Hunter-Torricke, a former communications and public policy adviser to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, was speaking at the MRS annual conference’s opening keynote today ( 11th March), in which he spoke of the benefits and risks of technology.

Speaking about Musk, he reflected on the strangest job interview of his life: “It was 2016 and I was working for Zuckerberg at the time,” he said.

“I’d flown to LA for the day to be interviewed [for the role of] head of communications for SpaceX. I had every conceivable tactic in my arsenal to talk about communications and marketing. Turns out Elon didn’t want to talk about any of that.”

Instead, he wanted to talk about terraforming Mars.

While it was, as Hunter-Torricke said, a “very strange” encounter (and one that led to him getting the job), he reflected on the flight back that it was a “bloody good question”.

Asked what advice he would give Musk today, he said “resign?”,  in light of Musk’s more inflammatory behaviour in the present day.

But he added: “I could probably encourage him, as gently as I can, to remember why he got into this business. He’s a guy who wants to talk about the future of humanity, and the last time I checked, humanity includes all of the people on Earth, not just the people who agree with you.

“Taking care of this planet and making a good life for people is surely is part of building a multi-planet species.”

Utopia vs dystopia

During his presentation, Hunter-Torricke painted both a utopian vision of a world shaped by tech, and a dystopian one. Each, he suggested, was equally viable. The former painted technology as the great enabler: generative AI that can help design buildings, improve healthcare and medicine and win Oscars, and how smartphones and digital interconnectivity allow billions of people to express themselves.

Hunter-Torricke said: “The arrival of machine intelligence will be cross-cutting and transformative in all in [many] dimensions. The fact our entire economy and way of life and society is powered by a vast infrastructure of unseen technology and code, all of that is about to be transformed and is being transformed by AI right now.”

But he also discussed how misinformation is rife and the globe is beset with political societal unrest.

Future for research and insight

In the concluding Q&A session, hosted by Babita Earle, managing director, international, Zappi, Hunter-Torricke was asked to reflect on the future of research and insight.

“No pressure,” he said. “You really are in the critical position to guide us through this future. There’s no way to navigate through this stuff without the most phenomenal set of insights and research.

“You’re going to have to step the game up 100x from where you currently are. The kind of things you are doing today in the industry are mind-blowing compared with where you were 20 years ago…

“You’ve got everything. You’ve got the tools, the tools are the easy part, remember. They’re coming. They’re here. You can solve that. The fusion of technology and people is not 2+2=4. It’s something much greater. That’s what gets me excited about the future.

“There are companies in this room that will play a defining role in helping this country and this world to navigate everything I just talked about. So, get to work.”