Foresight Vision weekend panel – Joon Yun, Melanie Swan, Thomas Kalil, Matt Bell
Dr. Joon Yun is managing partner and president of Palo Alto Investors, LLC, an investment management firm founded in 1989 with $1.8 billion in assets invested in healthcare. Board certified in Radiology, Joon served on the clinical faculty at Stanford from 2000-2006. He received his B.A. from Harvard, M.D. from Duke Medical School, and clinical training at Stanford. Joon has served on several corporate and non-profit boards, and has published dozens of patents, scientific articles, and business essays. He is a contributor to Forbes, and is the health editor for Evolution magazine. Joon recently agreed to donate a $1million Palo Alto Prize to reverse the aging process.
Melanie Swan is a future’s theorist.
Matt Bell is founder of Matterport which captures 3d images and visuals and makes Virtual Reality models.
Thomas Kalil works for Eric Schmidt. Thomas Kalil is Senior Advisor at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Group. He served during the Obama administration as Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council.
Highlights of Discussion
A discussion of existential risks about the chance we will not make it through the century.
Joon Yun is optimistic and we will unlock human potential this century. There is always risk but there is a lot of good things happening.
No one put a number on the chances.
Matt Bell indicated that there are enough possibilities for very bad things to happen to civilization that they should given more serious study.
Need to have ten year planning to move the needle on existential risks.
Articulate possible future success in performable metrics. Advance market commitment- Gates Foundation offered to buy 1 million doses of vaccines at $7 per dose to incentive the development of low cost medicine for Africa.
$250 million funding by Sean Parker to fight cancer because we now have the ability to engineer white blood cells to destroy tumors.
There needs to be identification of the audaciously possible.
Run data on networks for a long time.
Now we run value on networks with blockchain.
In the future, we will be transmitting brains and intelligence on networks.
Blockchain and AI will create a global computation network. Deep learning and blockchain consensus both can make predictions about the future.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.