2030 And The Good Future Technology And Humanity | Gerd Leonhard At Gcaiot 2021 (Audio-version only)

Hello and welcome to Gerd Leonhardt's podcast. Speeches, Greetings, and salaam alaikum. I'm Gerd Leonhardt, futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. It's my great pleasure to deliver a keynote for you guys today at the IEEE's GCA IoT Conference in beautiful Dubai. Too bad I can't be there in person, but I do hope you enjoy my talk and we can have a nice conversation later in the Q and A session. So I'm going to talk to you today about the good future. This has become my key topic, and it's kind of a strange thing to speak about the good future today because a lot of people are sitting here and saying, okay, is the good future? How real is it? I mean, basically, a lot of people are worried about the future. I mean, if you're looking at statistics around the world, people are concerned about, of course, Covid, climate change, globalization, the robots taken over automation, science fiction, black mirror, and so on. Here's a stat showing some really interesting numbers from the southern countries and the northern countries shown that quite a few kids between, say, 16 and 25 are worried about the future. The future is frightening and humanity is doomed. And quite a few people are saying this, and I've run across this in my talks and my conversations I have with people, and it's quite worrisome. And I'm here to tell you that the future actually is kind of the reverse. The future is better than we think. In a really strange way, the COVID crisis is kicking off kind of a weird golden era. And I'm saying this because I think despite all the things that are happening with COVID we have learned a lot. We have learned the power of science, the power of collaboration, the need to get together and figure out solutions. And we're now moving into a decade in an entirely different way. And this will have geopolitical consequences. It has consequences on the stock market, consequences, of course, on our environment and everything that we do. As we're moving into this future, we have a bunch of new doors opening up. This is very important to realize doors have closed. It seems a lot of doors have closed the last two years, but new ones are opening up. And I think it's safe to say, of course, that's true for every crisis. The opportunity and the crisis go kind of hand in hand. And many things that are a challenge turn out to be a major opportunity. Right after World War II, for example, and after 1968, the last big upheaval in history, and the financial crisis, of course, There was kind of a muted recovery, but I think we're going to see something completely different, basically running around those three different key points or three tickets for the future. One is digitization and of course that is all around us, the number one driver of economic progress pretty much around the world. But very big topic, how to get that right. I'll talk more about that later, of course, and decarbonization, which means to get out of fossil fuel in the next couple years. The end of coal is near, of course, oil and gas is next and basically a decade, right? Total decarbonization. And I think we're going to see a lot of that happening much quicker than we would have ever thought. But it's also based on the last point, which is what I call reformation. The idea of changing how we do things, of rethinking our economic logic, rethinking capitalism, if you wish, kind of a sustainable capitalism. And this has also been driven by the COVID crisis, because in the end, you know, how are we going to live on a planet that doesn't collaborate? I mean, even the richest person has to live on the same planet for the time being. So that has taught us a lot. And we're going to need to reform how things are being done. We have to change the rules. And that's already happening right now. Every industry is changing the rules, every to be ready for the post Covid era and of course for the era of decarbonization. And this is going to be a major trend, I think opportunities all around bound here. And the important thing is that we figure out, for example, starting with digitization, how to do this in a human way, in an ethical way, in a way that makes sense to us, not just in a sort of program kind of way. Because in the end, transformation isn't just about technology, it's about transforming our lives, our societies, the way that we live. And clearly here, I think it's obvious that we're heading into a future much, much quicker. In 2030, exponential leaps, right? 4, 8, 16, 32, we're going to be at 256. That's almost like 80x of today. Think about that for your own life and for the life of your kids and other digital natives. I mean, the stats are quite clear here. It's basically an unheard of period of technological transformation. All the stuff that sounded like science fiction, genetic engineering, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, robotics, is actually happening. Trillion dollar businesses emerging. Larry Fink from BlackRock said the other day, the next 1000 unicorns and big companies around the world will be in climate change technology and pollution technology and efficiency technology. I totally agree with that statement. As you can see here, these curves are already rapidly unfolding in the next two to five years. That's a majority of these changes. Whether it's hydrogen fuel or agricultural software and fuel cell EVs and smart meters, all that stuff is huge opportunity. We're getting it right and we can do this, I think, in the next decade. Look what's happening in Germany with a huge emphasis on this turnaround. Getting out of the fossil fuel business, of course, hugely explosive topic in the region, in the Middle East, North African region, as to how that is going to influence pretty much every decision. The other great thing in 2030, we're moving to the point where technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Exponential cost reduction trend. That's going to be true not just for genome editing and for data and of course, but also for the raw materials that we're using in mobile phones. So nanotechnology will allow us to build things much quicker and not use rare earth minerals. That's already declined 90% for the production of many mobile phones. And just look at that time horizon of where we're going to have abundant energy. Nanotechnology to 3D print things, that could be potentially quite interesting. It could be very, very positive in terms of where we are going. And clearly climate change, technology, that's the ticket right, right here. Data, everything networked, everything smart, everything leads to sustainable everything. And that brings in the sustainability revolution. This is truly a revolution because we're talking about a shift of roughly $150 trillion in assets to different places, but also hundreds of millions of new jobs emerging in the next decade or two. Big Blue, not IBM, but Big Blue technology. And Big Green is kind of the big future. That's the number one ticket right here. But nevertheless, we're going to have to figure out how to do this in a way that respects humanity, that respects who we are, because technology is exponential. But we are not. We are humans, we are biological. We are kind of linear. We're learning, we're growing. We have a plastic brain. We change. We don't think with the brain, we think with the body. We're not just data engines or being driven by algorithms. But this is clear. We're heading into a future where the next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. And the question in 10 years isn't going to be any more about what is possible with technology, because pretty much everything will be possible. Just 10 years from now, quantum computing, nanotechnology, 5G, 7G, 10G connectivity, 9 billion people on the Internet. So don't ask what technology can do, but ask what it should do. That is the key thing. What kind of future do we want for ourselves, for our kids? And that is the key question we have to ask right now here at this event. When we think about technology and standards and artificial intelligence, all the debate about the Internet of things, the question is not whether it can be done, it can be. The question is who's in charge? How are we going to control it? What are the benefits of it? And how are we going to build what I call a good future? And what is a good future? Well, most people kind of agree that not dying from disease or hunger is already quite good in having sort of basic rights and having the rights to build a family. And, you know, this kind of basic things most of us would agree on on the good future. Very important point to define what the good future is. I'm going to give that some more effort also in my next film that's coming out in January to explain the good future. But in a nutshell, this is our world we're moving into, highly fragmented, everything goes kind of world. The next 10 years, Perpetual Vuca volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And some people call it Barney. Right. Basically the flip of that is that we're always going to change everything in the next 10 years. That could be really, like I said, a kind of a golden era, but also really confusing. And so it's really important to realize what's happening in terms of technology with what I call the game changers that are coming in and changing our societies dramatically. So that is of course, big data, the Internet of things, cloud computing, all that stuff you talk about every day at this conference, I'm sure. But this is all happening at once. It's important to understand that this is not a gradual thing. Basically it's all coming to fruition at once. It's becoming sort of gradually and then suddenly an explosion of possibilities. And if we look in this direction, we see it all around us. It's basically whether it's dancing robots or robots that can actually walk or telemedicine or anything, virtuality. It's happening all around us, mind boggling times. And now we have to ask the question, what kind of goal do we have with technology? What is a good future? Is the good future going to be that we become technology like some people are suggesting? Singularity, transhumanism? I doubt it, but I think that is basically just morphing into another electronic being. And this guy, you may know him, E. O. Wilson, famous biologist, nature researcher, writer, all around brilliant person, he says the real problem of humanity is the. We have Paleolithic emotions, you know, Stone Age, basically, medieval institutions, that is for sure. And godlike technology and it's terrifically terribly dangerous. Well, that is a true saying. I mean, we have godlike technology and we don't really know how to control it yet. And we have, we haven't really done a very good job at controlling the power of technology because we don't want to put the brakes on anything. It's kind of like when you talk ethics, it's like putting sand in the gearbox. And I think this is the wrong approach because in the end it's all about being human, remaining human, creating human values. So when we talk about becoming as God, so to speak, having superhuman like qualities, living to be 100 or 120, connecting the brain to the Internet, doing all the things that used to be completely out of reach for humans, like computing, that is way, way beyond our own capacity with AI. We have that at our fingertips. And clearly here there's five things I want to share with you. As a horizon of this data is a new oil that's not new, but now it's also kind of a new plutonium. Data can be used as a weapon and we have to be aware of that. Technology is more neutral until we use it right. And we're going to use it more every single day. It's exponentially, exponentially exploding the amount of data. We have to do something about that one to keep us safe, to keep mystery, to keep surveillance to a minimum. Everything should be as connected as necessary, but not more. Because there is such a thing as being over connected. And the digital exhaust that comes from all of us in this direction. Of course artificial intelligence is the new electricity, because without that we can't sort it, we can't find patterns, we can't use robotic process automation, we can't make things smarter. And this is of course the promise behind the IOT and everything. And that is crucial, for example, also for solving problems with diseases like cancer and diabetes, is to be able to actually analyze and make sense out of things. We're going to need smart machines to do this voice control that's already happening, but we're going to speak to machines as if there were humans and vice versa. This is already getting very close and just in a few years we're going to have automatic lip syncing and Advertising. And we'll be able to talk to customer service agents, whether they're bots or real people, in like 50 languages. Virtual reality, very big deal right now. The so called metaverse. I'll talk about that a little bit later. That's the new senses, the new way of seeing things. And all that stuff is coming together. And you could say, well, clearly that's going to be amazing. And I'm excited about that too, because I'm a bit of a geek at heart there myself. But then we have to think about the consequences, the unintended and maybe the intended consequences of this. As we're becoming more superhuman, you could say not becoming as God quite yet, but superhuman. We have to ask a simple how do we protect what makes us human? Is it worth protecting? Well, absolutely, because there's many things about being human that machines would never understand. Emotions, experiences, engagements, relationships. We're not data engines. I don't believe we are. You may think different, we can discuss later. But this goes along with the definition of the purpose of what we're doing here. To get to the good future. People, planet, purpose and prosperity. Elkington, John Elkington and others talked about this for two decades. People plan that profit. But I want to enlarge it by saying people plan that purpose, the sense, right? What do we actually want? And which way are we heading with this? And what can it do for us in the long run? And what's our destination? Aristotle said once, the Greek philosopher once said that we think a lot about the means, you know, how we're going to get there. That's what we do here. But not about the destination. What is the destination of the good future? We have to think about that quite a bit to answer that question. I think in the very, very near future, for example, with artificial intelligence in all reality, what we have today is IA Intelligent Assistance. That's 98% of all applications, even GPT3 and others. And that's very powerful stuff and we can definitely use it. And some of those applications are inching towards artificial intelligence in the sense of being a bit more intelligent than just pattern recognition or using, of course, deep learning and machine learning to get further down that road. But artificial general intelligence, that's a whole different cup of tea. You know, a machine that can kind of pretend to be human or rival human capacity. And I think we're going to need some sort of moratorium there, you know, a shield that says, okay, we can take it this far, but not further, because it could be very, very, very dangerous for us. And I don't see much danger with intelligent assistants or AI as such. Except for, of course, displacement of jobs, which is a different discussion. But basically the idea of a machine with an IQ of a billion connecting to other machines with an IQ of a billion, I'm not so sure. Stuart Russell, the guy who writes all the great artificial intelligence books and teacher at UC Berkeley and pioneer in AI, he talks about this a lot in his last book called Human Compatible, which is a definite must read. Human Compatible. He says it's all about competence, you know, getting stuff done, not consciousness. I think that's a good path for the future. We should not seek for machines to become conscious and have human agency and to kind of do what we do. Why don't we just do what we do, what we can do best, which is the opposite of what machines can do best? That would make a lot of sense to me. And I think given that scenario, we have to think about what the future brings and how we can keep it from being too far in one direction. It could be heaven or it could be hell. And that's clearly when we think about 2030. It could be amazing. We could live in the nirvana where maybe we don't have to work as much anymore, where finally machines are doing the brunt of our work. And that could be amazing, or it could be hell in the sense of being suppressed by machines and being directed by machines and not having the power to withstand. Imagine, like social networks everywhere, in digital money, in banking. Yeah, well, I think that's going to, you know, that is a very big topic. How do we keep that from happening? How do we bring this forward? And I have discussed many times in my book five years ago, Technology versus Humanity, the concept of digital ethics, the idea of saying what is right for people and how do we translate that into standards, ideas, not just technical standards, but political standards? Because clearly there are two different things we're going to need political and policy standards, as the European Commission has been very busy doing. And I applaud them for that. I think it's not always spot on in the sense of it being perfect, but it's a very, very good direction, which without that society, without ethics, that is bound to fail. So let's have a look at a quick look at what I call the hell van gallery, the things that could be heaven or hell. And then you can make up your own mind about this. For example, this robot called Moxie. It's a robot used for kids that they can talk to and they can remind them of their Schedule and work on their grammar and things like that. And I do wonder, if kids build relationships with bots like this, what is the future of that? Are they going to be living in an entirely different world, getting used to what the bot does? I'm not entirely sure I would do that with my kids. And of course, beyond that, having real bots like Ameca, the humanoid robot AI platform, of course, what you don't see here is that this robot is obviously plugged in. It's not freestanding like a human, but they do make a very good show of it. It's kind of like Sophia, you know, interesting, but in the end, yeah, it's far from intelligent in my view. But other things like the neuralink, the idea of connecting the brain to the computer, the brain, computer interface, Elon Musk thing, of course, he has brought this forth in a project called Neuralink, and it's very powerful stuff. But listen to what he says about what neuralink and what he calls neuralase before, what that could actually be doing. Another question from Twitter. Will you be able to save and replay memories in the future? Yes, I think in the future you'll be able to save and replay memories. I mean, this is obviously sounding increasingly like a Black Mirror episode. Yeah. So, of course, you know, you could upload your brain to the Internet. That would be interesting, right? I mean, if you're quadriplegic and you use the neuralink to connect and be able to walk again, that's one thing. But uploading your brain to the Internet to become superhuman, I think that's kind of a flat, flawed concept. And I applaud Elon for many things that he does, but this feels fishy to me. I don't know about you, but we can discuss that later. And of course, the pinnacle of bizarreness and weirdness is the metaverse. The idea of us living in a place that is curated and run by our friend Zook, and of course by maybe Microsoft and other companies who have similar plans, like Nvidia and others. This is an interesting thing for work and that is definitely coming. But who's going to run it and how? We're not going to get lost in there. How are we going to live in a reality that is just so far removed from the things that we can do in real life? That brings up many, many issues. It's not just a good business. But here's the bottom line of technology doesn't have ethics. It doesn't care about our concerns. It will just go on and on and on. We have to import our ethics, and we have to insist on our ethics and we have to guard values here. And of course, at the same time, we should not fear the future. We should be open, we should be proactive, and we should give our scientists the free reign to try things within reason. But we do have to think about this, because in the end, technology won't care what we feel about things. Algorithms know the logic of everything and the feelings of nothing. And a great example is Facebook for basically doing what they set out to do, and now it actually works. And they're not doing anything criminal as far as I know. But it's unethical in my view. And here's the problem with technology and a lot of things like technology, like we have in social media, if you make a lot of money, like Facebook makes $120 million profit a day, I think as of recent measurements, you make a lot of money doing. Make good money, doing bad things. That's not a good idea, especially not when you have 3 billion users or something. And that's true probably for every tech companies. Can you make good money with face recognition or with artificial intelligence drones? And who's going to regulate this? And this is a key question you have to ask yourself, am I making good money doing not so good things? And this is obviously something we should think about on a higher level when we think about planning and collaboration. Because here's the problem. We've always looked in this direction of profit and growth as being the ultimate GDP growth and getting ahead and more jobs and more employment. And that's been okay, but until Covid. And all of a sudden we're looking beyond profit and growth. Like for example, with the vaccine. If we want to fix this on a global level and get everybody vaccinated, it can't just be about profit and growth. And this is what profit and growth has brought us. You see here on the left, the CO2 emissions are up, the weather anomalies are up, everything is up. That's not looking as good. And everything around us is primarily one problem, which is the environmental problem. But of course we can, and we will fix that. But think about that being the direct result of this obsession with growth. And at the same time, we can't propagate a degrowth society that's really not very human. I mean, we're going to have kids, we're going to grow, we're going to invent. So we have to look for sustainable growth. And that's really important. I think when we look in this direction and that we finally realize is what we've done is we've built all of this produced capital, you know, money and a little bit of human capital, but the natural capital is dead, it's declining, it's going to what, zero. How are we going to do business on a broken planet? Very few people can except for those going to other planets. And I think that's not a very good solution. Here's the solution. What we need to do, as I said earlier, is switch to a new business model that's so important for technology and everybody who works in technology. It must be about doing good things for people, for all people, the diversity of people, not just for people like me. Planet rebuilding, repurposing, replenishing the planet and solving those problems. Purpose which allows us to create our own sphere is to self realize and to figure out what we want to be and what we want to have. And of course, in the end, prosperity. Those things go together, they're not separate things. In the future we're going to have to tick all of those four boxes. And I tell you, in the next couple of years we're going to see a lot of efforts of stock market changing and dividends being only paid if those boxes are ticked. You see that happening right now with Unilever, with Patagonia of course, and many other companies and B Corp and so on. That is where everything is going. This is where tech companies are going to be going. And you see the first inklings of that already happening with a long term stock exchange in San Francisco, which is about long term thinking. And the first listed companies. There are of course tech companies like Asana. The other really important point is that in this future it's not going to be just about yes or no answers. It's not that simple. Like are we going to get into genetic engineering to fix cancer? Of course we have to. We should if we can save one person. But we're going to use that same technology to build super soldiers or superhumans. That's not a good idea. So all of that stuff hangs together of course, with those pieces of digital ethics. And we're looking at, for example, one key example here on this whole dilemma about how we can make things tick. All the four boxes, like augmented reality glasses, I can see that being very useful. What is it going to do to people when we can see the world like this? How are we going to react socially and how we're going to get out of this? Working with dominant companies to be part of their little backyard where we can play and we become the content and where they can give us amazing entertainment. And in the end, of course, they're all looking to sell us advertising. So that strikes me as a sort of limited, myopic Silicon Valley or maybe even Chinese view of the future. We have to bring this down to a larger story and we have to think about what that means, not just what it does and, and what the results would be. Because in the end, ethics are hanging between all of those points. Digital ethics is something that glues together the people and the planet and the prosperity and the purpose. That's where everything comes down to. And this is something we should think about. We should invest as much in humanity as we invest in technology, because I think that's just a way to safeguard our own existence going forward. Because here's the bottom line in digital transformation. It's not just about technology and of course you know that, it's about social transformation. It's everything that it does. And in the end about human transformation, we are going to change because of this and we can change our makeup because of this. Think about longevity, CRISPR, Cas9, and those are all things that we should keep in mind, not just say, well, you know, this is possible, so let's go off and do it. As we're mutating into a world of cyborgs that is basically all capable of doing everything, but it's like a race for us to get down to the bottom as quickly as possible and become robots ourselves. Not a very good idea. And humans and machines are in a way overlapping, converging collaborating much more. That is our natural progression of evolution. But how about safeguarding the parts that make us human? The andro rhythms, our mystery, our secrets, our mistakes, our discovery, our intuition, our imagination. All the stuff that actually makes us human. Because we're going to live in a world like this, where bots do things all around us, where we can be more efficient. Hopefully that means we only have to work ourselves two or three hours a day for the same money. Hopefully that means a lot more happy people around the world who flourishing doing things where we can distribute the benefits of technology. But in the end, technology also has this problem that too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. Too much technology is like too much coffee and too much alcohol and too much cigarettes and too many things that can be potentially interesting and good. There is such a thing as being over connected, like being obsessed with the immobile phone. It's an old example. We have more relationships with the screen than we have with people. And in virtual reality, I'd be worried about this kind of concept of us being tuned out of reality and just falling off the cliff and having a great time with our virtual buddies, but never really existing in real life. That is a bad solution, a bad outcome of this highly potential technology. So here's the choice that we have. We can choose the blue planet, the green planet, or we can stay red. And this is not just the environment, this is also about technology. Because here's the bottom line. Unless we take precautions and discuss it a lot more and come up with agreements and moratoriums where needed, the consequences of exponential technological change may very well surpass those of climate change. In other words, the pollution from technology, pollution of our minds, pollution of, of course, real life, too. 20% of CO2 is caused by computing. All of those things have to be addressed because in other ways, we're going to end up here in a world that essentially has two pollutions and two climate change factors. One is natural environment and energy, and the other one is technology, overbearing technology. And look no further than reading a great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called the Ministry for the Future that outlines all of those things in the next 10 years. And it's a very optimistic ending to spoil that part of it, but definitely a good thing to read and take a look at. The worst that can happen to us is that we have a sort of a race of AI, because that's where it kind of leads to whoever is first will run the world kind of thing. Many people have said exactly this. So there we're going to need to agree, because in the end, we don't want this kind of idea of disembodiment, that we don't need a body to exist. We can live in cyberspace or put my head in a petri dish and upload my thinking to the Internet. And this reductionism of just saying, okay, all that matters is our data and how we compute, because it doesn't. This is not what humans do. This is basically what machines do. And there's no such thing as a happiness kit, not even in the movies, not even the Matrix. You will not find happiness in the cloud or in an app. You'll find other interesting things there. Maybe a bit of hedonism, that's not such a bad thing sometimes. But, you know, we're in a fork in the road moment. We're driving down this highway of change, exponential change, and we've got to make some really important decisions as we're leading to the point of saying, which way are we going to go? What do we want from this? Which way are we heading? And that also goes for our skills. Very important, as machines are becoming intelligent. Smart rather with IA intelligent assistance. We're going to have to give up a little bit on this part of the equation that's really machine turf. Intellectual knowledge, logic, data, information. On top of that is what humans are best at doing. Deeper knowledge, tacit understanding, wisdom, purpose, consciousness, spirituality. Give that to a machine or be useless. Very important also for our education. We should continue with stem, science, technology, engineering, math. But in the end, we're also going to need hackie education. I call it Hacky, my book, Humanity, ethics, creativity, imagination. Invest as much in that as you invest in technology. That is really the ticket to a good future. So I think the future is really exciting. The future has a potential to be really, really good if we make the right decisions. If we prepare now and think a little bit further than just the bottom line, if we shield wisely, not too much, but not too little, if we come up with a new way of looking at the world and what we want. People, planet, purpose and prosperity. Not just one thing. If you continue in one direction, I think that direction will eventually time out and then we just become like the bots and they will treat us as pets or, or keep us in their gardens. So I made a film about this. It's called the Good Future. You can find it@thegoodfuturefilm.com in many different languages and a lot of people like it. It was shot in beautiful Lanzarote. And to summarize, digitization, ethical digitization, that is the ticket to solving many of our problems. And that's Big Blue in a way that respects what we are. And what goes right along with that is decarbonization. Changing how the world works from the industrial economy and the economy of fossil fuels, of burning CO2 into a whole new way of looking at the world. And lastly, reformation, reforming our financial markets, reforming our thinking, reforming our arguments about what we want and why we want it. Because if we have just one argument, profit and growth. Again, we're timing out for sure, as we can already see in the COVID crisis, the climate change crisis. But we are tackling it. I'm very, very optimistic about this. So let's drop the fear when we think about the future. Let's have caution, let's have discussion, but let's drop this idea that the future is a bad thing. Let's stop watching all those films that tell us that it's bad. Let's tune into hope, into the good future. Because there is a lot of things to hope for here. All we have to do is, is to agree. And I think we're capable of agreeing. And let's develop some foresights. I mean, it's very important. When you go on a fast highway, you can't look 20 meters, you got to look a mile ahead, otherwise you have a crash coming very soon. There's a great African proverb that says if you close your eyes, you learn by accident. That's kind of what we've been doing all along now. Values ethics, right? This is so important that we agree on the basic ethics. Like why shouldn't we have weapons that can kill by themselves without human supervision? Well, that is of course a value question. And most of you would agree that we shouldn't. And ultimately collaboration, the future is about multi purpose, multi party collaboration. It's about multilateralism, it's about working together, solving the global problems. We're going to eventually, probably in 20 years, end up with a kind of a global government as a consequence. And so if we're ready for this, this is a good feature. This is a future. I would encourage you to check out a little bit more. I want to thank you very much for your time. I know I talked a lot about different topics and now we're going to dive into some questions and I look forward to your tough questions and to take it further. Thank you. I think the important thing to realize is that just 10 years ago, even five years ago, we were restricted by what technology can do. For example, we would say, can we stream music on the mobile network or can we make an augmented reality with my glasses? And the question was usually, yes, but maybe not really. It's difficult, right? And now the question is, every time you ask technology can do something, the question is going to become, yes, it is possible. It is possible to connect my brain to the Internet. It's not working now, but it still. And so the real question, as I said earlier, as Aristotle, the Greek philosopher said, it's not so much about the means of getting to a place and the steps, but it's the destination that we have to decide. So give you an example. If Dubai is choosing to have robot policeman in the mall, then the question is not so much about what the robot policeman will do, but what is the destination? You know, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to create a society where we replace people with badly functioning robots? Or are we actually doing something that is going to be good for us and that is the real question, and that is the question, you know, if you build an artificial city, if you have an Internet of things, if you do all these things, we have to ask the question, what is the outcome of this? Can we control it? Is it going to be good for most people? Does it have benefit beyond money? Because money isn't enough, as we found out in the COVID crisis. You know, there are other things that matter. And that's why I say people, planet, purpose, prosperity. And that is the ultimate question. And that question is going to pop up all the time now, because we're getting to the point where technology is actually capable. Ethics is a difficult word, right? So most people perceive ethics as a stumbling block. You know, like many people say, oh, as soon as the ethics person comes into the room, everything slows down, you know, and nothing gets done because everybody is worried. And that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about essential human things that we must protect and keep. Okay, it's not an ethical question if you're going to have one car or two cars or electric cars or other cars or, you know, those kind of things. But it's very much an ethical question if a human has the power to do what the human, him or herself wants to do without having to ask a robot or an AI for permission. And that is basically the question we're talking about here. The good future is not a future that is governed by technology. The good future is a future where we use technology to govern ourselves and to create a better future. The simple question answer is that technology should remain a tool, not a purpose. And the metaverse is already looking a lot like a purpose, like a place, like a destination, not just like a tool. And if you ask me about government, the first thing the government should do is to make everything digital and efficient and easy and great to use for people without going into cyberspace and building a new population. I think there are more pressing things to do than to build a metaverse. The metaverse really is. I sometimes call it the metaperverse, like the meta that goes wrong. Because a lot of things in the discussion about the metaverse, I'm very excited to work in virtual reality like I'm doing now, but I don't live in virtual reality. We don't live in virtual reality. We have a body. We are actually there. And when we talk to actual people in actual places, which is what you're doing now, things happen. And we can't ignore that we are humans so that we can pretend we can live on this virtual place that is going to make a lot of money for the companies building it. But in the end, I always say the Metaverse will maybe fulfill all of our dreams, but it will not fulfill our most simple need, which is to connect with others. You know, I'm very excited about AI and the possibility of smart machines. I would just rather prefer not to call it intelligence, artificial intelligence, because it kind of sounds like semi human. And they're absolutely not. They are smart in their own way, those machines, right? And that is important because we can solve a lot of problems with smart technology. But humans have a 360 degree view of the world. We have emotional intelligence, social intelligence, kinesthetic, musical intelligence, right? We see the world like this machine, sees the world like this. And so we're actually making a very good pair here. And so this is where I say we should definitely pursue that as a tool. And that's why I prefer to call it intelligent design, you know, IA rather than AI. But we should not seek to build machines that have consciousness or competence beyond the logic. It could get very dangerous and it's totally unneeded. Why would I want a machine that can be like a human? I mean, that is a crazy concept because first we need to solve a lot of practical problems and all we need from machines is just competence. You know, for medical reasons, for financial reasons, for climate change, for all of these things. We just need machines that are better at cracking the numbers and the logic. We don't need them to think like a human. That's what we do. And that's why I say we should have a moratorium on the development of machines who can be super or generally intelligent. Because A, it's a total waste of energy, in my view, and B, it could be extremely dangerous and probably beyond control. You know, imagine a machine with an IQ of a billion. You could never figure out how to get that machine to be powered down. It would have run through all billion combinations of preventing it. So that's why I say we need to agree on where we're going. And AGI is not where we want to be going, I think, for the foreseeable future. Humans have always been afraid of technology, even the hammer or the electric loom, right? The Luddites and of course the Internet and television and the mobile phone. We've always been afraid of technology, and we should not move into the future based on fear. But we should also not move in the future like farm animals. You know, they're stupid, basically, right? We need to find a very Good compromise and say, okay, I don't use fear, but I am cautious about what I want from it. And that is the ticket, of course, to a balanced future, is to say, yes, we'll use it for this, but not for that. For example, genetic engineering clearly will have a big component in our future where we're able to prevent cancer. And if we can prevent cancer for one person, it's worth everything that we've done, like we've done with the vaccine. It's worth it and we're getting further. But the same technology needs to be supervised, just like social media needs be supervised so that it doesn't become toxic. You know, basically you can see with social media what happened. It worked well for a while, kind of, right? And then it became like a poison. Now you're wondering, like, you know, am I part of a poisonous system? And that we can't afford to have that happen with AI because that kind of poison we would not survive. And with genetic engineering, we're going to need a global consensus on what we're trying to achieve and what is good and what is not good. Like we have a global consensus for nuclear power and nuclear weapons that has kept up, right? If we didn't have that, we probably wouldn't be talking today. When we become technology, which, for example, means that we, we become superhuman, we connect our brain to the Internet and we can do anything we want, we can be superhuman, then we become a commodity. Because the things that make us human have nothing to do with technology. They are things like spirituality, understanding, emotions, foresight, creativity, communication. The things that machines would never understand. So if I was to become superhuman, I would need to let go of the good things like mystery, like the human component. And, you know, humans are inefficient. So this is all part of what we are. If I'm going to become superhuman, as Ray Coatsworth is suggesting, to become merging with the machine and Elon Musk, you know, I would drop all the other stuff just because I can, you know, increase the power of my brain. That seems like a very bad deal because everything else would get lost. And I think there's nothing wrong with living longer and healthier and maybe to 120, yes, possible. But to fundamentally change what humans are by combining them with machines, I think that is a losing battle, that we'll be very sorry to go down that road also as a competition, right? Imagine you could do that because we could do that because we have the money, but 80% of the world could not. I mean, that would be a very, very big injustice. So there are many issues here. I think we should use technology to improve things. Our planet, our purpose, and our environment and everything. But we should stay clear of getting too close to becoming one with technology. This is Gerd Leonhardt, Futurist. Thanks for listening to my podcast. Check out my videos@gerdtube.com on YouTube.