Futurist Gerd Leonhard - Fortinet Convergence 22: The Next 10 Years: Beyond Digital Transformation

Bonjours. Guten tag. Gritz immanand. Salaam alaikum. Kalisfera. Buenos dias. Botage. So people from all over the world are here today and I'm going to speak to you about the future. And God knows the future is a difficult topic. Now there are many people that you speak to about the future that are saying the future doesn't look that good. I have two kids at 25 and 33 and they're essentially saying the future is dark. Right? We had the pandemic, we have inflation, we have climate change, we have a diversity of issues in politics. And so I made it my job to think about the good future, where it's going. I want to start by saying one thing, is that the purpose of looking at the future is not to find predictions. It's extremely difficult to have predictions. There were people that did it like Arthur C. Clarke and Toffler and others, and Buckminster Fuller. But my job is really to generate foresight and insights, intuition. Jeff Bezos the other day, one of the most amazing people in the E commerce business, of course said that whenever he makes a big decision, he gets all the facts from the focus groups, but in the end he decides based on intuition. And that's what we do. We're humans, so we decide things based on what we think is the best possible way forward. Really it's not a good idea to think about too much of a logic when it's about the future, but to pay better attention. That's why I use this symbol here. This is from World War II where they were listening to the radar installations. This is the future mindset that we need. Without that it's going to get very difficult because guess what? The future is, is already here. We just haven't noticed. You go to some places like Palo Alto, they are self driving cars. Other places like in Saudi Arabia, you have an artificial city being built from zero. I mean we're going to a place where basically the future is already here. We just have to pay more attention and it's interesting to see. Now I worked in the car industry for a while as a futurist and years ago we had gatherings and gotten together to talk about the future. And I said the future of the car is not to have a car. They were kind of angry about that. But the bottom line is when you look at the future, it's important. What Henry Miller once said, our destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. It's kind of like when you go to therapy with Your husband or your wife. The goal is to find a new way of seeing things and that may be a resolution in the car industry. It goes from gasoline thinking, right, the gasoline economy, to electric. Look at the stats, right? I mean, if you're looking at the stats here, you'd be scared if you work for Mercedes Benz or Audi. The black box is ice. Internal combustion engines. The end of the ice age, I always say jokingly. And the red box is software. What's the feature of the car business? Mobility software services. Experiences. Not ownership necessarily. Ownership is just a part of it. Exactly. Like the music business. Who in their right mind today would go out and buy a CD or a dvd? I mean, maybe some of us still do that, right? But if you give your kids a DVD for Christmas, they're going to call a therapist. It's like, come on, it's a click of a button and imagine this, the music business is now in amazing shape. It's 180 million people pay $10 a month to click the button and cost us zero, almost zero. It's the cloud, right? But yeah, mind boggling. Two billion a month new money. That's the transition that we have to learn. And basically what's happening here is that as we go into the future, the new way of seeing things is really important. So last year I made a film called the Good Future because I got tired of my kids telling me about the bad future. So I went to l' anser Road to Canary Islands with mostly desert like this. And you can see the goodfuturefilm.com and in the film I outline why I believe that our future can be and will be good in the widest sense. I'll talk more about that in a second. But then again I come back and things change again. Another Covid crisis, the war, inflation, looking kind of dystopian. And of course the biggest issue today really is climate change. It will impact every single component of our society. In the tech business, just in Davos three months ago, the first Mover coalition, the tech companies, Google, Microsoft and others got together and said net zero by 2025. It's going to cost real money. I believe really the future is better than we think, better than we think because we watch a lot of news like social media, where the bad news travels six or eight times as fast as the good news. Not such a good idea to keep looking at this in my view. Famous futurist Barbara Hubbard once said, as we see the future, so we act. And as we act, so we become, in other words, if we think that the future is lousy, it will probably turn out lousy because that's our expectation. You guys are in the security business, of course. You can't be stupid and naive and not take care of things. But you have to have a positive outlook. The future belongs to optimists. Have you ever seen any innovation where there wasn't a giant optimism behind it? From the cloud to the Internet of things to AI? I mean, AI has been at work for what, 50 years, right? We're only at the beginning of what it will do. I'm sure Marvin Minsky wasn't a pessimist about AI when he thought about what AI could do. So we're now in this moment in history where the next decade will define our future. Kevin Kelly, who's a great futurist, who used to, he founded Wired magazine, he says we should be optimistic. Not because we have less problems, we have lots of problems getting more every day, but we have more capacity to solve them. That's of course very good. In your business. You're going to always have more security problems and more ways to solve it. But here's some examples. Here we can see the big explosion of technological progress, robotics, blockchain genome sequencing just exploding in the last decade. And here we see the business segments, five multi trillion dollar innovation platforms, blockchain, AI, energy storage, robotics. I mean, if you're going to have a complaint that there's no new business or no money, clearly not. Our capacity to solve climate change, our capacity to solve security, our capacity to solve other things is getting larger all the time. And here's of course the most important slide, this one. Our capacity to deal with everything that we've arranged in terms of climate change in the last 25 years. 50% of CO2 was put out there in the last 25 years. That's quite an accomplishment by people like myself traveling a lot. So we see this huge curve happening. The next 100 unicorns, the billion dollar companies are all going to be in climate change. I mean, think about the shift there for a second. McKinsey says $150 trillion value shift from the fossil fuel economy to the green economy. In other words, you could say Big Blue, not IBM. You know, technology and Big Green, that's the ticket and that is true convergence. Because we couldn't have Big Green without Big Blue, right? We need technology to actually make this happen. On the other hand, I would safely say business as usual is dead or dying. We can't continue with social media like we have. It's Basically garbage. Facebook is a shining example of the toxic environment of social media. Second one, we can't continue with how we do things in terms of E commerce or payment or digital money. It's a huge confusion around all these things. We can continue with many things. So this is what Covid has brought out. Business as usual is dead or dying. And now climate change goes from being a nuisance, you know, corporate social responsibility, something you talk about when you have time, it becomes the biggest opportunity ever. Let's not forget this for a second. This is actually solvable, it's doable. We have the tools, we have the money, and everybody wants. Has a lot to do with security as well. Because if we're going to have smart cities that are much more open to the environment and actually not polluting as much, we're going to need to make sure we protect people who are on the network in a smart city. So as we move here, we're heading into what I call perma change. Consider yourself lucky. The next 10 years is perpetual super drive change. I know it's annoying, it's potentially difficult, hard to stand, but that's what we have. It's like complete change the entire time with all the things that we see around us. The game changes. Big data. Here's a list. I'm going to share a PDF with you later. But you see this list of perma change, for example. The first one is work. Work is going from physical to digital. We're still going to work hybrid or in person, of course. But make no mistake about this, most of the new jobs will be in the cloud. Dell said the other day three years ago that basically 70% of all new jobs are not even invented yet. 21 million people work on social media didn't exist 12 years ago. Over 100 million people will work in climate protection and agency for the country, for governments, for cities, for companies, entirely new jobs. The other one is economics. We're going to the public sector as funding many of these big changes. Look what happened in America. Build Back better didn't work. Three weeks later, $580 billion for the biggest bill ever. Technology, climate, all together, right here. And this one, of course, the millennials are coming. Be aware of this. People my age, our age, let's say generally between 50 and 65, fading out in importance. And you can feel that, for example, in many places around the world, and the younger people are coming between 25 and 40 and half of them are female. They want different things, they want a different world, they want different things. That they can rely on. So I always say unthinkable is the new normal. We're going to see a climate tax for flying on the airplane. Every flight you take. We may see a carbon tax for eating meat. It sounds crazy, especially if you're from America, but it's coming. We're going to see stuff like this where we eat food that was made in the lab called cultured meat. Not a joke. It's a very, very big movement with hundreds of billions of investment. We want to see high rises in cities where we grow vertical organic farms run by robots. It's already working. It's just too expensive. All these things are happening at the same time. New paradigms, new priorities, new stories and new rules. I couldn't think of another more powerful scenario for the future of security because all, all of that will require technology. Smart, connected, fast powerful technology. Digital banking. We're going to move into a world where money is going digital. Not necessarily Bitcoin, I hope, but digital wallets. Right. Here's a short talk on this from Mr. Powell.

Rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar in the future. Most major economies already have or are in the process of developing instant24.7 payments. Our own FedNow service will be coming online in 2023. And in light of the tremendous growth in crypto assets and stablecoins, we are examining whether a US Central bank digital currency would improve upon what is an already safe and efficient domestic payment system.

Thank you, central bank digital currency. We're going to go digital with money. Think of the security implications on that. I don't believe Bitcoin or what's called Web3 is going to be the dominant vehicle for money. That's quite a big pipe dream in my view. Here's another take on this. What could possibly happen when we have digital money? I think you'll have a good laugh on this one. It. So imagine if money was digital. If money was digital and everything you do could be monitored and tracked. It could be heaven or it could be hell. This is actually a Bitcoin commercial, if you can believe it or not. I mean, it makes perfect sense for Bitcoin to say that, right? But anyway, moving into a future where everything is converging with technology. Everything, healthcare, money, banking, tourism, transportation, everything, everything is becoming technology. And we're only at the beginning. I mean, in 10 years we're going to have 9 billion people on the Internet. Today it's four and a half. We're exploding with change here. We're going to have digital healthcare like this, which is kind of like if you're rich and fancy and you know, you're a bit of a geek, you can do these kind of things, you know, monitor your health. Yeah, you can do that. Now this will be completely normal. It will bring down health care everywhere, even in Africa, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, everywhere. Very cheap devices that will help us with digital healthcare. So I think it's pretty safe to say our world would change more in the next 10 years than the previous 100 years. Oh, it sounds crazy, right? Previous 100 years, the Internet, World War II, World War I, the atomic bomb, but now the next 10 years, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, green energy. I mean, we're talking about fundamental shifts to every part of our lives and hopefully positive ones, of course, like longevity, living longer, healthier and happier. So two revolutions, you know already those are these ones. The other ones are coming at the same time. The digital revolution, that's our topic. The sustainability revolution and the human revolution. Changing what we are and what we can do. Programming DNA. I mean, crazy story when you think about this all at the same time. Make no mistake about this. Today we're not just transforming technology, we're transforming our energy system, our educational system, we're transforming all of that at the same time. And that brings up the opportunity. I call this a DDR. If you're from Germany, you understand it's kind of a joke on East Germany. But basically this is the law of the future. Digitization, decarbonization and reformation of economic logic that's happening all around us. For example, in digitization, the main topic is how do we protect humanity? How do we stay human in a world that's full of machines and AI and logic? What about our jobs? What about what we do? What about our privacy? So here, for example, in decarbonization, it's all about the circular economy. Taking things, giving them back. What is the biggest company in the world today? The most powerful and richest company, Aramco, was Apple before that. So it's a head to head. I think Apple will come back, technology will be more powerful again. But clearly this kind of circular economy is coming. And also reformation means we are looking for a different purpose. Not just profit and growth, but people, planet, purpose and prosperity. That sounds crazy to have all of that, right? But basically this is what's happening with millennials. They are asking for this. They don't want to live in a world that's just about growing, growing, growing at all costs. And this is your job. Your job as a leader is to cover all of that. Because transformation is not just technology. It has impact on everything that we have, on our surrounding, on our economic logic. So as we go into this future, we had our good friend Milton Friedman long time ago, it says the purpose of business is to make money. That was in the 70s, interesting paradigm that's hardly working out anymore now because all of a sudden we've come to the ceiling of the possibility of generating just revenues. And now we have these people, the millennials, juggling everything. They will not work for your company. They will not even look at you if there's no larger story than money. And they're 50% of the new population coming up making decisions, and half of them are female. Go to Turkey, for example. You can already see many people in the decision making process in companies. They're female, between 35 and 45. They're not our age. It's completely different. So in this world we have this old thinking of what I call the ego economy, right? Everything is about us, closed things. For example, the oil industry, that is still here, but now we're moving into what's called the ecosystem. We talk about ecosystems all the time. Security is an ecosystem, as we heard earlier, where everything is connected, where we're inventing stuff together. And you can see that in the car industry shaping out. That's essentially an ecosystem of innovation. And this one is an ecosystem of mobility. Most car companies are now saying they are actually mobility providers, whether it's scooters or even helicopters, solar powered bubbles, whatever they need to do in the future to make this work. And there's another implication. It's not just good or bad technology. Technology has the potential for both. It can be really amazing, can be heaven, provide free phone calls for us, or it can be hell. For example, when you're looking for a job on LinkedIn and the jobs that are advertised to women are completely different than those for men. You'll never see those because they never show up. It's a kind of computing bias. So here we have to think about this growth of what's happening with technology. Because basically what's happening is technology has no ethics. I mean, technology is binary, right? As people have said for a long time, technology is morally neutral until we use it. I can use a hammer and go build my house or I can go and kill somebody. I can do the same with AI. So we're going to need to think, for example, if AI becomes as big as this chart shows, roughly 60 billion in AI applications. So what is ethics? It's defined as what we have the right to do and what we choose to do. Two different things. Great example. Again, social media makes the best example here. So really what's happening is all of a sudden we're realizing technology is a gift. But as you sure know, it can also be a bomb when you use it too much or when you use it wrong. So that brings up an important fact for all of us CEOs. This is a research here from Statista must lead on all of those issues, not just on business issues. So that means all of our decisions are suddenly looked at in a larger way. So that brings me to an important point. As our world is going to be populated by these friendly robots everywhere, and technology will be everywhere. What do we do? Well, here's a simple way forward. It's not this. This is a concept that has been discussed many times. When robots get smart or machines get smart, we become useless. Don't believe it for a minute. The robots get smart in a certain way. They're not intelligent like humans. They have no emotional intelligence, no social, no kinesthetic, no musical, just computing. So what's going to happen in our future is that we're moving into this pyramid. And this is very important to realize also for business, the lower part of that pyramid, data, information and logic, that's essentially computing territory. Machines can do that. Machines can do all of those things much better, faster, cleaner than we. But on top of that pyramid. That's what we do here. Deeper knowledge, tacit knowledge. Understanding that's very difficult for a machine. It's called the Moravec Paradox. Whatever is easy for a human, as hard for computer, and vice versa. Thankfully, that's probably going to be alive for at least another 20, 30 years. So really what's important here, when you look at something like this, this is a painting that's made by an AI, has won an art prize in a gallery the other day, a painting made by a machine. To a way, you'd say, well, that's interesting, but knowledge without wisdom is. Is useless. Not to say that machines are useless. I would say they're not human. They can do interesting things. But we need a bit more than that to actually go into the future. So as we go into this future, you can see machines like this, very useful. They're going to be everywhere, including at home. They're going to do all kinds of things for us. They're very useful. They're not human, they're not intelligent. Not even this one is intelligent called Amela, that shows emotions in her face. And of course, our good friend Elon Musk would not be too far away without considering what he has done, which is the first humanoid robot showed at his show last week. Supposed to cost $20,000 for home use. So all that stuff is happening, but what does it mean for us humans? We have to move up the food chain. Deeper knowledge, understanding, wisdom. We have to change education. When we see this, It's amazing, right? The robot can monkey. Mick Jagger, I mean, a robot could never do that 10 years ago. Destroy the entire place trying to act like this. That's amazing, but it's still so far away from a person. It shows you what the future is. For the foreseeable future, we're going to use those machines. This is the important part, the handshake. How do we make it work? How do we go into a world where we don't want 100% security and 0% freedom? I don't think very few people want that. But how do we do that? That's your job, thankfully. I'll wait for you to solve this problem. And also this problem. We have to be proactive. We also have to be careful. So that's up for us to figure out. So I'm going to come to the end and basically say that what we are experiencing now is we are surrounded by technology, and that's not going to change. That's actually a good thing if we can afford sometimes to take some time off. I always say offline is the new luxury to get out of this circle, to reconnect to nature. You know, there's now an official disease called nature Deficit disorder. Not getting enough nature. That's actually a symptom now with therapists. But really what we're doing is quite clear. For us, this is the future. This is the future of business, of learning, of jobs. Because these things, creativity, imagination, ethics, values, hard to do for machines, impossible, probably because they're fuzzy. This is also why we have these events. This is also why you succeed in business. Sometimes you may not have all the technical answers, but you can still communicate or vice versa. So this kind of overlap between those two things, that's going to be absolutely crucial. So to summarize, right now we feel a little bit under pressure, everybody looking at the world at large. But I'm always saying the doors aren't closing for humanity, they're opening. Have you ever experienced the pain of a door opening? All of a sudden there's an opening and you realize, oh, it's painful, but that's the way to go. That's where we are right now. Painful doors have closed and now other ones are opening. Just look at what we can do with technology, what we can do with virtual reality, which is coming up everywhere. What we do with education and the metaverse and what we can do with spacecraft and space faring. We're going to go to space in less than 20 years with our AI and our robots. So the future is created by optimists. I wish you to be optimist of the future and I want you to consider being a digital leader that has the ears, the future mindset. How do you get the ears? If you spend 150% of your time on today and don't really look at tomorrow, you can be very successful. But you have a very short lifespan because you need to pay attention as to what's coming, because it's no longer 10 years away. So those three things, exponential change, convergent industries, holistic business models, sustainable futures, human benefit. That is the true transformation. That's the true convergence. Convergence isn't between being over the top. That's a different technical convergence. I'm talking about convergence of business models and ideas for the future. So that's something to think about. And I want to thank you for your time and I'll be around later to have some questions if you have time. Thank you.