This special episode is the fifth of 5 talks delivered on stage at StartWell's Event Space on King St W in downtown Toronto on November 28, 2019 for a globally roaming annual series called Dark Futures.

This talk was presented by Nikola Danaylov, founder of Singularity Media Inc, and is titled "NeoTechnocracy The Future is Worse than You Think."

*Dark Futures is presented by globally renowned Futurist, speaker, researcher, and author Nikolas Badminton. (https://nikolasbadminton.com/)

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Qasim Virjee 0:19

Welcome back to the 29th episode of The Star well podcast. My name is Qasim and I'm start will CEO and founder and for this special episode, which is the fifth talk captured at dark futures YYC, an event we hosted in our event space in downtown Toronto on November 28 2019. We've got a very special talk by Nikola. Dan I love and the talk is called Neil technocracy. The future is worse than you think.

Nikola Danaylov 0:59

In 2016, my wife Julia, Nas, and I did a road trip across California. Naturally, among the points of interest, were San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now, if you're driving in, like we were, chances are that the very first thing you would see upon entering LA is those makeshift tent camps with 10s of 1000s of homeless Americans. And that's interesting before because two years before our trip, Peter Diamandis published his New York Times bestselling book, abundance, and told us that the future is better than we think. And he said that we not only can, but also will solve all of humanity, humanity's grand challenges, with three things, more capital, more technology, and what people called what Peter called the right people. Later on in his book, he defined them as the new techno philanthropists. Well, strange enough, there we were, in Peters backyard, in ground zero, in the one place in the world with the highest concentration of all of the above. And somehow, all that we saw, was shocking level of poverty, environmental destruction, wildfires completely out of control, crumbling infrastructure, and allegedly very high rates of crime, especially compared to us. I got so shocked that I decided to do some research on it to get even more shocked in discovering that if you actually calculate the cost of living, the so called Golden State of California, is actually the poorest state in the United States of America. Because perhaps as many as one out of four, live either at or below the poverty line. Now, California is the fifth largest economy in the world, and of course, the largest economy within the United States. And yet, according to McKinsey's, it ranks dead last, in terms of quality of life. Now, this paradoxical situation raises a number of very important questions. For example, how is it that poorer countries such as Canada, that have less access to capital, less access to advanced tech, somehow managed to have happier, healthier and longer living population? By the way, we live for years longer than Americans on average? And have lower degree of homelessness, lower crime rates, and free health care to boot? Another question is, is it a mere coincidence that the richest state in the United States with the highest concentrations of billionaires, billion multi billion and trillion dollar approaching companies, and the most high tech ever is at the same time the poorest state? And finally, the ultimate question? What if the future is worse than we think? How would we know it? Well, one way to know it is to hear all the people in front of me, they did a great job. And if you haven't convinced you yet, I'm going to give it my best shot too. So we would know that the future is worse than we think by looking at the present. And by looking at California, we already know that abundance is a myth. I have spoken before at length, about how tech companies create deliberate sca