Lunch Program | The Future of Humankind

Session Overview

• The "Future of Humankind" conference session featured four global leaders addressing climate change, gene editing, cognitive computing, and forward-looking innovation.
• The panel selected four critical topics: climate change mitigation, gene editing to prevent disease, the potential of cognitive computing, and the evolution of the human world over coming decades.
• The overarching theme emphasized actionable hope, moving from identifying problems to implementing solutions that create a better world.

Al Gore: Climate Change and Sustainability

• Arctic ice has thinned by 40% in the last 40 years, with predictions indicating complete disappearance within 50 to 70 years.
• Global human civilization releases 110 million tons of heat-trapping pollution daily, a cumulative heat energy equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours.
• Extreme hot days are now nearly 150 times more common than they were 30 years ago, a trend visualized by a statistical shift in the bell curve of global temperatures.
• Over 90% of trapped heat energy enters the oceans, causing stronger storms and disrupting the water cycle to produce record-breaking downpours and floods.
• Climate-related droughts have triggered geopolitical instability, citing the 2006 Syrian drought as a factor that destroyed 60% of farms and drove 1.5 million refugees into cities.
• Tropical diseases like Zika are expanding into new endemic zones, with projections that 50% of Puerto Ricans could be infected by the end of the year and 80% the following year.
• The economic risk of "subprime carbon assets" is valued at $22 trillion, representing assets that may collapse in value once market realization hits.
• Wind energy production in 2010 exceeded the best 16-year-old projection by more than 14.5 times, following an exponential growth curve.
• Solar photovoltaic installations in the most recent year beat the 14-year-old best projection by 58 times, with 2016 expected to exceed it by 68 times.
• Solar panel costs have decreased by an average of 10% annually for 30 years, achieving grid parity where solar is cheaper than coal in many markets.
• Global electricity generation capacity added last year was 90% sourced from renewable solar and wind energy.
• The Paris Agreement marked a universal shift where every nation signed up, with China planning to implement a cap-and-trade system and the U.S. retiring numerous coal plants.

Jennifer Doudna: CRISPR-Cas9 and Genome Editing

• CRISPR-Cas9 is a genome editing technology derived from a bacterial adaptive immune system used to fight viral infections.
• The system functions as a programmable "precision scalpel," using a guide RNA to direct the Cas9 protein to cut specific DNA sequences.
• Unlike previous gene-editing tools requiring new protein engineering for each target, Cas9 can be reprogrammed simply by changing the sequence of a short RNA molecule.
• The technology operates in virtually any cell type tested, including human, plant, fungal, animal, and livestock cells.
• Experiments in mice demonstrated the ability to alter a single gene responsible for coat color without off-target effects, producing viable offspring that passed the trait to progeny.
• In early 2014, researchers in China successfully engineered embryos of monkeys, raising concerns that the technology could be applied to human embryos to create heritable genetic changes.
• The rapid pace of development, with nearly 2,000 publications using the technology in the last four years, has necessitated a global dialogue on ethics and safety.
• While the technology offers cures for genetic diseases, it raises the potential for "human enhancement" traits such as improved hearing or muscle growth, requiring careful regulation.
• Dr. Doudna emphasizes the scientific community's responsibility to address unintended consequences alongside the intended medical breakthroughs.

Guru Banavar: Cognitive Computing and AI

• The future of work involves a deep collaborative relationship between humans and machines, where cognitive computing augments human intelligence with large-scale data processing.
• Machines excel at mathematical reasoning and pattern discovery, while humans provide self-directed goals, common sense, and value judgments.
• IBM's "Watson" system has been applied in healthcare to assist radiologists and oncologists, reducing errors and processing patient files and textbook data faster than humans alone.
• In financial services, cognitive systems help manage compliance, detect fraud, and advise overwhelmed financial advisors.
• A demonstrated boardroom scenario showed AI assisting in mergers and acquisitions by identifying companies based on revenue, strategy, and structural attributes, providing side-by-side comparisons.
• IBM is building a horizontal platform with tens of thousands of developers creating applications across industries like education, manufacturing, and oil and gas.
• The long-term vision involves training machines to learn professional tasks across all domains, shifting how science and industry operate by connecting data to create cause-and-effect models.
• This technological renaissance is viewed as an opportunity to transform decision-making rather than a threat to human employment.

Eric Schmidt: Moonshots and Future Innovation

• Schmidt identifies a lack of imagination in modern forecasting and advocates for "moonshots"—goals 10 times better than current capabilities—to drive innovation.
• "Nerds over cattle" proposes synthetic food production from plants to reduce global warming (currently 15% from livestock) and lower food costs.
• 3D printing of buildings is predicted to reduce construction time from 18+ months to industrial-scale manufacturing, lowering costs and enabling 100% recyclable materials.
• Virtual and augmented reality are expected to explode in utility, moving beyond gaming to provide computer-assisted understanding of physical environments.
• Mobile phones are becoming essential health monitoring systems capable of triaging patients, with computer vision in diagnostics already surpassing human accuracy in specific tasks like diabetic retinopathy screening.
• Self-driving cars are presented as a critical "national moonshot" to save an estimated 32,800 lives annually in the U.S. and 1.3 million globally.
• Education is undergoing a shift toward personalized learning models where computers analyze student behavior to tailor instruction, delivered through teacher-augmented tools.
• Artificial intelligence is accelerating scientific discovery, such as materials science, by simulating molecular combinations faster than human intuition.
• The integration of AI introduces legal and ethical challenges, such as liability for autonomous actions (e.g., a self-driving car running a rolling stop).
• The core goal of these technologies is to make humans smarter by leveraging computational power for daily tasks and complex decision-making.

Panel Consensus and Conclusion

• The speakers collectively agreed that while significant uncertainty exists regarding the future, the responsibility to tackle global challenges with purpose and determination is certain.
• A recurring theme was the necessity of collaboration between people, machines, and governments to ensure technological advancements benefit all of humanity.
• The session concluded with a call to move beyond fear of change, focusing on the "yes" that follows the "no" to secure a sustainable and improved future.