The Futurists

The USA needs 5,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines a year but builds only 400. Jiake “Jake” Liu thinks the fix starts in the backyard. Jake is a serial entrepreneur whose new company, Outer Spaces, puts solar panels on the roof of a backyard pavilion with an EV-grade battery under the deck that can be installed in one day. This is a decentralized approach to upgrading US energy infrastructure. Rob and Jake talk about selling home energy now that the federal solar credit is gone, who should own the battery, and how trade with China shapes the product. In the future, Jake sees the 24 million acres of American backyards becoming charging pads for delivery drones, parking for flying cars, and even sites for tiny nuclear reactors.

Protopian futurist Monika Bielskytė, now advising NATO on cognitive warfare, joins Rob Tercek and Brett King to explain how hybrid warfare works. Its goal is not to persuade anyone of anything. It amplifies the extremes on both sides of real grievances until people believe nothing and become passive. Monika argues that the answer is a constructive vision of the future, anchored in science, and Elon Musk serves as the case study for how paper wealth and science-fiction hype translate into real-world power. Topics covered in this episode: Cognitive warfare and the politics of despair; Protopia vs. “burn it all down” nihilism; extraction vs. regeneration; Elon Musk is floating Mars, while shorting Earth; Consensus in an age of autonomous systems.

In this week’s pod international bestselling author Kevin J Anderson (Star Wars, Dune) returns. With more than 23 million books in print, Kevin has just embarked on his most ambitious personal project yet – creating the complete works of the Saga of Seven Suns epic. Kevin started this series in 2002 but is just launching his own Backerkit campaign. Along the journey Kevin explains how the business of publishing has been reshaped by technology and time.

Anand Chandrasekaran does not sit on the sidelines. He jumps into the game. He is the managing partner at Celesta Capital and co-founder of two AI companies, Crescendo and HiO. He explains why AI only transforms an industry when insiders drive the change, and why he expects the shift from scarcity to abundance to transform fields like customer care. He also describes how tokens have become the new capital, that is, the vital resource that CEOs must ration. Rob Tercek talks to Anand about what happens to the career ladder when AI automates the call center jobs that built India’s middle class, how the role of the VC has evolved, and Anand’s view that we are in the earliest stage of the AI super cycle.

In this week’s Futurist network we are joined live in the Dubai studio with two active AI architects, Jean-Baptiste Isnard (founder of Quantum Spirit) and Dr. Julia Michelin (founder of LumaBrush AI) a returning guest. The issue of whether AI is conscious continues to be debated at large but the question is perhaps not about if they are conscious but how the debate itself will change the view of human consciousness itself. In this very philosophical conversation Jean Baptiste and Julia present us with many of the challenges that emerge when mankind has to deal with embedded AI that is smarter than us collectively, while not necessarily being conscious or aligned. There’s no debate that AI is coming, but perhaps the biggest contribution it will make is helping us instead our own consciousness and the breadth of intelligence in the world around us.