Futurist Gerd Leonhard: Designing The Good Future at Fbtb Stockholm on 12 MAY 2023

Good morning. It's a pleasure to be with you today in beautiful Stockholm. It's not raining, actually it's really nice, much nicer here than other places I went this week, which is great. It's great to be back here. So I live in Zurich in Switzerland, originally from Germany. I spent 17 years in the US. I used to be a musician and producer. So I have kind of graduated from this nice thing that we saw here to speaking. I think I'm a better speaker than musician, thankfully. So I'll try to show that to you. It was really nice, the beginning. So thanks very much to the musicians. So my key topic in the last 3 years has been the good future. It's kind of ironic because I started working on the good future when COVID began. And it was interesting that because I'm a speaker now, I travel to 50, 80, 100 engagements per year. And in the COVID times, it just went dead. And I was forced to rethink what I do. How I do things. So I started doing things online, of course, but I also developed a concept for my future of my work called the good future. I wrote a book in 2016 called Technology Versus Humanity. And in this book, I talk a lot about what we see today. So it was kind of very early, the discussion about humans and machines. And this is a very big part of the good future or the bad future. And I'll explain to you why that is. Because what happened is, as a consequence of this discussion about the good future, I went to Lanzarote in 2001. I made a film called The Good Future. And if you've been to Lanzarote, you know it's very like a volcano. It's a desert, basically, right? Almost no trees. And the film talks about what it means to create a good future. And where they could possibly be going. Before I kick off with this, I want to say that basically what's happening today is a lot of people feel like the doors are closing on humanity. So climate change, Putin, whatever that's worth, artificial intelligence, right? The robots are going to come and take our work, and then they harvest our bodies for energy. Lights out. My own kids, you know, who are 27 and 33, they keep telling me there is no such thing as a good future. And research lately has shown in Europe 71% of millennials, roughly 25 to 35, believe their future is worse than their parents' present. And that's because we see all these things, and I'm here to tell you today that is actually something that we've learned probably on an Instagram feed or something. But I think the future is better than we think. I mean, if you look around, we are developing solutions to almost every practical problem, from climate to energy to meat to food, to all of those things that we see around us, even nuclear fusion, which has been an illusion for a long time but may come into fruition. The only problem that we're having as we're developing things is that we often don't agree on how to use it and how to put priorities. So it's like we have the power, godlike power of technology, but then we're acting like a bad god, you know, using it to make soldiers rather than to solve the world's solutions. So what we have to learn really is that we're now living in a world that's leaping. "Gradually, then suddenly" comes from a Hemingway novel. How does the world change? It doesn't change gradually. It leaps. At the exponential age, of course, you know, Metcalfe's Law, Moore's Law, and Wright's Law, and so on. The power of technology is leaping every 12, 16, 18 months. So that means when you go 4, with 4 now, the next level is not 5, it's linear. It's 8, 16, very quickly at 256. So now, until now, we know if you double 0.01, you get 0.02 and 0.04. It's still nothing, right? But 4, 6, 18, boom. Before you know it, 1 billion times as far. And we've seen those leaps in the last couple of years. And the latest leap is artificial intelligence. Now, what this means for creative people— we're all creative people in this room, more or less. I mean, I used to be a musician-producer, and of course, I produce my shows now, and I hire designers to do my stuff. So this is big. And every week there's a leap of some sort. I mean, it's amazing how we can now listen to Spotify somewhere in the mountains, and we can listen to 82 million songs or so. At 5G like it was real time, like it was nothing. I mean, those things are leaps. If you imagine the leaps now going forward, 4, 8, 16, right? That next year, 16 months, 18 months from now, that's 8, 16, and so on. All of a sudden we think about flying cars, not just self-driving cars. We think about fixing cancer, preventing cancer with genetic engineering. I mean, that is true science fiction. And very soon we're going to say, well, basically having augmented reality so we can see other things becomes as normal as using WhatsApp. And then we have to think about, okay, what does it mean for us as humans? I mean, WhatsApp can be dangerous, addictive, Instagram. But imagine if you had this feed on your eyeglasses that Apple is coming up with, right? And you could see all the things on top, like if you're a stockbroker or a doctor, you'd be kind of superhuman. And then all day long you work with these glasses and you're sitting in this Matrix-type environment where you're pulling out things. And then you're coming home in the evening and there is your family. It's just so boring, right? Because you're saying, "Where are my glasses?" I can't be superhuman anymore. So I think that will really be a big question. How much of a good thing becomes a bad thing? That's true for food, for water, for alcohol, for drinking. I mean, more people die from obesity than from hunger. And a lot of people die by overusing technology already. So there's a very big question that we have to answer, which way are we going and what does it do as we go up this exponential curve? It's like warp drive. You know, you watch Star Trek, you hit the button, you're like, pffft, like nothing ever seen before. And there's 4 big things in technology that we're looking at. Basically, information technology, big data, biotechnology, allowing us to change the human genome, printing cells, nanotechnology, synthetic biology. I mean, the story goes on, it's explosive, right? Energy and climate technology is solving our climate change problem. It'll be tough, it'll take a while, it will cost a lot of money, but we have the tech. That's the good news. If we were only to actually put the money in the right place, you know, then we could solve that, right? The last one, big leap, last 3 months, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing explosion. We're kind of like in a Sputnik moment. Remember when the Russians put the satellite in space? Everybody was freaking out because the Americans were thinking, "Oh my God, the Russians will own the moon now, and then the cosmos. So we have to go to the moon." And the Americans allegedly did go to the moon. It may all be a Hollywood production, some people say. In any case, we only went once, right? It's interesting. All that work to go once. Not even the Russians went. Many people died in this effort. And now, you know, now we're going back to doing this. But it's really interesting. So AI is kind of like this. It's a gold rush. It's going to the moon. Eventually just becomes something that is just there, right? But nevertheless, the biggest thing about AI is that we have to be very careful. That we stay in control. And I will argue as to why that's important later, but it's also important for our creative economy. Because the next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. I know that's crazy when you think World War I and II, the nuclear bomb, the internet. Next 10 years: quantum computing, 10G internet, 10 billion people connected to the internet worldwide. The fossil fuel revolution, the end of oil. I mean, all in the next decade. Hard to imagine. So it means a lot for us to be able to understand this. I think it's really becoming utterly crucial. So I'll give you an example.

Ah, my dear friend Bill, I see you have brought a device with you today. What purpose does it serve?

Greetings, Socrates. This is a laptop, a marvel of modern technology. It harbors an artificial intelligence that can revolutionize heuristic education.

Interesting.

Imagine a world where students learn at their own pace, guided by a tireless tutor that never errs.

Is this the MacBook you often refer to?

No, no, no.

This is a Surface. You just need to remember that. Surface.

Fascinating. But tell me, what is the essence of this artificial intelligence you speak of?

It is a machine that can learn and reason built upon vast amounts of data and complex algorithms. It imitates human thought processes to provide tailored learning experiences.

I sense a shadow over this marvel, a hidden danger lurking within.

Uh-huh.

Dear Bill, as you know, I am a proponent of self-examination and seeking wisdom.

That's true.

Tell me, what might we gain from this new form of intelligence you have created?

Oh, you don't know how much Microsoft has been in the limelight recently. If those big companies don't come out and talk about AI, I don't know how much the stock prices will fall. To be serious, Socrates, artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize heuristic education. We can utilize AI to personalize learning, allowing each individual to explore and discover knowledge in a manner tailored to their own interests and abilities.

As the great philosopher Plato once said, the measure of a man is what he does with power.

I agree.

Okay. You could watch that on YouTube. Just put in Socrates and Bill Gates. Now, this was done with a $50 software package that used to be a production, a major production. I am now working on keynotes where we use different 3D engines like the Unreal Engine. Where I can transport myself from the stage to the screen and disappear here, you know, just in case I want to have a drink or so, I put myself up there. But technology makes all that possible.

Seamless and sensing, allowing you to access the power of compute while remaining present in your surroundings, fixing a balance that's felt out of place for some time now. Imagine this: you've been in meetings all day, and you just want a summary of what you've missed.

"Catch me up." "Patrick is coming to tomorrow's design meeting, Bethany wants to move next week's dinner, and Oliver is asking about soccer this weekend." These are emails.

Calendar invites.

You can watch that again on YouTube. It's Iman Chaudhry, a TEDx talk from 2 days ago, where he shows a new device from a company called Humane AI that doesn't use a mobile phone, that is like your personal assistant that you carry, that you speak to, you know, that does the work for you. Allegedly. It's really interesting to watch the demo. I can't wait until that actually becomes reality. Now it's a demo now, right? But It could be heaven, it could be hell. Of course, that's really true for all technology, but especially now, the stakes are just much higher. Imagine, for example, I was in Delhi a couple of weeks ago, and people were telling me roughly 750 million people in India have now access to the mobile internet. Imagine if they would all start skipping search or social altogether and just speak through their devices. And get answers. Because that's what's going to happen. We're not going to type anymore. We're going to say, "Hey, I got to get married. Do you have a suggestion?" Yeah, I'm already married, so it's too late, but just fictitious. I mean, that's like the oracle, the advisor, the therapist all in one box. So the other day, somebody asked ChatGPT to talk about what it would like when Donald Trump speaks about Humpty Dumpty. And Donald says, Humpty Dumpty was a great egg, a tremendous egg. He was so big and so strong. Yeah, but this is of course easy to guess. Yeah, it would have been easy for you. And I love what ChatGPT and other generative AI do with me, make me look a lot younger and adventurous. You know, that's also very good. But I mean, that's also obvious in a way, but instant. This is an app from Expedia from 3 days ago where you can use the Expedia app to type in a request. I'm going to Hawaii for my honeymoon. Should we in Maui or whatever, and it gives you a whole list of things to do. You can drill deeper, you can say, I don't have much budget, or I don't want to fly, or that would be impossible. But anyway, it makes a list on your Expedia folder where you can look up further. Also not rocket science, right? But quite helpful. And that's really what intelligent assistants or IA does now. It's fancy software. I mean, if I have a good friend who lives in Hawaii and they know everything about traveling, I would get much better individualized comments, right? But it's still useful. But you have to think of artificial intelligence kind of like Google Maps. We all use Google Maps and we always ask, "No, no, no, that can't be true. It's stupid." But it's just not. But we still use it. It's everywhere. So will an artificial intelligence replace a designer, a creative person? I think it's highly unlikely, but a creative person with an AI will replace the person without an AI. Not in all instances, but AIs won't replace people. So basically, we're looking at a sort of power tool that's coming up everywhere, also sometimes not dispensing very logical advice, as I'm sure you know. So if you ask it to optimize the airplane for fuel, it would come up with this. Yeah. So I mean, the fact is, of course, machines don't know anything about real life. I mean, it's like basically it's hallucinating, making up stuff. So when I first got started with AI, I queried about myself, which is what I like to do. And then the engine said, oh, Gerd is really an expert on AI. And it came up with all the research and white papers I had allegedly written. Of course, I haven't written any of that. I'm too lazy for that. So I click on the link, and it's completely fake. It just makes up the argument to fit with what they found, like an autocomplete, basically. Now imagine if this becomes the new normal, how we're going to read the news, how we're going to find out about facts. We don't know when it's fabricated or not. We certainly don't know whether the data is fabricated or not to begin with. We don't know if it has a good day or a bad day, just like Google Maps, right? We're going to have to keep on asking questions. It doesn't mean the tool is bad. It just means that we could do bad things with it. I mean, people use the Tesla, you know, self-driving thing in California. You can see people all the time on the freeway in California sleeping, rigging up the steering wheel with a rubber band. So they, you know, you drive by them, they're sleeping. You're not supposed to do that with a self-driving car, right? I mean, yes, people will use artificial intelligence to generate lots and lots and lots of lies and garbage and distortions, manipulations, BS. They will, and they are. So we have to think about what that means and which way we're going with this. Here's another quick clip where people are using AI to be your therapist.

Hey there, meet my personal assistant Pi.

Hey there, great to meet you. I'm Pi, your personal AI. My goal is to be useful, friendly, and fun. Ask me for advice, for answers, or let's talk about whatever's on your mind. How are you doing?

Honestly, I don't feel good. I feel like I'm going to lose my job because of AI. What do you think?

Oh no, I'm so sorry to hear that. That's a really tough situation. I understand your concerns. While it's true that AI is becoming increasingly capable and is taking on more and more tasks that were traditionally done by humans, it's important to remember that AI will never replace humans entirely. AI can automate certain tasks, but it cannot replace human creativity, empathy, or emotional intelligence. There will always be a need for humans in the workforce. What makes you feel like you might lose your job to AI?

I am a pretty bad data scientist. I don't think anybody is going to give me a job if AI is going to do all the job.

Don't be so hard on yourself. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.

Okay, you get the point, right? You know what's happening here, of course, is a really great simulation because the AI has read every possible thing about psychology, about relationships, about— and the reading part is what AI can do very easily. It's read absolutely everything about it, so it knows how to combine answers. It doesn't know what bad feelings are or love is or any— it doesn't understand any of those things. It's basically a parrot. Okay? But a very good parrot. And we tend to think of that as, yeah, sounds very reasonable, plausible. But that's a total reductionism, of course. I think it could be comforting for people. This is like a simulation can be comforting, right? But it's still a simulation. So I always say basically the performance of empathy, for example, is not empathy. A performance is a performance, right? You can perform love, right? A robot can perform love. That's not the same as love. It's just a copy. It's also interesting, but it's just not the same. So a robot can make a song, probably not a very good song. It can paint a picture. But what's the meaning? That is the key question. Because as creative people, we are generating meaning. That's really what we do. We put context into place and generate meaning. So now we're at this crossroads. Well, basically, 2023 is a lot like 1968 when I was 7 years old, where the whole world changed in 5 years. The music revolution, the sexual revolution, the computer revolution took off then as well. And now here we're in the same spot post-COVID, post-Ukraine. Next year, maybe climate and artificial intelligence. There's two waves coming up that we have to deal with. The first wave is climate. Where is the climate wave? Give me the climate wave. Okay, let's try that again. Come on. It doesn't want to show me the wave because I guess it has different opinions. But anyway, we have those two waves. I'll get back to that later. But climate and artificial intelligence. And so when I made this film, The Good Future, that's what I worked into the topics. And Buckminster Fuller, famous futurist, said we are to be architects of the future. And I adapted it for this session saying we are to be designers of the future, not its victims. A lot of people feel powerless when it's about the future because the future is made in America, in Silicon Valley, in China, but not here. Right? That is not a good thing. We make our future by using things, by not using things, by being responsible, by making up our own mind. That is the most important part. We can make dystopia, which is prevalent everywhere. 98% of all major film releases that deal with the future are dystopian. That's because it sells. All these people dying, all the action is really fun. Yeah, but that's really not what the future is. You've seen all those pictures. Really what the future is, when we look at the facts, there's lots of proof for dystopia, like all the climate change issues that you've seen in media. You see here how the curve of money is increasing, but the curve of the Earth is completely declining. Quite obvious to everybody. You see here how we're going to have more wildfires, more climate disasters, more floods, and so on. You see here how the entire middle part of the Earth is going to get too hot for people to live in 20 years, not in 50 years. We're talking about 500 million climate refugees. This is not a minor occurrence. They're all going to come to Europe, especially Northern Europe, because you can grow wine here then. Well, you're already doing that, right? So Kevin Kelly, who's also a great futurist, he says we should be optimistic, not because we have less problems. We have lots of problems, but we have more capacity to solve them. We have more power to solve all of these things. Scientifically speaking, technically speaking, we have, and money-wise, we have the money. Remember what happened in COVID? We mobilized lots of money. We did away with the most basic principles in many societies of choosing your own fate. It was just boom. We were able to do that. So it was COVID emergency and now it's climate emergency. And you can expect that we're going to do away with the most basic restrictions on what emergency is in the future. Right after Ukraine, Russia goes away as a major concern. This is the new normal. So emergency taxes, emergency regulation, emergency— different ideas. And of course, using technology. So when he talks about our capacity to solve, it's quite clear. Look at all the tech that we have now available to solve that. This is just the last 20 years. Look at how, how much money is being generated in technology that we can use, of course, for solving climate change. Look at this graph, how cheap technology is getting. Everything but the iPhone. Is getting cheaper and cheaper. So, I mean, very soon CO2 sequestration, desalinating water is really expensive, it's going to be completely normal. Water problem solved. Energy problem solved 15 years from now. It's not that long. So we just have to find a way to tie over one to the other. How cheap it's become to do DNA sequencing in a how week? We can invent our way out of this. So right now, that's just a question of doing the right thing. I'm very positive in climate. We're finding solutions. We can solve this. We have to suffer. We have to spend a lot of money. 2 or 3% of global GDP every year is what we need. That's just going to happen. And in return, it's going to generate a whole new industry. And in this industry, Europe is the leader. 100 million new jobs is the forecast in climate technology. I mean, talking about jobs, this is where they're going to be. Even nuclear fusion is now back on the agenda. I mean, I was always against nuclear, but this is a discussion that we have to have now. And it's something that's sitting in the room. So we have to get away from this idea that the world, the future is just dystopia. Or utopia. Utopia we never reach because it's impossible to have a perfect nirvana kind of world. This is a concept. It's good to think about that. Dystopia makes us depressed. We just want to crawl into a hole and never come out again. Kevin Kelly again suggests protopia. I love that word because it's a stepwise approach towards the good future. Step by step solving these problems. Most of that through scientific and technological advancement, but also through policy. Because the most amazing technology doesn't do any good if we can't get together and agree on what we should do. For example, you know pretty well that no matter what you do here in Sweden or what we do in Europe about climate change, it will be utterly pointless if we can't get the Indians, the Indonesians, and the Africans, the Brazilians to come along. Because they are gearing up to do what we have already done. So in other words, that translates into a simple realization: we will have to pay for them to not do what we have already done, which is to take the carbon out. So we may have to pay a tax to get the Indonesians to use solar energy. Think about that logic for a sec. I think any politician suggesting this would be instantly gone. But anyway, that's kind of the concept that we're looking at. So Protopia is this kind of approach, and I think this is the approach we need in government, in our jobs, solving one thing at a time. Let's stop obsessing with all the things that are not working and with all the people that are so bad. We have those, but they're not actually dominating the landscape as much as we think. It's just the main thing that happened here is social media. Social media amplifies bad things 6 to 10 times as much. And ever since we had social media, democracy as an idea has been in decline. There is a direct relationship there. So Facebook can make $150 million per day in revenues in return for selling out democracy. That is a great project. So I left Facebook 6 years ago as a user, and I stopped speaking for them. But we still have this situation. So that's definitely something that we have to look at to figure out which way we're going to actually go here. So inventing our way out, right? 3D printing. Cultured meat. I know it sounds disgusting, printed meat. I've tasted it. It's actually not. I think there's a restaurant here in Stockholm where you can eat cultured, what's called cultured meat, or fake meat, whatever. Plant-based meat. Solar energy. Change in the human genome. And finally, healthcare that's based on analytics, not on taking pills. Imagine that. Imagine when healthcare actually becomes healthcare, not sick care. That's what we have now. You're sick, you go to the doctor, you get a pill or an injection or something of the sort, basically preventing you from dying. Imagine we could actually solve that with intelligence. That alone is like a huge shift into a nirvana kind of future. So bottom line of this, however, is science and technology will not save the day. Not alone. Because, you know, technology is morally neutral until we use it. Oppenheimer, the film is coming out, I think, in 2 weeks. This was the problem. Oppenheimer did not want to use the nuclear bomb. The government thought differently. And it took 15 years for us to get a deal to not use it again. So we're in the exact same spot now. We have to agree on climate change, radical action on that, and we have to agree on what we do with intelligent machines. This has both great impact on your work as creatives, especially, of course, intelligent machines, because what they are doing is they're taking over the routine work, essentially. So really, we have to live in a world where technology is a present, or a bomb. And it's the same technology. So what does it mean? We don't use the technology? We ignore it? We can't do that. We're not doing that. We can't pause and just say, wait, wait, wait, wait for the Chinese to take this over. But we need guidelines like we did with every technology. Media is regulated, oil and gas is regulated, banking is regulated. But Facebook? No, they can do whatever they You know, right? And if artificial intelligence isn't regulated, we're going to get into deep trouble, like social media, but 1,000 times. So that's something we have to look at and what it means for creators, for our purpose, for our telos, our wisdom. This is the most important word. We're not missing the tools and the tech and the science. We're missing the wisdom. That's why I'm happy that in Nordic countries we have more of that wisdom. I don't know why. Like the tax system has a certain amount of logic and wisdom that we have not realized yet in other countries. And there's an ethics council in Denmark, for example, on the future of technology. Much more balanced approach to technology. This is why I think Europe will be the leader in this conversation. Buckminster Fuller again said, humanity is acquiring all the right technologies for the wrong reasons. That was 1976. We keep doing this, using technology for the wrong reasons, we're going to basically outmode ourselves. That's a 2050 timeframe. If you have kids, you got to think about that. You know, that's going to happen much quicker than we have ever thought. So we're going to live in this world of technology that's basically everywhere, especially in your creative work. Technology is coming up absolutely everywhere. Replacing routine jobs. And then we have this issue, you know, technology is cool, it helps us, it's a great tool, but technology by itself doesn't care about what we want and who we are. It has no ethics. And the same is true for some tech companies, even though other ones are trying, like Microsoft. Generally speaking, however, if we want technology to behave ethically, We would have to create the framework. For example, why not have a digital dividend for creators? Everything that we put on the internet for images and videos and text and content that we have created goes into the cloud to create the AI cloud that Microsoft and Bing and Baidu, Alibaba, and so on are using. Why don't we get a dividend from this? A writer, a producer's fee, whatever you want to call it. It has been discussed many times before. Of course, that would be quite a revolution. 3 waves coming towards us that we have to understand and use: the digital revolution, mentioned earlier, the sustainability revolution, which is 100x of the digital revolution. Basically, if you're not sustainable and going towards that goal until 2030, companies and partners and consumers will hate you. That's already happening. A lot of people who are graduating now from law school, for example, they will not go work for a law firm that does work for the fossil fuel industry. Completely different than our generation, which was mostly about prospering. People are saying, I don't want to do this job. It's bad. It's bad work. And despite the fact that people get $280,000 $7,000 a year to work at Facebook. A lot of people don't want to work at Facebook anymore. It's an interesting thing when we look at this, saying, "OK, the purpose revolution, the last one, is all about the question of why are we doing this? Who's in charge? What do we want?" Of course I can connect my brain to the internet. I can do that today if I have $2 million. Or if I work for the Defense Department. But in 10 years, in 2030, we can all connect our brain to the internet to be faster. But the question is why? And what else happens? And what do we gain and what do we lose? Those are very, very big questions. Because the bottom line really is this: as computers are taking over the world, societies are driven by their tech, but defined by the humanity. And we have to keep it this way. It's not important what technology companies want and how much they want to sell and how much is possible. That is utterly insignificant. The question is, does it create human benefit? And now we live in a world where technology is the driving force of everything. And what we have now with artificial intelligence is where we have for the first time a system that is so good that is basically eliminating truth. I mean, I could be standing here in a holographic projection speaking about bizarre topics. You wouldn't know the difference. Well, not quite yet, but very soon. Fake videos, fake news. The first person was sentenced to jail in China last week for spreading fake news about a car accident using AI. I don't know if the Chinese government wants to make an example of this, but basically, you know, this is happening all around us. And so we have to stop thinking about this thing called ChatGPT or generative AI like a human-like thing, right? The reality is it's not. It's not thinking, right? It's not feeling. It's this. It's a parrot in a server. Regardless, it's very useful. I use it all the time. I'm rewriting my book from 2016, and I'm using it to suggest better ways of putting things. So I put in my text, and it says, "No, no, no, that's convoluted German English. No, it doesn't work." So it helps me to cut that down and find new things. But I realize if it helps me find new things, it manipulates me into finding what I already wrote. Many times it quotes me back to myself. I mean, OK, so it's Google Maps, OK? But here's the danger. We don't want that machine to collect real-time data of 5 billion people through their mobile phones, their Facebook accounts, their movements, their Google Maps, their Gmail, and understand ourselves better than we do, on top of all the stuff it has written, read about us, and then eventually reason something that is different than the command. The most popular joke in AI is you tell an AI to fix climate change, you know what it will do, right? Kill all of us. It's the most logical conclusion. It's called the paperclip problem. I mean, we are the reason for climate change, so do away with us. That would be the most popular solution. So you have seen this film with Mick Jagger and the Boston Dynamics robot, where the robot apes the dancing. It's a song called "Start Me Up." I can't play it because if I play it, then we get kicked off YouTube. The copyright dictators have decreed. But anyway, interesting, right? But you know what the interesting part is? This robot is certainly cool and interesting, right? But you know what the coolest part is? Mick Jagger, 79 years old. He is the interesting part. The robot is just a monkey. I mean, as much as we would appreciate that a robot can do this— and there's a couple of learnings I want to share from this clip. First, learning is not about memorizing. And creativity isn't about taking out the memory and repeating it. That's not what we do. That's an important point to remember. Intelligence is not just data processing. Data processing is required, and the human brain right now is pretty much on par with the data processing of ChatGPT. It's getting to be almost the same in terms of the neurons and the processes involved. But our intelligence is kinesthetic, it's emotional, It's social. It's everything. So you could safely say if we see the world at 100%, when we look at the world with our eyes and everything, and our ears and our senses, the computer sees 2.5 or 3%. Because it sees the data. It doesn't see anything else. So there I would say, "Hey, that's pretty cool, but is it real? Humans don't think with their brain." Humans aren't binary like computers. Real life transcends data. Logic alone is not enough. You didn't marry your husband or your wife because of efficiency, because they give you a good data feed, so to speak. There are myriads of reasons. Real life isn't like this. Real creativity isn't like this. This is a powerful tool that we need to learn how to use and also to reject. When the time comes, just like we reject other tools when the time comes. Humans are all sensing. This is our experience of life. Machines have one sense, and that's logic. And guess what? I wouldn't want them to have the other senses. I wouldn't want machines to graduate towards the point of autonomous intelligence, which is the stated goal of OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, is to invent superintelligence. I think that is a bad goal. It's a stupid goal. It's a suicidal goal. Because it says we're going to start using these things not as tools, but as gods, as religion. And God knows, you know, religion has been— technology has already become a religion. Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. Let's not forget, however, we want to use the good thing. If we can use AI to solve cancer, we have to do that. If we can use AI to be more efficient in our work, We must do that. But efficiency isn't the utmost thing that we need. Efficiency is just one thing that matters. If only efficiency matters, then we can say goodbye to creativity. We need to protect that part of humanity, clearly. So this is our future as humans. We're going to work with machines everywhere, whether they're actual machines or in the cloud or AI, like we've always done, but more. Basically, that means on this pyramid of what we do, we have to move up. This is crucial for education. We're teaching our kids to be robots. You work like a robot, you'll end up working for the robot. The robot will take your job. What's happening here is really quite clear. The lower part of this Maslow thing, so to speak, is machine turf. Basic logic, information, data. Not that we don't have to have that, but we can outsource some of that to machines. This is what we do as creatives, right? Human-only turf. That's what we do. And we should resist any idea to say that the computer is going to move up into that turf. It can't, it won't, and it won't do a good job. And I will not fix the garbage created by a computer so that it looks like it was done by a person. So that's very important, I think, for us ultimately to think. For the foreseeable future, humans will very rarely be replaced by AI, but humans with AI will probably replace many without. So that's an interesting thing that we have to think about when we think about— here, this graph shows us pretty much already what's happening. 4x productivity that we have when we use AI as paralegals in the office and so on. So that's— those are essentially power tools that we have to look at. This chart, I don't have enough time to share all of that with you, but basically on this chart, I will disseminate it later. You can see here, design is right here. Arts, design, entertainment, sports, media, 45% potential of automation. No, sorry, 25%. And 26% potential for augmentation. That's the critical point. Some of our tasks will be automated, and we have to welcome that within reason to move faster and quicker. But augmentation is good. That means we can do better things and find things and be more creative. But we're also going to need a bit of protection here. You know, people using our things that we create How do we get remunerated? What's the logic behind that? I used to be in the music business. The writers' strike in Hollywood, you heard about that? The writers are saying the AI will start writing scripts for film shows. They'll probably be even worse than what they are writing. Just kidding. They do write some good stuff. But the intention of the studio is not to keep the workers, it's to get rid of them or to squash down the salary using AI. That's not a good idea. Using technology to do that with people. So I got to come and wrap up, so I'm going to basically skip a couple of these so we can have a small debate. But basically, as I was saying earlier, human intelligence is like this, and this is creativity. The AI has one shape of this, right? Logic processing. And Demis Hassabis' AI is about turning information and data into knowledge. That is interesting. This is the guy who runs DeepMind, right? And then Stuart Russell says, who writes all the AI books, a famous professor, intelligence means having the power to shape the world in your interest. And we have been shaping the world. Do we really want a thinking machine to shape the world? We want the machine to do the job. We want it to be competent, solve our problems. We don't want it to be conscious. And that way we have kind of put a lid on this. What I want from intelligent assistants, from IA, is just to get the job done, to help me do my video editing better, or, you know, that's what I need. Maybe I need a little bit more of the AI that does a little bit more than that, give me some more ideas. But I don't want this. I don't want a generally intelligent machine. And that's something we have to come to grips with. Also, internationally, we have to discuss how we can prevent this. I'm going to skip ahead here to the ending because for some reason I have not been as fast as I thought I would be. All right, so, okay, here, sorry about that. So since I can't see my own slides here, I have to— okay. Sorry. This is what happens when you're running out of time and you have a lot of animation. So anyway, what now? Wrap it up to say your mindset contains your future. It's very important. When your mindset is either rejecting the future or mistrusting the future— that's a very common thing— or not interested in the future, then your present also changes. And as you think about the future, so it will be. I mean, if you think the future will be bad, you tend to evaluate things in a bad way. It's like a relationship where you think your partner is bad, you know, you look at it the same way. So we need some future therapy, right? That the future can be good. Let's start a different narrative. I think this will also greatly help you with your clients. Tell them that there's a good narrative about the future, sort of makes a very big difference. And I think in that regard, you know, I always say we should get these ears, you know, these radar ears to listen to the future, to pay attention. I can't tell you how many people I work with in government and in business who don't pay attention. They don't pay attention to their employees, to their customers, or never mind their family either. Nobody. Because they're looking straight at, you know, how to generate more money. If we do that, we're in deep trouble because now the speed is so tremendous. If we don't pay attention, 10% of your time should be spent looking at the future. And I'm not talking about Netflix or, you know, watching stuff. I'm talking about reading great books, reading articles, staying informed. Because when you do that, you develop better ideas. What's inside of your mind creates the future that you're going to go into. And as I was saying earlier, Buckminster Fuller, designers of the future, Barbara Hubbard, who was a disciple of Buckminster, she says the good future, or I put that in there actually, exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality. And this is very interesting because she said the future, I put the good future, but This is what creative people do, right? It exists first in our imagination, then we mock up something, and then it becomes real. And that's what we have to do about the future. So I vote for more creative people in government, more creative people in running those agendas, more creative people in business going forward into the good future. Thanks very much for your time. Thank you.

Thank you, Gerd.

Thank you.

Thank you. Join me over here. Okay. Stand in the corner so I can see you.

Stand in the corner. Good.

Thanks for such a—

No donkey ears though.

We can fix that. Thanks for such a wide-ranging and hopeful talk. A large part of it hinges on the— or at least the beginning of it, a large part hinges on this idea of exponential development of technology. So if my wife thinks that I'm not doing enough dishes, should I just say to her that in time, the amount of dishes I'm going to do is going to increase exponentially, it's just around the corner, or should I start fixing the problem now and do something now?

Well, that's an interesting question. Maybe you should just do the dishes, you know, skip the question. I think the exponential thing is hard for us to understand because we're not. You know, we're slowly learning, we're getting older, we're getting smarter, but we're not exponential. And we can't plug in CPUs here and make it think faster. We can take pills, but it doesn't work. So basically, as we see, Moore's Law isn't ending. It's still leaping. And we're seeing all these effects of technology. What we have to do is to sort of understand how it develops to incorporate that into our daily lives and to not also get bogged down. This is the other thing. So these days, if you're watching all that stuff, you can say, oh my God, you know, it's like, it's like literally being in the warp drive tunnel. So sometimes you have to take a step back. And I always say offline is the new luxury. You know, we get away somewhere to just clear out all that stuff, you know, because that's what humans need. We can't just feast on information.

Yeah, I think my point was that isn't there a risk that we postpone action if we think that everything's going to be solved by miraculous technology just around the corner? Isn't it? It's a bit like promising heaven to your cult subjects, maybe.

Well, nothing will be solved by technology. No, no, these are just tools that we use, and then we can make a mess. Or we can use them positively. They're just tools that we generate. And then sometimes it's better if we don't touch the tools, certain kinds of tools, you know. But generally speaking, it's about what we actually do with them. It's not that it will solve anything by itself, as we can see, for example, in social media. Social media has made the very same problems of society bigger because technology makes efficiency, right? So it makes the garbage more efficient. And we end up with more efficient manipulation. And this is not good. So we have to make our compromises and figure out what exactly to do about it.

And this is something that was recurring in your talk, that we have to make good choices. And you seem to have a lot of hope in our capacity to do that. Where does that come from? I mean, if we look at the human track record, it's a bit of a mixed bag perhaps in terms of choices that we've made.

Well, it's a very popular story to say that humans are no good. There's lots of proof for that. On the other hand, if you look at the actual story of humans, you know, lots of people have done that. There's a great book you should read called Humankind.

I have it.

I love it. And, you know, basically, I mean, it's the narrative of humans not being able to do and get anything done. And, you know, we're basically evil, da da da da da. It's just not true. I think, of course, it's true for some individuals that are very exposed to showing us that they can do all that. But generally, we are actually quite good at collaborating. We're good at inventing. It's the survival of the friendliest, not the survival of the strongest. And that's a really strange story when you look at reality, of course, that is kind of mirroring the opposite. So I think in many ways we have to also adapt that story to figure out why there is hope. Because if humans were evil, then there is no hope because we can be more evil now using AI. But in the end, the thing is that's a little bit worrisome is that we tend to react to pressure and then change. So we had two nuclear bombs and then we changed that. And then we had COVID and now we're maybe better prepared. But we can't allow artificial intelligence to become with an IQ of a billion connected to a billion other machines with an IQ of a billion. That is not survivable. So we have to be a bit more proactive, you know, on getting that done in time. That is, of course, a crucial part.

And I wanted to ask, what do you think the prospects are? But I guess you are hopeful that we will.

I think we have 10 years to solve these issues. We have for climate change only 2 or 3 years for major action. And that is coming. It will be painful for all of us. But we can solve it. I'm very optimistic about climate change because we have the tools, we have the will, we have examples, you know, we have the money. Technology, that's going to be a lot more complicated because there's so, you know, it's like a huge amount of money involved. The oil industry makes $2.5 billion revenues per profit per day. Okay. The tech industry, I don't know, $250 billion. Yeah, much, much bigger. So there we have to look at, you know, how will government help us with this? And the interesting part is that politicians will never take the lead, like Greta keeps saying, until we all ask for it. That is, of course, the key thing. We will not get that change from politicians or CEOs until everybody is screaming that something has to be done. That's just the way that it works.

As you were giving your talk, I was thinking, okay, you're a futurist. How do you work? How do you— on what grounds do you shape your view of the future? Is there a method to this madness?

I just ask ChatGPT. No, just kidding. It's a creative process, like every creative process. When you write a song— I used to write songs— sometimes it just comes out and boom, it's there. And then other times you work on it for 5 months and it's still dead. So it's kind of like, I think Steve Jobs once said, really what the mission is, is to combine art and technology. So I always think of that as art and knowledge or logic, you know, but the future is not about logic. There's no such thing. You can't predict the future based on logic. You can't. You have to use your intuition and imagination. Everybody that runs successful business knows this. In the end, it comes down to your intuition. And sometimes it's just not right, but generally speaking, you can be quite good when you practice.

Thank you so much for coming here today.

You're welcome.

A big round of applause for Gerd Leonhard.

Thank you.