APILama

Hello, everyone. Let’s create a story together. So, first of all, I’m Michael, and I love stories. Actually, most importantly, for me at least, I love comic books. 

So since I was a young child, I always wanted to have superpowers. I didn’t really care if I was the superhero or the super villain, I just wanted superpowers. So, you know, when I got the invitation to come here, I was thinking, okay, you know, like, that’s my opportunity to say a story and create a comic book so I started thinking about what should i say? So, my wife loves horses, so I said okay I’m gonna create a superhero who gets the powers from a horse. So, I created Horseman. And obviously, one thing you need to know about me, because I’m a technologist, I’m really bad at drawing or creating stories, you know, I just code.

Creating a story

So I went to my friend, artificial intelligence, from now on I’m going to use the term AI, and I said, okay, you know, we’re going to do something nice together. So I went to AI and I said, okay, let’s create our first comic book about… Horseman!

So those are the keywords I started using because I wanted to create a comic stripe with a rescue scene. And because I like the Lucky Look style, I said, okay, let’s give it a try. And this is what we created together. Actually, most of the work was done by AI. Isn’t it amazing? So after I created a full story of it, I said, perfect. What if I play a little bit more? So I said, what if I take the scene and I move it to a Sky-Fi feature and see how this is going to look like?

AI

So this is what we created together. So I said, wow, that’s really good. So without me being able to create comic books, I created two variations. I created whole stories. Actually, I created way, way, way more as I was playing with it. And I said, okay. That’s perfect! I managed to do something that I wasn’t able to. 

But let’s focus a little bit on Horseman. Horseman has the amazing ability to come from Athens to Patras in four to five hours running. That’s amazing, right? That’s amazing!! But I managed to come with a car in just a couple of hours. More interestingly, to come to this talk, I had to fly from Ireland in less than a day. So, you know, I don’t have any superpowers, but horsemen would need more than a week to come from Ireland running. 

So, what’s special about me? Do I have something that is unique on me, or do I just use the plane and the car? So, from the invention of the wheel, as species, as humanity, what we’ve been doing is that we can go longer, faster, carrying more weight. So, is that it? We can just go faster to places? Or do we have more superpowers? 

So, you guessed it right, we have way, way more superpowers. We can grow a lot of food, we can build skyscrapers, we can cure ourselves, and we can do way, way, way more amazing things. But does this stop there? Is that it? Discover all the superpowers that we could get?

Technology

The answer is no. Actually, I’m really amazed about what’s coming. So, first of all, quantum computing is a new technology that we’ve been talking about for decades, and it’s going to revolutionize a lot of computing. I’m going to refer to that a little bit later. 

So, the next technology that I’m going to speak a little bit is Metaverse. Actually, I see a lot of you here are young audience. I’m sure you’re playing online games, MMO RPGs, whatever. And that’s the type of Metaverse, but Metaverse can do way, way more things. Virtual reality, augmented reality, hybrid realities.

So another technology I wanted to mention here, even though it’s not so appealing, is Web3. Because our whole civilization is based on document exchange, we create a lot of paperwork, we exchange paperwork, and that’s at the core of everything we’re building in society, so that comes to revolutionize that. Biotechnology, okay, you know, a lot of you already expect what I’m going to say, has to do more with our evolution as a species, of having synthetic organs, or extend our lifespan with a lot of upgrades in a few years. 

And obviously, AI, and I’m not really going to talk about this a lot here, because you all know what I’m referring to. It’s the most popular topic, at least for the last year. So, as I was creating that slide, and I was saying, okay, you know, that’s it, that’s an interesting topic, but how is the future going to look like? Let’s all imagine, in our future, in 100 years, when we have all those technologies matured enough, how that future is going to look like. So I actually asked my friend AI, “AI, what do you think? How is it going to look like?” And my friend AI, she created that. So actually, I couldn’t zoom enough, but it’s very, very interesting how she thought about the future. She actually combined everything with all the technologies that we have today to think about that. 

Workplace

So I’m going to focus here in a couple of use cases. So use case number one is workplace. So when I started working with my current team 10 years ago, we couldn’t pay rent. So we started using all the technologies available to us, and we started doing online calls, we started using all the free tools that were available, digital tools, and slowly we started actually scaling and competing with giants, and everybody thought we were a big company, but we were just five to six people at this time using all the technology that was available to us. I’m just going to use the word cloud computing, but I’m not going to go deeper. 

Some other interesting use cases that we will see in the near future, it’s going to combine Metaverse and we’re going to see our friends, our AI friends being in the Metaverse sitting in boardroom with us. 

They’re going to have full body and they’re going to help us on our everyday tasks. Something that really struck me a few days back, I saw a very interesting use case from a company who managed to use generative AI to take a complicated task from an agent that works on a retail shop selling furniture to a hotel chain. And they were taking this whole task that would take a few days up to a week, and they were making that instant. 

Healthcare

And the other interesting use case that’s one of my favorite is healthcare. Healthcare is one of my favorite topics and I’m just going to take you back to the COVID era. So when COVID happened, what we saw is that we were able to accelerate innovation and take vaccine development from years, just weeks and actually a few months. What actually made that possible? Actually, except from our amazing doctors and biologists, what was available was amazing computational power, the data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. So all that accelerated the innovation to get our vaccines very, very quickly. Obviously, you’ve seen robots doing surgeries for the last two decades and making the most difficult operations, actually. And the last thing, as I promised earlier, is quantum computing. And here I’m going to refer a little bit to the future of what’s coming on healthcare. So if we actually manage to unlock the full potential of quantum computing, what will happen is that we will change the human genome. So for the last 200,000 years, we as a species, the Homo sapiens, haven’t really changed. Yes, maybe a few things here and there, but we’re more or less the same. With quantum computing, we will have upgrades, and we will be able to cure almost every disease that we know today. That’s going to make us more or less immortals. 

The Human Position in the New World

Isn’t that it? With all the superpowers that we’re getting, we’re going to become invisible, invincible, faster, stronger, even immortals. So, all those superpowers are just created for us, right? Because we, as humans, we love, we have friends, we have ambitions, we have passions. 

We are part of a bigger community. So, all the superpowers are only relevant for humans. They don’t exist outside of us. And for me, you know, that’s very very interesting and I cannot stop myself by thinking about how, you know, humans are gonna look like in the near future. I’m hopeful, you know, we’re gonna have all the upgrades and um we’re gonna become, you know, more powerful. And, you know, like, maybe we somehow utilize everything, like AI, as I say here. 

The Importance of Ethics

So, but as we become all those amazing things, and we become super humans, super heroes, maybe super villains, I don’t know, what should we look at? Obviously, for me personally, as a technologist, as an entrepreneur, when I build something, I always think, okay, this is what I’m building for the better of the society, for my friends? Is the creation that I have in my mind and data I create good? Okay, maybe that’s fine, but I’m not just an inventor. I’m also a consumer, and most of us here are consumers. And all of us here in that room, we have an amazing technology in our pockets called smartphones. So on smartphones you have all the best algorithms available out there. You have the best chips. You have amazing screens. I mean, my phone now folds these days. Wow. So, as consumers, we also have the ability and also we need to take care of how we use our technology. It’s in all of us to decide how we better utilize those technologies for the better good. Because this is what’s going to make technologies of the future to build those. 

Preserving our Humanity in a Tech-Driven World

So I want to remind everybody that today we’re speaking about superpowers. Superpowers that are available to all of us. And those superpowers are just tools. I just want to emphasize on those. They’re just parts of a bigger machine. and they’re only relevant to humans. So, as humans, we have this responsibility to understand those, and we have to really remain humans. We need to focus on our humanity and reach within the two worlds. 

I’m just going to give you a personal example. I’ve never run in my life, and a month ago, I finished the Athens Marathon. So how did that happen? I have my friend here, a smartwatch with AI, that helped me train and get through that. 

So together we managed to finish this marathon. 

So it’s on us to understand how to utilize the superpowers. But more than that, we need to think about the future and we need to think about the world. I’m starting to think a little bit more about how eventually I’m going to become a father. And I’m thinking, what is the next stage? Right now, how we can help with all of our superpowers the world become a better place. How we can leave something better for children. And last but not least, I want to invite all of you here today to understand how we use technology. Every day we use it, some of us we invent it, and we always need to think, is it for the better good? 

Thank you very much!