54] Marc Beckman: I love
[00:51:55] Robert Scoble: we can't tell you why, but you know, take your data, go to the doctor and we'll tell the doctor what, what we're seeing in your heart condition or something like that. And the doctor is going to be the one that prescribes you. And I think that's going to be the way for a while, you know, but there's lots of places in the world that don't have good health care, right?
[00:52:15] There's 8 billion people in this world,
[00:52:17] Marc Beckman: right.
[00:52:18] Robert Scoble: So are they going to have a digital doctor? Hell
[00:52:22] Marc Beckman: Why not? Why not? And let, let me ask you this. So, when you mention regulation, you there's it to dispensing medicine, but, um, you you regulation of artificial intelligence is a big issue right I read a report this morning, on that said, um, I think it was a, it was a survey and they said, For the the most part, they didn't believe that people, including President Biden, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, really the capabilities of handling these surrounding, artificial intelligence. In fact, Biden led the pack as as being trustworthy at 9%. Just 9%. Altman was behind him, Trump behind him. Zuckerberg, all of them. So do that the, government that we currently have is even capable of fully understanding the you're talking about and properly regulating?
[00:53:22] Robert Scoble: There's only a couple people in the Senate who can have a decent conversation with you about it, about what we're talking about here. That's not where you're going to get good policy out of, unfortunately. And this is a real problem because the Silicon Valley people, they're rapacious business people.
[00:53:43] They're seeing a way to make trillions of dollars, right? And so they're running full steam ahead. And the government just, first of all, even if there were confident people in the Senate, we're politically divided in the so we can't get together and decide to do anything. I mean, let's talk about just, you know, the jobless problem.
[00:54:04] If we were... If were run, you know, properly, and we were getting along, and we really were thinking about, you know, how do we take care of the problems that are coming, we'd be, uh, building a GI Bill or a Guaranteed Minimum Income right now, and we'd be talking about that, and we'd be talking about job retraining, and we'd be talking about, you know, how do we take a truck driver out of truck driving in the next 15, 20 years, uh, or 5.
[00:54:30] It's coming pretty quick. Um... How do we give him or her a fair shot at the American dream and get him back on the, you know, working? But we're not talking like that
[00:54:41] Marc Beckman: heard
[00:54:41] Robert Scoble: a real problem. It's a
[00:54:42] real
[00:54:43] Marc Beckman: we're back in this presidential cycle, right, technically, and I I haven't any politician or, or, you know presidential candidate yet talk these types of issues.
[00:54:54] Robert Scoble: No, because
[00:54:55] Marc Beckman: Nothing meaningful.
[00:54:56] Robert Scoble: they don't, they don't use this stuff the way I use it. I mean, you know, I use it for, I forced myself to use it to understand what these large language models do. And they're very, very complex machines that are very interesting to use as human beings. I mean, I listened to my psychiatry therapy session and took notes.
[00:55:14] Marc Beckman: and
[00:55:14] Robert Scoble: doesn't get your attention, nothing is,
[00:55:18] Marc Beckman: That's just incredible.
[00:55:20] Robert Scoble: You know, and they're using it on factory floors. I talked to a rocket engineer, he's talking about, you know, using it to make the rocket engines more efficient, and make it more
[00:55:32] Marc Beckman: So
[00:55:32] Robert Scoble: controllable.
[00:55:33] Marc Beckman: So, Robert, what's the the solution Like, we to rely so on politicians that just don't understand the technology? I mean, look what happened in Web 3. We've because of the uncertainty in defining whether something like ETH is a security, we've literally had a chilling on VC investment, PE investment, job creation. It's already gone overseas. Do you anticipate the the same type issue it relates to this spurt
[00:56:00] of growth surrounding AI?
[00:56:01] Robert Scoble: I mean, if we stop AI development here in Silicon Valley, let's say, uh, no more AIs, uh, stop buying NVIDIA cards, can't do any model building, no, we gotta slow that down. China's not thinking like that. They just spent 40 billion on their semiconductor industry, So you're going to put yourself at a disadvantage to China.
[00:56:22] I mean, here's an example of this. I was talking to Volkswagen. They have already digitized their entire factory floor, big, huge plants in Wolfsburg, Germany, right? They've already digitized that, turned that into a digital twin. And I was asking, well, uh, are you going to the next level? Are you putting 3D sensors on your factory floor, watching, you know, cameras or something, watching your workers work to.
[00:56:45] Have AI see a pattern, maybe it can find some more inefficiencies that you didn't even see, right? Because you're studying, uh, the factory floor with AI. Oh, we can't do that in Germany. There's rules against putting cameras on workers. In China, they don't do that. So they're, in China, the factories are becoming more productive because they're using technology to make the factory more productive. And,
[00:57:10] Marc Beckman: interesting.
[00:57:11] Robert Scoble: if you think that's going to work out for you as a country to stick your head in the sand and not, and not use it, then you're going to gift your economy to China because they're using it.
[00:57:24] And they're becoming
[00:57:25] more productive. Their factories are more productive than anybody else's factories because they use technology like this.
[00:57:32] Marc Beckman: right, so, so which politicians do you think, understand that and, can help
[00:57:38] Robert Scoble: Ed McKay, you know, problem is there's only one or two out of, you know, the hundreds of people who are running our government. The rest of them really don't understand at all.
[00:57:47] if any of them are listening to me, all I want you to do AI for every question you have. Any policy question, any, anything, force yourself to use it and see what it tells you because you're going to learn a lot about how it works.
[00:58:04] You're going to make better decisions, particularly if you say, show me all points of view, please, on X, right on, uh, using AI in factories, it'll tell you.
[00:58:18] Marc Beckman: The truth is, though, going back to where we started our conversation, this fear of newness prevails. I had on the show, um, a State Clyde Vanel,. He was first person to to write a bill using intelligence. And And attacked Robert, from the the landlords, the tenants from political on both of the fence both Democrat and Republican, and And what he found was, naturally, he like, Hit button bill was drafted Like he had to apply his wealth of knowledge surrounding this landlord tenant issue and massage it and massage it and massage it, but what found, which I I think super compelling, was that by using artificial intelligence to augment the bill writing process, he took a bill, he drafted the three It would have take, it would have taken him about two three And he was able to then allocate his time to help his constituency with other needs that they have in that gap time, where he made up, you know, he he time for them. He He was more productive as, as a politician, but in fact, everybody pushed back against it.
[00:59:28] Robert Scoble: We ban snowboarding in Tahoe ski resorts. When I was a kid, snowboarding was evil. It cut up the snow differently. Those, those kids were like the rebels. They were the troublemakers. Oh, we didn't want them around, right? Now it's an Olympic sport, right? Every time there's a new thing in human history, people resist.
[00:59:51] I wish they wouldn't, but they do.
[00:59:53] Marc Beckman: but with artificial intelligence, the the genie of the bottle and you're not, nobody could put it back in. we're you you we're past the idea of of slow it down. To your point, capitalism, politics, they're they're pushing everything forward. So it's just not going to happen.
[01:00:11] It's going to slow down.
[01:00:12] Robert Scoble: No, I
[01:00:14] totally agree with that.
[01:00:16] Marc Beckman: I want to ask you just, just to
[01:00:17] Robert Scoble: going to speed up, in fact.
[01:00:19] Marc Beckman: Yeah. I agree. I agree. Just fun Um, because you know, you have such an an um, history and and background as it relates to truly being a of the tech industry. Um, if Steve Jobs was around today, what do you think he thinking as it relates to artificial intelligence and computing would Steve Jobs want?
[01:00:46] Robert Scoble: liked the idea of a computer that humans could use better, right? He was all about making the humans more powerful, more productive, more creative, right? Um, he would not like the new, the, the latest LLMs because they hallucinate or they confabulate uh, answers. In other words, here's an example. I was in an Austin restaurant, I used ChatGPT, hey, ChatGPT, uh, what should I eat at this restaurant?
[01:01:17] And it gave me six items, four of which were amazing. They were right on point. I ate them all. They were great. Two were never on the menu. It made them up. You know, we can talk about why, but it made them up, and this is a real problem. Steve Jobs hated ugliness. He hated incorrectness. He hated that kind of problem.
[01:01:38] So he would be asking his engineers to solve that problem before they ship it. And that's sort of what's going on,
[01:01:43] Marc Beckman: Steve
[01:01:44] Robert Scoble: not seeing Apple being first to ship an LLM because it has these problems, right, of compabulation, error generation, um, and other things, bias and stuff like that, right? Ugliness.
[01:01:58] He wants to see some of that, most of that cleaned up before it gets into a product.
[01:02:02] Marc Beckman: Do you you think if Steve was with us today, and he in artificial intelligence war against Elon Musk, Jobs would win?
[01:02:12] Robert Scoble: He's the only person who got Siri. He, uh, bought the first AI app.
[01:02:19] Marc Beckman: So you would
[01:02:20] bet on
[01:02:20] Robert Scoble: would get it. Yeah, he understood how human beings work and what's important. When he sees a new thing coming along that's going to make a better product, he would be excited by it. But he would want to make sure that it doesn't bring problems to people.
[01:02:36] Because, you know, if his AI on your iPhone is lying to you and making shit up, that's not good for the brand, right?
[01:02:44] Marc Beckman: Do Do you think that, um, artificial can... ultimately assist with social um social justice topics, gender racism, anti Semitism, do you think at at the of the day, it's going to be, it's going to help us come together?
[01:03:03] Robert Scoble: That's up to us, right? If you have a curious people who ask lots of questions, we're going to get along fine and we're going to be led to a better place. Because if you ask AI, please show me all points of view on racism or on gender inequality, it has really good answers. But you have to ask the question in that way.
[01:03:30] You have to ask for all points of view. You can't ask it to back you up and make your point of view stronger. Because that's what most people do. They don't, they are tribal. They want things that agree with them. Right, if you're going to a Christian, into a church or something like that, you build a point of view, a worldview, and you don't like things that, that attack that worldview.
[01:03:58] So most people don't ask questions like that. But if you did, the answers are all there.
[01:04:04] Marc Beckman: What about taking the concept a little further it to justice? Um, you know, it know, it seems forever slavery has been on planet, including certain pockets and regions today. And it it comes to And what you you about earlier you know, robots can do manual labor.
[01:04:25] Do you think that we'll ever
[01:04:27] Robert Scoble: pick a strawberry out of a field just like a human can.
[01:04:31] Far faster by the way, and far
[01:04:33] cheaper, and
[01:04:34] they
[01:04:34] don't
[01:04:35] Marc Beckman: is like, will it ever be applied right? Like, can, in, areas China, where you hear about like the issue and and, slavery there, like Chinese is is of curve. have not just capital.
[01:04:48] Will replace, say, slavery with robots and AI? Will they they finance that just keep the humans
[01:05:02] down?
[01:05:03] Robert Scoble: I would say increasingly over time, technology is going to do more and more things that we used to do as work, start with the high value, high, high cost jobs. So the poor people in China will be the last ones to get affected, I predict. But I don't know, you know, you're seeing John Deere building a lot of robots that's doing a lot of farming around the world, right? And that used to be done by humans, teams of people, you know, uh, going out in the field and digging ditches and planting things and harvesting them and stuff like that. Now a lot of that's being done by robots, at least in the richer places in the world. And yeah, it's coming after everybody. I, you know, that's a tough question for me to answer because it's over my pay grade.
[01:05:57] Marc Beckman: I
[01:05:58] get
[01:05:59] it. I get
[01:05:59] Robert Scoble: in China very often,
[01:06:01] Marc Beckman: Sure.
[01:06:01] Robert Scoble: I can tell you what the rich people in America are doing because that's where I am.
[01:06:05] Marc Beckman: let's talk about that for a second because, you you know, we, our cities are really powerful. New is but is the built to and robotics, um, artificial in term?
[01:06:22] Do you think the concept of cities will change because of all
[01:06:25] of these technologies and you'll see certain
[01:06:27] Robert Scoble: Let's,
[01:06:28] Marc Beckman: cities, like even New York
[01:06:29] Robert Scoble: Let's not go crazy with a humanoid robot. Let's just talk about autonomous cars. Autonomous cars are going to change New York deeply.
[01:06:36] Marc Beckman: But But Is our capable of supporting it Like right now, short term, certainly we won't the to charge. We don't have maybe the ability to free up the streets. Did you know that, um, autonomous vehicles are illegal in New York state? I didn't. It's true. You
[01:06:53] Robert Scoble: Yeah,
[01:06:53] that'll
[01:06:53] Marc Beckman: in an an But in New
[01:06:56] Robert Scoble: That'll change. And you know why it'll change? Because two of my high school friends were killed in car wrecks. And how many more tragedies do we need in our society before people get a clue and make that legal?
[01:07:07] If in San Francisco, they never die, the kids in San Francisco never die because they have autonomous cars.
[01:07:13] And if you go to San Francisco right now, like every third car is an autonomous
[01:07:17] Marc Beckman: I see
[01:07:17] Yep.
[01:07:18] Robert Scoble: you think the voters in New York are going to put up with their kids getting slaughtered on the roads because their, uh, their politicians are are backwards?
[01:07:26] Marc Beckman: It's an
[01:07:27] interesting
[01:07:27] Robert Scoble: to last very long?
[01:07:29] Marc Beckman: Right? Because human
[01:07:30] Robert Scoble: it's, you know, I mean, let's talk it like a human to human.
[01:07:35] You want your kids to go get slaughtered on the road because you're backwards and trying to keep things the way they were?
[01:07:42] 40, 000 people in America get killed in car wrecks. You think that's acceptable, Mr. Politician or Mrs. Politician? You think that's acceptable to tell your people that live in your state that that's acceptable? That you shouldn't be going after and changing that, that dooms you to being a city with less productivity, because autonomous cities are going to be way more productive than a human run city, and it's going to slaughter people.
[01:08:12] You want that as a politician? You see how long that lasts, because people do get a clue after a while,
[01:08:19] Marc Beckman: I agree. I agree.
[01:08:21] Robert Scoble: and then they vote differently, right?
[01:08:23] Marc Beckman: hopefully, it seems like in
[01:08:25] Robert Scoble: No, they do,
[01:08:25] eventually. You know, we do change in America. It takes a lot of yelling and screaming, you know. In the 1950s, we had whites only counters, right? You know, and just a few years ago, I walked around Greensboro, North Carolina, with the first black mayor who stopped me in front of the Woolworths, where the kids sat at the whites only counter just a few decades ago.
[01:08:49] So we do change in America. A lot of noise. A lot of yelling and screaming and
[01:08:55] resistance
[01:08:56] to
[01:08:56] Marc Beckman: we there. you ultimately we'll end up in the right spot.
[01:08:59] Robert Scoble: I think so.
[01:09:00] We're gonna go in a better direction and we'll have some new problems to worry about. I keep sharing, you know, like, hey, there's new security problems with these large language models, right? That's a new problem that somebody has to solve.
[01:09:11] Marc Beckman: So, Robert, we've had you for a long time. What our guests do, I think you're going to be best at this, honestly, because of your perspective, um, at the end, we, remember the show called Some Future Day and and what we do is kind created three concepts lead finish the sentence, right?
[01:09:30] So, um, if you don't mind real quickly, the first one is on some future day. AI will create a world where humans and robots will.
[01:09:41] Robert Scoble: Humans and robots. Someday we're gonna merge. That's the singularity, right? When you have Neuralink on your brain, aren't you merged with AI? And aren't you working with AI as a partner? All the time, you you know, and, and, and you don't even need to go that crazy when get, you know, apple glasses version three, you know, in 2026, it's gonna do most of that already.
[01:10:12] Marc Beckman: On some future day, AI will create economic wealth for.
[01:10:17] Robert Scoble: Elon Musk, a lot of it , unfortunately, and we need to talk about that, right? If you're gonna create somebody who is a trillionaire, Right? we're talking about billionaires are nasty for society. We shouldn't allow that. And Elon could be a trillionaire someday or somebody like an Elon, right? And that's a real problem, uh, for society to have that much wealth inequality is a real problem.
[01:10:49] You know,
[01:10:50] Marc Beckman: On some future day, Apple's spatial computing will improve the world because.
[01:10:57] Robert Scoble: it'll let you see yourself in a new way.
[01:11:00] Marc Beckman: I love
[01:11:01] Robert Scoble: It'll let you travel to places you can't afford to go. It'll let you go to classrooms that you can't, uh, get access to. I mean, I, it's funny, uh, MC Hammer and I were teaching a class at Stanford, went to the business school and we, before the class,
[01:11:16] we turned that to each other and goes, damn, they would never let us into this place. You know,
[01:11:23] right.
[01:11:23] Marc Beckman: that.
[01:11:24] Robert Scoble: Didn't have the grades, didn't have the right skin color, you know, there was a lot of reasons that they wouldn't invite us in.
[01:11:31] Marc Beckman: Amazing.
[01:11:32] Robert Scoble: we are, that's about to change. You're gonna be able to, your kids are gonna be able to get access to things that, whether they have, you know, a lot of money or not a lot of money, they're gonna have access to things that, that only the kings had access to just a generation ago.
[01:11:48] Marc Beckman: it's kind of think it, if artificial creates a lifestyle, you mentioned the kings, where perhaps people have to, you know, do brutal work all long and they could more time concentrating on things they love, their family, hobbies, being learning and educating, being entrepreneurial, maybe world shift in we can't even imagine and, and perhaps that's why your recurring theme of, um, a basic wage or income will be important because, um,
[01:12:27] Robert Scoble: I think we need a new GI Bill first because my dad grew up in poverty in Brooklyn, right? And he took our family out of poverty by going to the army for a years. And then they gave him a GI Bill so that they would pay for his schooling. And he got a PhD from Rutgers University in New York and then got moved to Silicon Valley, you know, which wasn't called Silicon Valley back then in 1971, right?
[01:12:53] And he took our family out of poverty because of that, but he had to have the wealth to be able to go to school for five years or six years, right? That's a lot of, that's hard for a lot of people, particularly now. I mean, if you want to go to, if you get accepted to Stanford, that's the first thing people do as a family is like, uh, how do we afford to send you to Stanford for, it costs 70, 000 a year.
[01:13:15] So four years is a a quarter million dollars. That's Not easy for a lot of people to come up with,
[01:13:23] Marc Beckman: most.
[01:13:23] Robert Scoble: most, right? So now you have to think about, you know, how do you get funding for that? How do you get a, you know, a grant or a, um, you know, sponsor?
[01:13:36] Marc Beckman: Yeah,
[01:13:37] Robert Scoble: you call it?
[01:13:38] Marc Beckman: So Robert, I really all your today. It's really been a thrill to to you your and incredible. So, thank you.
[01:13:48] Robert Scoble: Thanks. But yeah, if I had one plea, you know, let's work on a new guarantee, not, I don't like the guaranteed minimum income. I understand that's going to be needed for a lot of people. So we should not take it off the table. You know, I don't like that. Our Native American reservations, they have a form of that guaranteed minimum income.
[01:14:11] And those places are not real fun to be at. There's a lot of alcoholism, a lot of hopelessness, because there's just no hope. There's no change. There's no nothing new, nothing for them to do. They're stuck. And I don't like that for humans. That's not a good place for humans to be.
[01:14:29] Marc Beckman: Well, Well, this is a whole other conversation I'd love to get into you, with you, like, as to like, individualism, capitalism, Anne type of you this is, this is important stuff.
[01:14:44] Robert Scoble: While we've been talking, I've been watching this AI art list I made. I made a list of all the AI artists on X. com and it's just gone crazy. So people are taking their extra time because their robots are doing their work, right? And they're, and they're using AI art programs to create their, their visions of what they want to create and put it up on X.
[01:15:04] com and it's
[01:15:05] coming out at a fast clip. Yeah.
[01:15:07] Marc Beckman: Is, is that list posted somewhere? Can, can we reference
[01:15:11] Robert Scoble: just made
[01:15:11] Marc Beckman: actually, why mention, you mentioned, you list, you two while we were talking. Do you you tell the where where can find lists and,
[01:15:18] Robert Scoble: If you go to, if you go to the thing that used to be called Twitter, x. com, and go to my profile and then go view lists, you'll see all my lists. I have lists on investors and founders and journalists and world news and tech news and AI art.
[01:15:36] And
[01:15:37] Marc Beckman: awesome.
[01:15:39] All
[01:15:39] Robert Scoble: AI companies is another one that's really crazy too, yeah.
[01:15:43]