Futurist Friday with Gerd Leonhard

Hello, this is Don McPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trend shaping the way we live and work. This summer I'm interviewing 12 futurists and forward thinking leaders in order to help you and our global audience of leaders become better visionaries for your organizations. Today's interview is with Gerd. Leonhard Gerd is a futurist based out of Zurich, Switzerland. We discussed the trends he's finding most fascinating right now, how much time he believes leaders should spend thinking about the future, and why he believes humans possess the technological capability to solve our most pressing problems, including climate change. The 12 Geniuses Futurist Friday episodes are brought to you exclusively by the Star Conspiracy. The Star conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. Reach out@thestarconspiracy.com for more information or to schedule a chat with the team. Gerd, welcome to 12 Geniuses.

Thank you.

You often point out that the future is already here. We just haven't paid enough attention to it. What do you mean by that?

Well, it used to be a William Gibson science fiction writer who said that the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And I think that's still very much true. It's just basically most people aren't looking. But now what's on top of it, with all of the exponential change of technology, where technology is becoming like making us superhuman, it's very hard not to see that. But we haven't paid enough attention as to what already goes on. For example, social media is run essentially by artificial intelligence and many people haven't noticed. You know, that's pretty much all they do is they use AI to data mine us and to sell ad, and all the old stuff is gone. So. So it's really important for us to see that the future is already here, that we can look at it, and that we basically have to find a way to come back from the future to remember it, rather than to pretend that it's coming next decade or something. It's here now.

And what are a few signals that you're seeing that kind of determine what the future might look like 10 years out or so?

Well, you know, the art of observation really is what my work is all about. It's not about prediction. It's about what we call foresight. Right. And I think if you sit back for a minute and a lot of people do that when they're under the shower or maybe on vacation or so you detach yourself from everyday things and then you start to realize what is actually there. Right? And if we look around and we pay attention to the current things, we can see when the biggest shift in human history as far as energy and climate is concerned, you know, where shifting to renewable energy, we're basically in the next 10 years going to go green all the way. And that is the biggest shift in the industrial economy and of course the information economy as well. And that's completely obvious. We're looking at the end of oil preventuses in the next decade. I mean there'll always be oil, but we're not going to bank on it anymore as we have. And that's one thing. The other thing is that machines are no longer stupid. So when you look around you can clearly see that machines used to be utterly stupid and still are quite a few. Like Google Maps is, you know, pretty intelligent, but not like a human. But now we can see that machines artificial intelligence is starting to emulate humanity. You know, telling stories, making images, writing refrigerator manuals. And we see basically in 10 years machines will have the capacity to do most of our routine work.

The general consensus is that they will not replace us, that they'll augment us, correct?

Well, that is hopefully true, but that's just 10 years. In 10 years, if your job is largely routine, you're going to be in trouble. And if it's stupid routine, many people wouldn't say that about their routine, but most of the routine is commodity work. For example, checking the books or making sure somebody has paid or whatever, or check out the supermarket, you know, that's largely routine. Most of those jobs will be, will be shrinken down to the human part that is still required. Like you know, checking out in a small store in the Rocky Mountain is different than doing a checkout the Safeway in London, right. Different skills are required, right. So I don't think it's a disaster. On the other hand, you know, especially in developing countries, a lot of people are working for 5$5 a day doing commodity work. And that work is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And we have to prepare for a new moment in history where we have to split up the money in a different way so that they get covered. Right. This is a big topic.

So let's back up a little bit and talk about what you are reading, watching or listening to that you would recommend for our audience. So it's a global audience of business leaders. Typically what would you recommend that they watch or listen to? Order for them to be better futurists.

It'S basically reading, whether it's electronic or audio, whatever. Reading, Right. The books that come back from the future. So Bill Gates has a great book about positive aspects of climate change. There's a book by the leading lecturer on AI, Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley. He talks about human compatible artificial intelligence. It's one of those AI books that you can actually read without stumbling, you know, so it's. If you're not an academic. And Christina Figueras is called the. The World We Want, I think it's called, it's about positive aspects of how we can deal with climate change. I have a long list on my website, futuristgert.com and I'm also on Goodreads. You know, Goodreads is the website where you swap Goodreads and just look for my name, Gert Leonhardt of Futurist, Gert on Goodreads. But this is what I advise all my clients spend about one hour a day in the future. And I'm not talking about escapism or playing a game or watching Netflix. I'm talking about actually looking at the things that are tangible today and educating yourself to change your mindset.

So what can leaders expect if they spend that one hour a day? That's an investment, right? And what kind of return would they expect with that? Because a lot of them are going to push back and say, I don't have have an hour a day. But what would you say in response to that?

Well, I often compare it to being fit or keeping your body fit or doing something good for your body. If you're not prepared to do that well, you could probably still survive. You're not going to look as good and you probably die early, but you won't enjoy it as much. So it's a decision that you make to eat well, to live well, to exercise. And if you don't make that decision, nobody can fault you and you probably won't get fired. But at the same time, you know, the result is less enjoyment. And I think what we have now when we look at the future is just to say, my priority is to understand, to observe what goes on so I can better perform and act today. That changes your life, it changes your family's life, it changes your company, your country, if you work for the country because your perspective changes. And that's really what we need. We need to have more awareness of this because that changes our actions.

You know, I've been thinking about this idea of earlier in my career, I would work 50 or 60 hour weeks no problem. That was before family and I owned my own business and it was grinding and grinding and grinding. But more and more I believe that I can be more effective working 35 hours a week or 40 hours a week and having these hours be very intentional, leading, building relationships, really understanding the people I'm working with. And I think that that's something that you're kind of advocating, right, is it's not necessarily the number of hours you're working, but how you're spending those hours. And if you're spending this hour a day living in the future, you're going to benefit longer term. Is that right?

Absolutely. And the other thing is of course that we're aren't machines. We can't take in endless amounts of information and just save it there. We have to contemplate, we have to digest. We need off time, we need slee. We're not super machines, we're not going to be superhuman just because we have a great computer. That's not the way it works. I mean, I work a lot, but it's very hard for me sometimes to say whether that's work or not because I'm investigating, I'm writing something, or I'm sure you have the same problem. But basically we have to work smarter and with more respect for our human limitation. I can't tell you how many executives I work with that work 80 hours a week and they don't understand much of anything because they don't respect the context of what they're up to. So I think this is one of the clear understandings. It's not about war, it's about difference.

Is there any author, podcaster, someone who's a thought leader, somebody who you just won't miss if they put something out new?

Well, there's a long list. I mean, I listen to a lot of that. I listen to a lot of books, of course, and many people on YouTube. My favorite recent sort of mentor has become Kim Stanley Robinson, ksr. He is probably the most well known science fiction writer right now. Kim Stanley Robinson. He wrote a book called the Ministry for the Future and he is an amazing writer. He also comes from a sort of a nature background. He's been really interesting guy and he writes about how we could basically salvage our future in what he writes as science fiction. But it feels like it's today, kind of like Black Mirror, but in a positive way. So I've been reading everything that he put out. He's got lots of books and short stories apart from the Ministry for the Future to kind of inspire my thinking. He's served up various solutions about the carbon coin, about how we can do climate change. So very, very powerful stuff. And I basically read everything he puts out.

As a futurist, you must run into something that just seems like it's out of this world. Science fiction that can't be true. And you probably see that on a daily basis. But how do you evaluate your sources? I am shocked at what some people will believe when they read something. And so I think one of the things that I would love to do in this series is help people become better at vetting their sources and being critical thinkers. What's your process there?

I think when you read a lot and you talk to many people, you develop sort of a healthy skepticism. I think Italian Professor Gramski long time ago said that we should have pessimism of the mind, of the intellect, and optimism of the will. So, yeah, I'm sometimes very pessimistic when I look at technology that says we're going to change the world. Like bitcoin, blockchain, metaverse, where I'm saying, yeah, this is just technology. People change the world, right? Not technology.

I'm curious if there is another social trend that you're following that's intriguing, or if you're exploring right now. And by social trend, I mean something like aging or addiction. Not social media, but something more along the social lines.

Well, I'm looking at a lot of different things there. One of them is the concept of what media should look like in the future. And this relates, of course, to the metaverse. The other one that's a very big trend is discussion of the future of healthcare and longevity and human genome editing and the whole issue of how we're going to improve our health. I mean, it's quite clear to me that we're looking, for example, here at the convergence of technology and biology. So just like the vaccine was essentially technology mRNA, it wasn't the same vaccine as before. And now we've learned what we can do with mRNA, we are looking at other solutions for diabetes, possibly cancer and stuff. And so we're looking at a future where basically the human revolution is coming, which means that we can change who we are, we can get much smarter about healthcare. Right now, healthcare is mostly sick care, you know, not healthcare. Right. And all of that is changing. So I'm looking at those things. I find that very interesting also to look at the borders between humans and machines and this concept of using technology to make our lives better, but potentially go too far with becoming technology ourselves. But that's a big topic for my work. In general.

With these advances in healthcare or this exploration in healthcare, what are the positive implications of this trend?

Well, I mean, it's totally obvious that when we have so many positive things that are coming out of technology, they are kind of offset by the externalities, by the negative things. Right. The positive things would clearly be their health care costs will be reduced because we're going to have a lot more options. And we're going to use devices for early warning systems. We're going to use DNA analysis to find out what our proclivity is for diabetes or cancer or whatever else it may be. We're going to get, actually get smart. Right now, healthcare isn't very smart. You know, it's smart once you're sick, then maybe it's smart right before that it's not. And so lowering the cost of that, making it available to everybody, that is a potential that's right within reach in the next decade. Right? Completely redoing medical science, pharma, life sciences, to be a wider field, using more technology, more early warning, more analytics, more holistic view of the world. That could be super promising. And I would say, you know, if we can save a single person from getting cancer because we have technology that warns it and analyzes or maybe eventually changes something within our setup, you know, then we must do that. But the flip side is we can use the same technology to get, you know, to really go out there and have custom babies designed super soldiers. And so this is one of the drawbacks of technology.

I'm curious, we've talked about a few technologies, but is there one technology that has really piqued your interest that you're tracking right now? And if so, what is that?

Yes, well, if I had to pick one, I think the concept of dealing with what we are as humans, genetic part and the healthcare part, that seems to be extremely exciting because a big half of that is just awareness and analytics and understanding ourselves better. That could prevent most of the things that have gone wrong, even some of the major diseases like asthma and diabetes and so on. Right. 450 million people take statins for cholesterol, which is insane considering that we could deal with that in so many different ways. So I think I find that extremely exciting because it opens up a holistic worldview that we had already long time ago in ancient Greece and places like that, you know, where it was more holistic about what we are and what we could be. To rediscover that and also connect back with nature, you Know, for. As a source of, of things rather than, you know, making everything about finding medications and so on, you know, and so that's kind of a. That's a major topic. I track a lot of these things and. And then there's a discussion about transhumanism, like what makes us human. Modifications would make us superhuman. And, you know, that's a very big topic because we're going to get there in 10 years, right? We're going to be able to get to do that.

So define what transhumanism is.

Well, it's the idea of using technology to alter ourselves. And of course, we're doing that today by taking pills. But this is harmless compared to, you know, the idea of connecting my brain to the Internet. Like Elon Musk has a, A protocol, the neural link, right. That does exactly that. So, so I become conscious in the sense of connected every other computer in the world if I, you know, that strikes me as being supremely crazy. But anyway, that's. That. That is his concept and, and transhumanism. And I'm not a transhumanist at all. I think it's basically be. It's no longer human when we do that. But there are many issues about. It's not a black or white answer. If you have an accident and you lose your legs, you're free to go buy yourself a prosthesis. And if you have $2 million, you can buy a machine that does a better job than your leg. But should you be able to take your legs off and get the machine instead? So those are all kind of issues that transhumanism is bringing. I think we're going to see a great fight between people who are technological optimists and obsessed with all of that, and then people who are humanists like me, who are saying that it's neither fair nor probably a good idea if we make that the new standard.

One of the things that I love about talking with futurists is that generally they have this incredible sense of optimism. And I'm curious what's filling you with a sense of optimism right now?

If you look at what's happening around us, we have all the technology in the science already, and we're getting more by the minute. So quantum computing, 3D computing, nuclear fusion, we're inventing all that stuff. So that filters with optimism because it's happening right. What we don't have is the telos, what I call the telos, the purpose and the consciousness, the awareness of collaboration. So I always said we have all the tech, but do we have the telos? And so the biggest problem is not that we don't have stuff or the money. We do. We're making the wrong decision. Buckminster Fuller, a famous futurist and a big mentor of mine, when he reading his books, he said that technology is inventing all the right things, but for the wrong reason. And I think it's so true. We have all the solutions, but what do we do? We make war. And so that is something that we must work on to figure out how we can actually get to the good future. That's not a question of tools. It's a question of telos wisdom.

Great conversation, Gerd. I could talk to you for hours. Thank you for your time and thank you for being a genius.

Thank you. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening to 12 geniuses. And thank you again to the Star Conspiracy for sponsoring our summertime Futurist Friday series. On next week's show, I interview Michael Kanin. He is the author of the book T Minus AI. Recently, Michael completed his role as the Director of Operations for the Department of Air Force MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator. And he is now the Chief of staff of the U.S. air Force fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Thank you to Richard, Jonathan J. Toney and the rest of the production team at GL Pro in London for producing this show. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to 12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a genius.