2017 Rewoldt Lecture at Mayo Clinic: Futurist Gerd Leonhard on Technology, Humanity, Democracy

It's really a great honor to be with you tonight. Also very much a big thank you to the Rewald family for making this work. And so I have the pleasure to talk to you about the future. The future is an interesting topic. The reason I became a futurist is because I used to be a musician and producer basically in the music business. And then the mid-90s, I got sucked onto the Internet and I started something like Spotify. Some of you may know Spotify 10 years too early, in the process of which I lost $20 million of investment and went bankrupt. It was a very good experience. I was ahead of the future. And then I wrote a book called the Future of Music. And that was my first book about the music business that became a best seller. And so I became the go to person if people want to find out what the future brings for their business. And in the last five years, I do about 100 speeches a year, and I do a lot of. We call that basically coaching sessions for CEOs and boards. And people want to think about the future. Number one question I get is, what is going to happen to people when the entire world is all about technology? Today, if you're 25 years old, if you want a date, you swipe on your mobile phone. If you want a doctor, you ask Siri or Cortana on your mobile phone. If you want to ride, you go to Uber. And the world is changing so tremendously. Most of it is for the good to say that I'm actually an optimist on the future. But technology will essentially allow us to become superhuman in a technology kind of way. I mean, what we can do today with these devices makes us de facto super. We can keep our addresses in here. We can listen to music, we can buy stock. We can have an automatic language translation. You know, just three months ago, I was in Japan and Tokyo in a sushi bar. Use this app called say hi. Okay? And say hi allows me to speak in 34 languages. You know, simple stuff, but not bad. And then I had a half hour conversation with a sushi chef about Japan and nuclear power and fish. And using this app, speaking back and forth. I was speaking in German and he spoke in Japanese. That's like Star Trek, basically. So my new book is available if you want to download my slides. I probably have way too many slides, but I will. I will be a little bit flexible on them. You can download later tomorrow morning@futurewithgert.com if you're having trouble remembering my name, think about Gastrointestinal reflux disease. G, E R D. Then you have my name. So I'm actually number two Gerd after the disease on the Internet, that's a dubious honor. So my book Technology vs. Humanity is available on Amazon and we do have a special PDF. I think you have it on the table already on this little slips there. You can download the PDF for half the price for the next week on this website. But it's on your table so you can see the code. But if you like print, old fashioned print, I do have two here. I will give away the first question gets a free book. That should be enough motivation for you to engage. So this is really my job. I don't predict the future. That's very hard to do. We had people like Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke that could do that. You know, they're so the Jimi Hendrix of futurism. I observe. That's my job. In China they say if you want to know about the future, ask your children. That is because our children don't have to make money. They don't have to be busy with all these things that we have to do every day. They can observe. That's the number one skill to have really. So as I like to say to my client, it's most important. The future is no longer a time frame, It's a mindset. It's no longer about tomorrow because the future is already here. I mean, depending on where you're going, you can see the future. In Korea, you can download a movie in 1.4 seconds. An entire movie, 2 gigabyte. In Japan, people have, instead of having pets, they have robots, robo pets. It's hard to believe 1.5 million people have a pet that's a robot that they teach. Here in the US roughly 14 million people use this Amazon device called Echo. Some of you may know that Echo Alexa that you speak to as if it was a person. Now in Germany we wouldn't touch that because it's basically an open microphone and we'd be paranoid about being listened to. But the future's already here. Self driving cars, if you ever get a chance to drive one, you wouldn't go in the German Autobahn with one. That would be suicide. But it's working pretty well. If you had a traffic jam in Los Angeles now, very soon we have the first airplanes that don't have a pilot. This is mostly for freight planes, of course, because we probably wouldn't go on them otherwise. But the future's already here, so it's really important to have a Mindset. And really what happens here is that in this future, we're rapidly moving towards a place where technology and humanity is coming closer than ever before. Some people would say we're merging with technology. In the book, I say that in the next 20 years, we're going to have more change than the previous 300 years. That's because technology is now capable of doing things. Just five years ago, your computer was still pretty stupid. You couldn't speak to it, it couldn't program itself. It certainly wouldn't learn anything. It wasn't fast enough, it would crash. Now, in the near future, a computer will have infinite processing power, what's called quantum computing. That basically means that in a very short while, in our lifetime, well, I include all of you here, but let's say five to 10 years and our lifetime combined, we have this. This change where technology is no longer going to be outside of us, but actually inside of us. For example, through nanotherapy, robots in your bloodstream directly connecting to the Internet, brain computer interfaces, artificial intelligence machines that can think straight from science fiction. The stuff that you saw on Star Trek. I know Star Trek is what, 50 years ago, you pull out the device and you hold it to a sick person, and the device fixes the problem. We're getting there now with remote diagnosis. There's 25 devices going on the market this year and next year that will allow the patient to have a remote diagnosis that goes into the cloud and basically says, okay, you don't have to come in. It's not serious. Scans your rash, you prick your finger, you cough into it. And that's actually going on the market in China now, called Scanado. This device, it's $100 and allows anybody to have a diagnosis from home. Of course, that wouldn't really work when it's about depression or asthma or, you know, but if it's about minor things, you know, it could. We're getting there. The question I have for you, how far would you go? Would you connect directly with technology if it was easy? I mean, the fact is, with these devices here, this is our external brain. It's your second brain. I don't know how heavy of a user you are, but in here, I don't remember all the phone numbers of my friends. They're just in here. It's like my brain, my financial records, my health records, my movies, my music, all in here. And these days, when you're sitting in a bar talking to other guys, you no longer talk about cars or whatever. You talk about what apps you have. It's kind of pathetic, actually. But this device now is essentially becoming our second brain. And this is much more powerful, more powerful than the president of the US had at his disposal 15 years ago in a mainframe computer. Now, this machine is going to have a million times the processing power in roughly 10 years. So it can take your DNA and you can have a live analytic of your DNA that tells you what has changed as compared to the last time, just in 10 years, in real time. So a lot of changes are coming. And the question really, is this right? In the end, sometimes I wonder, are we the last generation of unaugmented humans? I mean, we're in a way already augmented with a mobile phone or demented, you could say. But is this the last time? You know, for example, my kids and the kids of my kids, they will live in a world where being connected is like breathing in many ways. We're always online, we're always connected because the Internet is always there. In fact, now I have a new book I'm working on. It's called Offline Is the New Luxury. It's a luxury to not be connected. So that is a huge change. And clearly, as far as democracy is concerned, the impact of technology on democracy is both really terrible and really good. That is, of course, generally what technology does. So we're able to use Facebook to connect with friends and loved ones from 50 years ago. We can use online dating to find a partner. We can use all these amazing things. And then at the same time, turns out that the same medium, the social media, is killing the traditional media because all the advertising money goes there. So it's kind of a mix of good and bad things. But we still have this thing called the Moravec Paradox, which I think you'll be familiar with. If you have a science background, which I don't have, I'm just borrowing it. But basically, Moravec said, this is very important. Hans Moravech was one of the leading researchers for intelligence. He said, whatever is simple for a computer, it's very hard for a person, a human, and vice versa. So when we meet in the hallway later or having a drink or so it takes an average of 0.4 seconds for one human to kind of identify the other, to see, are you a threat, are you Interesting. That's without saying anything, 0.4 seconds. We make up our mind about the other person in 0.4 seconds. Now, a computer could observe you for 10 years, look at all of your Google searches. It would still not know that. It would know that you've always searched for sushi in Boston or whatever, those kind of things. Right. But it still wouldn't know you. So ultimately, I think the concern about technology becoming too human, I think it's probably a little bit premature. You know, we've heard Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkins talk about that, but there is something to it, which I'll explain. But basically what we're seeing here is our biggest challenge is really this one. The biggest challenge isn't that computers and robots will come and kill us. The Hollywood ex Machina, Terminator, Blade Runner, that sort of thing. They're far away from actually being anywhere close as intelligent. The biggest problem that we're having is that we're becoming too much like the machines. So we're expecting everything to be instant. We have no more patience. We're thinking that everything is an app. There's an app for everything, one way or the other. So I have two kids, and one of my kids years ago said when the iPad came out, he wants to be a musician, but he doesn't want to actually study the instrument. He just wants to get the iPad and, and $100 app to play music. And that's what he calls a musician. I mean, I went to Berkeley College, I studied for 10,000 hours and I still wasn't good enough. So I didn't really do anything. But anyway, 10,000 hours compared to 10 hours, I'm going to be a 10 hour musician. It's obviously easier. That is what I call machine thinking. So we look at other people and we say, okay, in the medical field, that's just all like science and algorithms and analytics and big data. But the reality is that our lives really aren't data. They have a lot to do with data, but our lives are quite a bit beyond data. So I have several chapters in this presentation. I'll probably skip some because of the timing, but this is the most important curve of the evening. You've seen it before. The exponential curve, okay, basically means Moore's law, Metcalfe's law. The power of technology doubles every 18, 24 months. And when you're at the beginning of the curve, it doesn't matter because you don't see much. So 1995, we're talking about the paperless office or streaming of music. Didn't work, didn't matter. But today, with the pivot point, right, we're at the takeoff point where literally science fiction is becoming science fact. I mean, if you're a scientist, you probably dispute some of this, but basically what's happening Is all the stuff that we talked about here is finally working. For example, you can use Gmail, Google to send money to each other. Anybody in the US can send money through Google. You can make free phone calls on Facebook, WhatsApp, you're probably using WhatsApp if you have international friends. I mean that basically the telecom companies are losing $100 million a day because people can use that free stuff. So we're now getting to the point where basically anything is the sky is the limit. I mean, just think about this for a second. When you're here, you're doubling 0.01, you have 0.02, 0.04. It's nothing, it doesn't matter. As Hemingway says, gradually, then suddenly. So when you're at 4:12, 18 months from now, 8, 16, 32, you are in five years, 30 times as far you go. 30 up the scale, you're in the sky, in the clouds, you're at 1 billion, 30 times up the scale, roughly 40 years. The kids or my kids will not know how to drive a car. They will not know what a CD looks like. They may not know what a book looks like. They will have unlimited energy in terms of energy that we can use for heating and those kind of things. They will solve diseases. They will see things that are literally out of science fiction, many of them good, other ones more worrisome. So I put together this map in my book called the Mega Shifts. And I'm not going to talk about all of them because that would take all night. But basically it's not just digitization, what's called digital transformation. It is also what's happening with cognification that machines can actually think, which I'll show you shortly. And robots, I mean robots have become so cheap, it's going to be absolutely mind boggling. So there's four mega Shifts I'll talk about in more detail. One is that everything is becoming data. You heard about big data. And basically in the medical field that is of course a huge boon. I mean, in Switzerland we don't allow people to go into the cloud quite yet because we haven't figured out how to safeguard the data. And that's a very big issue. But imagine if we were able to connect all of the health records of say, 2 billion people. I mean, the things that we can learn from that, that's called cloud biology. We can actually do simulations. The other thing is artificial intelligence, which I'll talk about a little bit more later. That essentially the concept that a machine can do what people used to Do. And that is the number one investment in the world. Now the US Is leading the market along with China and then Russia and India. So this is basically the idea of teaching a machine to kind of be like us in broad strokes. Okay. And that goes together with the Internet of things. You know, connected devices, cars, environmental systems. And finally, this is a big one for you guys. Of course, in this area is the human genome editing. I mean, this is, of course, the biggest potential that we see roughly 25 years from now is to say, well, if we know exactly what genome is doing what, and if we have enough trial simulations, we may be able to prevent cancer. May. Big question. But, you know, there's already 27 companies in California and Silicon Valley that have on their website that they are working on the end of death, the end of dying. This sounds like a joke. Check out this company, Human Longevity Inc. And their idea is to offer genome treatments to keep us from aging. Not entirely new, but with a new kind of science behind it. Science fiction. I'm not sure. I think that's basically going to be quite a scenario. There is a discussion that we're seeing in Silicon Valley about what's called the singularity. And the singularity is at the point in time where machines have the power of the human brain. That's roughly 7 to 10 years away. Human brain can do roughly 400 quadrillion calculations per second. And it's unknown what that really means as far as the neurons and so on are concerned. But a machine can do that now. But this machine is as big as this room. So roughly in seven to 10 years, this machine right here will have the same capacity than my brain. And then my colleague in futurism says that in 2050, we'll have a machine that has the capacity of all human brains. 10 billion. So an IQ of, I don't know, a million. Does that make them human? I doubt it. Right. Because, you know, after all, they're just zeros and ones. But there's a lot of things going on under that hood. Right. I'll show you some of that. But basically what's happening here is quite clearly in the very near future, we're all going to live and see this. And this is not a bad thing. The question will not if technology can do something, because the answer will always be yes. The question is why and who? Because Basically, in roughly 10 years, technology will be unlimited quantum computing, mobile connectivity, new nanoscience for devices so we don't have to use the raw earth materials. That's roughly 10 years away. Imagine if you had the power to change your kid's genome upon birth. Who's to say what would be right or wrong? I mean, never mind the religious parts of this. I'll leave this up for different discussion. This is just practical and ethical debates about should it be free. The European Commission says that roughly to develop a genome therapy would cost 35 trillion euros, roughly $45 trillion. But the actual therapy to prevent cancer would take four seconds. So if we're able to do that, would we have to give it away for free? You may be familiar with Kymria, which is the first drug approved by the fda. That is a leukemia drug. It's a gene therapy for leukemia. So for some really difficult cases, this is the only chance they have. Novartis developed this. The drug costs $475,000 and it's a money back guarantee. If you die, you don't pay. That's what Novartis says. It's a very strange way of looking at the world. Imagine if that became a standard for things. I mean, obviously that would cause a lot of unrest. So let me go to Switzerland and democracy. I'll come back to the other stuff in a second. So I live in a beautiful place. Well, that's not where I live, but that's Switzerland. I'm a Swiss citizen and a German citizen and also I was an American citizen. I had to give one of them up to become Swiss. So sorry about that. But I did live here for 17 years, so I'm. I still feel very American in many ways. So in Switzerland we have a very distinct culture. Seven million people, that's like the size of Manhattan. I don't know, very small. Drive through the country in three and a half hours. North, south, both ways, you've been there. And every year we get these amazing ratings. For example, we have been the most innovative country in the world for years. I don't exactly know what the metrics are, but if you ask Swiss people, they don't agree, which often happens. When you ask people in the country, are we the most innovative? They say, what? Really? I mean, this is an amazing list because we have a lot of research, for example, epfl, eth, and a lot of that stuff is happening. And then the strongest democracies. I don't know whether US is on this list, I will not discuss that with you. But the top 10, it probably has moved down this list in the last six months. But in any case, we're always on top of that list as well, because we have a special democracy Which I'll talk about in a second. And it's the happiest country in the world, along with Denmark and Iceland. No longer true for Iceland, I think now, but Denmark, funny thing about that is, of course, Denmark is now, I think in this year's research, this was last year, 2015, in 2017, Denmark is number one. But it's also the country where people take the most antidepressants. That's kind of a strange. You know, maybe you get happy because you take all that stuff all the time. But anyway, so Switzerland is doing really good on the ranking here. And it's definitely a country that is an interesting example of this. So we have driver democracy, which means four times a year, a big box, basically a big envelope, shows up at your doorstep, in your mailbox, and it's all the stuff that you're supposed to read and vote on four times a year. And some of that is very trivial, like the size of a sausage. Yeah, we had a vote on that, a referendum, because people were starting to make different sausages that people wouldn't approve of, because it's very important that the sausages are right length. So we had a vote on that. But it's stuff like nuclear energy, immigration. We have three forms. One is mandatory, which is changing the constitution. That is mandatory. You have to collect 100,000 valid signatures for your petition, which is quite big in Switzerland, and then you go to the Federal Council and they can approve to put that up for voting. So 100,000 people is quite the threshold. And then we have referendums, which this is the difficult part, where basically 50,000 people can go and say okay, or the cantones, which is the local governments, they object a law that's already in place and redo it. So if the government of Switzerland decides that they're going to allow genome research and experiments on humans, then people can put together a referendum and vote it down and go backwards. Biggest example was in 2002, very unpopular vote against foreigners in Switzerland. I immigrated in 2002, so I got in just in time. But this includes Germans and Europeans, not anyone, really. So we have In Switzerland roughly 2 million people who live in the mountains, and they don't like any foreigner, and that includes people from the next canton. But in any case. So there was a referendum on stopping immigration, basically, which is very bad for Switzerland because we have a shortage of workers, a shortage of professors, a shortage of pretty much anything. And the Conservative Party launched this referendum and it was accepted by a margin of 3,000 votes. I mean, 3,000 votes that's like very small. So what happened is that the government had to execute the people's opinion that immigration should be curtailed. That became a major issue because all of a sudden we had this in this beautiful country, we had to figure out how we're going to execute it and then at the same time keep in with government policy in Europe, which is basically mission impossible. So for example, if you're a German citizen, you could no longer come and work in Switzerland. And then basically the Swiss government figured out a way how to massage the people's opinion into policy, how to kind of go against it, but not overtly. It was a 15 year process. So here's the question I have about this. When issues become exponentially complex, how will citizens be able to make the right decision? I mean, this is my job to know about these things. But when I get this box from the election office and it has all that stuff in it, I give it to my wife too for her to figure out what we should vote for. Because it takes two and a half hours to work through that. And it's an average of 42% or so that vote, it's not very high. So it's sort of a dual sided question. I think in a world that's going exponentially fast, where basically you will not understand the world in 10 years, if you were to visit from here, then you would be dumbfounded. So it's a difficult thing to decide. Which way are we going? Here's a trend map that you see, many of these maps, all the stuff that goes on today, that if you're not an expert you would just say, oh God, this is just where can I hide the blockchain? Genomics, drones, smart grids, connected cars, smart homes, the list goes on. And in healthcare, this is a revolution, I think again, mostly positive, but definitely not so easy to understand. There's a lot of issues and concerns. So is a direct democracy the right tool to administer that? We're having lots of debates about this in Switzerland because it's one of the foundations of the Swiss culture. But imagine the government works on something really powerful and figures out a way to go forward. And a year later somebody launches a referendum and says, no, no, let's go backwards. And then the government has to scrap everything and then execute the will of the people who manage to get together. That can be great. I'm not so sure that's a way into the future. So direct democracy, I think for us it's working. But what it does in the future we'll Come back to in a second. Let me talk about intelligent machines. This is very timely because basically what's happened in computing is that if you grew up in the first edition of Computing, Tabulating and Programmed Machines, they would essentially be as dumb as a toaster. I mean, they would do whatever you tell them to do. You know, run a calculation, do a spreadsheet. But now there's this thing called cognitive computing, which allows machines to read all the data, for example, genomic data, oncology data, healthcare data, traffic data, and then make sense out of it by running a huge amount of data together. For example, in human resources now, in the corporate environment, people use all that data about their employees. Big companies run all of the data, all of the emails you're writing, all of your social media posts when you come into the office and on. And this data analyzes who you are. It's standard procedure for many large companies. And then it says, this person is the most productive or not. Kind of a scary thought, but this is kind of the computer does your thinking. So do you guys know Airbnb? Familiar with Airbnb? Everybody is. You want to rent your house on Airbnb, you don't have to figure out how much you should charge. You tell Airbnb where you are. It looks up all of the Data. That's sometimes 200 million data points of your city, the crime rate, the hotel charges, and then the AI, the machine says, your place is worth $74 a night. They do that for you. So that is the kind of example of smart thinking. Basically, what's happening here is that we're now entering an age where computers are listening to us. They understand what we're saying, they can talk to us, they can understand our meaning, and they're no longer programmed. Well, that's just starting to happen in the medical area. Area. That means IBM Watson is the leading contender here. It looks at all of the MRIs, all the cat scans, all of the stuff that you have. It reads 4,000 or so new oncology reports a week. It puts all the data together and it knows all of the numbers. It still doesn't understand the human behind it, but it certainly has a lot of knowledge as far as numbers are concerned. So that is a future dramatically different Alexa. Dim play that example from Alexa. Alexa is now the leading device. Also coming into the doctor's office now. Right. So basically, what is happening is people are building what's called skills, which are like apps, you know, for Alexa, for this machine. So banks, doctors, travel agents, and you can speak to the machine and have it do things for us. So example is this one. Alexa, dim the lights. Alexa, play Happy birthday. Happy Birthday. It's a trivial example. But think about the next step that are quite obvious. You say, well, Alexa, I need to invest $10,000 in environmentally sensitive companies. Alexa goes off and figures out what has been good performing. It replaces your banker, essentially that part of banking that's already happening in the medical field, that's going to become a standard, that you sit down and say, check what's my status health wise. And we'll say, oh, you're doing pretty good, but you should really not smoke that cigar. In the evening we'll give you some comment like this. That's called machine learning. It's hard to understand how that works. But basically it's safe to say that we're getting into a world where the machine, the artificial intelligence can tell us things. And that's if you, if you're using Google Maps, that's what it does. If you're using Gmail, it gives you automatic responses. If you're using Facebook, it gives you automatic updates from the things that you may like. That's machine intelligence. Now imagine what this will do for democracy. If we have devices telling us at every turn and they're getting very good at this, what is the best thing to do? Where we go shopping, why Amazon is better than Walmart and why we go to Whole Foods or not or whatever. It could be fantastic because it's very convenient. So now that the first websites where you can find a partner through a cloud like this, an intelligent cloud where you talk to the machine and the machine talks to the potential partner and connects you based on voice profiles and it's like speed dating in a way. So this is really what's happening here. Let's define intelligence very simply as the ability to accomplish complex tasks. We all have that. And that's quite different than a machine because you can take a machine that beats the world champion in go or in chess, but the same machine couldn't drive your car, it couldn't talk to your kids. It is very narrow and we can do, I mean, we can drive in the US and you can probably drive in the UK if you try hard. You can even drive in India because you can adapt. Machines can't quite do this yet, but artificial intelligence is really, this is the fact that machines can start doing what we used to do and that is something that we're going to see everywhere. And I tell you, a lot of people are worried about this because of Jobs. I'll talk about that shortly. My view is that the machines will take our tasks, our routines. That is certain. I mean if you're a bookkeeper, it's quite clear that the machine can eventually in the next five years learn bookkeeping quite perfectly. I mean there are some things about creative bookkeeping, but basically bookkeeping is just a job of numbers. It's a job that you have to do well and it takes certain knowledge, but it's not like you're going to write a book or something or perform a dance. So basically what's happening here is that we've seen in the movies what artificial intelligence looks like. We should forget all of that because that's entertainment. We are hundreds of years away from machines being human, if ever for various reasons. But what we are seeing is self driving cars. So this is not really artificial intelligence like the ex machina. This is really intelligent assistance. That's called IA basically not AI. And these are machines that can basically do human functions in a certain way. If you're foolish enough, you can make the Tesla crash, right? No problem. But it can drive just fine in a traffic jam. Or machines can work in a warehouse. Like this is Amazon's warehouse, fully automated. I mean these machines are dumb right there, but they're doing a good job, doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. And then you have robots now like Baxter. This robot is $25,000. You can teach the robot to do anything, including lifting your grandmother out of the bath if that's what's desired. I mean it's the first robot that is actually safe for humans to use. And this robot of course is a great competition for any manual job. For example, fixing a. And those machines are getting rapidly cheaper roughly. Baxter will cost about $5,000 in three or four years. Surprises going like this. And then you have things like Google Lens, which is your. That's the latest thing from Google where you can hold up the mobile phone over location and it will tell you what it is. I mean that's not exactly like going to Mars, but that's pretty smart. When you're visiting somebody's house and you hold the thing over a book and it will just load the book. I mean a human could do that with anything. But it's quite hard for tech to do that. This is my favorite is the first robot lawyer. So any lawyers in the room? This is a thing called do not pay. It's a bot, it's a messenger, you can try it on the Internet. Donotpay.co.uk and you can sue Equifax using this. You give it your case number, you can contend your parking ticket, if you got a parking ticket in New York or London, you can have the bot file a complaint. And this is if you want the non disclosure agreement, the bot will do it for you. So it's, I mean this is also kind of primitive in many ways, but it's still very useful. So imagine next time you get to Chicago and the airport is closed and United has to rebook, I don't know, 15,000 people, no more calling. You go the bot, the bot knows who you are, it has all your information. It does the same thing that you have to wait in line for at the airport in 14 seconds on your mobile. So that's really what's happening with artificial intelligence. All the things that we're seeing here, quite mind boggling. Here's this one. I didn't want to keep this one. First trials here in the us this would not be legal, by the way, in Europe, but here it is using software to decide on probation. So this is already happening. And so what is happening here is that the correctional facility, the jail essentially films the prisoner the entire time, collects all of the data and then the machine looks at all the footage, looks at all the data, looks at all the information and says this person shouldn't go on probation because they're likely to do it again. That's what the judge does. The judge has a bad day, nobody gets to go. And that's the argument. Of course it's quite clear. The statistics show decisions based on the machine were better than the judge. Does it make it right? That's the key question. My view is the judge should use the machine to get information to make better decisions. Imagine what would happen to democracy if we let the machine decide on policy. When should we nuke North Korea? The machine can tell us. We could basically look at this as a replacement of people. How far would we go with this? So that's a really difficult issue because the bottom line really is this. If you're looking at the brain and how we work, we have what's called social intelligence. So we would know when we're misbehaving or when we're not supposed to, you know, blame somebody or we would have this kind of feeling about each other. Some of us even have emotional intelligence. That's very hard to describe what that is. So we have compassion or empathy or, you know, it's. This is actually not really clear what that is. And then we have intellectual intelligence. Of course we know what that is. And then we have nothing. And then we have machines. Machines don't have any of this. They have kind of intellectual intelligence. But if a machine can figure out how to reroute the traffic in New York City or Los Angeles by looking at 1.5 trillion data feeds and then save 10% of energy or gas and make it faster, humans could never do that. We can't keep that much data. So machines are currently doing that, and that is the future of machines, and that will have impact on society. And then we have to figure out how far do we go and where exactly we go. For example, Putin, our good friend, says that whoever is first to have the most powerful artificial intelligence will rule the world. Of course, we know that is going to be right. It's going to be Russia, of course. So Russia, China, us, India, that's the four competitors. And that, I think, is a huge challenge for democracy also, because imagine what would happen when we have such systems in place. Do we still have control over that? That brings me to the issue of what I call digital ethics. Let me say in the beginning that ethics has nothing to do with religion. As the Dalai Lama said, ethics is more important than religion. That's what he said. I'm not saying that's true. I'm just presenting it for discussion, because there is things that make us human that nobody wants to miss that are not optional. And I think the ethics that we're looking at right now is basically what technology is doing is what I call hell. Then it's heaven. And it's hell. Take the example of genome therapy. If one day we can prevent cancer by genomic therapy, which is the goal, some people say roughly 25 years, if we can save one single life with that, we absolutely must do that. But on the other hand, we can use that very same process, mostly based on what is now called CRISPR Cas9 and the cutting of genomes, which is already widely used for vegetables and GMO and even animals. When we can do that, we can also program our kids. It's the same technology. And that brings up this dilemma. We cannot really afford not to do it, because we can do a lot of good things here, but then we have to figure out how to govern it. That is our primary challenge. So I always say the future is better than we think, but we have to make it so we have to govern it correctly. Like in this case with the genome therapy, we would have to say what is okay and what is not okay, and who decides that. So we may End up as, of course, the other thing that's happening there is longevity. It's an average true that we are gaining one third of a year of lifespan every single year we're alive. All of us in the west, the kids of my kids will, if it all goes according to that plan, they will live an average of 95 years and we will eventually get in the next 50 years to 120 years lifespan. So then you can retire with 60 and go on a cruise ship for 60 years, go to Mars or something. I don't know. So imagine the issues for democracy and for government, like retirement, for example. You're going to have retirement for 50 years. We don't even have it now for five years. We have enough issues with that. And then we have machines doing all the work. That's called the Internet of things, connecting cities, what's called a smart city, smart farming, it's smart logistics. We're essentially creating sort of a meta intelligence. So you heard about the Internet of things, but the bottom line on this is really Cisco says, the tech company says we're going to have 700 billion connected devices, our cars, you heard about the smart home, our banking, our health records. So clearly that could be fantastic. But there's lots of issues about who is controlling that, who may be abusing it, who's responsible. I think that comes down to governance. We can't just invent something and then say, well, something went wrong and 100 million DNA records got copied so you could have a clone would be unfortunate, I suppose. But. So basically what's happening is what we see today is that technology has given us some amazing advantages like free phone calls and all these things. But it could also be used as a weapon. So artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the blockchain, genome therapy. So does that mean we shouldn't invent the technology, we shouldn't use it? Well, that is not an option, especially not here. I mean, this place is one of the places inventing a lot of this. A lot of research is being done on the things like genome therapy and the future of medicine and so on and so on. We don't really have a choice not to be part of this. So what we need to do is to find a common place to where we can use it for the common good. Because basically what's already happening is quite geared. Arianna Huffington from the Huffington Post said that technology has been very good at giving us what we want, which is great technology. People love their mobile phones. Essentially, you could say the mobile devices are kind of becoming an obsession, but they have not become as good as giving us what we need, which is to connect with each other. So technology has in many ways actually replaced this. So I'd like to say that basically at this point, it's quite clear that what we have most important to us, you know, trust isn't digital. Happiness is not an app, it's not a device, it's not a program. Relationships are in code. Humans aren't machines. At least I believe that humans aren't machines. You would be surprised how many people do believe that humans are machines, fancy machines. So there's a kind of a, you know, there's a challenge for us because humans are the most inefficient as compared to machines. We make mistakes, we make up stories, we lie, we don't show up. We may be sick. We change our mind. Have you ever met a machine that changing its mind or that's making up a story? So in many ways, you could say that humans are the opposite of machines. We're completely on the other equation. And that goes for efficiency as well. I mean, I can't tell you how many of my clients are saying we're going to use technology to replace as many people as possible, because that's what brings up the margin. Telecom companies, banks, insurance companies, government, the Social Security Administration. It's quite clear that when you use efficiency, you need less people. You have smarter machines. So here's the interesting part about democracy. As I was saying earlier, democracy relies on preserving what makes us human. It relies on things that are not part of the machine. Sorry about that. Supposed to come in there. So it's actually democracy doesn't have much to do with efficiency, because you could say that democracy is essentially not efficient. As I was saying earlier, should we remove that because it's too slow? Should we have just one person decide because it's fast? Probably not a good idea. So one of the key issues here is that we have this temptation that we think of technology, automation as the holy grail. And the key issue really is we have to think about what should not be automated, what should not be connected, what should not be optimized. Because if the world was about optimization, we wouldn't exist. We would constantly fail all of that, because we would constantly fail to do what the machines can do best. So challenges are when we think about technology. Again, I'm an optimist on this. I think we can work all this out, but there are challenges that we should talk about. First of all, some people think that democracy could be kind of a Burning platform, which means, like, doomed to fail. Because technology is moving so fast and politics is woefully behind in Europe. Now we have a proposal that if you want to go into politics, you have to pass the technology test. You have to understand all the items that I already lined out earlier to prove that you are future ready. What we call future ready. I think that would be an interesting example. And to figure out where that could be going. You see already here that 52% worldwide, this is Pew Research center latest research, 52% are not satisfied with their democracy higher than ever before. And that is primarily, I think, because people are worried about the future. I mean, I get to hear this every day. I'll tell you why I think that is basically because of this, right? We are just humans. We're learning linearly. We're getting to be a little bit older, we understand more stuff, we're getting smarter, but only at a very slow pace. I mean, basically what happens here is that at this point we can look at technology and say, yeah, I'm a better driver than the Tesla car. 10 years finished. Not a chance. The curve goes like this. Technology can do just about anything better than we can. That is a routine driving a truck, doing the bookkeeping, financial advice, looking at MRI scans, diagnosis. 10 years. So basically, we have to wonder about where this is going to leave us. Basically, this is the question about ethics. Ethics has been defined by Potter Stewart as the difference between having a right to do something on the power and doing what is the right thing to do. That is the most basic definition. It's something we have to think about when we talk about the future. Because these days there's increasing what I call future shock. In the US, not as much. In some ways, that is quite a different story. But in Europe, people are saying, well, what's going to happen when technology becomes that good? The Oxford report says 55% of jobs will be automated away in America, that means two and a half million truckers, 4.5 million people working in fast food. Burger King and McDonald's are both developing places. That is, the entire place is run by one person. It's already highly automated. If you've ever been inside of a McDonald's will probably taste even better when there's just one person doing it. But, I mean, that brings up a huge challenge. What do we do with all those people? Catalonia, Spain. You heard about the recent. This is my favorite place in Catalonia called Caracas. Fantastic place to go to. And my colleague Paraghana says, basically what's happening is that we have a devolution, a decentralization of power because of technology, because technology makes it possible. So the Catalan people want to be independent, the Lombardia people want to be independent, the Scottish people want to be independent because technology makes it possible. It's a very, very big discussion about this and where that's going. So let me talk about work and jobs and then we'll open up the round for some questions very soon. So just as a reminder, I put together this little rotating thing here. So a lot of people that I talk to there, they tend to say that basically we are the horses of the digital age. You know, what happened to horses? We used to have horses do all the work and ride them and go places. And the horses, you know, we had the car and the railway, the horses went out. So now a lot of people are saying, well, is that what's going to happen to us? As machines come smart, we become like the horses so, you know, keep them as a toy or something? I don't think that's quite true. We have to give humans more credit than that, than the horses, because in the end, it comes down to this. The technology is going to enable us to do some pretty amazing things. The doctor that makes the rounds in the hospital, that has a tiny robot that has the entire world's library of everything ever known about diseases. Real time updates with many other doctors. That machine can be used to the detriment, which is to make the doctor work even faster. Or it can be used as a solution to have you go back and check something to actually talk to the patient. There's been lots of research with doctors saying that. Many doctors say, well, if I have this machine, I save time researching and looking up things, I can build a conversation, I can spend more time with the patient. Could it be potentially making you dependent? Yes, of course, Big question. So take a look at the economic stats. Basically saying that it's quite clear that the blue bar here is the jobs are likely to be Automated telemarketers, almost 100%, accountants, 94%, retail salespeople, 90%. You know, you know what's safe at the top of the pyramid? Priests, clergy, dancers, they're not on the list here, but dentists, firefighters. So does that mean doom and gloom? I don't think it does. I think what it really means is that machines are very good at doing the monkey work. Okay, now if you're an accountant putting a receipt from left to right, that is kind of a job that a machine will eventually master. That can be done now the question is, what do we do with this? And the answer really is that you can see on this graph already from the Economist, that anything that's not routine is going up. Non routine cognitive work. Most of people in this room would probably do that. And non routine manual work. Plumbers, electricians, artists, cooks, therapists. Well, manual, but non routine work. Don't let your kids learn anything that can be made of routine. And that is the key to the future. So in many ways we teach our kids to work like robots, to fulfill some sort of plan. Our kids have to be the opposite of robots. They have to be inventive, enterprising, flexible, agile, creative, imaginative, a pain in the butt, basically. I can tell you from my own kids that's the case. So that is the key for the future, because this is the bottom line, right? Anything that can be automated or digitized will be because computers are no longer dumb. And there's so many hurdles why that didn't work. But now it's going to work. 10 years, end of the story. So that brings up huge. I mean, the biggest issue for America is not the globalization, it's automation. And so that's what we have to address with education, because the bottom line is also true the other way around. Anything that cannot be digitized or automated becomes extremely valuable. That is understanding, creativity, compassion, values, empathy, things that a computer will never hopefully be able to have. The machine can understand emotions, it can read my face and you can say, oh, Gerd is angry or he's tired. The machine can do that. And then it can say, I pretend to be tired as well. Machine can do that, but it can't actually be angry because it doesn't exist. There's a vast difference here. In German, the word Dasein means existence. We exist and that brings up a whole different level. So in terms of education and our future, clearly our kids have to understand technology or they're going to be toast. I mean, that's totally clear. But why would you let my kids learn how to be a programmer? Machines can program themselves. My kids have to be better humans. They have to understand compassion, figure out what to do, invent their own jobs. Lots of research on the other end says roughly 70% of all new jobs in 10 years have not even been invented yet. So the kids, your kids, and the kids of my kids, they'll invent their own job because they're there. Technology will make it possible. The most popular job now, new job, is a drone operator. I'm not talking about the military here, civil drone operator. Hundreds of thousands of them are being hired in Africa to fly food and medication and stuff where there are no roads. These jobs didn't exist a couple years ago, so that's kind of good news. Clearly we're going to move to a world where our skills are changing. The World Economic Forum says this is going to be like this. Basically the old skills from a year ago, two years ago, the new skills are different and those skills are highly different. Critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, especially the skills of an artist, you could say more or less right brain. There's no such thing as right brain, left brain. But let's say for the practical purpose, not the logical part, but the other part, because this is what's going to happen to logic. I mean, make no doubt about this, if that's your job, it will be taken. Includes my own job. By the way, the other day I had a great experience in New York. I went to a company that makes artificially intelligent machines and I was able to speak to the latest prototype. I can't tell you which one, but I talked to her, it's always a woman for some reason. And I asked the machine about the future of Europe. What is the future of Europe? The machine gave me a 10 minute talk in a completely normal female voice. I could have sworn was like 98% real. And it was intelligent. Was talking about currency fluctuation, the end of oil, all of that 10 minutes. I was thinking like, God, that's kind of my job. But it actually isn't my job because then when I asked the machine the next question, I said, can you tell me about this concept I'm working on called the United States of Europe, which is a concept, as I'm sure you understand. Machine didn't say anything. I repeated the machine said command not understood. It's because United States of Europe doesn't exist. It's a concept, it's an idea. Computer doesn't know. So I think that is our future. Also, I think in the medical profession, clearly we're going to move into this part where we have different skills, where we're going to look at a different way of society. So I'm going to skip some of this because otherwise we won't get to the questions. You can start preparing because you can see I was vastly optimistic on the number of slides I was going to indulge you with. So let's skip this one and talk about this. Basically what's happening already, as I'm sure you're aware of that technology is increasingly moving across the line towards what I call dehumanization. Facebook has an algorithm that works on your face, literally, that's used by the FBI and the CIA, and they're using it in the back end. So whatever photos you put up on Facebook, they scan every part of your muscle. They figure out if you're angry or tired or, you know, all that stuff is happening behind the scenes. You cannot search for that. But Facebook knows that most of the time you come there, you're drunk. For example, I mean, Facebook. And Facebook knows more about you with photos and WhatsApp than anybody that would ever physically know you. I mean, the old joke was five years ago, Google knows more about you than your husband or your wife. Because you Google and you ask, you know, what do I do with my fungus nail or, you know, whatever, right? All that combined, it's vast. So now we're basically seeing all these things, you know, where. Basically then Elon Musk, another Tesla CEO, is suggesting we should create a connection from the Neocortex to the Internet so we can keep up with the smart machines. We're having all kinds of discussions about this. I mean, we're seeing technology creating all kinds of issues. And Mark Anderson from Netscape, originally, he said this in 2011. Software is eating the world. Everything is becoming software. Music has become software. Shopping has become software. Books are software. Films are software. Cars are software. Basically, I always say that we should be careful that software isn't going to cheat the world. Like, this is what happens on social media. We're inside of a group of friends, we get feedback from people, we see the things that we're supposed to see, we feel good about the likes, but the whole thing is run by a giant computer. And I'm sure you heard about the story. What's happening with Facebook is that it's quite clear there's no. People are still probing on this, that people used social media, particularly Facebook, and as a platform for disinformation, for essentially what they call sowing dissent, is to get people worried, basically. And we have a lot of. The founder of ebay, Pierre Omidya, he said that basically what happened here is that social media has become a place where that's possible, And this is where it impacts democracy. I mean, regardless of your opinion about Trump or the Republicans or any political opinion, manipulating what we think through a medium that is not clear as to what it says and what it is, it's a considerable problem. If you watch Fox Television, you know what to expect. If you watch pbs, you know what to expect. This is a regular medium. They actually have editors, but this is an algorithm that people can buy. $70 million a month was spent on influencing US elections. Is that fair? I can't really think that's a good idea. I mean, looking at this, the fact is, 45% of American kids get their news on Facebook, only on Facebook. And there's no editor on Facebook. There's no responsibility, there's no accountability. Facebook keeps saying, we're not a medium now. This is not good for democracy. Clearly not. And I've tried leading Facebook. I tried two times. It's like a drug addict. But Facebook's kind of an infrastructure now. So if I quit Facebook, my traffic goes down 70% to my website. Facebook is a fact of life now. So what do we need to do? The cheating the world idea is basically protecting us from things that we don't want to see. That is not good for democracy because it's creating what's called a feedback loop, an echo chamber, the filter bubble. And of course, Facebook has almost 400 neuroscientists and scientific personnel working on addiction to make sure you come back to Facebook. So it's a real dilemma. This is another one that's happening in China. They're developing software that can scan the entire traffic, no matter how you're driving or moving, to make sure that people do what they're supposed to do. Of course, in China, that's not a problem, considering that we don't have any rights in China, no matter how you look at it. But, I mean, clearly endangering democracy. And now there will be a universal credit system in China in 2020. Every single person will have a rating from 1 to 100 as to how important and valuable you are and what your credit is. And if you don't have 71, you're not going to get that special night in the Palace Hotel or so, because you don't qualify. That's like black mirror you see in the eye. It's quite scary. So let me summarize. This is a defining moment in democracy. We have to use technology for the good. And there's plenty of that happening. I mean, the fact that we can watch Netflix for $10 a month, we can watch 200,000 movies that used to be $25 for one DVD. That's pretty amazing. We can make free phone calls. We can do all that stuff. That's really good stuff. But we still have to be careful that technology doesn't grow into a place where we can safely say, well, it will be mostly negative for Us. And who would control that? Technology companies are now the most powerful companies in the world. In fact, I need to show you the slide that I skipped. Just give me a second. I'll pull it up. Because I think you need to see that statistic to see the context here. So in the meantime, you can think of a question. Okay, so here you can see the most powerful companies in the world all in one chart. It is no longer the oil companies which were the most powerful companies or the banks. That's bad for Switzerland, but that's true. The top 20 companies are technology companies. And they're doing in many ways what the oil companies used to do. They're essentially running the world. And almost all of those guys are my clients. So I have firsthand experience of talking to them about the worldview that they have and where they're going with this. Just to give you some background information. Okay, we go back to this. So here's the key question. Who will be mission control for humanity? Who will decide what is right or wrong or what we should or should not do or. Well, you know, where Mission Control is currently located, it's Silicon Valley. They have the most money, they invent the most things. They're the most entrepreneurial, and for good reason, because they risk everything every day. They're pioneers. But the key question really is ultimately, when they're starting to develop things, for example, connecting our brain to the Internet, or human genome therapy, or they impact everything that we do. What do we do about this? Essentially, we're looking at a future where technology is now capable of doing a lot of things that we haven't imagined. And some people would say, well, you know, that's kind of like game over for us. I don't agree. But Elon Musk says, you know, Tesla CEO and founder says there should be some sort of regulatory oversight. He's already gone. Elon Musk, come back, please. Okay, sorry about that. To where I have my own quote. Elon Musk said, by the way, I need to play that again. Sorry about that. For some reason, that was a little bit bad. But basically he's saying that we need to have some oversight because technology is so powerful now. And of course, he is creating a lot of that technology, which is an interesting point. So he basically says we have to have oversight so that we make sure we don't do something stupid with technology. There's plenty of options for that. I like to say that basically what we have to do is we have the most promising future as one where we don't postpone innovation and science. But we don't dismiss the exponential risk either. We basically can say that whatever is the risk of artificial intelligence or robotics, somebody else will take care of it. That does remind you in a way of the gun lobby, right? Somebody else will take care of the problems that come out of it. No matter what you're thinking about this same logic, we need to think about this and say, well, if these things are dramatically changing what we are and how democracy works, if Facebook is actually manipulating 40% of the entire population into thinking differently, does that call for something very big question. And I think what we need is the EPA isn't exactly fashionable anymore. Well, let's say it has kind of ceased to exist, but I think we sort of need an EPA for humanity. We need a protection agency for what makes us human, which inefficiency, emotions, things that only humans can do. Compassion, empathy, imagination, free will. The day will come that we're going to see that we are no longer allowed to drive because the machines will have learned how to drive. And then our free will is gone at that point because basically we just kill people when we drive. So we're very hard, you know, 1.2 million people a year, in fact, we kill. So do we need something like a digital ethics council? I think it has been discussed on a global level in many different ways. So here's a couple of things and then we'll take some questions. Bottom line is that we need to think about this as creating some principles in the Future of Life Institute, also funded by Elon Musk, has come up with four first, all technology should respect human values, human dignity, rights, freedoms, cultural diversity. Second, it should all create shared benefit and prosperity. Right now we can safely say technology hasn't really done that. It has in fact created more inequality. And if we are going to see the day where we have a therapy for cancer, will have to be free. How would that work in the capitalist system? I have no idea. You know it's going to cost 30 trillion. Hard to figure out. We have to think of ecosystems, we have to think of everything around what we're building, not just think of, for example, Uber is looking to displace the taxi drivers. Well, that's great, but if they're all displaced, will it just be Uber that runs everything? Big concern, responsibility. Those that design and build this are responsible. If IBM, Watson is going to redo the medical business as they want, if the pharma companies are going to be reset to zero because we use technology, we're going to have to figure out who is responsible, who's accountable, who could afford it. So this is our major challenge. Technology can work hand in hand with us or technology can work against us. Finding the right balance will be absolutely crucial to humanity and to democracy. Because if we don't find the right balance, we may end up in a place where democracy is shrunk, where it's automated, where machines decide our fate. That would indeed be like Blade Runner. So, four points. How to make that happen. To create your own future, going back to the beginning, observe. So this is the number one skill is as long as you know what's going on and you can see the future, you will find a way forward to figure out what to do. Observation is the key thing. This is not prediction. This is not about magic sauce. This is just looking understand. I always like to say, you can talk to your kids, but understanding your kids is a whole different cup of tea. So understanding this is really a human skill. Imagination. Einstein famously said imagination is more important than knowledge. And that is interesting from Einstein, of course, because he had genius knowledge. I guess that is a consequence of having that knowledge. But I would say there is nothing wrong with knowledge, but imagination is the skill of the future. Good exercise to do is to say, okay, what am I going to be in five years? What's my company going to be in five years? What is possible in five years? I think that's a very good exercise. And then to develop what I call foresights. I've talked about that before. Most importantly in my book, I use a phrase that I would like to reiterate. We shouldn't think of the world as a giant algorithm. The world isn't a machine. We aren't machines. You could argue that eventually we may be able to be explained by machines, but this is a different discussion. So we need to embrace technology because there's no other way than to do that. We're not going to go back and put technology back in the back. That's not going to be plausible. But we shouldn't become technology. We shouldn't allow the things that make us human to be removed because it's going to be much more efficient or easy or fast. So very important point at the end here. So I want to thank you for your time and I'm not.