Sussing the Future at XPRIZE (Part1)—with Neil deGrass Tyson, Peter Diamandis, Jennifer Garrison, Daniel Kraft, and Erik Lindbergh
The future of AI, space, women’s health, longevity, wisdom, and climate change: voices from the XPRIZE summit in Malibu » Also from my Archives: “Thomas Jefferson Would Work for GoogleX"
XPRIZE cofounder Peter Diamandis interviews astrophysicist and writer Neil deGrass Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum for Natural History in New York City, onstage at the recent XPRIZE Visioneering Summit in Malibu.
In this issue of FUTURES
Theme: Visioneering
New Essay: Sussing the Future at XPRIZE (Part 1)—Neil deGrass Tyson, Peter Diamandis, Jennifer Garrison, Daniel Kraft, and Eric Lindbergh discuss the future of AI, space, women’s health, longevity, wisdom, and climate change, by David Ewing Duncan
Q&A’s: Neil deGrass Tyson, Peter Diamandis, Jennifer Garrison, Daniel Kraft, Erik Lindbergh
From my Archives: “Thomas Jefferson Would Work for Google X,” By David Ewing Duncan, The Daily Beast (2015)
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this special XPRIZE column, featuring thoughts on the future from XPRIZE CEO Anousheh Ansari, Intel’s Stacey Shulman, Entrepreneur and philanthropist Lee Stein, Interstellar Lab’s Barbara Belvisi, Cellist and Composer Philip Sheppard, and oncologist Jyoti Nangalia
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Recommended Summit: Join me for a deep dive into the future of health and biomedicine at NextMed Health, coming together at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego this March 30-April 2, 2025. The founder and curator is Dr. Daniel Kraft, who is interviewed in this issue of Futures. You can bypass the usual application process and register here, using the code 'Futures' for a special rate.
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FUTURES is a column and a newsletter about possible futures at a pivotable moment in history, where the future could turn out wondrous—or not. I’m asking the most interesting people I can find what they are most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why.
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New Essay
Jennifer Garrison, Co-Founder and Director of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality and Assistant Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging— her team won the XPRIZE concept award at the XPRIZE Visioneering Summit in Malibu for her XX project supporting women’s health.
Sussing the Future at XPRIZE (Part 1)
Neil deGrass Tyson, Peter Diamandis, Jennifer Garrison, Daniel Kraft, and Erik Lindbergh discuss the future of the AI, space, women’s health, longevity, wisdom, and climate change
by David Ewing Duncan—December 11, 2024
Deep in the Santa Monica Mountains, the future looked not just bright, but dazzling—a relief from a world fraught with tribulations ranging from climate change and war to the rise of authoritarianism. It was late October and the scent of Eucalyptus was sharp in the air as 500 entrepreneurs, investors, academics, engineers, philanthropists, artists, executives, and writers conversed on everything from growing roses on the moon to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to make fuel; from slowing the aging of the ovaries to making sure AI isn’t used for evil.
When I first heard about XPRIZE almost 20 years ago, I was intrigued but skeptical. I found the optimism of an organization dedicated to incentivizing futuristic ideas and technologies inspiring—perhaps a bit too inspiring. Like much of what was happening during those heady early days of the Internet, genomics, smart phones, artificial intelligence, and all the rest, XPRIZE in its youth leaned hard into the notion that tech and clever ideas alone were going to transform the world into a futuristic utopia. They were hardly alone. As a tech reporter covering the exuberance of that moment from my base in San Francisco, it was easy to get swept up in what became a multi-trillion-dollar surge of techno exuberance that began with dotcoms in the 1990s and hurtled forward into the 20-aughts with nary a pause even for bubbles bursting and pet food companies going bust.
This year, XPRIZE turned 30—still young, but old enough to have experienced the reality that creating optimal futures is damn hard, that tech can have downsides, and the world can and does spin sideways at times in unexpected ways. Not that these realizations have dampened XPRIZER’s enthusiasm. But it has injected a deeper realization that self-interest and resistance to change are part of human nature and that bad stuff happens—and that it’s critical to take action to find real solutions, with stakes in some cases being the survival of our species and the health of our planet and the ecosystem that supports us. This vibe in the Santa Monica Mountains made a skeptical optimist like me feel more at home at XPRIZE in 2024 than I did c. 2008.
XPRIZE was founded by the physician, entrepreneur, and provocateur Peter Diamandis (interviewed below) who also co-founded Singularity University and ventures ranging from Human Longevity, Inc. to the Zero Gravity Corporation and a slew of space-oriented ventures. I met Peter 15 years ago when I was asked to speak at and then join the faculty of Singularity University, then primarily a 10-week deep dive into cutting-edge tech presented by a who’s who of innovators, innovators, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs, held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. During this time I joined a few XPRIZE gatherings and brainstorms to come up with prizes, including participation in the $10 million genomics prize to encourage the development of faster and cheaper technology to sequence DNA.
XPRIZE was founded in 1994 after Diamandis read The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh and discovered how this once obscure pilot became the first ever to fly from New York City to Paris—and how Lindbergh was inspired by a competition offering a $25,000 prize for the feat. In 1927, Lindbergh finished this then arduous journey ahead of nine other teams. In 1996, Diamandis—with just an idea and no funding—offered a $10 million prize to the first team that could build and fly a spacecraft that carried three people 100 kilometers into space twice in two weeks. (Lindbergh’s grandson, Erik, was part of this effort and is interviewed below).
Eventually, the $10 million prize was funded by Anousheh and Hamid Ansari and their family, with Anousheh later becoming the CEO of XPRIZE (check out part 2 of this column on XPRIZE for her interview). In 2004, the Ansari XPRIZE was won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures with their vehicle SpaceShipOne after 26 teams spent $100 million competing.
Since the Ansari effort, the organization has launched 30 prizes and awarded over a dozen winners receiving amounts ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to $15 million. Topics range from solutions to de-acidify the oceans, building more efficient rockets to go to the moon, preserving and cataloguing biodiversity in rainforests, and using apps to help educate children in the developing world. The prizes have generated $7.2 billion invested into over 10,000 competing teams and over 9,000 patents filed. Current prizes are now in the nine-figure range with a $101 Healthspan prize to promote research into human longevity, and a $100 million carbon removal competition funded by the Musk Foundation.
The Visioneering Summit is held each year as part of an elaborate process to develop XPRIZES, with the summit starting with 50 concepts that are winnowed down to 20 proposals and teams. These finalists present their ideas multiple times to the assembled brains, who ask questions and then vote for their favorites.
First place this year went to a team led by Jennifer Garrison of the Buck Institute and a team that also included Chris MacDonald, Yousin Suh and Daisy Robinton. Their concept was, according to Garrison, “a moonshot challenge to fundamentally transform women's health by optimizing ovarian function across female lifespan. This isn't about reproduction—it's about revolutionizing how we understand and support women's health at every age, from before puberty through end of life.” Check out my interview with Jennifer below.
I’ll end with a shameless pitch for my own idea for a XPRIZE—to address what I believe is the greatest hurdle to developing and adopting technologies and smart ideas to optimize the best of what it means to be human: toxic politics and policies, and political systems that are outdated, clunky, and out of touch—and resistant to change that can stymie the scaling and application of many of the idea and tech being talked about at XPRIZE. What about an XPRIZE to incentivize great ideas to reorganize how we govern ourselves? Maybe call it the Wisdom XPRIZE? Peter Diamandis and I discuss this in his interview below. Also check out Neil deGrass Tyson’s thoughts below about the urgency to foster wisdom.
Along these lines, check out the story below I wrote in 2016 for The Daily Beast that describes moments in history when certain humans got their acts together to not only invent wonderful gizmos and tech, but also to revamp the rules to promote the more positive aspects of human nature while preventing or lessening the impact of those who don’t always have positive aims top of mind. This commentary was an update of a similar piece I wrote for The Atlantic in 2012 called “Why do our best and brightest end up in Silicon Valley?”
Q&As: XPRIZERS Talk About the Future—Part 1
I usually interview one person for this column, but attending the XPRIZE Visioneering summit I thought it would be interesting to mark the 30th anniversary of XPRIZE by asking several attendees the question I ask everyone interviewed for this column: What are you most excited about and what are you most afraid of for the future and why?
Neil de Grasse Tyson, PhD
Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum for Natural History in New York City. Tyson was a guest speaker at the XPRIZE Visioneering Summit.
What are you most excited about and what are you most afraid of for the future and why?
My biggest fear always is that we are not wise enough to control or tame our inventions and discoveries, and without that wisdom extinction lays before us. We don't want to be the only species that was so smart to figure out a way to destroy ourselves. What does that mean? That we might have to redefine what smart means in that context. We have multiple powers at our disposal and genetic engineering in the hands of the wrong people, bad actors that can alter the course of civilization in ways that we would forever regret. Every modern scientific advance, technological advance comes with just such a risk.
What are you hope most hopeful about?
I think the more scientifically literate the world becomes, the better able we will be to maintain a course of discovery and enlightenment by discovering what nature has to offer. And if you look around the world of what were once called third world countries—they've been rebranded as developing countries—that's correct. But there are fewer people who are in poverty today than ever before. There are more people who are educated in the world today. It wasn't that long ago when hardly anyone went to college. In the 1800s, how many people went to college? The rich and the privileged.
But now ordinary people can go to college and learn something. And in a free society, they have access to capital and opportunity. We can tap the full intellectual capital of our species. If you look at China and what they've done with themselves just over the last two or three decades, the fact that that's even possible gives great hope for the entire world. It means the United States might not lead the world the way we once proclaimed. But as a scientist, that matters less to me than the fact that good things are happening with the application of science. I am a realist, but always hopeful in a way that I don't lose sight of.
Peter Diamandis, MD
Founder and Executive Chairman, XPRIZE
What are you most excited about, and what are you most afraid of for the future and why?
I’m most excited about two things where I'm principally focusing my energy and time. One is the extension of the human health span. I think there's no greater wealth than our health, and I think that this decade is going to give us a sequence of breakthroughs that will add at least a couple of extra healthy decades. And during those extra decades we'll have additional breakthroughs that will gain us additional decades.
The second area of equal import but with greater impact for humanity is AI. There's no question that we are giving birth to a new species on this planet, and we are going to co-evolve and eventually merge with these species. AI gives birth to new generations of humanoid robots. AI gives birth to nanotechnology; AI gives birth to ability to mine the asteroids and build starships. We're at this Cambrian explosion of potential futures in that is at its foundational wellspring, increased intelligence. In the past intelligence increase has been done using changes in societal structure and in recordings and books and computational power, and so forth. But now that we’re giving birth to AI and we have a new strata of intelligence with which to explore in all directions. For me, everything comes down to that inflection point.
What are you afraid of?
Human stupidity. We live in a universe of infinite resources but our early primitive hominid mind was designed for scarcity and fear. Our default mindset of scarcity and fear that dominates and our mindsets haven't evolved at the speed that our technologies are evolving.
What does this mean for AI? Are you afraid of the downsides?
Principally, I'm not concerned that AI is going to become a dystopian master, but I am concerned that humans in the early days are going to be using AI for their own evil purposes. As I see the timeline for development of advanced AI, I think that we're going to have super-intelligence that is multiple orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. What does AI that is a billion times more capable than human beings look like, feel like? How do we engage with it? How do we think about it?
One scenario people fear is having that level of AI on the planet. I fear not having that kind of AI on the planet, in part to keep us at some level of safe while we mature as a species, which I think is critically important. The challenge is to get through the rest of this decade, 2025 through 2030, where AI is becoming more powerful and people have access to it, but it has not become, for lack of a better term, conscious enough to know that using it to kill a million people is a really stupid idea, so let's just not do that. I think there's a future in which AI, if a nation state or a person asks it to do harm, that the more intelligent a system is, the more wise it is, the more likely it is to understand that there is no rational reason for us to destroy ourselves.
How can we, using our primitive hominid minds, build these machines that are going to be smarter and wiser than we are—that will save us from ourselves?
Wisdom is a result of sufficient experiences to understand potential outcomes. So if you go to, say, a council of wise elders and you ask them: should we go to war with this group, or should I marry this person, or should I take this action? Why are you going to these elders? It's because they've had enough experience to know that this particular path leads to a poor outcome, this other course probabilistically has a better outcome. I believe we're going to see advanced AI able to model billions of these scenarios and probabilistically determine which is the best one to take. I think that is the equivalent of wisdom, and we'll see that AI will be wise from that perspective.
Did you just come up with an XPRIZE? The Wisdom XPRIZE? Maybe we could come up with some metrics to make sure that the best of humanity is programming AI to make wise choices.
When I interviewed Elon Musk and Jeffrey Hinton on stage at my abundance summit last year, both of them basically said: Listen, I think there is an 80% chance that things going to be amazing for humanity with our AI future and a 20% chance that we're screwed. We need to minimize the 20% chance, to do what we can to avoid the downsides, and the upsides will take care of themselves.
Jennifer Garrison, PhD
Jennifer Garrison, Co-Founder and Director of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality and Assistant Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging
Leader of Winning Team, concept competition at the 2024 XPRIZE Visioneering Summit, for their XXPRIZE project on women’s health.
What are you most excited about and what are you most afraid of for the future and why?
I'm most excited about having a true revolution around female health. Full stop. Actually understanding how female bodies work. Actually having options for women to extend their health span. Actually being with a doctor and able to have everything that's happening in my body be explainable, and possibly treatable—at a minimum, knowing what's happening to me.
You did just win the XPRIZE concept with a project that supports this.
We did! I've been saying for a while that my secret mission was to make the XPRIZE a double XPRIZE.
The XX project has been going on for 3-4 years, right?
Yes—we used to be called the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity Inequality. Now we're calling it Productive Health.org, which is easier to read. In four years we’ve already done two rounds of grants to 49 scientists all over the world. There have been 50 papers, and there have been major discoveries. One example is [Cellular and Molecular Pharmacologist] Holly Ingraham at UCSF, she is one of our grantees. Holly just discovered and published in Nature a novel hormone that your brain makes that builds bone in females. She discovered it because she was asking a simple question, which is why don’t mothers when they're lactating lose bone? Because what happens during lactation is estrogen drops really low, and estrogen is what maintains bone. So lactating mothers should be osteopenic—have major bone loss. She found that there's a hormone that's never been studied before that’s made in the brain in lactating mothers that builds bone.
What are you afraid of for the future?
I could never have imagined that Roe v Wade would fall. I think political debate is healthy, and it's great that people have different views and that we can debate them. But when you're talking about reproductive rights, those are human rights. And that's not political. It's been made political, but then it did, and it was hard to get my bearings. Now the assault on reproductive rights is a rallying cry for change. My biggest fear is that people aren't listening.
But you rather resoundingly won the prize against some other ideas that were very compelling, too.
I was not expecting that. But I am just afraid that we’re in a bubble here and that it's going in the opposite direction and at an alarming pace outside of this bubble.
Daniel Kraft, MD
Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. Chair of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance Task Force. Founder and Chair of NextMed Health
Join me for a deep dive into the future of health and biomedicine at Daniel Kraft’s NextMed Health, coming together at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego this March 30-April 2, 2025. You can bypass the usual application process and register here, using the code 'Futures' for a special rate.
What are you most excited about, and what are you most afraid of for the future and why?
I’m excited about living in this era of exponentially available data. Right now, we've got basically a hundred-dollar genome, and you can measure all the different molecular elements inside you, from the microbiome to the metabolome with over-the-counter devices, and also your exposome, which tells you where you’ve been and who and what you've been exposed to. These exponential data sets are often still quite siloed, but the magic art of the possible is putting all this together in a near future of multimodal health insights and knowledge can be used at the bedside or on a website or as self-care, which can help you optimize prevention and health span.
Using the data along with AI we’re able to pick up diseases much earlier, at stage zero or stage one, and often pair this with a therapy. Everything from diabetes to mental health to cancer that's much more tuned and personalized and optimized and impactful. We’re moving from scattered intermittent data that’s collected now to a future where we can be proactive anytime, anywhere. So the optimist in me sees the ability to connect those dots. Early examples include the aura ring and the Apple Watch to see if you have A-Fibs or Covid or you just need to get a good night's sleep.
We know about generative AI, but what about generative health where the interfaces don’t look all the same like they do today, but instead can be tuned to your age, culture, language, personality type, incentive models, and where you want to go on your health journey from where you are?
What are you afraid of? What do you fear about the future?
The fear is that there's still a lot of misaligned incentives. There's the art of the possible, but also challenges of regulatory and reimbursement and workflow and the culture of medicine, which is incremental not exponential, and can often slow these things down dramatically. The ability to do proactive healthcare isn't aligned with most insurance companies. There are also the dystopian elements of what happens when this data gets out there. Let’s say I’m going to use your genome to target you with a biologic weapon, or to change your life insurance. But I’m optimistic we’ll figure this out.
Erik Lindbergh
What are you most excited about, and what are you most afraid of for the future and why?
I'm super excited about the hundredth anniversary of my grandfather's [Charles Lindberg’s] flight [across the Atlantic for the first time in 1927], and in using this as leverage to support a project I’m working on—which is creating sustainable aviation fuels that can be used to replace the carbon fossil fuel economy. The idea is we take air, which is filled with carbon, and convert it into fuel and electricity. If we can scale this, it could replace fossil fuels taken from the ground and recycle or remove carbon from the atmosphere. We’re developing an XPRIZE to help make this happen.
What are you most afraid of for the future?
I'm afraid that all this effort is worth nothing if we end up with a barren planet with no life on it. Already, our kids can experience only a fraction of what we experienced in the natural world as kids. I’m missing what my grandparents flew over and saw. They saw wilderness. My time in wilderness is restorative and I need that; everyone needs time in nature. And if my son doesn't get to experience that, if his kids don't get to experience that, then I'm afraid all of this is a moot point. We're arguing about politics in this country instead of working to save ourselves and the planet, it's ridiculous. Take sea level rise. Who cares if global warming is anthropogenic or not caused by humans? It's happening, and if we don't do something, we're going to have mass migrations. I don't want to migrate.
But I do have hope with the XPRIZE process This summit is the highlight of my year. It juices me up. When you come here, you hear from scientists and others that show empirical data about the changes that are happening and offer solutions.
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From My Archives—Daily Beast
Would Thomas Jefferson Work at GoogleX?
The government needs brilliant minds reinventing it with the same urgency they use to create apps and nanobots. How the tech world stole America’s biggest thinkers.
By David Ewing Duncan, Daily Beast, 19 April 2015
As Americans brace for another presidential election, availing a process invented over 200 years ago, where are this century’s counterparts of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton?
They’re working for Google or Facebook, or they’re founding start-ups to build the world’s first flying car—or bioengineering super cells to repair injured brains.
What they are not doing is devising new and creative ways to improve the body politic to optimize the development and intelligent use of flying cars and super cells. For many of our best and brightest, government these days feels obsolete. Politics is creaky and dysfunctional, or is something they seldom think about…
“It’s just not a place where I spend a lot of time,” Bill Maris, president and managing partner of Google Ventures, once told me his office in Mountain View, California. “Because I don’t feel like I can have a lot of impact there.”
Contrast this with Jefferson’s day. Enlightenment smarties from Rousseau to Locke were in a tizzy about how people should organize and be governed. Political theory was all the rage—along with science and inventing gadgets—pursuits that Jefferson spent time on in Monticello between writing declarations and governing the United States…
Another era that embraced government emerged in the 1960s when President John F. Kennedy declared: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
This led to a decade or two of brilliant minds in the mid 20th Century working to reframe government to support civil rights and a slew of government-led programs, from NASA and the clean air and clean water acts to the highway system. Led by government initiatives, the United States sent men to the moon, developed or paid for basic medical technologies like magnetic resonance scanning and cracking how the genetic code creates proteins, and created a first draft of the Internet.
Government is hardly the be-all and end-all. Jefferson’s system allowed slavery and excluded women and most nonwhites from his version of political enlightenment—to their eternal shame… but the United States government, however, remains the most powerful entity on the planet, with more money and influence than even the Koch Brothers…
For the complete story, click here.