A brain on a chip ? The future of singularity in the METAVERSE | Dr Abdalla Kablan | TEDxESCPLondon

[Music] a brain on a chip Singularity the metaverse neuromorphic Computing a lot of complex Concepts which I hope to be able to demystify and untangle for you today my name is Abdullah kablan throughout my career I founded a number of companies specializing mainly but not exclusively in artificial intelligence machine learning some of which were successful a lot of which were miserable failures but I've learned much more from the failures than I did from the successes and today I was introduced to you as a serial Tech entrepreneur investor expert which in the past would have filled

me with happiness and joy and sense of achievement to hear such titles but not today maybe because I changed maybe because my priorities have changed or maybe because the world has changed so when I look and reflect and see what am I proud of I think I'm proud of many other things that are not just career related one of which and the most important to me is the fact that I a father so please allow me to reintroduce myself my name is Abdullah kablan and I'm the co-founder of two beautiful little boys Moody and z

and to me the story of my own children is is something that I'm quite passionate about for those of you who have experienced the beautiful feeling of Parenthood fatherhood or motherhood number one you understand that suddenly the weight of the world is on your shoulders and you are responsible of the future of your Offspring number two it fills you with hope and strive to make the world better for them but when I look at my kids something different happened to them that what happened in my generation they were born in two completely different worlds moodi

was born in 2017 to a cheering crowd of nurses and doctors at guys in St Thomas greeted by the most beautiful view of London and I've just exited a company back then so I was happy my beautiful wife was happy we're all like enjoying the moment and theyve just started another company hoping to grow it Zade on the other hand was born in 2020 in exactly the same room and it was a coincidence complete coincidence but to a completely different world Zade was born in April 2020 the first peak of the covid pandemic something which

was quite new to all of us he was not greeted by a cheering crowd of nurses and doctors everyone was actually panicking what is this something new there's a pandemic going on when my wife was giving birth the 7th floor of G and St Thomas Hospital Boris Johnson the prime minister of the UK was in the sixth floor for fighting for his life being moved to a ventilator so everyone was really worried security all around the office people in azamat suits checking what's going on I actually almost missed the birth of my own son and

I realized that it was the same place but two different realities we are faced with a pandemic something that my generation or even my parents generation not seen before so I started like looking what what does this bring what does this mean so I exited my company again and moral of the story here it's not whenever I have a baby I exit my company if that's the case I'll be having much more babies but I just wanted to see what is about to happen in the world because I believe that we're truly at a pivotal

point in in our history because if you look back there's something very specific about pandemics pandemics have two main properties they're forgettable they spark Innovation forgettable because the human brain is wired to actually forget everything that humans did not cause themselves whether it's first majour of Act of God or something that we have not done we actually forget if you look at the previous pandemic the Spanish Flu which a lot of us have only heard about after Co has happened it actually coincided with World War I much more people died in the Spanish Flu than

people that have died in World War I yet we see much more movies poems songs about World War I then we see about the Spanish Flu mainly because one is a war that man or humans have caused and the other one is something that's completely external so all the mas and everything we've gone through in the past 2 and a half years I know it's for forgettable and for those of you who don't know that that's like good news we will forget about it but secondly it does spark Innovation there many stories about this like

for instance Isaac Newton discovered gravity and saw the Apple falling during the black Deb he was actually socially distancing from everyone that's why he had the time to see the Apple falling Albert Einstein has done most of his work on relativity during the Spanish flu so those are periods that spark Innovation also there are two other subproperties of pandemics the property of pandemic that a lot of people fail to see is that historically unfortunately people die in pandemics but also the economies die Co was the first pandemic in human history where unfortunately people have died

but the economies did not die that's for one reason the reason is that because in 2020 the digital migration has been completed we've suddenly moved our entire life to the digital world whether we know it consciously or we don't know it we started consuming Academia online we started doing our business online our financials our transactions have moved online even medical Tech have moved online the internet has suddenly become a utility a part of our life and for that reason the economies of the world did not die unlike any other previous p mic but that runs

on an infrastructure that a lot of people fail to notice the infrastructure is called the semiconductor every single device that we use has a piece of Machinery inside it called the semiconductors that black Chip that you see there and a lot of you might have heard that there's a global shortage around the world in in in in chips at the moment mainly because production has increased quite a lot supply chain has been disrupted rupted and we are not able to even produce the infrastructure that is powering everything that we're doing it's not magic that we

just click a button and we have 500 people on Zoom that requires massive in infrastructure underneath it however unfortunately the semiconductor architecture is completely flawed and without going too technical in this semiconductor architecture of almost every device we're using today is based on something called the voman architecture which is simply put a design where you have somewhere to store the memory and the other place to put the processing and the arms race for the past 50 years was to bring memory and processing as close as each other to make devices better faster easier to use

smarter and all that however if you look at the most sophisticated super computer in existence the human brain which unfortunately we have not evolved as a species to ize even 9% of its processing capacity processing and memory in our brains have never been split they all happen exactly in the same unit on a on a neurological level so for that reason there's a new wave of semiconductors are called neuromorphic Computing semiconductors that are inspired by the human brain and that is fueling a new wave in artificial intelligence that is making it better faster and easier

to make and easier to manufacture and consume less energy practically speaking the human brain which is as I said a superc computer consumes less than 40 Watts the world's best supercomputer at the moment consumes almost 40 gaw at any given time that's a huge difference we live in a world where we have already become cyborgs like we're speaking about cybernetics and and Robotics but if you think about about it the mobile phone that each and every one of us carries with them all the time that has become the fifth limb a lot of people are

actually experiencing Phantom limb syndrome which is people who unfortunately lose a limb they have Phantom limb which they feel that that limb is almost there if we forget our phone at home sometimes we feel the vibration in our pocket we feel like it is there and that means that we've already been wired and that is a notion that's EXC wrting from an intellectual property standpoint and the research and development standpoint but it's equally scary does this mean that we're about to reach Singularity now Singularity for those of you that don't know what it is it

is a area in AI where artificial intelligence will one day supersede human intelligence and becomes better and it will happen it's inevitable I know that my kids probably in 20 25 years time from now they'll either have their best friend as a robot or they may be leading the human Rebellion against the robots in a post-apocalyptic world like we've seen in the movie Terminator this is not far-fetched but today it is not going to happen because robotics have not Advanced enough with time it will get there and that's why coming back to my initial point

and the weight on my shoulder for my Offspring and for future generation that we need to be responsible when we're building such Technologies we need to understand our own psychology our own brain structures humans we are irrational but we're predictably irrational we keep on repeating exactly the same mistakes over and over and over again our history is replete with instances where we have self-destructed and nowadays we're witnessing similar instances unfortunately so we need to understand how our brain works secondly the other point is that all of us have experienced Zoom during Co all of us

have experienced trying to communicate with each other via video conferencing video conferencing lacks one thing it lacks what we've all noticed is very difficult to convey energy through a video call is very difficult to stay engaged it's exactly the same I mean I can watch a concert on YouTube but it does not feel anywhere as similar as actually being in the concert itself and that's because of immersiveness but in in parallel to all of that two-dimensional world that video conferencing have enabled for us we have the rise of virtual reality now virtual reality is actually

touching a a pain point in in in in the way our brain is structured due to their immersive nature they actually make us produce the exact same chemicals that we produce when we have a real life experience so when you go to an event for example or to a concert the reason why you feel the and you feel like that this is really cool and I like it it's because suddenly your brain starts producing dopamine starts producing serotonin oxytocin endorphins all the good stuff that our brain actually does produce when we're at a real life

experience virtual reality helps us recreate that and for that reason moving into a different world that is three-dimensional Paving the way to what is now known as the metaverse is actually going to be inevitable especially with the rise and fast advancement on the semiconductor front it is something that personally on a personal level I've tried some years ago in 2016 at the Microsoft accelerator here in London was one of the first people that have experienced the Holo lens in 2017 at the world economic Forum in Davos I presented a virtual reality platform for financial trading

they both failed the time was not right the technology was a bit early it was slightly ahead of its time like many other Innovations but now because of the digital migration because of moving into a new world we are witnessing what is known as the metaverse now for those of you who are hearing about the metaverse and they don't know what the metaverse is is practically the successor state of the internet if you think about the internet as a two-dimensional space the metaverse is the internet in 3D so you're practically being moved inside the internet

and that's going to open the door for a lot of Innovations we're going to market products differently because we're going to start thinking in three dimensions we're going to transact we're going to exchange value in a very very different way a lot of people are saying oh that's something for gamers and video gamers are the ones that do that we don't understand it that's not bad in fact video Gamers have always come before if you think about it with' or at least people in my generation we've all played Super Mario and Space Invaders 15 years

before we used Google so Gamers always come first and Gamers have been playing VR games for the past 10 years so it is now time that almost everyone of us within the next 5 years is going to have a headset on their faces instead of the phone in your hand it is going to move quite closer and that means that we need to reinvent the way we even think of value not everything is all should be captured in money monetary terms due to blockchain technology nowadays it helps us to come up with different ways for

the exchange of value to have trust in a decentralized manner we do not trust one entity some companies around the world are even rebranding their names to jump on the hype of this but in reality they are Central companies with Central authorities on you and your data and they handle innovation in a way as pretty much from a financial standpoint but in reality this field is incredibly promising and if it's combined with decentralized ledgers and technologies that are actually trustless because they have trust enabled within the technology itself then it's going to be a completely

different Paradigm a lot of people who look at blockchain and DT and think it's related to cryptocurrency it may be because if you think about it throughout history if you want to build a civilization you need two things a system of trade and a store of value system of trade could be exchanging bartering I give you a goat you give me a cow and we're exchanging accordingly or we exchange money a store of value could be assets Commodities money gold silver fiat currency or or money but if you think about the world's biggest currency at

the moment the US dollar its value is based on nothing but a promise from a government that has tens of trillions of dollars in debt so even though that piece of paper actually say says in Gods we trust you really should not trust that piece of paper whatsoever so due to that these Technologies are actually disrupting the way we're going to exchange value and think about a world where we are virtual we are in a metaverse where we are exchanging digital assets people are exchanging assets nowadays that are virtual whether it's pieces of lands whether

it's clothes for their Avatar and they're exchanging those for value and that value needs to be encapsulated a way different than the money that we have and that brings the value of blockchain interacting within the metaverse based on such technology the opportunity is huge and if you look at slides like these by investors they they'll just put in the money but I want to convey a message where value is greater than money if we seek value is if we seek creating impact if we seek looking at technology from a completely different perspective money will follow

money always follows Innovation follows value creation but if we keep money as the main point that's where it will never lead us anywhere useful for us as a species in general and this where as I said it could be different priorities it could be age but if we collectively think about value instead of just monetary terms I think we'll all live in a better world we need to take action personally my recommendation to everyone especially at a young age University students you need to do something look at the world around you try to analyze it

and analyze it yourself don't rely on the information that is being fed to you be brave take the plunge I mentioned my failures and they're dearer to my heart than my actual successes but when you fail you just become stronger to succeed next time and if you fail again you just try again most importantly be responsible it is not about us it's not only about family that we belong to it's about us all collectively we need to create value in a way that is responsible in order for us to have longevity for the world we

need to plan then act and this is a very important point a lot of people come to me and say hey I cannot start I have great ideas you need to do both planning on its own will never work one hour of action is better than a thousand hours of thinking but you need to always have a plan and if you're procrastinating in order for you to do the planning then stop planning and just do an action and feel it and try it and if it doesn't work know that now you need a plan if

you are doing many things taking action but you have no plans you'll get nowhere so try to do both both if you do both that's potentially going to lead to success thank you so much for listening to me