As council I'm Jane Wales c.e.o. This week's episode focuses on the ways in which technology well changed between now and 2050 and how it will affect our lives we'll hear from Daniel Franklin executive editor of the economists and our moderator Quentin Hardy head of editorial at Google Cloud this event was recorded in San Francisco before World Affairs audience and the broadcast is made possible by the generous support of Chevron and now to our moderator. Thank you very much good evening and thank you for joining us I'm Quentin Hardy and it's my great pleasure to introduce tonight's guest Daniel Franklin Daniel is the executive editor of The Economist and editor of The Economist annual publication the world in feeling the year since joining the economist in 1903 he has written about Soviet needs turn European affairs covered great European up people's been Britain editor and later Washington bureau chief in the us he is also the author and editor of a recent book mega tech technology in 2050 which will be much of our topic for discussion tonight I was intrigued by this because among other things I see Futurism or projections about the future is a little like Saif I it's mostly a comment on the present typically But unlike the sort of negativity one often finds in the air these days about where society is going or global warming or the threat of massive computers running our lives this is a rather optimistic text I think it is should. Say clearly that this is a 20 contribute says it's not just me written that I've written introduction and I obviously chose the contributors. But so I didn't go out and asked people please be optimistic but collectively I think the impression is yes it's not a depressing read. And it's not the sort of dystopian view that you will. Often get from fictional hearing into the future but there's plenty of I think hard questions that they ask and most of the chapters also raise some quite tough issues and I'm not naive about the challenges that have faced all that said yes I think you will not be depressed if you read this book and I think if you are looking for a fly wheel that propels this it's that we are in the early stages of a new kind of understanding which a couple of your people talk about why don't you spend a moment on that yeah absolutely I mean the structure of the book is 1st of all to look at some of the drivers of technology nobody knows what technologies are really going to look like in 2050 So one way of starting to think about this is to say what are the fundamental sciences. Allow or what stage we reached in them and what does that imply for the development of technology over the coming decades so for example and perhaps most striking I ask. Frank Wilczek. Physicist Nobel prize winner to the mit and he's thought deeply about these questions to ask to say where has physics got to and what does that mean for the future of technology and he makes a very striking I mean brilliant chapter by the way brilliantly written very succinct very clear. A striking statement that basically we have reached the stage in physics of explaining I think equations for. The natural phenomena around us by and large and what that means is that henceforth technology kind of violence increasingly by calculation by computation rather than by experimentation and that means that can go a lot faster you know one thing he says in the chapter is that computers currently model airline Airlines that's how we make an airplane we we model it rather than take you to a wind tunnel that's a later stage and that will soon be true for nuclear power or the understanding of a supernova or how a cancer cell. Works inside the body and so that more and more of our understanding can be generated through models and therefore will accelerate the speed at which we especially learn to apply to those models. Very extraordinary powerful computers more powerful than ever before so. The ability to calculate is not only that from the equations but also from the power of the computer that can do the calculation the other I suppose fundamental science that. Was looked at is biology and bought by the state of biology particularly through the extraordinary advances in genome sequencing that have been coming in seen in the past few years and hyper. Exponential growth. Something very akin to the sort of Moore's Law that's applied to the computing industry is happening biology not biology is that a much earlier stage than physics and we're not at this sort of complete explanation of how things work yet but we're at a stage where you can see that over the next 30 is extraordinary strides are going to be made in that extraordinary bounces thanks to this century through the ability to decode at a rate that we've been at a price that we've never seen before and so biology is sort of bubbling with youthful exuberance and you can see that that is going to have an awful lot of implications for technology over the coming decades now looking at your biography you've spent 34 years in the tire kicking and thoughtful cynicism business what's wrong with this picture do you find these overwhelmingly compelling arguments or do you wonder if there isn't some level of here too for undiscovered complexity the blow all this away well I suppose that So with these these people are much smarter than I am in their field so I sort of do find that compelling where I think the skepticism comes in and the concluding chapter actually is is devoted to this is on the unintended consequences of technology you know and you look if you take a historical view you see that this is happened repeatedly with technology not it's not necessarily. Mainly through ill will it's not that people have willfully ignored the consequences of what they're doing but often that we haven't been aware of the consequences of what we're creating So at the earliest stages of the industrial revolution it wasn't obvious to people that we were building up a problem of global warming and climate change wasn't obvious that C.F.C.'s was going to punch a hole in the ozone layer so you have these unintended consequences my concern is that this sort of high velocity development that we're going to have will it will most certainly have unintended consequences and things of a so that we contradicted our minds around yet but which are which have the potential to happen as fast as the science itself but then of course away from the science the sort of universal carry out is and then when you mix this in with human society who knows what devil true they'll get up to yes and I think it is the human interaction with science that is absolutely crucial and I think that again is something that the concluding chapter looks at is you know does science have a will of its own that some of the technology some Sometimes there's a quite a common view I think these days that technology wants to do certain things takes you have to pay in certain directions. And I think I would take issue with that again and say actually that we can't absolve us saddles of the responsibility for what the stuff we come along to yeah I should say for the room we spent a little bit of time and some high level views practically what gets talked about in the book is essentially the end of aging abundant food abundant leisure the computation of a massive number of problems resulting in faster speed of discovery a very low cost of manipulating the world in very high level of learning. New materials a car that is essentially spun from current. And the economist being beamed straight into your brain. Which was a little past 2050 but he was those were all things people talked about is near certainties in their view Yeah and there's a sort of common thread to that which I suppose is abundance right now as you know . A lot of stuff is going to be more available stuff that we thought of as being very scarce energy you didn't mention but that's another area where people think of energy being very scarce resource but if and it seems perfectly possible that renewable energy. Develops very rapidly solar power is experiencing again the sort of exponential change that the other other areas of technology showing. That we'll have energy in abundance where once we thought we had a problem of scarcity but scarcity is also very important for the proper functioning of markets people and institutions exploit the one thing they're good at to an extent others aren't and that means there's a scarcity there how the markets respond to a world of total abundance Well 1st of all again if it's total abundance of the some things that are abundant weight of a lot of other things that unsightly still be a while and I think that there will always be new needs and things that are full. Scale than they were before but it does change where the money is made you know you see this for example in the telecoms industry where you know. Distances they basically disappeared some parts of the ecosystem of the telecoms of the column very very cheap and very commonplace others a still highly valued Yes and the observation of behavior which previously didn't factor into the economics at all has become this new element that's the most valuable thing of all yes and as you mentioned data will be abundant we know that we're going to keep gathering more and more and more data we're going to be embedding chips and more and more old. Stuff but the ability to interpret data. And deliver really useful information is another matter and that will I think be a much much more refined a job where there will be lots of value to be had how well do you see government and other large scale social institutions responding to a world like this Well I think with difficulty because of the speed so it's hard regulation is a difficult thing at the best of times hard to get the balance right between allowing development to take place encouraging innovation and protecting society from potential abuse potential detecting consumers from potential monopolies protecting. Harmful things from being done but when you have this sort of speed of development it becomes doubly hard and actually chapter after chapter makes exactly this point that regulators have a hard job keeping up with the place of science and medical technology is is an obvious area where that is the case medical ethics I think are going to really struggle with for example the gene editing tools that are being created all the regenerative met medicine you know what it what human beings become is suddenly at issue because we can alter our genetic makeup and we will be able to alter the physical body parts the plea that we have and enormous areas of the government are usually given over to some kind of protection of the weaker members of society the very old need of a pension the very young in need of an education those victims of crime in need of protection and the society is moving forward based on those who are strong so you there's going to be a real mismatch there isn't there there is and I think one of the big worries in this respect is. With what it will mean for. The workforce and full Generally the world of work if. Clever computing robots increasingly make the traditional jobs that we've known today. Uncompetitive then you risk having whole swathes of the labor force that. Made. Along the useful and the social impact of that is potentially very great now I'm a long time optimistic and on this I think that we create new needs we work with machines in new ways we supplement machines as happened with the industrial revolution we will find new things to do However that doesn't necessarily happen on the same time scale that the old is destroyed so we could have a very serious social problem along the way work is important in some form or other because it's so closely tied up with identity it's who you are in the world and how you add value I raised this with a professor at mit one time but when the jobs go away what will people do and he said well they'll entertain each other but they'll work harder than ever to do it you know it'll be a real full time job and I found that an interesting paradox because it seems like a life of leisure but it's a very well he's very used to be that a life of leisure was something that people really a spawn to and the aristocracy would. Revel in and having leisure time to pursue gentlemanly pursuit and and to to be cultured or to. Join the Latin today oh skin to show you didn't work out I think it's actually nowadays it seems that the thing that is prized is to be forever busy and to be in more demand of your time than you could possibly if you want to that are no longer station in Silicon Valley go to a dinner and talk about how little you sleep everyone will talk about how little this is the status symbol Right exactly so this is you don't want to say oh I see. 10 float out. There. You know that maybe the point is that maybe culture will will start to shift and maybe leisure will be. Prize Draw the more than has been the full That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing one could hope I want to get to the local industry computing there's a quote computers will do for nuclear physics stellar physics material science in chemistry what they have always done for aircraft design can you say a little more about what it will mean when calculation becomes such an integral part of all science every act to every major industrial activity will there be a very few large companies will there be lots of start ups What do you think. Well one of the things that is sort of abundant is computing power so I think that gives power to startups actually to to be disruptive and do the the kind of fresh thinking that can can always happen so I'm not I'm sort of fairly optimistic that that will. Still come about but I think what you do see is that in territory after territory great prize goes to the company that gets there 1st and dominates the space and there are great. Economies of scale and. The fact can be quite hard to compete with after a while so I think they will still face disruption as. The technology moves on to the next thing but you risk having territory that is occupied by very very large companies I think what also happens in this world that you're describing is that the barriers between different technologies start to break down so technologies and science is move into each other's Yes territory talking about this before a little bit when everything becomes. A formula or a computation the lines between physics and chemistry in biology already collapse collapses they already do to some extent in the nanotechnology world but that's going to be seen at a whole new scale and information technology sort of invades. Sector after sector again if you take medicine you know the ability to. To compute and to gather data or on diseases on patient's own genetic makeup this becomes a very very important part of the puzzle of figuring out diseases and so. Alliance is or new players moving into this area becomes very very likely very plausible which raises an interesting question in this world what would you like your granddaughter to study how could someone be best prepared Well I think you'd sort of expect the answer after what you did to talking about to be sort of can a computer sciences or. Someone who does this sort of data crunching brilliantly. I think actually I would go the other way and say that I would rather I would be very pleased if if if my grandchildren had a deep knowledge of history. I think we're going to need humanities just as much as we need science is and and you know if you think of the financial crisis for example part of the problem that was not thinking historically enough we were too wrapped up in the present a lot of these. The 1st chapter in the book actually. My colleague Tom Standage gives us a tool kit for looking at the future and there's 3 things in that to look at one is science fiction one is the sort of edge cases from the present but the 3rd thing is history history of history of science actually you can learn a lot of how things are likely to develop by looking at you know what happened in the Victorian Internet which was the tell the electric telegraph for example so I hope that we don't forget in all this techno techno driven age the humanities and even I think to make. Artificial intelligence the interaction with machines between machines and people well you will need to have people people who work with the machines to make them more humane so the humanities again will be deeply and mom to circle back to what we were saying earlier about abundance and scarcity it's still going to be quite hard to encode empathy and yes the hard to encode taste. Yes but not as probably is as difficult as you might imagine because I think me well. You know again I think if you if you want machines to be most effective in interacting with with individuals you have to in a way teach them to be empathetic to ask questions to listen to what's being said to them not just blurt out to so I think that precisely. Understanding what what how empathy would trying to get machines to mimic facts as far as possible is going to be part of making them good I hadn't thought about that but there is a rich industry to be built in computers that respond to visual cues well and see how they're how they're computation is going over with their human owners you know I think when when things of really changed is when you go and see the doctor and you say Actually I'd rather speaks machine please rather than speak to the doctor because you think that a machine will understand you better than the doctor when. It's interesting you say history because in Luciano flurried he's chapter he talks about these great waves in which. Humanity's understanding itself has changed radically and it tends to affect all sorts of social sensibilities people's sense of themselves people's sense of their relationship to God Copernicus taking the sun from the center of things. Right through to Freud taking our rational selves from the center of things. But in all of those cases I don't think the inventors sort of thought that's right I'm going to change how humanity thinks of itself but this time this is an interesting period in history we actually are building machines and building technologies that we pretty much know will make humanity unrecognizable to our present selves within 2 or 3 generations Yes well who is a fix professor at Oxford University he talks about actually the 4th revolution. The one you missed out was was Darwin I think it's sort of each of those are the 3 change the perception of humanity in the in the universe or position in the Amongst other creatures or of consciousness and here I think. It's a. Change of perception of humanity and intelligence and what you get from that I think is a sense of Ultimately one would hope that it's an understanding of what makes us a heightened awareness of what makes us truly human and know we're not better than the best computer playing chess or even now. But we have other qualities is that. That that make us. The human and maybe by peeling away yet another lair of the myth of what we have where we stand in the universe we can understand our own humanity better be more aware one of the great fears one finds about this world is. A very intelligent and malevolent Ai typically someone will insert a picture of the terminator you know the computers will come to kill us. Do you subscribe to this view or you think this is well some very smart people worry a lot about it and you know long mosque and I think Bill Gates is worried about this Stephen Hawking part about it in precisely. The sort of takes issue with all that and says we're very far from from that kind of future but he does that's not to get away from the worry he says the world in his view the book The water is in the machines are still actually. They they do what they're told we design the machines but we also create the environment in which the machines can operate. And he water is that we will create these environments designed around the machines at the expense of. Human Human needs we're not careful and sort of bit by bit we may create a machine friendly environment that ends up not being terribly human friend think that's not official intelligence that's artificial stupidity. Yes but it could eat all too easily you can and that's happened yes you can see how it happened that you know you're with this stuff one thing that only needs knows how to do one thing it's not going to adapt so you end up adapting to it you know you create the environment that helps it operate it's like being in a in a marriage or a partnership where one partner is just deeply stop and the other is quite adaptable The adaptable ones and that one ends up adjusting to the stopping one so we may end up adjusting time and again to the to the needs of the machine and that over time and repeatedly that can be I think perilous for the for how the overall organization of things works let's do a couple of scenarios if we could what do you think medical education will look like in 15 or 20 years. Well I think the. Rise of the. Data machine you know I've sort of fancifully invented a company that is the corner of the market in medical the medical world called d k b which is doctor knows best and this is some super machine that has all this sort of clever. Database and an ability to compute so machines are just going to get very very good at this stuff and. My colleague who writes about a data driven world says actually that the computer is going to be the smartest doctor in the world so if that's the case the Med the doctor. Has to. Learn how to be to add value around that not just on that has to not just be the offer the best diagnosis because the machine might be able to do that but the best judgment the best interpretation explaining this to patients possibly the best out of sort of out of the box thinking that can do what machines can't do so I think medical education will have to include a lot as indeed legal education as well a lot more understanding what machines will add to this and a lot more understanding of patient interaction because that will be where it will often be better than machines and what will health look like. Well radically potentially transformed by the ability to do things like have. Regenerative Medicine and replacing tissues or whole body parts that the that are worn out a lot more targeted therapy through this understanding of the pathways of diseases particularly with specific genomes so we instead of having sort of blunderbuss approach to a class of cancer use design you can tell much more accurately which drug is likely to work for which particular person so health care potentially further expanded life's life's life's spans we've we've already seen a great expansion of human life in. In the rich world in particular in recent decades and that can be stretched further by technology one more. Nature if we're managing everything what does nature exist. Well nature exists of course but we've already tamed a lot of nature and we we've. Nature around us and we will continue to do so I think want to area where. This is quite intriguing is in the area of food so do we eat meat that is comes from live animals or to eat meat that is from cell cultures from animals so you can imagine a genuine factory farming with farming animal products meat and perhaps milk and eggs that are not produced from live animals but are produced in factory from cell culture and you could see how that would pick the sort of animal rights lobby who might be thrilled about that against the frankenfood lobby who might be concerned about. The Quite intriguing to watch that battle playing out you know well this is been taking place in the last 5 or 10 years it's been under way and I think people into it that much of this perhaps not in the way it's said in the book but much of this is taking place now and will continue to grow some of the most powerful social and political movements and you can look at Bragg's that you can look at the elections in the u.s. You can look at. In a very different when I say this without prejudice to make a parallel ISIS or al Qaeda are or the Arab Spring are movements where great numbers of people say no we're not going we're not going to do that and they don't really have it seems a very positive programatic alternative they just want the future to go away and they want some return that is impossible to capture how things were and it's a myth how things work well I think a lot of that is very understandable reaction to the pace of change that in many cases makes. Swathes of society uncomfortable and so it's a very human response often ironically it uses technology very smartly in that response so you know all those campaigns that you mentioned were very adept at deploying the modern technology in order to turn the clock back which is right they're all stranger to the social media very savvy very very good at social media and in the case of. You know or very good at other forms of science and technology as well perhaps you know quite quite scarily so so but I don't think you know I don't think that's destined to as you say you can't the clock back beast I need you can perhaps do so only temporarily and I think that these forces that we've been discussing a really terrible awful of a time presumably those who embrace them will be advantaged and that's historically been the strong argument I think those who embrace them will be advantaged and they're very seductive or lots of them are not a case very seductive even for the political forces you've been describing I mean they are not going to reject new medical treatments that are on offer they're not they don't reject new communications they don't go into some sort of poster of silence they they use they have access to all the modern communications. I will use data very effectively there is a very compelling chapter on the future of war yes the state run violence talks of the worry about that is that the the strategic balance may be upset on a accessibility of some very powerful tools such as cyber warfare and the use of. Quite highly but not very expensive destructive technologies that can be obtained by poor states or even non-state player as you're listening to world affairs the weekly broadcast of the World Affairs Council I'm Jane Wales c.e.o. We're hearing from Daniel Franken who's executive editor of the economists he is in conversation with Quentin Hardy head of editorial at Google Cloud this event that was recorded in San Francisco before World Affairs audience Ours is a membership organization and we're dedicated to conversations that matter you can visit us at world affairs dot org And now back to our program as you saw these chapters come in how did it change your thinking about the world to come well it did its encourage me in the sense that most were very full of the possibilities and the speed of how things might change and kind of scale of the transformative impact in Sector off the sector I think that that was and I have. I would I would say that it also did strike me and you're right that it was it's broadly positive book that again contributor off to contribute to does point to the things that we need to be concerned about so that to me was very real as well you just mentioned the chapter on on warfare and that's that's a prime example yes. We're in something of a barbell world where people have never been more empowered and people have never been more under control people have never had more. Information and people have never been more confused by things and we speak in extremes like this all the time now that tends to speak to an unsustainable situation something's going to give here and presumably will over the next 30 years well something clearly politically has given in certain in certain countries. I think the concern is that something very very big gives in we've also got the power to do all sorts of damage and Frank Wilczek in his chapter talks about 3 concerns in particular and you create destruction and viral mental destruction and he what does worry about they are enabled warfare so the hope is that over text 30 years we he would beings are responsible enough not to let those things go as far as they potentially could well we have some questions from the audience in the 1st one speaks to this actually. An audience member asks Will the Flynn effect continue that is to say we'll put people continue to become smarter in tandem with technology. Well I don't I think technology can enhance us I think that that is certainly the case and if you look at technologies such as. I don't know this is what is meant by the fin effect if you look at I saw and I thought about the national security exactly I don't know whether throughout all getting off there. In any way but. If you think about reality so where you can have people with information. Very excessively provided in real time overlaid on the real world that enables you to do things more efficiently for us on people. You know clearly technology can make us dumber as well if not capital but I think technology can in hindsight capability is an interesting. Little bit part of the game the Wilczek tapped to talks about how technology can in Hans literally and Hans our sense is that the human sense or him is very restricted and with technology you can see sights. Sounds and. Get access to a much wider. Range of the senses and he predicts that it will enhance our human sense or him enormously so that's really interesting too because that represents whole new areas of data to be collected and see you know the behavior of infrared at scale for examples of potentially you could imagine that could have enormous artistic potential mate of potential and similarly the the questioner asked Will emotional and mental health benefit as people self actualize through technology. And there's something to be said for that there. We are now in contact with so many different people and empathy can be improved yes we can make connections much much more readily and I think. Again going greater understanding in that way yes I've gone become positive on you know here's what I need a good typhoon you mentioned controlling nature is there anything even countered around the prevention of natural disasters can we stop earthquakes Thai food hurricanes Well that isn't something that anybody talks about in the book and obviously earthquakes here are particularly relevant but one imagines that it can't have more and more data I would say let's see 2 to understand those phenomena. Has improved with more and more data collection we still could do with much much much more data on parts of the world that are actually still relatively have been inaccessible underneath the oceans for example I think those are areas where we will in this sort of timeframe get much better tater and perhaps get a better understanding of predictive powers of those things we won't bolt the plates of the earth that but we will become better at remote sensing Exactly and we will become become better at new materials that like nature can sway and not just remain rigid during such things so there is a positive there. Here's a good question it sounds like you were discussing the impact of technology on the educated class what about the implication on the working man who just lost his job to a robot do you have optimism there I think that's really tough one and I think that that is where the biggest. Sense of concern and real watery eyes and that's why. You know the the sort of the arts are often is educate already cation better education more flexibility what with that that takes time. And that that does not. Solve the problem of the person who sees that job immediately under threat so. You know there are it's not as if technology won't offer all sorts of. Potential benefits to those those because as well all those human beings as well but it doesn't necessarily offer them the prospect of a job and that's fairly fundamental again it does this challenges another area of government what education looks like and we still seem to have this promise that you'll finish you'll finish at 18 you'll finish at $22.00 and you'll be set up that will be sufficient amounts of education and very little in this Excel aeration indicates that's a successful model now and there's a lot more talk therefore of lifelong learning and the need to constantly have access and to reconnect and technology itself and clearly contribution a lot to that can offer. Very tailored courses much more potentially much much more widely by making them available over. Internet platforms by working out what your needs are and then on string that So there is an interesting contribution the book which which says that precisely technology having created a lot of in inequality office the potential in areas like education in areas like like health in the law to offer more access more cheaply and to be part of the solution to inequality again that's I think it could also do both at the same time it could be part of the solution but also continuing to to create divides and by definition if there is that kind of education going on it has to take place while people are working you will not break from work you will be educating while at work I've seen some intriguing stuff around. Machines that in addition to interacting with people educate them while they're interacting with them helps them learn a new task yes that's only problem yet again is the people who are better at continues education are going to be the people who had more of the education the 1st place you better have the tools to learn. Do you believe in universal basic income will we just pay people to live well this is this side this whole idea rises precisely out of these concerns that if you're going to have a whole swathe of us or Whole us. Great numbers in society who can't have work maybe part of the answer is to have a universal basic in time in order to have dignity and and to avoid revolution basically. So I think it's something that has to be carefully looked at I'm myself somewhat wary of the idea because the 1st will be very expensive. Quite it's liable to raise all sorts of other issues of what you do in your borders and whether who you let into this to this universal basic income and what it might do to incentives to to work I mean we know from welfare systems that there's a whole debate about whether. Welfare at some level can and can discourage work and can be demotivating rather than motivating so. I think the idea is is is a is a difficult one but an interesting one an important one to explore on that I think it's part of you know when we had the industrial revolution there was a massive policy response on a very big scale providing universal education providing different sort of taxation we probably need something on an equivalent scale whether this particular idea is the right one I think that's that's an open yes or no an audience member asks who would pay the government or corporations and. Of course the government would receive its money from individuals or corporations that may in one way or another to the same to the same thing but I but I think that behind the question is also an interesting thought about how much responsibility to corporations have for this world that creating I think some of the. Some of the larger companies do what about the social consequences of where these technologies can lead and are very actively engaging in trying to make sure that they. They can contribute in some ways and partly as a protecting themselves against the risks of a few drop even if they don't there's a very interesting challenge on the tension between corporations which even today are seen as having national headquarters or national characters and the need to derive data and insight from the best minds across borders so that corporations and governments will increasingly be antagonistic to each other. Potentially although I think we see time and again that geography still does mean something and that they more well I think the state has shown itself to be but sometimes people have thought well international companies can row we're all really moral right imo but actually the state turns out it's pretty powerful in making regulations and when the state decides to. Intervene corporations have to listen pretty hard how they can they can move money around to some extent they can try to escape to areas of easy easier regulation but pretty often they have fairly bases somewhere and they say they have to pay attention. An audience member asks What do you think the consensus thinking would have been in 1967 looking at the future of technology today there's little interesting things about that question one people still think 2050 is 50 years away it's now 33 years away and it's coming out as fast yes but even 30 years ago I think you know people would obviously have got a lot wrong. And you know the iphone is only 10 years old and that ushered in a sort of smart phone revolution as changed the way that we operate our lives quite fundamentally in many cases and that didn't exist we wouldn't have imagined a Seri 30 years ago so I think that the question does rightly say well you know there is an extreme difficulty of having to. Saying you know what's going to happen in 30 years time of course what we do is we make educated guesses Yes and it is a snapshot of the present and absolutely you know but. Speaking to where that's concerned in this area 30 years ago. Many people could have pointed to Moore's Law by that point it was 20 years on and said computers are going to become smaller and more powerful and people bet industries on that did quite well you see an end of Moore's Law coming yes I mean Moore's law. Conk carry on working forever it reaches the sort of subatomic scale you can only make transistors so dance in so so there is probably a little bit of mileage left but not all that much but that mileage is important because we're talking about you know still exponential growth on even. Extraordinarily improved efficiency so so that matters. And it's a serious question therefore since we talk so much about data computing power and so on can this computing revolution will it have the fuel to carry on cut crunching ever more data and more more demanding. Difficult is put in front of the computing industry to cope with all this. The. In the chapter that addresses this most directly is not with the same ease as before not with the same metronomic. Inevitability and reliability that Moore's Law to live it but yes it can go on through a combination probably of different different reasons one is to put more in the cloud in the area you know very well another is to actually get better in the design of what's software because because people precisely knew that Moore's Law was going to help out with ever greater efficiency you didn't have to design your software necessarily as energy efficiently as you. As you would have done or as memory efficiently as you would otherwise have done so there's gains to be had there you can get gains by step. Things and then potentially other forms of storage and memory can come into play such as d.n.a. Very efficient potentially way of storage and even quantum computing over the sort of time scale I think could could turn out to be very significant someone asks what is technology and what is not technology which is an interesting philosophical problem the rotary phone versus the smartphone when does something become a piece of technology in a sense it's all technology Yes that's what I was going back to when I had this started chipping of flint it is old technology and sometimes I think here in this particular part of the world you tend to think of technology is just information technology and there's all sorts of up to take on the day that. Is just as important as technology as well but there is also a very real observation behind that which is the technology we have with information technology. For want of a better turn a kind of in chance objects because they learn from you and they and they deliver more value and so we are in a somewhat different technology realm of things that improve themselves yes and I think when you get into sort of self learning spark smart machines that that again is a speeding up of how things how things work but it doesn't mean that other apparently Dhamma machines are not technology I think it's still technology. What does the future do to the population curve will we still go to 9 or 10000000000 people over this sort of time frame that we're talking about I don't think that what we've been talking about has much impact on population now friends that sort of a lot of that is baked in. And we probably stuff will still do go to. About 10000000000 or so by 2050. And hence the need to be able to feed. $3000000000.00 on synthetic started damaging goes more efficient much less food waste I mean more and a lot of we've been talking mainly about technology in the rich well but there's also the application of technology. To the developing world which can have an enormous impact and so the bringing of already existing technology to those to those parts of the world can be very significant as a chapter in the book by Melinda Gates imagining if every woman in the world had a smartphone and the impact that that could have and could be enormous in areas such as access to finance these are often women who don't have any who. Excluded from the financial system. Farming is incredibly important actually women most farmers in the well law women and the majority of majority are women and the information that they can have through smart phones can be incredibly important in improving improving efficiency that health care all these areas are potentially can have a huge impact and that's technology that exists today you don't need to invent something new for that you also find that in some of those parts of the world. You get strange spurts in technology that moves faster than elsewhere and I think particularly of the development of mobile payments in Kenya through and paisa this was somewhere that didn't have a many people didn't have access to a banking system overall payments developed and you could make payments more easily than at the time than you could in America and this was Kenya. I think one of the benefits of the next 1000000000 people to come online and access this very high level of information which is a benefit of the cloud or of computation everywhere the 1st 1000000000 largely could get it from a library and then a desktop computer in a laptop computer the next 1000000000 will arrive in a world where there's so much stored in a few places that they'll access it by their phones. An interesting development there is. The relative abundance of geniuses will discover Albert Einstein's last great bit of luck was to be born in Germany and have means to publishing had he been a goatherder in some obscure corner of Central Asia he would have just been a strange man on a hill that's a wonderful That's a wonderful force and in fact one of the. One of the. Ideas in this. Analysis of how technology could be part of the solutions inequality is the discovery of talent the technology can help you discover where the toilets is and talent that may otherwise have been hidden can be discovered and an example small example is the way that the Israeli Defense Forces seek out talented people with the help of technology and discover some some some extraordinary talents that would otherwise not have been discovered are told to go on to do great things in some cases to come technology entrepreneurs themselves so if you can imagine that happening on a much larger scale yes the gene that the genius provides eventually will be great only the geniuses who already that but they will they will be empowered to do great things to use the genius somewhat in the. Based on the fearful prospect an audience member appropriately asks although I'm generally an optimist living in the Bay Area I find there is a dominant view that all technology developments are good many are useful but are they necessary do we need to go to Mars do we need so much automation. Well technology is Nest not necessarily either good or bad it just is and we can make it better or worse I think it often. Develops so it takes off if. It has if people find it useful. So you know going to Maz is very expensive so if you're going to go to Mars you're going to have to have some people who think it's an extremely important valuable thing to do that's worth spending a lot of time and effort pursuing and that may be large numbers of people that maybe a government or it may be an individual who thinks that this is essential to create alternative colonies to human race might otherwise destroy the self if it is also a characteristic of human nature so far. To say yes to a new technology I can't think of a people who have looked at something and said Now we don't need that well but short of a Cold War to bomb it hang on there are plenty of technologies that fail right there are plenty of tales in the market that a sale in the marketplace that they get any way to prove to be actually offer will not terribly useful so that's very I remember saying well it's just not bill that they try and it doesn't work well they might try thing it doesn't work or may welcome people just don't find it terribly exciting right. A question or on the singularity recurrence Wells idea that we will I suppose you'd say just are our minds will disappear into the machine and we will live forever in a idealised state of high awareness I'm just not. I find it very hard to get my mind around us. I don't think we'll get there by 2050 I . Seen the diagrams I find it a remarkably spiritual point of view you're a rational man you know. What do you think will stay the same what are some things that will remain durable the true. Yes Well I think I think we will remain mortal. I think we will remain a friend that I think we will remain. Fallible deeply fallible. I think that. The ability to be frustrated with the world around us but also the ability to be excited and surprised by the world around us and that's the wellspring of creativity in technological change that those will those will stay stay the same. And the fact that this is you know extraordinary challenging business to share the planet with so many other people and so many are so many other forms of life that will remain unchanged that's interesting you say that because to circle back though we may know the process is underlying physics or biology or chemistry that doesn't mean we're in a world of pure engineering there is still plenty to discover plenty discover about about well about vast and also about human nature. And the interactions below these things which may be thrilling very nearly in a spiritual sense too I was going to ask you what you thought the future of religion was in all this. And I qualified it here well I think. It sort of goes in 2 directions that I think rationalism is probably on the rise as opposed to religiosity globally on the well but it but extreme intense forms of religion are also on the rise Cymbalta Ennius the so I think. You know there's a big debate and actually this topic was addressed in a previous but precursor of this book mega change which. I had to a few years ago which talked about big tectonic shifts in the world and there was a chapter on religion in that which took issue with the idea that. Religion is you know broadly on the rise again and said actually secularism on the rise in Europe certainly that's the case the argument was that in America too beneath the surface that's actually the case. And I think that. The the rise of these incredibly powerful technology is both has the impact of us having people search for more meaning and that can make them turn to religion but it can also just make them rely more and more on the technologies and decide that this is actually the the the rational world they live in I'm afraid that's all the time we have tonight on behalf of world affairs I ask you to join me in thanking Daniel Franklin for this excellent discussion good night thank you. You've been listening to world affairs the weekly broadcast of the World Affairs Council Ours is a membership organization and we're dedicated to engage in the public and conversations that matter this conversation feature Daniel Franklin He's executive editor of The Economist and he was in conversation with Quentin Hardy head of editorial a Google Cloud If you'd like to take part in future conversations visit us at world affairs dot org This broadcast is made possible weekly by the generous supporter Chevron our technical supervisor is Monte Carlo us world affairs is produced in association with k.q.e.d. Public Radio I'm Jane Wales thank you for joining us Weekend Edition with Scott Simon next up at 5 o'clock. I'm Stephen Dubner on the next the economics radio why so much nutrition science gets overturned. Studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in the biological science. So what should we eat and should sugar band it's next time Freakonomics Radio. Here Freakonomics this afternoon at 3 and again tomorrow morning at 1 o'clock National Weather Service says to look for typical July weather over the next 7 days with periods of overnight clouds followed by clearing during the day along with sea breezes and they say temperatures will be seasonable temps today for the Bay School is the upper fifty's at the coast to the upper eighty's and now 5 o'clock at k.q.e.d. F.m. San Francisco and k.q. We are f.m. North Highlands Sacramento and live on line at k.q.e.d. Good morning. From n.p.r. News in Washington d.c. .