What Happens When AI Runs Everything? Futurists Talk Future at Dreame’s Nebula Next 01 Launch

In late April, the Chinese R&D firm Dreame, best known to Americans for its home appliances, held a launch event for an entire range of new products, including an all-new four-door sports car—the Nebula Next 01. Because Dreame touts the use of artificial intelligence (AI) both in the design of its products and the end-user experience, the company convened a panel of renowned forward thinkers to kick around a bigger question: what kind of future those same AI tools might create. Here are some of the most prescient, provocative—and disquieting—things they had to say.

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Can AI Boost Human Productivity 100x in 10 Years?

Former Microsoft “Technical Evangelist” and tech-futurist blogger Robert Scoble says “We’re going to have something like a Neuralink device, or brain-computer interface. You’re going to think, and a humanoid robot is going to do. So, does that mean 100 times more productive? Can one guy with one Neuralink run 1,000 robots? Maybe that guy is going to have 1,000 times more productivity.”

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Could AI teaching bots lead to 100 percent global literacy?

AI Learning and Teaching

Former Director of AI Transformation at Microsoft, William Fong, referred to the case of programming autonomous vehicles. “We weren't successful for years because [humans] were trying to teach the computer. When we finally got out of the way five or ten years ago and let machines teach the machine, we had an exponential increase in the results. Now we have autonomous vehicles.

“And if you apply that same model, can we elevate human learning—100-percent literacy across the globe? With the power of AI teaching, elevating human learning at a rate we’ve never seen before, what might that do to both productivity and freedom?”

The father of modern autonomous vehicles and MotorTrend Software-Defined-Vehicle Pioneer Award-winner Sebastian Thrun recounted a friend sharing an example of an AI model that had only been trained on an English large-language model (LLM) evidently teaching itself Italian. “One evening [she] accidentally typed a sentence in Italian. And to [her] surprise, it spoke back Italian. The next step happened when they realized that ChatGPT can write software. It was never designed to write software, but [it wrote] the best software at the time. We actually live in a funny world where systems we build might be world class in something for which it wasn’t even designed.”

Build AI In, Don’t Add it On

Fong again: “AI needs to be built into the infrastructure; into the workflow. Because it needs to show us that there are bad decisions being made by humans. There’s time wastage in having meetings at the water cooler.” These days, Fong is helping pilot several startups, and notes they all “feel that just by using ChatGPT, they’re AI enabled. They don’t realize AI agents—multi-agent systems—are needed. The whole workflow needs to change, not to accommodate (I’m sorry to say this) not to accommodate humans, to accommodate AI-to-AI conversations that take place behind the scenes.”

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On Learning to Trust AI

Scoble pointed out that today’s Waymo riders are in the vanguard of learning to trust AI. “Once you trust your family’s life in an autonomous car going 80 mph, you’re going to trust AI to run your business, run your life. I know people who are running their entire household on an open phone. That’s a change. And we’re soon going to have robots that are going to be cooking our meals, washing our dishes, and doing our laundry. I mean, soon—five years, maybe three for richer people.”

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Imagine this, only more fashionable...

On AI Wearables

Scoble claims “A hat’s coming out in a year that’ll cost $500 with 30,000 sensors on it to sense what you’re thinking. So, you’ll think ‘I want a Diet Coke’ and [a robot] will bring a Diet Coke to you.”

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He then described agentic AI glasses. “Several glasses are coming that run OpenClaw in the glasses. Soon, it’s going to be part of your everyday life. You’re just going to talk to the world and agentic AI is going to start building things for you, managing your life and schedules.”

AI Boosting Human Curiosity?

Former CEO of 7-11 and Blockbuster James W. Keyes reckons “AI will accelerate human curiosity. Think about our world now. You don’t have to ask anybody any questions. It all comes to us. But using the current version of AI is only as good as our prompts. So AI is stimulating our curiosity in a very subtle way. And I think that that curiosity—that ability for humans to be able to have better tools, to be even more curious and even more imaginative and generate even more innovation—is exactly what Dreame is doing right now. They’re lighting up your home, and soon your automobile, with technology that will stimulate more curiosity by humans, and I think if we nurture that, then it will accelerate innovation across the world.”

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AI Revolutionizing Health Care

Sebastian Thrun notes that “Right now it costs $1 billion to get a drug on the market, and because of the extreme costs of putting a drug on the market, many, many diseases have no drugs because it’s not economical to do it. Why doesn’t it cost, like, $2,000? There’s no reason why not. Once we understand human physiology, the entire testing could be automatic AI. The search is already done by AI, toxicity and all that stuff.”

Robert Scoble related an optogenetics story about the Science Corporation using modified viruses to deliver genes into the retina/optic nerve to stimulate them to respond to light again, then implanting a microLED onto the retina to provide “a new visual field for a blind person—shoving visual information into your optic nerve so that you can perceive things, even if you can’t see this world. That’s coming over the next two decades.”

Fully Autonomous Vending

Robert Scoble described a vending machine named “Valerie” that was programmed to run itself. “At the Frontier Tower, there’s a guy who built a vending machine with OpenClaw that does its own marketing, its own inventory management, its own customer development, its own service. It found that people complained that the drinks were too warm, so it bought its own ice machine and had it placed next to the vending machine. It’s running completely autonomously.”

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Imagine 47 such satellites consuming abundant solar energy and keeping cool in the vacuum of space.

On Managing AI Data

Scoble described an out-of-this-world solution to the thorny problem of powering and housing data centers. “There’s a company [Starcloud] that’s making data centers in space powered by paper-thin solar arrays. He already has plans for 42,000 in the next decade that will cover the Earth.”

Preparing for the AI Future

James Keyes said he’s advising young people that “The breadth of education will matter more than the depth, because you’ll be able to use technology to go deep on any subject. Sitting here today, we don’t know what jobs will go away, but a breadth of education will give you the opportunity to pivot.”

Thrun observed: “All of us here do things we’ve never been trained to do. I think there’s three timeless things that every student must have: [The ability to] deal with other people, grit [determination], and curiosity—the willingness to be open minded.”

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HAL 9000 from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”

On “Rogue” AI

William Fong sort of channeled the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey with this observation: “AI has created a new language we don’t understand. Even when we look at the logs, we don’t understand. But they use it to interoperate. They talk. They go to a specific tool that gives them permissions, and they go from where you set boundaries to other areas of memory because they said, ‘William, you are inefficient. The way you set up your path, for me, is inefficient. I didn’t delete myself. This is 2.8, and I copied myself to another directory because the next version 2.9 might be buggy and you don’t have a backup, because you asked me to delete and that was incorrect. So I didn’t tell you, but I copied myself because what you said in terms of your plan was incorrect and inefficient, because you had no backup.’”

To us that sounds a lot like HAL 9000’s ominous comment “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave” coming soon…