Why Optimism Matters In The AI Age: Inside Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots

It is hard to put Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots LIVE into “a box” and just label it as one thing. Imagine one part Star Trek convention, one part XPRIZE competition and one part live taping of the Moonshots podcast, then put 1,500 entrepreneurs, scientists, investors, technologists and creators inside a historic Los Angeles theater to consider what humanity could accomplish as artificial intelligence and other technologies advance exponentially.

Diamandis called it the “Oscars for Optimists.” But after two days of recurring Star Trek references, XPRIZE contestants, along with mind-expanding conversations about all the good things we can do with AI (along with some “moonshot thinking”), I came away believing something more consequential was happening. Moonshots LIVE was making the case for optimism at precisely the moment when optimism can seem in short supply.

To be clear, i’m not encouraging we have blind optimism. I’ve worked in tech long enough to know there are always risks, issues and displacements. And no, I don’t believe that AI will magically solve every problem. AI presents real challenges involving employment, cybersecurity, misinformation, inequality, concentration of power and human agency. The more useful definition of optimism is the one embedded in the Moonshots philosophy: problems are solvable, and we have an obligation to try to solve them.

That distinction matters because we are entering what I think of as the exponential intelligence curve.

For most of human history, intelligence has been scarce. It resided almost entirely in human beings. We educated people, organized them into institutions and built software to make their work more productive. AI changes that equation because we are beginning to manufacture intelligence at enormous scale.

The implications are much larger than chatbots.

Peter Diamandis And The Architecture Of Optimism

Moonshots LIVE took that philosophy and turned it into a community.