Welcome to this week’s edition of The Future In Five Questions, featuring venture capitalist Albert Wenger. Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of the recent book “The World After Capital,” in which he argues that the dawn of a new, information-driven successor to the Industrial Age will require a wholesale reimagining of how society and the economy work. We discussed his view on the state of AI, what it will take to sustain a still-growing global population and the centrality of fighting climate change for humanity’s survival. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. What’s one underrated big idea? Universal basic income, or unconditional basic income. It’s not a panacea. But I do believe it to be a cornerstone for a post-industrial age, which I call in my book the knowledge age. We need to make it so that people don't have to work just to be able to live. It’s a way of acknowledging that we've made a huge amount of technological progress and that we can afford this. It's also a way to get the benefits of automation broadly distributed and make people be excited about automation instead of fearing it. It had a bit of a moment when Andrew Yang ran for president, but it has since not received the level of attention that it deserves. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? AI. Like everything, whenever we have a breakthrough there's an immediate response: Oh my God, this is going to change everything, tomorrow. The valuations of the AI companies, both on the public and private markets, suggest that that's not going to be the case. It's going to be harder to use the stuff than people think it is. It's going to take a little longer. The long-term impact will be much more dramatic than anything we've seen today from digital technology. I think it's a typical cycle where we have this short-term overreaction and over-hype. By the way, I'm not saying that's a bad thing — just look at Nvidia’s stock. It's getting massive numbers of GPUs deployed. Carlota Perez wrote a fantastic book about how we get these cycles with every new technology, you know, going back to ocean-going sailboats and the East India Company bubble, railroads, and each time these bubbles get a lot of capital deployed that then gets usefully used over time. What book most shaped your conception of the future? David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity.” It's a book about science and about the power of explanations and the power of knowledge. People argue that 11 billion people are unsustainable on the planet, and the answer to that is, yes, if we don't come up with more knowledge, quickly. Because we're faced with the climate crisis, we're faced with infectious disease problems. The book does an extraordinary job of digging into what an explanation is, and why they’re powerful. There's been a backlash against the human-centered view of the world, because people equate it with human domination. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge a human-centered view of the world, because human knowledge is the most powerful force out there. But when you do that, you have to do it in a way where you say with that power comes a responsibility to take care of other humans, and animals, and the ecosphere. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Something like the ACCESS Act, which is draft legislation in the U.S. that moves power over computation back to individuals. On our phones, which are incredibly powerful supercomputers, when you hit one of the icons, that app completely takes over. … We really need to change that dynamic. It's at the heart of so many of our other debates, it’s why we are so worried about Twitter's algorithm, or Facebook's algorithm — because we can't use our own phones to investigate that algorithm as we see fit, not as some central power sees fit. What has surprised you the most this year? The acceleration of the climate crisis in 2023 has been extraordinary, and I think is not getting nearly enough coverage relative to how significant it is. If you look at charts of temperature in the Atlantic, or land temperatures, or methane in the atmosphere, there are lots of different indicators of the rate at which the climate crisis is unfolding. They're all way above anything that we have seen, and way above any historic numbers, and way above even some of the worst predictions that we've had. Eventually, our luck is going to run out. The oceans can absorb only so much heat, and the land will become hotter. We're seeing so many effects of this, these extraordinary downpours, flash flood events even in places like Germany that people don’t think of as suffering from flash floods. Even people like myself who've spent a significant amount of time studying it are still surprised by just how fast this has happened.
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