Beyond Business As Usual The Societal And Human Impact Of The IoT. Human Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Hello, everyone. Guten tag. Buenos dias. Salamat Pagi and so on. The best thing about my book is that it's available for free outside. So we're having a signing session later on at the Iot. What is your place? The outy lounge. I'll be sitting there waiting for you to come by to please relieve me of a copy and I can sign it for you, and you can sell it for €5 on eBay if you want. So it's really a great pleasure to be here today. As I was preparing for this discussion, I was thinking it's really interesting to see when you cut it down to all of the bottom lines of what we're all about. What is the purpose of business? What is the purpose of life? Well, go back to the old Greek happiness. And is happiness an algorithm? Can we have a happiness app? There are quite a few happiness apps, by the way, that you can try. But would it be that easy? Can we be computed? Are we computable as people? And how far should we take it? Are there things that we cannot compute? Are there things that data will not tell us? There are lots of different opinions on this, obviously, and I've gone through quite a few of them. When I was preparing, I was thinking already, this thing here that all of us have now, this is our external brain, our second brain. For some of our kids, it's the first brain. But basically, this is where we keep our phone numbers, our dating, our money, our music, and very soon, we keep our intelligence in here. These devices will have a million times the computing power in roughly seven to eight years and unlimited connectivity. So they become the global brain. And that could be very helpful, but also very disconcerting because maybe your own brain would stop working. I mean, this is not actually funny. Most pilots in airplanes, their brain stops working because they never fly themselves anymore. It's a big problem in the US it's called the glass cockpit syndrome. So in the US they actually now have a rule that you have to fly by hand so you don't forget it. Imagine what would happen if you only use this all the time and just say, hey, a date for tonight, get married next week, and boom, you have a solution, you stop thinking. So the Internet of things is this times a million. The Internet thinks is that we're all building is what I call a new meta intelligence. It's all of this times a million, times everything connected, times everything, always on, always connected. The benefits are huge. Solve climate change, solve water, solve energy, solve cancer. And I'm not Joking on this. This is all within reach of this. And then all of the other things that are happening as sort of a side effect. I'll talk about what that means and how we can go from here. I have two jobs. I love technology. I've been in tech for a long time. I was an Internet entrepreneur. Most of the clients of my company are technology companies and software companies. And so are many of you, our clients. So we talk about what the future of tech is and then there's this minor thing, you know, what does it do to us as people, as governments? And every day goes by now we see many more disruptions about what's happening around us. Fake news, of course, one of those things, the influence of social media. So there's two topics that I work on and that's essentially the idea of algorithms. You know, technology and what are called androrhythms in the book. It's very easy to understand. Andro rhythms are human things. And as I was writing the book, the list was about 14 pages long. Right? Emotions, creativity, design, negotiation, mystery, lying, you know, all the things that are very hard to describe. In fact, you could argue, for example, when we have a conversation, it may be more important what I'm not saying rather than what I'm saying. Try to teach that to computer. Very difficult. So those are two different worlds. But the reality is humans live in the world of androidms. We don't live in the world of algorithms. We use algorithms. As a famous philosopher once said, we should not confuse the tool with the purpose. That's the tool. All of you are building those tools. And we have to make nice tools at power that we can sell. But really what we're trying to do is this. Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba, said it's not the technology that matters, but the dreams behind it. And of course, sometimes it's hard to figure out what those dreams are. But in this world, we can say there's huge game changers. Not just the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, brain computer interfaces. We cannot think of the Internet of things as a separate thing from artificial intelligence because there's no way we can do anything with this data unless we have thinking machines. This is all very densely interwoven. And the question is, where is it going? I think it's quite clear we're going into a world that is completely combining technology and people. That will be our choice. To see how far you want to go with this, we will leave the Singularity University. Some of you, I'm sure, have been there. Their suggestion is, by and large, we merge with technology. I find that rather appalling, I have to say. I'm European, what can I say? But I'd explain quickly. In this world, we're at an exponential point of takeoff. When I first started doing Internet stuff in 1995, music, things mostly was too early on the curve doubling 0.01. It's still nothing. And now we're at 4. So gone. 4, 18, 16, 32, 7 steps to 128, 30 steps to a billion, straight into the sky. I mean, the world in 20 years will be so different. I would defy you to figure out, to describe to me what it will look like. The kids or my kids will never know how to drive a car themselves. They will certainly not know what a CD or a DVD is around playing plastic things, intellectual property, copyright, you know, downloading, remember all the copyright debates is laughable now, right? Because it's in the cloud. It's a whole different world. So man, machine, symbiosis, or symphony or singularity or simulation. Because, you know, when it, when it comes this far, we could easily simulate a reality because we're connected, right? We can just live inside of a virtual thing, as Facebook wants to make us suggest. Not enough that Facebook has distorted the meaning of the word friendship. Now they want to distort reality by us living inside of an augmented reality so they can sell us more ads. I mean, that is just amazing. How can you resist? We're going to end up here, right? Becoming as God. You know, I'm not religious. Maybe you are, but we're becoming extremely powerful here. Many of us will in the future do jobs that it took a thousand people to do analytics, predictive analytics using social media engines, sentiment analysis. I mean, this is stuff that just 10 years ago took a whole army in a skyscraper to figure out. So we're becoming extremely powerful. We can do new things. The question really is, in this world, what is a human? Is that a human? Are we just fancy machine? Well, there are lots of opinions on this. I wouldn't be asking otherwise, but how computable are we and other things that we can't find here? When we're computing our external brain, we know what's happening. Of course, every single company around the world, including most of those in the room here, are investing seriously serious amount of money in artificial intelligence, in building a brain. In fact, the Google project is called the global Brain. The attempt is to build a brain. So Facebook, in fact has a brain of 2 billion people. That's us inside their brain, and they can use that to think. And the next step, of course, is this. We already are adoring our technology. We're praying at the altar of technology. And I should be talking because I'm obsessed with the mobile phone. Ask my kids. But that's a little bit harmless. We laugh about this. We wake up at 4am and set off a tweet or something. Or instead of dating, we just tinder and we get to the result in 20 minutes. But that's amazing. But it's not really destructive to society. But imagine if this phenomena becomes exponentially powerful in 10 years and we're talking about several thousand times as big. Could we even exist without the Internet? Would we want to get up if we can't connect with our digital cortex? These are scientific questions, but connectivity is a religion. The mobile phones and the new cigarettes. So that's basically a way for us to say now this is not even the beginning. On a scale of 1 to 100, we're 5 with all that stuff. Because now we have our friend Elon, who's going to make trillions, building a neuralase which connects our layers of our neocortex to a digital cortex that must be the biggest business ever invented, is to reduce humanity and put technology in its place. It sounds like a winning proposition, but where is this going? I jokingly call this the soul FA larity, Not the singularity, but the soularity. Because we don't need a body anymore. We can just sit on the couch and remotely control the life around us. In fact, as Ray Kurzweil has suggested, we can just have a head. We'll just keep the head. Everything else can go. So that's kind of a disembodiment. But what's happening already today, of course, we're shifting to voice control. Now, this is a natural user interface. It does not require computing. We speak to machines. Headline of most of those companies that are making those boxes like Amazon Echo, Google and many others speak to the computer like a friend. Well, you can imagine where this could be going. I'm not going to touch on that. But a rapid shift towards kind of interfaces like Amazon Echo, where the echo knows you better than your wife and says, no, no, no, no, that's not going to happen. Because, you know, I. Right. So, you know, it's really amazingly convenient. But it's also kind of weird, right? As a cultural question, I think 6 or 8 million Americans already have the echo. I love the echo as a box. But the thought of this box listening to me the whole time reminds me also the World War II scenarios. This must be a German problem. But anyway, so we're going into the future where this is our reality and the Internet of things is just one piece of this. It's an AI that says, you know, I got this suggestion, you can do that. You can, you know, and of course you can save energy, you can reduce crime. But let me ask you this. Would you rather have the politician, not this politician. We will not want to talk about that. Would you rather have politicians be an artificial intelligence? Because they would never make a mistake. Well, is it human to make mistakes or is it. Machines don't make mistakes. Well, allegedly. Is it heaven or is it hell? Well, of course, like all technology can be hell can be heaven. It's up to us to figure it out. Nuclear energy, in theory, you can make power plants, or you can build bombs. 99.4% the same material, except for the uranium. So that's a very big question. Where do we go now? We're doing this. All of you in this room are doing this. We're building a global meta intelligence, a brain, a digital cortex. And the benefits of this are, I think the latest numbers are like $34 trillion of new revenue shifts. I mean, you heard about the blockchain this morning. It's just part of this. Clearly we must do that. We cannot say, oh, that's just, you know, it's dangerous. So we're not going to do that. So we have to think about, you know, what happens here in this new way of looking at things. What is the next thing? And basically, we're going into a future of what are called cognified machines. You know, we have this joke, we created this little animation. You know, you take any old business, you put it in the smart converter, the AI goes on top, and out comes the new business. Smart cities, smart farming, even smart banking. Who would have thought of that? Smart humans. No, because we can't go in the box. We can't be easily converted. That's the hard part. Humans are really a pain. You know that. Because humans are so inefficient. I mean, we are the epitome of inefficient. We have to sleep, we have to eat, we do bizarre things, we invent stuff, we have imagination, we tell lies. We're bad drivers. We kill each other. Should we remove all of that? If we could? I mean, we can probably can. Is that a good idea? Where do we go next? The temptation of automation, the automation of everything you know, it used to be in the music business where I worked the digitization of everything, and now it's the automation of everything. You know, every company work with, and there's hundreds of companies, all one top objective. Fire as many people as possible using technology. Well, every company has the concern. Of course, young people are expensive, right? They're inefficient, so they're expensive. And then they complain, even, and have their own ideas. So the impact of AI and automation will have vastly more challenges than globalization. And this is the real challenge. What do we do then? Is it automating our jobs or just tasks? I think the silver lining here is computers will always take tasks and jobs. You know, basically things that we have to do, but they will not take things that is about us. And I'll explain in a second what I mean with this. But the challenge is really this technology is morally neutral, says William Gibson, until we apply it. And we apply it everywhere, literally everywhere. Human genome changing. The possibility of changing my genes, to not have diabetes or cancer, to live to be 150 years old in Silicon Valley. Human Longevity, Inc. You may have heard about the company. It sounds like science fiction already exists. The end of dying. That's fantastic, right? Who needs to die? Who wants to die? But anyway, this is moral. These are moral questions. Of course, we don't know what those morals are because they're completely different. So we have social contracts, we have codes of behavior, we have ethics, hard to define. We have laws and regulations. And I would submit to you, if we go on this exponential trip on technology, and we're going to go straight into the sky, if we don't find a way to balance the two, we're going to come to a point where it's kind of, you know, we'll have a lot of this. And then all of a sudden we have this growing into a huge thing that's out of control. Not just AI, but just how we change. And I'll give you some examples on that shortly. My colleague Luciano Floridi, who is an AI researcher, said something very important just the other day. He says algorithms outperform human intelligence when it is not about the human stuff. And there's a long list. You know, understanding mental states, intentions, interpretations, you know, ephemeral stuff, beliefs. Those are very important. We can use Google Maps if it fails, you know, not a big deal. We can book our stuff on Airbnb. We can even have pilots fly. You know, there's lots of proposals to do away with the pilots now because it is Possible, allegedly. But then we get this right. The latest incident on United, if you should be so unlucky to fly with United, you know what I'm saying? Three weeks ago, where a patient was beaten, passenger was beaten, because the computer said four people have to go. And the computer said, We've got $850 for them to change their mind and not more. And people at the gate couldn't do anything about it. The computer decided this. The computer decided to go ahead and then say that there's lottery, there's a limit and so on. And the end result board as a doctor, leave as a patient. That's the Vietnamese guy who was beaten there. You remember that story. So that's kind of a side note on what could happen when technology goes wrong. So the biggest challenge in our society is not that technology will come and kill us. Forget all the stuff you hear in Hollywood and the robots and X machine. That is a long time away. I think that may be the case in 100 years or so, but beyond our horizon. Because these machines are pretty stupid and they, they are definitely not human in that sense. The biggest thing is that we become like them. That we may start using technology where we shouldn't. And that is a key question of what do we automate, what do we not? Because we live like this. That's an interesting realization. When the world is actually not as logical as we always make it out to be. Because Daniel Kahneman, world winning psychologist, says, award winning Nobel Prize, I think he says cognition is embodied. We think with the body, not the brain. Now if you remember the movie her, you've seen the movie her, you know, the problem was in the end, the guy found out that she's having sex with 3,850 other people at the same time because she didn't have a body, right? It's possible we don't. We have a body, right? We actually think differently. We think in a much more holistic way. So I'm going to propose another definition of artificial intelligence which is relevant of course to the Iot. Quite simple. We have these intelligences, social intelligence. Some of us have that emotional intelligence, hard to define what that is, emotions, intellectual intelligence. And then we have this, right, we have artificial. This is a new kind of intelligence. And this is how we should look at it. It's not at all the same like ours. Intelligent machines are not thinking like we are thinking. Let them think whatever they want. We can use them for the grunt work, no big deal. But let's not teach them to be emotionally intelligent. Even if we could do that. So here's something. I wonder if you recognize this intelligence at work here, give you a short audio example.

Have you heard about this new technology? Are you speaking about this new algorithm to copy voices? Yes, it is developed by a startup called Wirebird. This is huge. They can make us say anything now. Really anything. The good news is that they will offer the technology to anyone. This is huge. How does their technology work? Hey guys. I think that they use deep learning and artificial neural networks.

Well, this is not Obama, Trump and Hillary, but it's an. It's an AI that speaks like them. And I know you can tell it's not actually that good. It's pretty close. Give it two years and it's achieved over AI can do that and speak like my wife, for example, so. But I wonder about this thing. You know, I think wall in the room have the same concern. I think really what's happening is that exponential technological progress eliminates tasks, routines. You can see on the economy graph here, all routine is declining. So it's not so much about our job, it's about how we do our job and which job we do. So if your job is all about routine and tasks, of course it'll be gone like a checkout person at the supermarket. So the key is for us to rise above that. So what if the robot pours the beer? The robot is not going to have a conversation at the bar with somebody that's not going to be replaced. So it's about the eq, the iq, all the stuff that we can combine. These are the top skills in just five years. Critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence. And that is the talent we need. We don't just need great engineers and programmers, we need great humans. Exponential humans that actually have those skills. Because that is the success factor of a company. You know, I've observed in 15 years of doing this, the number one factor in success is not technology. If you have bad technology, you won't be successful. But number one factor is culture backed up by great technology. I mean, that is obvious to a lot of people, but we should look at it from this way. So really, in this world, you know, data is the new oil. You've heard that many times. It's finally true. You see the graph here. In the old days, oil companies and banks, most powerful companies of the world. That's the past. Oil companies are toast. Pretty soon they switched to solar energy. So they're all trying to jump ship. Obama's pipeline will never, ever be used because nobody's going to Want the gas in it. And this is the future technology platforms, data. But if data is the new oil that feeds the IoT, do we need environmental protection? Nobody likes protection. I mean, clearly that's a shocking word, just like responsibility. But I'm not talking about greenwashing here or any such thing. I'm talking about if data is the oil and we're making trillions a year with data, do we need a protection that says there's something that is beyond data? Do we need that? Do we need an EPA for humanity? This is a big question because we may end up here otherwise unprotected growth of data mining. And this has been referred to in the oil business as externality. So basically the oil companies have said, who cares what happens with the oil or global warming? It's not our problem because people need the gas to drive their car. So we sell it. Just like in the U.S. people say, well, people need guns to defend themselves, so it's not our problem. If they kill each other, it's their problem. Well, let me say we can't do this with the Iot. We cannot build a system of a meta intelligence that connects 8 billion people and 800 billion objects and our brain and our mobile and our bank accounts and then say, well, whatever happens as a burning platform, somebody else should worry about that. Maybe the EU commission could worry about that. Right? That's not going to be that easy. I think we need to come to a place where we look at business like this complete overlap of technology, humanity, organization being on the same page. And I think this is really about figuring out what is the future value of a company. Great graph from Accenture that talks about why we're doing this. We can find a way to regulate the issues and address them together. We don't actually need the government for that. If we do this. Well, of course we're always going to need the government for something, right? To look at this. But these kind of side effects, for example, deskilling, makes you wonder how many skills we're losing if we're just going to use an app and just speak to it like Google Home, makes you wonder if our technology is manipulating us. I mean, that's already frankly happening everywhere, but not just on Facebook. And then we're wondering if maybe this kind of filter bubble is everywhere. We're not seeing the truth really. And where everything becomes a medium, even our sex life and our kids. The computer will suggest if we should have the baby or not based on genetic analysis. That's already a huge debate. I'M sure you're aware of that, Right? And then the insurance would say, no, no, no, no, that's not going to happen because it will be expensive. So clearly in this world, this is what's happening in this graph. You can see right here the enormous benefit of technology on this scale and the unintended consequences. Artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet of things are right in the top corner. Very powerful, potentially very difficult, Huge unintended consequences. AI, clearly. So this is a question I have for you. Would you agree that we have an ethical imperative or are you going to argue that these are externalities and somebody else can bop them up? Well, the argument will be fair. I'm not saying we shouldn't make the argument, but should we have that to harness the power to serve the collective good, which everybody in Silicon Valley talks about the collective good. But you know what happens when Mark Zuckerberg writes his manifesto? He says, oh man, I've created a monster. There's nothing you can do. So that's something that we have to think about. Where is this going? Who has control and ultimately who's mission control for humanity? Who's controlling what we do, where the data is, what the rules are? Well, right now that is Silicon Valley. I mean, it's obvious, right? So lucky us. But this is an interesting question. Microsoft started having servers in Germany for that reason, to move the mission control to Europe. And then we have inequality. I mean, all of you know, of course, the reading on that has been plenty lately. Technology has increased inequality. Look at this graph here. And what's happening here, you can see the country with the most Iot devices. Korea, Switzerland, us. The rich countries. Will African countries have the Internet of things? Will it be possible for them to actually do this? Looking at this graph, it's going to get worse. And clearly. Sorry, just a second here, getting too excited. And. So clearly in this direction, we have to ask the question. Inequality is the number one reason for terrorism and we're creating it by the plenty. It's something we have to look at clearly where it's going. So I'll come to the end, wrap up and we'll have a short conversation afterwards. Bottom line, is this right? This is the era of digital ethics. Everything is interdependent. We can no longer say, well, we built this, it works great, we make lots of money and that's it, right? We can't do that because now we're touching on the very basis of humanity. We're going inside of our body, changing our genes, changing our brain, using AI Connecting everything. Then we can just say, well, so what is just like having a steam engine. Not quite. This is the world of megashifts, which I describe in the book, which you will faithfully read afterwards. I'm sure, all the stuff that's happening there, great quote here. Ethics is the difference between having the right or the power to do something and to do what is the right thing to do. And that is business. That's why it's business. Because you have the power to do something and you do the right thing, you actually are better off in the end. Something the old companies failed to see. So the future of technology, future of what we're doing, is kind of what I call a hell van. You know, it's hell and heaven really can be both. Right now we are 90, 10, 10% hell. You know, privacy, surveillance, a little bit of hell, not much. We don't want that to grow exponentially. As Jack Ma says again about the dreams behind technology, how do we keep that mix alive? Do we need a global ethics council? And who would that be? Would we even agree on the ethics that we have? I mean, we would agree on, bottom line, ethics like a machine should not kill people without human supervision. I think if we took a vote on that, everybody would, except for the people who make the machine. You know, we would agree on that. And there are people who make that machine. So let me say a final thing. Technology is often confused with the utter tool of optimization and efficiency. This is totally wrong. What we're doing here with the Internet of things is not about efficiency. That's just a side effect. The CFO likes it. We should never put efficiency over humanity. It the purpose of what we're doing is to create human value, relationships, trust, added value, meaning purpose, general improvement. And efficiency is one of those things that we use for money. That's a good thing, but it's not the final destination. Very important to keep that in mind. The Asilomar principles. I won't have the time to go through this. You should read them yourself. The future of life. They apply very well to Iot. Human values. Shared benefits, ecosystem thinking, responsibility. Absolutely crucial for us to go in that direction to understand what we're trying to do here. And I think that your position, whatever company you're with, on this issue, is the number one issue of success in the future. What is your position on the man Machine polarization? How much are you on Team robot or team Human as it's been called? There's been a term cooking for this, but you know, if you make robots, of course, you're on team robot, but you can still be on team human and make robots, obviously. Well, difficult question. I think this is obviously something we have to define and think about where this is going. So I think it's important that we have to invest as much in humanity as we're investing in technology. And I don't mean humanity in the sense of writing artworks or books. Right. The people you hire have to be exponential humans to be successful in this future. Not just great tech people, not just the left brain, because that's really what we need. I mean, in five years, computers will program computers. In 10 years we have AI scientists. We already have them. Will they replace scientists? Not really, but they'll do a lot of the grunt work. So really powerful stuff that we have to think about. I'll summarize and then we'll take some questions. We'll have a short debate first. A holistic approach will win. Holistic in the sense of externalities, balanced systems, interdependence, an investment in algorithms and Android. And I think this is really where things are going. Ultimately we have exponential technologies that are not about efficiency, they're about transformation and general, what I call human flourishing. And that has to go into the business plan. I mean, I think you're aware that roughly in five to 10 years we're going to look at the change of economic system, economic logic because of technology. Technology creates abundance, like music, like films and what's going to happen then? We have to think about those things as well. Stewardship. I mean, this is a wide open position, all of you having stewardship and saying this is the future where pro action can meet precaution. The key future talents will be emotional intelligence, being human. That's the people we want to hire. So the best possible combination would be, of course, somebody who's a brilliant engineer and a brilliant human. You know, Einstein once said imagination is more important than knowledge. I think that was very easy to say for Einstein considering that he had a lot of knowledge. Of course you have to have knowledge, but in the future, knowledge is kind of a thing. A lot of computers will have knowledge. I mean binary knowledge, which is really not much, but they will have knowledge that they can read 2 million books in a minute. That's the kind of knowledge that we can't really compete with. So we need to seriously consider a global mission control. We can't just leave this issue hanging up there and saying, you know, well, it will self regulate, it will not. We're talking about $43 trillion here. This will not self regulate. So something to think about where this is going. I hope you like my summary. This is from the book. I'd always like to say embrace technology, but don't become it. Have a nice day.