Reed Hastings

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“One Of These Might Come In A Pill”

November 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Not having to worry about food or shelter allows people to stop and dream, and those in possession of obscene wealth are often given to the most outsize visions of all. Money is a hallucinogenic.

Netflix Founder and billionaire disruptor Reed Hastings fears that in the near future you won’t tune in but instead turn on. He believes entertainment might soon become chiefly pharmaceutical, even more than it already is, all nice and legal. Binge-watching would be replaced by pill-taking, which would be bad for his bottom line.

From Dom Galeon at Futurism:

IT’S PHARMACOLOGICAL

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made an interesting prediction two days ago. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJD Live 2016, Hastings spoke of better entertainment substitutes for movies and TV shows in the future. One of these might come in a pill.

After talking about the possibility of an AT&T/Time Warner merger, the Netflix boss unexpectedly veered toward the future of an industry that’s largely been screen-based. Netflix’s competition, according to Hastings, is anything that takes the viewer’s attention away from the screen. For the future, the real challenge is to figure out what will take back this attention, he says. “Is it VR, is it gaming, is it pharmacological?” he asked, according to TechCrunch.

He added: “In twenty or fifty years, taking a personalized blue pill you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable.” It’s an idea straight out of The Matrix and, more recently, featured in a video game called Watch Dogs.

“And if the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble,” said a not-so-chill Netflix boss.•

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“As AI Accelerates, He Predicts That So, Too, Will The Ability To Augment Our Genetic Code”

January 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Echoing what physicist Stephen Hsu wrote in Nautilus in 2015 (a piece that made the “50 Great 2015 Articles Online for Free” list), Reed Hastings of Netflix believes the future will see a race between engineered humans and Intelligent AI. To me, that seems the most likely outcome. In the very long run, we will probably increasingly drive our own evolution. We’ll be the “existential risk” to what Homo sapiens currently is.

From Chris O’Brien at Venturebeat:

During a conversation on stage today at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, Hastings said he was far less worried about looming threats of an AI-triggered apocalypse than are many other observers, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk.

“Some people worry about what happens when machine intelligence is too strong,” Hastings said. “That’s like worrying about our Mars colony and people being overweight on our Mars colony. We can deal with that later.”

He emphasized, rather, that machine intelligence is just beginning to be felt, through applications like Netflix’s recommendation engine. But he expects that impact to accelerate and predicted that the world is only five to 15 years away from a time when we can hold a three-person conversation and not be sure which of the three is a machine.

Even then, Hastings believes all will not be lost for the puny human race. As AI accelerates, he predicts that so, too, will the ability to augment our genetic code.•

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