So we had a, I’m going to talk about aliens. But before I do that, we had a little bit of interesting news today that’s Kindred relevant and I wanted to share it with you because I’m pretty proud of it. So we, Kindred was named to a list of MIT’s smartest 50 companies and this is a very prestigious list, it’s very hard to make it, but the thing that was distressing about it is that they have this map that they show of where all these companies are from and there wasn’t a single company on the list that was from Canada, not a single one, which was a little surprising of course because we’re from Vancouver, but they thought that we were from San Francisco because we have an office there, but we’re not, we’re from here.
Geordie Rose Talks About Founding Previous Company D-Wave
Three years ago, the previous company that I founded, D-Wave, also made the list and it was also the only company from Canada that was on the list at that time. So I’ve been trying to build the tech community in Vancouver for 25 years and I find it super depressing that it seems to be so hard to generate world-changing zero-to-one companies around here. I think that I’m gonna just pitch this idea, some of you may have seen me talk about this before, but we have this problem here that we don’t think big enough.
We’ve got all the ingredients to create this massive, massive thing in Vancouver and the spark is not being lit. So I implore you, if you’re entrepreneurs, people who are thinking about what you want to do, think bigger because we don’t think big enough around here. Okay, so my previous company was D-Wave.
D-Wave Builds Quantum Computers
I’ll just show you a couple of things. We built what are still the world’s only quantum computers that you can buy and the company D-Wave has been doing this. Thanks. I didn’t really have much to do with it, but you know, so this is one of them. This is one of the processors and a lot of interesting things happened to me over the years. I got sent pajamas, a whole bunch of stuff, you know, there’s lots of interesting things that happen when you build something like a quantum computer. Just as an aside, because I thought it was funny, one of the interesting things that happened from the D-Wave story is there’s this gigantic conspiracy that’s arisen on the internet that goes like this.
So D-Wave builds quantum computers. The way that they work, if you know how this works, is one of the interpretations is that you tap into these parallel universes and they do computations. It sounds really weird, but what’s happened is this idea has been hijacked to describe something called the Mandela effect, which is this thing where the past changes. So think about something you know to be true from the past and then imagine you went out on the internet and you can’t find it at all. It’s not there. It doesn’t match with your experience. So these people think that D-Wave is responsible and certain and of course the quantum key to the abyss factors into it somehow. I’m not exactly sure how. Okay, so that’s just D-Wave. I did that for about 15 years. It was a lot of fun.
Geordie Rose Talks About Kindred Artificial Intelligence (AI) Making Humans Obsolete
Kindred AI was bought: Ocado acquires Kindred and Haddington
Big science project that we turned into a commercial entity. That was a warm up for Kindred. So Kindred is much, much, much more ambitious than D-Wave and what Kindred is trying to do is build real Artificial Intelligence (AI).
So what you’ve heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI)is not what we mean by AI. What we mean by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a software system that can do literally anything that a human can do. Literally anything. Obviously computers are better at things than people in lots of different ways. So now imagine not only can they do everything that a human can do, but they can do everything that the best human at any task could do better than them. So imagine there was the mental Olympics of the 100 meter dash and Usain Bolt is the fastest person. I imagine that’s some kind of a mental thing like writing a novel or writing whatever. Imagine now that the thing is so much faster than Usain Bolt, for example, it’s a spaceship. It’s still doing the same thing, but it’s doing it so much better because we’re limited, because we’re people.
So what Kindred is trying to do is solve this problem. How do you build machines that are better than people at everything? Now there’s a mental block that we have here when we think about this. Because when you think about that, one of your questions might be, for example, what are the applications of this? So imagine this. Imagine for $10, let’s say, I could build a machine like a little robot that had fingers and eyes and all that. And it could do your job better than you, no matter what it is, and I could sell that to your employer for say $15 and make a profit instead of having to pay you $100,000 a year. Now imagine that was true for every single job. So that’s what we’re talking about here is a complete and utter transformative change that of the likes of which has never been seen before in the history of humanity, making the industrial revolution look like a little tiny blip on the path that humans have taken from when we emerged from the a few billion years ago. We are right on the verge of that transition now.
Rich Sutton Famous for Artificial Intelligence (AI)
So this guy, Rich Sutton, is one of the most famous people in the academic world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). And like many, when asked, when will this happen? He says things like this, 25% chance within 13 years of this thing that I’m talking about. You know, when you think about what you read on the news, you know, CNN, Buzzfeed, whatever, they’re all kind of the same nowadays. Think about how unimportant that thing is that you’re reading if this is true. Yeah. So what does this have to do with aliens? So Sam Harris, who I quite admire, is a very interesting guy, was reciting this parable at a TED talk that he was giving.
It goes something like this. So I say I’m the president of the United States. So I received this message from the heavens. So my microwave dish, my SETI dish finally captures something. What it says is, in 50 years or 13 years, we’re coming to your planet. You got to be ready.
Alien Scenario Landing in Our World
Now, just imagine what would happen if that happened. A super intelligent alien race beamed down a message to all of us Earthlings saying, we’re coming July 13th, 2030. Boy, you better be ready because the mothership is landing right on the front lawn of the White House or wherever you wanted to land on that day. The amount of resources that would be marshaled to try to figure out what to do would encompass the whole world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just like that.
Explaining the Definition of What an Alien is
So when this thing that I’m talking about happens, it’s going to be exactly the thing that you’re thinking about, about those super intelligent Artificial Intelligence (AI). So the one thing I can tell you is they’re not going to be like us. So alien means different. These things that we’re building are not going to be people. They might be really smart. They might be really good at all sorts of different things, but they’re not going to be like us. They’re going to be aliens. They’re going to be, I’m sorry to say, way smarter than every single person in this room in ways that we can’t even comprehend. So this, of course, triggers a lot of alarm.
Elon Alien and/or Demons
One of the guys who talks about this is Elon who says things like this, like, when you do this, beware, because you think just like the guy in the stories that when you do this, you’re going to put that little guy in a pentagram and you’re going to have your holy water out and you’re going to wave it at the thing. By God, it’s going to do exactly what you say and not one thing more, but it never works out that way. So this is an attitude that some are having, this emerging alarmism about the way this is going to go, but these words, demons, doesn’t capture the essence of what’s happening here.
HP Lovecraft – Cosmic Indifference. Entities That Don’t Care About Humans
I don’t know if any of you are turn of the century weird fiction fans, but there’s this guy named HP Lovecraft. He’s a very famous American weird fiction author. He exposed a view which is called Cosmicism. The essence of Cosmicism is cosmic indifference. So what he was saying is basically, yes, there are these massively intelligent entities out there, but they’re not good. They’re not evil. They just don’t give a shit about you, even in the slightest. The same way that you don’t care about an ant is the same way they’re not going to care about you.
These things that we’re summoning into the world now are not demons.
They’re not evil, but they’re more like the Lovecraftian great old ones. There are entities that are not necessarily going to be aligned with what we want. So this transition is really, really massively important for our entire species to navigate. Going back to that thing that Sam Harris was saying, nobody is paying attention. This thing is happening in the background while people bicker about politics and what’s going to be in the health care plan in the U.S. And underneath it all is this rising tsunami that if we’re not careful is going to wipe us all out.
So on that pleasant note, we’re hiring people to try to make something like this happen.
Of course, this is a very difficult project, of course, and I’m kind of a little bit tongue-in-cheek about all this, like how bad things are, because it’s not really like that. Technology is a double-edged sword. Even something like this, it’s agnostic. It depends who wields it. If you want to have a say in how all this goes down, you can’t sit on the sidelines.
One of the ways that you can get involved and really change the world, like, you know, a lot of people say, hey, join the Marines, you’ll change the world or whatever. This thing, this opportunity that I’m talking about here in Vancouver is an opportunity for you to literally change the world. Because the code that you write may be running in the brains of these things in 10 years.
So this is a huge opportunity. I’m going to ask that anybody here who is a software engineer, who’s really good, to talk to any one of these three folks who are sat at the back there, who are Suzanne founded Kindred, and Olivia and Paula are some of our key folks in Vancouver, or talk to me, and we’ll have a conversation. By the way, I love Joseph’s talk.
It’s true. Startup life can be very, very difficult. You will fail many, many, many times before you succeed.
Just as a matter of course. Thanks.
