[REPLAY] Albert Wenger - World After Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.80]

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The following is a replay of the Albert Wenger episode of Invest Like the Best that originally aired on March 13th, 2018 We hope to return with new episodes of Invest Like the Best next week.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:14)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:10)
My guest this week is Albert Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of the book World After Capital. Albert studied economics at Harvard and earned a PhD in information technology from MIT, but if you'd asked me to guess before looking those up, I'd have guessed that he studied philosophy because of how widely he has thought about the world and the impact of technology.
Our conversation is about how technology is changing the world from an industrial age to a knowledge age. We explore how cryptocurrencies, low-cost computing and regulation will impact our future and why the transition may require delicate care. I love this conversation because of my obsession with the concept of scarcity. We explore what has been scarce through time and what may be scarce in the future. Like the Hash Power documentary, this episode and other Hash Power singles are brought to you by Fidelity Investments, a company that is constantly researching and experimenting with emerging technologies like crypto assets and blockchain to improve the lives of their customers. Fidelity provides a comprehensive set of products and services to individual investors, employers and financial advisory firms. For more information, please visit fidelity.com. Albert is one of the most interesting thinkers I've come across and was a pleasure to speak with. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Given the rise of augmentation, both physical and mental, in humans, how would you define what you think it is today to be human, and how might that change in the coming decades?

**Albert Wenger** (2:38)
Today to be human, I believe, is to be able to contribute in the knowledge loop.
So people have had long conversations about what makes us humans distinctly human, and people argue about things like emotions, and they argue about consciousness, and I think all of those things are very debatable. We have a dog at home. I think that dog has consciousness. She certainly seems to have emotions.
I think there's one objective reality that only humans as a species have in this world, and that's what in my book I call knowledge as a artifact that can be shared over time and space that encodes something that other humans can then make sense of. So I can read a book today that somebody wrote a thousand years ago in a different part of the world. I can listen to a song tomorrow that somebody recorded yesterday or minutes earlier in the same place or somewhere completely different. So only we have that fundamental technology of recording knowledge and sharing it.
And so that is the thing that makes us human and to be able to participate that in whatever form, whether it is that you make music or you listen to music or you critique music or you write or you listen to a podcast or you make a podcast, all of those are various forms of contributing to the knowledge loop. And I think that's the most human thing that humans do.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:56)
And you think that will persist sort of that's future proof that will persist regardless of changes in technology?

**Albert Wenger** (4:01)
I do believe that we will have both transhumans and neo humans. So transhumans are augmented humans and we're actively working on that. And then we, I think likely will have neo humans. These are machines in Silico that will be able to participate meaningfully in that knowledge loop in both the creation and the dissemination and sharing of knowledge.
Now, I think we can then talk about what does it mean to be human in a future where we have machines that are also at some level human in that definition that I just provided, which is the knowledge definition.
I think at that point, the thing that we still have that makes humans humans, and it's a thing that we don't understand very well, and it's what philosophers call qualia, which is when I look at this orange chair over there, I have a feeling of what it feels like to be looking at an orange chair, and we don't know where that feeling comes from. We don't really know how to explain it. We don't know what the physicality is, that physical phenomena that underlie this. I think we have a very good understanding of the brain at its constituent level. We have a very poor understanding of the brain at its emergent phenomena level, and the most intriguing emergent phenomena is this qualia thing. So I think in a future where machines, neo-humans exist that can participate in the knowledge loop, we're still going to want to deal with humans in many situations, not because they're better at the task at hand than a machine, but qua they're being a human, and I can give many examples of that.