to our session of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas,

We are the Gods, Now.

I'm Ann Mossop from the Sydney Opera House.

I'm one of the curators of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas,

and it's a great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon

to hear from Jason Silva.

When we were planning the Festival,

we really wanted to talk about the future and the impact

of technology on the future, and because of our experience

trying to talk about scientific topics, pessimistic topics,

difficult topics, we decided we really

needed to find somebody who could talk

about the future of technology in a way that

was optimistic and exciting and that

was going to get people to think about these kind of very

complicated and sometimes difficult issues

with a positive undertone to what they were saying.

And we were absolutely so excited

when we came across the work of Jason Silva,

and a few weeks after we talked to Jason

and started to arrange for him to come,

we found out that he was speaking at TED.

And I was fortunate enough to see

him speak there, introducing a video

he had made for that conference, and I thought, yes,

this is something that's going to be really wonderful to see

here in the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

Jason is someone who's hard to categorize.

He's not someone where I can say,

yes, he's the author of XYZ, and he's a professor

here and there.

Jason is a philosopher, a filmmaker, a visionary,

I think.

Someone who, above all, is a really extraordinary

communicator about science, about complexity, and about

the future.

So I'm delighted that he's here to talk to us this afternoon.

Please make sure that your phone are on silent.

Tweet to hashtag #fodi, which has

been hacked because so many of you

are getting so involved in the conversation

that it became a magnet to a lot of people trying

to get you to buy something else.

But we're fixing that, and Twitter is still

going through, so don't hold back.

Jason is going to talk to us for about half an hour, 30 minutes,

40 minutes, and then there'll be plenty

of time for questions and discussion from you

because I think this is something where you will

get a lot of provocative ideas.

So the opportunity to have a conversation with Jason today

is going to be one of the great pleasures of this session.

So please join me in welcoming to Jason Silva.

Wow.

Hi, everybody.

How you guys doing?

Hope you guys are doing great.

We are the gods, now.

What a topic.

Huh?

And I suppose, for me, the big inspiration behind this

came after I read Ernest Becker's book, Pulitzer

Prize winning book, the Denial of Death, 1974.

Pop culture reference for that books,

it's the book that Woody Allen gives Annie Hall in the movie

Annie Hall, and he says, look, you

need to read this so you can understand

where I'm coming from.

And basically the Denial of Death

said that the human condition is characterized,

characterized uniquely, by our awareness of our mortality.

In other words, we're the only species

that is aware that we are mortal beings,

and this causes a tremendous amount of anxiety.

We would go mad if we hadn't come up

with solutions to the death problem.

And throughout history, Ernest Becker

identifies three main solutions to the problem of death.

The first one was the religious solution

to the problem of death.

You create a narrative in which your soul will live forever

in the kingdom of God, and it gets rid of the death issue

because everything will be taken care of in the end.

Now, as technology has increasingly-- science

and technology increasingly made religion sort of more difficult

to believe, we've had to come up with other solutions

to the death problem.

The second main solution to the problem of death

that Ernest Becker identifies is the romantic solution.

You turn your lovers into deities.

She's like the wind.

She's my salvation.

It's the lyric to every pop song.

She is the sun.

But of course, no relationship can ultimately

bear the burden of Godhood.

Eventually, your gods reveal their clay feet,

and all of a sudden, we can't be saved by our lovers

and the anxiety about our mortal coil kicks in again.

Ernest Becker says we are gods with anuses.

We have this capacity to ponder the infinite.

We're seemingly capable of anything.

We can mainline the whole of time

through the optic nerve with our astronomy and with our space

telescopes, and yet we're housed in these heart-pumping,

breath-gasping, decaying bodies.

So to be godly, yet creaturely, is just impossibly cruel.

The last solution to the problem of death

that Ernest Becker identifies, he calls the creative solution,

and I think this is, perhaps, the most interesting one

for a variety of reasons.

Of course, symbolically, to create a solution

allows us to create great works of art,

to create work that will outlive us

and that will outlast us to leave

a sort of symbolic immortality and legacy of that sort.

But also the creative solution to the problem of death,

I think, is the engineering solution.

It's the way through which we remake the world.

It's the way in which we transcend our limitations using

science and technology, and this gets me really excited

because this is, ultimately, how I see technology.

Technology is a scaffolding.

Andy Clark, the cognitive philosopher,

says technology is our second skin.

Terrence McKenna says it's the real skin of our species.

Through technology, we transcend the limitations

of thought, reach, and vision.

We extend ourselves.

We transcend time, space, and distance.

Technology is our extended phenotype, as Dawkins says.

It's really what we are.

Our skyscrapers, our jet engines, that's us.

Just like the termite colony is temperature controlled,

and it's a part of the termite species, so to technology

is a part of who we are.

Now, as Ann said, I'm a filmmaker,

and my background is I worked in television.

I worked for Al Gore's TV network for a number of years,

and I fell in love with the power of short form filmmaking.

I felt that with short form, you could create content

that could spread, that could be shared

in the age of social media.

And when I left current TV, I decided

to create a series of short films, microdocumentaries,

that look at the co-evolution of humans and technology

because I feel so in love with this idea of technology

as a means to transcend our boundaries that I felt

like this was a narrative that needed to be put out there

in the world because we live in this world of doom and gloom.

We live in a media environment where, if it bleeds, it leads,

and there's a reason for that.

My friend Peter Diamandis, founder

of the XPRIZE at Singularity University,

wrote a book called Abundance, Why the Future will

be Much Better Than You Think.

And in the book, it talks about how

we have these overactive amygdalas that we've inherited

from a time where we used to live in the savannas of Africa,

and it was biologically advantageous for us to be

really nervous all the time and always

looking for danger because it kept

us alive against the tiger, so that the tiger wouldn't eat us.

And we've inherited that, but now

we live in a world that is increasingly

safer, increasingly less violent.

I don't know if you guys know the work of Steven Pinker, who

says that the chances of a man dying

at the hands of another man today

are the lowest they've ever been,

or the work of Matt Ridley, who actually shows

the measurable progress that we've made using science

and technology and how the world has actually never been better,

or the work of Hans Rosling, who has the website

gapminder.org that went viral a couple years ago because it

showed how every nation in the world,

by every measurable indicator, has been rising.

Quality of life has been rising over the last 200 years,

but we don't notice this because we

have these overactive amygdalas that are just

looking for danger, and our increasingly wired world

is more than happy to showcase all the danger,

even though it's less than there's ever been before.

Anyway, promise to go slow.

So I decided that there was room,

there was room to start a new conversation about how

we see ourselves and how we see technology,

and I felt that online video had become ubiquitous enough

that we could actually create content that

was short form, that was infectious,

and that people could then spread.

And so I started to do this, and I

created a project, a series of shorts.

I called them Shots of Philosophical Espresso,

and the point of the content is to pull you out

of context in such a dramatic manner

in order to force you to gawk in amazement

at the ubiquitous everyday wonders

that we seem to be culturally disposed to ignore.

OK, so what I'd like to do today is actually

want to walk you through a series of these short films

which will, hopefully, convince you

that we are on our way to becoming gods.

The first film I want to show you is actually

on ode to the power of ideas, and let's play it,

and then we'll talk a little bit about the themes.

You know, I love this idea of radical openess,

the free exchange of information,

the free flow of ideas, creating spaces in which ideas

can has sex as Matt Ridley talks about.

And this is huge because it turns out that ideas are just

as real as the neurons they inhabit,

as James Gleick tell us.

A new kingdom rises above the biosphere.

Denizens of this kingdom are ideas

because ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,

it turns out.

They leap from brain to brain.

They compete for the limited resources of our attention.

They have infectivity.

They have spreading power.

They are what Richard Dawkins calls the new replicators, born

from the primordial soup of human culture.

Their vector of transmission is language

and electronic communication.

And though ideas are not made of nucleic acid,

they have achieved more evolutionary change

and at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

You know, Ray Kurzweil says our ability

to create virtual models in our heads

combined with our modest looking thumbs was sufficient to usher

in a secondary force of evolution called technology,

and it will continue until the entire universe is

at our fingertips.

This is unbelievable stuff.

It speaks to the telescopic nature of evolutionary change,

more change in the last 100 years

than in the last billion years.

Terrance McKenna actually wrote, "From the moment

that human beings invented language,

biological evolution essentially ceased,

and evolution became a cultural epigenetic phenomenon."

Now, we take in matter of low organization,

we put it through our mental filters,

and we extrude it in the form of space shuttles and iPhones.