Recently, George Gilder and Jay Richards enjoyed a wide ranging discussion on the topics and people converging for the COSM 2021 Technology Summit: From Life After Google to Life After Capitalism. In the first portion, they discussed life after capitalism. Who can still innovate? In this portion, they talk about innovations that will make a difference:

Kai-Fu Lee, 2018

This portion starts at about 10:30 min. Here is a partial transcript and notes:

George Gilder: Kai-Fu Lee will be there to talk about his new book, Ten Visions, about artificial intelligence. We hope that he can give us some ideas that are relevant to the new environment for US-China relations… But people like Kai-Fu Lee are keeping world of knowledge and wealth, then learning going. [00:11:00] People don’t know how what a paramount figure he is. But he’s also a skeptic about extreme AI, that apocalyptic AI that Elon Musk describes as portending the end of the human race. Very curious, while they’re leaving us way behind …

I’m going to be debating Niall Ferguson on this subject at COSM. [00:13:00]

Jay Richards: If you don’t want to hear debates, don’t get anywhere near COSM 2021! But if you actually want to be in the middle of these things, you can attend this conference in person.

Everybody’s been doing virtual conferences now for almost two years, but this, you can actually be there if you want to, November 10 to 12, COSM 2021 in Bellevue. [00:13:30]

Note: The Early Adopter Fee is applicable through September 15.

Jay Richards: George, I want to talk just a bit about your assessment of the technology scene. I was thinking of you just actually this morning, I read about how the self-driving cars seem to be continually being delayed, sort of indefinitely. Some of the initial predictions are off. And, of course, you’re someone who, on the one hand, is an optimist about the benefits of technology — but you also are skeptical about some of these extreme claims about artificial intelligence. I mean, what are the really important developments technologically that you think are going to be happening here in say the next five years? [00:14:30]

George Gilder: Well, certainly autonomous, self- driving automobiles are a real goal, and they are advancing rapidly. And in Life after Google, I described the venture of Austin Russell, who was a Thiel fellow, to start Luminar, a LIDAR company for self-driving cars.

His critique is that the strategy that Google, Tesla, and a number of other companies are following achieve self-driving cars is really futile… Self-driving automobiles are chiefly a vision problem. As we know, vision is not just a sense, it’s an intelligence. So this does entail a lot of software, but the chief goal is vision. And that’s what Luminar is doing. We still don’t know whether we’re going to have Austin at the COSM. He’s really busy. But, Luminar has become the leading self-driving car company. [00:16:30]

A big moment last year was when MobilEye, which was the leading Israeli company and was purchased by Intel, became the chief source of profits at Intel last quarter. Mobileye turned to Luminar to provide the vision systems for its big Robotaxi program. So, it may be that Russell’s insight that AI itself is not the solution, that you really need to mobilize hardware functionality of real advances and vision. [00:17:30]

Jay Richards: That is where the problems are.

George Gilder: We’ll be discussing that at COSM. Yesterday, we had another COSM speaker visit us here at Discovery. Philip M. Parker … He has 18 engineers who’ve been working for several years on a Bodypedia which combines… Wikipedia, and all the languages of the world, real time, Wikipedia that actually generates content for the particular user in real time. … What it really is good at is assembling material quickly, instantly, and responding to tags and parameters that the actual users provide. [00:19:00]

Jay Richards: So Parker will also be one of the speakers…

George Gilder: It’s really the best idea for the life after Google I’ve yet encountered. He’s really worked that out. His brother was a great inventor of back propagation technologies. He’s a very sophisticated mathematician. He’s got an incredibly high wattage team that is used… In Wikipedia, you just got the names of the people who happened to be certified as celebrities by the New York Times or as notable by the Washington Post or so. I mean, that’s literally how they choose. But anybody in the COSM audience can get their own name and they’ll generate a PDF page for them in real time from this stage. We’ll see whether that actually comes to pass. But he was doing it yesterday [00:20:30] …

Jay Richards: Well you predicted it in life after Google. So again, the COSM conference is called “Life After Capitalism,” which is the name of your book, forthcoming in a year or so.

In Life after Google you predicted… Well, first you’d claim — I think it is sort of a provocative claim — that the free model of the big tech platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, [is flawed].At least here in late summer of 2021, these platforms seem to stride the world, but you think that that is a temporary phenomenon, right? [00:21:00]

George Gilder: They’re like IBM was 20 years ago or so. They’re riding high, but approaching a cliff of technological transformation. There will be a new side of technology giants emerging, and we’ll try to add them brighter or project some of these at COSM. We’ve moved from microcosm that telecosm. And now we’re having a kind of open the cosmic mission. And we hope — in Bellevue on November 10 to 12 — to illuminate some of these futurist ideas.

—

Here’s Part 1: What do we need to know about life after capitalism? At COSM 2021, a number of thinkers will discuss and debate the pressing questions. Tech philosopher George Gilder tells business prof Jay Richards that. after capitalism, money loses “information content.”