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(soft electronic music)
All right, good afternoon, everybody.
How's everybody doing?
(audience cheering)
Okay, first of all, I just want to thank LT Smooth
who's here with the big island of Hawaii and his whole band.
Will just stand up and be recognized,
LT Smooth and the whole band.
(audience applauds)
Thank you guys for bringing the aloha spirit
to Davos, aloha.
We're so grateful to have LT Smooth again.
LT, how many years have you been coming now?
Eight years, amazing, what an accomplishment, thank you.
We're so happy to have him,
and we're going to have LT later tonight, also.
And we have some other incredible musical performances
lined up and incredible people here.
I want to thank all of you for being here.
We're so grateful to you,
to each and every one of you for everything that you do
for us every single day.
We realize that you have a choice that you can make
when it comes to technology vendors,
and what you're doing in regards to the world,
and even spending time here at Davos,
and to have all of you here means a lot to me, personally,
so thank you, and it means a lot to my company
and all my executives.
And will all my executives please stand up
and be recognized, those who are here,
all of our Salesforce team.
(audience cheers and applauds)
Fantastic.
Thank you to all of you, everyone here.
I'm so lucky, you know, on March 8th,
we're going to be 25 years old,
finishing up a year at about 35 billion in revenue,
it's been very exciting.
Moving and seeing 40 billion's in the future,
and kind of hard to believe that all this is happening
with over 70,000 employees,
and now the third largest software company in the world,
second largest in Japan,
(audience applauds)
so congratulations to our team
for this incredible accomplishment.
And of course, you know, we did it
with our core values intact over 25 years,
which has been so amazing.
Trust and customer success, innovation, equality,
sustainability, and our one-one-one model
continues to scale.
We've given away almost a billion dollars now in grants.
We run almost a hundred thousand nonprofits
and NGOs for free on our service,
and we've done about over 7 million hours of volunteerism
all over the world, so I'm so proud of our teams for that.
But this is also an opportunity where wherever we go,
we like to recognize the people
who are doing the Lord's work.
If you are with a nonprofit or an NGO here in Davos,
will you just stand up and be recognized
if you are in the nonprofit organization?
(audience applauds)
Thank you.
Daniela, Nancy, thank you.
All the great people who are here,
United Way, American Heart Association,
Sustainable Ocean Alliance,
so many great people doing great things.
Before we begin the program today,
really have a special guest in the audience,
want to invite up my friend Sam Altman,
who's the CEO of OpenAI,
(audience applauds)
also Time Magazine's CEO of the Year, CEO of the Year.
Sam Altman, welcome, please.
Thank you.
Here, grab a seat.
We're so happy to have you here,
and we just did a little panel together,
and you know, Sam, this is your first Davos.
We appreciate you being here.
This is a moment in artificial intelligence
in kind of the lifespan of AI.
This year has been such an incredible year,
really, starting with GPT-4, which is, I think now,
you know, really, is it a year old?
I mean, it's barely a year old.
Coming up on a year.
Coming up on a year.
Amazing what's happened in last year,
and congratulations to you and your team
and what you've accomplished in the world.
How many of you used Chat GPT?
Raise your hands.
Happy to see that, thank you.
All right, so you have a few customers here,
and you know, Sam, just give us some insights.
Where are we going in this spectrum?
You know, you can see we, you saw uniquely, one, two, three,
you saw now four, you've seen the glimpses
of five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.
Just totally relax, and give us all your key secrets
and insights in the world,
and hit it with hard and give it with all your gusto.
Look, I think there will be
all of these new features, these new tools,
but the most important thing,
and this is hard to get across,
is that the level of overall general purpose
intelligence jump from three to four,
can happen again from four to five, five to six.
And it doesn't matter, well, it does in some sense,
but the most important thing
is not what feature we're going to add when,
or, you know, when it gets this modality
or when it gets really good at this class of problems,
it's that this is a truly general technology
and the improvements that we make generalize,
they get better everywhere.
And so right now, you have this tool
that can do some very small percentage
of the tasks you'd like,
and this year it'll do a higher percentage,
and next year higher percentage, and higher after that.
And that's what I think is so remarkable about this,
and this is the thing that is different
than previous kinds of AI is the generality.
And so, you know, we can debate which feature
we should prioritize or, you know,
we want it to get better at this kind of problem
or that kind of problem,
But nothing is as important as the jump
from three to four is going to happen again.
It's hard for me to even think about
what that's going to be like.
Sam, I want to ask you a question,
which is, you know, I've heard you speak so many times
and talk about it, we've had private conversations as well.
Also, my family was happy, you came over to our house,
had dinner with us
That was lovely.
We were grateful for that.
I want to ask you a question.
You know, you said something once briefly,
and it just stuck with me.
You said, you know,
"Intelligence is kind of an emerging property of matter."
And I don't know if I really understood
what it was that you were saying
and how you were thinking about
the work that you're doing at a fundamental level,
but you know, I think maybe you were in India
and I was watching you on a live stream even or something
and you're like, "Yes, look, you have to understand
"why this is happening,
"and intelligence is a emerging property matter."
What did you mean by that?
When we structure a neural network, one in a brain,
or one in a artificial neural network in a computer,
whether we run that computation in biological cells
or in silicon energy flowing through
this particular structure that can update and learn
and do some cognition,
I think that's like a physical principle of the universe,
and it's very mysterious,
but it gets a little bit less mysterious over time,
and I think for a long time we didn't know how to do
intelligence in anything but biology,
and the fact that we can now do it in silicon,
imperfect and early, though it is,
the implications of that I think
are one of the most phenomenally important things
yet discovered in human history.
There's no magic, it's science.
So when you say this is like
we are seeing intelligence appear, you know,
not just in biology but in silicon as well,
what is the two or three major implications of that
going forward?
I think one of the most important quests humanity is on,
or should be on even more than we are,
is to deliver technological prosperity to the world,
and you know, there was like, I think at Davos
in some years past,
there was this whole degrowth conversation going on,
I think that's not something people actually want,
or it's at least only a very fringe thing.
What most people want is the world to get better
and for our lives to get better,
and the only long-term, sustainable way to do that
is technology, scientific discovery.
And I think the two most important areas for that
are intelligence and energy.
I think those are the key inputs to everything else
in this like techno-prosperity mission,
and so as we bring the cost of intelligence down,
its capability up, its abundance up as cognitive services
come down in cost by a factor of a thousand
or a million or whatever,
think about what can happen for the world there.
Every kid can have a great one-on-one personalized tutor,
every kid of the future can get a better education
than the the best kid can get today.
We can all get great healthcare, we can discover new drugs,
we can all be more productive.
You're already seeing this with programmers today.
We can be way more creative.
I think the quality of media and entertainment
is going to go nuts in a really wonderful way.
And we can all have a great chief of staff,
we can spend our time better.
Eventually, we can all have like a whole company's worth
of cognitive ability, and we can create
whatever we can imagine.
I think this will be the most powerful tool
humans have yet created and what it will let us do
to create, to imagine things, to translate, imagine ideas
into reality.
I think we will have never seen anything quite like it,
even though it's always tempting to say,
this time it's different.
You know, Sam, you can look around,
and hit the Salesforce event.
We bow into nature today, you can see the trees in here
and the idea we're in this beautiful landscaping
and this beautiful town and beautiful skies above
and so forth, what do you think
the things we can do with AI,
what's the most fantastical thing we could do for nature?
I think one of the things you're doing
is you're working on nuclear fusion,
not fission, not like a nuclear power plant,
but the idea almost that we can have free energy
through nuclear fusion,
so that we could power a town like this, for example,
without having to burn some kind of fossil fuel.
What else will we see,
or maybe you want to amplify that in terms of
how can we make nature better
and create a more sustainable world
through this amazing technology?
I certainly do think transitioning to sustainable energy
is one of the most important challenges in front of us,
and it's not just the stick,
it's not just that we're destroying the environment,
although that is plenty good reason to do it.
The carrot of what happens to quality of life,
if we can drop the cost of energy 10 times
is going to be pretty fantastic.
And with energy at that level of abundance,
you can do a lot of things to make nature better.
Give us a picture of that.
Paint a a picture in your mind, see it,
what does it look like?
Look one thing
that I think will happen is, unfortunately,
I think we're going to have to just do carbon capture
of some point at, of some sort.
You can't do that very easily with current energy prices,
and we don't have enough clean energy to do that.
If fusion works, I think we can undo
a huge amount of climate damage
with a clean source of energy.
I wish we weren't in this place in the world,
but now we are, and we can I think undo a lot of the damage.
Very good.
So when you look at that in your priorities,
I mean you're working on nuclear fusion,
you're working on artificial intelligence.
Are these your two primary priorities?
Do you have any other major priorities in your life?
No, before this I ran this firm called Y Combinator,
and I got to work with like many hundreds
or low thousands of companies,
and it's really fantastic to get that very broad perspective
and I think led me to a bunch of insights
about how we should build out AI,
and where the technology was in different places
that could come together.
And I've been reflecting at this conference
that I miss that perspective.
It's great to have the tremendous focus,
I like it more than the broad perspective,
but there is something about the broad perspective
that was super valuable.
We had had a long breakfast, do you remember?
Where you were pitching me on the importance
of getting even more focused.
Yeah.
So are you now,
is the pendulum swinging for you?
No, no, I'm happy to be very focused.
I'm just saying there's like something lost,
but it's worth it.
But what are you saying though?
Or should we be moving more to be less focused?
Oh no, I'm saying it is net better to be more focused
for me at least, but I do feel like I've given this-
But you're feeling a sense of loss.
I've given something up in exchange.
Yeah, so you'd like to have some ability.
No, I think I'd like to be even,
I'm recognizing the trade off,
but I'd like to be even more focused.
You're going to be even more focused.
Hopefully.
And if you were to pick one focus,
one thing you're going to focus on for the next 12 months,
what would it be?
I mean, certainly OpenAI and specifically
getting our next generation of models
to be as good as we can, as safe and responsible as we can,
and as useful to people, as many people as possible.
And I think we're going to have a tremendous year for that.
And if you would say the one thing you want to accomplish
in the next five years, what would it be?
The thing that I am personally sort of most excited about
is when we can build AI that can make
new scientific discoveries
or help us make new scientific discoveries
at a much more rapid pace.
I don't know if we'll get there in five years,
but to the earlier point about science
and technological progress being
what drives the world forward, what increases prosperity.
When we can get to AI systems that can do that,
I think that'll be a wonderful moment.
And whether we can do that in five years
or it takes us 10, we're going to get there.
Well, let's talk about that just for one second
as we wrap this up, which is, you know,
in our industry people are always overestimating
what you can do in one year,
but underestimating what you're able to do in one decade
and certainly in a couple of decades.
So tell me in one decade, where is your mind,
what would you like to have absolutely under your belt
and fully accomplished?
Where do you see yourself?
Where would you be living?
What would you be doing?
What has the world looking like?
What is going on?
(audience murmurs)
Who are you with?
Give us the full picture now, boom.
Look, I hesitate to say this
because I think the definition of a AGI has become so fuzzy.
It's sort of irrelevant,
but I think in a decade we will have made something
that most of you would consider an AGI.
I hope to be working on that,
watching this wonderful world start to unfold.
I hope to be living on our ranch, raising our kids,
and having a quiet of a life as I can.
Very good. (applauds)
Thank you.
Please thank Sam Altman.
(audience applauds)
Get this up, first time being at Davos.
(audience laughs)
All right, okay.
All right, okay.
Now, how about Sam Altman,
how about a round of applause for him as he's leaving.
Thank you, Sam.
Very grateful for your leadership.
All right, now I'd like to move to our panel
if that's all right.
We have some incredible people here,
and we're so fortunate
to have some repeat offenders as well,
but I would really be delighted to welcome,
the very first time we ever did this stage here in Davos,
in this do beautiful dome, my close friend, Will I Am.
Please welcome him, Will?
(audience applauds)
And also another repeat offender,
someone who has mentored me and gurued me,
beaten me, constantly is giving me some of the best advice
I've ever gotten around nature on sustainability,
on my life and what to focus on,
and please welcome Dr. Jane Goodall.
(audience applauds)
And panelist we have not been able to have before,
but we're so fortunate to have him with us
because we're also going to be hearing
his incredibly beautiful music,
but he is the soundtrack of our entire life.
He has incredible wisdom, in terms of how the world is
and what it can be, and I'm so delighted to have
not only him but his beautiful wife here as well.
And so please welcome Sting.
(audience applauds)
Yes.
Okay, so there you go.
Here's a microphone for you as well, Sting.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
All right, well we're going to just try to take
a few minutes here, and you know,
I'm just so thrilled to have this panel and the discussion.
Now you may have noticed that we had Yo-Yo Ma
and Kristalina up here,
but I want to just fill in the details
that both of them, unfortunately,
are a little under the weather,
and so we're sending our best thoughts
for a quick recovery to our good friends
Yo-Yo Ma and Kristalina.
(audience applauds)
Well Will, I think that you've had a lot of prophecy
up here on this stage over quite a bit of time,
and a lot of the things that you've said have come true.
So people should be paying notice to what you're saying,
because if we go back and rewind the movies
from the panels here over the years,
you kind of called it, called a lot of it,
especially in the technology side and the data side,
but we're seeing some amazing things,
and I think that one of the things
that was probably a seminal moment for both of us,
we were on our way here last year,
and we were sitting there,
and you were collaborating with AI,
writing music and found yourself a creative partner
who was finally was at your intellectual peer.
So let me ask you, you know,
what are you looking at as the future today?
How do you see AI, how do you see the world?
Where do you think we're going?
Maybe you could just give us kind of like I was saying
with Sam, you know, maybe this year
or within the next two years, in this relatively short term,
what is the world that we're looking at?
Where is the world going
and what should we be focused on as a community?
That's a lot to unpack, but I'll go where my heart,
how my heart responds to the question.
And that is, in a year's time, GPT-4 has been released,
it's a year old, and maybe the whole concept
of generative AI because of Google's T, the Transformer,
is eight years old,
and the funding that went in
to make these computers ultra smart
outweighs the funding to make people smart.
And so that means in the next couple years,
we'll have a world where the majority of the population
is not at the level of the tools or the interfaces
and the products that they're interfacing with.
Right now, you go to the supermarket,
there's items on the shelf,
each one of those items has the ingredients.
There's an expiration date.
You're going to be talking to the freaking products
in the next couple of moments,
having deep conversations with products,
and the products will have self-awareness,
and smarter than the people consuming the product.
And that's kind of inhumane,
how we can have a world where items
have more funding to be intelligent than people.
So that's what I work on with our foundation
and find every year, raising money for AI
is easier than raising money for HI,
for human intelligence, for some odd reason,
people don't seem to find it urgent to bring people
up to speed.
So that's a troubling, as much as I love technology,
I'm like, yo, this is amazing.
It just breaks my heart that we're not up-loving.
We have to re-skill, we have to up-skill,
but no one's talking about up-loving,
and how do we lead with empathy and not lead with greed.
(audience applauds)
Jane, do you have a microphone there?
Very good.
We're in a moment in time with nature.
You've been spending so much time,
I think, even this year, in Africa.
You have a message for the world.
You've been here before.
We're so happy to have you back.
We want to hear your message today,
and what you want us all to focus on
and where you want our hearts and minds.
Well, I think everybody in this room
understands really well that the planet
is not in a good space right now.
And if we look around the world,
we find everywhere problems with governments,
with business and especially the environment.
We've got two major wars and many, many conflicts.
We've got discrimination, we've got violence,
domestic violence, and we've got a terrible,
terrible destruction of nature.
And because of this, and because so often in the countries
I've been to anyway, and I'm traveling 300 days a year
to different parts of the world, people are losing hope,
especially young people.
And you know, that began way back in 1991,
already back then, young people were losing hope,
and they were angry or they were depressed,
or they were simply apathetic.
And so when I asked them, "Why do you feel like this?"
They said, "Well, you are compromising our future,
"and there's nothing we can do about it."
And I said to them, "Yes, you're absolutely right
"that we are compromising your future.
"In fact, we've been stealing your future
"ever since the industrial revolution,
"maybe since the agricultural revolution.
"But we do have a window of time."
And fortunately it's not only me,
there are other scientists.
I don't really think of myself as a scientist, by the way.
I think of myself as a naturalist
because when I was a child of 10 wanting to live in Africa,
women didn't become scientists like that.
But anyway, I said to them, you know,
there is this window of time,
and we are moving towards a planet that's heating up
and we are moving towards a time when it will get so hot
with the patterns so disrupted
that life as we know it on this planet
will no longer be possible, but we are not there yet,
and we'll get there much slower if we take action now.
And so I began this program for young people,
which we call Roots and Shoots,
which began with 12 high school students
and is now in 70 countries around the world
with members from preschool through university.
More and more staff at big corporations,
and Mark, we're talking about Salesforce even yesterday.
The children of the staff of big, international corporations
bring them together, help them to understand
that much more important than the color of our skin,
our language, our culture, even our religion
is the fact we're all human beings.
We all feel happy.
We can all feel sad, we all feel fear,
and we can all feel pain.
And so my biggest reason for hope
is the young people when they understand the problems
and we empower them to take action.
And in our program, the young people get to choose
what they do, as long as they do a project to help people,
one to help the environment, one to help animals,
because it's all interconnected.
And this program, which is spreading all the time.
The last group, I was just in Brazilian Amazon,
and the last group was a little number
of eight to 12-year-old children
from six tiny villages coming together
to learn about the forest
and to understand what was happening to their forest.
And helping them to understand
that government has a big role to play,
they're far distant from it.
But since President Lula came into power,
the destruction of the Amazon forest has halved,
and there's 2,000 square miles of forest
that have been saved and not cut down.
So I started to say the news is full of doom and gloom
and we do need to know what's happening,
and it's shocking.
But at the same time, because I'm doing this traveling,
I'm meeting the most amazing people,
I'm seeing the most extraordinary projects
where nature comes back if we give her a chance,
even to places that have been completely destroyed by us.
And I'm finding individuals who tackle what seems impossible
and won't give up, and so often win through,
and I'm meeting corporations that are truly changing.
And I mean Salesforce is one of them,
And Paul Polman, Unilever was another.
And I'm sure there's others in this room
that I don't know about.
And so the last thing I would say,
I was talking to a group of CEOs in Singapore
a little while ago, and one of the CEOs
came up to me afterwards,
he had a big multinational corporation,
and he said, "Jane, for the last eight years,
"I have been really, really trying to get my company
"more sustainable, more ethical in a country
"where we source our products
"along the supply chain, which is difficult,
"but we are trying in our offices around the world
"and also the way we treat our customers."
And he said there were three reasons.
One, I saw the writing on the wall,
I saw that nature's finite, natural resources
are getting used up too fast.
And secondly, consumer pressure.
People are beginning to understand and ask questions.
This product, did it harm the environment when it was made?
Was it made with artificial pesticides and herbicides
and did harm animals like factory farmed animals?
Did it waste water?
They're asking questions like that,
and they're also asking, why is it cheap?
Is it because of unfair wages?
Is it because of some kind of slave labor?
And they're also, in addition,
what changed my mind completely, what tipped the balance,
what really pushed me to put everything
I had into making my corporation more sustainable
was my little girl of 10 years old.
And she came back from school one day,
and she said, "Daddy, they tell me that
"what you are doing is hurting the planet.
"That's not true, is it Daddy?
"'Cause it's my planet."
That is something that reaches the heart.
We will never change governments and businesses
and individuals unless they want to change from within.
And you don't get that by arguing with them,
pointing fingers, telling them they're bad guys.
You get it by finding a way to reach into their hearts.
(audience applauds)
Thank you.
Well, Sting, we're so happy to have you
back in Davos with us, but on stage with us today to speak.
And you know, one of the reasons why I invited you is
we've had an opportunity to be together
a couple times this year, and when I've heard the words
that you've been saying to the world
in these different venues that we've been,
I thought this was a venue that needed to hear your heart
and what you've been thinking about.
So can you share with us,
what do you see this community's imperative,
a focus for the next several years?
Where do you want our attention?
You have tremendous insight into what's going on.
I'm very intrigued by AI,
and I think a lot of people in this room
are in that field.
As a songwriter, as a composer, as a recording artist,
the best compliment I ever receive
is when someone comes up at random
and says, "You know, I fell in love to one of your songs,"
or "I got married and we played one of your songs
"at our wedding."
Or, "We buried Uncle Charlie to one of your songs."
Now that is about empathy.
Now, artificial intelligence can produce music
perfectly serviceable music that you would hear
in a supermarket or in a public space
like an airport or a hotel.
But I think there's a difference
between hearing and listening.
Hearing is passive, listening is active,
it involves empathy, which is what my friend,
Will I Am was saying there's such a dearth of in the world.
Can AI produce music that will be an emotional touchstone
for your life?
A memory of falling in love, getting married,
putting someone in the ground?
At the moment I would say no,
and so I don't feel particularly threatened by AI.
But as Will said,
there is this dearth of empathy in the world.
We are all becoming trapped in our little echo chambers,
if you like, and we're not hearing the other.
And songwriting for me is a way of communicating my soul
with other souls, it's a search for meaning.
Musicians try and order the world,
the chaos of the world
into some kind of coherent architecture
that can soothe us, that can calm us,
but most of all, that surprises us.
For me, the essence of music is surprise.
When I listen to a piece of music,
unless I'm surprised within eight measures of that music,
I will move to something else.
Surprise is everything.
I mean you can listen to AI music academically,
but would you choose to listen to it
for more spiritual reasons?
At the moment, I doubt it.
That's my feeling.
I really appreciate you opening that door,
and I'm going to try to run with that a little bit
if it's all right.
And you know, I think 20 years ago
I was very fortunate to be invited in a meeting
with the His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
And I had a opportunity to talk to him about AI
and empathy and I said, you know,
is it going to feel our pain?
And his response at the time was twofold.
He said, "First of all, Mark, number one,
"technology is never good or bad.
"It's what we're doing with it that matters
"and we need to keep this first and foremost.
"And number two, if the technology is not suffering,
"how will it have true compassion?"
And his kind of position and kind of Buddhism
is kind of the Bodhisattva of compassion,
and so he was kind of a evoking this concept
that Buddhism kind of evokes in the Four Noble Truths
that it's through suffering that we end up
with this high level of empathy or compassion
and ability to feel for our ourselves, for others,
for the world, you know.
Well, you've had a lot of time to think about this
and you spent a lot of time with AI, with technology.
Where do you see this going in the next five or 10 years?
You, you heard what Sam said,
and obviously Sam has been tremendously prophetic
in this area, but you have as well.
Where do you see this all going?
If you were to kind of take this out a little bit farther
from where you are now
to where we could be potentially by, call it,
you know, 20, 30, just five years from now.
And by the way, I'll just mention,
you mentioned the word transformer,
and the Aidan is standing right there,
who was on the team that invented the Transformer,
so you got his a got his attention,
where I'm glad that Aidan is here.
So, all right.
Right now, it seems that we're trying
to make the machine think like us, love like us,
empathize like us, and when it comes close,
it's not close enough.
But if you look at nature, nature doesn't act like us.
Like does a tree bear fruit
because it's thinking of nurturing us
or is it just doing what it does?
And we get to eat.
We get to nourish ourselves.
And as we build these technologies
that are going to do some pretty phenomenal things,
we have to start thinking of what do we do to evolve?
How do we become better at loving and caring?
I keep going back to that empathy part.
Because we do a pretty poor job of it.
While we expect machines to be empathetic, we're not.
What's happening in the Congo, AI didn't do that.
Where are attention is, they neglect,
ignoring the folks that have been going through
a horrible reality, mining the very mineral
that is powering our technological advancements.
But AI didn't do that.
So we have to do a better job.
So I think this technology is going to push us, I hope.
Pushes us to be better humans.
And we enter this human age,
I hope it pushes us to.
Because you never would take your child to a tree
and ask your the tree to raise your child.
Now, we're going to have a machine raise your child?
And that's great,
everybody having a professor in their pocket.
That's awesome.
But when is the last time in humanity
where an object guided us to be human?
So we domesticated like, we could train a lion,
we see them in circuses, bears, elephants,
so are we now being domesticated?
And so, I hope that's not what it is.
I hope we.
We love more.
And music has always talked about that.
Like all we need is love.
Turns out we need to love the planet better.
We need to figure out how to solve the things
that we created.
So what happens when the machine comes to the inevitable,
hey, we know the problem.
We're relying on this machine so much
that we have a professor in our pocket.
What happens when the machine says,
hey, got the solution to that climate
you guys are trying to figure out.
It's you, what do we do?
In that state.
To the music part?
Yo yeah, this AI music stuff is, it's for real.
It's heavy.
It can and will make some pretty emotional music for you.
But I write a heartbreak song.
Oh man, what girl making me mad,
and I write a song about it, ooh, let my pain out.
And then you listen to that song
'cause it's a proximity to your pain,
but it's not your pain.
It's the closest thing to it,
but that's not your exact, you know,
situation that you've been through.
AI will help you write that, your song, you know?
That this is your song, your song is coming.
And I've seen some version of that,
and there's some 14-year-old kid that's going to make that,
your direct recipe to your pain.
That's amazing.
For the old schoolers, that's now,
we are now writing our song, my rinse.
And it's going to be an incredible time, a lot of learning.
'Cause there's no rule book.
There's nothing that we could look through in the past
like, hey, this is what they did back in the day.
We're defining this right now, where attention goes.
This, I was talking to Trudy today,
I was like, is this a phone or is this a conditioner?
Has it reconditioned us to where now
we act like the app swipe out
or notification or attention change and shifts.
You're talking to people
and no one really has a clear focused conversation
and comes to resolution.
Everybody's mind splinters.
Everybody has some version of attention disorder
because there's apps that know how to get your attention.
Make sure it bites, it's monetized,
it's commercials, eyes all over the place.
So we probably need to reconfigure ourselves
in this new age as well.
I'm over time.
(audience applauds)
Jane, you heard Sam's comments,
I think this is the first time
you had an opportunity to meet Sam.
And I was happy that you were able
to have that opportunity.
He's had such a huge impact on the world
at such a young age.
You talked about the hot planet,
and what what is happening with us,
but we also all read your book Hope.
We saw the movie.
Also, we are securing that contract with AI.
And Sam opened the door that AGI is 10 years from now
that he wasn't working anymore.
He was just able to, in a world where he felt
that energy maybe had become decarbonized
and the world was being decarbonized
that he was with his children,
who he hasn't had children yet.
So, you know, and his farm,
and he was coveting the youth,
and one thing that I notice when I'm with him,
he's trying to very much deeply listen while he's speaking.
I wondered, you know, how your experience of love
comes through that, how you hear about
this distraction disorder that Will is talking about,
ADHD and how these computers have affected
our sense of focus and ultimately nature
and our interplay with it.
Where are we going with all of this?
Well, to be honest, I worry about it.
I'm probably one of the oldest people,
if not the oldest person in this room.
I'll be 90 in two months.
(audience applauds)
I don't think that's anything to applaud me for.
(audience laughs)
It's, it's just a passage of time.
But, you know, I've lived through change,
like when I was growing up,
which happened to be during World War II,
there was no television, hadn't been invented.
So we learned from nature, we had a big garden,
and from books.
And I loved books, and we didn't have money for new books,
but I had a little secondhand shop.
And then I was good at school,
but we didn't have money for university.
But I did some free night classes
when I was at a job in London.
And what I loved, Mark,
was learning by looking something up,
and that led you to something else
and it led you to another book,
and you climbed a high shelf in a library
and it was like a detective work,
and it took a lot of using your brain.
And what I worry about is young people today,
including my grandchildren, you know,
they want to write an essay,
so they get AI to write the essay.
They want to write a poem,
so AI will write a poem
and AI will write your music for you.
But isn't this something different?
Now, let me take you out of your comfort zone
because as I've spent years and years
out in the rainforest with the natural world,
I've also developed a very close spiritual connection
with the natural world.
So we are probably divided in this room
into people who think that the material life is it,
that everything must be explained by our brain,
that there's nothing beyond our brain.
And there'll be other people who think
that may be beyond this life, there is something.
And if you start thinking about this spiritual connection
with some great power,
which some religions will call God,
some religions will call Allah, whatever,
it doesn't really matter,
there's this one great spiritual power in my mind.
Then how does AI fit into that?
I don't know.
I'd love to ask Sam what he thinks about that.
But to me, I think of children of the future.
Think that they can ask all their questions
and have their problems solved by AI.
What will that do?
Will we end up with a world of morons
who just get every answer solved by pressing buttons
on a computer?
I don't know.
I don't know enough about AI, it's new to me.
I'm scared of it, to be honest.
I absolutely know, and I've seen proof
that in some areas it's fantastic.
It can do great, great, good,
but we all understand that in the world
there are people who will very, very happily use it
not for good, but to pass on misinformation
that's already happening with social media.
And I just learned to my horror today
that one third of teenagers in the UK
has believed this long misinformation campaign
that's been put out by right wing politicians,
that the people, the scientists who come up with solutions
for curbing carbon emissions, it's not true.
It's been exaggerated,
and they really shouldn't worry about climate change,
but just get on with their life.
And, of course, you and I, Mark,
and many people in this room
know that one of the best solutions to the climate problem
is nature, forests, land forests, kelp forests,
the natural environments of the planet that store CO2,
and which then give up the CO2, and we destroy them.
And somehow these two aspects,
nature and AI,
I can't reconcile them in myself into a whole.
And I guess my brain doesn't work well enough to do that.
And I'm sure other people's brain would,
but as I say, I'm going to be 90 and yes,
I can change with the times.
I do use computer in our work of conservation,
we're using satellite imagery and drones,
and all kinds of things like that,
and I see their immense use,
but I also am fearful of the way that they can be used
to the destruction of humanity.
And we humans are not exempt from extinction.
(audience applauds)
Well, Sting. (chuckles)
You correctly called out, there's technology leaders here,
there's cultural leaders in this room also.
There are nature leaders in this room,
environmental leaders,
there are business leaders in this room, government leaders.
What message do people need to take home,
bring forward, bring into their lives?
How do they use their platforms for change?
How do they use their lives to go forward?
They are leaving this conference
with an opportunity to do something.
And do you see that?
Or even how do you see it for yourself?
What changes are you making in your own life
so that you're improving the world?
Well, I can only speak personally,
I'm not an expert in anything, really.
But I see AI as a challenge,
a challenge to my creativity.
And the analogy I'd like to use is in the 19th century,
the visual arts were challenged
by the invention of photography.
It became very easy to render reality
on photographic plates.
So what is the point of taking your brushes and paints out
and trying to render the same reality less efficiently?
Artists of the time, geniuses like Renoir,
like Monet, decided that they weren't going to paint
objects anymore.
They painted the air around objects,
they painted the spirituality of landscapes
rather than the hard lines.
And I think we have the same challenge as artists.
And as I said, you know,
AI can make perfectly serviceable music,
but does it represent our spiritual reality?
I would suggest it doesn't.
And as Jane said, maybe it can't, it's a question.
But I am challenged by AI the same way,
we were talking, Will and I, before about drum machines
20 years ago,
we thought that they were going to put drummers out of work.
But we didn't, it actually made drummers better
because they realized they had a play in time for change.
(audience laughs)
So it is a challenge and it's a challenge
I feel excited to take on.
I have to become a better composer, a better songwriter.
But the key is empathy.
The key is joining souls together
rather than separating us,
and I think technology can separate us.
As we found disinformation and AI
are very, very closely linked,
and in the wrong hands, it's already in the wrong hands.
So we need guardrails, and we need to,
it's not going to go back in the bottle,
so we have to engage with it in a direct
and a positive way.
Hell yeah.
That was good.
(audience laughs and applauds)
Will you thank my panel today
and thanks everybody for coming to this wonderful lunch?
(audience applauds)
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