path: root/transcripts/hplus-summit-2010/d2s13-tony-greenberg.html

Tony Greenberg.<br />
Building a Services Market for the Transhuman Era<br />
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Veytzel<br />
Pullier<br />
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ONe man, one army. So we're going to count down what we do. Honored to be hanging out here with Tarcek, Lightman and a bunch of buddies. When Alex said, come to Harvard, I said, I better bring some backup. I called some brilliant guys that I know. Built dozens of companies, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, exited multiple times, trendsetter in IT, current companies, ServiceMesh, DeskTone, and so on. Really changed the game every day. Thank you very much. Alex my company, Ramp Taste, my personal guru. He's from ..<br />
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Boiling the Human: Convenience and Confusion on the Path to the Singularity<br />
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How do service markets go and how do they build up and stuff? So, basic challenges. Tomorrow is becoming tomorrow faster than yesterday is becoming today. The frequency changes. We have to catch up as we rocket towards Singularity. We're fueled by new laws for tech, development, exponential. Virtuous cycle. There's a serious disconnect. We talk about today, we do have to change, tax reform changes, that's how we deal with personal private data, more choice less freedom, better prioritize fear and risks. The reptilian bits of our brain rules our brain. We have to harness the decision the evil purposes to guide our path and future. We worked around the physical limits of a shrinking transistor and higher storage capacities. A humane singularity is possible if we recognize obstacles. We're entering into the land of lost, the difference between what we're capable of achieving evolving and let's just say, the bad stuff which are exploited business models. We've entered the world of Madoff's law: anywhere profit can be made, will be made. Profit has driven business models. We have 25 years to correct Madoff's Law. What laws exist today that we can correct?<br />
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Our big concern is that Madoff's law will thrive. We're looking at the exponential curve of technology. And we're very excited. So, as we start to talk about what's actually growing on the exponential curve, a lot of people are getting excited about Moore's law, nanotech advancements, advancements in nanotech and biology. All of the things that are not advancing exponentially, what about step functions, or so on? Our basic instincts, our human biology. So, our basic instincts are easily manipulated in light of the rapid change sweeping up on us. Rob was saying why it's important to focus on today, to kind of ground it, instead of just the exponential curve. In the next 12min or so that we have, really ground it on the phenomenon today. The land of the lost and the exploitation that's possible within that, we're seeing signs of that, and it's gradually creeping up on that. <br />
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We speak in terms of boiling the frog, or boiling the human. The reality is that the frog jumps out, and as transhumans in the evolved state, let's say that humans are evolved in the conclusion, let's say that we're really taking.. time of global warming.. economical reprieve and problems.. we're now faced with many things that turn up the temperature.. privacy laws. Do we end up boiling the frog or making frog bites? Which, I can't pronounce. So, as we take a look at drawing the line.. look at yesterday's revolution, relying on the strenght, and talk about the revolutions.<br />
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So, it's really important to look at where we're coming from. There was no email, no browsers, where connectivity was fleeting, and this was changing rapidly, people-to-people, what's interesting about this, information-information, people to information, each time there's an innovation, everyone laughs at the business model, and doesn't think it's going to be fundamentally important, that allows things to sneak up, that allows the temperature to heat up as you get more cooked up. As you go from browsers to exponential connections between people.<br />
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The phenemonon of sharing is going to sneak up on you. When you talk about sharing, you have to talk about the speed at which information is flowing between individuals and systems. There's a couple red herrings that people are.. that's allowing people to become complacent. What's the cost to actually move information around, and if you look at that, and you believe that those are gaining factors, then it allows your brain to become complacenet, and stay in that boiling pot; cost of bandwidth, cost of storage; explosion of information. <br />
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Moore's law<br />
Metcalfe's law<br />
Zuckerberg's law: the amount of information shared between people doubles every 12 to 18 months.<br />
Eric Pulier's law: the time and cost to launch a venture that reaches 100M people havles every 12 to 18 months.<br />
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It fails in comparison as facebook, which is now at 500M people. Zynga in the last 6mo, and things happening with Foursquare. <br />
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The danger that we talks about is that .. the default options, when we talk about boiling the human. The exploitative business models, entering the frey. Privacy becomes a process, probably all of you spent X number of hours to cancel your AOL account. The default is that you're stuck forever. This is happening with everything. Privacy settings and the way people are sharing your data and by default, and so on. Little by little. If you think back to Amazon, everyone laughed at the business models. The volume would never rise high enough. Soon people were ok with doing credit card transactions online. Convenience is the single most powerful and dangerous driver to how you mitigate an example that seems intractable. You cannot govern it, you cannot tell people what to do, the people won't do it.. but if you make the convenient solution the solution that you'd like them to use. This is what's happening in the world today. Google made it hte most convenient place to find information. Now they just make more and more targeted ads with your information. Facebook then comes out, it became popular not for any other reason over what was really existing with myspace, or friendster. Facebook, felt more privace, it started here. And then went to other campuses, and it felt like you were in the zone that was separate and safe from the rest of the world. You got the feeling of comfort, and then they started to sell the data. The privacy settings, dangerous. Facebook is at over 500M. Twitter did the same. Foursquare is now the final step, where your actual physical location is being broadcasted. Each of these are notching it up additional levels each time, taking you into the additional layers. The minute we release our powers and so on, our responsibilities.<br />
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Innovation. Some markets are wildly successful. <br />
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The human brain does not quite catch up with technological innovation. The innovation itself. In the 1940s, someone got misquoted about the potential size of the computer model. A PC in every home, and a smart phone in every pocket, and Tony has four in his back right now. This is how innovation will work. You think of an idea and it explodes beyond imagination. The other promise at the same time- at the 60s, everyone was going to have a flying car. In 1985, we got a definite timeline: in 2015, where we're going we don't need roads. Instead we got 13 versions of Canyonero. Innovation got derailed because of the way we structured the businesses, profit motives. The first and simplest form of failure was failure of innovation, where business models don't catch up to the pace of technological innovation. You don't even see what you're missing.<br />
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The business model can outspand the human brain's ability to expand the assault and start exploitation.<br />
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The paradox of choice. As we get more choices, we get less happy, we get stuck in decision paralysis. This could become exploitative, this is where we go- we run away from fchoice. We run into conformity, we run into specific low-brow, low-class, lowest common denominator solutions, and we get stuck there because we're too afraid of everything else that is available to us. What do these 32 companies have in common? They were the nominees for the worst companies in America. 21 of those, including 3 of the 4 finalists and the eventual winner, was a services company.<br />
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Transhumanism is a services market. Regardless of the general trend, everything as a service. The specifics out there. Virtual reality, uploading, service, cryonics, heritage in terms of the business model. Even nanotech.. kids any more.. we likewise can't probably hand out nanotech kits to because of security concerns. It's a services model, and it's not always.. the services model is predicated on managing costs better. When you think back to your last interaction with your credit card company, insurance company, or cable ISP. What about a company that holds your brain hostage? That's exploitative.<br />
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What about the people who are out to do harm? Twitter accounts are worth more than credit card numbers. We've looked at the good, the bad, and the horrible. Now let's figure out how to avoid something terrible like the QWERTY keyboard. The thought leaders and investors will shape how tomorrow looks. We're kind of moving into, what's to much ado about nothing.. <br />
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There's a lot of fake cures out there. There's fearmongering, like "I'm not going to take that, and I'm going to shut off my facebook account". One of the decisive campaign issues was that someone had designed the facebook privacy policy. People are aware of this, and they know it's a problem. It's dangerous to raise the topic, and nothing systematic to change it. You feel like someone is doing something, but in reality, fact is nobody is doing anything about it. Just a lot ado about nothing. We have to step forward and put something in place. One statement as to why this is so important. If you really think about how much there is in the public today, around identity theft, it's a huge problem. Not a huge problem in comparison.. black market for facebook and twitter accounts. Those people are generally wired to trust anyone who are within a certain degree on their social market.<br />
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How do we reshape the market? Capital of tomorrow. What is the score coard? What are the libertarians doing today? There's a variety of solutions. More innovation. Regulation. Tax cuts, government regulation, and the counter-argument was that it's most often co-opted by the people who it is supposed to regulate, and that's used to move the line of business innovation down, and that's how we get stuck with the failure to innovate. The guy who made craigslist. If you want to benefit humanity, and not just line your pockets, give people an incentive to behave. Dictators will arise, l.. of course you have to get.. facebook. So we're going to list our big ideas. <br />
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Create a singularity bill of rights for humans and machines.<br />
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Singularity stock exchange SSE rates companies against its Bill of Rights. Capture the conscious capitalist!<br />
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You have certain religious movements, and they boycott things that don't believe in their basic fundamental principles. There's more basic to the future of the humanity. There are such things as the profit motive, the planet, the basic tenants of economics of transhumanism. It has to come together to become a bill of rights of things we believe in.. a ranking against companies.. in real time, if we can have a ranking where the stocks of these companies are going up and down, based on there adherence to these principles, and through a little crowdsourcing and voodoo to make it hard to game the system, we can make a correlation between their score and the actual stock price. That will create an incentive.<br />
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Divorce political organization from geography. Not just technology and business, the idea is to model more goods into the maqrket.. including political goods. Joint citizenship with people across the world, if you're still.. lso.. Clinton didn't win.. still can be your president. If we get market structures right, if we can prevent them from being exploitative, we can become free of geographic boundaries. How do we get there?<br />
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How do we move to the services market without the salesmanship and exploitation? I've been trying to eliminate the sales process. If there's true value exchange based on value and understanding. We create awareness, expectations, accountability and so on. What are the boundaries on turning ythe power off for southern California? The software that meshes people and tech, our possibility of creating and understanding new service markets are critical for us at this time.<br />
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