Day Two Keynote: Pablos Holman – Implementing Science Fiction

14 February 2023

Implementing Science Fiction

Silicon Valley’s big win was disrupting Yellow Cab. What about disrupting General Motors? General Mills? General Electric? Energy, water, waste, food, manufacturing, construction—things every human on Earth relies on—have made incremental progress over the last century but have not seen the kind of exponential improvements we take for granted in computing.
Now is the moment when all of this changes. We are living in a renaissance, with the potential to reinvent almost everything humans do using the superpowers of automation, robotics & AI. These technologies are getting more accessible everyday, and they are being used to change the way every industry operates, making them faster, more efficient & more humane. The winners aren’t usually market leaders, with decades of experience and dominant market share. The winners are those who can innovate fastest by internalizing new technology and adapting it to rearchitect an entire industry. How many taxi companies could have made an iPhone app, but didn’t? We want to understand the process of technology based disruption so we can plot a successful course of innovation for our own businesses. This is what Pablos is coming to talk to us about.

Pablos is a hacker turned inventor—his wild career, from cryptocurrency in the 1990s to AI for stock market trading to building spaceships at Blue Origin for Jeff Bezos, is like no other. Pablos helped start the Intellectual Ventures Lab for Nathan Myhrvold, where his team was awarded 6,000 patents on their own inventions, including a machine to suppress hurricanes, a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste, and a laser that can shoot mosquitoes out of the sky—part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates.
These days, Pablos leads Deep Future, an Invention Capital firm investing in the mad scientists, rogue inventors, and maverick entrepreneurs who are crazy enough to try building a better future.

Presented by: Pablos Holman

Located In: Tate Ballroom