A Brief History of the (Near) Future: How AI and Genomics Will Change What It Means To Be Human

I'll be giving the talk below to an audience of oligarchs in Los Angeles next week. This is a video version I made for fun. It cuts off at 17min even though the whole talk is ~25min, because my team noticed that I gave away some sensitive information :-( 

The slides are here.

A Brief History of the (Near) Future: How AI and Genomics Will
Change What It Means To Be Human

AI and Genomics are certain to have huge impacts on markets, health, society, and even what it means to be human. These are not two independent trends; they interact in important ways, as I will explain. Computers now outperform humans on most narrowly-defined tasks, such as face recognition, voice recognition, Chess, and Go. Using AI methods in genomic prediction, we can, for example, estimate the height of a human based on DNA alone, plus or minus an inch. Almost a million babies are born each year via IVF, and it is possible now to make nontrivial predictions about them (even, about their cognitive ability) from embryo genotyping. I will describe how AI, Genomics, and AI+Genomics will evolve in the coming decades.

Short Bio: Stephen Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech.