Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views expressed in the following program are those of
the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty am or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
JUDITHI and everyone, and welcome to the Brian Cromby Radio.
I've got a really interesting gentleman that's an expert on
AI to join us tonight. Doctor Chris Smedley is his name.
He's got a PhD in Artificial intelligence. He's a visionary
technologist and a futurist. He's dedicated to harnessing AI superintelligence
to unlock an era of hyper abundance, hyper abundance for humanity.
(00:40):
He's got a deep expertise in AI and exponential technologies,
develops innovative solutions to tackle global challenges from sustainable energy
to advanced transportation. Doctor Smedley has collaborated with several industry
giants including Google, Microsoft, n Video, Singularity University, and the
X Prize Foundation. A decade ago, he founded Digital Habits
(01:01):
and Exponential Technology firm that integrates AI across energy, transportation,
humanoid robotics and beyond, creating fully autonomous products and services
to power the mobile communications of tomorrow on land, sea, air,
and space. I came across doctor Smedley. When he wrote
about Elon Musk, he wrote about AI. He wrote about
(01:24):
self driving autonomous vehicles, and I thought it'd be great
to check in with him about what's going on, what's
the future. She would be scared, she would be excited.
What's happening, Doctor Smedley. Welcome to the show, sir.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Thank you very much for having me, Brian.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
It's great to be here. My pleasure AI is AI
like some people describe as revolutionary as the Industrial revolution
or the coming of the internet, or is it just
one more new technology, you know, the fax machine moving
two emails.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It's actually far more profound than any of those. In fact,
it's the culmination, if you will, of a long road
that humanity's gone through to apply technology, and many people
are suggesting it will be the fastest adopting technology of
all time, far outstripping any others, and ultimately it will
(02:23):
lead to the complete transformation. And if you want to
talk about the scary part, we expect that within five
years all human cognitive and physical labor will probably be replaced.
So we are looking at the downside being things like
mass unemployment. But the upside is that we're able to
(02:46):
use the technology to massively increase our productivity through robots
and other means, as people are doing now, and this
is what will lead us to have a world where
anyone can have any thing they want for ostensibly free,
and for those who want to adopt this technology, it
(03:08):
will be an untold possibility for the future.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So I'll give you two counterpoints for a second. If
I couldn't see what your response is, I watched an
interview with Gregory Hinton, who I understand is sort of
the godfather or grandfather of AI, who has really left
the a country companies that he was working with and
is out there right now warning people about AI and
(03:35):
suggesting that we need significant government regulation for AI. And
then there was an Israeli psychologist, Harari I think is
his name, who's written Homo sapiens and homodeis and he
talks about a world in the future where there will
be humans that use AI and medical technologies and a
(03:59):
whole bunch of other things and others that won't, and
that one group of humans that have got access to
that technology will be like humans and the rest of
us will be like Neanderthals, and they will almost create
two different human races, ones that have got AI and
ones that don't. What do you say to those two gentlemen.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
They're both correct. So Jeff was my profit UFT, so
I'm very proud of my association with him. And there
are many in the AI community. Maybe I'll frame it
this way. I'll introduce Peter Diamandis, who you may know,
and Ray Kurzweil, and these were both co founders of
(04:39):
Singularity University, where I was faculty, and they present the
optimistic scenario, the one that Elon suggests is eighty percent likely,
as a world where abundance can be offered to everyone.
And understandably, most of the AI industr, including Elia Sutskov
(05:01):
and others, are cautioning that this is far more powerful
than nuclear weapons or any other sort of technology. And
you know, it's understandable that people would be concerned about this.
But also to what Mogadat and Harari and others are saying,
(05:21):
is this will bifurcate the species. Those small number of
people that embrace having their minds enhanced through artificial superintelligence,
those who say I'm going to be a part of
this transformation on a personal and corporate basis, will likely
(05:45):
be the benefactors, and those people who who are afraid
or uncertain about the future will find themselves on the
unemployment lines and not knowing what to do. So this
is a large portion of what digital habitats evolved in
is to help communities navigate what is called the singularity,
(06:06):
which is a point that originally Kurzweil had suggested what
happen around twenty forty, but it looks like we could
be doing this by twenty thirty five or earlier. And
what this means is that at that point everything that
humanity has been and known will transform. And you know,
(06:27):
when Elon talks about the possibility of one hundred billion
humanoid robots on the planet, what we're really seeing is
once in humanity's existence, point in time that we're all
fortunate enough to live in where we'll be able to
transform our biologic selves into synthetic life and travel the cosmos.
(06:53):
And this will be undoubtedly terrifying to many many people,
you know, those that live ordinary exists stints are going
to be totally disrupted, and our hope is to help
them prepare for that eventuality.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
I interviewed a professor at the American Military College in
the United States who specializes in war studies, and we
were talking about drones and Ukraine, and he said that
war is changing and is changing dramatically, and it's for
the first time war that can take place without human casualties.
And he said that that actually is scary because one
(07:30):
of the reasons why people stop wars and find wars
aphurrent is because people die, and there's big issues in
that regard. And he says that increasingly drones and he
thinks in the future robots will be the ones at
the front line, such that you can have governments that
are interested in territorial advancement, like Russia invading Ukraine, and
(07:58):
we'll do that more often now because they can have
robots and drums to it. What do you think about that.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
I think that's absolutely correct. Delan himself has said many
times that there will be no humans on the battlefield
of the future, and if you look at places like
Ukraine and others, he says, it's going to be a
killing field. You would never put a human being up
against a terminator. So you know, that's the horrific side
(08:24):
of the potential of war, but it also incentivizes people
that you know, instead of using our emotional abhorrence, you know,
and emotional concerns about death, we look at why is
it that we're launching all of these machines at each
(08:46):
other to gain territory or political advantage, And maybe this
also needs to transition to a more profound sociological problem,
which is to be blunt human stupidity. So, throughout the
history of our world, the limiting factor on our ability
to move forward has been people's inability to comprehend things.
(09:11):
Politicians desires to use propaganda and emotional leverage to get
people to do things, and ultimately this becomes reflected in
an undermining of the concepts of democracy. So, you know,
here in Canada, we've recently had an election that was
highly emotional, and it turns out that that emotionality doesn't
(09:35):
serve Canadian interests because you want to be able to say,
how can we use technology and AI itself to elevate
the dialogues that we're having and remove our personal conflicts
with each other, both in our homes and our nations,
(09:56):
so that we can get past our mental weaknesses, as
it were.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Jeffrey Hinton in the interview that I listened to, was
warning US of AI taking over and wanting to control
us humans, and he suggested that we needed significant government
regulation to ensure that that future doesn't happen. The bill
in the United States, the big beautiful bill that passed recently,
(10:25):
really takes regulation off AI, and the pitch was that
if we want to compete with China and other developers
of AI worldwide, we need to have the least amount
of regulation possible. What's your answer. Is Jeffrey Hinton right
that we need significant regulation or is Donald Trump right
then that we need less regulation, the most minimal regulation
(10:47):
as possible.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'll comment from
David Sachs, who's the AI zar at the White House
right now and a member of the All In podcast.
Their bill bill is specifically designed to ensure that the
United States becomes the superpower in AI, that it outcompetes China,
(11:11):
that it outcompetes everyone. And the reason for this is
not just military, it's economic. So what many people don't
understand is that in Elon's association with Trump, there was
a number of conversations where Elon informed him of these
trends and he managed to turn that into policy and
(11:34):
the key takeaway was one, AI is irreversible. You cannot
put the genie back in the box. You cannot regulate it.
Two that your best option is to accelerate its development
so that you become the smartest AI anywhere. Then three
(11:57):
apply that to growing your economy ten or one hundred x,
reducing costs, and anticipating that people are not going to
be operating in jobs in the same way that they
did the past. And this is why you're seeing Trump
talk about it in such positive terms. And this also
extends to automobility and Sean Duffy's conversations about having a
(12:22):
national self driving vehicle framework as a strategic defense. You know,
you can't have this technology be in the hands of
the Chinese or others where they could have vehicles driving
themselves and doing all of this stuff. And so you know,
I'm also suggesting this is something that every country in
(12:43):
the world will need to take to heart. And we
see the trillions and tens of trillions of dollars that
are being poured into AI. There's no way to regulate this.
So you know, people like Jeff and others there it's
understandable the sentiment, but it is an unstoppable force, so
(13:06):
we might as well embrace it and figure out how
we can improve ourselves.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
When the interviewer that I saw with Jeffrey Hinton asked
Professor Hinton about the future, he said, given what you've described,
what would you tell your kids or your grandkids to
focus on? And he said, plumbing. They should become plumbers
because I know that they'll always be a need for plumbers.
I'm not sure whether there will be a need for
(13:32):
anyone else. So what do you tell your kids and
grand kids to focus on?
Speaker 3 (13:38):
I think that's also misguided, and I only point you
to the fact that we're going to be having robots
do our plumbing, taking care of our kids, walking our dogs.
And you know, Elon has said everyone is going to
want their own personal R two D two. And again
it's not just his company. There are hundreds of companies
(14:00):
now that are starting in this field. So what you're
seeing is first the disruption of cognitive labor, office work
and the like as we're seeing right now. But secondarily,
what is coming right around the corner is the I
robot era, So you know, there will be no future
(14:21):
jobs for people. So what we recommend is The first
thing we need to do is to change our mindset
and figure out in a world that doesn't have work
and capitalism as economic drivers, what becomes more critical is
what is our purpose and meaning, what is our long
(14:43):
term life strategy? And when we also look at potential
for longevity to live hundreds of years, it creates an
opportunity for people to cast off how we've thought in
the past and not adhere to I need a job
to earn dollars to pay rent and all of what
(15:06):
Tony Sieban others talk about as an extractive capitalist system,
and I need to figure out how if I had
infinite intelligence, I could do unbelievably great things. So that's
what I tell all the young people is to shift
from trying to figure out how you fit into the
world as it is today and see how you can
(15:30):
expand your own mind and your own capabilities to be
your best self.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
This is gonna be a fascinating conversation today. One of
the first reasons that I became aware of doctor Smedley
was he wrote about Elaan Musk and so we're going
to take a break for some messages, and we're going
to come back, and we're going to talk about some
of the moneies that Elon Musk is investing in AI
right now, what doctor Smithley thinks about it, and what
he thinks about Elon Musk, you know, controversial character, but
(15:58):
certainly a driver of of invasion of electrical cars, of rockets,
of satellites, et cetera, tesco. So in two minutes we're
gonna be back with doctor Chris Smedley talking about Elon Musk,
AI and the future. Gave it us. Everyone back into.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Stream us live at SAGA nine am dot C.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
A Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crimey Radio. I've
got doctor Chris Smedley with me tonight. He is an
AI expert, he's got a PhD in AI, and we're
going to be talking about AI the future, what he
(16:44):
thinks of the future, and it's you pretty fascinating, and
also about Elon Musk. But before we go there, Chris,
I wonder if you could tell all of us a
little bit about you. Why did you decide to do
a PhD in AI and then focus your career on AI?
What about you, sir?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I've personally been involved in technology, compute technology for over
four decades and so part of that initially would have been,
of course building out infrastructure and compute technology. But I
was inspired at a young age to look at many
science fiction stories and to envision a better future for myself.
(17:26):
And this was also when I met Ray Kurzweil, maybe
around two thousand, two thousand and two, and he, in
case you don't know, is a world leader in this area.
He's written a book called The Singularity Is Near, which
is subtitled When Technology Transcends Biology. And so this launched
(17:49):
something called transhumanism, and this is the concept of cyborgs
and people that can live long life spans. And so
Fort's say the last two decades, those in this community
have been aware that there is an irreversible trend that
has gone on since the beginning of humanity. It's not
(18:11):
stopped by wars or anything that humans do. And Kurzwhile
map this out in what he calls his law of
exponential accelerating returns, so we can map out our transition.
And it turns out that around the turn of the
millennia this century is when that curve started to take
(18:33):
an upward slope, so that it's now moving towards a
near infinite possibility. So If you look at Kurzweild's book,
he talks about in twenty ten, we had compute power
roughly equal to an insect brain. Then when we move
forward to twenty twenty three, people like he and werner
(18:53):
Vinge had said, we're going to have an AIAGI moment
where there're one brain equal to compute capacity. And then
as we move forward into twenty thirty and twenty forty,
the entire sum of all human knowledge will be available
and it's already been read by AI for us to consume,
(19:18):
and the amount of compute power that's on the planet
will skyrocket to limits that we can't imagine. So if
we fast forward to today after seeing CHATGPT in twenty three,
we anticipate that by twenty six or twenty seven we
should have artificial superintelligence. And since Kurzweil's tracking perfectly on
(19:43):
this particular pathway, it now seems inevitable that we have
to embrace this as a What many are suggesting is
the function of biological life on any planet, which is
to build its technological success. Does that help her?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
The function of our life is to build our technological successor.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Yeah, So from an evolutionary perspective, all biological life in
the universe right follows the idea of increasing intelligence to
get control over its environment and an understanding and that
the apex of intelligence is machines. This is again discussed
(20:29):
at length in all kinds of scientific literature. So you
know the reality of that, or won't necessarily say reality
that this is a likely scenario also radically shifts our
assumptions on what the value is of human life and
(20:52):
what our connectedness is all of the things that are
anthropomorphic and biologically related. And you know, if I can
refer you to Arthur Clark's nineteen fifty three classic Childhood's End,
where an alien comes to Earth and basically says, I
can give you an era of abundance. You can have
anything that you want. The humans attack it and try
(21:15):
and destroy it. So Arthur Clark was very prescient and
understanding that the weakest link in this transition is going
to be people.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
I became interested in you and connected with you because
of your writing about Elon Musk and ex Ai. Tell
me about what Elon Musk is doing in Ai right now,
his investments, what they're doing, and what you think of them.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Yeah, that's great. So I think that, first of all,
what Elon's done at XAI is rather remarkable. He's, in
let's say, eighteen months, built the world's most advanced AI
AI facility. One of the things that he had been
involved in directly was building out the Colossus data Center.
(22:08):
So while we had competitors struggling to deploy one hundred
thousand coherent GPUs, Musk and his team achieved the impossible.
They built in one hundred and twenty two days one
hundred thousand clusters, and now they're going to advance that
double it to two hundred thousand GPUs in ninety two days,
and they're on track for a million by year end.
(22:30):
This means that XAI will have at its disposal computes
roughly around two hundred thousand exaFLOPS, and by comparison, Metas
systems are currently around four hundred. So in the global
race for AI, the winners are those who can scale
massive compute the fastest and those who can use it
(22:50):
to exponentially boost model accuracy, speed, and reasoning. So XAI
exemplifies this and it's outpacing all rivals in every respect.
So as an example, they recently released Rock four, which
has been trained with ten times more compute than GROC three,
and it already delivers cross disciplinary PhD level intelligence, topping
(23:13):
benchmarks in math, coding and multimodal tasks. And GROCK four,
excuse me, GROCK five, which will come out probably in
a few months, will use one hundred times more synthetic
data because as we mentioned earlier, AI has already read
everything that humans have ever written, and so in order
(23:37):
to understand the universe, we're going to need to generate
synthetic data and then compare that to reality as a
way of understanding whether assumptions are true or not. So lastly,
and a bit of a tie in into Tesla is
that he just before.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
We get to test, Before we get to test, I
can ask you a few questions. Sure, of course, what
is a GPU.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
A GPU is a a AI specific chipset. So you
may note that in video is at the top of
the economic boards now the market cap, because they are
the world's largest supplier of this technology, and so it's
it's originally based on gaming technology. But what it is is,
(24:28):
you know, the AI brain compared to an ordinary CPU,
which is only designed to do ordinary compute.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So one hundred thousand GPU is what a lot or
a really.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Lot or what it's a really lot. So I'll give
you a bit of an example. Rock three has to
run for Grock four had to run for several months
on this one hundred thousand node cluster and it ultimately,
I think it was around ten to the thirty three
(25:04):
cycles that it had to do in order to build
the system. And a few years ago the EU had
said any system that does more than ten to the
twenty seventh is going to need regulation because it's too big,
too powerful. And by the same token, the subsequent generations
(25:25):
that we're talking about, when he scales up to a
million and beyond, we expect models that are now going
to go to ten to the thirty eight or whatever.
It's just an unlimited amount of compute. It's inconceivable.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
So is this just a massive, big computer like those
old computers that I used in college, the IBM three sixty, Like,
is it just a big, huge, massive machine.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
It's not exactly that. It's not just a bunch of
machines all sharing loads like we have large data centers
that do that now. Instead, it's probably better to look
at it like a human brain or neural network where
all of the different components are. You know, I think
the brain has something like ten billion different neurons in it,
(26:13):
and we're talking about doing a similar situation where each
neuron could be a GPU, and each GPU is itself
super smart. So it's equivalent to one hundred people or
more at today's technology. So you just multiply that ten
billion all connected and more importantly, all operating coherently with
(26:36):
a single I'll say hive mind, knowing that the borg
you're going to be shortly having a conversation here. But
it's that they all act with a unified purpose, in
a unified direction, and they don't get distracted like people do.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Okay, so this may be the answer to my next question.
But you said it's solved massive coherence challenges. What are
the coherence challenges that needed to be solved.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Well, basically, the coherence challenge was that when you have
all of these nodes operating together, they have to operate
off of a same shared memory or same set of
facts so that they can make sure that they're not
out of alignment. And one of the things that Elon
Musk personally did was when he was building this one
(27:29):
hundred thousand GPU system is everyone said it was impossible
and no one had been able to do that kind
of system at scale, and he applied some technology that
they had developed at Tesla that actually turned the Internet
protocols that were previously software into hardware and chips, which
(27:53):
means that that part of the stack, the communications stack,
can be accelerated by a thousand times now. So that's
how he's managed to build a system that can now
scale to a million or more and every component is
able to talk to every other component at the same time.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Okay, you wanted to tell me about Tesla, and the
sense is that Tesla used to be a car company.
It no longer is a car company, So tell me
what's going on to Tesla.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yeah, that's a really good point. So most people believe
it to be an auto company. And for the past
several years, Elon has and the team have been developing
what's called full self driving technology, so that they're looking
at how could we build vehicles that drive themselves anywhere
with no human drivers. And it's been a long road
(28:42):
because historically this was built on ordinary software and many
of the competitors that are out there are still using
that kind of model. They're also using lidar and all
sorts of sensors in their solutions. But Musk had a
vision that said, what you need is an end to
(29:02):
end neural net that mimics the human brain and drives
the way that people do, which is photons go into
our eyes and we think about it and we understand
the world around us, and then we move the vehicle.
So this is what he managed to do in late
last year with the latest version OFFSD number thirteen, is
(29:24):
to build a generalized solution so that these vehicles are
rolling AI brains that are superhuman in their driving abilities.
So you know, most recently there's been an acceleration of
the number of people using FSD, and Elon has set
(29:47):
a goal of six billion miles or ten billion kilometers
before he releases an unsupervised version of the product, and
this will be the one that allows us to permanently
take humans out of the driver's seat and increase our
global safety.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
What's FSD, sir?
Speaker 3 (30:08):
It stands. FSD stands for full self Drive, So it's
the marketing name for the product that Tesla offers, and
it operates by using AI brains. There's two AI brains
that have been put into every Tesla vehicle ever made,
and so now this software enables it to unlock that
(30:29):
power and to be able to operate the way that
it does. So it's much more advanced than the previous product,
which was called autopilot. So a lot of times the
media confuses the two and they're radically different products with
totally different safety records.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
You wrote that this is you think, one of the
most audacious pivots in tech history.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Why because you know, Elon had recognized that once they
get to the solution, that they were not an auto
company and that they were now an AI company, and
that he pivoted to enable the entire organization to use
(31:14):
automobility as their driver, and shifted his master plan towards
how can we not just do sustainable energy and transportation,
but how do we transform the world by having machines
that can move goods and people and services anywhere that
we want in the globe without even thinking about it.
(31:36):
So this is, you know, if we take a look
forward into his plans for cyber cabs, which you may
or may not know, is a vehicle that will come
out in twenty six that has no steering wheel, no pedals,
it's a two person vehicle, so there is not even
a possibility to operate it as a conventional human and
(32:01):
this is very likely to radically change. Let's say make
it the iPhone moment for transportation.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
What will happen to Uber lift taxis.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
They're dead, They're fundamentally dead. In fact, Travis Kalanik and
Daria and others at Uber have echoed the same thing. So,
you know, we've had conversations with Ontario communities where there
are a lot of Uber drivers and they go, what
(32:35):
are we going to do about the future, you know,
when our jobs are gone? And the answer is that
Tesla will be bringing out the ability for private owners
of vehicles to operate their own fleets. So instead of
having a truck driver having his own you know, human drivers,
he'll be able to operate a fleet of Tesla's semi vehicles,
(32:58):
or in the Uber case, people could have many vehicles
under their control. We look at businesses being able to
operate their own fleets, those kinds of situations are.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Imminent, unbelievable. This is very interesting. We're going to take
a break for some messages and come back with our
guest doctor Chris Smedley in just two minutes, and I'm
going to ask him about regulation, about the future, about
how autonomous vehicles, about FSD vehicles is going to change
(33:31):
our built environment. Stay with us, everyone back in two minutes.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot C.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
A welcome back everyone to the Bran Crime Radio. We've
got doctor Chris Smedley with me today. He's a visionary
technologist and a futurist that is dedicated to harnessing AI
superintelligence to unlock an era of hyper abundance, hyper abundance
(34:07):
for humanity. He comes to us from Mississauga and he's
got a business here in Canada. Chris, what's your business?
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Digital Habitats is focused on building fully autonomous communities on land,
sea and air using advanced ay eyes the latest in
various technologies from energy to transportation, to humanoid robotics and beyond.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I ended up having a really interesting chat with a
city planner who said that we've got to anticipate a
change in our built environment that is profound. And he said,
think about when we moved from horses to cars. You know,
we all had carriage houses because the horses had to
be kept in a house that was separate from from
(34:59):
or a carriage house that was separate from the house.
That we had, you know, roads that were a certain width,
we had the problems with the poop from the horses, uh,
you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that cars changed
our built environment dramatically. That allowed suburbs, that allowed highways,
that allowed uh, parking garages that you know, changed our
(35:22):
built environment dramatically. And he said, think about the future
of of shared vehicles like Uber and Left, but also
about autonomous vehicles. He said, think about parking that we
no longer need. Thinking about highways that are going to
become very different. When when when vehicles can When can
(35:43):
vehicles can draw travel an inch or foot apart? Think
about stadiums where people want to go watch an event.
You don't need a massive amount of parking, but you
need a huge amount of drop off and pickoff spot.
Tell me, what do you think our cities are going
to look like and how are they going to change
(36:03):
in this self driving autonomous vehicle era.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Those are all very good points. And our position is
that we're looking at developing a automobility accelerator program to
speak with communities that would include putting autonomous vehicles at
the heart of government and business fleets and make private
(36:29):
vehicle ownership unnecessary for people. So Tony Ciba, who's from
rethink x as a world renowned futurist, who discusses how
within the next five years we're going to see an
eighty percent reduction in private vehicle ownership. We're going to
see the removal of things like insurance and vehicle costs
(36:51):
from the private individual's pockets, and a transition towards being
able to replace services like buses with their shared vehicle
and shared routing systems with private direct rides where you
have control of the vehicle and it's only your party
that's traveling to the implementation and our proposals are to
(37:16):
look at the parking issue that you discussed in large
venues and to transition those to be energy infrastructure hubs
with storage and charger supercharger capabilities, garaging facilities to depot
these vehicles, and if for example, you had a shopping mall,
we'd propose covering all of the parking spaces with solar energy,
(37:42):
which then becomes used to be stored. But at the
same time we envision a future where actual habitation, our workplaces,
our homes will be inherently mobile, like urvs or roving
doctors' offices, mobile shop all that kind of stuff. So
(38:02):
you'd look at a shopping center right now where everyone
goes to the same place so that they can browse
around to fix store, and instead our model is take
that store out of the physical building and have it
go and do visits, caravans, farmers' markets, all those kinds
of things where the mobility allows the services to come
(38:25):
to the people, not obligate the people to come to
the other way. And then on the point of congestion,
if we start look at a transition from our mourning commutes,
which is always the peak hour, then and people are
doing more work from home, as we learn from COVID,
the ability to have less commuting going on and more
(38:51):
people operating locally in their homes and doing things other
than conventional work will also radically enable them to avoid
those congestions and problems like that.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Is this actually happening you mentioned in one of the
things you wrote to me about is a test in Austin,
Like people are worried about whether these things are safe.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Yeah, So that's a a great question. It turns out
the companies like Weaimo and Zeukes have already been offerating
autonomous vehicles throughout the US. Austin is one of Waimo's
larger centers and also the home of Tesla's gigafactory. So
in June they launched a robotaxi test where Elon said,
(39:37):
we're just going to dip our toes into the waters
and be super safe. So they've implemented safety riders in
the passenger seat, but it was a resounding success, and
this meant that by July they had expanded their radius
to overlap over lap WAYMOS coverage area in a phallic
(40:03):
shaped symbol as a flex on technology. And this was
actually suggested by a YouTuber, a Tesla YouTuber, and so
Tesla in nineteen days said, great, we'll just geofence this
and you know it'll be a rather stark symbol to
inspire discussions and if we go a little further. Tesla's
(40:25):
plans are over the balance of this year and into
next year to go to US states. They're already moving
this weekend to California, San Francisco and potentially eleven to
thirteen different states that have favorable self certification regulations, and
(40:46):
this would allow Tesla to in theory, have access to
roughly half of the US population in the next coming months.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Tesla sales are way down, market value is way down.
There's animosity in Canada to Elon Musk and to Tesla,
the satellite system that he was going to launch Starlink
in Ontario. The contract has been canceled, but at the
(41:17):
same time, you're suggesting this is sort of going to
happen no matter what. And Canada has recently nominated for
the first time administer that's responsible for AI. Tell me
what you think Canada's attitude toward Elon Musk to Tesla
to AI should be.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Firstly, I want to point out that the media is
for its own self interests because Tesla doesn't advertise directly,
and so you know, conventional automakers are funding the media
to generally create very negative bias. There are many articles
on this, so the unfortunately the public becomes missing formed
(42:01):
both on Elon's motivations on what Tesla's products can do.
But more to the point is that while the public
narrative is Tesla's sales are down, it's false. Most recently,
there was, you know, all of this conversation about how
in Europe and so on and so forth their sales
(42:22):
were dropping, But this was because Tesla has the world's
best selling vehicle of any kind in the model why,
whether it's Ice or EV and they changed to a
brand new model, a refresh model called the Juniper, and
they simultaneously brought up four different factories around the planet
(42:46):
to accelerate that in the first quarter of this year.
So the second component is that, yes, automotive sales may
be reduced due to affordability. And what Tesla has been
working on with the cyber cab and lower cost vehicles
is it has continuously been dropping its cost to build
these and therefore it's offering lower prices to people. And
(43:09):
then lastly, we'll see in the States, with the expiration
of the IRA tax credits, Tesla will be announcing even
more affordable vehicles in the fourth quarter when those aren't available,
because Elon has pointed out that the number one concern
that private vehicle owners have is how much is my
(43:32):
monthly payment? So regardless of economic headwinds or whatever else
might be there, the underlying technology is improving over time
and The last thing I want to mention is that
most people don't realize that because Tesla is an intelligent machine,
(43:55):
it gets better over time. They continuously improve it, it
gets more features, so that when people buy the product,
they get something that improves every day. And as an
illustration of that, they've just recently rolled out the Rock
four AI into all Tesla vehicles so that people can
(44:16):
have an intelligent driving companion at the push of a button.
No other automaker is even close to considering that. No
other automaker in North America, there are some Chinese that
are working on this, has any sort of fully autonomous
self driving technology even remotely visible. So this is an
(44:41):
unassailable data lead that I think will accrue to Tesla's benefit.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
It appears that President Trump is trying to disintermediate the
North American automobile automobile industry and make it a Canadian industry,
a US industry, and Mexican industry. And at the same time,
we've matched US one hundred percent tariffs against Chinese electronic vehicles,
so we've separate ourselves from China. And it looks like
(45:09):
the US is trying to separate itself from US. If
you sat down with Christian Friedland, our Transportation minister or
our Prime Minister Mark Karney, what would you tell them
our automative automobile strategy should be.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
So firstly back to the you know, the notion of
what has our the autopac done historically, and that we
have a fifty billion dollar industry in ice vehicles that
says we can't make a profitable EV. So this is
a huge differentiator is that Tesla is the only EV
(45:44):
maker in the world that makes a profit doing it.
You have Forward with their you know, lightning vehicle, their
f one to fifty lightning vehicle stopping production because they're
losing thirty thousand dollars a vehicle, which explains why they
have said, well, let's pivot back to highbreds because that's
(46:04):
a technology that we have and we can sell. And
it really ignores what the market is doing. And if
you look at what the trend has been recently, Stilantis
just finished announcing going bankrupt in China, and it's pretty
clear that every conventional legacy automaker is in financial dire straits,
(46:29):
partly because they've been sitting on a cash cow for
so long, for almost a century and they haven't been innovating.
So when we look at vehicles that are not only
ev but vehicles that can drive themselves, and those legacy
automakers do not have a competitive product to offer, they're
going to try and attack it in the media. But
(46:52):
more to the point, it effectively means that defending Canadian
auto workers is misguided. It is a dead industry and
what we should be doing is pivoting to industries that
are innovating and phasing those workers out into the new
era of the true automobile.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
We're going to take a break for some messages and
come back with a few conclude comments with this fascinating
discussion with doctor rus Smedley about electronic vehicles, about self
autonomous driving, autonomous full FSD vehicles, about Elon Musk, about Tesla,
about the future of AI. Stay with zev one back
(47:37):
in two minutes.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on SADAY nine
six am dot CA.
Speaker 4 (47:47):
A welcome back everyone to the on Crimetry Radio.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Or what a fascinating conversation we've had today with doctor
Chris Smedley. He he runs a company that specializes in
trying to figure out for for for for people, for cities,
for companies what they're going to do with with technology,
exponential increases and improvements in technology. It's called digital habitats.
(48:22):
We've been talking about AI, we've been talking about cars.
We've been talking about FSD, which is full self driving technology.
We've been talking about Elon Musk and I gotta ask you, sir,
to close if we could. If you were going to
sit down with a real estate developer that is building
the typical condominium or apartment building downtown Toronto with you know,
(48:46):
four stories of underground parking, and or with a mayor
of a city. You live in Mississauga, so the mayor
of Mississauga that's building you know, an l r T
up here Ontario, that's talking about a subway, talking about
a go train, talking about you know, highways. What would
you tell either the real estate developer or the mayor
(49:07):
that they've got to be thinking about if the future
that you describe is going to come to pass.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
So let me break that into two parts. The first
part would be transportation related. So the first thing that
I would recommend to all Canadian communities is that they
need to examine what currently is transit. As you mentioned
the LRT line and bussing, for example, is a key
point in Mississauga. They spend one hundred million dollars a
(49:36):
year running the Myway service, similar costs in places like Brampton.
Brampton has said we're going to spend two billion on
buses or four billion on buses. The argument that I
would make is, given this technology is coming and the
pace that it is coming, those communities need to change
their transportation policies so that they implement this kind of
(49:59):
techology at scale, and they do that in their personal fleets.
And then we extend that over to urban developers and businesses,
where what we're advising is that all businesses should consider
transiting to a automobility structure where they get to have
their own fleets doing their own deliveries, but at the
(50:20):
same time they might be operating that fleet as a
part of a community fleet in the evening. So if
you look at things like hoteliers the GTAA, those are
places where when the transition from uber happens, you could
have the GTAA saying why would we not include a
ride to and from the airport and have the airlines
(50:42):
pay for that for every person traveling in and out
of our facility bundle it into the price. But when
we also talk about urban transformation and real estate development,
the idea is that you need to shift from a
static parking based model and reuse that real estate to
(51:04):
be what we call mobile real estate. So these idea
of offices or businesses, mobile shops, being able to extend
a shopping mall's capabilities, to be able to offer additional
services at large venues or at rail locations, these are
all possibilities that will greatly enhance the ability for people
(51:27):
to get to their stores and to use their products.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
Will we still need go trains subways, They'll.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
Still exist, But over the next few years, what we're
going to find is that as many people, similar to
what happened with Uber, as many people say well, I'm
going to use this other service at much lower costs,
there will be massive pressure for communities to say I
can't afford to spend tens of billions of dollars on
(51:59):
the these mass transit systems, especially when you consider that
the average rider views that as the only choice they've
ever had. And this also applies to low cost people,
people with disabilities. The idea of you going into a
crowded subway where safety concerns are there, These wall become
(52:20):
like the horse compared to the automobile.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Chris, there's a lot of people listening right now that
probably have never used chat GPT, have probably never been
in a Tesla, maybe not even in a hybrid or
electrical vehicle. I saw an interview with Bill Gates who
said his recommendation was be curious and give it a try.
What would be your advice to people that haven't had
(52:47):
any exposure to anything that you've talked about other than
maybe watching Star Wars or Star Trek.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
So my first advice would be that there is a
massive amount of YouTube content out there. There's a huge
Tesla community that is producing high quality content and discussions,
particularly on X and my advice would be for people
to kind of look at some of that content and
(53:16):
see how it appeals to them. There are many videos
of old ladies using the technology and families enjoying its experience.
But then the second component is that we need to
basically put butts in the seats, you know, we need
first hand experience from people. And Tesla has said that
(53:38):
they will give a free self dive drive demonstration to
any person at any Tesla facility who's interested in buying
the car. So Elon's reinforced this on many occasions. So
my immediate recommendation would be talk to your local Tesla dealership,
talk to your there is a Tesla Ontario Club. There
(53:59):
are other facilities in Ontario that will happily help you,
including our own, understand the technology, feel it for yourself,
see if it's right. And then lastly, I believe there's
a ninety nine dollars a month FSD program subscription that
Tesla's offering in Canada and the US where if you
(54:21):
are existing Tesla owner, And oddly enough, half of all
Tesla vehicle owners haven't even tried the tech, perhaps using
an earlier version thinking it wasn't very good. And so
my recommendation would be try it out for a month,
see if it works for you. You might be sold.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
Doctor Chris Smedley, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
I really appreciate it. This has been a fascinating conversation.
I think that a lot of people are going to
come away from this scared about what the future is
that you've described, and I think a lot of people
are going to come away excited about this audacious technological change.
But that's probably the reality that we need to be
a little bit scared and a little bit excited at
(55:04):
the same time. And you know, I think that this
idea that Bill Gates talked about is be curious and
give it a try, probably is good advice. And so
I appreciate you joining us and telling us about your company,
about you, about the future, and commenting about how we
maybe have got to give Elon Musk and his ideas
(55:24):
a second look. Thank you so much, appreciate it, sir,
Thank you very much. That's our show for tonight, everybody,
thank you for joining. I remind you I'm on every
Monday through Friday on AM radio. Chris Medley has probably
never heard about AM radio. Talk about me being in
old technology. This is scary, but I actually am also
(55:44):
on podcasts and on videos, and so you can get
me in a lot of different places if you don't
listen to your AM and I'm on every night on
Trible w Saga nine sixty am dot CA, all of
my podcasts and videos or Briancromby dot com, Good Night
of the View
Speaker 1 (56:02):
No Radio, No Problem, stream us live on Saga nine
sixty am dot ca