How your emotions change the shape of your heart
No other organ, perhaps no other object in human life, is as imbued with metaphor and meaning as the human heart. Over the course of history, the heart has been a symbol of our emotional lives. It was considered by many to be the seat of the soul, the repository of the emotions. The very word "emotion" stems in part from the French verb "émouvoir," meaning "to stir up." And perhaps it's only logical that emotions would be linked to an organ characterized by its agitated movement.
But what is this link? Is it real or purely metaphorical? As a heart specialist, I am here today to tell you that this link is very real. Emotions, you will learn, can and do have a direct physical effect on the human heart.
But before we get into this, let's talk a bit about the metaphorical heart. The symbolism of the emotional heart endures even today. If we ask people which image they most associate with love, there's no question that the Valentine heart would the top the list. The heart shape, called a cardioid, is common in nature. It's found in the leaves, flowers and seeds of many plants, including silphium, which was used for birth control in the Middle Ages and perhaps is the reason why the heart became associated with sex and romantic love.
Whatever the reason, hearts began to appear in paintings of lovers in the 13th century. Over time, the pictures came to be colored red, the color of blood, a symbol of passion. In the Roman Catholic Church, the heart shape became known as the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Adorned with thorns and emitting ethereal light, it became an insignia of monastic love. This association between the heart and love has withstood modernity. When Barney Clark, a retired dentist with end-stage heart failure, received the first permanent artificial heart in Utah in 1982, his wife of 39 years reportedly asked the doctors, "Will he still be able to love me?"
Today, we know that the heart is not the source of love or the other emotions, per se; the ancients were mistaken. And yet, more and more, we have come to understand that the connection between the heart and the emotions is a highly intimate one. The heart may not originate our feelings, but it is highly responsive to them. In a sense, a record of our emotional life is written on our hearts. Fear and grief, for example, can cause profound cardiac injury. The nerves that control unconscious processes such as the heartbeat can sense distress and trigger a maladaptive fight-or-flight response that triggers blood vessels to constrict, the heart to gallop and blood pressure to rise, resulting in damage. In other words, it is increasingly clear that our hearts are extraordinarily sensitive to our emotional system, to the metaphorical heart, if you will.
There is a heart disorder first recognized about two decades ago called "takotsubo cardiomyopathy," or "the broken heart syndrome," in which the heart acutely weakens in response to intense stress or grief, such as after a romantic breakup or the death of a loved one. As these pictures show, the grieving heart in the middle looks very different than the normal heart on the left. It appears stunned and frequently balloons into the distinctive shape of a takotsubo, shown on the right, a Japanese pot with a wide base and a narrow neck. We don't know exactly why this happens, and the syndrome usually resolves within a few weeks. However, in the acute period, it can cause heart failure, life-threatening arrhythmias, even death.
For example, the husband of an elderly patient of mine had died recently. She was sad, of course, but accepting. Maybe even a bit relieved. It had been a very long illness; he'd had dementia. But a week after the funeral, she looked at his picture and became tearful. And then she developed chest pain, and with it, came shortness of breath, distended neck veins, a sweaty brow, a noticeable panting as she was sitting up in a chair all signs of heart failure. She was admitted to the hospital, where an ultrasound confirmed what we already suspected: her heart had weakened to less than half its normal capacity and had ballooned into the distinctive shape of a takotsubo. But no other tests were amiss, no sign of clogged arteries anywhere. Two weeks later, her emotional state had returned to normal and so, an ultrasound confirmed, had her heart.
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy has been linked to many stressful situations, including public speaking --
domestic disputes, gambling losses, even a surprise birthday party.
It's even been associated with widespread social upheaval, such as after a natural disaster. For example, in 2004, a massive earthquake devastated a district on the largest island in Japan. More than 60 people were killed, and thousands were injured. On the heels of this catastrophe, researchers found that the incidents of takotsubo cardiomyopathy increased twenty-four-fold in the district one month after the earthquake, compared to a similar period the year before. The residences of these cases closely correlated with the intensity of the tremor. In almost every case, patients lived near the epicenter.
Interestingly, takotsubo cardiomyopathy has been seen after a happy event, too, but the heart appears to react differently, ballooning in the midportion, for example, and not at the apex. Why different emotional precipitants would result in different cardiac changes remains a mystery. But today, perhaps as an ode to our ancient philosophers, we can say that even if emotions are not contained inside our hearts, the emotional heart overlaps its biological counterpart, in surprising and mysterious ways.
Heart syndromes, including sudden death, have long been reported in individuals experiencing intense emotional disturbance or turmoil in their metaphorical hearts. In 1942, the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon published a paper called "'Voodoo' Death," in which he described cases of death from fright in people who believed they had been cursed, such as by a witch doctor or as a consequence of eating taboo fruit. In many cases, the victim, all hope lost, dropped dead on the spot. What these cases had in common was the victim's absolute belief that there was an external force that could cause their demise, and against which they were powerless to fight. This perceived lack of control, Cannon postulated, resulted in an unmitigated physiological response, in which blood vessels constricted to such a degree that blood volume acutely dropped, blood pressure plummeted, the heart acutely weakened, and massive organ damage resulted from a lack of transported oxygen.
Cannon believed that voodoo deaths were limited to indigenous or "primitive" people. But over the years, these types of deaths have been shown to occur in all manner of modern people, too. Today, death by grief has been seen in spouses and in siblings. Broken hearts are literally and figuratively deadly.
These associations hold true even for animals. In a fascinating study in 1980 published in the journal "Science," researchers fed caged rabbits a high-cholesterol diet to study its effect on cardiovascular disease. Surprisingly, they found that some rabbits developed a lot more disease than others, but they couldn't explain why. The rabbits had very similar diet, environment and genetic makeup. They thought it might have something to do with how frequently the technician interacted with the rabbits. So they repeated the study, dividing the rabbits into two groups. Both groups were fed a high-cholesterol diet. But in one group, the rabbits were removed from their cages, held, petted, talked to, played with, and in the other group, the rabbits remained in their cages and were left alone. At one year, on autopsy, the researchers found that the rabbits in the first group, that received human interaction, had 60 percent less aortic disease than rabbits in the other group, despite having similar cholesterol levels, blood pressure and heart rate.
Today, the care of the heart has become less the province of philosophers, who dwell upon the heart's metaphorical meanings, and more the domain of doctors like me, wielding technologies that even a century ago, because of the heart's exalted status in human culture, were considered taboo. In the process, the heart has been transformed from an almost supernatural object imbued with metaphor and meaning into a machine that can be manipulated and controlled. But this is the key point: these manipulations, we now understand, must be complemented by attention to the emotional life that the heart, for thousands of years, was believed to contain.
Consider, for example, the Lifestyle Heart Trial, published in the British journal "The Lancet" in 1990. Forty-eight patients with moderate or severe coronary disease were randomly assigned to usual care or an intensive lifestyle that included a low-fat vegetarian diet, moderate aerobic exercise, group psychosocial support and stress management advice. The researchers found that the lifestyle patients had a nearly five percent reduction in coronary plaque. Control patients, on the other hand, had five percent more coronary plaque at one year and 28 percent more at five years. They also had nearly double the rate of cardiac events, like heart attacks, coronary bypass surgery and cardiac-related deaths.
Now, here's an interesting fact: some patients in the control group adopted diet and exercise plans that were nearly as intense as those in the intensive lifestyle group. Their heart disease still progressed. Diet and exercise alone were not enough to facilitate coronary disease regression. At both one- and five-year follow-ups, stress management was more strongly correlated with reversal of coronary disease than exercise was.
No doubt, this and similar studies are small, and, of course, correlation does not prove causation. It's certainly possible that stress leads to unhealthy habits, and that's the real reason for the increased cardiovascular risk. But as with the association of smoking and lung cancer, when so many studies show the same thing, and when there are mechanisms to explain a causal relationship, it seems capricious to deny that one probably exists. What many doctors have concluded is what I, too, have learned in my nearly two decades as a heart specialist: the emotional heart intersects with its biological counterpart in surprising and mysterious ways.
And yet, medicine today continues to conceptualize the heart as a machine. This conceptualization has had great benefits. Cardiology, my field, is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific success stories of the past 100 years. Stents, pacemakers, defibrillators, coronary bypass surgery, heart transplants all these things were developed or invented after World War II.
However, it's possible that we are approaching the limits of what scientific medicine can do to combat heart disease. Indeed, the rate of decline of cardiovascular mortality has slowed significantly in the past decade. We will need to shift to a new paradigm to continue to make the kind of progress to which we have become accustomed. In this paradigm, psychosocial factors will need to be front and center in how we think about heart problems.
This is going to be an uphill battle, and it remains a domain that is largely unexplored. The American Heart Association still does not list emotional stress as a key modifiable risk factor for heart disease, perhaps in part because blood cholesterol is so much easier to lower than emotional and social disruption.
There is a better way, perhaps, if we recognize that when we say "a broken heart," we are indeed sometimes talking about a real broken heart. We must, must pay more attention to the power and importance of the emotions in taking care of our hearts.
Emotional stress, I have learned, is often a matter of life and death.
Thank you.
The incredible chemistry powering your smartphone
When I waltzed off to high school with my new Nokia phone, I thought I just had the new, coolest replacement for my old pink princess walkie-talkie. Except now, my friends and I could text or talk to each other wherever we were, instead of pretending, when we were running around each other's backyards. Now, I'll be honest. Back then, I didn't think a lot about how these devices were made. They tended to show up on Christmas morning, so maybe they were made by the elves in Santa's workshop.
Let me ask you a question. Who do you think the real elves that make these devices are? If I ask a lot of the people I know, they would say it's the hoodie-wearing software engineers in Silicon Valley, hacking away at code. But a lot has to happen to these devices before they're ready for any kind of code. These devices start at the atomic level. So if you ask me, the real elves are the chemists. That's right, I said the chemists. Chemistry is the hero of electronic communications. And my goal today is to convince you to agree with me.
OK, let's start simple, and take a look inside these insanely addictive devices. Because without chemistry, what is an information superhighway that we love, would just be a really expensive, shiny paperweight. Chemistry enables all of these layers. Let's start at the display. How do you think we get those bright, vivid colors that we love so much? Well, I'll tell you. There's organic polymers embedded within the display, that can take electricity and turn it into the blue, red and green that we enjoy in our pictures.
What if we move down to the battery? Now there's some intense research. How do we take the chemical principles of traditional batteries and pair it with new, high surface area electrodes, so we can pack more charge in a smaller footprint of space, so that we could power our devices all day long, while we're taking selfies, without having to recharge our batteries or sit tethered to an electrical outlet?
What if we go to the adhesives that bind it all together, so that it could withstand our frequent usage? After all, as a millennial, I have to take my phone out at least 200 times a day to check it, and in the process, drop it two to three times.
But what are the real brains of these devices? What makes them work the way that we love them so much? Well that all has to do with electrical components and circuitry that are tethered to a printed circuit board. Or maybe you prefer a biological metaphor -- the motherboard, you might have heard of that. Now, the printed circuit board doesn't really get talked about a lot. And I'll be honest, I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because it's the least sexy layer and it's hidden beneath all of those other sleek-looking layers. But it's time to finally give this Clark Kent layer the Superman-worthy praise it deserves.
And so I ask you a question. What do you think a printed circuit board is? Well, consider a metaphor. Think about the city that you live in. You have all these points of interest that you want to get to: your home, your work, restaurants, a couple of Starbucks on every block. And so we build roads that connect them all together. That's what a printed circuit board is. Except, instead of having things like restaurants, we have transistors on chips, capacitors, resistors, all of these electrical components that need to find a way to talk to each other. And so what are our roads? Well, we build tiny copper wires.
So the next question is, how do we make these tiny copper wires? They're really small. Could it be that we go to the hardware store, pick up a spool of copper wire, get some wire cutters, a little clip-clip, saw it all up and then, bam -- we have our printed circuit board? No way. These wires are way too small for that. And so we have to rely on our friend: chemistry.
Now, the chemical process to make these tiny copper wires is seemingly simple. We start with a solution of positively charged copper spheres. We then add to it an insulating printed circuit board. And we feed those positively charged spheres negatively charged electrons by adding formaldehyde to the mix. So you might remember formaldehyde. Really distinct odor, used to preserve frogs in biology class. Well it turns out it can do a lot more than just that. And it's a really key component to making these tiny copper wires. You see, the electrons on formaldehyde have a drive. They want to jump over to those positively charged copper spheres. And that's all because of a process known as redox chemistry. And when that happens, we can take these positively charged copper spheres and turn them into bright, shiny, metallic and conductive copper. And once we have conductive copper, now we're cooking with gas. And we can get all of those electrical components to talk to each other. So thank you once again to chemistry.
And let's take a thought and think about how far we've come with chemistry. Clearly, in electronic communications, size matters. So let's think about how we can shrink down our devices, so that we can go from our 1990s Zack Morris cell phone to something a little bit more sleek, like the phones of today that can fit in our pockets. Although, let's be real here: absolutely nothing can fit into ladies' pants pockets, if you can find a pair of pants that has pockets.
(Laughter)
And I don't think chemistry can help us with that problem. But more important than shrinking the actual device, how do we shrink the circuitry inside of it, and shrink it by 100 times, so that we can take the circuitry from the micron scale all the way down to the nanometer scale? Because, let's face it, right now we all want more powerful and faster phones. Well, more power and faster requires more circuitry.
So how do we do this? It's not like we have some magic electromagnetic shrink ray, like professor Wayne Szalinski used in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" to shrink his children. On accident, of course. Or do we? Well, actually, in the field, there's a process that's pretty similar to that. And it's name is photolithography. In photolithography, we take electromagnetic radiation, or what we tend to call light, and we use it to shrink down some of that circuitry, so that we could cram more of it into a really small space.
Now, how does this work? Well, we start with a substrate that has a light-sensitive film on it. We then cover it with a mask that has a pattern on top of it of fine lines and features that are going to make the phone work the way that we want it to. We then expose a bright light and shine it through this mask, which creates a shadow of that pattern on the surface. Now, anywhere that the light can get through the mask, it's going to cause a chemical reaction to occur. And that's going to burn the image of that pattern into the substrate.
So the question you're probably asking is, how do we go from a burned image to clean fine lines and features? And for that, we have to use a chemical solution called the developer. Now the developer is special. What it can do is take all of the nonexposed areas and remove them selectively, leaving behind clean fine lines and features, and making our miniaturized devices work.
So, we've used chemistry now to build up our devices, and we've used it to shrink down our devices. So I've probably convinced you that chemistry is the true hero, and we could wrap it up there.
(Applause)
Hold on, we're not done. Not so fast. Because we're all human. And as a human, I always want more. And so now I want to think about how to use chemistry to extract more out of a device.
Right now, we're being told that we want something called 5G, or the promised fifth generation of wireless. Now, you might have heard of 5G in commercials that are starting to appear. Or maybe some of you even experienced it in the 2018 winter Olympics. What I'm most excited about for 5G is that, when I'm late, running out of the house to catch a plane, I can download movies onto my device in 40 seconds as opposed to 40 minutes. But once true 5G is here, it's going to be a lot more than how many movies we can put on our device.
So the question is, why is true 5G not here? And I'll let you in on a little secret. It's pretty easy to answer. It's just plain hard to do. You see, if you use those traditional materials and copper to build 5G devices, the signal can't make it to its final destination.
Traditionally, we use really rough insulating layers to support copper wires. Think about Velcro fasteners. It's the roughness of the two pieces that make them stick together. That's pretty important if you want to have a device that's going to last longer than it takes you to rip it out of the box and start installing all of your apps on it.
But this roughness causes a problem. You see, at the high speeds for 5G the signal has to travel close to that roughness. And it makes it get lost before it reaches its final destination. Think about a mountain range. And you have a complex system of roads that goes up and over it, and you're trying to get to the other side. Don't you agree with me that it would probably take a really long time, and you would probably get lost, if you had to go up and down all of the mountains, as opposed to if you just drilled a flat tunnel that could go straight on through? Well it's the same thing in our 5G devices. If we could remove this roughness, then we can send the 5G signal straight on through uninterrupted. Sounds pretty good, right?
But hold on. Didn't I just tell you that we needed that roughness to keep the device together? And if we remove it, we're in a situation where now the copper isn't going to stick to that underlying substrate. Think about building a house of Lego blocks, with all of the nooks and crannies that latch together, as opposed to smooth building blocks. Which of the two is going to have more structural integrity when the two-year-old comes ripping through the living room, trying to play Godzilla and knock everything down? But what if we put glue on those smooth blocks? And that's what the industry is waiting for. They're waiting for the chemists to design new, smooth surfaces with increased inherent adhesion for some of those copper wires.
And when we solve this problem, and we will solve the problem, and we'll work with physicists and engineers to solve all of the challenges of 5G, well then the number of applications is going to skyrocket. So yeah, we'll have things like self-driving cars, because now our data networks can handle the speeds and the amount of information required to make that work. But let's start to use imagination. I can imagine going into a restaurant with a friend that has a peanut allergy, taking out my phone, waving it over the food and having the food tell us a really important answer to a question -- deadly or safe to consume? Or maybe our devices will get so good at processing information about us, that they'll become like our personal trainers. And they'll know the most efficient way for us to burn calories. I know come November, when I'm trying to burn off some of these pregnancy pounds, I would love a device that could tell me how to do that.
I really don't know another way of saying it, except chemistry is just cool. And it enables all of these electronic devices. So the next time you send a text or take a selfie, think about all those atoms that are hard at work and the innovation that came before them. Who knows, maybe even some of you listening to this talk, perhaps even on your mobile device, will decide that you too want to play sidekick to Captain Chemistry, the true hero of electronic devices.
Thank you for your attention, and thank you chemistry.
How AI can save our humanity
I'm going to talk about how AI and mankind can coexist, but first, we have to rethink about our human values. So let me first make a confession about my errors in my values.
It was 11 o'clock, December 16, 1991. I was about to become a father for the first time. My wife, Shen-Ling, lay in the hospital bed going through a very difficult 12-hour labor. I sat by her bedside but looked anxiously at my watch, and I knew something that she didn't. I knew that if in one hour, our child didn't come, I was going to leave her there and go back to work and make a presentation about AI to my boss, Apple's CEO. Fortunately, my daughter was born at 11:30 --
sparing me from doing the unthinkable, and to this day, I am so sorry for letting my work ethic take precedence over love for my family.
My AI talk, however, went off brilliantly.
Apple loved my work and decided to announce it at TED1992, 26 years ago on this very stage. I thought I had made one of the biggest, most important discoveries in AI, and so did the "Wall Street Journal" on the following day.
But as far as discoveries went, it turned out, I didn't discover India, or America. Perhaps I discovered a little island off of Portugal. But the AI era of discovery continued, and more scientists poured their souls into it. About 10 years ago, the grand AI discovery was made by three North American scientists, and it's known as deep learning.
Deep learning is a technology that can take a huge amount of data within one single domain and learn to predict or decide at superhuman accuracy. For example, if we show the deep learning network a massive number of food photos, it can recognize food such as hot dog or no hot dog.
Or if we show it many pictures and videos and sensor data from driving on the highway, it can actually drive a car as well as a human being on the highway. And what if we showed this deep learning network all the speeches made by President Trump? Then this artificially intelligent President Trump, actually the network --You like double oxymorons, huh?
So this network, if given the request to make a speech about AI, he, or it, might say --
(Recording) Donald Trump: It's a great thing to build a better world with artificial intelligence.
Kai-Fu Lee: And maybe in another language?
DT: (Speaking Chinese)
KFL: You didn't know he knew Chinese, did you?
So deep learning has become the core in the era of AI discovery, and that's led by the US. But we're now in the era of implementation, where what really matters is execution, product quality, speed and data. And that's where China comes in. Chinese entrepreneurs, who I fund as a venture capitalist, are incredible workers, amazing work ethic. My example in the delivery room is nothing compared to how hard people work in China. As an example, one startup tried to claim work-life balance: "Come work for us because we are 996." And what does that mean? It means the work hours of 9am to 9pm, six days a week. That's contrasted with other startups that do 997.
And the Chinese product quality has consistently gone up in the past decade, and that's because of a fiercely competitive environment. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs compete in a very gentlemanly fashion, sort of like in old wars in which each side took turns to fire at each other.
But in the Chinese environment, it's truly a gladiatorial fight to the death. In such a brutal environment, entrepreneurs learn to grow very rapidly, they learn to make their products better at lightning speed, and they learn to hone their business models until they're impregnable. As a result, great Chinese products like WeChat and Weibo are arguably better than the equivalent American products from Facebook and Twitter.
And the Chinese market embraces this change and accelerated change and paradigm shifts. As an example, if any of you go to China, you will see it's almost cashless and credit card-less, because that thing that we all talk about, mobile payment, has become the reality in China. In the last year, 18.8 trillion US dollars were transacted on mobile internet, and that's because of very robust technologies built behind it. It's even bigger than the China GDP. And this technology, you can say, how can it be bigger than the GDP? Because it includes all transactions: wholesale, channels, retail, online, offline, going into a shopping mall or going into a farmers market like this. The technology is used by 700 million people to pay each other, not just merchants, so it's peer to peer, and it's almost transaction-fee-free. And it's instantaneous, and it's used everywhere. And finally, the China market is enormous. This market is large, which helps give entrepreneurs more users, more revenue, more investment, but most importantly, it gives the entrepreneurs a chance to collect a huge amount of data which becomes rocket fuel for the AI engine. So as a result, the Chinese AI companies have leaped ahead so that today, the most valuable companies in computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and drones are all Chinese companies.
So with the US leading the era of discovery and China leading the era of implementation, we are now in an amazing age where the dual engine of the two superpowers are working together to drive the fastest revolution in technology that we have ever seen as humans. And this will bring tremendous wealth, unprecedented wealth: 16 trillion dollars, according to PwC, in terms of added GDP to the worldwide GDP by 2030. It will also bring immense challenges in terms of potential job replacements. Whereas in the Industrial Age it created more jobs because craftsman jobs were being decomposed into jobs in the assembly line, so more jobs were created. But AI completely replaces the individual jobs in the assembly line with robots. And it's not just in factories, but truckers, drivers and even jobs like telesales, customer service and hematologists as well as radiologists over the next 15 years are going to be gradually replaced by artificial intelligence. And only the creative jobs --
I have to make myself safe, right? Really, the creative jobs are the ones that are protected, because AI can optimize but not create.
But what's more serious than the loss of jobs is the loss of meaning, because the work ethic in the Industrial Age has brainwashed us into thinking that work is the reason we exist, that work defined the meaning of our lives. And I was a prime and willing victim to that type of workaholic thinking. I worked incredibly hard. That's why I almost left my wife in the delivery room, that's why I worked 996 alongside my entrepreneurs. And that obsession that I had with work ended abruptly a few years ago when I was diagnosed with fourth stage lymphoma. The PET scan here shows over 20 malignant tumors jumping out like fireballs, melting away my ambition. But more importantly, it helped me reexamine my life. Knowing that I may only have a few months to live caused me to see how foolish it was for me to base my entire self-worth on how hard I worked and the accomplishments from hard work. My priorities were completely out of order. I neglected my family. My father had passed away, and I never had a chance to tell him I loved him. My mother had dementia and no longer recognized me, and my children had grown up.
During my chemotherapy, I read a book by Bronnie Ware who talked about dying wishes and regrets of the people in the deathbed. She found that facing death, nobody regretted that they didn't work hard enough in this life. They only regretted that they didn't spend enough time with their loved ones and that they didn't spread their love.
So I am fortunately today in remission.
So I can be back at TED again to share with you that I have changed my ways. I now only work 965 -- occasionally 996, but usually 965. I moved closer to my mother, my wife usually travels with me, and when my kids have vacation, if they don't come home, I go to them. So it's a new form of life that helped me recognize how important it is that love is for me, and facing death helped me change my life, but it also helped me see a new way of how AI should impact mankind and work and coexist with mankind, that really, AI is taking away a lot of routine jobs, but routine jobs are not what we're about.
Why we exist is love. When we hold our newborn baby, love at first sight, or when we help someone in need, humans are uniquely able to give and receive love, and that's what differentiates us from AI.
Despite what science fiction may portray, I can responsibly tell you that AI has no love. When AlphaGo defeated the world champion Ke Jie, while Ke Jie was crying and loving the game of go, AlphaGo felt no happiness from winning and certainly no desire to hug a loved one.
So how do we differentiate ourselves as humans in the age of AI? We talked about the axis of creativity, and certainly that is one possibility, and now we introduce a new axis that we can call compassion, love, or empathy. Those are things that AI cannot do. So as AI takes away the routine jobs, I like to think we can, we should and we must create jobs of compassion. You might ask how many of those there are, but I would ask you: Do you not think that we are going to need a lot of social workers to help us make this transition? Do you not think we need a lot of compassionate caregivers to give more medical care to more people? Do you not think we're going to need 10 times more teachers to help our children find their way to survive and thrive in this brave new world? And with all the newfound wealth, should we not also make labors of love into careers and let elderly accompaniment or homeschooling become careers also?
This graph is surely not perfect, but it points at four ways that we can work with AI. AI will come and take away the routine jobs and in due time, we will be thankful. AI will become great tools for the creatives so that scientists, artists, musicians and writers can be even more creative. AI will work with humans as analytical tools that humans can wrap their warmth around for the high-compassion jobs. And we can always differentiate ourselves with the uniquely capable jobs that are both compassionate and creative, using and leveraging our irreplaceable brains and hearts. So there you have it: a blueprint of coexistence for humans and AI.
AI is serendipity. It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human. So let us choose to embrace AI and to love one another.
Thank you.