The Philanthropy Handbook by Tej Kohli (Chapter Five - Frontier Technologies and Exponential Impact)
A Serialisation Of 'Rebuilding You: The Philanthropy Handbook' by Tej Kohli
If you are contemplating a move into philanthropy today, then you are doing so at an unprecedented time in human history. A chain reaction of rapid technological development across science and technology is unlocking brand new and novel solutions, and with them come unprecedented new opportunities to solve major human problems. Many of these solutions need to be incubated and their potential ‘proven’ in order to stimulate widespread adoption, and it is here that there are tremendous opportunities for you as a philanthropist.
Frontier Technologies
Many philanthropists come from an entrepreneurial background, and many have built successful commercial enterprises or pioneered new technology solutions before. This expertise is absolutely critical to unlocking the potential of these new and frontier technologies in a way that can have an exponential global impact. With the exception of the development of new medicines such as penicillin, the overall scope of opportunity for individuals to truly make the world a better place has historically been narrow. But today there is a hugely rich and fertile landscape of new opportunities to improve human life.
Something that you must consider is whether your existing expertise might lend themselves to finding new ‘philanthropic applications for existing technologies, or whether your expertise might enable the combination of existing technologies to drive humanitarian outcomes?
I have long been fascinated by deep tech and frontier technologies. When I started my conglomerate of technology companies in 1999, we were figuring out a vast array of brand new frontier technologies, combining them to building brand solutions and applications, and then competing in a constant arms race to remain ahead. By the time that I left in 2006 my company employed armies of software developers in Costa Rica and in India. And this experience as a technologist is now also threaded through my objectives and ambitions as a philanthropist.
My real point is that we are now at a watershed moment in human history where philanthropists need not follow the precedents set by those who have come before them but can instead synthesise brand new ways to create positive human impact.
In particular, the opportunity to innovate solutions that could eliminate specific areas of human suffering entirely, rather than merely alleviating them, is very real, and requires a type of thinking that is not hindered by the status quo of what came before.
The current scope to innovate with new and frontier technologies means that being a philanthropist and a technologist can quickly become one and the same thing, and so it is also fortunate that many ‘new’ philanthropists come from a technology background.
AI and Humanitarian Robotics
I strongly believe that AI and ‘humanitarian robotics’ have the potential to drive innovations that will alleviate human suffering and hardship, both directly and indirectly. I also believe that humanitarian efforts the world over will be greatly advanced by these emerging technologies as they continue their exponential growth.
Back in 1962, Doug Engelbart hypothesized that the future of humanity lay not in replacing humans but in augmenting them. His work culminated in the invention of the computer mouse, which is still remembered by many as “the mother of all demos.” After Apple and Microsoft repackaged it for commercial deployment, the mouse changed the course of modern life and human productivity. Similarly, at this inflection point of robotics, I believe that we are on the verge of a game-changing advances in productivity that will enable humans to accomplish much more.
This is all very relevant for would-be philanthropists.
Whilst I am equally optimistic that new technologies will continually amplify and augment our natural human abilities, I also think that some of the most exciting opportunities that technologies such as AI and robotics can bring us lie in solving the most basic human problems – some of them millennia old. These solutions to seemingly intractable human problems are most likely to emerge from cutting-edge science and technology labs and startups. Creating better food systems and solving climate change are as much data problems and computer science problems as anything else, and so we should embrace and tackle them in the same way.
This creates a dichotomy for new philanthropists that can only be solved through deference to your own personal preferences. Is it better to feed tens of thousands of starving people right now, or to use those funds to develop technology solutions that might prevent the starvation of millions of people in the future?
You will therefore need to decide what relative value you place on helping people right now versus the possibility of helping a lot more people in the future. Equally you must weigh up directing your wealth into alleviation versus directing it into elimination.
These are huge and extremely difficult decisions the outcome of which, unlike most commercial decisions, might directly impact thousands of people who are in need of help. And of course, whilst one can endeavour to ‘do both’, inevitably sharing resources across ‘direct interventions’ and ‘future solutions’ means that those resources are ultimately diluted across the objectives.
But that is not to diminish the importance of developing solutions. A great many basic human problems and deep technological challenges have more in common than many people realize. And it may take pioneering and risk-taking philanthropists like you bring them into alignment and create proofs for all sorts of novel new applications.
Combination Technologies
Take for example artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Both are frontier technologies that are locked into an exponential growth trajectory. They are the favoured focus of philanthropy for titans such Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Larry Page because of their immense promise to improve how we experience every aspect of our lives. And today there is enormous potential for the symbiotic combination of these technologies to create metamorphic new solutions to major human challenges.
A starting point is to consider the pace of recent developments. Biotechnology has been improving by a factor of ten every year in terms of cost benefit. The cost of deciphering the human genome has dropped from $3 billion in 2001, to about $1,000 today. What took many months ten years ago can now be done in less than one hour. And based on current developments, PricewaterhouseCoopers thinks that the global AI economy will be worth $15.7 trillion by 2030 – more than the current output of China and India combined.
And I believe that these predictions still underestimate many factors. I have previously predicted that AI will be so manifest within all aspects of life, and that the applications are so broad, that the AI economy will worth four times that of the Internet: today worth $50 trillion. And I also believe that the siloed nature of analysis means that the future potential of AI and biotech as combined technologies is yet to be fully comprehended or valued.
Blockchain and Organ Donation
For context, take for example a global health issue such as the global organ donation crisis. More than 100,800 solid organ transplants are performed each year worldwide according to the World Health Organisation.
In the USA there are 113,700 people waiting for a life-saving organ transplant, yet approximately 8,000 good organs are discarded each year. There are 100,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant in the USA, and previously their options have been limited: they had to find someone who was willing to donate a kidney who was also a viable biological match; or wait for a viable deceased donor in their local hospital.
Yet given enough willing donors, it has now become possible to form a pool of data that is big enough to facilitate significantly more matches than this localised old one-to-one system allowed for. Artificial intelligence, with its ability to learn from large quantities of data, has enabled a system of paired kidney donation across these huge data sets. As long as a patient can procure a donor – even a donor that is not a match – then they could get a matching kidney because AI matches donors to recipients across huge numbers of patient-donor relationships stored within a blockchain.
So a person stepping forward to donate a kidney to a loved one – or even to a stranger – can set off a ‘blockchain reaction’ which then saves dozens of lives.
Since the first paired kidney exchanges took place in 2000, thousands of people have already received kidney transplants from paired exchanges identified by algorithms. But this could be just the start of the use of AI in organ transplantation. Currently AI can identify potential donors and recipients who are suited for one another, but in the future, it may also be able to take patient data, and even moral factors, and weigh them to determine who gets a transplant first.
Whilst this all sounds like a very promising example of artificial intelligence improving human life, there is however a practical limitation that prevents these AI models expanding to their true global potential. And it is biological. In theory AI could be expanded into data sets encompassing all organ donors and all patients on a national or global basis. But the practical reality is that a heart or lung only stays viable for transplantation for six hours. A pancreas or kidney can only be kept viable for transplantation for up to twelve hours.
The limitation is therefore not in the ability of AI and blockchain to match organs with donors – but to reconcile those pairings within the real world. And this is where synthetic biotechnology may soon play a role. The global synthetic biology market is growing fast and is expected to exceed $12.5 billion by 2024 with a CAGR of 20%. I have personal investment exposure to this opportunity through my investment into Detraxi, a Florida-based synthetic biotechnology company that is developing proprietary solutions to global health issues.
Detraxi has an exciting vision for a solution that enables the preservation and even the regeneration of organs outside of the body for many days at an ambient temperature. It could take years to perfect the technology, which at the time of writing is being tested at John’s Hopkins University. But if successful, this type of biotech could enable the preservation and transport of viable organs over greater distances and longer time periods. And with the time that an organ can remain viable greatly extended, the geographic pools of patients and donors could also be greatly expanded, thus unlocking the network effect within organ pairing AI models that would improve speed and efficiency and greatly improve the overall efficacy of the entire global organ donation regime, saving tens of thousands of lives.
Eight lives can potentially be saved by just one deceased organ donor. The combination of technologies such as AI and biotech could soon mean that this potential is never wasted. I find that very exciting indeed.
Technology for Good
For me this is a good example of why as rapid exponential technological progression continues, philanthropists must continually seek to unlock new combinations technologies to solve our biggest human challenges.
Around the world, AI is already transforming developing countries. In Nepal, machine learning has been utilised to map and analyse and prioritize reconstruction needs after earthquakes. Across Africa, AI tutors are helping young students to catch up on coursework. NGOs and humanitarian aid agencies are using big data analytics to optimise the delivery of supplies for refugees fleeing conflict and other hardships. And in India rural farmers are being encouraged to use AI to improve crop yields and boost profits. Innovations like these bring us closer to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on issues like eradicating poverty, ending health-care inequality, increasing access to schooling, and combating global warming.
And yet the world is only just scratching the surface of what new technologies could do for human progress. To harness technology’s power to advance development, we must find new ways to apply it.
With the support of philanthropists like you, the skies above developing countries could be filled with drones delivering medical supplies to remote hospitals. This is already happening in rural Rwanda, where a unique partnership between the Health Ministry and Zipline, a Silicon Valley-based tech start-up, is giving doctors in hard-to-reach clinics the ability to order blood by text message, and to then have it arrive by parachute in a matter of minutes. Since the program launched in October 2016, delivery times have been cut by a factor of five, and thousands of lives have been saved.
Philanthropists and technologists – who may be one and the same - must continue to identify the projects, initiatives, think tanks, and organizations that would benefit from new applications of artificial intelligence firms – like Zipline in Rwanda.
And conversations about developing technologies for humanitarian purposes cannot be left to NGOs, charities, and governments. Philanthropists have far more latitude to take risks and to prove concepts long before these larger organisations are able to make their decisions.
My advice to you therefore is that even when as a philanthropist you find yourself dealing with highly emotive issues, at times you must force yourself to adopt a cold and hard logic. You must refuse the accept the status quo and not forget that opportunities for new solutions may exist today that did not exist a year ago.
And that means that sometimes even the ‘experts’ may overlook opportunities to apply new technologies to create an exponential positive human impact.
Do not discount the role of technology in your philanthropy. It really can change the world.