Ep. 125 - The 5 Forces That Change Everything - with Steve Hoffman

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Steve Hoffman, AKA Captain Hoff, takes us on a voyage to better understand the radical innovation and transformation that new technologies are likely to cause during many of our lifetimes. He is the CEO of Founders Space, one of the world's leading incubators and accelerators, and the author of “The Five Forces that Change Everything: How Technology is Changing Our Future.”

Becoming Captain Hoff

Steve has always been fascinated by the intersection of entertainment and technology, and he developed an eclectic career mashup over the years: he studied electrical computer engineering in undergrad; got a Master’s degree in film and television; started his career as a TV development executive; worked at Sega, one of the largest video game companies in the world, helping them come up with ideas for interactive entertainment; and then eventually entered the start-up world, launching several of his own.

As a creative person at his core, this journey was a result of continually pivoting toward an innate interest and desire to build and create things, and he ultimately felt the best way to do that was to be an entrepreneur — and this career mashup has enabled him to support and cultivate talent in addition to working towards accelerating compelling new technologies.

Today, he runs Founders Space, a global startup, incubator, and accelerator that operates in 22 countries. They have become one of the top startup hubs in the world with the mission to educate and accelerate entrepreneurs.

“I'm always restless. I'm always looking for new opportunities. I am fascinated by technology, all the emerging technologies. I'm fascinated by ideas, all the new ideas for business models, how we can change the world, how we can change our lives. So my job is a perfect fit.”

The Five Forces

Steve’s obsession with technology and love for science fiction inspired his newest book, “The Five Forces that Change Everything: How Technology is Changing Our Future.”

“Literally, we're sort of living science fiction,” Steve says. “The technologies being born today are so powerful and so incredible that they will just completely transform not just every industry on the planet, and not just our lives, but how we perceive ourselves and interact with the world.”

Direct and non-invasive neural interfaces, editing the building blocks of life, developing new forms of intelligence that far surpass our own: these are the kinds of technologies that Steve Hoffman sees shaping the future of work and life.

But anything with the ability to transform society will have dramatic consequences — and that’s why Steve thinks we need to be discussing the forces that will shape our future now, before they arrive. Because some of this stuff that seems like science fiction is a lot closer than you might think.

The five forces that change everything are:

Mass connectivity. Innovations in neural interfaces will allow our brains and our technology to connect. As a result, interconnected, intelligent, digital networks will emerge. Will that create new ways to experience life and communicate? Or will that give corporations more power to manipulate us?
Bio convergence. Merging biology with technology will enable us to decode the building blocks of life, create entirely new species of plants and animals, conquer disease, and heighten human abilities. We already have things like genetically modified foods and vaccines. What comes next?
Human expansionism. We will push the edges of the known universe, into the quantum world and deeper into outer space. How will technologies like space travel, new materials, and nanotech transform our civilization and open up new horizons we never imagined possible?
Deep automation. We will soon have the capability to automate all underlying processes for managing, growing, and sustaining life. Will we wind up delegating our most important decisions to data crunching algorithms? And does this mean our machines will end up running our economies, our corporations, and even our lives?
Intelligence explosion. What happens after we create an artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence and capabilities?

The Sci-Fi Future is Still Human

Steve talks about the future on a more macro level and longer timeline than we’ve talked about on the show before. But when we get down to it, these technologies are just changing which kinds of problems we have to solve, and the next steps that Steve suggests we take sound awfully similar to what Ken Tencer said in the last episode:

Human Ingenuity is the most important tool that we need to develop to solve future problems.

We are architects of the future. Even when we’re talking about tech that will fundamentally change the way we experience and navigate life, the future is still about being human.

We will be the ones influencing how automation transforms society, whether AI takes jobs or provides abundance, or where to draw lines when it comes to bioconvergence.

We can already see the first signs of the forces Steve talked about in this episode in our world today. We see automation enabling new jobs that never existed and empowering one person to do more than they ever could before. We see AI learning how to do work in a fraction of the time that it takes people to do it. We’re altering the food supply on a genetic level.

These five forces have the power to dramatically improve our lives... and these things have the power to cause significant harm. That’s why we need to talk about the future, and that’s why we need to center humans in these conversations.

Definition of Success

“I feel I am most successful when I am contributing to the world. So when I feel like I can do something that's meaningful — this is the thing that makes humans wonderful.”

Best Career Advice

“Computers are gonna change the world.”

Key Takeaways

There are five forces that will have a significant implication the way we live and the way we work which :

Force 1 - Mass connectivity. Will neural interfaces create new ways to experience life and communicate? Or will that give corporations more power to manipulate us?
Force 2 - Bio convergence - We already have things like genetically modified foods and vaccines. What comes next?
Force 3 - Human expansionism. How will technologies like space travel, new materials, and nanotech transform our civilization and open up new horizons we never imagined possible?
Force 4 - Deep automation. Will we wind up delegating our most important decisions to data crunching algorithms? And does this mean our machines will end up running our economies, our corporations, and even our lives?
Force 5 - Intelligence explosion. What happens after we create an artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence and capabilities?

The skills of the future will be soft skills. We are living in a world of greater complexity, so being able to collaborate to solve new problems will be the most important skill in an automated and interconnected future.

The future is also about building a life of meaning. When we have to spend less of our time doing work just to make society function, we can spend more of our time pursuing a purpose.

No matter what the force, in the end, all of this is really the hybridization of everything, so we have to understand what that might look like so that we can figure out where we fit best.
There are inevitably positives and negatives in terms of where we are headed with all these five forces that will change the world. What’s important is knowing that we need to educate ourselves on the implications because, in the end, it’s humans who can direct the outcomes vs. technology driving us.
Taking that human-centered approach will help us ensure that we don’t lose an important aspect of who we are, how we feel, or how we connect.