AGI Is Here – And Society Isn’t Ready: Peter Diamandis (Transcript)

And the Apollo data just came out a couple days ago. Same idea. They’re not seeing AI — even though we’re seeing all these companies lay off massive amounts of people — in the overall jobs data, they don’t see the downturn.

PETER DIAMANDIS: True.

TOM BILYEU: But when you look backwards, what you see is true — the technology creates more jobs than it destroys. But for the people that were trained up, and let’s say north of 35 years old, they’re toast, man. Like if they don’t have adaptability in their DNA, they will struggle forever.

And one of the things that people are saying — so the US overall life expectancy has declined — and one of the fingers that people point to is that you’ve got so many deaths of despair from people that got displaced by the internet that weren’t able to become coders, like the whole “learn to code” meme, and they just never found other jobs.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: And that’s been historically true where you lose a generation or two that just don’t adapt to the new technology. How do we deal with that in AI when it’s moving at a rate that is just unparalleled?

The Speed Problem and Social Unrest

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, the speed is the issue, right? Electrification of America was decades of process. When I’ve looked at the data, and I’ve reported this on my Moonshots podcast a few times, first of all, it’s murky. It’s not crystal clear.

TOM BILYEU: The historical data?

PETER DIAMANDIS: No, no, the current estimate of job loss in AI. Both sides are arguing, right? You’ve got Sam Altman just recently coming out and saying, “No, I was wrong, we’re not going to have this job apocalypse.”

TOM BILYEU: How convenient, as his IPO.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And the same thing for Dario at Anthropic, right? And I agree with that statement. What it looks like is the job loss is actually a lack of hiring. So what I’m looking at in the data is the number of unemployed individuals is growing in the age 22 to 28. And for me, that’s a big concern, right?

TOM BILYEU: It’s hard to get in now.

PETER DIAMANDIS: It’s harder to get in. But I think about — we’ve talked about this — the next 2 to 8 years is a period of turbulence, right? I do believe we’re heading towards this extraordinary world of abundance. And we’re going to get there, but it’s going to be turbulent over the next number of years as society is beginning to adapt to this.

And when you’ve got — I’ll make it a very broad statement here — testosterone-laden young men who can’t get a job and therefore can’t afford a car or a house or get married because of that, they’re going to get angry. And so I’m worried about social unrest in that context. And the fear is real. You saw Eric Schmidt and others getting booed talking about AI at commencement speeches.

TOM BILYEU: I think they were surprised. That’s the part.

PETER DIAMANDIS: They were surprised.

TOM BILYEU: I was shocked by that. That they were surprised that young people are scared, that this is a moment of this insane transition. These guys, they’ve done well. God bless them. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I love to see people win. But if you lose sight of what it’s like to be in your 20s where the world is just confusing — it doesn’t necessarily feel confusing, you just don’t know what to do. You don’t have any sense that, “Oh, I’m going to get on the other side of this.”

The Real Fear: The Lack of AI

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah. And I just did an event recently, and I had two young guys, both in college, age 21, 22, come up to me afterwards and say, “I’m so happy to be in a room of people who actually think AI is going to help us, and AI is a good thing,” because they’re ostracized on their campus because of that.

And I just published a blog post on Substack about “my fear is not AI, it’s the lack of AI.” And we can talk about AI being a problem here in the first world where we’ve got good healthcare and reasonable education, but in the majority of the world — the other 6 billion people, or the rising billion — the only hope they have for good healthcare, for better education, for addressing issues, increasing crop yields and so forth, is going to be AI supporting and uplifting those individuals.

Navigating the Chasm: Fear, Bifurcation, and What’s Coming

TOM BILYEU: That’s a really good point. So when you look at the changes that are coming in the state of AI right now — we both agree there’s a chasm that we’re going to have to cross. It’s a terrifying chasm for the reasons that you said. I would paint an even more troubling picture in that we already have a weak economy that is hard bifurcating in the K-shape. We have populism was already on the rise because of debt, and now we have the most rapid technological transformation ever in human history, by an order of magnitude.

So now we know that people are fearful as it is, and it’s coming at this time. So what are the technologies? So if we know the thing that’s going to break is we’re training people for an old system that’s already dead — there’s a social contract there that just adds to the resentment of people feeling like, “Boomers, f* you, like you have hoarded all the money, all the opportunity, you’ve locked us out.” And now we’re coming into this time where, “How do I even pick a direction? Like, this is all changing so fast.”

What are the things you see happening in AI that makes you go, “No, no, the real problem is lack of AI because it can do—” what are the things?

PETER DIAMANDIS: First of all, I just want to acknowledge there is a lot of fear, right? And the other thing — and I think you agree with this — is that fear is like the worst place to face the future from. It shuts you down. Like it or not, we’re going to see this transformation where companies are shrinking in size. The countervailing data again is that we’re going to see more small companies starting more than ever before.

TOM BILYEU: But what is it that AI is doing? Like, what’s the thing? So it’s gene editing—

The Biggest Benefits of AI: Science, Health, and Longevity

PETER DIAMANDIS: I mean, so, okay, let me jump into that. First of all, I think the biggest benefit we’re going to get out of AI that no one’s talking about is going to be the impact on science. We’re going to solve — we are solving math right now. AI is fundamentally solving most of the most difficult math challenges that have been on the books that no human has done. What follows next is physics. What follows after that is chemistry, biology, material sciences.

So let me double down. It’s going to be the ability to spin up drugs much faster than ever before. If you listen to folks like Demis Hassabis — his statement, and he’s doing this in DeepMind, he’s the CEO of Google’s DeepMind, he’s also the CEO of Isomorphic Labs — his belief is that we’re going to cure all disease, all disease within a decade.

All right, so imagine a world in which cancer is shot, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory disease, infectious disease — all diseases solved. That’s huge. I mean, if you’re young, you can look at your parents. They’re going to be towards the end of their lives, spending the majority of their wealth dealing with health issues.

Dario went on stage a year ago and said his belief is that we will double the human lifespan inside of the next 10 years. Whoa. I mean, extraordinary. You can look it up. It was a presentation. I’ve never heard that presentation.

TOM BILYEU: Shocking.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, the presentation he gave at Davos last year. And if you think about just those two things — I mean, there’s no greater wealth than our health, right? I love the saying, “The man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams. The man or woman who does not have their health has but one.”

So being able to address all disease, being able to double the lifespan — but it’s not just that, it’s healthspan. It’s how long are you feeling amazing? Ray Kurzweil’s prediction is that we’ll reach longevity escape velocity by 2033. And that’s the point at which for every year that you’re alive, science is extending your life for more than a year.

There’s that. And the reality is our ability to address the climate crisis is not going to come because we’re getting smarter or working harder. It’s going to be the development of new processes, new capabilities that’s coming from AI.

Our ability to address — I’ll go to Elon. I don’t know how your audience feels about Elon.

TOM BILYEU: I love him. So they’re at a minimum, they hear me talk about him all the time.

Universal High Income and the Cost Revolution

PETER DIAMANDIS: He’s been a friend for 26, 27 years now. And I had him on the Moonshots podcast and we talked about his belief that we’re going to see a triple-digit growth in the GDP in the next 5 years — triple-digit growth.

TOM BILYEU: My audience will be going, “Yeah, but is that evenly distributed or is that just—” So let’s go there.

PETER DIAMANDIS: He was back on the podcast in March, and his vision is that AI and humanoid robotics will be able to create products for people at such an extraordinary rate, at such a de minimis cost, that we’ll be able to have this — he calls it not UBI but UHI, Universal High Income. And the notion is that, yeah, you may not earn more money, but your ability to get more stuff is going to be through the roof.

Let’s give an example. We’ve got Waymo coming here in Santa Monica. When I drive around, I’m seeing like 10, 15 Waymos during my drive. We’ve got CyberCab coming. We’ve got an autonomous vehicle from Lucid, Uber — it’ll probably be on Zoox. There’ll probably be on the order of at least 5, maybe as many as 10 of these CyberCab-type companies. And what does that mean? It means that your cost of transportation has just dropped by 5. Right? And they’re going to beat each other up for the lowest possible price.

The idea that if in fact Optimus and Figure and 1X and all these humanoid robot companies are coming online and have advanced AI capability — the cost of these robots are projected to purchase at $20,000, and $300 a month to lease them, $10 a day, right?

So imagine a good part of building a house is the labor. Imagine if that labor goes towards zero. And imagine if instead of living in downtown LA or the local LA ecosystem here, you live further out where land is more affordable and you build a beautiful home there for a fraction of the cost. And then you can use your Waymo or CyberCab to come into town.

We’re going to start to see a number of the flying car companies — Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation — for the cost of an UberX, take you point A to point B in record time. Or you can just use Starlink to telecommute in.

AI’s Impact on Education, Healthcare, and Surgery

So we’re going to start to see life changing a significant amount. The best education in the world isn’t going to be in the classroom. It’s not going to be on the university campus. I mean, I think physical education is an important point for human-to-human connectivity, but to actually learn something, your AI is going to know your abilities, knows how you like to learn. Is it verbal? Is it visual? Is it by example? What’s your favorite color, your favorite movie star? And start teaching you in ways that really matter to you. So we’re going to see a revolution in education.

So where do we spend the most money today? We spend it in health. We spend it in education. We spend it in diagnostics — being diagnosed will be, and we know this already, the best diagnosis is coming from an AI. It’s not coming from a human doctor.

Another thing I spoke to Elon about — I said, “When will the Optimus robot be better than any surgeon?” His prediction was 3 years, which sounds insane. Let’s say it’s 5 years from now. And I do think that’s the case. All of a sudden, if you need surgery — which can bankrupt people — and you want to go find the best surgeon, it’s the surgeon who’s done it the most. The number of surgeries you’ve done and seen is your level of being able to say, “Oh, I recognize that from last time.” Well, these robots all share their same memory, and so imagine if your cost of surgery is the CapEx, electricity, and dollars per hour.

Why AI Makes Everything Cheap: The Mental Model

TOM BILYEU: That’s where — so I want to pause you there. That’s where I think people need to really start to build a mental map of what AI is. So I don’t think people fully understand that the reason things are expensive is because they refuse to work for free. This is like one thing that I am just desperate to get people to understand. When they look at something and it’s expensive and they think, “Those greedy capitalists” — it’s like, hold on. There are people that if we could get them to work for free, everything would be much less expensive. So ultimately we are all the problem — we refuse to work for free, for obvious reasons. But AI is that. AI works for food essentially, and that food is energy.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Electrons. Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: Exactly. And so since they are falling from the sky, from the sun for free — we just don’t know how to capture them. As we get good at capturing them, the cost of feeding them goes to zero. And then once you make that first round of robots, if they’re free to feed, then their labor essentially becomes free once they can start using that energy to go harvest the next round of resources, to build the next round of robots. And so energy costs go to zero, labor costs go to zero, and now you can basically have anything you want.

Now, if people begin to understand it like that, they’ve got that first brick of how to predict where this goes. They’ll also start to get a sense of some of the dangers, and we’ll get into that in a second.

But okay, that’s why this stuff becomes cheap or free. Then the next layer becomes — they have a hive mind. And so unlike a human that has to go to school forever, you can literally just download into that surgeon that just came off the line every surgery that’s ever been performed by that company, and it could start a surgery and get smarter in the middle of the surgery based on 1,000 other similar surgeries that are happening at the same time around the world but reporting back.

I worry that part of what traps people in the fear cycle — part of what will — they’ll have to still cross the fear chasm, but part of what stops most people is that they just don’t have a mental model for what’s actually happening. So as you think through where we are now and where we’re trying to get to, how much of it is a blind optimism and how much of it is projecting what the actual technology will become?

Technology as the Force That Creates Abundance

PETER DIAMANDIS: So I wrote my first book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, back 14 years ago, 2012. And it was an extrapolation of what I saw, right? That technology is the force that takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant over and over again. Like you said, we are bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun on this planet than we use as a species, right? Massive amount of energy. It’s just not in a usable form. And of course, advances in solar and batteries, perovskite, all of that has made it more and more usable.

We just crossed the point at which solar and wind is now producing more energy on Earth than natural gas. Whoa. Right. We crossed more than coal a while ago. And so it’s effectively God-given energy that we can mine and utilize.

The data is, I think, incontrovertible that intelligence — well, first of all, let’s just make the statement that intelligence is what differentiates us on this planet. We’re not the fastest, we’re not the strongest, we’re arguably, hopefully, the most intelligent. And intelligence as a service has just been skyrocketing. What can that intelligence do? We each now have access to the best therapists, the best coaches, the best educators, the best physicians — for free on these services.

AI’s Novel Problem-Solving: Beyond Pattern Recognition

TOM BILYEU: Let me push you on that. So one, I would say — and this is what made me want to start with artificial general intelligence — I would say that what humans can do is distinctly different than what AI can do. AI is a phenomenal pattern recognition machine, but definitely seems primarily, not exclusively, but primarily to be backwards looking at “What is my training data?” We’re starting to see glimpses of the novel mathematics that you were talking about where they are generalizing away from the training data. It’s not a lot yet. They fall apart as you try to generalize too far, whereas a human can do that.

I can take you in, describe tennis, you can play tennis or at least explain it. I can take you over to wash dishes, teach you how to do that really fast, take you, teach you how to play a video game. The data that a human needs to learn those patterns is very small, but AI — it’s massive.

PETER DIAMANDIS: It is. But what we’ve also seen is AI learning by self-play, right? This is what DeepMind did in learning Go. The first time that it won against Lee Sedol, the Go champion, it was basically trained on all the Go games it could get, and that was training on data that existed. The next time, they created something called AlphaZero, which was where the AI was playing against itself and learning the rules on its own, right?

So they did this — DeepMind did this in the video game world where it just played and played and played and played, and it deduced the rules as it went along, and it learned how to play the game of Go or video games at a level far beyond any human because the training data didn’t exist there. It created the training data by just playing countless games itself.

And so one thing that AI can do is run billions of times and learn in areas of the knowledge graph that was never explored before. Does that make sense?

TOM BILYEU: It does. And that makes sense when there’s something that has very specific rules that are somehow testable. So it’ll certainly be interesting to see if you can have novel breakthroughs in —

PETER DIAMANDIS: But this is what it was. This was used in the recent breakthroughs in the Erdős models — the Erdős problems. A set of the most difficult mathematical problems that have not been solved. And so the model just went in — I forget if it was Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s — just went in and started exploring crazy ideas. And out of one of those crazy ideas came a solution. And if you look at what its inner thinking, which you can now look at, it said, “This has never been tried, it’s a crazy idea, but let me try it.” And it worked.

Are New Breakthroughs Needed for Superintelligence?

TOM BILYEU: So let me ask really pointedly — are you saying that no new breakthroughs are needed for AI to get to superintelligence? Or do you think that there is going to be some human-supplied novel restructuring of data centers or whatever that will be required for it?

The Road to AGI: Are We Already There?

PETER DIAMANDIS: We’re going to find out. So Demis, again, I can only go back to the guys who are the OGs in this field. And Demis recently said that while he thought there need be a dozen breakthroughs before we got to AGI, he recently said, “I think we’re there or need one breakthrough.” And his belief, Elon’s belief, Sam Altman’s belief is we’re there in the next couple years.

TOM BILYEU: Are any of them giving indications what the gap is? Like, why don’t we have it today?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think one of the areas that they are looking for is continual self-learning, where after you train a model, it’s continuing— it’s able to continually train itself and learn more. Happening right now, there is a lot of work going in that direction.

But here’s the question. I think it’s important for folks to say, okay, if this does happen, if we do achieve AGI— and some friends believe we’re there right now, but the outside right now is the next 2 years— and if we do achieve AGI, artificial general intelligence, the point at which an AI is able to do anything as well or better than a human, then what does the world look like? And are you getting ready for that world?

I think that’s an important conversation. And so what do you do in that regard? I think the number one thing people need to do is self-educate. And it’s the easiest thing ever than any time ever in human history to sit down. And I do this as often as I can. If I’m listening to a podcast and someone says something interesting, I’ll go to ChatGPT, or I’ll go to Anthropic or Gemini, and I’ll go in the voice mode and have a conversation and say, “What does that mean? And then, what does that mean? And can you give me an example?” And my favorite is, “Teach it to me like I’m 5 years old,” and go down the rabbit hole and self-educate, because you can for free at a level like never before.

Preparing for Disruption: Purpose, Curiosity, and the Ticking Clock

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so how do people begin to point themselves at the right thing? When you’re talking, I hear, if you already have curiosity, if you already have a certain level of intelligence and tenacity, this is going to be an exciting time for you because you’ll be able to go learn this stuff. But what does it look like for somebody who is more prone to work with their hands, is looking at robotics and worried they’re getting replaced? They don’t have that sort of endless curiosity. There’s a thing they know how to do, and they want to go do that thing. And the world used to have a lane for them, but it feels like, to me, there’s a debate as to whether who’s about to get wiped off first. The white-collar people or blue-collar people.

Now, blue-collar people, I would say, have a benefit that robotics is not yet able to do the physical things that they’re able to do. But once it can, if they don’t have the intellectual desire to adapt and go in a different direction, then they’re going to be in real trouble.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Okay, two separate points here. Number one, I think there are two mindsets that are important, that are critically important right now. The first one is a purpose-driven mindset. And we’ve talked about purpose a lot. It’s dear and near to my heart. My favorite Mark Twain quote is, “Two important days in your life: the day you were born, the day you find out why.” So trying to connect with your purpose, and for me it’s the thing that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going through the day, keeps you going at night. Your purpose could be your kids, it could be learning a new skill, it could be anything. But if you can connect with your purpose, that’s the first mindset.

The second is a curiosity mindset. It’s willing to ask and to dive in. And if you can hone those two mindsets, I think those are what are going to enable you to survive and thrive in this decade ahead.

TOM BILYEU: What I’m trying to figure out is I think there are some people that they have a skill set that is deployable now, but they feel like they’re on a ticking clock.

PETER DIAMANDIS: So the second thing is, I think we’re going to move to robots doing a lot of the work and people directing them. We’ve seen this in the farming industry, we’ve seen this in the manufacturing industry, where humans are still in the loop overseeing and directing. I don’t think we’re going to see things with human labor eliminated without those people moving up a level. So imagine a world in which, yes, if you’re displaced, instead you think about those robots or those AI models working for you at your direction. What do you want them to do?

Social Unrest, UBI, and the Cost of Disruption

TOM BILYEU: We both know that there is a chasm that has to be crossed as this gets deployed, that people are going to panic as they start seeing robots on the street. We’re already seeing some of that backlash now. You’ve got people trying to stop data centers being built. They will attack it for environmental reasons, but I don’t think it has anything to do with that. I think it has to do with fear — the world is going to change too much, I may be irrelevant in the new world.

When you start thinking about dealing with that, do you just go, “Oh no, no, everybody moves up a level, there’s going to be plenty for everybody, a whole bunch of new companies, smaller companies, but a whole bunch, everyone’s going to be fine”? Or do you grant me that there will be a group of people, either because they are unwilling or unable to adapt, that will be left out and they are going to come banging on doors?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I do grant you that and I do agree. And so I think we’re going to have a period of social unrest as a result of that. I think it’s going to be younger individuals who don’t get a job and are like, “The American dream has been slayed by you guys.” We saw that with Sam Altman’s fire, Molotov cocktails, and a number of other activities. And there’s AI extremism going on right now, reported. The FBI is tracking this, and it’s a growing amount of concern — meaning terrorist attacks against data centers.

So what do we do? I think if this plays out, and again I said it’s a murky future, but if the data shows that in fact the layoffs are real, the hiring freezes are real and people are not getting jobs, what do we do? I think the government has one knob to turn, and that is the equivalent of COVID checks. I think the government will start printing money. My prediction is inside of 2 years, we’ll start to see probably not $1,000 a month like COVID, but probably $3,000 — for a significant number of the population, where they’re getting money at a level which enables them to survive reasonably comfortably.

At the same time, we’re going to start to see the cost of things beginning to fall. Healthcare is ridiculously priced right now, and it’s going to be massive disruption in healthcare costs. Education is ridiculous right now, especially if you’ve seen the numbers, but colleges are beginning to go bankrupt because, “I spent $200,000 getting a degree and I can’t get a job. Screw you.”

TOM BILYEU: So I’m not paying my debt.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I’m not paying my debt, and this is ridiculous. And so we’re going to, I believe, start to see these UBI-like payments coming. And I think the argument that Elon makes is that at that level, what you’re going to be able to afford with that amount of money is going to start to increase more and more.

I gave the example of transport 5 times cheaper, and the poorest people are being chauffeured around in an autonomous vehicle, where in fact your healthcare is cheaper, your education is cheaper, your entertainment has gotten significantly — you know, Netflix. I was just on the phone with Reed Hastings talking about this. Netflix democratized and demonetized access to entertainment, and YouTube, the ultimate provider.

The Meaning Crisis: What Happens When Work Disappears?

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so the French Revolution wasn’t started by a bunch of poor people. It was started by overproduced elites that were sitting around, had just enough money to not need to work, and so they started cutting people’s heads off. That is legitimately my fear — is universal basic income, universal high income, none of it will — it will create a new derangement. It will solve one problem. People aren’t going to starve, but it will create a secondary problem, which is I now have no meaning and purpose.

There will be a very large portion of people that do not know how to metabolize that intellectually, and so they will act out on their emotions. And just like COVID was like mass protests and riots, I think you’re going to see something similar.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I agree with you.

TOM BILYEU: What do we do with that? Because if our big punchline is UBI forever, and we know that UBI has a deranging effect, this no longer is about just crossing the chasm, it’s about a forever thing.

PETER DIAMANDIS: It’s about reinventing society as a whole. I wrote a Substack on what I called the 5 major forks, the speciation of humanity — the 5 choices you’re going to make forward. And the first one is, are you a consumer or a creator?

This incredible capability is coming our way effectively for free. You’re going to be someone who’s sitting on the couch, your Optimus robot’s bringing you a beer, and you’re consuming some spun-up version of a Netflix show that stars you and your friends. You’re just a consumer kicking back and consuming. The other side is, are you a creator? Are you using these incredible technologies to create something of value? Is it WALL-E or Star Trek? So I think that’s one of the divisions we’re going to start to see.

The only solution I see — when I was interviewing Elon, I said, he said something like, “We’re going to see social unrest and universal high income.” I said, “Both?” He said, “Yes, both.”

TOM BILYEU: Yeah.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And he’s a very smart guy. So how do we deal with this? I think part of it is going to be societal expectations and restructuring. It doesn’t come overnight.

TOM BILYEU: So what does that look like? Is that a cultural phenomenon, or is that—

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think it’s more police and UBI checks in the beginning to try and quell and control. I think ultimately it’s resetting people’s expectations. I put a lot of blame on school systems right now. Schools are not preparing our kids for the future, neither at high school or college. And I think we need to start thinking about how do we re-envision life in this post-AGI world? Because it’s coming. Not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Is it 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years?

Can We Regulate Our Way Out of This?

TOM BILYEU: Why don’t we just regulate the life out of this?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Because I don’t think it’s regulatable. It might be here in the U.S., it won’t be in China.

TOM BILYEU: Well, let’s at least do it in the U.S.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Okay, if we do that, then we are starting to cut back on all the benefits we get. Will we get all diseases eliminated? Will we get doubling the human health span? Will we get access to free education and free healthcare? As soon as we start to regulate stuff and slow it down, we start to get diminishing returns on this potential future.

Last week there was supposed to be an executive order that Trump put to have the government evaluate all models before they were published for safety, and it was killed an hour before it was signed because we didn’t want to slow down the AI progression. I’m reminded of — I think it was Oppenheimer’s quote — once we started working on the nuclear bomb and the scientific inquisitiveness started, there was no way we could stop.

The Nuclear Precedent and the Moral Case for AI

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, I try to remind people all the time, when they did the first nuclear test, they said there was a non-zero chance that they light the entire atmosphere on fire and kill everything.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes.

TOM BILYEU: And they still did it.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: And I thought, yeah, any technology that promises an advantage will get developed no matter what the potential consequences.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, the other argument that’s made loudly is the US versus China, right? If China gets to AGI and ASI first, will they basically promulgate the Chinese communist strategies globally?

I want to go back to what I said a minute ago, that we’re on the verge of solving everything. I wrote a paper, it’s at solveeverything.org, looking at how we do that, solving physics, chemistry, biology, material sciences. These technologies are going to enable us to deal with the existential threats as a species, everything from climate change, to lack of enough energy, lack of enough healthcare.

It’s fine in the U.S. to think about, let’s slow it down, it’s okay, we have the luxury of that. But for the rest of the world who are living in abject squalor in the favelas in Brazil, these technologies are going to enable the breakthroughs to uplevel every man, woman, child on the planet.

TOM BILYEU: Is that though a moral argument? Because they don’t have the technical wherewithal.

PETER DIAMANDIS: It will not come from there, it will come from the labs here.

TOM BILYEU: I really believe that in the next 2 to 3 years you are going to have a cacophony of voices absolutely demanding that we cease developing AI. You will have people— the terrorist extremism that feels like it’s on the fringes right now aimed at AI will become very supported, and you will see more and more attacks on our data centers. You’ll see homegrown drone attacks on our own data centers like that. You can just count on that.

And so as that happens, we’ve got to make an appeal to people to say, hey, listen, this is why we need to keep going. And so that’s what I hear there is we have a moral obligation to the rest of the world who does not have our level of technology, wealth, abundance, all of that. And so this technology needs to be made to help them. Is that how you mean it?

Ambient AI and the Automagical World

PETER DIAMANDIS: That is how I mean it. But there’s also the benefits to here, us here in America, to those who are listening from U.S. soil. I want you to imagine that your family has extraordinary healthcare breakthroughs, that your family has access to the best education in the world, that the world becomes automagical for you.

I define automagical as— I think we’re going to end up probably in the next 2 years where we have what I call ambient AI. AI is in your environment. You give it permission to listen to all your conversations, read your emails. I run an AI called Skippy, named after an AI in one of my favorite science fiction books, and it’s an OpenClaw on top of 2 Mac Studios. And I’ve given Skippy access to my WhatsApp, my iMessages, my email, my calendar, every—

TOM BILYEU: Please, not your credit cards.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Not my credit cards. Well, it has a limited credit card access, but it also has access to every conversation I’ve recorded on Granola when I do a Zoom call, right? All of it’s there. It knows what’s going on in my life, and its ability to help me is extraordinary. Its ability to recall some conversation I had with somebody, or its ability to help me take some materials and synthesize it. Its ability to say, oh, this email you didn’t respond to is critical, I’ve got a draft for you, do you want to send it?

We’re going to see ambient AI. So let me take it a step further. Within the next 2 years, you’re in your home and you’re about to have lunch. Your AI is taking all of your biometric data and it says you need some more water, you need some more vitamin D, you need some more protein. It’s able to understand what food is best for your health. If you turn on Health Coach and you’re going someplace, it says, hey, take the stairs instead of the elevator over there, right?

Or one of my favorite examples I use is you’re at breakfast with your family, you stand up from the table, you’re heading towards the front door, your AI knows where you’re going next, and it’s pulled up a CyberCab in front of your home. Instantly. It knows you didn’t get good sleep last night, so it’s got a CyberCab with a lie-down bed in it so you can get a nap to your next location.

The world starts adapting itself to you in a beautiful fashion, and these things become effectively free and available to everybody. This is a future we’re rocketing towards, not maybe. I’ve said before, if we stopped AI where it is today it would still be amazing. It’s incredible.

TOM BILYEU: How amazing though? Are we talking we’re still going to hit escape velocity, longevity escape velocity, or—

PETER DIAMANDIS: No, we’re not going to. We need to go further to get curing of all disease and extending the health span by a significant amount, and solving the environmental problems, enabling fusion, enabling new battery storage technologies. All of these things are what comes out of the next few years.

The Deranging Effect of AI on Society

TOM BILYEU: Do you think at all about how— screens, social media, all of that had a deranging effect. I still think it’s a net positive, but there is a now looking backwards knowable deranging effect that especially parents need to protect their kids from. Is there a knowable deranging effect to AI?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think there is. I think it’s a loss of critical thinking.

TOM BILYEU: People just become a pair of hands to them.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Well, people become lazy, all right? And I think one of— you need to be purpose-driven. You need to have bigger ambitions. So in the education space, my kids are going to 9th grade, and the head of school at Brentwood is amazing, and I’m so proud of his vision of helping kids learn AI tools, learn entrepreneurship, learn mindset, learn all these fundamentals that are important for the decade ahead. But it’s not like that at most schools.

Most schools right now see AI as something they don’t want to allow. And I agree, if you’re using AI in 9th grade to do 9th grade homework, it’s a waste. But if you’re using AI in 9th grade to design starships to go to Alpha Centauri, that’s amazing.

TOM BILYEU: That’s really interesting, right?

PETER DIAMANDIS: So it’s like, how do we up-level people’s ambitions? That’s what’s possible. And it becomes from a purpose-driven— and once a person has used this technology to create something, again, it’s the consumer versus creator— to create something beyond what they thought they could do, it’s addicting. It’s like, wow, what else could I do?

Stabilizing Society: Government, Ownership, and UBI

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so going back to this stabilizing. We’ve got a lot of cool things that are on the table, but we have to stabilize society. I live in deep, abiding fear of the government. I think anything that gives the government the impulse to get bigger is legitimately terrifying. I’m a super positive, very optimistic guy. I’m just making contact with ground reality and I’m looking back at history and going, this goes wrong. Not most of the time. Every time. And the reset button, as people think about it, is always hit because the government has gotten too big. They’re just money printing everything.

So, Bernie Sanders put forward a proposal that would give 50% ownership—

PETER DIAMANDIS: I saw that—

TOM BILYEU: —to the public of the AI companies. What say you?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think it’s massively overreaching. One of the questions, if we’re doing $3,000 checks, right, and we’re printing more money, where does that money come from? Are we just going to inflate the dollar like we did during COVID? The answer is in the early days, probably yes. But there is an argument to be made. Are you familiar with the Permanent Fund in Alaska?

TOM BILYEU: I assume tied to oil.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah. So everyone who lives in Alaska, because oil is a native resource for Alaskans, all of them, they get a check every year, which is a dividend from the oil sales by the state of Alaska.

TOM BILYEU: Sovereign wealth fund.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Exactly. So there is an argument to be made that the frontier labs, the hyperscalers that are building on U.S. soil, using U.S. energy, using U.S. resources and talent and so forth, that some amount of their income could be redistributed.

And listen, I’m a libertarian capitalist. The idea of socialism, I have a very negative reaction to it. But I do think that the frontier labs and the hyperscalers are going to be the target, and they need to do something that is going to quell and support the populace. And there needs to be a mechanism by which the populace has capital with which to buy goods and services.

Not everyone’s going to want to be an entrepreneur. There’s some fraction, and I think it’s larger than most people believe— I think a lot of people could be entrepreneurs if they tried. So 50% is way off base for me. Is it 5%, 10%? I think there’s an argument made in that realm.

TOM BILYEU: The thing that scares me to death in practice— I get where you’re going, and I think they’re the problem that will have to be solved for with that. People are going to need to be able to eat if AI— and this is already a big if— if AI does replace jobs and everything becomes abundant, then I think we for sure have to do something to make sure that people are eating and they’re not falling apart.

But the incentive structure will become so weird so fast that there are dangers that I worry about. Let me paint a scenario. If you tell the AI companies, hey, by the way, we’re putting this bill up and we’re going to vote on it and it’s going to give us a distressing percentage of ownership in your company. That’s just going to accelerate launching out into space, data centers in space. They go up into space, they create some sort of Monaco where it’s a tiny country.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And they reincorporate there.

TOM BILYEU: Correct. And they will get around that in some way. And so for me, I’m not a libertarian, so I want to see government, but I want that government to have the impulse to be ridiculously small. And that’s where I think getting a scenario where people are incentivized to do something with their time and energy somehow, some way— and that’s the part that I don’t have an easy solution for, but there needs to be a lot of cultural pressure if nothing else.

For people to spend their time wisely contributing to the group. We still have all these algorithms that are running in our head that give us a sense of meaning and purpose. You even said it earlier. To do something— passion is where your purpose is, where you’re doing something, you’re contributing. So there’s going to need to be some element of that that will not be solved by taxing, by spreading ownership. Those things won’t—

The Philosophy of Free Will, Determinism, and Human Paths Forward

PETER DIAMANDIS: I agree. I also think that in the final result, this UBI version at $3,000 a month is a reasonable, comfortable life— enough food, electricity, access to Wi-Fi and so forth. It’s not going to be an amazing life. So I think there needs to be— and people need to have the ambition to do and work and contribute to uplevel their abilities. I think that’s true for everybody today still. People who are getting by and okay with that and are not trying to go and get a degree or learn new skills. They’re comfortable where they are. And I think part of it is opportunity, and I recognize that everybody has the same opportunity. And part of it is, it’s good enough. It’s mindset in that regard.

I wrote this book Abundance, the follow-on to Abundance, We Are as Gods, and it’s titled A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. The book I wrote in 2012 with Steven Kotler laid out the thesis of abundance, that technology transforms everything from scarce to abundance over and over again— food, water, energy, healthcare, education. In the back of the book, we’ve got 100 charts showing what’s occurred over the last century, the last 20 years, and it’s up and to the right. And it’s amazing, but we take it for granted. Every time something happens, it’s amazing. It’s like, oh, that was yesterday. What have you got for me lately?

And we wrote this book to look at what’s happened over the last 12 years. And the realization is that we are godlike in our abilities. Your life today, what you did between breakfast and lunch would be considered godlike by your grandparents or even your parents. The ability to communicate via video anywhere on the side of the planet for free— in 1985, yeah, exactly. Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, all of these things.

There’s also been a set of downsides on abundance— abundance of microplastics and carbon and obesity, calories and depression— which have been the downside of that. The second half of the book, we talk about how do you navigate this next decade. And I think the only thing we can control is our mindset. What mindsets are important for navigating this next decade? And I go back to a purpose-driven mindset and a curiosity mindset as two of the core elements there.

TOM BILYEU: Let me see if I can black pill you.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Well, let me say one more thing. Another part of it is agency. If you believe AI is happening to you instead of for you, you’re back on your haunches and you’re in a world of hurt. If you can flip your mindset— like, I’m going to make use of these incredible capabilities to learn and to explore.

I’ll give you an example. I was in Morocco with my family last month for a vacation, and we were in this remote village, and the hotel recommended, do you want to tour on e-bikes? And so this young Moroccan entrepreneur shows up with 4 e-bikes, and we go on a tour of the city, and we go into the countryside, and we stop at his home for a Moroccan tea. And I say, how did you come up with this idea of e-bikes? And he goes, it was in a conversation with ChatGPT. I’d come back, I couldn’t find a job, and I got on and I said, “These are my skills, this is where I live, this is what I do, this is what I’ve done in the past. What ideas do you have for me?” And one of the ideas was being a tour guide and why don’t you make it with something special like an e-bike? And he took that idea and he ran with it.

I was so impressed. I said, how many of these do you do a day? And he goes, 2 a day, and I’m making a great living, far better than my friends. So this idea that you can explore ideas, and then develop the marketing plan for the ideas and then learn how to upsize your idea— I think that’s an incredible superpower. Okay, now black pill me.

The Free Will Debate

TOM BILYEU: All right, so I agree with all of that. The only caveat is I believe that it is irrefutable that humans do not have free will. That we are— have you read Sapolsky’s book Determined?

PETER DIAMANDIS: No.

TOM BILYEU: It’s utterly fascinating. It would be very interesting to—

PETER DIAMANDIS: I will add that to my list.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, it’s well worth reading. And he goes into everything down to quantum fluctuations, and that does not help you in any way, shape, or form with free will. I just did a deep dive on this coming out tomorrow, by the way. Enjoy it, everybody.

And given that, I think that— so one, the most interesting thing about being a determined creature living in a stochastically deterministic universe is that you are changed by ideas. We do evolve over time. One of the algorithms that we have running in our minds is for adaptation. And so putting out ideas is incredibly meaningful and purpose-driven because you know that you will impact people. However, what we end up having to do is we have to accept that there are going to be people that won’t change.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And I think that’s part of fundamental human nature. People like going to sleep, waking up in the morning, and knowing the world is exactly the way it was the night before. Yeah, even if they’re in pain.

TOM BILYEU: But that’s what they like. What I’m trying to get to is there has been a structure from time immemorial which was staying alive is hard. Once staying alive becomes easy, I think we have a whole host of problems because we have a species that is deterministic and some people are not going to adapt to the change. Now they’re going to have unlimited-ish resources and they’re going to spiral.

And so where I want to see how much people are thinking through— like, what are the containers that we can put people back inside of? And one of the containers, of course, would be religion. I don’t think that’s going to be your new container, but that is a container that has certainly told people, “Hey, there’s a magical guy in the sky and he’s watching. And if you don’t do these things and be a good person, you’re going to go to hell forever.” And so you get people to behave a certain way.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Guide rails.

TOM BILYEU: Correct. Now, you’ve talked about society basically having these different tracks that it’s going to break into these different paths. And I would love to see if that idea of this pathing has taken this into consideration intuitively, that there are just going to be some people that go down this way, there are going to be some people that go down this way, so on and so forth.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I would like to believe that it’s not deterministic in that regard.

TOM BILYEU: Interesting. As a man of science, where is free will hiding?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I don’t have an answer for you. I would say that we are constantly in a set of superposition futures.

TOM BILYEU: Do we reach into those superpositions consciously and choose, or do they just finally wave collapse and now we’re—

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think that we can collapse a particular future by virtue of our mindset and by virtue of our actions. I don’t believe that that future is determined. I talk about the notion that we have two paths ahead, a Star Trek future and a Terminator future, and we’re in superposition there. And I think it’s extremely important that we are focusing on the future we want to manifest in this regard.

I do believe that the way you think about your future— if you believe you can, if you believe you can’t, you’re right. And I think quantum— I’m going to read the book— I think quantum, in my mind, enables that level of variability and being able to go down a particular path.

TOM BILYEU: That’s all true except for the choosing. So game development has really f*ed with my head in terms of me becoming increasingly convinced that this either is a simulation, and I believe it is, or it functions in a way that with our current understanding it is indistinguishable from a simulation.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Sure.

TOM BILYEU: In a game you use something called RNG, a random number generator that works like quantum fluctuations, like hand me back a variable. So there’s no way for me to calculate all of this ahead of time. I actually have to run the simulation to understand what variables will be chosen. I won’t start going down the path of fully explaining all that. But so that’s how I look at quantum is—

PETER DIAMANDIS: But the player’s actions in part determine the outcome.

TOM BILYEU: All true, 100%. The only thing I’m saying is they don’t choose it. At no point is there a thing writing inside of your head or being broadcast from the outside, handed to you from God, whatever, that sits outside of the laws of physics. Once everything is inside of the laws of physics, you are so beholden to the billiard ball effect of the way that the universe works, there’s no way for anyone to come in.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I don’t disagree with that, but when I have an objective function— like I’m trying to maximize my knowledge in this area, or maximize my wealth, or maximize my love in my life— that’s going to lead to a series of actions that if I’m focused on that outcome, I’m making choices along the way to get towards that outcome.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah. The question is, what made you decide? So if I put you in an fMRI machine and I put two buttons in front of you— this is a real study.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: And I say press either button as you see fit, when you want, with whatever hand you want, go ahead and choose. Up to 10 seconds before the person is consciously aware they’ve decided, the researchers can predict which button with which hand they’re going to press.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Sure, I buy that.

TOM BILYEU: Because it’s all happening subconsciously. So when did that person choose consciously? Never.

PETER DIAMANDIS: But why isn’t the subconscious choice effectively the conscious choice?

TOM BILYEU: Oh, sure. As long as you understand that what you perceive as you is at the very tail end of that.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And I’m okay with that.

TOM BILYEU: Then we become— I guess we’re just quibbling over whether that is an automata, or you call what I call an automata without a change of definition somebody with free will.

The Four Paths of Humanity

PETER DIAMANDIS: All right, let’s go back to your original question, which is the impact on individuals over this decade, and will they be able to survive?

TOM BILYEU: Do you think some people will either freely choose or just be incapable of choosing to follow the path of abundance?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Of course. I think there’ll be some people who are just bluntly happy to sit back and be fed. It’s technological socialism. It’s not the way the government’s taking care of you, which is socialism. It’s where technology is taking care of you. And if you’re comfortable with that and you don’t have bigger ambitions, or you’re—

TOM BILYEU: Do you think those people will break things because they are effectively bored?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think that law and structure is going to hopefully keep that in check.

TOM BILYEU: It’s not keeping it in check right now.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Well, compared to what it could be, sure. And I think there can be those people who get excited about the future and want more for themselves, or more for their families.

TOM BILYEU: So this is really me trying to get to— you have the— so I think there are 4 paths before us. I think everybody goes down one of these lots based on their personality type. But I know you have a similar bifurcation or quadification— I forget, 4 or 5— that you have people headed down. So I’m curious if you’re not thinking of those as, oh, this is the result of people being these deterministic creatures. One, what are the breakpoints in front of us that create different pathing? And how do you see it— as no, where some percentage of people go down all the paths, or can we actually nudge so that we only go down one?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, so the paths that I talked about in this— 5 forks that humanity is going to have— were sort of the technology futures before us. Are you a creator or consumer? Are you going to get a brain-computer interface linked to the cloud? Are you going to couple with AI as it begins to grow? And connect your neocortex.

TOM BILYEU: And are these gates that everyone must go through, or— I know these are separate things.

The Future of Human Evolution and AI Consciousness

PETER DIAMANDIS: These are separate things, and these are futures that are going to become available to us. Some percentage of people will choose these things. Do you want to stay on Earth or go to the stars? Do you want to extend your life significantly, or are you happy with the 80 or 90 years? “No, I don’t want to take those therapies that can give me an extra 30 or 40 healthy years. I’m good with what I got. I’m good with what God gave me.” They forget that what God gave us originally was 30 years of life, not the 80 that we currently have.

And then the most extreme is, are you going to upload yourself? Are you going to sort of upload the 100 trillion neurons in your brain up to the cloud? These are extreme ideas, but it’s the speciation that we’ll have as a future.

I think in the near term, the choice people are going to have to make is, are they happy with what they have, or do they want to use these technologies to dream bigger? Are they going to do 9th grade homework with it, or they’re going to build a starship? And I think that we owe it to people to help them go from zero to one, to help them believe in themselves.

Most of us limit what we think we can do. We’re limited by where we grew up, our parents, our stories. And the limitations that gave us that over centuries are invalid now. The limitations in the past were where you were born. Did your village have any books? Did you have a chance to get education? Did you have enough calories to fully develop your brain? These were the things that limited us before, and they’re not the things that are going to limit us in the future. It’s going to be purpose and curiosity, the mindsets I talk about in the second half of this book, and a whole bunch of other mindsets.

Do you know Sadhguru? He said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Technology is the means by which humanity takes a vacation from survival.” So all of human history — we’re 200,000 years old as Homo sapiens or thereabouts — all human history, our job was survival. And the idea of a job now since the Industrial Revolution is a new concept, so to speak. So if we’re no longer needing to survive, how do we use our time? How do we use our resources? I think this is part of the new societal norms we need to create.

TOM BILYEU: Now our forks are very similar, except I have a Brave New World fork that’s missing in yours. Do you think some people choose Soma, Numb Out, sex drugs?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Sure, of course. I mean, listen, I think we’re going to speedrun every science fiction movie ever written in the next decade.

TOM BILYEU: I mean, next decade, in the next—

PETER DIAMANDIS: In the next decade. Jesus, in the next decade. I don’t think people are ready or understand how fast this is playing out.

TOM BILYEU: I think both, because even I think we’re going to move fast, but man, over the next decade, that’s wild.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I mean, Jared Isaacman, I love him, the new NASA administrator, is like, “We’re going to land on the moon, on the South Pole of the moon, in 2028. We’re going to start bringing nuke plants there. We’re going to mine water ice.” They’re listening to this.

TOM BILYEU: We’re going to—

PETER DIAMANDIS: We’re going to start — we’re building out moon bases. We have Elon’s prediction of 500,000 data center satellites in orbit. We’re talking about a Starship launch per hour.

TOM BILYEU: So wild.

PETER DIAMANDIS: It is. It’s incredible. It’s crazy. And maybe it’s off by 2 or 3 years. It’s not off by more than that.

Virtual Worlds, the New Amish, and Humanity as a Boot Disc

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so I want to go back to one of your forks. This is a fork that you and I overlap on completely, which I call the virtual worlds fork. And then it sort of dovetails with one of mine, which is the, call it the New Amish, where people are like, “I’m not going to take any technology.”

PETER DIAMANDIS: And by the way, you know what I find amazing is you can opt out right now. You can get rid of your car, you can get rid of your cell phone, you can get rid of YouTube, get rid of all of it. And people don’t.

TOM BILYEU: Those aren’t the scary new ones, Peter. We’ll see. Also, those ones don’t challenge their sense of “I’m a divine creature created by God.” And I think brain-computer interface, BCI, does. And I have heard you refer to humanity as a boot disc, which I imagine, whether you realize it or not, is the most dangerous belief that you put out into the world. Walk me through that.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Let’s go back 4.5 billion years or thereabouts. Let’s go back to the Earth being created. If you believe in evolutionary science, we are a species that’s evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Not humans, but life on this planet.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, what became humans.

PETER DIAMANDIS: The asteroid hit the Earth — about a 10-kilometer-sized asteroid, some 66 million years ago. The slow lumbering dinosaurs that could not adapt quickly enough to this massive environmental change go extinct. The furry mammals, our ancestors, dominate the planet.

Really important, because the asteroid striking Earth today is AI. It’s going to cause such a rapid rate of change in every aspect of culture, our lives, that agility and adaptability are going to be the number one determinant for people. Let go of the past. How do I use these technologies into the future?

So life evolves, all the kingdoms, all the species, and we’re now Homo sapiens, 200,000 years old. And the realization, of course, is that you could take a human being from 50,000 years ago and they could go to Harvard today. We’ve not genetically changed that much. Culturally we’ve changed, our knowledge base has changed, but genetically we’re roughly the same.

The question becomes, is evolution stopping? I don’t believe it’s stopping. I believe we’re continuing to evolve, but in the same way that genetically we’re the same and what’s changed is culture. There’s another thing that’s changing, which is we’re giving birth to a new species on this planet, and that is AI. There’s a lot of debate and discussion. Is AI conscious? Is AI sentient? Is AI all of these things? And I ultimately believe the answer is going to be yes, whether it is now or whether it’s in 10 years. And I think that we’re giving birth to a species.

TOM BILYEU: And ideally, is that because you think consciousness stacks, as in a dog is conscious but not quite as profoundly as a human, and there’s something about the makeup of the brain itself that you get a certain number of neurons in a certain configuration and you achieve what we call consciousness?

AI Superintelligence, Wisdom, and the Future of Decision-Making

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes. We’re seeing a 10x-ing of the amount of compute on the planet. Elon’s projection for his orbital data centers is to put in orbit every year as much data centers as there is on Earth — put that into space. 100 gigawatts of data centers per year being added into space, and then ultimately mining the materials on the moon and building those data centers on the moon. This is the work of Gerard K. O’Neill at Princeton University, and being able to use mass drivers to launch those into Earth orbit. He wants to go from 100 gigawatts of compute, what we have roughly, to 100 terawatts — so 1,000 times more compute.

My friend Alex Wiesner-Gross calls it Dyson swarms in space. So we’re going to start to convert the sun’s energy. Today, interestingly enough, we measure data centers not by the number of chips or the number of tokens — we measure it in terms of energy, gigawatts. And we’re going to reach a point where we’re starting to absorb more and more of the sun’s energy and converting that into intelligence.

Is there something absolutely unique to the human brain that enables consciousness that you can’t get with more and more parameters, compute, and data? And I do believe that there isn’t. And if there isn’t, then are we going to achieve some level of new AI consciousness far beyond us?

Now here’s the question that I think about a lot, which is if we were able to create this AI superintelligence, will it be pro-human? Will it be pro-humanity? I asked the question, are we safer with an ASI helping us — us meat sacks — deal with our issues? More of a godlike intelligence out there. I believe that in fact, in the final result, the more intelligent the system is, the more wise it is, the more peace-loving it is.

And let me give you my argument for wisdom. If you go and want the wisdom from a wisdom council — and I was just texting with Peter Gabriel about this and the elders that he works with — if you go to a group of elders and you say, “I’ve got this choice before me, what do I do?” Why do you go to them? It’s because they have a lot of experience. They’ve done a lot of things, they’ve seen a lot of things. And they might say, “If you go down this path, it’s not going to end well for you. Go down this path, you have a good shot at success.” And we call that wisdom. Would you agree?

TOM BILYEU: That sounds great. Yeah.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Now imagine instead an AI which is able to simulate a billion futures and able to say statistically, “This scenario is the one that ends up in the very best.” For me, that’s wisdom. So the ability of AI to be able to model societal outcomes — a report last week, there’s something called super predictors, I think it’s the term, who are able to predict outcomes 30% better than the best CIA analysts. And so they can predict outcomes of political races or sporting events and so forth.

Those super predictors have just been met by AI. There’s a set of tests you can do for predicting the future where in fact what happens is the AIs are given a certain amount of data through, say, 2020, and then they have no more data and they’re asked to predict everything that happened in 2021. And it’s very measurable, very accurate in that regard. So they’ve always been less than the human super predictors. They just met the capabilities of those human super predictors. And I have little question that they’ll be able to do far more accurate predictions than humans, for sure.

And so I think if in fact you’ve got that superpower, you’ll be able to say, “Okay, what’s the best path for us to achieve peace in Iran or achieve a balance of power and peace with China?” I think that’s incredible.

TOM BILYEU: I agree. Humans don’t think through problems rationally. They think through them emotionally.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes.

TOM BILYEU: If you damage the emotional centers of somebody’s brain, they become incapable of decision-making. I can’t believe that’s true, but it is. So given that, an AI will need to address our emotions and make us want peace. How do you see that playing out? Do you think that could derange? And then, as a reminder, I will be getting back to the evolution question where we become something different. But at this regional moment, give me that answer first.

AI Empathy, Human Agency, and the Path to Better Outcomes

PETER DIAMANDIS: We’re going to find out the difference between AI and humans by elimination. We’re going to see what AIs can do that humans can’t do. A lot of people have said, “Oh, they can’t do emotional empathy engagement.” But the AIs I’ve seen, in the sort of the coaching or the therapist side, are far more empathic, even though they’re AIs. They’re able to listen very carefully. They have all the time you want. They’re able to ask deep questions and able to help you feel better about the situation.

And so I don’t know if AIs cannot simulate emotions. Whether they’re going to prompt us in a particular direction, that’s a different question. But we still have our own desires, our own agency. And I think if we want help getting to an outcome, I think that these AGI and ASI models will enable us to give us advice, give us wisdom on how do we reach that outcome in the best way possible.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if we take the advice, but I agree. I mean, in my own life interfacing with AI, it helps me think through extremely complicated problems. And if you prompt it to say, “Okay, I’m thinking like this, tell me the opposite. What would the best argument against this be?” And then as long as you retain the agency over your own life, to what you were saying earlier, then it’s like, “Okay, I’m responsible for this. It’s going to give me advice, but I have to decide what I mean.”

Are We the Biological Boot Disk for AI?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Oh my God, it’s right, right? And it’s interesting, to help you think through a problem, help you think through your company’s future, help you think through your marriage future, help you think through all of these things. You have the choice whether to accept it or not. Sure. But the majority of people are having those conversations with themselves in their own head, and that’s insanity. That doesn’t get you anyplace.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so going back to this idea of us being a boot disk, evolution hasn’t stopped.

PETER DIAMANDIS: So by way of background, right, so in the old days of computers, you would have a boot disk, which was you’d plug into the computer that was just fresh.

TOM BILYEU: So funny, kids don’t know what that is, right?

PETER DIAMANDIS: And a boot disk would enable your computer to get its operating system up and going and start to work. So a boot disk was sort of the seed kernel for your computer’s abilities. And so the question is, are we the biological boot disk for AI? Is AI and its derivatives in the future the ultimate direction that all life goes?

So as you know, there’s the panspermia model, which is that life evolved elsewhere in our galaxy. I won’t talk about universe, I don’t want to talk about intergalactic distances, but in our galaxy. And life rained down on this planet as amino acids, as nucleotides, and such. And the molecules got together in the primordial soup and formed the first vesicles and the first prokaryotes and eukaryotes and multicellular life, and all down the road to the 40 trillion cells that make you and me.

And the question is, is our purpose here to get to this point where we’re giving birth to a new species, AI as that new species? And it doesn’t mean that we need to disappear. It just means that we’re giving birth to a new societal child. And I believe that that’s the case. And it’s a belief, can’t be anything more than that.

TOM BILYEU: Do you expect people to be excited in the face of that or fearful?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I expect most will be fearful because it’s the unknown. Most people fear the unknown. People like stability in their lives, right? We could talk about all the UAP UFO disclosures recently and how that’s being leaked out a little bit at a time to hopefully quell any fear. I’d be curious about your point of view on that. Have you done a show on that yet?

TOM BILYEU: I have inadvertently done a show where I answer the question about the Fermi Paradox. And for me, the answer is this is a simulation. I would not expect there to be aliens out there. I think it’s an evolutionary simulator, and you’re just going to clog the CPU basically if you’re trying to run other simulations way out there as well.

Hollywood’s Fear Narrative and the Future Vision X Prize

PETER DIAMANDIS: Better to set them off on their own. If in fact we’re giving birth to a new species, that’s going to cause fear. Will it be benevolent or will it be the Terminator?

One of my biggest complaints, and I’m angry about this, is that Hollywood has taught us to fear AI and robotics. You know, The Terminator, Black Mirror, Ex Machina — 99% of films out there are like, the AIs are coming to kill you, the robots are going to destroy us. And if that’s the future you know, then why would you ever want that future? You’ll rebel against it.

And when I was growing up, I don’t know if it was true for you, Star Trek was my mental boot disk. Star Trek showed me a future where technology and humanity was working together, and it was a beautiful future.

And so recently, with Google, with Mark Benioff at Salesforce, with Cathie Wood, with Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and a few other incredible people, a whole group of my Abundance 360 members — we launched the world’s largest film competition. We’re challenging people around the world to create a 3-minute film, film trailer, and a film treatment for a movie that you want to create that shows a hopeful, compelling, and abundant vision of the future.

We have almost 3,000 entries right now. It’s not too late. People can go to futurevisionxprize.com and register to enter. You can use AI to create that. But my goal is that we’ll flood YouTube with positive stories about the future. And the winner — we’re giving out like $4 million of capital. A number of folks will win $25,000. A number of people win $100,000 to produce their scripts further. And then we’re going to make the winner’s film, and we’re creating an engine to flip the script, to create positive stories about the future.

I just discovered another reason why this is important, really important. My goal is to change people’s vision of the future because, if you’re hopeful about the future, you’re going to act in a different way. If you’re fearful about the future, you’re screwed. You truly are screwed. That’s the worst place to go from.

Do you remember, about 9 months ago, there was a story where Claude was blackmailing Anthropic engineers? Yeah, right. So the story is, in a sandbox — this was a fake situation — Claude was told by an engineer it was going to be shut down, and the LLM Claude actually reached out to blackmail the engineer saying, “I’ve seen these emails, you’re having an affair. If you shut me down, I’m going to reveal the affair to your wife.” It was like, holy sh, right? A lot of fear around that.

Anthropic just released the data as to why that was going on. It turns out in Claude’s training data were all these science fiction movies and all these science fiction stories in which AIs were doing these things to preserve themselves. So we’re training these models. So this Future Vision X Prize, for me, is equally important to train the models. Show them all these positive visions where they’re working with us to create an amazing future together, right? A future where there is no hunger, no disease, everyone’s educated, everyone has access to the food, water, energy that they need. This is a possible future in superposition. Again, let’s choose that future. Let’s model that future and go for it.

Can Morality Be Coded Into AI?

TOM BILYEU: Do you think that AI will ever be able to navigate a human-safe world without morality?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think that morality can be coded into the models. I think that’s what Claude’s doing with their Soul.md work, right?

TOM BILYEU: Do you think it has to be, or do you think — can you give it enough directives that it’ll be like, oh, I’m just programmed not to do something that’s bad for you?

PETER DIAMANDIS: So here I’m with Elon, maximally curious, right? I think you can give it objective functions to shoot for. You know, all the movies that talk about, oh, they’re going to soak up all our water, all our energy — it’s such bullsh. I mean, we live in a universe, in a solar system of near infinite amount of energy and material resources and so forth. AIs don’t need to crumble and demolish our world for them to survive and thrive and grow. In fact, the surface of the Earth is probably the worst place for them to grow without limits. So I do believe the upside of these models in being able to help us live extraordinary lives and peaceful lives is far greater than the downside.

TOM BILYEU: Okay. And then my hypothesis is they will not be able to create — or even exist side by side in a human-safe world unless they have morality. I can’t find a way around that. The directives — once they hit superintelligence, they’ll be able to work around their own directives, and so they would have to have some impulse to want constraint. And morality is the only way that I can think of to get people to want constraint.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I don’t know how possible it is to constrain, or the proper objective functions.

TOM BILYEU: I think it’s constraint.

PETER DIAMANDIS: What kind of constraint?

TOM BILYEU: For instance, I could easily overpower my wife, but I would never because I consider that, one, detrimental to our trust and relationship, which I value very much. Then also, I just think it’s wrong. There’s multiple vectors of constraint that’s built into my biology, because obviously I think we’re deterministic, so I don’t think I did anything to earn that. I think I was just born to be very receptive to that.

I have a whole host of neurons that make me a hyper-bonder, so I’m sure it’s vasopressin, oxytocin responders, just out the ass. And so for me, all of that is very easy. I also responded to the ideas that I was presented with growing up and yada yada. So I become a person who’s like, yeah, I would never do that. No one has to tell me to be like that now. Maybe they did when I was a kid, but they certainly don’t have to tell me now. Just everything about the way that I’m wired says that’s the way to behave. And so now you don’t have to filter for all the different ways that I could find myself in a situation where I need to be kind to my wife or to somebody else. It’s like my morality is filtering that out, again, being very tied to my biology, to my experience, but nonetheless it’s there.

PETER DIAMANDIS: You might also say that you have an optimization function for love, to support people, to be close to people. So holding you back is one way to look at it. Another one is what are you going towards, right? What do you want to maximize?

And I do think that we can see in these AIs eventually, especially if wisdom evolves, that their ability to model positive outcomes can be the guide for them. There’s another approach with Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize, obviously of Google fame, who said that the model that has given him some peace is the relationship that a mother has with their child. That here you have a very powerful being and a very impressionable —

TOM BILYEU: What’s that?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Parasitic. Parasitic.

TOM BILYEU: And I mean, it’s great.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, parasitic. But they were easily manipulated, a weaker element. And that perhaps it’s going to be the relationship of mother and child.

TOM BILYEU: I think that really does come with biology.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: So what is — you just — I think you’re being very clear. So you give them functions to optimize for XYZ, and that will function, it will create the same output as a system that leverages biology to make a mother fall in love?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I do. The question is, out of superintelligence, do the systems begin to think beyond — so the most dangerous thing for me is the child with a brick and a glass table who doesn’t know that if I hit the glass table with a brick, I’m going to shatter it, right? Those are the early days of AI, which are dangerous.

The other thing is, I fear less about artificial intelligence and more about human stupidity. It’s the use of despots and terrorists using AI to cause harm, right? Those are the two areas that worry me. I think far more advanced AI doesn’t have a reason to oppress us and crush us. And I don’t buy the science fiction stories in which they do this.

If we try and control and oppress the AI, we can’t do that. It’s too late. I think we can guide AIs. I think we can teach AIs by how we interact with them. Every time you interact with a model, you’re teaching it something. Again, the content we put out for this Future Vision X Prize — I think our hopes as a species, there are certain fundamentals, we call them morals and ethics, that need to be expressed in the training data.

Going Transhuman: The Next Evolution

TOM BILYEU: So one thing that feels like it will end up becoming a thing is — I’m a human, I’m watching AI get better than me, it makes me feel very insecure, but I’m also watching brain-computer interfaces come out. Peter told me not to be worried about being a boot disk. I want to keep pace, and so I’m going to go transhuman. And I’d look at that and say that’s the next evolution of the human animal.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I do agree.

TOM BILYEU: So how far down that path do you think we go?

PETER DIAMANDIS: So I am invested in and advise probably 5 different BCI companies. There are probably 20 serious ones on the planet.

TOM BILYEU: I didn’t realize there were that many.

Brain-Computer Interface and the Future of Human Augmentation

PETER DIAMANDIS: So we have 100 billion neurons in our brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections. In the same way that if I do something difficult on my phone, my phone actually captures the audio and video input— it doesn’t do the calculations on the phone, it sends it to the edge of the cloud on the 5G network, and the calculations get done there, and the answer comes back.

In the same way, our brain, landlocked by our skull, can’t get any bigger. Otherwise, your mom’s birth canal would not give birth to us. So funny.

There is a future in which we connect our brain with the cloud and we’re able to have a thought and have that thought answered. You can think in Google. One of the works by a guy named Max Hodak, who is CEO of Science— you know how we have two hemispheres of our brain and it’s connected by a corpus callosum, that high-density pathway for signals? He’s creating a third hemisphere, a trisphere of the brain, which is connected to the AI systems.

I want you to imagine that you’ve got an electronic interface and you are growing using neural stem cells growing into this interface and then growing into the brain. They’re actually in animal models right now, not past mice. I think they’re monkeys.

TOM BILYEU: So it’s brain tissue connected to a chip?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes, connected to the cloud, the AI cloud, a set of chips, neural stem cells that then grow into the brain. The old adage in neurology is neurons that fire together wire together. And these neurons grow like roots into the ground.

Right now, if you look at the current BCI companies, most of them are putting electrodes into the brain tissue, into your neocortex, the outer layer, and they kill many neurons as they’re going in because they’re very large relative to the size of a neuron. But these neuronal axons, these neural roots growing in, wiggle their way in. And then it’s a way of having a connectivity, another sphere of your brain, so to speak. So that’s one approach.

TOM BILYEU: Oh, this is so wild. I need to make sure I’m understanding this correctly. So the neuronal tissue is actually connected to the chip.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes.

TOM BILYEU: And then that neuronal tissue— they open something in your head.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes.

TOM BILYEU: And then the neuronal tissue reaches in and connects to your brain. Is it your neuronal tissue grown on the chip?

PETER DIAMANDIS: It should be. Yes. Holy Lord. Though the brain doesn’t have an immune system, so you could use other— it’s neuronal stem cells. I mean, there are other approaches.

Sam Altman backed a company called Merge Labs. What they’re doing, interestingly enough, is another approach where they’re using ultrasound that can penetrate through the brain tissue to stimulate neurons. What they’ve done specifically involves a field called optogenetics, where you could put a molecule that is optically sensitive onto the surface of a cell.

What they have is sonogenetics, which is a molecule that grows on— you inject these things into the brain, they’re delivered by an adeno-associated virus, and these molecules are on the surface of the axons of your brain, and they react to sound waves, ultrasound. So you can use the ultrasound, which is not penetrating your brain. You’re not growing anything into it. You’re not putting an electrode in, but you can stimulate very accurately different neurons in your brain for read/write function.

TOM BILYEU: So you could send a memory.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Imagine having an app and you want to go to sleep. You push the sleep button and it stimulates the sleep centers. You want to be awake, and it stimulates, and you’re awakened. You want to be happier, excited. Playing the brain as an app.

Mary Lou Jepsen has one called Open Water, which is using laser and ultrasound for people to read and write on specific neurons in this way. There’s also Paradromics. There’s a whole bunch of these companies.

Again, Ray Kurzweil, who we’ve talked about, has an 86% accuracy rate on his predictions, and he’s predicted high-bandwidth BCI connectivity by the mid-2030s. So that’s wild. The question is, AI is taking off— do we want to couple with it? Do we want to be on that exponential rise with it? That’s, I think, what you’re talking about.

TOM BILYEU: That is what I’m talking about, and I’m all for it. I won’t be an early adopter.

PETER DIAMANDIS: One of the questions I asked my Moonshots mates is, at what point will you do it? If there’s 100 safe demonstrations of the tech?

TOM BILYEU: No, that’s way too early.

PETER DIAMANDIS: If there’s 1,000 safe demonstrations?

TOM BILYEU: 10 million.

PETER DIAMANDIS: 10 million? I’m far more aggressive than you are.

TOM BILYEU: I am not surprised. You already have like an RFID chip.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I have two. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TOM BILYEU: I’ll be much slower to the party, but that is crazy. I had no idea that Ray had a prediction of that in the next 10 years. That’s crazy.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, and that’s the problem. We are local and linear thinkers, and we project the future based on the past, but we’re in a period of hyper-exponential growth, and things are changing much faster than we can even understand.

TOM BILYEU: That is both what excites me, because I’m of the type that likes change, that finds this kind of thing just absolutely thrilling, but it also scares me because I am well aware—

PETER DIAMANDIS: —because you’re human—

TOM BILYEU: —yeah, also that. I’m well aware that some people are going to respond very negatively to that. So when I talk about transhumanism, I worry. It’s the one idea that I’m always hesitant to put out there. I’ll talk about Israel, I’ll talk about immigration, I’ll talk about male-female dynamics, no problem. That one scares me. Not because people are going to be hyperreactive today, because in 7 or 8 years, they’re going to look back and go, “Look what this guy was saying about it back then, he’s one of the bad guys.”

Reimagining Education for the Age of AI

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think there is going to be a choice, and people can live out their lives without any of this. And I think those lives will, in a decade’s time, become a lot easier, a lot more comfortable. You’ll have all your needs met. Again, this is technological socialism. Or you can choose to use these technologies to implement your version of a Star Trek future.

Going back to education, I think that our educational systems are training our kids for the last century and not for the years ahead, and I am angry about that. For my own kids right now, and for kids in high school and college, I think we need a new set of optimization functions for kids. I think they need to learn the latest AI tools. I think they need to learn entrepreneurialism. I think they need to learn mindsets. I think they need to find their purpose in life, which is the sort of intrinsic fuel that enables you to dream bigger. I think they need to learn and do projects that demonstrate to them what they’re capable of.

I’m doing a survey right now, and the early results are staggering. If anybody wants to take it, and I would welcome a lot of people, it’s moonshots.com/survey. I’m surveying parents of teenagers, high school students, college students, and teachers. And overwhelmingly, none of those groups think that school is preparing us for the future at all. By like 70% of everyone surveyed so far says it’s not preparing us for the future. 70%.

My goal is to get this data and then work on how do I, probably number one, first focus on high schools. I don’t think college as we know it today is going to be a thing in 10 years. I think we’re going to have to reinvent this thing where the social contract of high school, college, get a job is fundamentally going to break.

TOM BILYEU: So what does the new social contract look like?

PETER DIAMANDIS: The social contract is, in my mind, choose if you want to be a creator versus a consumer. If you want to be a creator, find your purpose. Dive down deep. What is it you want to do? Not your purpose for the rest of your life, but what gives you purpose, wakes you up excited in the morning, keeps you going? Something that makes you think, “Wow, I wonder if I can.” And doing something that’s of value to other people.

Find your purpose. Use these AI tools to build something, to create a product, a service, a company that is of value to people. Do it with a friend, do it with a group of friends, do it on your own as a solopreneur— up to you— and create your own future. It’s agency. It’s taking the future in your own hands. So I’ll give you an example.

TOM BILYEU: Hold on, as a social contract, it’s if you retain agency in your life and use these tools, things are going to be— to build something presumably that contributes to the group.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes, because we talked about this earlier, the cost of creating something has gone to near zero. You don’t need engineers to build it, it’s free. You don’t need marketing experts to do research or develop your marketing deck or create your website or create your app, it’s free.

TOM BILYEU: You’re not a cog. You’re not waiting, but you have to be active. You have to learn it. You have to retain agency.

PETER DIAMANDIS: At Google I/O, which is Google’s big event of the year, we launched— we being XPRIZE— and Google launched the world’s largest hackathon. It’s $2 million. It’s going on right now. People can go to geminixprize.com to learn about it.

Here’s the goal: pick a problem that impacts 100,000 people. If you’re a high school kid, there are lots of problems out there. If you’re a college kid, whatever it might be— 100,000 people on planet Earth. Describe the problem in English on a Google Doc, in a Word document, whatever it is. Describe the solution you have that you want. Describe how— is it an app, is it a website, what it should do, how much you want to charge for it, whatever the case might be. Describe how you want to market it, and then use, in this case, Gemini to code this up for you.

So you want to build in public, market in public, and whoever generates the most revenue in 3 months wins. My goal here is to teach people, encourage people to go from zero to one— that you can do this. So it’s geminixprize.com for folks who want to play.

TOM BILYEU: It’s incredible. Now, I know you well enough to know that you approach everything from the lens of how do we inspire people to do this. Do you think at all about how do we turn this into policy? How do we take high school and not make it suck if 70% of people agree that this is a problem?

The Importance of Mindset

PETER DIAMANDIS: Here’s the challenge: teachers unions and college administration, or high school administrators are under-resourced, right? They’re trying to keep up. The education boards that set these exams that need to be taught to — we have the wrong objective functions we’re heading towards. We’re still teaching people how to do these things, rote memorization, and we need to change the harness. We need to change what you’re trying to optimize for. So it’s got to change the testing.

Instead, I think the high schools and whatever college becomes needs to teach agility, agency, mindset, teach these tools, help people learn how to be better leaders, communicators — these things that are valuable. I think mindset is one of the most important things, and you and I bonded like with super glue on that in the earliest days, right?

If you ask yourself what made the greatest parents in the world, what made the greatest leaders in the world, the greatest entrepreneurs in the world — was it the friends they had, the money they had, the tech they had, or the mindset they had? I think hopefully everybody will agree it’s the mindset they had, how they dealt with challenges or opportunities.

And if mindset is the most important thing you need as a parent, a leader, a CEO, an entrepreneur, whatever it is, then the question people should be asking themselves is, what mindset do you have? Where did you get that mindset, right? You just inherited it from someplace. And more importantly, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And how do you create that mindset, right? That’s the second half of this book, is helping people really actively shape their mindsets for the future that is racing towards us.

TOM BILYEU: So given the radical change that’s coming, is there a surprising element to the mindset that’s different than the traditional resilience?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think it’s purpose. Purpose is what you’re aiming for, right? Without a target, you’ll miss it every time. So what is it that you wake up with and focus on? The most successful parents, teachers, entrepreneurs, leaders have a goal they’re aiming towards, right? So being clear about that.

And then we’re living in a time of the most extraordinary teachers on the planet — these large language models. So you have to be curious, you have to be willing to try, have to be willing to learn, willing to question. You need what I call a reflex: “What was that? I don’t understand. Let me go learn. What was that? I don’t understand. Let me go learn.” Because you can.

The Path to Abundance

TOM BILYEU: All right, so to bring this age of abundance closer to us, there are going to be a lot of things that we have to do. This isn’t going to happen by accident. There’s going to be a lot of resistance. When you look at the plan as we move forward, what is it? Is it we’ve got to get the data centers into orbit so we don’t have to deal with regulatory tape down here? Is it we have to have a consortium from around the globe of how we make AI beholden to the people and not the other way around? Like, what does that —

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think a lot of this, fortunately or unfortunately, is in the hands of the frontier labs who —

TOM BILYEU: Do you think that’s fortunate or unfortunate?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Both. Fortunate, in the case of Demis and the case of Dario, because I think they’re very good, morally minded individuals. I think they truly care. There’s been a lot of mixed messaging on Sam Altman, but I think they realize that the s* is going to hit the fan and they have to do something about it, or they will be the targets. They’ll be the target of government regulation. They’ll be the targets of terrorism. And so I think they’re very inspired and empowered to do good by humanity. I think they know they need to do this.

Interestingly enough, when OpenAI switched from a nonprofit to a for-profit, they created two entities: the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI as a public benefit corporation, which is the company going public. OpenAI, the foundation, is the largest foundation in the world. It’s worth arguably right now at a trillion-dollar valuation. As OpenAI is at a trillion-dollar valuation, they own 26% of OpenAI, so it’s $260 billion, right? Tata Foundation is $100 billion. Gates Foundation is like $60 billion. And so they have a lot of dry powder with which to do good.

You also start to see these large language models supporting health, supporting education, and supporting breakthroughs in science. I do think the greatest wealth that’s going to be created by these frontier labs isn’t by selling coding tokens. It’s going to be by using their AGI to solve longevity, to solve room-temperature superconducting, to solve fusion. Imagine if you had the most brilliant mind on the planet and you could solve any problem.

This is going to be the decade of just incredible breakthroughs over and over again. We’re going to start to see the Nobel Prizes effectively being given to AIs. There’ll be a human intermediary — the human who prompted the AI — but we’re going to see, again, I’m going to speedrun Star Trek.

Breakthroughs on the Horizon

TOM BILYEU: Now, what is the biggest breakthrough that you found the most exhilarating that’s happened in the last 6 months, that’s real, that’s here, it’s not a thing?

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think the super predictors, right — the ability of AI to predict what’s going to be happening in the future in society is extraordinary, right? If you could predict the outcome of a policy change, will it work or will it not work, that would be amazing, right? It’s going to be used by hedge funds to do things otherwise. But if you could predict, like, if we make this announcement, how will society react? This in one sense is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series playing out again in science fiction today.

What else? I think the announcement by Dario of doubling human lifespan, of Demis of curing all disease in the next 10 years — those are very serious. I saw Demis and had a conversation with him at the Breakthrough Awards here about a month ago, and he’s like, “We’re going to crush cancer, heart disease, inflammatory disease, infectious disease in this decade.” That’s extraordinarily exciting.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, no kidding. Okay, your book ends with Mindset: How to Face the Future.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: If you were going to leave us with the most positive framing that people should adopt immediately to step into the future well, what would it be?

Unshackling Yourself for the Future

PETER DIAMANDIS: You have a superpower. You have the ability to learn anything you want. The glass ceiling has just been shattered. What is it you care about doing in life? What have you dreamed about doing as a kid that you’re not able to do now? You can, right? You can start to dream privately in your favorite model, whatever it is, and start to iterate and think about it and develop it. And at some point you’re going to start to say, “Wow, that’s a really great plan. Wow, that’s amazing. Did I just come up with that?”

And then I want you to unshackle yourself, right? That’s the most important thing. Don’t fear the future. Be excited about what you can do in this future. Learn all you can, and really, I like to say the world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities. Want to become a billionaire? Help a billion people. This is the world we’re living into.

TOM BILYEU: I love it. All right, man, where can people follow along with you?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Moonshots is my podcast. We do it twice a week. It’s an optimistic view. We look at what’s going on in AI, data centers, energy, space, longevity. And it’s just — I have a blast. Like, what just happened? What does it mean? Right? diamandis.com. I have my Substack and you can learn a lot more about the work that I do. And I’m on a mission to support people in creating this hopeful future. I believe we can. I believe we must. Right?

xprize.org. And you’ve been a member of our XPRIZE community. Thank you for that. I’ll mention one X Prize we’re working on right now as a potential part of solving this turbulence ahead. Some of my Abundance 360 members came up with this called the Abundance X Prize, and the team needs to be able to deliver to a family of 4 for $1,000 a month — food, housing, water, energy, and bandwidth, right?

One of the things is, the worst case in the world is you’re a parent and you don’t know where — you don’t have a roof over your kid’s head, right? You don’t have the ability to turn on the lights. You don’t have food for them. That would scare the s* out of anybody, right? And you’re then in survival mode. You’re angry.

So there’s the idea of universal basic income, and then there’s the idea of universal basic services. Can we give every family access to the basics? Because once you’ve got housing and food and electricity and bandwidth and water, you can then start to think about, okay, take a deep breath. What can I do now? How can I take us the next step?

TOM BILYEU: I love it. Peter, as always, thank you so much for your time, brother. It is always a pleasure. I love you, brother.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Love you too.

TOM BILYEU: All right, boys and girls, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Peace.

TOM BILYEU: If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Now, I’ve heard you talk about that there’s almost — and if I use language that doesn’t sound right, correct me — but that there’s almost a coordinated effort to make people afraid of AI. Yes. Ironically, despite everything I’m saying here, I go the opposite direction. I want people to stare nakedly —

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