A Brief History of the Future

[Waves crashing] Man, voice-over: A few summers ago, I was at the beach with my family.

And right when we got there, we took off our shoes and ran to the ocean's edge.

And we've all experienced this before.

The waves kind of come in.

And as they wash out, we feel ourselves sinking because the sand beneath us is getting wet.

But at the same time, if we're looking out to the horizon line, it doesn't seem like much changes.

It's very discombobulating.

Marine biologists call this area that is sometimes above water and sometimes below water the intertidal zone.

In many ways, that's where we are right now as a society.

We're in an intertidal moment.

You feel like everything's in some ways the same.

You still wake up.

You're still you.

But there's a shift, and you can't quite put your finger on it.

It's really a crossroads moment for humanity.

Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper.

Well, it's not as far-fetched as it may seem.

Woman 2: Well, I think what we're seeing is a new digital wild west where no one is in charge.

Thank you for the likes!

Let's get to 40,000.

[All clamoring] Man: This is freaking crazy.

Woman: More than 3 billion people in almost 70 countries and territories have been asked to stay at home.

Joe Biden: The question is-- Donald Trump: The radical left-- Biden: Will you shut up, man?

Trump: Listen.

[All clamoring] Woman: Abnormal behaviors mean more panic, aggression, confusion, or anxiety during waking hours.

Man: I don't believe we've even se en the tip of the iceberg.

I think we're really on the verge of something wonderful and terrifying.

[Thunder] Man: I can hear you.

I think it's a filter.

Man 2: Yes.

I'm here live.

I'm not a cat.

[Rumbling] Man: How come you're smoking weed in the Capitol?

Man 2: Because I can.

Woman: Do you feel like too much is changing too fast?

[Grimes' "Oblivion" playing] Ooh Ooh I never walk about after dark It's my point of view Someone could break your neck Coming up behind you Always coming and you never have a clue I never look behind all the time I will wait forever Always looking straight Thinking, counting all the hours you wait [Car horns honking] Man: I use the term the intertidal moment to kind of describe where we are in the current kind of arc of human history.

What sets this apart from almost any other intertidal that has come before, this is probably the first time that we can actually recognize that we're actually in an intertidal.

So, instead of it just kind of happening and everyone feeling discombobulated, we all feel something is not working.

And at the same time, we're grappling and looking for something else.

Hello there.

I'm curious about how we can find and embrace the creative potential of this moment.

But first, we have to get a bearing on what moment we're actually in.

That's led me here to Columbia University, where I sat down with a group of graduate students training to become the future leaders of tomorrow.

So, it's 2040, and you're being asked to kind of describe this moment in human history, in the big scope.

Talk to each other.

Talk to me about how you're going to describe what it is that we're going through right now.

Coming out of the pandemic, and there's a lot of confusion around, well, if we're coming out of this, what are we going into?

The world that we knew before is just much different.

What is, you know, that next step?

What's the life that we're moving towards?

Nobody really knows.

Like, from individuals to business leaders to government leaders, we're all here just really trying to figure it out.

And that sense of leadership as this is who I want to follow to get there is probably more unclear now than it maybe has ever been.

I think this is an interesting moment of, like, excitement and opportunity, but it's all founded in a level of uncertainty that I have not been in before.

There were a lot of things that I think we took for granted, a lot of certainties that we had taken for granted that I think have all bubbled up to the top right now in terms of, you know, where is there security?

What does it look like for something to function correctly for everyone?

What is it that we are taking for granted?

Just revenue building can't be the bottom line, that individualistic mindset can't be it anymore.

So, in 2040, if I looked back and I explained to my kids hopefully what this time looked like, I think it was a time of opportunity with responsibility.

I feel like also climate-wise, this is-- I mean, these years are really going to be, like, deciding about our future, right?

So, by 2040, hopefully, we'll be looking back and say we made some very wise decisions in that regard, and we won't have to tell our kids, well, sorry, we, like, did it wrong.

I really do hope that.

And I think with regards to that, there are a lot of sort of turning points that we are able to shape right now, which gives us a responsibility you mentioned and which means that you have to think about how you want to shape the future.

Wallach, voice-over: When things are stable, it feels safe.

But that's the opposite of what the world feels like right now.

From our lives to our own jobs to our families to our country to the climate to the politics, it feels unsteady, it feels in flux.

When that happens, your brain, your amygdala, is going to say, "This is not safe."

I don't feel like we're in a stable place.

Man: You look at any long form of humanity over thousands and thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, if you go way back to the beginning, and it's flat.

It's flat in terms of population.

It's flat in terms of technology.

It's flat in terms of communication.

It's flat.

And then for the last eye blink, it explodes.

You've never had a period on a planet like the last 50 years, really half a century of un precedented human progress.

Education levels increased.

Infant mortality reduced.

Life expectancy grew extraordinarily all over the world.

Now, there were costs to that globalization.

We are now at the beginning of a new globalization in ways that even a year ago, never mind 20, seemed inconceivable, and, of course, I'm talking about the AI revolution.

We're living through a moment of extraordinary change.

Even good change can be hard.

The information environment that we're living in, it is completely surrounding us.

It's coming at us 24/7.

And unfortunately a lot of times, this information that comes at us is negative.

It stokes fear and anxiety.

But for young people in particular, there is more and more data that we have that is telling us that many young people are in fact harmed.

There are 3 numbers that really stick out to me.

If you look at a high school with 1,000 kids in it, about 450 of those children are feeling persistently sad or hopeless.

200 of those children have considered taking their own life.

And 100 of those kids have attempted suicide.

As much as we're struggling right now, as much as our kids are in a mental health crisis, it does not have to be this way.

There's a choice we have between a world where people are increasingly in despair and a world where people are connected to one another, where we look at the future and see possibility.

Wallach, voice-over: Life has always been full of change.

But the growing sense that we ar e entering uncharted waters is being felt around the world in unprecedented ways right now.

We're living in a time between times when what was is no longer working and what will be has yet to be born.

But what happens in a moment when the usual shifts we experience all the time in one industry or culture become heightened and intertwined?

What does it take to navigate through a period when the degree of complexity and confusion in our lives feels like it's turned up to 11?

And what kind of stress is this all putting on our brain's ability to make sense of what we're living through?

Man: So, Ari, we're going to do a neurofunctional assessment.

This is called a TheraQ.

It's picking up brainwave activity.

There we go.

Beautiful.

Voice: This will only take a few minutes.

Your assessment is starting now.

Close your eyes.

Wallach, voice-over: Dr. Brown has spent his life following the effects the modern world is having on us through traditional psychology as well as neurofeedback systems that are getting increasingly powerful at monitoring our brains' response to the pressures of this moment we find ourselves in.

One of the things that I'm curious about is how you see this current moment.

And by that, I mean this current moment for humanity writ large.

Broadly, I think we're in a time that has moved more and more towards kind of the atomization of individuals.

There are stressors that are putting demands on our bodies and on our brains that are in turn affecting the way we live our lives and the way we live together.

One way of thinking about this is that our bodies and our brains have a blueprint that was laid down for what was useful to survive 100,000 years ago.

And back then, what you're trying to do was not be eaten by a bear or a saber-toothed tiger, depending on how far back you go.

So, everything in our evolution was shaping us towards developing an effective fight or flight system, dealing with physical threat, immediate threat.

And that's not very well suited to our life now.

Instead, we have stressors and demands that are longer term, that are chronic, and our bodies aren't really designed for that.

Our brains aren't really designed for that.

So, what happens when you take someone who's wired for fight or flight, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, but you stick them in a cubicle, or you stick them, you know, on a factory floor, doing the same thing over and over again, or you put them in a classroom for 8 hours a day, sitting at a desk?

I think we perceive a lot of threat right now in our world.

And it's not often the kind of threat that we're designed to deal with.

We're designed to deal with concrete, time-limited threat.

What we have is diffuse, something bad's going to happen, I don't know what, kind of threat.

And it's not time-limited.

It's ongoing.

Wallach, voice-over: A lot of us feel that right now, this kind of low-grade sense of fear and uncertainty about where we're headed.

And it can leave us feeling powerless over what comes next.

[Wind howling] But what do we do when some of these threats are not imagined, but rather painfully real?

One of those is a threat to the natural world around us.

The systems that sustain all life on this planet are warning us that things are not OK. And yet if you're like me, it 's so easy to feel helpless in the face of a challenge this big.

That led me here to the northeast coast of Canada, where Valrie Courtois leads a growing group of people who refuse to ignore this threat right here, in one of the most ecologically important places on Earth.

Tell me about this land.

Where are we right now?

We're in Nitassinan, which is the Innu word for our land or the place of the Innu, specifically known as Labrador today.

We're at the foot of the Mealy Mountains.

Interestingly, the Mealy Mountains is a joint park between the Innu Nation and Parks Canada.

It's the largest intact forest left on this planet.

It is home to over 5 billion birds.

It's got a quarter of the world's wetlands, a fifth of the world's freshwater.

It actually absorbs twice as much carbon as tropical forest per hectare.

And so, in terms of climate regulation, this is the most important terrestrial landscape on the planet.

There's a movement afoot, several movements afoot around the planet, but especially here for First Nations and obviously in Indigenous groups, to actually have a much stronger part in protecting and preserving these lands.

Why is that so important?

Well, you know, 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity is on lands that are loved by Indigenous peoples.

And that's not an accident.

It's because we know that we're responsible for those landscapes.

And unfortunately, Western society has lost its way.

And, so we're finding that more people are looking to Indigenous peoples and looking to us for new ways of thinking about that relationship.

How do you feel about the biodiversity loss that these lands are going through right now?

I feel grief.

I feel a loss of responsibility, and I feel guilt that we've gotten to this place.

But I also know that not all is lost.

You know, the world is resilient.

The land is resilient.

We are resilient.

Wallach, voice-over: Valrie has spent years lobbying the Canadian government to invest in protecting these ecologically rich environments.

And her work led to the creation of a group known as The Guardians, a First Nations-led initiative across the country tasked with defending the long-term health of the land.

Together, they steward not on ly these fragile ecosystems but also an ancient way of seeing themselves in relationship with the land itself.

- Yeah.

- Cheers.

Man: This is the first time that we talked about working as a superintendent here in the National Park and also with working with Innu Nation.

We've been asked to do up a guideline... - Mm.

- About how to protect it.

And I say to the government that we've been doing this for thousands of years.

If we didn't manage the way we managed, there wouldn't be any animals.

There wouldn't be any resources at all.

And now you're expecting us to write it and put it on paper and have it stamped and say this is how it is?

It's a way of thinking.

Exactly.

It's a mindset.

Man: In the Western world, you get people that want to overcut, want to overkill, want to kill every fish in the water, every caribou that walks on the Earth.

But the Innu, they don't think like that.

There's not clear cut in the whole area just for profit or to sell to somebody else.

They just think, OK, I just need this for this long, or I need this to feed my family and my mother-in-law.

So, I'll take this many salmon out of the river, and then I'm done.

I think we need to-- we need to go kind of go back to that relationship and make a conscious effort to do it.

I think if more people were connected to the land, we'd be a much better world.

Mm.

Courtois, voice-over: Our la nguages come from the land.

Our practices, our laws, everything comes from the Earth.

We can learn those things again.

I don't know about you, but I want to be here for a little while.

Yeah.

And I want my children to be here for a little while.

And I want my grandson to be here for a little while.

We have a role to play and we should be helping decide and taking care of this place.

Wallach, voice-over: It's an unforgettable experience to spend time with people wh o simply refuse to give up, building on ancient wisdom to lo ok beyond our modern moment to a future worth fighting for.

These are the stories we need right now.

It's so easy to see what's wrong and even easier to lose hope altogether.

But the creativity comes in finding new ways to do something about it.

I'm in Rotterdam to meet Boyan Slat, who's doing this very thing, inventing a technology designed to give our oceans a second chance.

Tell me how you got started.

I was 16 years old.

I went scuba diving in Greece.

And I was hoping to see all these beautiful things.

Then I looked around me, and I just saw a garbage dump.

I just saw more plastic bags than fish.

And I was so dismayed and shocked by that that I asked myself a simple question.

Why can't we just clean this up?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest accumulation of trash in the world's oceans.

It's an area halfway between Hawaii and California.

It spans twice the size of Texas, and it contains about 250 million pounds of trash.

Plastic is one of the largest threats our oceans face today.

There's now 700 species known to be directly impacted by plastic pollution.

A few hundred of those are actually threatened with extinction.

The most uncertain factor but perhaps even the most impactful factor is the health impact to us humans.

Plastic breaks down in to smaller, smaller pieces.

They transport toxic chemicals into the food chain, and that's a food chain that includes more than 3 billion people that rely on fish as their key source of protein.

Wallach, voice-over: Boyan and his team are working towards a goal to clean up 90% of floating plastic pollution.

And here's the most powerful part.

It took several attempts be fore they created something that even had a chance to achieve that.

It was touch and go.

People said the system he was inventing would never work.

But then it did.

Slat, voice-over: So, the system itself is a long, U-shaped floating barrier that we drag forth very slowly just to make sure that the fish can escape in time.

It acts like a funnel.

Pl astic goes towards the center where we have what we call the retention zone, which is a collection bag.

Every few days when it's full, we take the bag onto a ship.

We empty it, sort the waste, and then ultimately, we bring it back to land for recycling.

Actually, the oldest object we ever collected.

And you can see how it's been degraded.

Yeah.

So, these flakes are coming off.

The thing is because of UV light, because of the sun, the plastic becomes more brittle.

So, then, layer by layer, like an onion, it kind of peels.

So, this eventually can end up in the fish that we eat.

Yeah, and this can turn into millions of pieces of microplastics.

Yeah.

So, in here, what you see is the, essentially, the recycling process in steps.

So, actually, half of what we get out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets.

- Mm-hmm.

- So, it looks just like this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would say probably the most harmful type because this, of course, ensnares a lot of wildlife.

So, what we then do is we wash it, and we shred it to get to this kind of pulp.

Yep.

And then ultimately, we injection-mold it, we compound it, so, we add some additives to make sure that the materials is safe and high quality.

And then it becomes this.

So, these are what you call pellets.

And these are the building blocks for any new object.

So, you can just mold this into something new, and the idea is that we are producing durable, sustainable products out of this, and with that, help fund the cleanup.

Actually, as a proof of concept, we made these sort of high-end designer sunglasses.

Wow.

So, this is 100% made from the plastic we took out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

They look good on you.

These are great.

So, if the Garbage Patch is cleaned up in 10 to 15 years, what's to prevent another one 20 years from now forming?

Realistically, the amount of plastic that's being produced is not going down.

In fact, the projections are that by 2060, the amount of plastic produced will increase threefold.

So, really what we need to do is we need to decouple the plastic usage from the plastic flows into the ocean.

We have interceptors now in 11 rivers, some of the most polluting rivers in the world.

And we believe we can really stop most of the world's plastic emissions from leaking into the ocean.

Wallach: What do you think when people say what you're doing is impossible?

I think when somebody says something is impossible, I think the sheer absoluteness of that statement should make you suspicious of it.

If you look at history, everything that we now take for granted used to be impossible at some point in time.

So, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're trying to make something, if you're trying to create something, yes, I think it's very important to listen and to listen to people's advice.

But if there's one bit of advice that you should really ignore, it's people who say that something can't be done.

Wallach, voice-over: The challenges facing Boyan and us all are daunting.

Intertidal times are full of danger, but it's also where all the creative juice is.

And for those of us who want to push the envelope on who we are and what's possible on this planet looking forward, this is our moment.

[Explosions] Man, voice-over: Man, one of the most fragile of Earth's creatures, the builder of civilization, entrusted by nature with the unique but dangerous ability to alter the very conditions that gave him rise.

Wallach, voice-over: We've been in moments like this before.

The big one is moving from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.

That was maybe 10,000, 12,000 years ago.

We went from being in small clans and tribes to now actually starting to urbanize.

We also have things like the Gutenberg press.

So, we went from an era where knowledge could only be held by a few people to now being able to mass-create knowledge in a way that would actually bring it out to people.

Now, from that, you got the Reformation and all sorts of upheaval around Europe and around the world.

Another one is kind of moving from this idea that the Earth is the center of everything, to moving towards heliocentric models of how the world works.

Moving from us being the center of the universe to just being one kind of node in a multi-noded galaxy and universe was highly disruptive.

The Industrial Revolution, moving from this idea that the power that we had in the world was just what we could do with our own hands and backs and change where we lived, what we ate, how we travel.

It changed how we fought wars.

And it also fundamentally changed the way we told stories about who we are and where we're going.

When we go through these moments of flux and creativity, all sorts of new things start to arise.

That's the potential before us right now.

These threats and challenges hold opportunities to remake the world.

As the old ways break down and fall apart around us, what does it look like to reimagine what comes next?

In Albany, Eben Bayer and his team at Ecovative are working to answer that question... using mushrooms.

So, we're going to head right over here.

All right.

So, as I understand, this is kind of just a beautiful piece of mycelium, basically, in a sense.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Like foam-like substance.

What is this?

This is a leather-like material.

We call it a forager hide.

And it's made from this foam.

We just squish it and tan it and color it and you get something that behaves, looks, and feels a lot like leather.

So, how long will this last?

So, this particular leather-like hide will last for a year or two in this application as tanned.

You could make it last longer by putting other tannery chemistries in, like we use for conventional leather.

So, this is where we actually started with something called mushroom packaging.

These are just little corner blocks that would go on a box you might get in the mail, and, you know, they've got little breakaways on them.

And then when it gets to you, unlike Styrofoam, big difference is you can just start to break this up.

If you have a compost at home, you can put it in your compost, or you could put it in your yard waste bin.

And within 30 days, this will turn into a nutrient, not a pollutant, in whatever your local ecosystem is.

What are the biggest problems that you're trying to tackle here?

The problems that we focus on at Ecovative are around plastic pollution, so, this idea that we just created this incredible miracle material that can't degrade, and it's, like, clogging up the lungs and everything of our Earth's ecosystem.

And the other is around animal agriculture, so, the mass production of animals for food or materials.

I grew up farming in Central Vermont.

It's fine to raise animals.

Doing it industrially is not ecologically responsible or ethically responsible.

...here.

Those units over there... Wallach, voice-over: Eben sees times of di sorder and chaos like these as full of opportunity for transformation.

Rather than simply seeing problems, he sees openings full of potential to invent entirely new ways of doing things that most of us take for granted.

Welcome to the magic store.

So, what you're seeing here are the aspects of a conventional vertical mushroom farm.

You've got your shelving system here.

You've got your environmental controls.

And now we've modified it to use the soil we use to grow our special forms of mycelium.

And rather than getting a bunch of mushrooms growing out of that bed, you're actually getting a slab of mycelium tissue.

That's really the power.

- There's no wasted space.

- There's no wasted space.

- Because it's sheer mycelium all the way across.

- Yep.

- Like in a slab.

Well, one of these rooms could produce 20,000 pounds of mycelium.

So, a harvest machine will pull up.

And it comes out like a conveyor.

It comes across and squishes into basically like a pork belly, or a mush belly, we call it.

And then those come off and those go to the bacon facility.

- Wow.

Wallach: So, now, this came out in a block.

Bayer: Yeah.

Wallach: And then you started slicing it?

It rides along just like a piece of pork belly would be.

So, run it through the slicer, you get your slices of bacon, you add salt and sugar and some natural flavorings.

And then at the very end, we put the coconut oil on, which is the fat, because mushrooms don't have any fat in it.

And this is minimally processed.

Sliced and smoked, basically.

Compare and contrast the inputs that would go into, you know, 5 pounds of this versus 5 pounds of bacon from a pig.

So, to produce a million pounds of our product takes about an acre of land in one of our vertical farms, and it occurs over about 10 days.

To produce the same amount of bacon using a pig, you'd need about a million acres of land.

- Hmm.

- And you would also need to feed that pig high-quality food, so, like, grains versus woodchips.

And then you have to grow them for a period of 6 to 9 months.

And so, in each of those dimensions, land use, the input material, and the time frame, we're massively, like by an order of magnitude, improving the equation.

- Mm-hmm.

Tastes like bacon.

Now, tell me, where does this go, because so far, we've heard about packaging, right?

Obviously, there's food, and you've mentioned leather.

- Yeah.

- Where do you take this?

My dream is we grow everything.

You know, I think we can grow almost everything around us from the buildings to the medicines we need to the food we eat.

And we'll do that through structural materials, nutritional materials, and even things that might be alive when you use them.

Such as?

Well, you could imagine a building that senses the environmental conditions within it and maybe even releases beneficial compounds to, like, clean the air.

You can imagine buildings in an earthquake develop cracks and in those cracks, there are, like, embedded little water balls that break open.

And the fungus is not dead but is dehydrated, which it can do, and it'll start growing and seal up all those cracks.

Mushrooms are uniquely situated to save the world.

Wallach, voice-over: What Eben and his team are doing here is inspiring and it gives me a renewed sense of possibility for the kind of futures we can choose to create in this moment.

Here in New York, an architect named Bjarke Ingels is working with a similar perspective to reimagine the cities in which we live.

Ingels, voice-over: I think ma ybe the best way to explain what's so special about architecture and the power of design is that the Danish word for design is formgivning, which literally means form-giving.

When you design something, you're giving form to that which has not yet been given form.

In other words, you are giving form to the future.

So, when you're designing a place or a building, you are giving form to a little part of the world that you would like to find yourself living in in the future.

How do you think about the moment of time that we're in right now?

It's kind of chaos and flux.

And a lot of people will want to look backwards, where others will want to stick their head in the sand to keep what they have.

How do you think about this moment?

Ingels, voice-over: We're living in a time where a lot of technologies are bringing possibilities to the table that we have never been even close to before.

And I sense that this innovation that has been maybe locked in virtual in the last few decades has finally arrived in physical space.

And maybe give you one example.

The building we designed in Copenhagen called CopenHill is the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world.

The steam that comes out of the chimney is actually cleaner than the air of Copenhagen.

Suddenly, the power plant no longer had to be some ugly, dirty, polluting eyesore.

It could actually be a welcoming, inclusive environment.

We could make the facade into the tallest man-made climbing wall in the world and we could turn the roof into an alpine ski slope.

So, it's an idea we call hedonistic sustainability, that the sustainable building or the sustainable city is not only better for the environment, it's also much more enjoyable for the people that get to inhabit it.

Wallach: A lot of times, when people hear the term sustainability or even regenerative, they think, "Something's going to be taken away from me.

"It's not going to be as fun.

"I'm not going to be as happy.

I'm going to lose all these things."

That's not the way you think about it.

23 years ago, we opened the Copenhagen Harbour Baths, a simple floating structure that extends the life of the city into the water around it.

On opening day, it became so clear that the clean port is not only nice for the fish, it's actually amazing for the people that live in that city, and this idea that the sustainable city is not only better for the environment, it's much more enjoyable for the people that live in it.

Like half of the Copenhageners commute by bicycle, not because it's environmentally friendly but because it's the most enjoyable and effortless way to move around the city quickly.

So, in that sense, we just keep reminding ourselves that there is a better and more enjoyable way of doing it.

And I think the benefits of a sort of environmentally friendly city is that it is greener and cleaner and more enjoyable.

Wallach: Tell me ab out the cities of the future.

Where are we going?

Where do we need to go?

What does it look like?

Ingels: If you would return to Manhattan in 10 or 20 or maybe 50 years, you might see streets that entirely become almost like linear parks woven together in both directions of Manhattan.

People can walk and play where you used to have traffic and parked cars.

You might have different kinds of personal mobility also taking over whole areas.

Our cities will really become greener and more enjoyable, which will make them more walkable and more bikeable.

So, I think a lot of the dichotomy between the city and the countryside, you're going to get mu ch more interesting blends.

The city isn't the way it is because it has to be.

The city is the way it is because that's how far we've gotten.

And if we would like to ask more of our city or if we would like our city to accommodate another kind of life than what it used to, we actually not only have the possibility, we actually have a responsibility to make sure that our city fits wi th the way we want to live.

Wallach, voice-over: In 1945, my mother was born in Oakland, California.

And very early on, she realized that where she could kind of bring her gifts to bear in the world was through creativity.

And so, she ended up becoming a professional artist.

Growing up, my mom would often bring paintings that she was working on kind of back into circulation.

So, most people think of an artist as someone who paints something.

They're done.

They put it up on the wall.

My mom had paintings hanging in her garage or around the house that she had painted in the 1960s and '70s.

And every once in a while, I'd see one of those on the easel, and she would kind of add to it.

And I'd say, well, "I thought that painting was complete."

She said, "A work of art is never necessarily complete.

It's up to the artist."

And so, what I learned is even when you're crafting something, that you can always come back to it.

You can always make changes because you've learned new information.

You can take from the past.

You can augment it.

It really means that things are fungible and changeable as long as you're trying to make them better.

Sometimes, the way to make things better is to look at who needs help.

Where is there a need?

And how can we improve on the way things are currently being done?

We have powerful new tools and technology available to us right now.

And rather than just using them to entertain or sell us more stuff, we can meet actual human needs, altering and improving the experience of being alive.

Woman: My name is Veena Somareddy, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Neuro Rehab VR.

We create virtual reality therapy applications for physical therapy, occupational therapy, for patients who might have gone through a stroke or a spinal cord injury or Parkinson's or MS, and we help them get back their limb function as best as we can.

Physical therapy hasn't really changed since the sixties.

It's very manual.

It's very tedious for the patient as well as the physical therapist.

And sometimes, you need one or two therapists working on one patient.

So, it's just not possible in a modern world when there is shortage of clinicians and also access to care.

What's the big opportunity for humanity in terms of these new kind of digital reality realms that are being built, and that we're kind of, in many ways, kind of living into?

For me, I think on the health care side would be access to care, access to care for anybody, not--you know, in any socioeconomic status that they're in, which has been a huge problem in health care, being able to send our systems to somebody who doesn't have access to therapy so they can do it on their own in their own time and get back that function that they might have lost, and come back into society.

Wallach, voice-over: Veena di dn't just see what was broken in the field of physical therapy.

She saw what was needed, what could be, and created something new.

While we were at the clinic, she let me experience the work for myself.

Somareddy: So, you'll have a green ball coming at you, and you have to dodge it.

You can move to your left or you can move to your right.

- Now I see a picnic table.

- There you go.

You'll see the ball coming at you.

There you go.

Do you feel like Neo from "Matrix"?

- Yes.

- There you go.

I mean, obviously, this is helping with balance.

But what other things is this helping with?

Weight shifting is a huge thing with stroke patients.

- OK. - Because usually when they're affected, when they have a stroke, they're paralyzed on one side.

And they're very afraid about putting their weight on that affected side.

Is it that you can't do it or it's like the fear of doing it and what might happen?

It is mostly the fear, especially with chronic patients.

They're used to what they cannot do, they know, "This is what I cannot do, and these are my limitations."

And they're stuck with it.

- Yeah.

But once you put them in an immersive environment where they don't see the bias of their diagnosis, that you don't see your body right now.

All you're concentrated on is on dodging that cannonball.

- I am.

- Right?

So, that takes them out of that fear of not being able to do something.

Now, what should I do with the chicken?

Should I eat it?

You can eat it.

Yep.

Exactly.

[Chuckles] I was working with a stroke patient.

And her goal for therapy was being able to go grocery shopping with her grandkids again.

And so, we were like, let's create that.

So, you can practice everything that you'll have to do in real life right here in VR, so, it feels like you've done this before, and you're not afraid.

So, you've got eggs.

So, what you're doing right here is pattern-matching, being able to pattern match from the item that's on the shopping list to the item that's on the shelf, which is something a lot of people can forget or lose that after a stroke incident.

So, right here, we're able to simulate everything from the touch, the feel, the visual aspects, and the ambience, too, so that they can get used to all of that before they actually go into a grocery store.

Wallach, voice-over: Obviously, the VR that you're mostly working on right now are people who have suffered either from a stroke or neurodegenerative diseases.

Somareddy, voice-over: Right.

Wallach: But I would imagine it also can start working for other traumas.

Somareddy: So, this is something that works on also PTSD for veterans.

Exposure therapy has been shown to desensitize them for the fear that they might have experienced, the trauma that they might have experienced.

Just the sounds of being in a battlefield can help them decrease that anxiety.

A fear of spiders, a fear of heights, you can work on all of this in the virtual world.

And you know that you're not going to get hurt.

And then maybe go back to the real world and be able to experience that without the amount of fear that you might have had.

Wallach: The overlap between digital and lived realities is growing every day.

And as new AI tools continue to expand what's possible, Veena believes this work is only the beginning.

[Upbeat pipe organ music] AI has been around since the early 20th century as a concept.

Voice: 1, 2, 3.

Woman: Hello, Kismet.

- Peek-a-boo!

- I love you, doll.

In the nineties, we got computers that could process vector graphics for video games and that type of thing.

And that enabled a revolution to happen in neural computation.

So, we could start to stack up layers of neurons, and that's what's called deep learning.

And that's what's really advanced the field so much.

We could create a world where AI is just driving us towards more consumption and more recommendations of products.

Or we can create a world where AI is allowing us to express different things, to understand ourselves in different ways.

Whichever of those outcomes is more likely to happen has a lot to do with who's making the AI and why they're making it.

Wallach, voice-over: The conversation around artificial intelligence is thrilling and complex.

And at the current speed of innovation, it's hard to keep up with how fast these tools are developing and to what end they will be used.

Greg Cross and his team at Soul Machines have been working on these technologies for years.

What is surprising you most about the field and/or the state of AI today?

We are living in a moment of time where sort of AI has crossed the threshold from something that the techies and the geeks talked about all the time to it's now on the lips of, you know, just about every human being on this planet.

Artificial intelligence--will it be the savior of humanity or lead to our ultimate demise?

Woman, voice-over: Many people are going to ask, "Why on Earth did you create this technology?"

Cross, voice-over: The speed at which things are moving now is just, you know, astonishing.

You know, stuff that I used to think about, well, that's 3 to 5 years away, that's, like, now 12 months away now.

Wallach, voice-over: So, what are you and your team working on right now?

So, Soul Machines sits at this intersection of technology and entertainment.

We create avatars, you know, so, CGI characters.

And we bring them to life using some very, very specific different fields of artificial intelligence.

So, our digital characters are alive.

- Mm.

- They are digitally alive.

A lot of people feel we are very much at a crossroads moment for humanity, for our species on this planet.

But you're generally very kind of optimistic.

But what's driving most of that hope right now?

One of the really, really cool things about artificial intelligence is you're creating a learning system, so, the way in which we simulate human behavior, the subtlety which we can simulate human behavior.

I mean, this is about making, yeah, it sounds like a corny phrase, but making AI your friend.

Woman on screen: It's great to meet you.

Patrice, what do you think the future will be like?

Patrice: I'm very optimistic about the future of AI and how it will shape our lives.

The possibilities are endless.

Can you tell me about yourself, Patrice?

Patrice: Absolutely.

I consider myself a vibrant and professional personality, and I bring energy and enthusiasm to everything I do.

Patrice, how will AI change what it means to be human?

Patrice: On one hand, AI can help us achieve things that were once impossible.

At the same time, we need to remember that AI is still a tool and cannot replace humans when it comes to making decisions.

Tell me more about the work that goes into creating something like this.

Yeah.

So, you know, Patrice is what we call a synthetic digital person.

So, she doesn't exist in real life.

She's not a clone of a real person.

So, she's entirely made up.

So, to create Patrice, we've built a creation suite we call Digital DNA Studio.

Wallach: So, right now, there's a lot of fear and concern about what AI could do to us, do to humans.

How do you see this?

Well, I mean, at the end of the day, I think the debate is really, really the most positive thing that can happen at the moment in terms of people talking about what it means for the businesses that they work in, the industries that they compete in, the communities they live in, the type of regulatory environment they would like to see.

But the debate is absolutely critical.

Allado-McDowell, voice-over: You have to look at the holistic picture of everything that's happening right now.

AI is not happening in a vacuum.

It's a really profound technological shift.

But it's also happening alongside mass extinction, climate change, the greatest economic inequality that we've had.

We're becoming aware that our actions have global effects.

Bremmer, voice-over: When we start talking about artificial intelligence, that's the first thing in our history that has the potential to either change us as human beings into a future form or extinguish us.

There's never been such a thing.

Allado-McDowell, voice-over: Th is is part of a profound shift in how we see the role of the human.

And that's a little scary but also potentially very hopeful.

Because I think a lot of the reason we're having these perceptions is because of problems.

It's because of things that human-centricity created, shortsightedness.

If we think about AI in the long term, it really does matter what we do now because it will affect future generations just like it does with everything else that we do.

We cannot be narcissistic as a species.

Wallach: So what should we be optimizing for?

As leaders, if you want to galvanize and bring people together, you have to have a vision.

You want to co-create that vision.

But you need to-- you know, there's a telos.

There's an ultimate aim.

There's a goal if we want to move forward.

And I will put on the table that we've lost that.

So, take me there.

I think we are at an inflection point.

Like across society, we have this access to amazing technology.

We have people that are thinking differently about what is their purpose?

What is the world going to be in 2040?

So, that gives us a chance to make change and make decisions that can be beneficial to all.

However, we can very much have all these conversations and not make any decisions.

So, nothing actually does change.

So, my fear is that while we have this opportunity that we don't take advantage of it, and then we're continuing to live through the same things years from now.

Are we providing basic human rights, basic human needs?

And then beyond that, like, how do we incentivize that innovation which pushes GDP, that solves cancer, that brings AI into the new age and allows us to just sit and make music all day instead of having to worry about, you know, building another slide deck.

Woman: I would like to challenge you on GDP.

Man: OK. Woman: Because I feel like GDP is what we're all chasing now.

The question is, like, up until what point?

Some people or some corporations are super successful, they drive innovation, they drive the GDP.

But actually, the rights you're chasing after or the equality or equity isn't achieved because of that.

And I feel like GDP doesn't account for all of those things we care about, and I feel like that's not always money-related.

It sounds like to answer your question, we need a social contract.

That's the thing I'm tying together from everyone's answers is there's a need for accountability from people that we're going to call leaders.

It sounds like we need to hold each other accountable in some contractual way that emphasizes the need for rights and no harm to others.

Wallach, voice-over: When I look around and I see people working on projects and ideas, they're not all just thinking, how do I get as much as I can?

Like, what's my little pot of gold?

I see the folks who are building and making better tomorrows for themselves, for their kids, my kids, future generations.

I mean, I see things that are being worked on right now that are going to have downrange impact for the better for hundreds of years.

Courtois, voice-over: We're in a world of turmoil.

The human nature in turmoil is to kind of cocoon and to become more conservative.

If you're insular, then you don't learn.

We could do better.

We can imagine a better future and work on it together.

Ingels, voice-over: My son was born right around the time we finished the CopenHill Power Plant.

So, he doesn't know... Wallach: Mm.

that there was a time when you didn't ski on the power plant.

For him, that's just like a natural part of the landscape of Copenhagen.

So, if that's the normal for him and his generation of Danish kids, imagine when they have to start coming up with what-if scenarios for their future.

They're going to come up with some pretty wild stuff.

Bayer, voice-over: Innovation occurs at the intersection of things.

The greatest opportunities are in chaos.

In times of, like, change, there's a maximum opportunity to change everything.

The future is all about integrating different interdisciplinary areas into one.

So, anybody who is younger, go beyond just the computer science.

Look at the arts.

Look at what's happening in marine biology and then neuroscience.

And you'll be able to bring all of those ideas into one and create something that nobody might have thought about.

Slat, voice-over: Progress is not inevitable, and it really requires conscious effort.

Sometimes, people ask me, why you?

Why did you decide to work on this?

And I think it's a strange question.

A much more interesting question to me is why isn't everyone doing this?

If there is something that's bothering you, I think it would be strange to just wait for somebody else to solve it.

Wallach, voice-over: Hundreds of years from now, they are going to look back on our moment that we're in right now as potentially the most pivotal in human history.

The decisions that we make around our technologies and how we're going to live on this planet will actually dictate who and what we are to become.

We have to ask ourselves, in this moment of complexity, what is it that we want to see happen?

Where do we want to go?