Audio Version only of my keynote ALU FUTUREFEST Africa on Digitization, Decarbonisation

Greetings and hello everybody. This is Gerd Leonhardt, futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. I am delighted to provide a short keynote for you guys at the ALU Future Fest 2021. And I want to start by saying that I've been to Africa many times. I've been to Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, of course, the North, Morocco, South Africa and Nigeria of course. But of course I'm not an expert on Africa. You guys are the experts in Africa. So I'm going to try to share a couple thoughts about what I think may be relevant for African nations, African people. But you have to make your own transfer as to how real that would be for your reality. I also played in an African band. I used to be a musician and producer. So about 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I played African music, I played high life and juju music. I'm going to share with you the 3Ds, the three most important things about the future and the future of Africa when we put them together. And I hope you enjoy the presentation. So let's start right here. When we look at Africa right now, the fact of how big and how powerful Africa is. When you look at the map here from Visual Capitalist, all of these countries would go inside of Africa, that is the full size of the African continent. Imagine if all of that could be put together or act together in a completely different kind of future. Imagine if in this future all of the mega cities around the world are put together into a like minded body. 17 of the 20 fastest growing cities will be and are in Africa if you're looking at the slides here. So, so that's the fastest growing population that we see around the world. And of course this status even more interesting as we're looking at the future and what's happening with Africa, the world population by region. I think you guys mostly aware of this. The biggest growth will be in Africa. In 2100, roughly 40% of the population will be from Africa or somewhat stemming from Africa in a direct or indirect way along with Asia. Of course the growth is humongous. So many people say the future is Africa. That is not new to all of you, but let's take a look at what that means and which way we're going. So in my keynote I'm going to share three thoughts and a few other ones. First on digitization, what it means to go digital and why it's so important to pursue digitization and to be part of the global digital economy. Then about decarbonization, which means climate change action, getting rid of fossil Fuels switching to green energy, clearly a key point in today's discussion and a huge opportunity for Africa and other countries, of course. And finally, democratization and putting real governance in place and making a focus on human flourishing and changing education and so on. That's more the human part. I'll talk about all three and let's dive right in with the first one, digitization. So clearly in the last 12 months, or say 18 months, we've had more transformation in terms of technology than we've had in the previous five years. So more people are using E commerce, doing things online as we do here, of course, ordering things, going to telemedicine. Very big deal. In Africa, it's like a warp drive into a digital future. And in Africa, that has happened everywhere, despite the fact that Africa isn't very well connected. Basically, the COVID crisis has been an acceleration of technology. It's like we hit the warp drive button and all of a sudden everybody's doing everything online, remote everything, cloud everything. And yes, that's sometimes very difficult when you don't have good Internet, as I know that is a major problem around Africa. But digital acceleration has increased in Africa, for example, on ICT in general, Internet, that is basically Internet technology and communications, finance, and also down here on real estate and education and government. Lots and lots of interesting growth. If you're looking at the acceleration here, that is quite hopeful. And then if you're looking at a statistic like this one that shows you the number of tech startups securing funding in Africa has exploded in the last couple of years. And this is a great study from Boston Consulting, overcoming Africa's tech startup obstacles. Very interesting graph that we see here. Lots and lots of things happening. Many of you are probably in that startup scene. I foresee great things happening in Africa on the startup side with technology, and that's already starting to happen. One of the real drawbacks is here that investors are not getting enough return from investments in Africa. That must change, and I think it will change very, very quickly. So Africa could become in many ways a contender as far as innovation goes on a global level. Very important. Now, with the COVID crisis raging all over the continent, and of course in many countries, including Europe and Switzerland, where I am normal, the idea of normal has kind of gone away. It's hard to say what normal is. We're not going back to normal. So if you think about this for a second after the COVID crisis, we're not going to go back to life in the same way. We are going to go back to Restaurants and maybe football stadiums and, and maybe even flying. But normal, normal is fading away. Instead of normal, we have many, many new normals. For example, new climate change action, new health care mechanisms, geopolitics, the vaccine debates. That's basically all happening in parallel. So don't expect to go back to normal. We're going to build back better, as some people say, and we're going to build to a different future where normal is kind of upside down and you can expect many things to go dark. Like television has gone dark and for analog television in most countries. I know that's not true for Africa, but that is coming. So we're now switching to a world that's like this. It's on demand, it's many stations, many possibilities. This has vast and huge potential for education. Switching your stations on, you know, years ago, Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffer and others have said that they wish they could talk about the future on satellite tv. And that's now becoming possible with the Internet again, subject to requirements of course being fulfilled. And governments open the door for the deregulation of telecoms. Very, very important topic on this. But the next 10 years, and consider yourself lucky you're here right now, the next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. And I'm not toying with this, I'm not just saying this, take advantage of it. Moving into the future. We have to understand the future better. I call this the future, this, the future mindset. Understanding the future, paying attention. And this is the best thing you can do in education and of course if you're working for a company or for an enterprise, is to understand, to pay attention to the future. And that involves listening, understanding and imagination. Not just reading a research report or a book for that matter, but thinking further, a deeply transformational decade, you're going to need to pay attention. Future mindset point number one, try to get yourself a nice future mindset, understanding what's coming. For example, with 5G, I know there are many debates about how that would work and how that's going to roll out all over Africa. But with 5G, we can expect roughly 90% of the global population to be connected and of course through other means as well, like the low flying satellites that other companies are launching around the world. But we're clearly seeing that emerging as a major facilitator. We're going to have 90% of people online, 8 billion people will be hyperconnected, always on at high speed and low cost devices. In many ways you could say this could be Heaven, or it could be hell. Imagine all the surveillance and all the dependency that we already have. That's going to take wise governance. The thing about the future here is that we can use technology, but we have to be careful about how we govern it and what the limitations of it should be and what kind of ethics we should have. That's going to be, tall order, what I call digital ethics. And having wise governance and people understanding how that all hangs together, that could be great or it could be not so great. I think it's going to be vastly positive. And Buckminster Fuller says, I would say then that you're faced with a future that was 50 years ago in which education is going to be a number one among the world great industries. And that is coming because education is going virtual. It's going online, it's going augmented reality, and it's going real life and location. It's always going to be hybrid because humans learn in a natural way with each other of course as well. So that is the next big Google will be in the educational sector, maybe that big. Next Google can come from Nigeria or South Africa or Tanzania or Kenya. So very important to understand where all this is going as we're going in the future. That already has been depicted like this. The augmented reality, virtual reality. This is overlands, of course, that allows you to go to school virtually through a holographic environment. And there's many, many proposals like this. I believe that's really important. At the same time, I would say that going to locations and actually meeting other people is of course what it's all about for humans as well. So a hybrid scenario, in 2030, an estimated 70% of all new jobs haven't even been invented yet today. What does that mean for our kids? Well, our kids are going to invent their own job. You are going to invent your own job when you're out of college or education or whatever school you're going to. And those degrees and certifications haven't even been invented yet. We're going to be working in the cloud, we're going to be working remotely. You can sit in your house somewhere in a really remote location and contribute to the world economy. That's been a pipe dream, but it's coming to fruition now. And that's going to be a very, very powerful motivator. Also, of course, considering that we're going to constantly learn, not just learn in school, but continue to learn, lifelong learning will be the major thing happening to us in the near future. Isaac Asimov said that's another trouble with education as we know it. It's for the young. And people think of education as something that they can fix and finish. It's not. Education will go on forever. And, you know, I'm 60 years old. I'm learning every day, trying to educate myself further about the future. And I think this is really true for everything. There's going to be a huge business in lifelong learning, in training and learning on demand. And schools are going to change entirely because we're going away from this idea of downloading information, you know, learning just in case. Now it's going to be learning just in time. Reminder. The future isn't linear anymore. The future isn't 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. It's 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. It's exponential. 30 steps linear will take you 30 meters from the starting point of, you know, here going out to the street, maybe where you are going out to the road from your house. And 30 exponential steps will take you 26 times around the planet. And this is what's happening. We're going to an exponentially changing future. Don't think for a minute that we're going to slow down. We're not. And that also means that many problems that have been plaguing Africa for a long time in terms of infrastructure and connectivity and water, food, will be fixed quicker. Because on that scale, we're leaping, the costs are going down. I'll show you a slide on that later. We're at the pivot point of exponential progress. Take a look at these stats for Sub Saharan Africa. 24.1% of the of users are connected to the Internet. That is a very, very, very low number. But this will change exponentially fast. So just keep up the good spirit of hope that this will be fixed soon. I think that is coming the pivot point of exponential progress. The other thing is that as we're looking at technology, despite all the benefits of technology, we don't want to be framed by technology all the time. So whatever technology tells us, it's kind of become the holy grail in many ways. You could say that technology has become a new religion, especially social media, and we should not look at the future only through technology lenses. We're not going to find happiness, true happiness. We're not going to find that on a screen or in a cloud. We find sort of hedonic happiness. We find happiness that allows us to make free phone calls or connect or, you know, pay for things and those kind of things. That's kind of a momentary, fleeting happiness that's good, right? But real fulfillment comes from different things. And it's very important that we realize where this is going as we use. Technology could be heaven or it could be hell. And so we have to be very careful about how far we go with things like augmented reality, virtual reality and doing things online, because there's always going to be the need for human contact. I always say that zoom is great, but hugs are greater. And we have to keep that in mind as we're going and thinking about technology. Technology is a tool, not a purpose. It's not. The purpose of life is to have more technology. It is a tool that we use. And sometimes I say algorithms. Technology knows the value of everything, but the feeling of nothing. Let's talk about the other thing that's really crucial today. Decarbonization. By that I mean getting rid of fossil fuel, oil, gas, coal, and substituting and bringing in renewable energy, including possibly nuclear fusion in the future, solar gas. Why is that not happening yet? Well, we were too slow and now we're seeing the consequences. Climate change is now absolutely everybody's front of mind. And the question that we need to ask ourselves is not the question of what is the future capable of or, or what can it bring? What future do we want? It is a choice that we're making. And this choice right now, I tell you, it's being made by lots of people saying we do not want the worst case future scenarios for our kids. And this is a huge issue for Africa, of course, because the entire northern part of Africa and the sub Saharan to some degree will be too hot to be livable and to be inhabited by people if we go on like this. You can see here the frequency of extreme events if we go in global warming from 1 degree, 1.5 all the way to 4 degrees, it's disastrous. Heat waves, rainstorms and droughts and not a very good scenario. We've got to take action. And this is happening right now. And COVID 19 was a test run for climate change. It made us think that we can change and we can collaborate and we can see the issues of course, with collaboration and as well. But you know, we have invented a vaccine in 12 months. Well, not we scientists. And now we just have to roll it out. That's more like a business problem. So what kind of future do we want? And then the question is really what used to be unthinkable is now the new normal, like carbon taxes. We're going to see carbon taxes for flying. We're going to see carbon taxes for eating meat. And many carbon taxes that will be raised will be made available to countries so that those countries can be brought forward into the future. For example, to not burn carbon, but to get rid of coal plants, to find new ways of energy to build solar plants. There's going to be a giant global shift of trillions of dollars into new carbon funds moving around the world to actually amend problems. And this is happening. The debate about the carbon coin, of course, and the gross national progress indicator, all the things that we see here, that's basically our future unthinkable. No, it is totally thinkable that we can solve this problem. And it's totally thinkable in the next decade that we can tackle this problem that we can put to rest gas and oil and coal and switch to new energy. Total decarbonization in the next 10 years. I tell you, in 10 years anybody who invests in oil and gas is going to be considered akin to a criminal because we are clearly seeing what it does to our world and where we are going. And if we let it go for another 50 years, you know, then the gates are closing for us very, very quickly. So here there's a great article imagable about this so called carbon coin. And the idea of that is that the rich nations will have to pay more because they are leading producers or they were leading producers carbon and they are like China, still producing too much carbon while the developing countries are not. And so in many cases what I see happening now is we're going to see this carbon coin payments of countries that pollute too much to other countries that don't yet pollute enough parenthesis not to burn carbon. And a great book you should read about this called the Ministry for the Future. It's of course a science fiction book by Kim Stanley Robinson, fantastic book outlining all of those scenarios that are likely and possibly to happen in the next 10 years. He writes about 2032, but basically it feels like very close to the day we're going to see a future to where countries that are developing, especially in Africa, are going to get subsidies not to do what the other countries have done, which is to pollute even further. There's going to be a global exchange of value here. I see a whole new business model emerging. Decarbonization is probably the biggest business opportunity in the next 10 or 20 years. And the tide is coming in. We're clearly at a point to where that is becoming also financially relevant. So here we see the investment in esg environment, social and governmental fundamental funds and people are Putting their money into new avenues. Sustainable. Everything is no longer just an idea or a party slogan or, you know, nice to have. It's our business plan. And this is where we need to go to put in new resources, new education. This is where future jobs are going to be. The World economic forum says 300 million new jobs in the next two decades if we put the money in the right place. And of course that is a very big if, but we're moving into that direction, I think, in my view, fairly quickly. So here's one of the biggest copper mines in South Africa, and this was a big business, or is a big business. And all over Africa, right? Natural resources extraction. And here's the new business of creation. That's zipline, right? Drone delivery of blood and other necessary items. We're going from this extractive economy into extracting stuff like oil and gas and just selling it anywhere will go. And that includes, of course, also wood and forest and animals and so on to a creative economy. This is where Africa can shine, already does, by inventing things in the creative economy, not just the extractive economy. That is the future. Also where we are going in terms of mindset. We're going from this idea of products and services to the idea of experiences, of transformations about creative products. And of course, technology. Right. Technology is by and large the driver of this effort. So lastly, and I have another two chapters after that, is the democratization of what's happening. So basically we start with the digitization and then the decarbonization, and now we're at democratization. So with that, I mean, for example, what's happening with technology is that things are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Exponential cost reduction, whether it's data storage or batteries or genome editing. And you know what that means for Africa? It means despite the fact that the infrastructure is bad, it's going to get cheaper and faster and more things are going to become available at a much faster pace. That is good news and urgently needed. Everything will become available to African countries gradually, then suddenly. That's the principle, right? You don't see much at all like, like we do until now or just recently, but suddenly it's there. Suddenly it's going to be important to understand what this is happening. Leaping. I've been talking a lot about what's happening in Africa in regards to leapfrogging, but governance of that will be crucial. Opening the doors to progress, deregulation of necessary sectors and finding transparent business models and all of these things that you know better than me what the issues are in various countries in Africa on this issue. But clearly we're going into an interesting era here. As the Financial Times says, there are limits to leapfrogging because the rapid spread of technology has raised hopes. But digital services cannot take the place of good governance or indeed ship move around bad governance. Good governance is going to be essential to take benefit and also to do away with a digital divide and get everybody aboard of the digital future that we have here. Remember riffing off Peter Drucker Culture eats technology for breakfast. Culture beats everything else. We have the right culture in place, we do the right things in terms of policy and politics and leadership. Then we can have a future where technology will help us do things, but it will not solve social, cultural, political problems. Technology will make them worse. Look at social media. Have we solved the issue of racial discrimination? No, we have not. We've made it worse in many ways through manipulation so that we have to solve ourselves. So while we going to invest in technology and grow and make and that's a huge problem solver and of course GDP accelerator, we also need to solve the basic human, social, cultural and political issues that inhibit us from taking advantage of technology. So as we are reaching this sort of economic pivot point about how we can make things work in a free market and traditional parenthesis capitalism, we're moving to a new logic where we're asking for different things. And when I say we, it's basically business, politicians and people around the world saying we need to think further than gdp. It can't just be profit and growth and just taking care of the top 1, 5 or 10%, but a much larger concept. And for a long time we've talked about people, planet and profit. But I put in purpose. I think purpose is so important because it's the sense making that really matters to humans, people, planet, purpose and prosperity. That is the new economic model. There's already stock markets like in San Francisco that are pursuing that idea of a long term value exchange. And that is the position that in my view African nations have to take, take not just copy whatever the rich nations have done, but to move beyond that into a larger paradigm. This is the opportunity in the sort of post Covid society and the key lessons that we've learned there. We will only get to the good future together or not at all. We can solve problems like power, energy, food, pandemics, security, safety, all of these things only together or not at all. And that's what the pandemic has shown us. I made a film on this called the Good Future it's thegoodfuturefilm.com It's a short film. It's quite popular on YouTube. Check it out on YouTube. The Good Future. And very important to see all of the examples that have already occurred. Like now we have a global corporate tax rate that's being discussed of 15%. Took 15, 50 years to bring this out. But corporations should be paying a minimum tax regardless of where they are. Now we have the discussion about distributing the vaccine that is broaden the idea of Creative Commons, you know, doing away with the patents. Now we have the European green deal being tied into economic recovery and that's just been signed off a couple weeks ago. We have oil companies looking at the future in different ways because they're forced by their shareholders and by the public to think different. And of course, in Africa we have the cfta, the one African market. I don't know enough about it to tell you a bit more in detail, but you probably do. But this is to come together and this is happening, actually happening, even though in many cases it doesn't look like it's happening, but it is. We're coming together to create a good future together. And we're getting rid of this concept that everybody is in their own little bubble. This used to be in technology, of course, their own little bubbles. Countries, regions were not. We're much more like this. We're completely interdependent. We're moving into an ecosystem globally. And Africa can have the biggest ecosystem of services products. When it comes together, that's going to be so crucial. I think a uniquely African opportunity is to build the largest ecosystem on the planet. And this seems to be an unfolding discussion about how that could be done. I think that's going to be essential when we go into the future. That is going to be based on those four people, planet, purpose and prosperity. That's where you need to put your flag. If you're going out after college or if you're graduating or if you're a teacher, this is where we must put our flag. This is where. This is where countries and new countries need to put their flag beyond gdp, a larger definition of value, not just the good old definition of what used to be good or not. So let's talk about education. Clearly, for a long time this has been the secret to how you're going to get a great job. You get a STEM education, engineering, math and so on. And that's still very true. But on the other hand, what's I think emerging is that on the flip side of this, I talk about this in my book we also are talking much more about humanity, ethics, creativity, imagination. So humanities are making a comeback and I think we're entering a sort of new human renaissance, an era where humans are going to be more important again, not less. And this is a crucial message, I think, for education in Africa. In my view, everything hinges on the humanities. And then on top of that we have STEM education. And of course, in an ideal world you can combine the two. But don't just take the ticket of engineering and efficiency or logic or science as the ultimate destination. It's really going to be both art and science, humanities and science. That's going to be crucial because in the end we're going to do whatever machines can't do. Machines can do a lot and they will learn a lot. Most of agriculture is now done by machines in many countries, and most of the driving will be done by machines. But what are the things that we can do, the human only things? Negotiation, creativity, design, understanding, forecasting, foresighting. Very important not to get carried away with the idea of what machines can do and take over from us humans completely. And really what's happening is sort of this new pyramid of work and education, as I call it, is on the bottom level. You know, we've always had this obsession in education, for example, with intellectual knowledge and logic and data and information and proving the point. So we kind of were for a long time here and now with technology, we can safely say that machines are going to learn how to have intellectual knowledge, some kind of machine logic, right? Machine learning, deep learning. They can have data and information. We need to move up this food chain and create new jobs based on understanding and tacit knowledge, quiet knowledge, deeper knowledge, wisdom, purpose, the things that only humans can do. What do machines care about purpose? And certainly don't have wisdom because they can't think beyond the zeros and ones and humans can. We're sort of multinary and machines are binary, zeros and ones. All of education is going to dramatically change. This is a huge opportunity for Africa is to move into the new level of education that's going to be about the human only skills, combining art and science, moving into that new future. And you know, if you look around, clearly this is what's happening. Technology is surrounding us and that's taken longer in Africa, but it will explode in the next decade. Be ready for this. Because this kind of, I call it the Neoluvian man, like the Vitruvian man, Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, surrounded by technology. And of course that same Goes for women. We must invest as much in our humanity as we invest in technology. That goes for skills, it goes for training, it goes for public funds. We should not just pursue technology as the holy Grail, you know, as a problem solver for everything. It's not. And talking about women, you know what I just added there, I think we're going to see a lot more women, female leaders, younger people around the world coming in, like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, like in Iceland and Taiwan and in Finland and so many other places. We're going to see a whole tight change here. Right? Investing in humanity. Not just. If I could distill it down into one concept that we are pursuing in New Zealand, it is simple and it is this kindness. Yeah. Jacinda Ardern kind of sprung on me there a little bit quickly, but kindness. Think of the governance principle as kindness. Wow. This is definitely my favorite politician. So invest in kindness, not just in smartness. You know, this would also be, I think, a good path in the future. African saying, I don't know where it's from in detail, but knowledge is a garden. If it isn't cultivated, you can't harvest it. So what it means is that we have to cultivate our knowledge. And Michael D. Simmons calls this compound learning. We have to spend time on the future and learning every single day, and learning in the sense of what is not already here. Spend an hour on the future every day. That is the key to having a successful future, as your knowledge and your vision will compound. So let me wrap up and say, what do we do now with all the stuff I've said? What is the next step? Let's start right here. We are at the fork in the road in humanity. What we decide in the next 10, 10 years will make or break our future. That is climate change, technology, artificial intelligence, work, automation, energy, and Africa will play a crucial role. As I showed in the beginning, I think that timing is actually too late. It's going to be quicker than that. And Africa can play a crucial role in determining that shift to a new ecology, a new way of thinking and a new future. One thing that's really important is that we have to get away from this concept, this negative thinking that there is no future, that the future is bad and the future, nothing is working well. Can't be further from the truth, because I really believe the future is better than we think. Great saying here by a disciple of Buckminster Fuller, Barbara. As you see the future, so you act as you act, so you become, in other words, when you think of the future as being bad and lousy and, and nothing is going to work and there's no hope, this is what you're going to get. We have to break that cycle and say, yes, there are bad things happening and clearly there's a lot of hardship all over the place. But now we're moving into the future where those things can be solved and we do have the ability to collaborate. Humans are not evil by nature. We can definitely solve these issues and collaborate and work together. Crucial aspect, again, for Africa, the future belongs to those that can hear and see it coming. That is the number one skill you need to acquire the future mindset. And that is done by practice and by spending time on the future. Four key bullets on this observing, understanding, imagining and then to transform. And this is why we're going to see so much creativity coming from Africa as we already have in the last decade. Startups, new ideas and creating its own economy. That is going to be the number one ticket, I think, for that future that we see here. I want to end with a quote from my book. And my book is about five years old, but it's still going strong in 12 languages. Embrace technology, but don't become it. Because when you become technology, you become a commodity. That's the ticket to the future. Embrace technology, but don't become it. I want to thank you very much for your time. I know it's been a long talk with lots of different details, but it's been my pleasure to share and here are a couple links. My website, futurewithgurt.com, the Good Future film that is definitely something I would Recommend. It's about 14 minutes long and my YouTube channel. And here's the giveaway of the day. You're going to get a free copy of of my book Technology vs. Humanity as an ebook, of course. Saving the Dead Trees. This can be used on any device, Android, iPhone, whatever, Kindle, if you have. And of course the computer, you can just scan this code here and we'll take you to a website that you can download the book for free. In return for your email address, that is. But I will not spam you, don't worry. And this is the English version and here is the French version because I know that still many countries in Africa that are French speaking. So you can scan these codes. We're going to make them available later again so you know, just in case you missed that. Now you'll make it available later. Thank you very much for listening and let's build a bright future together. Live long and prosper. This is Gert Leonhardt, futurist, in Zurich, Switzerland.