How will the world change in 2022 and beyond? Futurist Richard Yonck joins us for a revealing look at the new technologies and trends that will shape the future. We talk Digital Humans, Biotechnology, Artificial Emotional Intelligence and manipulation by Algorithms. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Things That Should End in the New Year.

Richard Yonck: 01:50ish

Pointless: 35:20ish

Top 5: 50:55ish

https://intelligent-future.com (Richard Yonck Website)

https://www.facebook.com/IntelligentFuture (Richard Yonck Facebook)

https://twitter.com/ryonck (Richard Yonck Twitter)

https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Machine-Artificial-Emotional-Intelligence/dp/195069111X (Heart of the Machine - Book)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1948924382 (Future Minds - Book)

Interview with Futurist Richard Yonck

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we look into the future and count down the things we don't want to see in 2020. To

Richard Yonck 0:26

some of this, this is kind of an expansion of an area, we'll call digital humans, the idea that we've got more and more representations of ourselves in the world. In the current decade and beyond, we're going to see more and more kind of almost partnerships with a robot or other form of automation in the workplace, so that we're working side by side, this, the phrase for this that's often used is called Cobots, or a robot co worker, some of my biggest fears probably have a lot to do with algorithmic influence, these systems have the potential to, if not themselves, manipulate us be able to be used by other people to manipulate us.

Nick VinZant 1:13

I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, leave a review, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So the big question in this episode, what does the future have in store for us in 2022? And beyond? Our first guest studies exactly that everything from digital humans and emotional intelligence, to algorithms biohealth and the role that artificial intelligence will play in the coming decades. This is futurist Richard Young, moving into 2022. What do you essentially see ahead for us this year, and kind of in the immediate future,

Richard Yonck 1:56

there's really, from my standpoint, so many different fields, so many different considerations. So I'll talk about things like artificial intelligence. And right now we've got an enormous amount of advancement being made in voice tech, and different aspects of being able to incorporate voice as interface but also voice as a means of supplementing human workforce and human intelligence. Some of this, this kind of an expansion of an area will, we'll call digital humans, the idea that we've got more and more representations of ourselves in the world in the workplace, certainly increasingly in the metaverse, cyberspace, whatever we want to call it, in which we will be able to have representatives of ourselves some pretty rudimentary right now. But over time, they'll have be able to be our emissaries essentially be able to perform certain basic routine tasks, know what our preferences are, whether that's booking a flight for us, or, you know, even something is as currently complex as performing in an interview for us.

Nick VinZant 3:23

And you know, for me, like looking at this from a complete outsider's perspective, I guess, like what's the point? Like, what, what are we what's the goal of creating this kind of virtual selves?

Richard Yonck 3:34

Definitely a valid question. In terms of creating a world, a virtual world, there's a lot of hype, a lot of tech interest, where you have this plan, this desire to create an alternate form of reality, that thing is that a lot of people push back on this and say, you know, I mean, here, we're, we're trying to create this alternate reality, we're actually I creating a more space, more distance between ourselves, we're creating new ways of essentially distancing ourselves from human contact and human interaction. So that's definitely a negative and definitely a reason why this would be not necessarily as everything everybody wants it to be. On the other hand, as a, in a business use case, the opportunity to create things like digital humans, digital avatars, that can represent us and be used for performing various routine and repetitive tasks in the workplace, can increase efficiency and and it's essentially really reduced the number of people that are needed to perform a particular task right now we're we're seeing a real disconnect in terms of the number of people who are available to work and the number of jobs. They're not meshing, or we have a lot of gap there. And one of the ways that this is, unfortunately going to be addressed by some business, is through increased automation.

Nick VinZant 5:26

How soon do you think that's going to happen? Like when you look for the rest of the 2020s? What do you kind of see coming?

Richard Yonck 5:33

Parts of it are already happening? It's mostly a question of how good is it? Is it going to be dependable enough that you can put it into a, a work environment a decade from now? Oh, yeah, I would anticipate that we will see a lot of this.

Nick VinZant 5:51

And when we talk about chatbots, we're kind of talking about the idea of the thing like you do the Hey, I've got a problem with this company. You talk to this thing it like you put in the answer, and you get an answer immediately back like that kind of thing. But instead of having an obvious computer, it would be like me, giving those answers. Right

Richard Yonck 6:09

now you might see an image, it might be photographically realistic, it may be something more cartoonish, that is meant to kind of help suggest that this is a person to person interaction. And that it kind of tweaks some of what Sherry Turkle of MIT used to call our so called our Darwinian buttons, essentially, we are design, one of the earliest things we did as a species was developed language and a means of interacting with each other through emotional and visual cues, a lot of nonverbal cues, and so forth. So to have visual avatars that, continue that or extend that will essentially make us feel more and more like we are engaging with another person. And we fall into that habit very, very easily,

Nick VinZant 7:05

we will feel more like we're engaging with a real person, but it will be less of a real person that we're engaging with the same time, correct.

Richard Yonck 7:13

These are basically statistical models. They're simply connecting words and strings of words and phrases together, based on statistics. So there's no awareness there.

Nick VinZant 7:25

When you kind of look into the future. Are we more poised now? For a bigger change than we have been in the past? How close are we to the next big thing,

Richard Yonck 7:36

the next big thing is always around the corner. And you never know exactly when it's going to happen. If you're speaking about AI, and so forth, we're still quite some ways out from let's just say something that is it, artificial general intelligence, or something very self aware, and so forth. That's still many, many decades away. In terms of just technological development, and innovation, every single day, there's so much out there, and there's so many things that everyone is doing. Knowledge has a tendency to self reinforce, create self reinforcing loops. And so all of a sudden, we're able to do things with our knowledge of genetics. And by using AI and bioinformatics to start mining and finding out new ways to generate new drugs, treatments, therapies, and so forth. This coming decade is going to be huge for biotechnology and healthcare, digital healthcare. So this is definitely a time in which we're going to see enormous innovation over the course of really the coming decades. I don't foresee it slowing down, if anything, it will accelerate,

Nick VinZant 8:52

has COVID changed any of that? Did COVID Speed it up? Pause it have no difference at all, like what do you think

Richard Yonck 9:01

when COVID hit, it accelerated a number of technologies and really put the brakes on a number of others. So that right there, you know, shows you how things that occur in the in our world in our environment that maybe aren't necessarily anticipated can skew the direction that technology and other trends are developing. So, to be more specific, we saw an enormous advancement in areas like you know, remote technologies, the things like teams and zoom and everything else. They really went to town, expanding their capabilities in the during that period. Some of the abilities to deal with situations remotely, whether that's you know, various forms of of the Every drone work and so forth, these advanced. On the other hand, during that time, certainly we saw a huge drop off early, early COVID, at least in things like, for instance, rideshare. Some of it is about the industries, some of it is about the technologies that are considered to be viable to roll out during that time.

Nick VinZant 10:19

What do you think is kind of going to be the next big technology

Richard Yonck 10:23

AI is permeating everything is what what people don't a lot of people don't recognize is that AI is here, AI is everywhere. And it every time it rolls out in some new fashion and is incorporated into various devices in our environment, various parts of our environment, we think it's all very cool, very new, for a very short period of time, it gets good, and then it kind of disappears into the environment. It's part of our background. And it's, it's pervasive, it's there, but we don't think about it, a bunch of the things that go on in our cars, things that go on in our homes, the applications that we use on the computer, all of these are using various aspects and forms of AI, some of them are going to continue to get more intelligent, some of them, there's not much point in in adding to it. But the fact is that over the course of this decade, and the next we're going to see a range of deep learning technologies, forms of machine learning come out and be used in pretty much everything in our world. So just expect that that's going to become more and more a part of our world, and much of it will become less aware of overtime.

Nick VinZant 11:44

Is this going to be stuff though, that's like ultimately going to be good for society? Or is this going to be stuff that, you know, we we go to the lowest common denominator. And what I mean by that is like we invented the internet. And we could use it to have all of the information at our fingertips. But instead, we kind of use it to snipe at people on Twitter, right? Like, is this? Is this going to be good for society kind of things, or

Richard Yonck 12:09

it's an ongoing issue? And a very important question to be asking social media, certainly the internet, they didn't turn out quite the way people expected or wanted. And one of the things that I advocate is that we have incorporate more of a technology assessment in the early design processes of of these new innovations. Because this allows us to can allow us to try to anticipate and overcome some of the different kinds of issues we see with new technologies.

Nick VinZant 12:50

Yeah, and no, I think that a lot of the things that we would kind of naturally talk about are summed up in some of our listeners questions, so I want to jump into them. This this one, I think kind of hits it the thing that we were just talking about, are we creating something we don't understand?

Richard Yonck 13:05

That's a very big question. Are we creating something we don't understand? Absolutely. We are continuously in the process of in the course of building the world, building the future, we create things we don't understand all the ways that will be utilized all the ways it will develop the unanticipated consequences of it. When people Jenner developed the automobile, the early gas engine, they did not anticipate the way that it was literally going to transform our, our cities, our country, our environment. If cars didn't exist, our cities would have an entirely different configuration. And things like as simple as you know, how we lay out streets or pathways, how we have, you know, commit enormous amounts of space to parking and so forth. All these things. Were never foreseen at that time. This happens with every single technology.

Nick VinZant 14:18

When will the future look really different? And I think what they mean by that is like if I were to get into a time machine, like how far in advance would I have to go or be like, Oh, this doesn't even look like earth anymore. Like I don't recognize this.

Richard Yonck 14:32

If you could have looked down on the earth in 1900, we would with enough resolution, we would be able to definitely tell that this is a very transformed world. Part of it is what what the expectation is and as with other kind of forms of thinking imagery, what have you resolution So the more detail we look at, the more things have transformed and changed. As I say, AI is pretty much everywhere it's it. But if you don't know what to look for, if you aren't able to appear into the workings of a particular technology to understand or to see that you don't know that that's going on our world has transformed and is transforming rapidly in terms of it becoming what I typically refer to as more and differently intelligent. There's a growing preponderance of machine intelligence, some of it is skewed and biased. And this is transforming our world. Depending on what you're looking at. You could say that the world transforms almost unrecognizably ill in as little as a decade, think about what the world was like before social media.

Nick VinZant 16:01

What are we getting first flying cars are jetpacks.

Richard Yonck 16:06

We've got both jetpacks are actually kind of useful and cool. In a, there's definitely being incorporated more and more by the military. There's some real benefits there. Flying cars, we're getting into something that's kind of different there. From the standpoint, we can engineer almost anything except that at this stage, it's down to within the laws of physics, it's down to economics, for the most part, when you talk about a flying car, if you mean the Jetsons, where it is a something that has no apparent, you know, method of thrust. That's, yeah, that's gonna be a long time. If you're talking about something that's basically a personalized airplane, or helicopter or a quadcopter, or what have you, there's some thought about that being appealing to people who have considerable wealth to kind of skip around some of the traffic jams and problems in an urban environment and so forth. That is a different matter and gets into a range of issues around inequality problems of what happens when certain parts of society for go, you know, the what everyone else has to use. Does that is that to the detriment does that lead to deterioration of those services and so forth. So that's a big problem. But down to the real issues and and of having cars just kind of flying through the air on a hill, almost like another level of traffic, human beings did not evolve to navigate a three dimensional space, we've always pretty much occupied to possibly two and a half dimensions. We aren't fliers. So there's two problems with that we really make mistakes really quickly. So we've got to turn all of that over to AI to and that's got to have gotten to the point where that's really good. But any small accident you have a fender bender on the freeway, okay, you pull over, you have a fender bender in the sky, it's a catastrophic failure, and you fall. That's to your detriment. And it's a big problem for the city below. So there, you get into regulation liability, the insurers are not going to let that happen. I was

Nick VinZant 18:45

thinking about that I was traveling over Thanksgiving and less like thinking, Could you imagine if all these cars were just flying all over the place? Like it would be a nightmare? Yeah, well, will robots take over the world,

Richard Yonck 18:58

some people would say they already have. They will not take over the world in the IP for a very, very long time, in the sense of a Skynet Robopocalypse Terminator type style takeover. On the other hand, there's the economics of using robotics wrote using robots to supplement the workforce. In the current decade and beyond. We're going to see more and more kind of almost partnerships with a a robot or other form of automation in the workplace so that we're working side by side with technologies that are increasingly intelligent and increasingly able to perform certain tasks that they can do better than we can either through because of the repetition speed. What have you this? The phrase for this that's often used is called Cobots. Or it's like a Robot, sorry AI robot co worker. And this idea is pretty much we're developing in a slow evolutionary pace at this point. But it's increasingly how we work. We use technology all the time in the in our work in our environment, you know, different applications, certain amounts of AI that do analysis for us, and so forth. This just a further extension of this into the physical space. And certainly, we're already seeing this in warehouses, and other kinds of manufacturing and so forth.

Nick VinZant 20:38

In terms of biohealth, what do you think will be happening in that arena? Like, where do you think the changes are going to be there?

Richard Yonck 20:46

Right now, we are on the verge of an enormous amount of innovation and advancement in biotechnology, we have had the ability to sequence human, the human genome in detail for a couple of decades now. So it's taking a lot of time, but we're figuring out some really interesting approaches, and gaining new knowledge about how our bodies work, how biology works. And so we're getting some new, you know, incrementally new ways to deal with cancers through immunotherapy, what's we have to be very careful of, is creating problems for ourselves or future generations through the misuse of that genetic manipulation at this point, we have different tools like CRISPR. With that, potentially, we have the ability to make changes to the gametes, the the eggs and sperm that ultimately lead to the next generations, even if that is changed or manipulated, that can go really, really wrong. And the problems may not show up for generation,

Nick VinZant 22:10

what is your safest prediction for the future? What is your boldest prediction for the future? Like so bold, that if you're around like all your futurist buddies, like you're not even going to say it. It's so bold, that like they're gonna laugh in the fighting suggested, but what is your boldest and your safest prediction?

Richard Yonck 22:31

safest predictions easy, the sun comes up tomorrow. So the expectation that all aspects of the future are unknown or unknowable. It really runs through a whole gamut, a spectrum of certainties, the one that's out there, there has been speculation that somehow or another, we're going to have an ability to interact with the past. At some point, I find this highly unlikely. But if you extrapolate that long into the future, then at some point down the road, you could potentially have a version of our version of our society or civilization affecting change. In the past, I find that almost almost impossible. Ah, okay. There's one I definitely dispute. Okay. The concept that we are living in a simulation. There are people who have talked about this. I think, Musk, I'm not sure if Max Tegmark said something similar, but you know, on the order of 50% likelihood that this is we are in fact living in a simulation, I am going to go with the far more specific prediction that there is a far less than 1% chance we are living in a simulation. It's possible. But that's my prediction. It's very, very, very unlikely.

Nick VinZant 24:08

I don't even want to like think about that. I don't even want to think about it. Right, that I've always wondered, you know, like, what's why? What's the reason that some people think we are living in a simulation like where's the

Richard Yonck 24:23

no proof. So this is one of the big problems with it. It's not falsifiable in any way that I've been able to figure out.

Nick VinZant 24:30

Let me follow up that excellent point by a movie or TV show that you feel has the most accurate depiction of the future.

Richard Yonck 24:37

I love these things for entertainment, but I am simply not going to say any of them are really good representations of our reality, and certainly not yet.

Nick VinZant 24:48

Did you think we'd be farther ahead by now?

Richard Yonck 24:51

Hmm, great question. And very general. Thank you. So did, there have been definitely times Over the years and decades where I've looked at the top explored things and thought, yeah, we'll be at this stage at this point, and we're not. So early 2000s, we had predictions and some pretty accurate ones, that we were going to start seeing autonomous vehicles in around 2017 or so. They're not out there in the form, quite the way we would have thought that wasn't going to be like, Oh, they're going to take over the roads. But the technology is there, the technology developed, and we're at currently, what SAE talks about the Society of Automotive Engineers, talks about is level four autonomous vehicles, we won't see true autonomous vehicles, till probably 2030 or beyond. And I think that that's probably going to be pretty accurate. In terms of where I think I thought, at certain stages that certain aspects of artificial intelligence and its ability to have more contextual understanding would be further along at this point, we're moving into a stage that has been referred to as a third wave of AI, that some of this is developing into projects that are developing more and more capability of reasoning common sense. One shot learning or learning more like human beings do, in in these systems. And we're going to see that advanced quite a bit over the next decade or two. But I think I thought some of that was going to be here a little faster than it was,

Nick VinZant 26:53

correct me if I'm wrong on this. But the thing that I've always heard of like describing AI, and the challenges with it, is that you can teach a computer perfectly, how to play chess, all the strategies, all the stuff, but it can't then take all that knowledge and use it to play checkers. Like it can't think the way that we can where we can take lessons from one thing and transition into another thing.

Richard Yonck 27:17

Sure. Right now, when you talk about that example, we're talking about neural networks, these are systems that over the past couple of decades have gotten really good at certain very specific tasks, they take an enormous amount of training, lots and lots of data. And once trained, they can perform very, very well. There is when they are when the attempt is made to retrain, something occurs that's called catastrophic for catastrophic, forgetting that I'm not sure that's quite right. But anyway, the point is, it loses pretty much most of what it has learned or all of what it's learned, because it's not actually learning. So one of the things that's in this new third wave that is being worked on is to be able to accrete knowledge to to build on prior knowledge to inform what comes after. And that's what much more like what we do today. The other aspect of all of that, I've written a couple of different books about the future of artificial intelligence, future minds and heart of the machine. And in the heart of the machine, I explore the future of what's known as emotional, artificial emotional intelligence or emotion AI. This is these are technologies that can read and interact with human emotion. Now, that technology could one day lead to some very, very important aspects of increased intelligence in our machines, because one of the things that really informs a lot of our, in our intelligence is how we place value on in the world. If you based on your emotions, you know what, to look at what to pay attention to, at any given time, if I'm that chess playing computer, or robot in a room, and I'm playing away, performing excellently and beating the pants off of the human that I'm playing against, and that room catches on fire that the human is going to get up and leave probably rapidly and with a little bit of emotion about it, that program or that robot, or that computer is pretty much going to likely sit there and stay it doesn't have any means of recognizing that its environment. It's what the values have changed in its conditions, and it needs to be able to change its mission based on that.

Nick VinZant 30:11

What scares you what gives you hope?

Richard Yonck 30:14

The future gives me hope. So the future, as far as I'm concerned, is about potential. The future is what ultimately we are all striving toward. We don't, we may be able to remember the past, but being able to interact with anticipate and direct our present day actions to build a generated better future is really what gives us power as a species. Some of my biggest fears probably have a lot to do with algorithmic influence the idea that as we develop these systems as we interact more and more with these technologies, right now in the form of social media platforms, but potentially, later on in terms of other forms of power, environment, AI in our environment, these systems have the potential to, if not themselves, manipulate us be able to be used by other people to manipulate us. That's enormously problematic. It literally gets to a stage where you can look at it and talk about it, undermining freewill very significantly. So I think that's probably my one of my biggest, long term concerns is algorithmic influence.

Nick VinZant 31:39

Do you feel like we're already there? I

Richard Yonck 31:42

think we're on the road.

Nick VinZant 31:45

Yeah, it doesn't like because now I'm hearing about things where like, like, they can tailor this political message to this exact group, tailor this political message to this exact group, even though that group wouldn't necessarily have voted for that candidate. And if it wasn't for this thing, right? Well, you're just you're just become so specific.

Richard Yonck 32:04

Definitely things like that. But I think more nefarious, for lack of a better word right now, is the problem that if you have a system that is able to read and interact with you, whether it's through visual cues, eventually emotional awareness of these systems, and so forth, the ability for them to change their strategy, change script, highly rapidly based on the feedback from us. This creates a feedback loop, one that we in which we effectively become what's known in programming or in, in computer science, as an optimization problem. You want the person to click and click and click again. Okay, well, let's feed them A and B, oh, they click more on B, well, let's do that, again, with another set A or B. And you just keep doing it. And you keep and this is basically how something like Facebook works. That you extend that kind of thinking that kind of potentially manipulation into I mean, the ability to basically turn us into a, an algorithm for profit.

Nick VinZant 33:31

That's pretty much all the questions that I got, man, is there anything you think that we missed or anything like that? Hmm.

Richard Yonck 33:39

As I say, if we can imagine that we can build it, if we can take responsibility for the future that we want to see built, we can build that too. But what we have to do along the way, is not just assume that every single new thing is good. We have to be willing to assess as we go along. And in the aftermath, in order to try to protect the kind of future not just that we create for ourselves, but that we leave for future generations.

Nick VinZant 34:16

Oh, let me ask you this, like what's kind of coming up next for you? I know you got some books out

Richard Yonck 34:20

working on the next book, but yes, always out there doing keynotes for different conferences, consulting for business, and certainly writing articles and, and books. So that's kind of my gig. And that's going to continue to be the case for a good number of years yet.