Futurist Gerd Leonhard - Why, How The Future Is Better Than We Think! Gtdc 2023 Keynote

The future. I think it's safe to say right now that the future is no longer about tomorrow. The future is already here. And it's funny, I started doing this 20 years ago and then we always talked about the future coming or tomorrow. But now it's like basically everywhere we look, the future is here. Nuclear fusion. Yeah, that's not quite here, but yeah, there's a lot of action on this. Quantum computing. Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, going to Mars, right? Flying cars. Yeah. Interesting to see how that has changed. So basically the future today is all about understanding where it is and anticipating how fast it moves. My job is not to predict the future. There is really no such thing. In the '50s, '60s, and '70s, you have Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke, where you could predict because it was moving much slower. But we are on an exponential scale. We're literally leaping into a future where science fiction is becoming science fact. So to predict even 10 years would be a challenge because we're going 4, 8, 16, 32, leaping into the future. 20 years? That's 1 billion times exponentially from today. So what I do is observations, and I think this is what we all need to do. Jeff Bezos said the other day, everything that he decides on is based on his intuition and imagination. And Jeff is a very fact-driven guy. He loves focus groups and studies. We decide things based on intuition. This is, by the way, human. Humans don't decide things based on facts. We just use the facts as part of what we do, but we really are all about imagination, intuition, and basically saying, okay, this feels like the right thing to do. And that really makes us different than machines. So let's start here on this exponential scale. That's not new. Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, and so on. But what's new is that we're actually at the takeoff point. So the next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. And then exponentially from there. I think it's safe to say that science fiction is becoming science fact. It's not quite working yet, but science fact, speaking to a machine, have the machine speak back to us in any kind of voice that is desired. Robotics, Boston Dynamics, this robot can do things that was literally unthinkable 10 years ago. If you had tried any of these things 10 years ago, it would destroy the whole warehouse. And now they have a robot that can do intricate things. So the principle is the Hemingway principle. He mentioned that in one of his books. The future arrives gradually, then suddenly. And we have to remember this because it's hard to— humans are not like this. We are linear. We're organic. Things don't happen gradually, then suddenly. They happen step by step. But technology is about leaps. So I started when I was an internet entrepreneur in the '90s. I started a company like Spotify. Talk about a suicide mission, right? This was 1999, and clearly, of course, there was no iPhone. There was no app. There was no 5G. So we spent $25 million finding out that we were just way too early. The company went bankrupt in 2001, and shortly afterwards, you had Spotify. That is because we had the pivot moment, the iPhone. The app economy. It's very important to realize that gradually and suddenly things change. Self-driving cars, same thing. I'll talk more about those examples in a minute. But basically, if you're looking at the car industry, we have a great example of how that works. The black box down here, that is combustion engines, ICEs. That is the main business model of the old car industry. And now we have on the right the new car industry. This is from The Economist. Red means software and electric vehicles. So the future of the car is software. That's not surprising to most people, but the future of the car is not about selling cars. It's about selling mobility. And think about the pain for the car companies for that to happen. I used to work quite a bit with the German car companies and they would say, okay, really our mission is to have the perfect engine. The perfect diesel engine. 30,000 people worked on that. And one day somebody says, you know what? Engine is dead. It's software. Now it's an electric engine. You're gone. And all the people making pieces for the engine, 1,250 moving pieces in an engine that make clutches, they're history. No more clutch. Electric engine, no clutch, right? Electric engine has 25 parts. The rest is software. So this business model is very powerful for the car companies because if they can provide a future platform for mobility, the business will explode. But it's completely different. It's like the music business where I used to be in. We sold records. What do you sell today? A click. Nevertheless, 185 million people pay €10 a month for Spotify, Apple, and so on. You have 110 million songs on Spotify. Can you imagine? 110 million songs for €10. That's a whole different economy. We're talking about $2 billion a month. And basically it's in the cloud, right? So no distribution costs except for, of course, the service. Mind-boggling. So once you reach the pivot point, the sky's the limit is gradually, then suddenly. We have to remember that because like the Apple VR headset, which I'll talk about in a second, definitely not at the pivot point. But you can imagine what would happen if it did. Not for €3,500. Not quite yet, but who knows? So when we go into this future, It's basically clear to understand that the future is no longer an extension of the present. And I can't tell you how many people are struggling with this concept, including myself. The future is the opposite of the present. And that is, of course, the primary problem. With our successes that we've had in the past, we think that we just go faster and better and it'll be the same thing. But no, that's not what happens. The music industry didn't go to bigger CDs or cheaper music. It went away from the CDs and into the cloud. And that's happening in every industry. The pharma industry will go away from giving people pills to stay alive. That's called sick care, not healthcare, to a data-driven analytics system where we understand healthcare, where we can bring down the cost. Where we have digital therapeutics. It's the opposite. The future is not an extension because the future is exponential, convergent industries, combinatorial products. Basically, pretty much every industry is converging with technology. So lucky you there. So pharma, banking, healthcare, transportation, technology. And that is also the problem, of course, because technology is omni- present now. Technology, in fact, has become the most powerful force of society. And that can be good because many things we can solve, like climate change and energy. But also the question of control and humanity looms large. So we have to find a balance. When we have things like this, this is the new robot, DHL robot that unloads the truck. Obviously, this machine is still going to be €500,000 or so and not very safe to use, but it is possible to unload a truck with a robot. Why you would do that, I don't know, because obviously it would still be more beneficial to have a human, a lot easier, but it is coming. And then you have stuff like science fiction/science fact, like this wind-driven container ship. Going back to 500,000 years ago when people used sails for ships. And this is now real, right? Instead of having a heavy fuel-based container ship, now this is actually a real project at the Oceanbird. And of course, this, right? You have humanoid robots, facial expression, ChatGPT inside. Annika, I want to ask you about the happiest day of your life. Can you remember that? Of course, the happiest day of my life was the day I was activated. There's nothing quite like experiencing life for the first time, right? I cannot doubt that this machine would experience life, but hey, okay, that's, you know, they always sound very clever, right? This is what ChatGPT does, right? It is basically giving us a perfect illusion of human speech. I'll talk more about that in a second. But clearly, we're going to see robots everywhere. They'll act humanoid and they will simulate reality. They're not conscious, they're not intelligent. They make a pretty good job at faking it though. And I think there's lots of potential here also to understand what's happening. So we have 6 major kingmakers, 6 kingmaking technologies. They're all happening at the same time. Kingmaking means If you rule one of those, you rule the world, basically. And this, of course, is a political thing. It's a military thing. It's all of these things. First, of course, artificial intelligence. I'll talk more about that. Quantum computing. If you have that unlimited computing power, that is a very strong asset to have. Nuclear fusion, the opposite of fission, clean nuclear energy is being worked on in over 20 countries, trillions of dollars of investment. Estimate is roughly 15 years. When we have nuclear fusion, unlimited energy, sustainable energy, clean energy. We can do anything we want. It's like Spotify for energy, right? Basically. And if that happens, we don't have to worry about any climate change thing anymore. We can go back and fix that. Synthetic biology. Doing synthetic materials based on nature, like spider silk. 3D printing, cultured meat. A very big turf. Genetic engineering, solving cancer by changing the human genome. Sounds very trivial. It's not. Right now, that's a plan. And lastly, geoengineering, which is what we'll have to do once we can, is to actually bring the Earth back to being green. Obviously, we're going to have to agree on what exactly that means. Okay, so those are 6 very big things that are happening, coming towards us. And I always speak about the future and looking at what's happening right now is that many people think about the future as being lousy, especially in Europe. Europeans are famous for being more about the past, right? The past. Many people say Europe is like a museum, right? That has to change. I live in Switzerland, which is interesting. We are like an island, a beautiful island in the sea of the world. It's a really interesting angle. People here in Europe, 71% of young people between 20 and 40 think that the future is worse than the present. Many people who are around 30, 35, they think about not having kids because the future is so terrible. I'm serious. My own kids, they tell me I'm a futurist. So they're saying like, no, the future is not good. Climate change, autocrats, geopolitics, nuclear, alien invasion, all these things. But I think here's the key. We have to stop looking at dystopia, which is primarily driven by media. 95% of all of the big motion pictures, Hollywood, Nollywood, Bollywood, Nellywood, Netflix, they have the same agenda, which amazing films about the future that end with total, utterly disaster. Like The Social Dilemma, you've seen that maybe, or Don't Look Up. Remember that one? Great film, but how does it end? Not good. Black Mirror, same thing. Ex Machina, same thing. The only good film about the future that's positive, Star Trek. That's old, like really old. Okay. So anyway, so that's a problem because people are looking at the future saying, oh, it's dystopia. And really what we have to start thinking about, we have to think about protopia. It's a term that's coined by Kevin Kelly, famous futurist. He says we should be optimistic, not because we have less problems, We have a lot of problems, but our capacity to solve them is infinitely greater. Every week gets greater. We're inventing every day. Scientific breakthroughs, collaboration, things that were literally science fiction. Now we can have 5G pretty much anywhere in the world, and anybody can enter the internet pretty much anytime. It's getting cheaper. All of those things are mind-boggling. So he says protopia, that is a stepwise approach into a better future. I think it's a very good word and I've used it a lot in my presentations. So here are some examples. We are now in a world where most of the things around us are explosive in technology. They've been there before, 3D printing, robotics, but now they're basically exploding. All of these trillion-dollar segments of new business Blockchain, genome sequencing, genome editing, 3D printing. They're finally here. You're worried about jobs? There'll be plenty of jobs here. Plenty. Not just in technology, but all of the related sectors. And so what if AI would take some of the routines here? We need a bit more education to figure this out. But right here, the World Economic Forum says roughly 100 million new jobs in green energy. In the next 20 years. Most of us will work on climate change in one way or the other, climate mitigation. And you see this chart here showing basically the top concerns of people today: global collaboration, climate change, public health, of course, technology governance. That's new because now we're realizing that too much technology Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. Like eating, drinking, smoking. We don't outlaw drinking or smoking, not in most places. But we find social rules and regulations. Kids are not allowed to drink. We don't smoke in the room here. But it's not illegal. Technology doesn't have that. And so we have to think about how we can actually find a conclusion on governance. And now the technology is basically omnipotent. By 2030, technology is virtually unlimited in power. Upload my brain to the internet. Sounds like a joke? No, it's possible. Do we want that? Is it a good idea to become superhuman? No. But basically what's happening here is that we have to agree on many of these things, but there is huge hopeful things like the much increased capacity, climate technology. BlackRock Partners, Larry Fink says the next 100 unicorns are all going to be in climate technology. So that is climate fintechs, carbon markets, battery storage, precision agriculture, all in the next 10 years. You want to invest billions, you're going to invest there because we have to fix this problem. The next 20 years will be a lot of suffering for climate change, but we can fix it and we will because we have the tools. So I'm very optimistic about it. It's not impossible. It's a large mission. It will roughly cost 2-3% of global GDP to fix climate change. But you know what? We have the money. We don't really have the will right now. We have to work on that. But it also makes money. The biggest change in the last 100 years is the shift to renewable everything, circular economy. And if you're not on that agenda, you will not sit here in 2030. People will hate you. They will not buy from you. They will not be your customers. They will not want to work for you. That's already happening right now. You see here the transition results for the net economic gain. Yes, it will cost a serious amount of money, but the green infrastructure spending is going up, of course, but transition costs can decline as we're moving into the new economy. So it is a net positive, actually. Climate change, addressing climate change will not just cost money. It's the biggest opportunity that you can possibly imagine. So when we look at all of this, energy investments, top $1 trillion, that's electric vehicles, nuclear energy, next generation nuclear energy, renewable energy, and so on. I see only good things here. But what's going to happen clearly, the fossil fuel industry is on the way out. And that means painful transition. Right now, the profit of the oil industry, $2.5 billion per day. A lot of people are getting a lot of money from that. So I imagine it's going to shift over here. Who's going to get that money? Now we're talking about a power struggle here. We're not talking about a money struggle, but they are very difficult to understand. Nuclear fusion, as I was saying earlier, is coming. Lots of debate if that's even possible, but I think we're looking not at 50 years, but maybe 10, 15 years. So we have 3 revolutions coming up and 4 exponential technology exploding sectors. The first revolution, of course, digital. That's not new. We know, of course, what's happening here. Digital revolution is everywhere, still in full swing. The next one, the sustainability revolution, green energy, redoing fossil fuel, a circular economy. It's 100x of the digital revolution. In fact, if you're not thinking about this as the same, you are in trouble because Big Blue, not IBM, but technology, and Big Green, They go together. Obviously, they're making the world a different place. The last one is the hardest one, the purpose revolution. And that is people asking, why are we doing this? Who is doing it? Who's in charge? What's the purpose? It's not people my age because we didn't ask much for purpose. We asked for money. The baby boomers, Gen X. Now the millennials are coming. Gen Y, and the Zillennials, the younger ones. And they're saying, what in the world are we doing this for? Are we going to have more money but no planet? This is where we're going towards, right? The top 10% having more, top 90% declining, and eventually no planet to live on. That is not a very future-fit concept. So Millennials are saying, this is not working. We have to have a different kind of capitalism. A new operating system. And they're just now coming because they were basically defunct in COVID, right? So a lot of millennials couldn't do anything in COVID. So now they're coming back in force. That has political consequences. I'll talk more about that in a minute. But mind-boggling changes here in technology. We have 4 different platforms. Information technology, that's, you know what that is. Biotechnology. Synthetic engineering, nanotechnology, vertical farming, 3D printing. Huge. Reinventing how we do things. We're going to make mobile phones without minerals from South Africa. We're going to be able to print complete devices using composite material. We're going to have concrete that can be put out in a machine and be 100% recycled. Do you know that every person around the world We have actually put out so far 40,000 kilos of concrete per person. Can you imagine? 40,000 kilograms per person is what we've built already. And it can't be recycled. And just that problem alone to solve would be huge. And that's happening with biotech, nanotechnology. Complete redo of energy, €150 trillion new economy. And the biggest one right now, artificial intelligence. I'll talk in detail about that. But those 4 things are changing everything. They're changing our work. They're changing how we compute. They're changing our society. So bottom line is, it could be heaven or it could be hell. It could be heaven because imagine we could solve almost every practical problem: water, food, disease, energy. Spacefaring? We could, right? But if instead we use it wrongly, we end up in a system where only certain countries or entities are controlling AI, or only rich countries get to use the new concrete, or we don't pay for the southern countries to come along on climate change. All of that. We can do whatever we want in Europe and in America on climate change. We can be net zero next year. That would be great, but it's not going to fix the problem. We don't get India, Africa, Asia, Brazil, Indonesia involved, we're still going to roast in the true sense of the word. So that brings up all kinds of global challenges about collaboration, working together. Just this chart here, I'm going to share the charts with you later. This is biotechnology. So in 10 years, we're going to have biofuel, that's made from fermentation processes. In 5 to 10 years, we have chemicals, textiles, food and agriculture, and mining that can use biotechnology to substitute for existing materials. I don't know if you've ever tasted any artificial meat, cultured meat. It's from a cow, but not a dead cow. It's the cell of the cow put in the lab, growing in the— sounds disgusting, I know, but Growing in the lab and basically multiplying the cells with fermentation. Lots of companies have invested. I've tasted it. It's actually regular sausage, more or less. It's just meat culture. But Bill Gates has invested. Richard Branson has invested. Right now, this is still very early, but Richard Branson is saying roughly in 10 years, this meat, parenthesis, will be 1/10 of the price of regular meat. That's how we can feed the world. And it tastes— it's not like it's actual meat, but anyway, you can look it up on YouTube. But this is a very big change. And so here is the problem. E.O. Wilson, famous environmentalist and biologist, he nailed it. This was 1973, I think. He says, the real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic Stone Age emotions. Medieval institutions and godlike technology. And today we can safely say, I think we have improved our emotions. We have even improved our institutions. I think some of them, maybe the Commission would be part of that. I don't know, European Commission. We can talk about that later. Godlike technology. We have more godlike technology at every turn. I'm not going to talk about God, but I'm just saying super technology. Forget the word God. That's really his word. But basically, we have technology that enables us to be superhuman. If I put on the augmented reality glasses from Apple, I can work 50 times as efficiently. I beat everybody else in the company. Hands down. I can beat Tom Cruise in Minority Report. If it works, we'll see about that. And of course, the implications are if I work 50 times as much, maybe fire all the other 49 people. Not such a good idea, really. What are you going to do with those people? So basically, you can be very excited about the future or you can get fearful. Right now, fear is dominating. And artificial intelligence is producing more fear. That is also because we just haven't bothered to explain to people. It's polarized. So we need to really have a much more of a good story about the future, the positive future. So I started 3 years ago on a project called the Good Future Project, which is explaining to people why the future is better than we think. Why we should not pay attention to all the social media feeds that tell us everything bad. This is what social media does. That's the primary job. Social media is an AI that repeats bad stories because bad stories sell, right? And that's why bad movies, not bad in that sense, but negative movies sell, right? It's action, entertaining. If you watch 10 of those films that came out in the last 5 years about the future, then it's no surprise you're going to think badly about the future. It's obvious. So how do we do this? I think the main point really is this: what's the purpose of technology? And I always say technology is not what we seek, it's how we seek. Technology is a tool to do something that I want to achieve. And intelligence is the ability to achieve an objective. Technology by itself will not save the world. It will make it more efficient. So if you use technology, you can be a more efficient dictator. That has been proven already. Technology by itself is a tool. You can take a hammer and kill your neighbor, or you can build a house. Same is true for AI. So what do we need? We can't make the hammer illegal. That wouldn't make any sense. We have to say the hammer can be used in certain ways. And so this is a very big challenge when we talk about purpose, because somebody will have to come up with the bottom line of what is okay. I don't know, will it be you? Will it be me? Will it be Antonio Guterres? Or Klaus Schwab? I don't know. Somebody has to come up with some ideas about it. I'll talk about that in a second. But here's the big deal. The future is no longer about if and how. It's about why and who. That is the key question. And this is the question we have to answer if you're in the tech business. Why are we doing this? Does it have a purpose beyond money? And who's in charge? This is so crucial, especially in Europe. In Europe, we are humanists, right? We like humans. Is that true in America? I think also in many ways, but it's not as humanistic as Europe, which is why sometimes we are so backwards because we want to keep things human. It's really interesting to see the cultural differences, but we have to agree on a global level as to what we do. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said technology can do great things, but it does not want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. And that is true and also a real problem. We can't expect technology to understand our values, our feelings, our emotions, our targets, our goals, our alignment. Technology doesn't give a damn about that because it doesn't understand any of it. ChatGPT can give you a perfect answer on pretty much anything. It has no idea what it's talking about. It doesn't know what a face is. It doesn't know what a feeling is. It doesn't know any of these things. It just puts together the logical answer. It is a super parrot. Very useful. I use it all the time. But to look for answers there, of course, that's not going to work. We have to put in what we want to happen. So let's talk about AI and where that's going. Really what's happening right now is that human intelligence and machine intelligence is converging. That's really what's happening. And human intelligence, as we all know from research, we have about 8, 10, maybe people say 14 different kinds of intelligence. Emotional intelligence, social, cultural, kinesthetic, Musical. What intelligence does a machine have? Logic. Unlimited. So a machine with a logical IQ of a billion is not unthinkable. But it has an emotional IQ of zero. That is because emotions aren't data. They're not zeros and ones. Humans are completely different because we are actually not logical or efficient. We are Plastic. We change all the time. So really what's happening now, we have voice understanding. This is huge because you realize the next interface in computing is not to type, it's to speak and command your IT. And that is shortly before happening. So ChatGPT in the future, we're not going to even use this. We just hit a button here on my button on my jacket. Say, hey, I Can you find me a date for tonight? Or who should I vote for? And of course, in developing countries, people are not going to use a fancy phone like this to run ChatGPT. They have a little box and then they can just ask and they get an answer. That's what it will do. Instant connection, like an oracle in your pocket. Imagine the responsibility of 800 million Indians. Getting instant answers. It could be amazing or it could be, basically we're going to see this, the oracle. Not Oracle, the oracle. And to that I would say that could be like Google Maps. All of us use Google Maps. Most of us ask questions about Google Maps. So we say, no, that can't be true. It's just completely wrong. I'm not going to drive off the cliff because Google Maps tells me there's a shortcut. But we still use it. We laugh about it. We don't take it for real. We use it. We have to do the same with AI. You have to say, okay, yeah, it's interesting. Let's ask some questions. And the other thing that's happened now is augmented reality. Apple made a huge leap here. Apple does everything better than the other guys. But then, of course, it's hugely expensive and it's a whole different ecosystem. We have to see how that plays out. But think about the two together: artificial intelligence and augmented reality. That's more than God, really, in a way. It's like superhuman, where you can see everything, you can understand everything. That could be amazing. But it could also lead to dehumanization. I've tried virtual reality many times and sometimes I feel like, okay, I'm wearing it. I get a little bit sick wearing it, like the simulator problem. But what happens when I take it off and I sit down with my kids and my family for dinner? I'm like, it's so boring because I don't have this fancy world anymore. This is what happens to gamers, right? And if you have any kids that are gamers, you know what I'm talking about. They don't want to get off the game because it's so boring to be in real life. That could be a big issue with Apple that I would get used to being anything, being anywhere. So here we have clearly a situation where now we're moving to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, right? Artificial intelligence. And if we define it, the best definition is then as a service, it says computer systems that turn information and data into knowledge. That should worry you and also excite you because in a way, that's what we are, right? You're here because of your knowledge. And there are other reasons, right? And generative AI, AI that creates information and data content, telling stories. This is also amazing because I can use that to shortcut my work and I can write my book much quicker. But do we want the human narrative to be told by a machine? Do we want politics to be influenced by what machines tell us? Fake videos? Engineered information? Probably not. But what is the best way forward? So Expedia has an app where you can do your next travel search. This is about going to Maui. And you can just ask a question and the AI of Expedia, that's part of the app now, will put together a travel schedule for you. And you can, you can drill deep and say, I want it to be much cheaper, or I want sustainable hotels or whatever. It makes all that stuff for you, what it did before, but much more entertaining. And then it creates a travel schedule where you just have to click and buy the whole thing. That's of course what Expedia wants. And then we have this Salesforce. Salesforce, I think we need some sound. There's some sound here a little bit, but so just a little soft sound, but basically allows you to go into your CRM and find out beliefs, right? That's what Salesforce Einstein does because yeah, it's basic, right? But powerful tool. And this is what I do with AI. We can't compete with intelligent computing. We can only compete with human intelligence, which everybody knows does not just involve computing. You get the point. I use it to make up my videos and make me look better. I don't know if that's better, probably not, but it certainly is weird. But AI is the new electricity. It's that big. Some people could say AI is the new printing press. It's one of those big steps in history. So we have to think about what that means. And as we're moving to that future, of course, right next to that is green is the new digital. If you take the two together, you have your business model. Everything is going to go green and sustainable, and AI will get us there. That's basically, okay, that's the next 1,000 unicorns right there. But to get there, we're going to need standards and understanding what we want and who's in charge and how do we deal with side effects. The side effects of social media: manipulation, bias, lies, distortion, untruths. Nobody's looking. Basically, the social networks like Facebook makes $150 million per day in profit. And it says the side effects are not our concern. The government should take care of it. That's not good. We can't do that with AI. We're going to have to be a little bit more forthcoming than that. So I used ChatGPT to figure out what I should say and talk to you about. So I went to ChatGPT Pro and I asked the question, how can we balance the power of exponential technologies such as AI with our desire for collective human flourishing? And it gave me some interesting answers: ethics, regulation, oversight, transparency, decision-making. It told me things that I already was looking at, but it was a nice, interesting summary. Didn't invent the world, but hey, so I got reminded of things. Sustainable development, long-term planning was interesting. So I use it for that. And that gives me ideas, for example, on how to write. So I would recommend you try this and figure out some answers from ChatGPT. Bottom line, however, is this is IDC Research showing basically what's happening with artificial intelligence. We're using most of the tools with IA, not with AI, right? IA is intelligent assistance. Better software. In other words, not intelligent in the human sense. So we have all these things like improve efficiency, improve customer experience, improve this, increase innovation. Nuts and bolts. That is the next 5 years. We're going to use technology that is better than before. It is no longer stupid, but it certainly isn't human. It's just better software. So intelligent assistance means all of a sudden you can do your robotic process automation, you can do analytics, you can do all that stuff much better. And that is a good thing. So that's the low-hanging fruit, I think, for the technology industry. The other thing that's happening is that we're seeing the improved efficiency of people working. So you see here lawyers, paralegals, bookkeepers up to 4.5 times as efficient using AI. And again, this could be interesting. We're saying, oh, that's amazing. I can be 4.5 times as efficient. Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley says 10x as efficient if we use the tools correctly, which could result in an 8 to 10x increase of GDP in 20 years. $13.6 quadrillion. So it's not a surprise that everybody is on this topic, right? Because that's like, wow. Quadrillion dollars. That's a good target, right? So really it's about this. In the end, we have this problem. It could be a present. It could also be a bomb because the bomb could mean, hey, if I'm more efficient, I work for a telecom company, let's fire 60% because I'm so efficient. Machine can do this routine work, right? Basically. Not so good. Or it could lie, right? Of course, ChatGPT is full of hallucinations and BS, right? So I ask it about myself being an AI expert, and if I probe long enough and I ask hard enough, it will actually generate wrong links to my scientific research reports. It will say, Garrett wrote an article on AI in XYZ journal. You click on the link, page not found. That's not unusual. That's because it's a learning model. It's a language model that basically combines words. So that we have to keep an eye on. And really what's happening here is that the biggest problem is that artificial general intelligence or AI and language models isn't made to show the truth. It's made to show patterns and results. It does not know how to estimate. It does not know the truth, if there's any such thing. It would be even hard for humans to know the truth. But truth and reality is not part of the program. Not at all. It is about giving an answer as quickly as possible. That's it. The most likely answer. Like a fancy parrot. Very fancy parrot. Useful parrot. But truth is not part of the equation. If we want that, we have to put it in. And that is clearly going to be a challenge because it's also about control. If you're looking at this chart, literally right now about $200 billion have gone into AI, basically progress and capabilities, and very little has gone into what's called alignment, being able to get things together to be humanly useful. This tiny thing here, that's about work. Control, ethics, military, security, safety. Very little money going in. But that's obvious because the money is here, right? But that's not going to work. If we do this, we get social media times 1000. And this is why we have the current debates about how we can actually deal with AI without destroying it and without having too many negative consequences. So people think of ChatGPT like a human-like thing because it sounds so human, but it really is just a box. It's a giant algorithm. We have to understand this. It knows nothing about real life. Nothing. It knows everything about data. There is a vast difference. Machines don't think. They don't understand. They don't care. And they shouldn't. What machines are very good at is simulation. A simulation of empathy or emotions or compassion is not the same as empathy. It is a simulation. Blade Runner 2049, you've seen the movie. The guy falls in love with his girlfriend, a hologram. He buys a fancy device, brings her down into the room. She's even better than before. She can instantly change her dress and so on. Power goes out, she's gone. So yeah, it's a simulation. It's not real. It's just a simulation. And we have to understand what that means. Trustworthiness, transparency, accountability— those are human things. If we want that, we'll have to find ways to put that in. Not into the technology, but into the framework. Technology is morally neutral until we use it. And the more technology we use, the more we have to think about that because it's going to be absolutely everywhere. So bottom line of that is technology does not have ethics, but technology companies should. Technology doesn't care about it. It doesn't actually understand any of this. This is because it's very hard to understand our ethics. Ethics, which is understanding what is right or wrong. Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is the right thing to do. This is the number one issue of Facebook. Facebook has every right to do what they're doing, but they're unethical in pulling it off. It's like, they can, I signed the user agreement, but it's still bad. And so what I've been saying to my technology clients, I would like a technocratic oath, like the doctor's oath, that says, I pledge to place humanity over technology in every decision. That's what we want. Because otherwise, it makes perfect sense to place money and technology over anything else. It makes monetary sense. But that is about the only sense it makes. And we're at that point now where that discussion is raging, where we are going in this world from intelligent assistants to more intelligent machines to AGI, artificial general intelligence. This is a death wish. A machine that can be generally intelligent, connect with other machines that have an IQ of a billion, There's just no way that we could rule it. So basically, as Stuart Russell says, intelligence means to have the power to realize your objectives. If we have a machine with an IQ of a billion and a million other machines with the same IQ, what objective would they fulfill? It could just be an accident. The joke in AI is if you tell such a machine that general intelligent machine to stop climate change, they would eliminate all humans. This is the most logical answer because we are the problem. It's a little bit inconvenient for us. We would have to think about how we can get more alignment on this. So as we're moving in this future, assisted intelligence, automation, augmented intelligence, those are all good things. They will have huge social consequences. But the last one we don't want. That's why I'm saying every company like OpenAI that wants to invent an AGI, an artificial general intelligence, should be subject to government regulation. That's like saying I'm going to build nuclear power plants or nuclear weapons. Who will be mission control? That discussion is raging. I have proposed for 7 years now The International Artificial Intelligence Agency, like the Atomic Power Agency. And yes, you could argue that's not going to happen. It's too complicated. China won't come along. I've heard all the arguments. But we have to do something to figure out the guidelines here. And that discussion, I'm sure, is raging in every single technology company. I used to call it the Digital Ethics Council, but that has evolved. So we're going to go into a world where basically fake humans and humanoid robots will be everywhere, and we need rules for that. This is Samsung Neon. This is Replica. And this is, of course, the new Apple thing. What do we do about this? Apple fans like myself, they'll probably buy anything, even the Apple Car for $200,000. So we have to figure out where we go with this. That's why I signed the Open Letter for AI. There are now 5 of them calling for international agreement on how we can regulate meaningfully. Regulate does not mean prevent. We don't want that. We can actually solve most of our things with AI, but we're going to have to agree on what that is. Otherwise, we may have an arms race. We survived the nuclear arms race until now because it took us 15 years to get to the agreement, the proliferation agreement. We wouldn't want that to happen with AI. We probably wouldn't survive that because it's hard to build a nuclear bomb. It's not hard to build AI. We need both proaction and precaution. And in your daily life and technology, I would recommend you think about that. How can we have proaction towards a better future, but also precaution about what else it could do to find a context between the two? So quickly about work and jobs. Biggest challenge here is most of these jobs— this is from IDC actually as well, or from Accenture, I think— showing you roughly that many jobs are about this high potential for automation because of AI, and many other ones are about augmentation. So the job can be enlarged. But here's the important thing. Unlike the previous change in work, this is about the knowledge worker. Knowledge workers are impacted by this. That's us. It's not the factory people. It's the knowledge workers. And their work is going to change fundamentally. And here's the good news, of course. What it does, it changes our routine, our tasks, It doesn't take away our job if we're careful. Our job is changing, of course, because machines can do it. Very important will be this pyramid here. As robots are going to be everywhere, this is the sort of Maslow pyramid of work. It is crucial that we look at this and say, okay, the lower part of this pyramid is now going to be done by machines: data, information, and basic knowledge. Machines are good at that. And we're going to move up the food chain, deeper knowledge, tacit knowledge. That's what our kids have to learn. That's what our future workers have to learn. Resilience, creativity, human agency, consciousness. That's what I call the human-only turf. And all of education will focus on this in the future. Science and technology, that will always be there, clearly. But that's the ticket to our future. The purpose of revolution, going back to that, and then we'll wrap up. The millennials are juggling two things: technology and climate. And the millennials are now coming into power, as you can see on this chart. They're getting their money from their parents right here. Baby boomers are declining. Gen Z is increasing, and Gen X is basically pivoting out. So by 2030, 56% of all executive positions and leading political positions will be held by millennials, by people who are now 25 to 45. They will change everything. If you're not ready for that, you will miss the biggest potential of change that we're going to see there. So I'll summarize and maybe we can take some questions. So the good future is about two things. The good future could be a bad future if we don't pay attention to them. Two big waves: climate change, the sustainability wave, and artificial general intelligence. It's important to realize that both are extremely positive things. They're not just bad things. They both are potential solutions for lots of things. But artificial general intelligence is probably a bigger threat to humanity than climate change. Climate change we are solving. We can solve it. It's painful, but we will solve it. That's a scientific challenge and political challenge. But AGI, going back to what I said earlier about the proposal of the agency. Also, we have to finally pull out our future mindset. All of us have to think from the future backwards. Not 50 years, 5, 7, 8 years. I call it the future mindset. And so Bill Gates says 5-hour rule a week. I say 1 hour per day spent in the future. I'm not talking about watching movies here, right? I'm talking about reading books, getting information, understanding what the future brings. When you live in the future 1 hour a day, after 1 or 2 years, you will be ready to make big decisions just because of all the things that you've saved up and to answer questions. If you can't answer the question, What does my life look like in 5 years? Or what does my company's life look like in 5, 7 years? You are in deep trouble because it won't be 5 years. It'll be 2 years. So we have to start thinking about the future. The future mindset means foresight, questions, imagination. Picasso said, machines are for answers, humans are for questions. That's our job. Our job is not to look to the machine and say, oh, that's the answer. But to take it as a question, like Google Maps, and to use our own thinking, to have courage, optimism. Very important here: always keep the human in the loop. I am not generally in favor of an artificial intelligence that's a black box. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it decides. I just do what it says. That doesn't strike me as a very good idea. Keeping the human in the loop. That means using humans even when it's less efficient, when it costs more money, when it takes longer. We still are going to use humans because we want to be in the loop. Very important to realize that. And the other point, of course, looking for the target of the good future. I'm not looking for just one future, profit and growth. If we do that, we're timing out in 2050. It's over for us. Then we're going to be one with the machine. We're looking for a larger story. That has really always been true, but especially now, that is the agenda. So let me wrap up by saying the future is better than we think. We just have to plan it wisely. Thanks very much for your time. And there.