The Next Moonshot Won’t Come from Silicon Valley: ex-Google X’er Salima Bhimani on How to Invent Now

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Friday, August 21, 2026. Our long, hot Luddite summer is stumbling to an end. Apparently, this is the summer that America became a nation of Luddites. We've done all sorts of books recently on the impact, the very negative impact of technology on the world. Yesterday, we did one with James Crawford, who has a new book out on The Vanishing Earth, which implies that we are literally destroying ourselves as I half joke with James. You might have called it Apocalypse Now, although that title, of course, is taken. So I thought given it's Friday, we might try to cheer ourselves up a bit. Today's author is Salima Bhimani. She used to be very much involved with the Google X labs, been involved with all sorts of interesting companies, moonshot companies. And her new book, Invent Now, is all about the next leap in moonshots, and Salima is joining us from somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego. Salima, congratulations on the new book. Are you surprised— you were at Google six and a half years? Now you're involved with all sorts of institutes. You're the— you're the CEO of Responsible 10X— 10X Responsible Tech and a senior fellow at AI 2030. So you've been in the tech business for many years. Are you surprised with this lurch into negative Luddism in America these days?

00:02:23 Salima Bhimani: No. Not really. I mean, I think that people are feeling, maybe to some degree, compressed by things they can't control. You know? Technology is all around them and doing things that they don't necessarily understand. People are concerned. It's hot. You know? People would rather be in air conditioning than sweating in the sweltering sun. You know? There— there's a lot about the world that I think is pushing up against people's sense of self and identity and what makes them feel whole and human. And that's a tough spot to be in.

00:02:57 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So to cheer themselves up, they might go to your website, Salima Bhimani. You have a front page which talks about expanding humanity, emerging technology with a global footprint. Why should we believe what people like yourself, Salima, say? You've been saying it now, and I don't mean to lump you in with Sam Altman and Elon Musk and all the others. But Silicon Valley has been giving us a very positive message now for thirty years, and things seem to be getting worse and worse. Why should we believe the optimist?

00:03:37 Salima Bhimani: I'd like to think that I'm a more nuanced optimist in the sense that it's very clear that, you know, technology is not a one-sided story. You know, it's got— it's sort of living in, I wouldn't say it's a binary, but I'd definitely say that it is one where we can see that, you know, there are harms that it can do. We've seen this with data being used for surveillance. We've seen it with, you know, drones being used in ways that make people feel highly uncomfortable or in war. So there's ways in which technology is being built and adopted and utilized that, you know, frighten people, and that is something that we have to keep in mind. And the reality also is that the whole piece around ethics and responsibility continues to be a conversation, and regulation continues to be a conversation, a needed conversation, and something we have to keep building into how we are designing and deploying technology. On the other hand, though, there are opportunities that technology is unleashing that, you know, are quite frankly, for me at least, we're in another era of that, you know, where more and more people are able to use technology to solve problems we couldn't solve before. You know? And that is exciting. So I actually think it's holding this tension, and I talk about that a lot in my book. I'm not asking people to say, hey. Be optimistic and just go for it. I'm saying that, no. You gotta hold the tension. You gotta hold the tension that technology can do bad things. We have some evidence of that already. There are lots of questions about what's gonna happen with AI and what it's gonna do or not do to us. And at the same time, there are fields of opportunities in front of us where we can use technology as our co-partner but with a discerning eye. I mean and in a relationship where that tension and friction is alive.

00:05:24 Andrew Keen: One of the other things that your website promises about yourself is that you can see the future. How do you see the future, Salima? Why? Did your experience at Google X, did that allow you to see the future? Is it some sort of special skill that you acquire from having been in Silicon Valley for many years?

00:05:49 Salima Bhimani: No. I actually— I don't know that I can see the future, but what I can do is perceive patterns and relationships. And I think that that's something that didn't actually come from Silicon Valley. You know, I grew up in a world where, you know, my father was— I talk about my dad in the book. He— he used to own a grocery store, like a magazine stall in a subway system in Toronto. And if you've ever been to Toronto and you've been in the subway system, you know, you— people are getting in and out of the subway car. And I would stare at the subway all the time, this big metal tube that people would come in and out of. And my question wasn't like, you know, where is this— where are the people going? My question was like, what is our relationship to this tube? You know? So I've always been asking questions about how systems operate, why they operate that way, how we built them in relationship to ourselves. And so, you know, Silicon Valley was kind of like a— I would say it was almost like a expanded view of that in a way that I've never had before. You know, I came from government. I came from nonprofits. I was working on the ground with people. And here I was entering Silicon Valley where resources and time and energy to build really audacious projects that solve really hard problems in the world was kind of bread and butter. You know? And I didn't come from that place. I came from a place where constraint was bread and butter. You know? Constraint in budget, constraint in opportunity, constraint in, like, can we solve this problem with, like, you know, 10 million people? That you know? And so for me, it was those two things coming together, these worlds coming together that instead of the, again, the tension, the constraint in that— that allowed me to think about, well, how do we move towards a future where, more and more people can be at the forefront of designing the solutions and the opportunities that we will need for humanity to flourish? And I think Alphabet taught me, in some ways, a kind of ambition that I had never really tapped into because, again, in the world of ambition that I was in, you know, you are constantly being hit by constraints in a way that are, like, just very real on a day-to-day. And Alphabet was exactly the opposite. You know? Endless amounts of money, endless amounts of capital, endless amounts of runway. You know? And that's unique, and so I don't take that for granted at all. But my thinking in the way that I think about the future or I think about what comes next is really in relationship with those worlds coming together, not one or the other.

00:08:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You even get my wife just worked for many years for Google too. Like yourself, I know you get the free lunches too. Is that abundance healthy? There seems to be two camps these days in the world. There's the abundance camp of the Marc Andreessens, maybe even the Ezra Kleins. And then there's the scarcity camp of guys like James Crawford, who are much more pessimistic. Which of those camps are you in when it comes to abundance versus scarcity, in terms of the future? Is there gonna be more abundance or more scarcity or different kinds of abundances and scarcities in the future?

00:08:55 Salima Bhimani: Yeah. I don't think I'm in either camp. I think I'm in the camp that we'll see abundance in some areas and we'll see scarcity in others. You know? Will we see, you know, people feeling more scarce because maybe their skills are now being taken up by AI? Possibly. You know, will we see more abundance? Because now— well, maybe you're not, you know, doing that spreadsheet, but you can actually go and build a solution with some other folks that are in your industry. Yes. You know? So I don't think that it's either or. I actually think that it's way more, way more nuanced than that. And the question is gonna be, where is the abundance gonna be and where is the scarcity gonna be? And maybe in all of that, we find something else that we didn't even know. You know? That's the point of the book. It's sort of like, how do we start to imagine not only the present, but a future in ways that we haven't really had the opportunity to in the past or even thought we could.

00:09:49 Andrew Keen: Tell me more about the book. Who's it meant for? It's called Invent Now, The Next Leap in Moonshots. So— yeah. Judging by the title, some people might think, well, this is for the kind of people who read Fast Company and go online all the time. Or might it be for guys like your father in Toronto who— whose lives are dominated not by abundance, but by scarcity? Who are you writing this book for?

00:10:15 Salima Bhimani: I think it's for multiple audiences. I definitely did write it with the people in mind who don't really think of themselves at the forefront of invention, you know, or innovation. And, you know, because so much of that, the big scale innovation, the moonshots have come from Silicon Valley, have come from, you know, government, have come from places where people see themselves outside of that. You know? And so part of this was a call to the rest of the world to say, hey. You know, in ten years, could you see yourself being part of a consequential change or solution in the world? And I want you to step into that. I want you to step into orienting yourself towards that reality that you could actually do that potentially. But it's also for— it is also for people who are already in tech and people who are already building and to say there's other ways to build. You know? The way that we've been taught sort of the Silicon Valley playbook or the technology playbook may not be the only way. There might be other paths and opportunities that we're just not thinking about.

00:11:15 Andrew Keen: And I know you also suggest that the next great moonshots won't only come from Silicon Valley. Where are they gonna come from? Places like Toronto?

00:11:26 Salima Bhimani: They could come from places like Toronto, but what I argue in the book that they actually come from the convergence of places, people, and contexts. So I actually think that maybe the opportunity in front of us is not necessarily to go to Toronto and try to find a Toronto problem, but it's that, you know, are there opportunities that we could uncover and discover when you have people from Toronto and Montreal and New York City coming together to say, hey. We're all trying to figure out this energy. The question of energy, the question of, you know, whether people can, you know, cool themselves off in a heat wave. Let's— what happens if we actually come together and try to solve that as a collective opportunity and a collective problem? What would we discover? What opportunity would we discover together? And can we bring together the sort of— the person who's, like, living and being on the street along with the engineer who's gonna ask different questions that have different points of view about that? This isn't some kind of collaboration light or anything like that. It's more that we are trying to— I'm proposing and provoking that we should be really thinking about collective intelligence as our superpower. And, really, I don't think most of the technologies that we've built, at least the moonshot tech, have come from that place. They haven't come from collective intelligence. Somebody decides, and then we adopt or redeploy and we adopt. But there's another way of doing this, and I think that that's what's exciting me right now.

00:12:54 Andrew Keen: What are you most— you were at the moonshot factory at Alphabet Google for six and a half years. What are you most proud about in terms of the work there? What company or initiative gives you the most satisfaction when it comes to invention?

00:13:15 Salima Bhimani: I mean, I think that, you know, all of the bets are— the one thing I appreciated about being at Alphabet, and I tell a very nuanced story about my— what I experienced at Alphabet. I'm an ethnographer by training, so I like to look at, again, systems and relationships and dynamics and how things are working. So I was really always compelled by the fact that everyone was very mission driven, and people felt very connected to the solution or the problem that they were trying to solve, you know, whether that was mobility with Waymo or whether that was, you know, access to goods and services with Wing or whether it was AI with DeepMind. So I don't know that there was one project, Andrew, but what did compel me over and over again was that people were trying to solve a really hard problem using technology. But what I realized in all of that was that it's not just a technological problem. It's actually an ecosystem problem. Right? So when Wing is trying to go out there and say, hey. We need more drone delivery. We're not just talking about technology going out and, like, delivering something to your front door. We're talking about regulators, and we're talking about safety, and we're talking about communities and whether they want something dropping from the sky onto their porch. You know? There's so many elements to this. So— for me, what Alphabet did for me was that it illuminated that when we continue to see moonshots as simply technological interventions, we actually miss the larger field. Most people, you know, address all of the other stuff that I talked about afterwards. Right? We do it at maybe at the mid mile or the last mile. And for me, it's like, no. Actually, if we brought it all forward, if we said that we start with the ecosystem, what is the ecosystem revealing to us about what's needed and wanted in the world and use technology as our partner to help us, you know, solve or, you know, address something, we might end up somewhere else. And that is what— that's what awoke inside of me when I was at Alphabet in a new way.

00:15:11 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Wing. It's— not everyone will be familiar. Most people will know Waymo. They're self-driving cars, which now dominate the streets of my city, at least, San Francisco. Wing is— Wing are autonomous lightweight delivery drones transporting goods. I'm not, of course, suggesting that Google X has anything to do with drone warfare in Ukraine. But is it any coincidence, Salima, that these inventions that you write about in Invent Now have both good and bad consequences? On the one hand, we have Wing getting our Amazon deliveries by autonomous drone. [ed.: Wing's US delivery partners are Walmart, DoorDash, and Walgreens; Amazon operates its own drone service, Prime Air.] And on the other hand, now we have drone warfare in Ukraine and Iran, and, probably, it's the future of warfare all over the world. How do you distinguish between the good and the bad of tech? And how did you deal with that at Google X when you were thinking about how to create moonshots with drones?

00:16:21 Salima Bhimani: Well, I mean, there's a few things about that. I had my— when I left Google Alphabet, I— I had a couple of co-founders. We were actually building a drone detection company. And one of the big— our big questions was that our solution, sort of full stack solution that we were building, would actually be really, really beneficial for communities and cities and all kinds of things. But on the other hand, it could also be used for all kinds of, you know, nefarious things in the world. And that was an unsettling tension to sit inside. Because now I wasn't just helping other moonshot companies build a moonshot. I was building a moonshot myself. And I have to tell you that, like, that was— I have sat with CEOs at Alphabet at pretty much all their companies and asked them this question of, like, what are the, you know, what are the goods and bads of what you're trying to do here? You know? Do you understand, like, what is going to be the trade-offs? Because there are always trade-offs. You know? Are you willing to take on the potential that your drone could be used in x nefarious ways, and how are you gonna ensure that that doesn't happen? So, you know, for me, you know, these conversations were always about let's illuminate what we may not be thinking about. Let's think about the potential of what could happen even if that's not our intention because intention is, you know, pie in the sky when people actually are impacted. And then how do we make different choices? And then how do we live by the choices that we make? You know? Because sometimes people make choices thinking that it's all good intention, but then they sort of ignore the fact that that choice can have an impact that is negative. And I just wanna bring that forward again for people. It's like, no. No. Not don't think about it ten years down the line or five years down the line after your technology or drone is out there. Think about it now because you're gonna have to live with that. And some people can live with it, and that's fine. Right? About whatever the range of implications could be, and other people can't. You know? And so that kind of decision-making and that kind of questioning and really, you know, mapping out the potential of what could happen here has to be part of how we decide which way we go or don't go with the technology. And, ultimately, we folded our drone company because I think that the implications are not something that any of us could have lived with. You know?

00:18:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the lab you worked at within Google, the moonshot factory—

00:18:42 Salima Bhimani: Yes.

00:18:43 Andrew Keen: Is like a VC. You make a lot of bets. Most of them, you don't win. One or two of them, you win. Everyone, of course, now knows Waymo, remarkable story, increasingly—

00:18:54 Salima Bhimani: Yeah.

00:18:55 Andrew Keen: Ubiquitous, not just in San Francisco, but in many other cities around the world.

00:19:00 Salima Bhimani: Yeah.

00:19:00 Andrew Keen: In terms of moonshots that didn't work, which is the one that, in your experience, that you're most disappointed with that when you're going to sleep, you know, I think that that one could have worked. We could have done this or we should have done that.

00:19:17 Salima Bhimani: I mean, I think that there's two, but Sidewalk comes up as one of them. Sidewalk is a— of course, was a very contentious bet.

00:19:24 Andrew Keen: Right. And I was gonna bring up— and you might introduce Sidewalk because it brings us back to the street— literally the streets of Toronto where you grew up.

00:19:32 Salima Bhimani: Yeah. Yeah. So Sidewalk Labs was trying to essentially build what was a smart city, you know, integrate technology, as a way to improve, you know, in the environment, as a way to make people— you know, make things more accessible for folks, within the city, create sort of an urban environment where technology is integrated, as a way to kind of elevate everyday life. And, you know, they face a lot of scrutiny and they faced a lot of tension. And they really did try to build with communities. They did a lot of consultation. They did a lot of sort of, you know, talking with indigenous communities, people who sort of are, you know, really connected to the land and why it matters to them. And, ultimately, they could not get over the hurdle that I think in Toronto at that time and in Canada at that time, really, there was a sort of sense that, like, tech is gonna come and is going to take our data, is gonna come and make us more vulnerable to these big companies who will use our information in all kinds of ways. Who knows what they're gonna do with this? And I just don't think they could get over that hurdle. I mean, that was one aspect of it.

00:20:37 Andrew Keen: It was a kind of early tremor in many ways of the earthquake now against data centers.

00:20:44 Salima Bhimani: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that there's, again, that sort of that friction and that tension, it in some ways, I think it was unfortunate because I think what Sidewalk intended to do was a lot of good, and there was a lot of potential there. But what it revealed was that people were just not ready. People were you know, they didn't understand technology. They don't understand the integration of technology into cities, why that was actually a good thing for them. And, you know, what are the even if you put in the guardrails that, yes, we're not gonna use your data x, y, or z way, or it's only gonna be used in this particular, you know, slice of, you know, the of a solution. I just— I think that what— to me, again, it revealed is that with society where society is at with technology and where how technologies are being built and maybe even deployed by companies like Sidewalk and others, there's a massive gap there, and we haven't closed. I don't believe we've closed that gap.

00:21:37 Andrew Keen: What was the story then of Sidewalk? Because, as I said, it folded. It faced legal challenges in Toronto. Also, its CEO quit and then focused on fighting ALS, which was a disease that affects his family. What went wrong at Sidewalk? I mean, what was the literal reason why now when you go to Sidewalk, it's not there. You just get sent to a Google page that they— Alphabet— folded Sidewalk into Google itself.

00:22:15 Salima Bhimani: I mean, I think this is a function of moonshots, actually, Andrew. You know? Some are gonna thrive and some are gonna fail. And they fail once you, again, once you get into the friction of society and you bring, you know, your solution, your technology into society and you say, hey. Here's the way we wanna do. You're gonna be faced with all kinds of pushback and backlash, and some of it's gonna be real, and some of it's gonna be bluster, and some of it's gonna, you know, be informative, and some of it's not. You know? And I just think that with Sidewalk, there was too much of that, and it wasn't gonna happen in Toronto. You know? So they did take parts of what they were building, and they folded it back into Google and other parts of it, you know, went away. And I actually think that that's part of the life cycle of building a moonshot. I don't— you know, it's unfortunate, but it's how the— it's how this— how the moonshot building works.

00:23:07 Andrew Keen: Last year, we had Geoffrey Hinton on the show. Of course, everybody knows Geoffrey Hinton, won the Nobel Prize, the so-called godfather of AI. He had worked at Google. And ironically enough, it's much of his white paper and much of his thinking that eventually got incorporated into OpenAI so that when it comes to AI, the moonshot that seems to have won was the generative AI developed by OpenAI, now by Anthropic, and even by Gemini. Well, I wouldn't say what went wrong, but what is the fact that Google itself failed to develop Hinton's ideas. What does it tell us about the limitations of a moonshot within a large corporation like Google?

00:24:03 Salima Bhimani: Yeah. I thought— I talk about this a bit in my book. I mean, part of it is I think that, you know, anytime you're in a space of invention— innovation— I think that when people hear that, they think sort of unfettered, you know, ideas, take on anything, build anything, you know, but that's not really how it works in reality. You know? There's a— there is a structure and system in place, and I think that I mean, with Google, like, that is— we're talking about, you know, the size of a city or a country at this point, you know, in terms of people and dynamics and structure. And so I just think that, you know, whether Google took Hinton's work or not to build the next thing, I think is a complicated story, and you'll have to ask the people at Google why that was or wasn't. But my sense is that in a place like that, you are always working up against how we think about innovation and where innovation can go or not go. And, obviously, whether it lands in the world and makes you a billion dollars is an important part of the story. You know? And so, you know, I don't know. I don't know if that was part of their story or thinking, but I definitely know that in the innovation or moonshot space particularly, it's not just technology to build the next big thing. It's also something that's gonna land in the world that's gonna be the next billion dollar company. You know? And that's— that is an important part of the thinking. And it was at Alphabet, and I think it continues to be. And that makes sense because they're not just innovating for the sake of innovating. Right? They're innovating because they wanna have an impact on the world.

00:25:31 Andrew Keen: You work with DeepMind, which, of course, was Demis Hassabis' startup that was bought by Google, and Demis then won the Nobel Prize for his breakthroughs in medicine— in AI and medicine in particular. [ed.: Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for protein structure prediction.]

00:25:45 Salima Bhimani: Yeah.

00:25:46 Andrew Keen: There's recently been a reshuffle, my understanding at least, within Google Alphabet. Demis has been, if not sidelined, certainly shifted. We used to think he was gonna run Google after Sundar left, but now, one of the co-founders of the company, Sergey Brin seems to have become the AI czar. Do you think that true moonshot types like Demis— I mean, he's clearly the epitome of a moonshot thinker. I don't even know if he's an entrepreneur. He's more of a humanist in many ways. Do you think it's the right place for them to work in large companies? Some of his other team in DeepMind, of course, and some of the AI people recently at Google have left and now doing their own startups. Can one be a moonshot type and exist in a big company like Google or for that matter, Facebook or— or Amazon or Apple?

00:26:49 Salima Bhimani: Well, it depends on how much space and leeway you have to do what you are, you know, which you wanna set out to do. And so I think that, like, you know, in the case of Demis, you know, his move, I think, in some ways, you know, maybe it frees him up actually to do what he's best at, which is let me go figure out, like, what the next sort of step in AI is, you know, being mired in the day-to-day of products and all of that. That's not his wheelhouse clearly. You know? His wheelhouse is, you know, invention and innovation. And so, you know, will he have space and room to be Demis? I don't know. You have to, again, ask Google or ask Demis. But do I think that, you know, if he's given that space and room that he will continue to do brilliant things? He will because he did them at DeepMind, and he'll, you know, he can— he'll figure it out. I mean, he's a smart guy. But I do think that cons— when constraint is taken away and you're given space to build, you can build extraordinary things. Now whether Demis will stay there or not there, I don't know. But I do know that he is— my sense of him and anytime I've talked to him or, you know, what I've read about him is that he is somebody who is focused on humanity, you know, and humanity with technology. And that relationship, I think, is embedded in who he is, and hopefully, he'll take that and see what he can do next.

00:28:07 Andrew Keen: Do you feel more or less constrained now that you're out of Google Alphabet and that you're essentially on your own?

00:28:17 Salima Bhimani: Yeah. Sure. I feel constrained in a different way. You know? Like, when you're at Google or Alphabet, you have the Google or Alphabet name to sort of, you know, to leapfrog from. You know, I— as I talk about in my book half jokingly that, you know, when you have the badge, it's like, you know, you got the badge. You know, doors open, fly open. And when you're on your own, you're, you know, you're you don't have that badge anymore. But what I do have is, you know, fifty-one years of a lot of experience and a lot of learning. And I take whatever I could take from Google with me or Alphabet with me, you know, what I do moving forward. So I actually think that sometimes leaving a place like Google, in fact, opens up the aperture. And maybe that's what it's done for me.

00:29:06 Andrew Keen: Ed Luce recently wrote a piece in the FT on AI phobia, which is what he calls America's new consensus, particularly the way in which even AI entrepreneurs like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei are articulating in a kind of self-hatred manner— self-hating manner, their understanding of AI. When you were at Google X and you were schooling thinkers like Demis and others, the people at Waymo or Wing, did you think about educating them in the way in which they describe their products, not to insiders, fellow Silicon Valley people like yourself or myself, but more broadly to Americans?

00:30:02 Salima Bhimani: And, I mean, we did talk about, you know, again, how do you land the plane? I mean, that there is— again, there's a relationship between you and what happens in the world once your product leaves the world, you know, leaves your world and then enters the real world. And there is something about, you know, how you communicate it. But listen. I'm not a comms person, and my job is not— my job was never to, you know, build communications so that, you know, the product could be more legible to the world. That wasn't my job. You know, my job was always to get leaders to think about what are the implications of the thing that you're building. And, you know, how do you build a company that's gonna, you know, be able to, you know, service humanity in the world in the way that hopefully we want? So that was always my role. And I remember talking to one of the leaders there, for one of the bets. And, you know, he was having a real, like, crisis moment where he was like, well, we're about to go and deploy in a state, and there's a lot of, like, sort of social challenges in that state. And what do I do with that? And, you know, again, our conversation was about, you know, like, where do you stand as a leader, and where do you stand with your technology? And, you know, what— what's the story that you wanna tell that is honest and real, you know, along with the fact that you have to make money and you have to get your product out there and, you know, you've gotta get customers. So none of these things are easy. These are not easy conversations. But for me, though— those were the conversations we had to have, and that's what we did.

00:31:33 Andrew Keen: What can we learn from Waymo? Seems to me, at least as an outsider, Waymo is the most successful of all the Google X bets. It's now becoming increasingly ubiquitous. It strikes me that everyone who hasn't ridden in a Waymo are terrified of it. They think, oh, I'm never going to go in a car that doesn't have a human driver. And then they do it, and afterwards, 95, maybe even 99% of them are convinced that, wow, I'm never gonna go in another car with a human driver. What is it about Waymo that we can replicate for other big bets that mostly seems to be improving the world? I mean, of course, one can argue Waymo might not be very good for Uber drivers, human drivers, and, maybe there are some other arguments against it. But it mostly seems, especially when it comes to safety and the environment, it seems a really brilliant kind of bet, one that, if you haven't done it, seems like magic, a scary kind of experience. And then you do it, and it seems natural, inevitable.

00:32:40 Salima Bhimani: Yes. Yeah. I mean, perseverance. And this is gonna sound abstract, but it's not. You know, I sort of came into Alphabet at a time where, you know, Waymo was in the middle of, like, building their technology, like, making sure that it works on the streets, you know, ensuring that it's safe, ensuring that, you know, the lidar is working well. Like, I was— I came at a time where they were still in the, like, the middle of that, you know? And I saw every day people persevering towards yeah. We believe that this technology and it's not self-driving cars. I think Waymo has a bigger mandate. Right? self-driving cars is one expression of what they do with self-driving technology. As John Krafcik always used to tell me when he and I would have conversations that, you know, we're building self-driving technology that will have many applications, cars being one of them. And I think that their perseverance and also the sort of North Star, right, that we can shift mobility because at the end of the day, there are far greater outcomes of that for humanity than not. And I think that that perseverance, that desire to reach that outcome is what makes Waymo successful. I mean, other people can have that, quite frankly, but I think Waymo had it in spades, you know, whether it was with their leadership, their teams, the sense of motivation that had. And I worked very, very closely with Waymo for over five years, and I can tell you that everybody there was really, really focused on that outcome. You know? And they grappled with it. It's not like it's not an easy thing to do. My goodness. It took them, what, sixteen years to get to where they are now. You know? So they— they're— they had to really invest in that North Star and that belief that we can get there was a very hard technological problem. But here they are, you know, sixteen years later.

00:34:33 Andrew Keen: Maybe it's because they're the female CEO, in contrast with some of the other male CEOs. [ed.: Waymo is co-led by Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov.] I'm half joking, Salima. What is the biggest moonshot of the twenty-first century? There's a piece in the Financial Times this morning about Moderna's cancer shot. Supposedly, in the future, we'll all be able to get shots for cancer, and we'll eliminate cancer. That is, of course, Elon Musk's literal moonshot at SpaceX. What's your sense when historians from the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries look back at our century? What's gonna be the biggest moonshot of them all?

00:35:17 Salima Bhimani: I don't know. I don't know that there's one, but I do think that there's gonna be a big question about labor. You know, what happens to labor? You know, how will people make income? You know, how— what will labor look like over, you know, the next decade? And labor just not in terms of like skills and output, but also in terms of people feeling purposeful and wanting to feel like they're making an impact. Some people might wanna make an impact in the world, feeling like they have meaning in their lives. And so much especially in North America, so much of our meaning comes from work. You know, we can— you and I could probably debate that and argue that till the cows come home about whether that's a good or a bad thing. But I actually think that, you know, we're gonna have to rethink possibly, you know, what does shaping the world look like? You know? If industries are gonna be changing, which will continue to evolve and shift, it doesn't mean that industries are gonna be gone or erased. I don't know that that's gonna happen. Definitely, we're gonna have evolutions particularly with AI getting integrated. So, really, the question is, like, human purpose. What is gonna be human purpose when it's not work, or it's another form of work? You know?

00:36:28 Andrew Keen: And is that what you're doing both as the CEO of 10X Responsible Tech and a senior fellow at AI 2030, both very interesting positions, addressing not so much the technology or maybe even the moonshot entrepreneurial nature of it, but what we're all gonna do in a world of AI where machines do most of the work?

00:36:54 Salima Bhimani: That's part of what I'm doing. And I'm also trying to get people to think about, again, unprecedented solutions and opportunities that they wouldn't have thought of before, you know, because we've been doing invention or innovation in a very particular way. And Invent Now is really a call and a provocation in many ways for people to think about doing it differently. And I go and talk to leaders and organizations and companies and say, alright. Let's go— let's think about what your next moonshot could be or a moonshot could be for you. But I also want you to think about how we could do this different than maybe you have or you haven't done it at all, and so here's an opportunity. So that's part of it. And the other part of it is, yes, getting people to think more broadly about what our AI systems are going to do or not do to our lives in the future and what we could do. I don't— you know, I'm the kind of person that says, if you're in this moment, take the moment and ask, what are you gonna do with that moment? You know? I don't want people to just feel like they're on the receiving end of it. You know? I wanna feel— I want people to have some agency around what can happen to them in their lives in the future.

00:38:06 Andrew Keen: Seems to me that the best futurists, and you— you're a futurist, are good historians. They understand the past. At 10X AI Studio where you're the CEO, you talk about AI not being born yesterday. In other words, we have to understand its history if we're to understand its future. What does the history of AI teach us about the future of AI? What can we learn from it?

00:38:34 Salima Bhimani: That's, by the way, not my— that's not associated with me, just so— just to be clear. [ed.: Bhimani is CEO of 10X Responsible Tech; 10X AI Studio is a separate entity.] I— what— sorry. Tell me the— ask me the question again.

00:38:44 Andrew Keen: The history of AI. What can we learn from— we talked about Geoffrey Hinton and the experiences of AI. It's really— it's been a technology that's been around for thirty or forty years. Born in some ways at MIT.

00:38:59 Salima Bhimani: Yes.

00:39:00 Andrew Keen: What can we— I mean, what would you say AI 2030? It's only four years away. It seems like forty in some ways. But by 2030, it seems as if AI will dominate more and more of the world. What can we learn from history about where we want to nudge AI? What we shouldn't— what we should and shouldn't want to invent out of this remarkable new technology?

00:39:30 Salima Bhimani: Well, most people don't realize that, you know, AI has been around for thirty or forty years because, you know, it's been in labs or it's been happening in more incubated spaces or it's, you know, been integrated in ways that we don't even know it's been integrated. You know? So I think, partially, that's part of it. Right? Is the— so the transparency and the evolution of our technologies, particularly like an AI technology, that is happening in the background of most of our lives. And I think that maybe the lesson is that now we're at this point with this technology that, you know, again, this sort of brain that is continuing to expand and change and shift. You know, if we build— if we continue to build without humanity, if we continue to build for people and not with people, you know, we won't have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years. And we may not still have a say because, you know, these long large language models are being built by the Googles and the Anthropics and the whatever. Right? And we don't— most of us are not part of those companies. But I definitely think that one of the lessons is that we can build very, very powerful things in incubated spaces. So what if we flipped it? What could we build in unincubated spaces? What kind of powerful things could we build? And so for me, that is sort of one of the lessons is, you know, we gotta step in and not be stepped out.

00:40:50 Andrew Keen: Step in, not be stepped out. That's the message of Salima Bhimani's new book, Invent Now, The Next Leap in Moonshots. There are gonna be many moonshots. Hope they're good ones. Salima, congratulations on the book, and best of luck with all your visions of the future.

00:41:09 Salima Bhimani: Thanks, Andrew. It was great.